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Through the door of language Tolkien entered the world of myth. "The seed [of the myth] is linguistic, of course. I'm a linguist and everything is linguistic—that's why I take such pains with names." A language, he believed, could not remain abstract. It must arise within a history and a culture—or, if lacking that, a mythology. Soon he would create for his own languages a most elaborate world indeed.

In 1900, much to the dismay of her family, Mabel was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church. Her family strongly disapproved of her decision—though they tended to be only nominally Protestant—and they cut her off from all family money. Four years later, Mabel died of diabetes, which might have been treated with sufficient finances. In his adulthood, Tolkien remembered his mother as "a gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering, who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by the persecution of her faith."

It would be impossible to stress too much the influence her death had on Tolkien. He was almost thirteen when she died, and she had served, effectively, as his only parental figure to this point. She had influenced him in everything, and Ronald would attempt to live up to her memory for the rest of his life. This was especially true in his religious devotions. "I witnessed (half-comprehending) the heroic sufferings and early death in extreme poverty of my mother who brought me into the Church," he reflected in 1963.

Mabel left Ronald and Hilary to the care of Father Francis Morgan, a Roman Catholic priest at John Henry Cardinal Newman's Birmingham Oratory. Half Welsh and half Anglo-Spanish, Morgan is described by Tolkien's biographer as "a very noisy man, loud and affectionate, embarrassing to small children at first but hugely lovable when they got to know him." Ronald struggled with Father Morgan at times, especially over dating his future wife Edith, but he considered the priest his true father. Indeed, Tolkien credited Father Morgan with solidifying the faith into which his mother brought him. "I first learned charity and forgiveness from him," Tolkien wrote in 1965.

At the Oratory, Tolkien absorbed the lingering, profound presence of Newman, the founder. Newman was a devout follower of St. Augustine, another significant influence on Tolkien. In his Apologia, Newman recorded having been deeply influenced by the Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the City of God and the powers of darkness. He believed this battle was about to intensify, as nineteenth-century liberalism was poised to usher in a secular, modern City of Man.

"A confederacy of evil, marshaling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, [was] preparing the way for a general Apostasy from it," Newman feared in 1838. Tolkien saw his world devastated by the forces that Newman had believed imminent.

After a highly successful college career at Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien became an officer in the British military. He experienced first-hand the horrors of mechanized warfare in World War I. He was a member of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, one of the most decorated regiments of the war, and also a unit that suffered devastating casualties.

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