I agree with Formendacil, but would like to go a little deeper (surprised, anybody? I thought not.
) "A mythology for England" was not, to be sure, his sole motivation, not even at first. There was his deeply emotional response to languages and words, from which derived his
hunger for Welsh and Finnish, clearly not English languages in the least! Which means that his Elves were not really meant to be English at all, but strange and wonderful beings that his Englishmen - no, let us say, his Men - would encounter in Faërie.
His faith was also a key element.
I recently read Carpenter's take on Tolkien's motivation for the
Sil and the Legendarium.
Qualifier: Yes, it's an authorized biography, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything in it is complete accurate; just quite likely. p. 103:
Quote:
...in what sense did [Tolkien] suppose The Silmarillion to be 'true'?
Something of the answer can be found in his essay On Fairy-Stories and in his own story Leaf by Niggle, both of which suggest that a man may be given by God the gift of recording 'a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth'. Certainly while writing The Silmarillion Tolkien believed that he was doing more than inventing a story. He wrote of the tales that make up the book: 'They arose in my mind as "given" things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew ... I always had the sense of recording what was already "there", somewhere: not of "inventing".'
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Make of it what you will.
But I think I may have stumbled across the critical element to at least a few of the six preliminary answers I offered above. It is something that I already knew, but failed to connect to this discussion, namely how Tolkien went about sub-creating the entire mythos. To summarize Carpenter, Tolkien had two approaches.
First, he carefully created names in his made-up languages. Then he asked himself, "how did that name come to be?" A typical philologist's question. So he subcreated stories that explained the names.
It was in the stories that the second, and to my mind more crucial element arose. In the heat of writing the story, Tolkien would come up with a good sounding name on the spur of the moment, following his artist's sense rather than his philologist's care. Then he would go back and see the name he had created, and ask the philologist's question: How did that seemingly impossible construction arise?
Now, most writers (I have done this myself), when faced with these problems of inconsistency, take the seemingly obvious way, and remove the inconsistency. Not Tolkien. His approach was to research the linguistics, to search out the histories, the myths, the legends, and figure out how the inconsistency actually fit after all!
Now, will this approach not more likely create a legendarium that
feels more real than the cleaned up stuff most writers write? But they way, writers are taught to do the obvious thing, and perhaps rightly so, since Tolkien was the linguistic genius and none of us can possibly hope to get anywhere with his approach.