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more to say—is still virtually unknown, at least in England.
    The reason for Tolkien's enormous popularity in the sixties was not simply that he is a fine storyteller, and one of the greatest exponents of the art of 'escapism' in the history of literature, but because his ideas suddenly struck an answering chord in young readers —I apologize for the cliche. In 2001—A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke had popularised the notion that perhaps men were not the earliest intelligent life on earth; perhaps there had been visitors from other planets who had deliberately 'helped' us. Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? (serialised in a Sunday newspaper under the title: Was God a Spaceman? ) made the same suggestion in more detail, and in spite of its slapdash presentation and a tendency to harangue the reader, it became a world best-seller. At the same time, H. P. Lovecraft's stories, with their legend of 'ancient old ones' who inhabited the earth long before human beings, and who destroyed themselves through the practice of black magic, suddenly found a wider audience than he had ever known in his lifetime—or indeed, for many decades after his death. I had discovered Tolkien and Lovecraft at about the same time, in 1960, and had written of both of them in The Strength to Dream, pointing out the similarities. 'Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by name-less things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he ...' This could easily be Lovecraft. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings also carry the history of Middle Earth back to these far ages before men and hobbits. (Oddly enough, though, Tom Bombadil was supposed to be alive then—a point that emphasizes that Tolkien's imagination is much more cheerful than Lovecraft's.) Tolkien has this desire to create a whole world, and supply it with remote origins. He is expressing a human craving to reach beyond the everyday boundaries of human existence. And this, I think, is perhaps his real significance. Brian Aldiss has a science fiction story called Outside that captures something essential about human existence. Six people are living in a windowless house; every day food appears, but no one asks where it comes from, or what they are doing there. Eventually, it turns out that five of the six are aliens from space, who can imitate the form of human beings. They have been captured and placed in the room to force them to reveal their identity. Only one is a true human being, and because he is passive and seems incurious about his situation, the aliens are also passive, thereby, the author implies, revealing that they are not human. For human beings get curious, want to know what they are doing here ... .
    That is not quite true. The great majority of western literature, from Homer to Jane Austen and Trollope, takes the world in which we find outselves for granted, and asks no awkward questions. For more than two centuries now, science has declared that such questions would be pointless, for we are simply objects, like other objects, in a material universe. The modern philosophy known as logical positivism also asserts that 'meta-physical' questions are meaningless. We are here, and that's that ... . But periodically, human beings seem to experience a compulsion to know why they are here—or at least, to ask the question. It began to happen midway through the last century, with writers like Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And the same curiosity took the form of an 'occult revival' in the last three decades of the 19th century. By 1918, that was all over, and Wittgenstein had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with its insistence that it is meaningless to ask questions about a 'beyond', because there is no beyond; it is a linguistic misunderstanding. Wittgenstein was by no means happy about his own conclusion, as his tortured life — reminiscent in many ways of Tolstoy's — reveals; but logical positivists like A.