MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England is the first book on Tolkien by Jane Chance, an American medievalist who taught at Rice University. It was published by Macmillan in London in 1979, and a revised edition followed from the University Press of Kentucky in 2001.
The book studies the link between Tolkien's academic work on Old and Middle English, such as his lecture on Beowulf and his essay On Fairy-Stories, and his fiction, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to The Silmarillion and the shorter tales. Its subtitle comes from Tolkien's own wish to give England a mythology of its own.
How Tolkien's work as a scholar of Old and Middle English shaped his fiction and his wish to write a mythology for England.