It's been fifteen years at this writing since I first came across THE LORD OF THE RINGS in the stacks at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. I'd been looking for the books for four years, ever since reading W.H. Auden's review in the New York Times. I think of that time now - and the years after, when the trilogy continued to be hard to find and hard to explain to most friend - with an undeniable nostalgia. It was a barren era for fantasy, among other things, but a good time for cherishing slighted treasures and mysterious passwords. Long before Frodo Lives! Began to appear in the New York subways, J.R.R. Tolkien was the magus of my secret knowledge.
I've never thought it an accident that Tolkien's works waited more than ten years to explode in popularity almost over night. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties - they merely reaped the Fifties' foul harvest - but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties were the time when word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse in being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I myself, like a shot.
For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien's considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness hire in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discovers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
-Peter S. Beagle
Watsonbille, California
14 July 1973
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