Fans of Tolkien's legendarium, once they become aware that he was the preeminent scholar of Beowulf (and in some ways still is), often seek evidence of his academic work lurking amid the hills of Eriador. This is a fruitful area of Tolkien scholarship as well.

Less often embarked upon is the opposite: looking at Tolkien's Middle-earth work and how it influenced his academic work. Part of this is because Tolkien fans and scholars have internalized the idea that, although he looms large to us for having penned The Lord of the Rings, writing about Elves and Hobbits was a side hustle for Tolkien—and one he was not always proud of. But in this month's A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook does exactly that, turning the revelations from a close-read of certain passages from The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices to shed light on Tolkien's most famous scholarly work.

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by Tolkien that marks a watershed moment in Beowulf scholarship. It is widely credited by Anglo-Saxon scholars with changing how Beowulf is read, allowing it to be interpreted as literature and not simply mined as a historical and philological source. The lecture-turned-essay includes a lengthy and beautiful analogy of an old man and a tower. This analogy has been interpreted by numerous very well-known Tolkien scholars.

For the past several months, Simon has discussed the tower analogy, including (much to Tom Shippey's chagrin) how existing scholarship about it reads it wrong. This month, he does what is so rarely done: looking at towers in The Lord of the Rings, especially as they appear in Frodo's dreams, and considering what the meaning of these towers in The Lord of the Rings can show us of the meaning behind an uncannily similar tower in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Tolkien's side hustle, in other words, may have shaped or at least reflected how he thought about the medieval texts he cherished and made his life's work.

You can read Simon's article "In the House of the Fairbairns" here.