[Morthoron]

Some folks just don't get it. Oh, they'll say they get it, and cite any number of other literary pieces, complete with appropriate quotations from the author to bolster their sere and rigid view, and yet they have a fundamental disconnect in regards to what other people are saying.

For a magician to work an astounding illusion, it requires a suspension of disbelief, and in certain circumstances a wish to believe that the illusion is real. The audience knows that what they are seeing is an illusion, and perhaps some even know how the bit of magic was produced; however, for the eye and brain to be fooled, even among jaded cynics, makes the illusion all the more powerful, and the magician all the more celebrated.

Tolkien was a magician. He was not a conventional author, as the snobbish critics of post-modern literature would have you believe, and yet he compiled and created a world so compelling, a synthesis so complete, that the eye and mind, and more importantly, the heart, is utterly enchanted, and we are whisked away to realms we wish we could live in.

That is the magic. That is what is real.

We now return you to the stale interrogation by the grand inquisitor, who wishes to purge the folk assembled here of using their imaginations, because he lacks that ability himself.