The Hobbit
di J.R.R.
Tolkien
Ballantine
Books, New York
29° ed. 1989, pp. 304
Illustrazione di copertina di Michael Herring
Cartonato
Note di quarta di copertina
In this
delightful and enthralling tale, J.R.R. Tolkien first created the imperishable
world of fantasy called Middle-earth, and those charming, indomitable
creatures, the Hobbits, whose adventures are continued in “The Lord of the
Rings.”
It's been
fifteen years at this writing since I first came across THE LORD OF THE RINGS
in the stacks at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. I'd been looking for the book for four years,
ever since reading W. H. Auden's review in the New York Times. I think of that time now—and the years after,
when the trilogy continued to be hard to find and hard to explain to most
friends—with an undeniable nostalgia. It
was a barren era for fantasy, among other things, but a good time for
cherishing slighted treasures and mysterious passwords. Long before Frodo Lives! began to appear in
the New York subways, J. R. R. Tolkien was the magus of my secret knowledge.
I've never thought it an accident that
Tolkien's works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost
overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a
decade than the Fifties—they merely reaped the Fifties' foul harvest—but they
were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society
had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately
deadly. In terms of passwords, the
Sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and
escape stopped being comically obscene.
The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of 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 Tolkien's considerable gifts in showing it 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 and 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 at last praise the
colonizers of dreams.
— Peter S.
Beagle
Watsonville, California
14 July 1973
