In order to fully understand what I’m about to write, you will need to see the book for more details. More than simply the facts of John Ronald Reuel’s life (and deaths), I found some material about artistic accomplishment and loss in childhood that applies quite specifically to Tolkien.

Let me make the point by outlining a possible time travel story (one of the literary ambitions of Tolkien, by the way, that never materialized: he was to do time travel while Lewis was to do space travel).

Say you are, against your will for reasons you don’t understand, thrown back in time and space to South Africa in 1896 with some brief medical training and supplies. There you meet a man named Arthur, who–you were told–is likely to get rheumatic fever.  You stay with him and manage to prevent this from happening.

Then you are whirled forward a few years in time and a few thousand miles in space to an English home. Arthur is there and tells you he decided to return to make his fortune in England since his wife so prefers it. Their two boys also love the English countryside (perhaps the older one does so especially in contrast to early, vague memories of the South African wilderness). They are a faithful Anglican family, attending a rather middle-church parish. You recognize your next and final assignment in the wife, Mabel. You explain what insulin can do for diabetes and leave her with the training, equipment, and supplies she needs to remain healthy for years (extracting a promise never to reveal her anachonistic technology).

And then you return home and find you cannot recognize the scifi section of your local bookstore. It is all spaceships and ray guns.

The Lord of the Rings was never written.

Now there are jillions of things wrong with this scenario. We could assume the rules of LOST and say that time always tries to spring back into its original shape so that, once you prevent a death, another death comes about soon after, so that Arthur and Mabel still die early.  If Arthur had decided to stay in South Africa (as he seemed to want to do, despite Mabel’s misgivings) then the whole family would have been present for the Boer War. No one knows what might have happened then.

Also, maybe some other great author would have invented fantasy.

On the other hand, I might be under-stating the impact. Perhaps C. S. Lewis would never have been converted. Then there would be no apologetics and no children’s fantasy either.

But getting back to the impact on fantasy literature: frankly, I don’t think we would have Star Wars, Dune, or Harry Potter or many other works. No Ranger’s Apprentice series not least because the term “Ranger” would be restricted to cowboys rather than medieval war scouts.

It is pretty clear that noteworthy, creative people are disproportionately likely to have suffered the loss of one or both parents in childhood. While he could have wandered in many ways (and almost did many times), Tolkien was following a rather well-trod path going from bereavement to fame as an author. (The loss he suffered in the slaughters of World War I probably also count in this regard.)

I argue for all this in the book, I won’t say more here.

But I will ask you this. What if we replay the scenario except you recognize who Arthur is and realize that when you go back, if you save him, it will be a world with a much happier Tolkien and no trilogy.

Do you save him?

You don’t want God’s job.