from Middle-earth to Hogwarts

[Doreen]

No: HPFGUIDX 13228

To help pass the time from now until book five, I picked up a copy of JRR Tolkien's, The Hobbit, to read again. I read the preface (I think that is the right word) and I could not help but to compare what Peter Beagle said about Middle-earth to the way that I feel about Hogwarts and Harry Potter.      
 I thought I would share it with you all. It just sums everything up so nicely.

"... lovers of the Middle-earth want to go there. I would, myself, like a shot.
For in the end, it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkein's considerable gifts in showing it all to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams, adn twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers -- thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us last praise the colonizers of dreams."
Peter S. Beagle
Watsonville, California
14 July 1973

Doreen


 


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