That is the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of Myth—a confluence of folk and fairy tale, classical epic, medieval and Renaissance and Eastern romance, romantic ballad, Victorian imaginative tale, and twentieth-century book of fantastic adventure such as T. H. White’s Arthurian cycle and Tolkien’s great book. Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children. And kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element,
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