Cirrus@Austlit

James Bradley recalls his youthful readings of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He argues that, at its best, fantasy fiction 'has a capacity to connect us to things we too often seem to have lost, to make these deep questions [about belief and the human condition] somehow comprehensible, making us feel as if we are somehow connected to the past, to a way of being that might, like the outlines of the map of Middle-earth that once hung on my bedroom wall, reside somewhere in the shadow of our own past'.