Here's a little overview I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about five

theses, philosophy and Tolkien, and then the other points will sort of follow up on

that. What was Tolkien's philosophy? How did Tolkien's philosophy fit into that of the

inklings, more generally? The, oh, in Firefield, one of those inklings, in particular I want

to focus on, in his notion of ancient semantic unities, and that that influence on Tolkien's work and then the uncanny influence of Tolkien's work

and argued there that he did indeed shape the world that we live in many ways.

So here are five theses. Some of these, first of these fairly boring. That is Tolkien had

philosophical views and influence his work. Well, that's true for everybody, pretty much.

And so it's not terribly surprising, but I'm still going to talk about it nonetheless.

The second one is that Tolkien saw as fiction in part as a vehicle for propagating those views.

Again, that's not terribly unusual, quite common, I think, among fiction writers, although

not perhaps universal, certainly.

Thirdly, though, this is where things get a little more interesting.

Tolkien's fiction was the embodiment or incarnation of that philosophy.

So I'm going to try to explain what that means, and that I think is something that you find

in Plato, in the way that he uses myth in the Republic and the Temaeus.

And you can see it also in Dante and probably Milton and C.S. Lewis as well.

So that's a much narrower group now that Tolkien's a part of when we get to point three.

And four, this is where I think things get really interesting.

I'm going to argue that that very philosophy also guided the construction of Tolkien's work. So not only was a particular philosophy

embodied in the work, the philosophy itself enabled him to do that. And that, I think, is unique.

I don't know of any other work in fiction, which you can say something like that. And then finally,

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