Tolkien the Modernist: "Writing out of himself..."

From Verlyn Flieger's book A Question of Time:

A story need not be about a particular war in order to show its effects. Nor does it have to have a contemporary setting in order to mirror contemporary thought. Indeed, quite the contrary. The most effective commentary on an age or an event is as often as not oblique rather than direct. The nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" says as much about the perils of kingship as does Lydgate's Fall of Princes, and Huckleberry Finn is as telling a piece of social commentary as Das Kapital. Tolkien is too often dismissed out of hand as an anachronism, a contemporary Pre-Raphaelite trying to pretend that the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment never happened. On the contrary, any thoughtful reading of his work that looks below the surface will show that he is in fact quite a modern thinker, dipping into the past for the stuff of his story but reworking it for the age in which he lived and felt. [...] His creative energies kept pace with the times, consciously and unconsciously recording for his audience their world and worldview, their defeats and renewals, their despairs and hopes. We write what we are, and Tolkien wrote not just out of his scholarship but out of himself and out of his response to this best and worst of times that is the twentieth century. Writing out of himself, he dared to be of a time not his own, and in doing so he made a profound and lasting comment on his own time.