I love comparative studies by nature. So, when I first discovered John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, I immediately realized I was in front of an extraordinary opportunity to start a very long travel through the realms of fantasy, as well as through those of reality. The thesis I am going to demonstrate with this essay is that there exists a secret path, a hidden but powerful dimension in the sceneries of Middle Earth. The imaginary continent conceived by Tolkien’s mind contains in fact an outstanding degree of “real world”, and can therefore have remarkable effects on our perception of life. In order to fully illustrate these aspects, I will subsequently touch the following key-points:
- What are the fundamental characteristics of Tolkien’s fantasy?
- In which sense can we say that Middle Earth is a hidden reality? And does it differ today from what it used to be in Tolkien’s time?
- What is the specific effect that reading Tolkien’s works, and in particular The Lord of the Rings, as well as seeing the Oscar-winning movie, can have on us people of the 21^st Century? Can a comparative literature approach help to better understand the repercussions of such a cultural phenomenon on our appraisal of the world we live in?
I believe all these points are interrelated, so that it will not be possible to find a definite boundary between one reflection and the other ones. However, each of them represents a distinct moment of analysis.

First of all, I will focus on the theme of fantasy. This is a word that derives from the old Greek fàinesthai (faÛnesyai), which means “to appear”. In strict terms, therefore, fantastic is whatever “appears” in front of our mind’s eyes, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything either real or unreal (imaginary). One could say that something is real if it can be caught by our senses (eminently, by our sight): “I can see it with my eyes, then it is real”. Another could, from an opposite viewpoint, argue that something is unreal if we cannot see it, or however physically perceive it, but nevertheless we can imagine it is there (or in another dimension bordering the place we are in): “I can’t see it with my eyes, but I can imagine it in my mind. Evidently, it is unreal.” The realm of fantasy, and in particular of Tolkien’s fantasy, does not perfectly coincide with either of these “poles”. In fact, it consists of places, characters, objects and events that do not belong to our dimension (and, in this sense, are unreal), but possess an inner energy that is exactly the same which permeates our world’s nature (and this, in a peculiar way, makes them real).
In his essay On Fairy-Tales [1], Tolkien extensively illustrates these concepts. In there, in fact, he explains how secondary creation is the essential aspect of his personal approach to fantasy. Secondary creation is the typically Elvish craft, which consists in making unreal things appear so concrete that the spectators can no longer distinguish reality from imagination, being deeply absorbed into the vision they have got before their eyes. The true fantasy writer, likewise, possesses an equivalent gift, which, in his case, means to describe the imaginary (i.e. unreal) dimension of his tales in such a vivid and involving manner that the reader will be completely drawn into it, although only until the story lasts. Tolkien designates the three basic moments of such subcreative process as Escape, Recovery and Consolation. Who reads a true fantasy story, indeed, is first dragged into the parallel dimension in which the events take place, and in so doing goes through a freeing sensation of broken chains (Escape): the laws of the real world no longer matter, at the moment he dives into the imaginary. Once he’s landed there, however, he finds it so real that he cannot doubt for a second that it is the dimension he has to refer to. In other words, he has momentarily forgotten his world of provenience, and fully accepted the new one. Of course, he is not seeing it with the eyes, but with the mind. Still, such vision is so powerful and rich of inspiration as to reproduce even physical sensations, as if he was still moving and acting in the real world.
The essence of such state is precisely the Recovery, or the reappraisal of the (often) lost pleasure deriving from the immediate contact with things and people, as well as an intuition of the real essence of the life around us, from physical perceptions to feelings. At this second stage, which is undoubtedly “catalysed” by the parallel dimension of the fantasy tale, is already implicit a good slice of reality. In other words, Tolkien, who refused allegory as a possible means of deception for the fantasy reader – because of the link of comparison it implied with the real world –, wasn’t instead critic towards a “soft” form of allegory, which we could define as a natural allegory: a sort of “third solution”, apart from allegory and metaphor [2]. Natural allegory works by means of inspiration. In fact, despite the innumerable types of symbolic interpretation that have been made of The Lord of the Rings – many of which absolutely arbitrary, like those politically oriented [3] -, I reckon it would be very inappropriate to simply look at this novel as a sequence of symbols [4]. In my own view, Tolkien’s masterwork doesn’t mainly “symbolize”: it rather suggests, or anyway inspires. This is the way Recovery works: in fact, once the reader is plunged into the parallel dimension – and so, Escape has already happened –, he re-discovers, in there, the beauty of perceptions and feelings that are a common dominion of the imaginary and the real world.
In Recovery, therefore, is implied the idea of returning to the dimension of reality. We could ideally visualize Recovery as the highest point of a parabola, starting from which the descent begins: such descent is the return to the real world. What happens at that point, though, is something extraordinary, which makes such return special and changes the readers forever. Secondary belief, in fact, has not only made them feel part of a parallel dimension (Escape) and rediscover lost perceptions though it (Recovery), but also recharged them with an intense sensation of joy – which Tolkien Christianly considered an anticipation of Heaven’s Joy –, that is Consolation. Let’s think again of our parabola: from its top, two possible movements begin: one is that of descent, which is the return to real world, catalysed by Recovery; the other, less visible but indeed present, is that of a tangent line that goes towards the infinite. In other words, it is as if the reader, in the highest subcreative moment, had grasped the very secret of Nature’s energy, and thanks to it had experienced a feeling of re-birth, or anyway of utmost enthusiasm. After such an experience, he returns to the starting point radically renewed. Recovery by itself wouldn’t have sufficed: that is the healing remedy, but not the secret itself. Consolation is such secret, after which, in Tolkien’s words, “we should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red” [5].
If these are the fundamental characteristics of Tolkien’s fantasy, considered as a subcreative experience, we still need to specify what are the elements that make such literary genre – of which Tolkien can be rightfully considered the archetype – on one hand different from other “parent” fields (like “fables” and science fiction), on the other strictly linked to what has traditionally been judged as its opposite: realistic literature. This may appear as a digression, but it’s not. Its aim is firstly to better define the core aspects of Tolkien’s fantasy – incidentally touching those of other bordering genres –, and secondly to emphasize how fantasy, in the end, is not only a “literary genre”, but an approach to life that can emerge also in works which describe the real world.
Fantasy, science fiction and traditional “fables” are all expressions of fantasy, meant as man’s capacity of imagining things that don’t exist in the world we live in. This, however, is true in different senses for each of these genres. Science fiction (we could think of Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke) proposes us sceneries of a world that still does not exist, but could become true in the future, thanks to technological progress; “fables” (let’s recall the Latin Phaedrus or, among the moderns, Beatrix Potter) emphasize certain aspects of our dimension, sort of caricaturing them in order to express moral teachings (like when animals are discussing or interacting with each other or with men). Both of these genres, therefore, take place in our dimension, although science fiction focuses on the category of “probability”, while “fables” on that of “absurdity”: the former, in fact, aims at making us reflect over the possible consequences of the current human need for technological progress; the latter aims to serve an educational purpose, by expressing a moral teaching through a tale that has animals as protagonists. Neither of them, however, is able convey a secondary belief in the reader, because they are both attached to reality. Proper fantasy, instead, is what Tolkien talked faerië, which is an imaginative elsewhere: this, however, during the reading (or the listening), becomes a totally convincing here and now. Tolkien’s creation doesn’t put us in front of a “probable” world, and not even of an “absurd” one: he doesn’t actually need, and doesn’t want, to think of what he is telling as something that might happen (as it would be with science fiction), or as something so far away from the normal world’s schemes to express teachings in a neutral form (like “fables”), but as a possible dimension. Middle Earth, in other words, isn’t either probable – because it is by definition other – or absurd, because the mind-shift of Escape makes is absolutely real, in its own context. What is true, instead, is that it contains so much of the real world we “come from” that we can’t help recognising certain features of it while mentally travelling through it. Tolkien doesn’t mention any aspect of reality, and never makes comparisons between his imaginary continent and the lands of our planet, but nevertheless we readers really feel at home, on many occasions. This is not only due to a superficial resemblance between the two dimensions, but, more in depth, to an affinity of atmospheres and emotional states – in one word, of situations – that the places described and the characters’ feelings per se emphasize. There is a kinship of basic emotions between Middle Earth and the real Earth. In fact, this is the first characteristic of The Lord of the Rings that struck my attention, when I first read it. I am not one of those keen readers of Tolkien that have gone through the entire novel for at least twenty times, although I’ve repeatedly read several passages of it for my interest and my literary activity. I’ve rather thought that it was possible to locate numerous points of Tolkien’s masterwork which recalled other consonant, although different, ones of other authors, and especially of realistic authors. This was actually a surprising idea, which I tried to develop in my first book [6], and I am currently dealing with in new researches. We could even say that Tolkien is not so much a fantasy writer, if we consider fantasy as a literary genre, but belongs to the noble family of those artists who have been able to catch, and reproduce in their works, the very roots of nature’s (and so, of man’s) life: energy in its purest form. From this point of view, he can be legitimately compared also to authors like Homer, Plato, Lucretius, Dante [7], but also to many writers of our time (like Hermann Hesse and José Saramago, for instance), who have realised artistic pictures of perceptive and emotional states, taken as universal and therefore a-temporal models. The old masters have especially emphasized the side of absolute values (for instance, in Homer, the hero’s commitment to fighting in order to reach eternal glory; in Plato, the path to the Truth, beyond the dark cave’s ignorance; in Lucretius, the relationship between man and nature; in Dante, the faith in an afterlife and the possibility of a redemption), still realising pictures of the human soul and intelligence that are close even to our perception of life. The moderns, instead, have mainly drawn specific intuitions of nature and man’s sensitivity into scenes which belong to our everyday experience, but enriching them with atmospheres filled with mystery. Both the approaches – between which, in my own view, Tolkien represents a transparent diaphragm – are fantasy-oriented, in the sense that they “precede” or “reproduce” [8] his ability of seeing the world as a complex cloth, woven with threads that are the human feelings and emotions, as well as natural atmospheres and values that unite different people. What I mean is that, by means of a comparative analysis, fantasy may be taken no longer as a literary genre, but as an approach to life. As a consequence, there can be a lot of fantasy also in realistic literature, and – so coming to the core point of this essay – a lot of Middle Earth hidden in our world.
The question, as previously announced, so becomes: if Middle Earth is hidden in the reality we live in, does it hide today differently than in the past? More specifically, in what sense was is it hidden in the years in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published? And what change, if any, has occurred nowadays? There is an undeniable difference, in fact, due to the profound changes that history has determined. The generation of readers that lived between the Thirties and the Fifties was the result of a newborn modern world, in which industrialization had injected an abundant measure of disorientation, due to the mechanization of productive processes, which scraped the awareness of the individual identity: the values of which the classical literatures were imbued were all based on the sense of being thinking individuals, and the implicit premise of any constructive thought was (in René Descartes’s words) Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). The very capacity of thinking, instead, with modernity is jeopardized, because traditional parameters, like the sense of time flowing, the perception of nature and the contact with the living creatures, come to a halt, or anyway go through a deep crisis, in front of a world in which going faster has become the fundamental imperative. There is not enough time to reflect and appreciate the beauty of things, as the only pressing duty is that of finding an effective way to survive (for the poor) and to accumulate wealth (for the rich). In social terms, modernity – as Charlie Chaplin admirably illustrates in Modern Times (1936) – brings on solitude and impossibility to communicate [9]. Even before dictatorships expand in Europe (with Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal), the crisis of the traditional points of reference has already begun, and in a dramatic way. Pirandello writes Uno, Nessuno e centomila (One, None, and a Hundred Thousand) (1926), where he theorizes the fragmentation of the ego in numberless facets, each of which corresponding to the different opinions that the others have of him, because he is no longer able to say who he is by himself; Kafka, in The Metamorphosis (already published in 1915), offers an astonishing view of man’s objectification, when he describes the waking up of a man transformed into a giant insect; Musil publishes The Man Without Qualities (1930); James Joyce, in the Dubliners (1914) and the Ulysses (1922), pictures different aspects of a society (that of the early Twentieth Century’s Ireland) suffocated by an old mentality, based upon a repressive interpretation of Catholicism and on sclerotic social schemes, which result in a radical inability to choose and live. These are all examples of a diffused conviction that there no longer is a way for man to be mentally free, and so reach happiness. Dictatorships appear in such a context, and further reduce the degree of free thought, bringing on also the threat of a terrible war, much more devastating that the 1915-1918 one. The threat, in the end, comes true, and destruction prevails almost everywhere. Therefore, the tormented artistic period which, between the Twenties and the Thirties, has produced the works of the “literature of the crisis”, which I mentioned above, but also the masterworks of Cubism and Surrealism in the visual art, comes to an end. Everything is zeroed and has to be re-built from the roots. 
It is very important to underline that, in these very years, Tolkien, careful observer of the real world, is also very busy writing the stories of Middle Earth. The idea of The Hobbit has in fact proved to be a very demanding dàimon (daÛmvn) [10] to him, in the name of which he has begun a long and emotionally involving imaginative journey, that will ultimately result in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien repeatedly says, in his letters [11], that he didn’t mean to write an allegoric representation of the events of his time. Mordor’s threat has nothing to do with Hitler’s (nor will it be possibly compared to the Soviet Union’s, when, years later, the Cold War will worry the Western world). Tolkien, as already emphasized, refuses allegory, as that would impede a true Secondary Belief. However, it cannot be thought that the emotional shock of the bombings on England and the preoccupation for the world’s destiny haven’t had an influence on the author’s works. In my opinion, such terrible events have confirmed and somehow perfected the writer’s awareness of the deep cultural crisis that the Europe (and not only) of the first half of the Twentieth Century had been experiencing. They have made it plain, and no longer deniable, that the false myths of velocity, progress and competition, couldn’t possibly replace a natural approach to life and a bunch of traditional values (namely, love, faith, courage, protection of the weak, custody of remembrances, hope, and more) that centuries of history had always considered as logically related to the human soul. I am not, by so arguing, adhering to the ideas of those who have considered Tolkien an exponent of the “conservative thought” in Europe, in religious and political terms [12]. On the contrary, I believe that Tolkien was truly progressive, because he was convinced that the pretended progress would in truth determine only a regression to a state of ignorance and depression, as the war’s outcome would dramatically confirm.
It was necessary, on an ethical ground, to rediscover the contraposition between Good and Evil, and to radically opt for the Good and fight the Evil, but the basic distinction that comes out of Tolkien’s works – and in particular The Lord of the Rings – is that between Light and Shadow, Plus and Minus, intended not only in a material sense but, more in depth, as the two energetic poles which are at the roots of life. Tolkien, in other words, seems to understand, in a sort of cosmic intuition, that a true reconstruction of the world – and of man’s mind and soul – can happen only if the people realise which are the elementary forces that determine the world’s vicissitudes. It is not by chance that he feels the need to create a whole cosmogony, in his parallel dimension, to the extent of describing, in Ainulindalë [13], the very creation of the world by Eru and the Ainur. From this, everything else has stemmed. This is the basic truth that Tolkien’s works could reveal, for the readers of his time. Reading The Lord of the Rings, for them, was first of all something completely new, and even strange, in a cultural context of the type that I was evoking a few lines ago. In a time in which everyone seemed to talk about the impossibility to communicate and to choose freely, the end of hope and the fragmentation of the ego, Tolkien simply didn’t care about all this fuss, and went straight to the core points of life. Let’s think of the pacific dimension of the Shire, with lazy and funny creatures, the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, living in peace and comfort, shaken by terrible events that force them to change their life path radically: how many readers possibly felt somehow akin to them, as probably also their lives have been destroyed, or anyway traumatized, by the arrival of World War II? But, even beyond such emotional resemblance, how many readers felt the need to read a story with a beginning and an end, although with several narrative internal pathways, in an age in which even the structure of novels and short stories had been innovated in a deconstructive manner? Finally, and even more relevantly, how many people needed to have clear points of reference, in a time in which fantasy had been killed by violence and every ethical principle seemed to be irremediably dead? In this sense, the contribution of The Lord of the Rings has definitely been huge, because, despite treasons (let’s think of Saruman) and hideous attempts of the evil to creep into the minds of the good (let’s consider Boromir), in The Lord of the Rings the fighting parties are very clear, and the basic idea is that there cannot be any compromise with those who have chosen Darkness instead of Light. Also, and even more deeply, beneath Middle Earth we feel the presence of an entire pulsing universe. All the fights, and even the wars taking place on Earth, therefore, can be contemporarily seen as involving adventures, in which the Secondary Belief has full implementation, and perceived from a safe distance, like the remotely cold light of the stars. Such sense of “distance” is somehow the back-taste of the Lord of the Rings: it is clearly perceivable in sceneries like those of Lothlórien and Rivendell, in characters like the Elves, with their nostalgia for the immortal lands of the West and yet their inability to leave Middle Earth, with the enchantment of their magical gifts applied to nature. I believe that the readers of the generation in which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published needed also such a sense of distance. Tolkien’s creations provided them not only with an emotional involvement in the stories narrated – and with an Escape and a Recovery that their sharp shocks had made necessary –, but also with a mental relax which is of the same sort of a pleasant sunset, or of a peaceful night. Reading The Lord of the Rings, in fact, can be caressing like the sensation of admiring beautiful natural scenery. 
On the other hand, I don’t think it would be correct to propose a psychoanalytical interpretation of Tolkien’s works as the most important key of access to his fantasy world. At least, I don’t repute it the closest to the real needs of the readers of his time. It would be arguable that the Oxford Professor tried to express remote symbols, like maybe the Ring as an object able to convey a sense of power and submission at the same time, or maybe a sexual metaphor or any other similar sort of explanations. I don’t even want to go through all the possible psychological keys of reading of Tolkien’s places and characters, although it is undeniably true that they also have a psychological relevance. And the reason why I don’t ultimately reckon this appropriate is that, again, it would reduce Tolkien’s fantasy to an allegory, or at least to a sequence of metaphors. Therefore, any possible “Freudian” or “Lacanian” interpretation of Tolkien would be as forced as a possible political interpretation of the same author. Tolkien didn’t want to explore the ego, although his creation probably was the expression of an intimate artistic need for light and truth, somehow described by the complicated path to liberty and peace of the small Hobbits, after their forced departure from the Shire. He rather aimed at expressing emotional states, engraved in a story that was perfectly carved into a whole coherent dimension. This is why his places, characters and even the objects (like the Ring, or maybe Andúril, Aragorn’s sword) don’t really “symbolize” hidden values or psychological truths. It is correct, instead, to say that they inspire with feelings and emotions, which indisputably recall values and truths. One could say that this is true of every literary masterwork of every time. This is exact, in fact here I’m not assuming that Tolkien has done something different or better than any other great writer of any time. I am simply observing that he has deeply caught his readers’ attention – from the first years in which his books were published – because they could identify with the atmospheres of the places, the feelings of the characters and the sensations evoked by the objects of Middle Earth. This is also what the Classics had done, but the specific merit of Tolkien’s was that of reproducing such an involvement in a time which had erased all involvements, apart from that of fear. In this sense he has been able to reinterpret the old myths in a modern way. His early readers cannot have missed this aspect. By reading his books, they learned again to appreciate the values that modernity and war had made them forget, not because Tolkien’s novels symbolized them, but because his books plunged them deeply into a parallel dimension where such values appeared as neat as ever, for their profound coherence with an articulated context of events and interwoven feelings. In other words, the readers of that time perceived fantasy as a reinterpretation of the old myths, which had run out of fashion in the modern world: and the old myths returned to life not through allegory, but thanks to their emotional purport. What is a myth, in fact, if not a story with a meaning? And the basic meaning of the Greek word mythos (mæyow) is “word”, which equals saying that a myth’s nature is to “tell” something” [14]. The philosophic purport of Tolkien’s fantasy is therefore proportional to the extent to which it “tells” and, by telling, it “means.” In the troubled atmosphere of political and cultural decadence of the Athens of the 4^th Century b. C., Plato conceived the immortal myth of the Cave, fundamentally a tragic parabola that has a prisoner as protagonist, getting free from the chains and coming to the light of truth from the shadow of false knowledge, and finally returning into the Cave to wake up the other prisoners from their false illusions of knowledge – with the only result of being hated and persecuted –. This is not only, or mainly, a wonderful allegory of the never-ending conflict between appearance and essence, ignorance and truth, but first of all a very beautiful story, made of feelings (anguish, tiredness, and then joy – indeed, a flash of Consolation – and finally bitter disappointment), and also of physical sensations (the pain caused by the chains, the effort to get free, the initial blindness, when the sunlight invades the visual field of the ex-prisoner). But isn’t this true also of The Lord of the Rings? Doesn’t it mean while it simply tells? The author’s purpose never appears to be that of “teaching” anything, insofar as he never intends to “symbolize” anything. He has only conceived a beautiful and involving story in which the very natural perceptions and the feelings of the characters are shared by the readers, as they feel “protagonists” of the situations described. This is the medium by which the meaning reaches the readers. The people who read Tolkien in his time, as I reckon, intensely needed this, as they had been deprived both of their values and of their emotions. Only a “healing myth”, not an allegory, could have helped them to reconstruct their devastated appraisal of the world. It wasn’t only the positive message of a world to re-build after destruction, that is the external and incidental resemblance between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the history of those terrible years, but the affinity of emotional states, which carried a meaning. My idea is that the readers of those years needed that meaning, but would have never appreciated it as much as they did, if it hadn’t been expressed through those perceptive and emotional states. In this sense, they read Middle Earth as the hidden dimension of their time.
What has happened, in the meantime? History has made things change profoundly, as the world has gone though the Cold War, the threats of terrorism, the never-ending technological progress of the North-West of the world, the extension of hunger and poverty in the South-East, and then the end of the contraposition between USA and USSR, the destruction of Berlin’s wall, the radicalisation of the Middle-East crisis, and September 11^th 2001. But we have also passed from an age in which paper was the main material for writing and diffusing ideas, to a time in which television and Internet have shown to be the candidates to the future monopoly of communication. However, the events that have characterized the sixty years gone by since the end of World War II are not ultimately what has influenced the human minds. The state of culture and human thought, in our time, is rather the result of a sequence of subtle phenomena, definitely interrelated with the massive events taking place in the outer world, but less visible, and almost made of a transparent substance, but indeed very dangerous. It is nothing less than what Tolkien himself lamented in his letters [15], where he expressed his doubts as to the concrete possibilities of seeing the world improve even after the end of the terrible conflict of those years. The American “cosmopolitanism” would result, in his opinion, in a massive cultural homologation, which would determine the disappearance of many languages and the regression of almost every place to a flat province lacking character and originality. History has demonstrated that he wasn’t wrong at all. The current result of such involution is nowadays’ globalisation, taken as a cultural levelling agent.
But the sixty years elapsed in the meantime have also revealed various facets, each with a peculiar shade, of this transformation. From the classical principle Cogito, ergo sum – already erased by the irruption of modernity in the first half of the Twentieth Century –, we have passed to the Habeo, ergo sum (“I have, therefore I am”), implicit motto of Consumerism, a stream of commercial thought originated from America and gradually spread into the whole Western world, after the end of World War II. The late consequences of such basic idea are what we see even today, when people do not only think that they will feel happier if they keep buying and accumulating, but mainly assume that they will be at peace because of what the others think about them (or, which is the same, because of how they appear). What I mean is that, while in the phase approximately included between the Sixties and the early Eighties the fact of possessing something was considered as a brick to build up one’s happiness (legitimate aspiration, up to a certain degree) and pride (very frequent degeneration), the latest twenty years have seen another trend prevailing: that of feeling the constant need for being “like” the others: from Habeo, ergo sum, to Videor, ergo sum (“I appear, therefore I am”). Before, people wanted to appear richer, wealthier, and possibly younger than the others. After progress has put a relatively high number of people in the condition to afford the pleasures of life, the goal has become, instead, that of reaching the “common” standard: to appear in line with the rest of the people. Most people have started to think that they would be happier by adapting themselves to the most widely diffused commercial models. Homologation, therefore, has become the key word. Undoubtedly, this is also the result of television and technology, more in general, as people have lost the habit of reading, the educational systems have ceased paying the due attention to the lesson of the Classics, and the very sense of curiosity for the world’s numberless aspects has been constantly decreasing for the majority of individuals. The involution has been slow, but diabolically genial. The masters of TV, in particular, have apparently thought that, since all the available “spaces” had been filled, and nothing new could be offered to an audience which, in most cases, had given up the habit of thinking independently, the only possible way to continue selling was to make the spectators protagonists. This is what had already begun happening in the late Fifties and Sixties with the TV quizzes, but in the rest of the world has become a reality during the Seventies and the Eighties with a series of shows which didn’t involve the human brain excessively, as they were mainly focused on a passive form of entertainment and on situations in which everyone could identity himself or herself. Let’s think of TV soap operas or of music shows exclusively targeting a commercial type of production; let’s also consider the “candid camera” and the “karaoke” shows. These were all “items” that even rusty brains could receive, because they did not involve thinking (quizzes still did, a little bit, but not definitely the other shows mentioned). The ultimate – and dramatic – involution of such premises has happened in the Nineties, with the reality shows and the garbage TV debates with people getting naked and fighting just for the sake of it, and more in general with empty and meaningless vicissitudes presented to the audience as a mirror of their lives. A tendentially homologated world – because already accustomed to a quality of TV products that didn’t urge the intellectual faculties to work and develop – has so finally surrendered to a complete lack of content, in the name of the importance itself of watching. Nobody has any longer wondered what they were observing, but the bare truth is that they were just contemplating the image of the hollow lives of theirs, reflected in a mirror. We could say that the vast majority of the people have become “Nazgûl” of such type of TV production, which has radicalised their natural tendency to appear in front of the others (“I watch this type of TV because it says how I am; ergo, I unwillingly tend to become more and more like that”). This is, after all, what the protagonists of reality shows do: competing in a series of meaningless activities, in order to impress an audience. The audience itself, then, normally supports the candidate that is closer to its own expectations, which means the one that is more “in the average”. This is a perfect synthesis of homologation and vampirization, considered as the need for sucking from other lives in order to find one’s life sense. It is the same non-logic of the stalkers, individuals who passively follow someone else’s life just for the taste of watching it [16].
It is therefore in such context that we must attempt to define in what sense Middle Earth today can still be (and is, in own view) a hidden reality. To this regard, it is important to underline that a famous philosopher of our time, Jean Baudrillard, between the Sixties and the Seventies had already elaborated the concept of Hyperreal. In his words, “unreality no longer resides in the dream or fantasy, or in the beyond, but in the real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself” [17]. This is due to the fact the true reality (i.e. the essence of things) has by now disappeared, and what remains of it is only an illusion, realized by technological means (from photography to Internet, we could say), which reproduces what once was but no longer is. Baudrillard assumes this is what even Realism contributed to, with its attempt to create a double of reality in a reproduction that might be as close to the original as possible; Surrealism substantially confirmed the end of reality, because it supported an Escape into an imaginary world, which was completely disconnected from it, and made of the same substance of dreams. Only Hyperrealism, in his opinion, is an honest mirror of the world we live in, because, in truth, a world, considered as the dimension in which we exist, no longer exists. There is only a pale remembrance of what it once used to be, and a series of useless efforts to reproduce it in artistic or technological forms. This is the same logic of fantastic creations like that of the movie Matrix, in which the world is just a mental image injected into the human minds by machines and computers that have gained control of the whole world and feed on the survived men and women’s lives. But it’s also the very concept of virtual reality, elaborated by William Gibson in his most famous cyberpunk novels [18], where a human mind, by means of a computer equipment, can access a synthetic dimension, every aspect of which corresponds to specific sides of the real world (like databases and bank accounts under the shape of palaces and objects). Not by chance, Baudrillard is judged the most relevant philosopher of Post-Modernity, the ultimate reality in which we all live, today. In it, given the premises of his reasoning, there is no need for a real Escape and a Recovery, because the world by itself is illusory, as it is filled with simulation in all its parts.
So, here we come to the core question of this essay: where is Middle Earth hidden, in the post-modern age? In other words, how can Tolkien’s world interact with today’s potential readers, who are not only generally lacking a classical culture background, but also mainly inclined to appreciate the superficial appearance of people and things? It is not easy to answer, but one premise is necessary: we must not think that the effects which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings could have on the readers of their time cannot be repeated today. There is, after all, a tiny thread of continuity between that age and ours (so close, yet so far): it consists in the stress that still today someone needs to place on the often forgotten – but never dead – values, which modernity has progressively eroded: love, faith, courage, friendship and others, and surely emotional aspects which can still today touch the chords of the sensitive souls. But the true question is: can a true Escape, a Recovery and a Consolation happen in a time in which appearance seems to have prevailed over everything else? Can a Secondary Belief be triggered in a time in which people just look at what they are served by TV and technological devices, without even thinking for one second of the beauty of nature? In Baudrillard’s view, this wouldn’t be possible, and would even be absurd and meaningless, given that the very world we live in is an illusion. In “Tolkienian” terms, instead, I believe there would still be room for hope. This is true for an essential reason: despite the corroding presence of technology, which progressively erodes the natural spaces, nature still endures, on many occasions showing up with catastrophes like the recent tsunami, but in most cases silently working as a soothing agent, which can be enjoyed only in the enchantment of silence. In one of his letters [19], Tolkien longs for the empty spaces of South Africa, the land in which he had spent the first four years of his life, and where now his son Christopher, during World War II, has been obliged to go with the British Army [20]. The author here says that, from an intellectual point of view, it is impossible to accept the idea of surviving in a desolate scenery, but adds that, if there weren’t such desert places and unexplored lands to imagine, he would begin to hate all the green that exists in the world. In my own view, the first agent through which Middle Earth can perform its healing power in our time is precisely such sense of empty spaces and unexplored lands (and seas). The reason why it is so pervasive and magnetic, in an age like ours, is that we live in a hyper-filled world. Baudrillard is right in saying that we have artificially reproduced the true reality, but what is mostly true is that we have erased the perception of space, and the very possibility of imagining new dimensions (real or unreal) to discover. This is the consequence of the growing laziness of the mind, induced by the technologically driven homologation, but also the premise of a possible reconquest. People are probably, even unconsciously, reacting against the bottom-condition to which they have been forced by the media, and are trying to rediscover the pleasure of seeing things with their own eyes. This is somehow related to the energy of Middle Earth, if we want to read the world we inhabit in Tolkienian terms. In fact, it is not only a superficial similarity: we have a world (Middle Earth) that machines and monsters have tried to destroy, but in which nature (see the Ents) has remained able to react, and then we have a reality (the real world) in which somebody is resisting against the prevalent ignorance and homologation. Furthermore, and even more importantly, the people have begun to understand how disappointing could be their tendency to get satisfied with the outer shell of things, without catching their soul, how inadequate to supply them happiness. Someone has therefore started looking for an alternative. And such alternative can only pass through nature and culture, as only nature contains the free space in which body and thought can find peace, and culture is probably the most powerful means to teach the importance of all this. Not by chance, the Lord of the Rings and the other Tolkien’s works have in nature their main focus.
I previously said that the Escape, the Recovery and the Consolation triggered by the places and the characters of Middle Earth, for the readers of Tolkien’s time was the premise for rediscovering the values hidden underneath. Ultimately, this was the deep sense of Consolation, in that age of Fall, in which everyone felt the need for a Redemption (although not necessarily in religious terms). Today, probably the most important moment, in the triad of Secondary Belief, is Recovery. People, in fact, find that they cannot escape into another dimension, because there is no other dimension (as Baudrillard as rightfully taught). What they can do is to rediscover the hidden dimension that lies in the very world they live in. And this is the dimension of nature and its energy. Middle Earth places so much importance on this aspect, that even an apparently secondary character, like Treebeard, is in reality fundamental, and not only for the contribution that he and the other Ents give to the cause of the free people of that continent (by defeating Saruman), but mainly for the lesson of calm and patience in the appraisal of nature’s energy that they offer. They have suffered, they have pondered their sorrow for long years, longing for their maidens, mysteriously disappeared, but they haven’t lost their ability to get surprised in front of nature’s beauty. They haven’t forgotten how to be positively superficial, because there is so much depth also in the surface of the world, if this is not the result of obtuseness, but the fruit of a profound compenetration with nature’s pace (and peace). Middle Earth reactivates our ability to enjoy the present time and place, the fact of being here and now, without necessarily have to plunge into deep philosophic reflections, but also with the awareness that, if we want to do so, led by the healing power of nature, we will not get lost, but we will find a safe way back to the real world. Middle Earth, therefore, nowadays proposes itself as a possible approach to reality, rather than as an alternative to it. Getting into that dimension means to rediscover the roots of our world’s beauty. This is also true because Tolkien’s fantasy today can no longer be considered as much a literary genre as a different perspective on reality. It is still not an allegory, but a palette on which we can find the same colours – the same essences, I would say – that compose the world we belong to. There is a secret path that goes back and forth between Middle Earth and the real Earth, which is that of simple perceptions, the ones that the sense of wonder enshrined in Recovery can convey.
There are many points in common between all this and holistic medicine, in my opinion. Bach Flowers and other similar natural remedies, in fact, aim all at re-establishing the natural energetic balance in every individual, by supplying them the substances that they need in order to compensate specific faults of their body and character [21]. The result of following the right therapy is a state of serenity, in a quiet contemplation of nature’s traces even in the stressful reality of every day. Tolkien can provide similar emotions, and today more than in the past, because Escape, Recovery and Consolation seem to be closer to each other. We can escape into our very world, or better into natural energy, by means of a story that emphasizes its healing power, although referred to an imaginary elsewhere; moreover, we find our Consolation in a simple but intense joy, which seems that of the best moments of our lives. Escape and Consolation converge and stay attached to the core moment of Recovery, engraved in the secret heart of nature.
The beauty of Tolkien’s creations, in fact, lies also in the fact that, although led by a deep Christian faith [22], they don’t have a “conversion” as a pre-requisite. Tolkien himself, in the Letter no.89 [23], underlines how he has personally experienced intense moments of Consolation while reading certain passages of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, like when Bilbo sees the eagles arriving or when Sam (wrongfully) realises that Frodo has been killed by Shelob. Therefore, there can be a Consolation which, although comparable to Heaven’s Joy, is worth appreciation by itself, and independently from the faith one may have: to the extent that it can also appear in dramatic moments, because the eucatastrophe (the Happy Ending), although apparently lost, still burns underneath. But isn’t this, mutatis mutandis, what nowadays’ reality is? A world as grey as Mordor, in many cases, because made poor and sterile by technology and ignorance, but in which energy can still be found, as long as we learn again to appreciate the beauty of nature and its wonderful healing power. This is where Middle Earth hides today, and where we can find it. And this is also the demonstration of how fantasy – no longer regarded as a “genre”, but as an approach to life – can in truth become the most delicate form of realism (or however the most efficient interlocutor of realism) in locating the most seducing and appreciable aspects of the real world. By similitude, in fact, we can read many authors of the real world as an ideal continuation of Tolkien’s sensitivity in the “real world’s literature”. I am especially thinking of the ones that I have already mentioned before: Hermann Hesse and José Saramago, very different between themselves, but indeed able to convey a common message of consonance with Tolkien’s themes. In fact, they have detected a secret thread in the everyday life of this world, without stepping into esotericism, but just considering elements of strangeness and atmosphere in situations that we all experience in our daily routine. Their parallel dimensions are situated in the very Earth we all know, but indeed evoke haloes of perception and meaning that seem to allude to a Middle Earth of Reality. In the last part of this essay I would like to consider some of their passages, compared to other ones from Tolkien’s works, before making some final reflections on the contribution that the Lord of the Rings movie has given to the rediscovery of Tolkien in our time.
First of all, I would like to quote a passage of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund, where the author places a special stress on the enchantment of nature, focusing in particular on its direct relationship with man’s choices and course of life events. The protagonist, the young student Goldmund, is a student in a medieval monastery, and his teacher is the monk Narcissus, who is specially dear to him.

In such a dreamlike world Goldmund lived more than in reality. The real world (…) was but a surface, a thin membrane trembling above the transcendent world of images and dreams. Anything would have sufficed to pierce such a subtle diaphragm: a mysterious note in the sound of a Greek word in the middle of a boring class, a wave of scent from the knapsack in which father Anselm collected herbs for his botanic studies, the view of a stony spray sprouting from the capital of the column of an arched window… such tiny spurs were sufficient to perforate the membrane of reality and stir up, behind its placid aridity, the tumult of abysses, floods and milky ways that agitated that imaginary world of the soul.
                                   (Hermann Hesse, Narciso e Boccadoro (Italian title for Narcissus and Goldmund),
                                   ed. Oscar Mondadori, 1989, p.56. Translation by Giovanni Agnoloni - hereinafter, G. A. -).

This passage can be looked at as a poetic synthesis of the themes we have been considering in this essay. The attitude toward nature and culture of this student, Goldmund, substantially consists of the same themes: a deep curiosity and a secret enthusiasm. So sharp are these feelings in him, that he precociously develops a very profound philosophic intuition – that of the world being just a membrane, which means an illusory diaphragm under which lays the true essence of things –. His own mind, therefore, is gifted with a powerful talent of fantasy, that he uses not to escape into an imaginary dimension, but instead to feed his mind and soul with the natural energy, emanating both from father Anselm’s “herbs” and from the architectonic details of the monastery in which he lives and studies. Underneath, lays a storm of intellectual forces in preparation, ready to make him become the wandering artist that will walk for never-ending miles through the counties of this patch of world, leaving works of craft here and there, as the novel tells. Mind and culture, therefore, emerge as powerful traits d’union between the natural energy and the surface of things, as to demonstrate that perceptions and reflections are not necessarily in contradiction with each other, as long as the superficial dimension of natural well-being remains the point of reference of the thinking soul. There can be no knowledge, the writer seems to assume, if disconnected from a simple acceptance of nature’s pace, and, likewise, there can be no real pleasure in living in this world, if not accompanied by the awareness of the values and meanings it entails. In other words, the ideal solution for a happy existence (away from the “disease” of mental homologation) seems to derive from a careful balance between surface and profundity: in this sense, there can be so much intensity of thought in a quiet natural perception.
In this light, I cannot help citing the words that Tolkien uses to describe the fusion of ingenuity and wisdom of the Ent Treebeard. These are the sensations that Pippin will recollect, when remembering such character’s eyes:

“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground - asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waken up and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.”
                                                                          (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, HarperCollins 1991, p.452)

It is beautiful how the eyes of Treebeard comprise two different but convergent dimensions: that of insight and that of “out-sight”. They have trained themselves to studying the intimate nature of the Ent, but are still able to reflect and enjoy the immediate pleasure of the outer world. And it is interesting to note that the expression “like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake” suggests sensations related to air (the implicit idea of the wind that caresses the leaves of a tree), water (the lake) and earth (the ground in which every tree is rooted and on which the Ents can walk), along with that of pure energy (the shimmering light of the sun). These are all the necessary ingredients of a natural approach to life. One could assume that, as long as you have earth, water, air and sunlight, you can be happy, and you don’t need anything else. However, Treebeard has not been satisfied only with this. He has always wanted to go deeper, to understand the intimate secrets of nature, starting from his very soul, and much has suffered, like all the Ents, for the disappearance of the Entmaidens. But his own self-awareness has always been somehow tailored on his identity of a natural entity, conscious of its own limits (“just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip”), but also of a heritage belonging to centuries of natural and cosmic history (“between deep earth and sky”). In other words, Treebeard is the point of connection between the vegetal and the human nature. He is aware of the deep dynamics of nature, but has also feelings absolutely similar to those of a human being. And, most relevantly, he suggests – just with his eyes’ expression – much more that he directly reveals. This is one of the most important aspects of Tolkien’s fantasy, as well as one of the reasons why Treebeard, better than other characters, reveals the true meaning of the expression natural allegory, or, in other words, the peculiar way in which symbols appear in Tolkien’s works, by means of natural inspiration. Treebeard doesn’t “symbolize” anything specific, but suggests, or better inspires, an idea of equilibrium between simple perceptions and the dimension of thought [24]. Not by chance, Tolkien, in his letter no. 180 [25], admits that he hadn’t planned to create the Ents, but they simply appeared out of his mind; more in general, the whole story seemed to be writing itself. All this explains why whatever symbol can be found in Tolkien’s works hits the reader’s imagination not by allegoric means, but through inspiration. Tolkien didn’t dislike symbols per se, but simply didn’t approve allegory. That didn’t exclude the possibility of perceiving symbolic meanings which naturally emanated from the perceptive halo of the places and the characters of Middle Earth. This is the way in which what I call “natural allegory” works, and Treebeard is a very relevant example of it. In fact, we readers of today can interpret the Ent as an implicit sign of alarm in relation to our world’s large state of indifference and homologation. But this was not, of course, Tolkien’s purpose, in creating such a figure. He had only followed the natural course of his inspiration. The writer, though, didn’t aim at “teaching” anything: it is just our readers’ freedom which permits us to feel this character as a spur against today’s world’s indifference and lack of sensitivity, and this is a legitimate interpretation, insofar as it doesn’t contradict, but rather completes, the halo of atmospheres of the forest of Fangorn and of the Ent people. The “surface” of the “real world”, to repeat Hermann Hesse’s words, can so be pierced almost without effort, because our mind is involved only after our senses. The world of inside and that of outside find a point of contact as much in the eyes of Goldmund as in those of Beardtree. Both of them are the expression of a fantasy approach to reality. This is, therefore, an important clue of the existence of a “Middle Earth” as a “hidden dimension of reality”, which is an invisible bridge of energy between the sphere of perception and that of reflection.
The following passage, from José Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ [26] goes deeper into such themes, because it almost offers a cosmic fresco, whose paint is precisely the secret of natural energy.

It was the time in which morning twilight covers with grey all the colours of the world. He set off toward a little penthouse, which was the donkey’s shelter, and there he relieved himself, listening, with a half-conscious satisfaction, to the sharp sound of his urine against the straw spread on the ground. The donkey turned the head, letting its protruding eyes shine in the darkness, and then shook vigorously the hairy ears and poked again the muzzle into the manger, tasting the leftovers of its ration with its big and sensitive lips. (…) Joseph stared at the sky and, in the depth of his heart, wondered. The sun is late to rise, there’s not, in the whole heavenly space, even a slight trace of the pale tones of dawn, not a gentle stroke of pink or of sour cherry, nothing, all along the horizon line, as far as the courtyard walls let him see, for the entire extension of an immense ceiling of low clouds, similar to little squashed cloth-balls, all alike, nothing but one violet colour that is already beginning to become vibrant and luminous there where the sun will break in, and is progressively getting darker, more and more, so as to blend with what, beyond, is still night. (…) With the heart filled with awe, Joseph imagined that the world was coming to an end, and he, there, only witness of the final sentence of God, yes, he alone, there’s a complete silence both in the sky and on earth, you can’t hear a noise in the nearby houses, not even a voice, the cry of a baby, a prayer or a curse, a breath of wind, the bleating of a goat, the barking of a dog, Why aren’t the cocks crowing, he murmured, and he repeated the question, anxiously, as if on the cock-crow depended the last hope of salvation. They sky, then, started to change. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the violet began to be tinged and to assume, within the ceiling of clouds, a pale pink colour, which then reddened, until it disappeared, it was there and one second later it no longer was, and suddenly the space exploded in a bright wind, multiplying in golden spears that hit and pierced the clouds which, who knows where and when, had increased, become enormous, huge boats that hoisted incandescent sails and ploughed a finally free sky. (…) The morning was advancing and expanding, and it really was a vision of almost unbearable beauty, two immense hands that entrusted to the air and the flight a huge and shining paradise bird, which displayed like a radiant fan its tail by one thousand eyes, making sing, near there, simply, a nameless bird. A breath of newborn wind then hit Joseph in the face, agitated the hairs of his beard, shook his tunic, and then surrounded him like a whirlwind in the desert, or maybe what seemed that was just the dizziness caused by a sudden turbulence of the blood that was running down his back like a burning finger, signal of another and much more pressing need.
                                                 (José Saramago, Il Vangelo secondo Gesù, cit., pagg.19 ss. Translation by G. A.)

The concept of natural miracle here matches perfectly that of natural allegory, converging with it in the definition of a way to grasp the core of nature’s energy. The scene describes what, in the “heretic” view of José Saramago’s, is the atmosphere preceding the Conception of Jesus Christ through the Holy Ghost. This, in this very unorthodox perspective, happens when Joseph, pater putativus of Jesus, right after an unnaturally delayed dawn feels the need to stay in bed with Mary, and through his semen – although unwillingly – lets God’s spirit fecundate his wife. The spiritual miracle passes through a series of images which of course belong to the real world, but possess also an inner strength, an inexplicable “strangeness” that is the purport of their proximity to another dimension. It would not be improper to call this the realm of fantasy, but what is mostly true in such a statement is the fact that fantasy and reality share a common secret: energy, the very one that comes to us through the sun, water and air, and makes life possible on earth, coming out as the most direct means to comprehend, simply, the deepest mysteries of faith. Silence precedes the cosmic music of clouds, light and wind, and there is an indeed abrupt passage from the immobility of a sort of pre-life or limbo-existence, to the full blossoming of the new day. In such a vision, man mirrors himself into universe and we can perceive, although for a tiny second, the intimate affinity which exists between even the smallest particles of the world and the physical and spiritual unity of its whole. Well, I see a profound consonance between such an approach to the real world and Tolkien’s one to Middle Earth. What is, after all, this dimension of energy inside our world, if not a reproduction of the deepest chords of Middle Earth’s melodies? Isn’t it true that Arda, Tolkien’s earth, was created when the Ainur developed the musical theme that Eru (God) had suggested them? And cannot such music be regarded as a wonderful natural allegory – that is, a symbol that works by means of a natural inspiration – of nature’s energy? What I mean is that Saramago’s description is coherent with the most profound and delicate part of Tolkien’s imagination, which borders the territory of religion. Tolkien was a true believer, a devout catholic, although he didn’t necessarily want to express religious values through his literary works. In his letter no. 165 [27], he remarks how wrong it would be to find allegories in The Lord of the Rings, but also rejects the critic [28] that in his novel there is no religion. In fact, he adds that Middle Earth is a monotheistic world of “natural religion”. In my own view, such expression (natural religion) is perfectly consonant with natural allegory and natural inspiration, because they are all facets of the same “entity”: natural energy. This is why Tolkien never goes deep into the figures of the Valar or Eru in either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. We perceive the presence of a secret layer of cosmic secrets, beneath the surface of the world, exactly as we have caught it in Saramago’s passage, but it’s all sort of implicit in the “superficial” beauty of nature. Inserting a forced element of “religion” into this frame would make the narration lean toward the extreme of allegory, rather than that of natural allegory and natural inspiration. Therefore, Tolkien prefers to develop such themes in works that are not ultimately “human”, but mainly focussed on the immortals and the Elves, like the Silmariillion and Ainulindalë. At the beginning of the latter, we read that.

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Ilúvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.
                                                                                  (J.R.R. Tolkien, Ainulindalë, in The Silmarillion, cit., p.15)

This is a mythic reproduction of the cosmic secrets hidden behind the veil of appearance of the world’s curtain. But such degree of comprehension is not human. Men (and Hobbits) can only perceive something much closer to the surface of the world they live in, both in the real earth and in Middle Earth. We have seen Saramago’s Joseph staring in wonder at the natural miracle of a very unusual dawn. Now let’s remember Frodo’s enchantment at the Elves’ songs in Rivendell:

Frodo was left to himself for a while, for Sam had fallen asleep. He was alone and felt rather forlorn, although all about him the folk of Rivendell were gathered. But those near him went silent, intent upon the music of the voices and the instruments, and they gave no need to anything else. Frodo began to listen.
At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep.
                                                                                                 (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, cit., p.227)

Again, it is music that conveys Frodo’s sensations. Music was the medium to create the world, and now through it a mortal creature may perceive the softest harmonies that connect the real world (supposedly, Middle Earth, in a Hobbit’s perspective) and the beyond of the unmentioned immortals. Such “intuition of a parallel dimension” inside the parallel dimension of Middle Earth is in fact the most powerful means for us reader to identify with the places and the situations of the Lord of the Rings. Indeed, this is a sort of “squared fantasy”, as we live ourselves the experience of secondary belief – and therefore of Escape, Recovery and Consolation – at the same time as the novel’s protagonist. We feel drawn into a parallel dimension while he feels dragged into another parallel dimension, the very one evoked by the Elves’ music. This means that we are deeply plunged into the point of view and perception of the book’s protagonist, and really come to a point where our “memory” of the real world somehow fades, although only apparently. What will happen to Frodo, after the end of the elven enchantment, will happen to us, too, after the end of our reading. But this is part of the process of Recovery: rediscovering our world with renewed eyes, once we have washed our senses by walking through the purifying cascades of faerië.
This is also the way in which Middle Earth works its soothing way into our world. Today it does so differently from how it used in Tolkien’s time, because it is more focussed on the energetic and emotional side of human experience than on that of “values”. Values, still, are the substance of which perceptions and emotions are made, but in a world become culturally and humanly deaf, in most cases, they could not catch the people’s attention so vividly if they didn’t respond to the intimate need for healing that almost every sensitive soul nowadays has. In my own experience, reading Tolkien has somehow confirmed the positive experience I was having with holistic medicine, which has got me into studying such analogies more in depth, especially by means of comparisons with authors of “realistic literature”. It is by so doing that I’ve come to discover the common territory of energy as the dimension of life’s appraisal which both fantasy authors and “fantastic realists” have. Such comparisons, in fact, may lead to understanding more in depth various core points of Middle Earth. Furthermore, they may let us realize that Middle Earth is so charming and convincing because it strictly resembles (in depth, not only in surface) the real world. This is something missed by large part of the critic that over the years has flourished in Italy (but not only here) on Tolkien’s themes, which has often placed a special emphasis on the religious implications of Tolkien’s inspiration, or even on a supposed political background of his thought. Nothing could have been more wrong, in my opinion. Tolkien’s inspiration was essentially the result of a secret dialogue between him and nature, and the sceneries that he offers to us in his works are a natural path through life, which may lead to religion, if one wants to take it in that way, but does not necessarily push in that direction.
This is something that more than anything else explains people’s never-ending attention for Tolkien’s works, even in a superficial and homologated world as that of today. And this is also something that Peter Jackson and his staff bore in mind, in making the Oscar winning movie of The Lord of the Rings. I believe they have been able to realize a film that couldn’t have been closer to the original imprint of Tolkien’s novels, although undoubtedly different and also less profound and delicate than it. The necessity to involve the audience in the sequence of the events, together with that of simplifying as much as possible the complex dynamics of Middle Earth’s history, has caused the lack of charm and profundity that many parts of the movie present, compared to the novel: let’s think of the Shire or of Lothlórien, which have been quickly touched, while in the book you could breath their atmosphere and enjoy it fully. But this doesn’t mean that the movie has been a failure. On the contrary, within the limits of the show business, it has definitely succeeded in offering a very involving plot of events and emotions, pressed together in am exciting whirl, with sudden although short breaks – like the sceneries of Rohan, the vision of Minas Tirith seen from a distance, the Misty Mountains –. These are the gifts that a piece of real world – New Zealand –, combined with the prodigies of computer science, have made to the spectators of the whole world. I wonder how many of these have decided to read the Lord of the Rings for the first time after seeing the movie. What is sure is that Peter Jackson’s work has definitely contributed to raising people’s curiosity in a time that is very poor of it, and in which culture must necessarily walk down the path of business, in order to be considered. But indeed, it has been a very important step toward the opening of a wider debate on the value of fantasy as a means to rediscover and appreciate reality.
As a conclusion of this essay, therefore, I would like to remember once more the sensations evoked by the greenest sceneries of Middle Earth as described by the movie (the woods of the Shire – the Old Forest –, Lothlórien, Fangorn), while quoting a passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the masterwork of another great fantastic realist, Gabriel García Márquez, and then a passage of The Hobbit, on the Mirkwood. Nature leads the game, in fantasy as much in the new fantasy that the real world literature can offer, and finally also in the best possible compromise between commerce and culture, that is the good cinema. There indeed exists a circularity of perceptions that should make us think about the relative value of boundaries between different artistic expressions, as well as between art and life. I will not add any more comment, after these excerpts. I would just like to read them, and propose them to the readers’ attention, while thinking of a realm in which nature is the only sovereign, and men and the other creatures spontaneously respect it, because they are all aware that they are part of it, and even in its darkest corners they mustn’t be afraid, since there is an intimate light of hope (or of energy) that leads them through its meanders. Adding more words to these artistic expressions, after all that we’ve been saying, would mean to search for symbols, or to look for allegories. But the true fantasy, as well as the genuine “new fantasy” (or “fantastic realism”), doesn’t bear allegories, but essentially inspire us with energetic meanings. The true fantasy is intimately imbued with reality, and constantly lets us Escape and Recover, finding a true Consolation in our present and in the place we live in.

The earth became soft and wet, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation grew constantly more insidious and the birds’ trill and the monkeys’ screeches got farther and farther, and the world turned sad forever. The men of the expedition felt oppressed by the silence, anterior to the original sin, where their boots sank in ponds of smoking oils and their machetes cut in pieces bleeding lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they worked their way like somnambulists through a universe of affliction, weakly lit up by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects and with their lungs oppressed by a suffocating blood odour. They could not return, because the path that they were opening while walking closed again in little time, with new vegetation that they saw growing almost with their eyes. «It doesn’t matter », said José Arcadio Buendía. «The essential thing is to not get lost». Always relying on his compass, he kept leading his men towards the invisible North, until they finally got out of the enchanted region. It was a deep night, without stars, but darkness was imbued with a new and clean air. Exhausted for the long crossing, they hung their hammocks and slept deeply for the first time after two weeks. When they woke up, with the sun already high, they got stupefied. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palms, white and dusty in the silent morning light, there was a huge Spanish galleon. Slightly inclined on starboard, from its intact masting hung down the squalid rags of the sailage, among shrouds adorned with orchids. The hull, covered by a neat body of petrified remora, and of soft musk, was securely bolted in a ground of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy an ambit of its own, a space of solitude and oblivion, forbidden to the vices of time and to the habits of birds. In the inside, that the expedition explored with cautious fervour, there was nothing but a thick layer of flowers.
                                  (Gabriel García Márquez, Cent’anni di solitudine, ed. Mondadori –
                                 Italian edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude - , 1982, pagg.12-13. Translation by G. A.)

They walked in single file. The entrance to the path was like a sort of arch leading into a gloomy tunnel made by two great trees that leant together, too old and strangled with ivy and hung with lichen to bear more than a few blackened leaves. The path itself was narrow and wound in and out among the trunks. Soon the light at the gate was like a little bright hole far behind, and the quiet was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along while all the trees leaned over them and listened.

As their eyes became used to the dimness they could see a little way to either side in a sort of darkened green glimmer. Occasionally a slender beam of sun that had the luck to slip in through some opening in the leaves far above, and still more luck in not being caught in the tangled boughs and matted twigs beneath, stabbed down thin and bright before them. But this was seldom, and it soon ceased altogether.
                                                                                  (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, HarperCollins, 1995, pag.132)
 
General bibliography:
- J.R.R. Tolkien: Il Signore degli Anelli, ed. Rusconi (The Lord of the Rings)
- J.R.R. Tolkien: Lo Hobbit, ed. Adelphi (The Hobbit)
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. HarperCollins
- J.R.R. Tolkien: Albero e Foglia, Rusconi (contains essay On Fairy-Tales)
- J.R.R. Tolkien: La realtà in trasparenza. Lettere, Rusconi (contains all published Tolkien’s letters)
- J.R.R. Tolkien, Racconti perduti, ed. RCS Libri (The Lost Tales)
- T. Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, ed. Houghton Mifflin
- R. Helms, Tolkien’s Worlds, ed. Panther
- H. Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, ed. Houghton Mifflin
- P. Baroni, C. Isoldi, E. Rialti, M. Zupo, Uno sguardo fino al mare, ed. Il Cerchio
- L. Del Corso, P. Piacere: L' anello che non tiene : Tolkien fra letteratura e mistificazione, ed. Minimum fax, 2003
- E. Passaro, M. Respinti, Paganesimo e cristianesimo in Tolkien, ed. Il Minotauro
- N. Abbagnano – G. Fornero: Filosofi e filosofie nella storia, Paravia.
- I. Vecchiotti, La dottrina di Schopehauer, ed. Mursia
- A. Grünbaum, I fondamenti della psicoanalisi, ed. Il Saggiatore
- S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 1923
- J. Lacan, Ethics, 1960.
- J.M. Palmier, Guida a Lacan, ed. Rizzoli, 1960
- P. Prini, Storia dell’esistenzialismo, ed. Studium
- S. Moravia, Introduzione a Sartre, ed. Laterza
- J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Paris, 1976
- J. H. Smith,. The World of Samuel Beckett. Psychiatry and Humanities, Baltimore, 1991
- G.Colli, La nascita della filosofia, Adelphi
- I. Biondi, Grasce et Latine, ed. Spazio Tre
- G. Agnoloni, Letteratura del fantastico, ed. Spazio Tre
- D. Modenini, Mitologia delle origini, ed. Spazio Tre
- D. Modenini, Mitologia e significati, ed. Spazio Tre
- AA.VV., Filosofie nel tempo, ed. Spazio Tre
- L. Pirandello, Uno, nessuno centomila, ed. Mondadori
- F. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, ed. Bantam Classics
- R. Musil, Man Without Qualities New York, ed. Putman
- J. Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Penguin
- J. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Vintage International
- Isaac Asimov, Foundation Novels, Paperback edition
- Homer: Iliad
- Homer: Odyssey
- Plato: The Republic
- Lucretius: De rerum natura
- Dante Alighieri,“La Divina Commedia” : “Inferno” , “Purgatorio” , “Paradiso”
- A.C. Clarke, Odissea nello spazio: 2001 – 2010 – 2061 – 3001, ed. SuperPocket
- W.Gibson, American Acropolis, ed. Mondadori, 2000
- W.Gibson, L’accademia dei sogni, ed. Mondadori
- W.Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ed. Bantam Books
- W. Gibson, Neuromancer, ed. Nord 
- H. Hesse, Fantasma di mezzogiorno e altri racconti, Tascabili Economici Newton
- H. Hesse, Narciso e Boccadoro, ed. Mondadori (Narcissus and Goldmund)
- H. Hesse, Siddharta, ed. Adelphi
- H. Hesse, Knulp – Klein e Wagner – L’ultima Estate di Klingsor, ed. Mondadori
- J. Saramago, Cecità, ed. Einaudi (Blindness)
- J. Saramago, Memoriale del convento, ed. Feltrinelli (Baltasar and Blimunda)
- J. Saramago, Il Vangelo secondo Gesù, ed. Bompiani (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ)
- J. Saramago, Tutti i nomi, ed. Einaudi (All the Names)
- J. Saramago, Viaggio in Portogallo, ed. Einaudi (Passport to Portugal)
- P. Coelho, L’alchimista, ed. Bompiani (The Alchimist)
- P. Coelho, Il Cammino di Santiago, ed. RCS Libri (The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest For Ancient Wisdom)
- P. Coelho, Monte Cinque, ed. RCS Libri (The Fifth Mountain)
- P. Coelho, Sulla sponda del fiume Piedra mi sono seduto e ho pianto, ed. RCS Libri (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)
- G. G. Márquez, Cent’anni di solitudine, ed. Mondadori (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
- G. G. Márquez, Nessuno scrive al colonnello, ed. Feltrinelli (No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories)
- G. G. Márquez, La mala ora, ed. Feltrinelli (Collected Stories)
- C. Segre, Il tempo curvo di García Márquez (preface to the Italian editino of One Hundred Years of Solitude)
- M. Scheffer: Il grande libro dei fiori di Bach, ed, Corbaccio (an essay on Bach Flowers, one of the core points of Holistic Medicine)