This article was originally posted at National Review.

Halfway through the Second World War, Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien found himself inside a storm of discouragement and self-doubt. In 1937, shortly after the publication of his children’s novel, The Hobbit, he began writing a sequel. But by April 1942, the story had ground to a halt. His fantastic tale of the Ring of Power and the struggle for Middle-earth “was growing out of hand,” Tolkien recalled years later, “and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening.”

It is difficult to overstate how menacing the world looked to the British people in the spring of 1942. Great Britain had been fighting for its life since the fall of France in 1940. Within a week of the attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces had stormed across the Pacific and Southeast Asia in a vast offensive that sent British and American troops staggering in defeat and surrender. Singapore fell after a week of intense fighting, with more than 130,000 British soldiers taken prisoner. By April 1942, the Japanese war in the Pacific was larger, and nearly as devastating, as that of the Nazis in Europe.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany seemed destined to achieve the “living space” demanded by the führer. Germany controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe, all the major capitals and ports. Following their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces conquered Crimea and were pushing toward the Caucasus. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Byelorussia were all in Nazi hands. Crimes against humanity were being committed on a scale for which the civilized world had no conceptual category.

This was the fate that awaited Great Britain, the United States, and their allies if they could not take the fight to the enemy and prevail.

Perhaps Tolkien had this geopolitical nightmare in mind when he wrote of the dire warning from Lady Galadriel, ruler of the Elves, to the Fellowship: “But this I will say to you. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” By his own admission, The Lord of the Rings, with its portrayal of radical evil and existential dread, was not the sequel Tolkien had promised his publisher; it was no bedtime story for children.

“The war had arisen to darken all horizons,” Tolkien recalled. He was nearly certain that his epic fantasy would never be finished. Yet to his own amazement, and with little effort, Tolkien suddenly produced a short story. He simply woke up one morning, in April 1942, “with that odd thing virtually complete in my head.” He wrote it out in a few hours.

Poignant and soul-searching, “Leaf by Niggle” is the story of a painter who becomes distraught when it appears he will never complete his masterpiece: a great and beautiful tree. It was Tolkien’s self-administered remedy to every man’s fear: the fear of death. Not every painting, not every story, will be completed on this side of the veil. “Leaf by Niggle” is rightly considered the most autobiographical of all Tolkien’s writings.

Niggle is the painter — “not a very successful one” — and, like Tolkien the writer, he is a perfectionist and easily distracted and harried by his neighborly obligations. Niggle’s “garden,” which is not well tended, looks suspiciously like Tolkien’s literary career. “It would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size,” Tolkien writes in “Leaf.” “But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.”

Just so for Tolkien. He was asked to chair endless committee meetings to address wartime contingencies (e.g., what to do if Oxford were bombed by the Nazis). In addition to carrying a heavy teaching load, he had to create and oversee new courses for college cadets preparing to be sent into battle. Like other Oxford families, his took in evacuee children from London. He volunteered as an air-raid warden, performing duties that included all-night patrols and an emergency rescue effort when a British plane crashed near his house. Art was indeed imitating life.

With his painting unfinished, Niggle is suddenly forced to leave his home and everything else behind and take a train ride to an undisclosed destination — to face death and judgment. He is sent to a workhouse (purgatory), where he overhears two Voices evaluating his life. “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” says the First Voice. “He never got ready for his journey.” The Second Voice agrees but offers an explanation: “But of course, he is only a little man. He was never meant to be anything very much; and he was never very strong.”

Here is a man at the age of 50 — a respected academic at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — taking humble stock of himself, his achievements, and his ambitions.

Although he had fought honorably in the First World War, Tolkien referred to himself as a man lacking in physical courage. He modeled his hobbits, he once admitted, on the humble English soldiers with whom he served in France and considered “far superior to myself.” Writing to one of his sons, then training as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, he observed: “You three boys all seem to have a decent share of courage and guts. You owe that to your mother.”

In some ways, Niggle is the man Tolkien hoped to become. Despite his failings, the artist makes a courageous and selfless decision before his departure. Although somewhat grudgingly, Niggle agrees to help a bothersome neighbor, Mr. Parish, who interrupts his work on the painting to implore him to fetch a doctor for his ailing wife. Niggle is willing to allow his creative life to effectively come to an end if it means helping another life in need. “It seems plain that this was a genuine sacrifice,” says the Second Voice. “Niggle guessed that he was throwing away his last chance with his picture.”

The Voices allow him to leave the workhouse and journey to the country, where he encounters his painting: completed, magnificent, sublime in its beauty. Yet it is more than that: It is a living Tree. “All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them, rather than as he had made them.” Niggle is overcome with wonder. “He gazed at the Tree, and slowly lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said.”

His real journey, however, is about to begin. There is more work that can be done on the Tree than Niggle can complete on his own. He realizes that he needs the assistance of Mr. Parish, who has never appreciated his painting but knows a lot about earth, plants, and trees. “This place cannot be left just as my private park,” Niggle says. “I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.”

This portion of the story suggests Tolkien’s decision, more than a decade earlier, to share with his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis a long narrative poem he had begun writing in 1925. It is considered the most personal story in all of Tolkien’s mythology: the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal Elvish princess. The tale of Beren and Lúthien would play an immensely important role in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth.

Lewis’s response must have appeared like an oasis in the desert. Tolkien had entrusted to his friend the story that he loved best of all his work, a story inspired by his relationship with his wife. It was a rare moment of vulnerability. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis praised the poem in the highest terms, telling him, “I can honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.” He proceeded to send the author 14 pages of critique, with “grumbles at individual lines,” as he put it. Tolkien incorporated many of Lewis’s proposed changes into his next draft.

Back in Niggle’s village, the local authorities talk disparagingly of their departed neighbor and his painting. His unfinished canvas, in fact, is being used to patch a neighbor’s roof. “I think he was a silly little man,” says Councillor Tompkins. “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” Painting has its usefulness, Tompkins adds, but only for those “bold young men” with new ideas and new methods. “None for this old-fashioned stuff. Private day-dreaming.”

The carping characters in the story can be read as embodiments of the utilitarian outlook of the age. Yet Tolkien also battled the “bold young men” of the Modernist movement in literature who came into vogue after the cataclysm of the First World War. Concepts such as courage, virtue, noble sacrifice, and faith seemed to vanish into the killing fields on the Western Front. From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the old beliefs about mankind’s dignity and high moral purpose were discarded as obsolete. As literary critic Roger Sale summarized the Modernist mood, the writer who imagined a heroic destiny for his characters was considered “deceived and dangerous.”

It was precisely this outlook that Tolkien was rebelling against in his story about the war for Middle-earth. “It is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,” he once explained, “without actual offensive action.” The Lord of the Rings was his great salvo in the struggle against the moral cynicism that had infected his generation. Like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien believed that imaginative literature could help reclaim the older concepts of sin, grace, and redemption for the modern mind.

“Leaf by Niggle” achieves this aim in its evocative, almost mythic conclusion. Niggle next encounters Mr. Parish, who also has arrived in the country. In the village, Parish dismissed Niggle’s painting as “Niggle’s Nonsense,” while Niggle called him “Old Earth-grubber.” But now the two men work together on a landscaping project. As they live and labor together in the country, Niggle thinks of “wonderful new flowers and plants,” and Parish knows “exactly how to set them and where they would do best.” Even more remarkable, as Niggle gazes at the Great Tree he realizes that its most exquisite and beautiful leaves — “the most perfect examples of the Niggle style” — have been created “in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

Tolkien is taking to task the self-absorption of the modern artist. Creative work must not be attempted at the expense of everyday relationships: Our obligations to others do not cease when we enter the studio. Tolkien had learned how unexpected friendships can open up the artist to new sources of beauty and grace.

Writing “Leaf by Niggle” was an act of defiance: In the spring of 1942, the forces of dehumanization appeared to be on the winning side of history. For a time, it really seemed that life was absurd, that the disintegration of civilization itself was at hand. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. For Tolkien, this represented one of the purposes of imaginative literature: to help us combat the darkness. Literature of this kind could remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our lives. There are such things as beauty and goodness and truth.

There is a noble purpose to the human story, Tolkien believed, and we need eyes of faith to see it. Niggle begins to see it: beautiful mountains beyond the Great Tree, which stir a sense of longing. “They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.”

The political and ideological chaos in the aftermath of the First World War had created a maelstrom of doubt and disillusionment. “Leaf by Niggle” was part of Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to overcome it — first in himself and, ultimately, in those around him — and to re-enchant the modern mind. There is nothing escapist about imaginative literature of this quality. On the contrary, “we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives,” writes novelist and historian Edmund Fuller. “Our sensitivity is whetted to honor and courage and aspiration and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”

Here, for Tolkien, lies the deepest purpose of the creative imagination: to give others a taste of ultimate Reality, a glimpse of life with God, of life as it was meant to be.

Although Niggle’s painting is destroyed and forgotten in his village, it becomes a source of hope and joy in the country, a refreshment for weary travelers: “Niggle’s Parish,” they call it. “It is splendid for convalescence,” explains the Second Voice. “And not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”

Tolkien knew what it was like to live in the Land of Shadow, at the threshold of Mordor. To produce works of such radiance and dignity, to give readers an “introduction to the Mountains” — when the world had descended into a sinkhole of darkness and degradation — seems itself a mystery of grace. Whether he believed it or not, J. R. R. Tolkien, like Niggle, was not such a little man after all.

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Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.