“I always thought that the films people love the most are the films that are wise, that have simple lives, truths and ideas in them. All my favorite films growing up, like E.T., have that quality. Hollywood tends to dumb down things, and be incredibly formal and simplistic and paint-by-numbers. And I never thought that is what people actually liked. But why those big Hollywood films were so successful—why they make so much money, why they are so universal—is that they have big important issues and essential wisdom in them.” - Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin
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“I always thought that the films people love the most are the films that are wise, that have simple lives, truths and ideas in them. All my favorite films growing up, like E.T., have that quality. Hollywood tends to dumb down things, and be incredibly formal and simplistic and paint-by-numbers. And I never thought that is what people actually liked. But why those big Hollywood films were so successful—why they make so much money, why they are so universal—is that they have big important issues and essential wisdom in them.”

- Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin

The shadow falls along the shore

The search lights twinkle on the sea

The silence of a mighty fleet

Portends the tumult yet to be.

The tables of the evening meal

Are spread amid the great machines

And thus with pride the question runs

Among the sailors and marines

Breathes there the man who fears to die

For England, Home, & Wai-hai-wai.
Winston Churchill’s poetry
If, as I believe, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded more completely than any previous writer in this genre in using the traditional properties of the Quest, the heroic journey, the Numinous Object, the conflict between Good and Evil while at the same time satisfying our sense of historical and social reality, it should be possible to show how he has succeeded. To begin with, no previous writer has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail. By the time the reader has finished the trilogy, including the appendices to this last volume, he knows as much about Tolkien’s Middle Earth, its landscape, its fauna and flora, its peoples, their languages, their history, their cultural habits, as, outside his special field, he knows about the actual world.
In 1956, W. H. Auden reviewed J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King.
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