"It's perhaps the most thoroughly imagined alternative reality with which I am familiar," says Douglas Raybeck, a psychological anthropologist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "There are no false steps. What I like most about the tales is that the heroes are hobbits. You have other heroes in the story, of course, the guys with the swopds. But the people about whom the story revolves are these runty, food-loving, not terribly bright individuals who display very important virtues: loyalty, steadfastness, and integrity."
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