Taum Santoski II

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

2. The events in Tolkien's mythos are located in a world related to but not identical with the present physical world. Nor is Middle-earth a mirror-image world reflecting back the common [>ordinary], but contains its own reality, its own flow of events, its own languages, customs and patterns of behavior, which impinge very efectively, but with a newness and nowness, upon our world.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984