| List of Figures | p. ix |
| Acknowledgements | p. x |
| Conventions and Abbreviations | p. xiv |
| 1 Introduction | p. 1 |
| His 'private and beloved nonsense': The Silmarillion and the 'Silmarillion' | p. 1 |
| A Victorian beginning and a modern end | p. 5 |
| 'I hold the key': constructing a 'biographical legend' | p. 6 |
| Part I How It All Began ... | p. 9 |
| 2 In the Beginning Were the Fairies ... | p. 13 |
| Fairy-things and fairylands | p. 14 |
| The creation of a saga | p. 20 |
| Fairies and elves in Tolkien's children's literature | p. 23 |
| 3 'Fluttering Sprites with Antennae': Victorian and Edwardian Fancies | p. 28 |
| 'Flower-and-Butterfly Minuteness': the fairy painting imagery | p. 28 |
| Peter Pan and the Cottage of Lost Play | p. 34 |
| Fading, passing departing: the fairies' farewell | p. 38 |
| 4 The Fairies, Faith and Folklore | p. 40 |
| 'Natural' fairies and romantic religion | p. 40 |
| Brownies, nymphs, mermaids and the 'elementals' | p. 45 |
| Fairies, folklore and the 'mythology for England' | p. 50 |
| Part II Ideal Beings, Ideal Languages | p. 63 |
| 5 The Cat and the Whiskers: Tolkien's Linguistic Creation | p. 69 |
| A multi-lingual novel | p. 69 |
| Examining the corpus | p. 72 |
| 6 'Linguistic Aesthetic': Sounds, Meaning and the Pursuit of Beauty | p. 76 |
| Theorizing language invention: A Secret Vice | p. 76 |
| The theory of 'inherent linguistic predilections': English and Welsh | p. 80 |
| Language attitudes | p. 83 |
| Sound symbolism and sound experiments | p. 88 |
| 7 Ideal Languages and Phonetic Spelling | p. 93 |
| The myth of a universal language | p. 93 |
| Aspects of linguistic creativity: language change and language decay | p. 101 |
| Invented alphabets, universal alphabets and the phonetic spelling | p. 104 |
| Part III From Myth to History | p. 117 |
| 8 The Claim to History | p. 123 |
| A changing cosmology: from a flat to a round world | p. 123 |
| Reconsidering the 'framework' of the mythology | p. 125 |
| 9 A Hierarchical World | p. 131 |
| 'Race' and racial anthropology | p. 132 |
| Tolkien's views on Nazi Germany, race and language | p. 135 |
| Focusing on Middle-earth: constructing new hierarchies | p. 141 |
| Racial mixture: the problem of the Half-Elven | p. 151 |
| The face of evil: the origin and appearance of the Orcs | p. 154 |
| Tolkien and the charge of racism | p. 157 |
| 10 Visualising Middle-Earth: Real and Imagined Material Cultures | p. 160 |
| The idea of European prehistory and historical 'cultures' | p. 163 |
| The culture of Gondor: ship burials and winged helmets | p. 165 |
| 'Chambers', 'Windows' and the Anglo-Saxons | p. 176 |
| Victorian countryside and relics of the industrial revolution: the material culture of the Shire | p. 179 |
| Romancing archaeology | p. 185 |
| 11 Epilogue: From Fairies to Hobbits | p. 189 |
| Mistakes and inconsistencies | p. 189 |
| The rise of the hobbits and the fairies' fate | p. 194 |
| Appendix 'And Wither Then?': Stepping into the Road | p. 200 |
| Notes | p. 204 |
| Bibliography | p. 217 |
| Index | p. 232 |
