Man behind the Mythology

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Well, Bethberry, that is a very good answer, and I shall accept it, but you missed the crucial component when you did not address the initial question:

What is the connection between the following poem and Tolkien's reputation as a writer?

The answer being, of course, that Auden was among the very first critics to write glowing reviews of The Lord of the Rings. He was also, as an interesting tidbit, the keynote speaker at the first meeting of the Tolkien Society in 1966. The text of his speech has been reprinted, but darned if I can remember the citation at the moment. It's very interesting though!

I doubt very much that the tutor spoken of in the bio was Tolkien, but let's pretend that he was, just because it would be so good!

Sidebar: one of my now-retired colleagues did his undergraduate work at Oxford where he took Tolkien's Beowulf seminar in the winter of 1955. Needless to say, I have plied him with many a drink for interesting stories of the man himself, but all I ever got was that if the students did not feel like working that day, all they had to do was ask the Professor a question about a particularly obscure Anglo-Saxon word, and he would go off on an hour long tangent about its etymology, derivatives and connections to other words in different languages. One other interesting thing is that at the time, none of the students even knew that he had published LotR that very year (!) and only one or two of them had heard that he had published "a book for children some time ago".