All of your suggestions were awesome, and I'm kind of taking off on Nogrod's response, really. Tomorrow is when my topic proposal is due, so my advisor (the poor man, he's halfway through the Silm and is trying to keep all of the Noldor straight) gets to find out what I'm writing about. In a nutshell, my topic is as follows:
Tolkien's stories were created and invented, and were intended wholly to be fiction. Naturally they were influenced by other mythologies (Norse, Old English, and Finnish, for example). Yet to the characters of Lord of the Rings, the stories in the Silmarillion are
histories. When Gimli recites his poem about Khazad-Dum, Sam is fascinated, and says, "I'd like to know more!" The summary Elrond gives at the council in Rivendell is received as sheer fact by those present. In a way, Tolkien has created an entirely new genre/category of fantasy/fiction, by creating mythologies that are also histories behind another standalone story.
At this point, I'm probably going to start looking at other novels/series/entities that are written as stories, then expanded upon into worlds with histories behind them. I'll end up delving into DnD at some point, I'm sure, as well as Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, Piers Anthony's Phaze/Proton books, and the immense collection of Weis/Hickman Dragonlance titles. (Of course, these had to have all been influenced by Tolkien in some way, soooo....)
I'd still love to hear suggestions from fellow English majors/history miners [sic].
And that Toynbee proposition sounds awesome, Morth. I'm sure at some point I'll have to look at the composition of primary sources and reliability.