Word: tolkein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TWENTY-FIVE years, Richard Adams was a bureaucrat in Great Britain's Ministry for Housing and Local Government, mediating between federal housing policy and local sensibilities. This strong dose of reality perhaps explains the difference between England's two most famous modern fantasies-Watership Down and J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkein, a professor of English, invented a whole mythological world for his fairy-tale creatures to inhabit; they in turn, are more concerned with forces of good and evil than with practical necessities like food, clothing, and shieter. Adams's rabbits, on the other hand...
...genre never faded permanently. As Cott points out, rock musicians, like Donovan, dabble in variations of fairy lore; professors, like Tolkein, study the Silent Moving Ones; and Victorian imagination persists in the social and political satire of "The Wind in the Willows" or "The Wizard of Oz." Susan Sontag relates that the North Vietnamese Women's Union rehabilitated thousands of prostitutes after the liberation of Hanoi from France in 1954 by telling them fairy stories and encouraging children's games. "That," a spokesman explained, "was to restore their innocence and give them faith again in man. You see, they...