PWD: What do you find most enduring in Tolkien's work?

DA: I find that since they're very finely done, self-contained world, the books have an enormous appeal to people. Tolkien speaks to any day and age. The first film came out in December and because of the fraught political situation that we're familiar with on a daily basis, the books have a contemporaneousness that's accidental.

PWD: In your opinion, are there writers of fantasy who will sustain the same level of interest?

DA: There are other writers who have used fantasy in brilliant manners, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood series or Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books. But unlike many fantasy writers today, Tolkien really tapped into mythic roots.

PWD: It's been said that The Lord of the Rings was inspired by Tolkien's experience in World War I. Have you found this to be true?

DA: Yes, in a sense it's a reaction to the trauma he suffered in World War I. He was sent to a war that was supposed to end all wars, and all his friends but one were killed. After World War I, Tolkien conceived a mythology he could dedicate to England. Quite separately, as his children grew up, he told them stories. In the Hobbit, you see them merge. Tolkien was a scholar of Beowulf, which is an elegiac story about passion and change. The Lord of the Rings is about the old order changing and giving in to the new. It's also an elegiac book, though
some people have confused it with a longing for a wished-for-past. I hink they're completely wrong about that. It's like the enduring interest in The Civil War. People like to read about it, but they don't long for a return to that time.