When the first book of Tolkien’s trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, appeared in 1955, his Oxford friend wrote a review for Time and Tide. Lewis frankly acknowledged that Tolkien’s story about hobbits and elves and wizards was a romantic, fantastical tale thoroughly out of step with the times. Here, like nowhere else, the heroic romance “has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism.”5 Nevertheless, Lewis insisted, one of the surprising strengths of the story was its realism: the description of a titanic struggle between Good and Evil that navigates between the
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