LOTR Fantasies...

[Thingol]

Tolkien himself believed that Middle Earth existed, if only in a collective imagination.

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 colonizer of dreams.

-Peter S. Beagle