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Originally Posted by Gothmog
I don't know what you mean by the "truth",
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The 'truth' that there was so much more to England's hstory and culture than that which came after 1066. Tolkien, like so many people of his class and age, was educated in the public/grammar school tradition of a 'good classical education'. Lots of Latin and Greek, Homer, Virgil and the mythology of the South. I went to an ordinary school and even there any focus on mythology was from the Classical world.
Tolkien instead took his inspiration from the tradition which grew up in the Victorian period, leading from the pre-raphaelites through William Morris and on - an interest in the 'Gothic' and the Northern. England's history and culture before 1066 was predominantly Northern. Even during the Roman occupation British culture remained strong, so much so that that culture is called Romano-British; many of the villas discovered from that time will have been owned by British people who prospered under the Roman occupation.
England is filled with the marks of its past culture, Stonehenge, Avebury, the Cerne Abbas Giant, Silbury Hill - even in the city I live in there are prehistoric remains in one of the woods, and I'm only 30 minutes drive from two major megalithic stone circles, Sherwood Forest, Mam Tor, Odin's Mine and Lughnasadh's Hill, among other things. Most of these places also have stories attached to them, tales of faeries, giants and druids. I think Tolkien hoped to reawaken awareness of this, and for me he certainly did, as it was only after reading his work that I 'discovered' that the seemingly created magic of Middle-earth was actually all around me in the real landscape.
What I'd like to know is if Tolkien really did capture this magic, or if he altered it into something else entirely? In a sense, I think he did recreate some of that magic, but in another sense, he ommitted some of it. His work points the way towards the 'truth', but doesn't tell the whole story.