INTERVIEWER
Given the place of Tolkien in Babel Tower, what is the place of Tolkien in all this?
BYATT
It can be connected to what I got out of Calvino and Blixen, a sense that there were still mythical worlds going on. When I was teaching in the art school, student after student was painting pictures out of Tolkien, those who weren’t painting hard-edged abstraction, that is. Sometimes they were doing both—a hard-edged abstraction given a Tolkien name. They would say, You know, I haven’t read anything since I was a child that I enjoyed, and then suddenly there was this. I think the cult of Tolkien in England was quite different from the cult in America. In America it had to do with the frontier, with the sense of Thoreau and Walden that the wild was better. One of the emotions I feel in Tolkien is to do with my ecological emotion—that he’s describing a world in which the landscape is as big and as endless as it is if you’re a human being who has to walk in it. It’s simple things like that. I don’t actually like any of his people very much, but I like being in a world where you experience the midges and you can’t ever get away from the midges. That I like, and a lot of its readers like that.

It also crosses over into the world of Dungeons and Dragons. I went to take my youngest daughter out, when she was at Newcastle University. There’s a kind of deep dingle next to this rather good restaurant. As we arrived these Land Rovers drew up, and all these people got out in cloaks and swords and things. They were all dressed as different people out of Tolkien and they just vanished into the bushes! It is immensely powerful. I think you can read Tolkien, and you can identify with the very small people with furry feet, or you can identify with Aragorn, who has the weight of the world on his shoulders. You have to do it in a very primitive way. If you start thinking, you’ve got to stop reading.

I read it as a sort of soporific. I read it when I’m very tired, and I read it partly because there’s no sex in it. I read it because it’s not stressful, which is why I don’t think the argument that it’s too simple because the good are going to beat the evil carries much weight. You ought to know that. It’s that sort of story. It’s good that you know that nobody you really care about will die except the very old. That’s very soothing, and children, after all, should have their literature. - The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 168.