"The fantasy of Tolkien, then, is a flight into reality, when we spend most of our time running away from it. We are beguiled into truth, but not as an allegorist may fool us with symbols for a while. We enter Middle-Earth neither knowing nor caring overmuch where it will lead us, but because it is a real-world, observing the real and unalterable moral laws of the created order, it leads us into our own world through the hobbit-holes and dwarf-hewn tunnels and eagle-flights of Tolkien's imagination."