On the surface, it would be hard to imagine two writers more different than Tolkien, lost in a medieval landscape of trolls, orcs and dragons, and Christie, meticulously working out the details of the murder at the vicarage. What they had in common, though, was that although they continued writing into the early 1970s, they were most deeply influenced by the popular fiction of late Victorian Britain. Tolkien’s particular favourites were the fantastic fairy stories of George MacDonald, notably The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and the folk and fairy stories collected by the Scottish poet Andrew Lang. Today fairy stories have a rather weedy, effeminate image: a century ago, however, this was not the case at all. As the Tolkien scholar John Garth notes, many of the soldiers who fought for Britain on the Western Front had been reared on the tales of MacDonald and Lang, as well as JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Tolkien’s other great enthusiasm, meanwhile, was more stereotypically masculine: the rousing adventure stories of H Rider Haggard. The American critic Jared Lobdell has even argued that when considering Tolkien’s influences, Haggard’s should be “the first name” on the list, and that when Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings, his real aim was to produce “an adventure story in the Edwardian mode”, not unlike Haggard’s rip-roaring romances King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887).

The most obvious influence on Tolkien, though, was that Victorian one-man industry, William Morris. It is a pretty safe bet that when most people see Morris’s name today, they think: ‘Wallpaper.’ But in the first years of the 20th Century, what earnest young men like Tolkien loved about Morris was his nostalgic idealism: his evocation of a lost medieval paradise, a world of chivalry and romance that threw the harsh realities of modern, materialistic industrial Britain into stark relief. Both Morris and his friend Edward Burne-Jones were arch-medievalists, besotted with the legends of King Arthur and, in Morris’s case, the ancient myths of northern Europe. In 1876 Morris had published The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Nibelungs, adapted from the Old Norse sagas that won so much international popularity in the late Victorian period. Largely forgotten today, Morris’s epic poem made an enormous impression on his contemporaries. Tolkien seems to have first read Morris at King Edward’s, the outstanding Birmingham boys’ school that had previously educated Burne-Jones. Addressing the King Edward’s literary society, the young Tolkien even claimed that the story of Sigurd the dragon-slayer – the Norse equivalent of Wagner’s Siegfried – represented ‘the highest epic genius struggling out of savagery into complete and conscious humanity’.

And while other boys grew out of their obsession with the legends of the ancient North, Tolkien’s fascination only deepened. After going up to Oxford in 1911, he began writing his own version of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, in a distinctly Morris-esque blend of prose and poetry. When his college, Exeter, awarded him a prize, he spent the money on a pile of Morris books, notably the epic poem The Life and Death of Jason, the proto-fantasy novel The House of the Wolfings and Morris’s translation of the Volsunga Saga. Indeed, to the end of his life, Tolkien continued to write in a style heavily influenced by Morris, not just mixing prose and verse, but deliberately imitating the vocabulary and rhythms of the medieval epic. In this sense, it was as though his clock had stopped before the Great War.

Other clocks, however, ticked on. On 7 June 1914 Tolkien and his fellow students enjoyed a lavish dinner to celebrate Exeter’s 600th anniversary. Two years later, on 7 June 1916, he awoke in northern France, having just landed on a troop transport from Folkestone. Tolkien was 24 years old, an Oxford graduate with a young wife. He ought to have been establishing a name for himself in his chosen career: academic philology, the study of language. Instead, he was a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, commanding miners and weavers from the industrial north-west.