Tolkien, Agnon, and the Power of Imagination

The Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon and J.R R. Tolkien, the English author of Lord of the Rings, do not appear to have much in common. Yet, aside from being near-contemporaries, both were religiously devout, allowed religion to inform their work, and were profoundly influenced (both personally and in their fiction) by the trauma of World War I. Do the similarities end there? Jeffrey Saks writes: