Free Meditations on Middle-Earth by Karen Haber

same sort of gulf that lies between those who would imitate Tolkien and the man himself. It is the difference between haste and care, between commerce and love. (I don’t mean to suggest that Tolkien was immune to concerns about commerce; any examination of his letters proves otherwise. But he had built his world long before commerce became a concern. It is not often, and cannot often be, thus.)
    As I’ve noted before, perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude fantasists of all stripes—emphatically not just the imitators—owe to J. R. R. Tolkien is what his success did for the genre as a whole. A couple of generations ago, speaking in broad terms, fantasy was something writers occasionally turned out in between novels full of spaceships. Science fiction normally outsold it by a considerable margin.
    It isn’t like that any more. Fantasy novels, these days, appear on bestseller lists far more regularly than their counterparts from science fiction. And a rising tide lifts all boats. Fantasies that could not have hoped to find a home in the 1950s or 1960s now have a better chance of seeing print, because—in no small measure due too Tolkien’s work—fantasy has become a recognized category of its own. It is no accident that the professional organization for those who produce speculative fiction recently changed its name from the Science Fiction Writers of America to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
    The next question to ask is, why has this happened? What has made Tolkien so enduringly popular? What has made fantasy in general so popular, besides Tolkien’s example? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the ongoing, ever more rapid, changes in American life—indeed, in life throughout the industrialized world—during the course of the twentieth century, and especially after the end of World War II. We are all travelers nowadays. When we look back to our childhoods, we remember a world quite different from the one in which we live today.
    Take me as an example. I am, as I write these words, fifty-one. Things we take for granted nowadays that either did not exist or were in their infancy when I was born include television; vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, and chicken pox (I had all but the first, though I didn’t come down with chicken pox till the age of forty-three); frozen foods; jet airliners; no-fault divorce; most, though not all, antibiotics; audio- and videotapes; space travel and most of what we know of astronomy (in the 1950s, the canals of Mars and oceans of Venus were legitimate topics for hard science fiction); birth-control pills; microwave ovens; the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental movements; freeways and the interstate highway system; rock ‘n’ roll; lasers; CDs; mass in the vernacular rather than Latin; computers; legal pornography; e-mail; the hydrogen bomb; organ transplants; and the World Wide Web. The list is brief, and far from comprehensive.
    No wonder, then, that every so often we are tempted to stop and wonder, What the hell am I doing here? Throughout almost the entire course of human history, people lived in much the same world at the end of their lives as at the beginning. Change did happen, but incrementally, even glacially. Medieval artists dressed the Roman soldiers around the crucified Jesus in the armor of their own day, and saw nothing incongruous in doing so. That styles and techniques in such things had altered through time was beyond their mental horizon.
    Only in the past couple of hundred years has change become rapid enough to grow visible in the course of a single human life. It is no accident that historical fiction—fiction emphasizing the differences between past and present—came into being at about the same time as the Industrial Revolution took flight. The smooth continuum between past and present was broken; the past became a separate country, and interesting specifically because of that.
    I also think it no accident