In Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, Brian Rosebury says that "there is something about Tolkien's art which eludes the conventional strategies of contemporary criticism, even when these are deployed with sympathy and patience" (4). The key words in that sentence are, of course, "conventional" and "contemporary," for what Tolkien was doing, for all his contemporary popularity, was anything but writing a contemporary -- or modern -- novel. Given that he was not writing a modern novel, it is quite logical that conventional criticism can make little of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings other than reduce them to World War II allegories or mere escapist yearnings for a passing rural England (the sort of criticism continually aimed at The Wind in the Willows, among others). What was he doing, then? As a student of traditional narrative, I have returned to Tolkien's two most famous books from time to time and have begun an argument that I would like to continue here; I believe that Tolkien committed a traditionally-patterned oral narrative to paper and that we can understand The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings better if we look at them not through the lenses of modern criticism but through lenses developed for the study of earlier works.