It's fuelled by ideas from people who have read the Vedas or other scriptures in Sanskrit or translated the Tao from its ancient language. A second key was Bruno Bettelheim's book on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment . Bettelheim was a Freudian analyst and an Auschwitz survivor whose work with children centred on the recognition that for them, fairy tales are the means by which children best understand and recognise the world and their place in it. According to him, they're the highest form of art to a child. Tolkien meant a different thing by 'fairy tales' than Bettelheim did, perhaps, yet both of them would recognise the power of those symbols and the way the Wolf and the Dark Forest stay in the sediment of our unconscious, as does the desire for justice and happy endings.
Fairy tales are, on the whole, hopeful.
Good will prevail, and worth will be rewarded. They are also a prescription for behaving in a certain way. One has only to read his letters to realise how deeply concerned he was with moral issues, and yet one can read The Lord of the Rings for years, as I did, without perceiving the Christianity of it. Contrast that with C. S. Lewis, where good and evil are left as opposites, the one to be rewarded, the other to be punished. The third key that has linked everything together a book by Joseph Campbell called Myths to Live By .