Tolkienists.org

The academic value of Tolkien’s work is already known to all of a mindset different from the established literary sense of worth, and thus with these lines my intention is to address its importance as entertainment and the comforts of escaping. If nothing else, the past year and a half ought to have taught us — for painfully obvious reasons — just how vital both entertainment and escapism are in whatever form they may come. Historically, however, when it comes to fantasy literature — indeed, imaginative fiction as a whole — there remains a sad universal constant as to how it is perceived when contrasted against the so-called literary fiction, a label which by exclusion segregates even the most prestigious works of fantasy to the dreaded land of genre fiction.…