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Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it – because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. “Oh those awful Orcs,” they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is. And they’re too damned lazy to do it.
