[Mb-civic] The Hobbit

[Cheeseburger]

The Hobbit


I just thought this was interesting.  The Introduction penned by Beagle in 
1973 to Tolkien's "The Hobbit":


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 book 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 friends - 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 into popularity almost overnight.  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 the word "progress" lost its ancient holiness, and 
"escape"  stopped being comically obscene.  The impulse is being called 
reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there.  I would 
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 here in a poisoned 
world.  We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - 
thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses.  Let us at last praise 
the colonizers of dreams.

Peter S. Beagle
Watsonville, California
July 14, 1973


Go read "The Hobbit" again.  We need your help.  I hope you have plenty of 
cakes.  Me and a few of my friends are coming to Tea on Wednesday..............




Cheeseburger

- Where has the sparrow gone now that I need its song.

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