After having all this to say about the circumstances of 1943, I'm pretty sure J.R.R. Tolkien would turn over in his grave if he knew the current state of the world.

"The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitization, morale-pep, feminism and mass-production throughout the Near East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither, Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa and the villages of the darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down on travel. There will be nowhere to go. . . Col. Knox says one-eighth of the world's population speaks 'English' and that it is the biggest language group. If true, damn shame -- say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say 'baa-baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian. But seriously, I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. . ."
Roger Sales saw in later days that, "Tolkien has always spoken. . . as though only fools and madmen would contemplate the twentieth century without horror."

Goodbye, localized culture. . .