When you succeed at creating your own world, whether it's in any realm - like Tolkien was able to do - and people are able to enter that world, it's a special thing.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One thing Tolkien does incredibly well - and this is from a lay person's point of view; I am not scholar or anything - is that you don't have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.
I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine.
In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.
A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.
Through art, you create your own world.
To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.
In any great art, you create a world, and you invite people into that world, and hopefully, it's fleshed out enough and you've explained it well enough.
Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is.
'The Lord of the Rings,' published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.
We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay.