[MLD-Grounds-Keeper-Willie]

I very much agree with orual and mortal elf. Not completely, but almost.

If you think about it, the opposite of reality is fantasy. What is real and what is makebelieve. As I have said before, people (including myself) often read fantasy because they want to escape from reality. There is a good thread called Do we live in Middle-earth? (Page 2) and it sort of realates to this thread (and this thread proves my point in the other thread). Anyways, I said

I think that ME did not exist like a world we live in. It was never real and never official. Therefore we can not live in it and no one could have. But I believe that it is a place that you can go. When you read the books, you enter an illusion and escape from reality. That is why I love Middle-Earth.

People read to 'enter' middle-earth. You get lost reading and therefore, you get lost in the book. You might have a bad day and everything seems to be going wrong. Everybody is p*ssing you off and acting like jack*sses. You start to read LotR or another fantasy and you forget about what happened while you're reading. You don't worry about any of that. In a way, reading a fantasy can also relieve stress. If you read a fantasy while you're stressed out, it can calm you down.

Orual, you said

So often I get sick of the complicated world that we live in, and I want to go back to a time (whether or not it ever really existed)

I often feel the same way. I love the middle-ages. You probably know that already. I wish I could visit it any time I wanted. I'd like to be a warrior or a great hero with a huge b@stard sword or a giant sword. I'd like to be the first one into battle, with my silver armor shining and the tip of my fine and deadly sword glistening in the sun...I could go on forever. But the middle ages are over, and I can't visit them. Here is my favorite poem. It's called Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albiet he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

*MLD-Grounds-Keeper-Willie sheds a tear*

If only Miniver could read the works of tolkien. Poor Miniver couldn't even read any of tolkien's books. The author of this poem lived from 1869 to 1935, so he couldn't have even read tolkien's works. People of Robinson's age didn't have fantasies like we have today. I think that Robinson would have loved Tolkien's works. I'm not sure if tolkien was familiar with this poem, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was.

Orual, you might not want to go to th MA but you want to sometimes escape from the real world to another place, "even if it never existed." Which is why we like to go to middle earth. We can't really go back in time, and we can't really go somewhere that never existed. But we can go to those places through reading. That's what I think that fantasy is. ME was tolkien's own world, that he created. I like reading works of tolkien because they let me escape from reality. When we read and 'enter' ME, its like an illusion. Its not real but we don't think about that. If we thought about it, we wouldn't be escaping; we'd still be in reality. Its like a dream; you don't know that its not real, but if you realize its not real, you wake up. We get lost in the reading and forget about what is real and what is not. I love ME for that reason.

We need fantasies to escape from reality. We can live without them, but we might end up alcoholics like Miniver. The more the world progresses, the more we'll need fantasies. We like to read fantasies to slow down and get away from modern society if only for a short while. The people who say LotR sucks and other stuff like that might not need fantasies if they really feel that way, but when the get older, I'm pretty sure they will. I think that eevryone at some point in their life will need a fantasy.