Tolkien and Edwardian adventure stories

The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien enjoyed Edwardian adventure stories by authors such as John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard as a boy, and among many other influences made use of their structure and motifs in his epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings.

The Tolkien scholar Jared Lobdell accordingly writes that the novel is in the tradition of the Edwardian adventure story. Among the parallels that he mentions are the story of Englishmen travelling abroad; the past strangely alive in the present; the accidental assembling of the group of travellers, and their safe return.

The scholar Julie Pridmore agrees with Lobdell that The Hobbit is reminiscent of Edwardian adventure stories, but writes that The Lord of the Rings is more clearly modern. Tom Shippey comments that Tolkien's writing is post-war; Pridmore concurs that having experienced the First World War, Tolkien made his heroes ordinary soldiers, unlike Victorian or Edwardian adventure heroes. Anna Vaninskaya writes that while Tolkien was influenced by authors born in the Victorian era, he can be viewed as responding like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to the trauma of the First World War, or like William Golding and George Orwell to the evil of the Second World War.