Discover the real Middle Earth.” We climbed into two buses after the retreat and before the opening of the seminar to do what the brochures invited. It was a scorching New Zealand summer day, like the magical English summers of childhood’s selective memory.The Tolkien industry was already taking off when I was an undergraduate and Christopher Tolkien, the son of J.R.R., was my tutor. As soon as his father died, he resigned his fellowship at New College and devoted himself to butterflies in the south of France and editing the unpublished manuscripts. Hollywood took over and the trilogy became one of the great global fantasies of the century. I tried several times but failed to get into The Lord of the Rings. Maybe it is a book that needs to be read to you, as it was originally