[Child of the 7th Age]

Regarding skin tone....the Harfoot were said to have been nut brown.

Helkha,

An interesting question, and since I lived through those times, I do have some peronal opinions. As one of the most "ancient" of Downers who went to college in the late 60s, I do have keen memories of fantasy both before and after LotR. My dorm room had the old Ballantine poster up and I ran around in long skirts looking like a hobbit girl, baking bread, disliking technology, and having very strong feelings about what was happening to the trees and the earth. A lot of this was tied in to Tolkien. And believe me when I say that I was definitely not the only one to behave in this strange fashion.

There was no "fantasy" industry, but there were a few of us fans. What I mostly remember is reading fantasy as a child. This was around long before LotR. I poured over Edith Nesbit, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, Wind in the Willows and also, of course, the Hobbit. (It's interesting how most of these are English authors.) We think of some of these books as classics rather than fantasy, but that's actually what they were.

As I became a teen and began searching the bookshops and media for the adult variety, it was sparse. There was some sci fiction that almost verged onto fantasy such as the Star Trek TV show which was much beloved by a large number of us who later went on to be Tolkien fans. There were also books by George McDonald, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, H. Rider Haggard, William Morris and, my own favorite, T.H. White. Some of these were published in the 50s while others were much older. Plus the sword and sorcery stuff like Conan. And of course there was comic books like Superman. (Don't laugh, many of us fantasy fans were "desperate" for whatever we could get!)

But, except for Superman and White and Conan and Haggard, many authors were often impossible to get hold of, even in the libraries. Their books were out of print. So, even though they existed, I couldn't read them!

What really helped the "industry" explode was the paperback book that became more common in the 50s. For the first time I would go to a bookstore and buy cheap reprints of Morris, McDonald, and things like the Mabinogion, plus the new stuff by Tolkien, and the younger writers who were just coming out. Believe me, I bought tons of such books. Some of them I still have, and some have fallen to pieces. And then the floodgates opened and many more people began writing....and the fantasy industry was born. The internet has also given it an enormous helping hand.

I don't know how to say this, but I think Tolkien was born and wrote at the "right" time. Any earlier, and there would have been no Ace or Ballentine publications, and his name would have been known among only a few quasi-academics. Remember that it was the American paperbacks that really spread Tolkien to a wider group of people! (I was too poor in college to afford hardback books.) Any later, and JRRT would not have had the influence that he did on the developing genre.

As a historian, I can say that all the right things came together at the right moment. But, as a fan, I'll go even beyond this. Just like JRRT says in his Letters: a man once asked him....you don't believe you did all of this on your own? And Tolkien had to admit he had stopped thinking that way long ago, and that, despite his unfitness for the task, he saw himself as some kind of "instrument".

Call it fate or providence, or something even stronger if you prefer, but, by the mid fifties, people were looking for something that echoed their own desire to go back to basic things about hope and fear, right and wrong, good and bad. Our world is so complicated.....there is a whole lot of grey, but something resonates when we see the more clear cut choices that Aragorn and Frodo made, and we want to believe we would have made these same choices, if confronted with the same situation.