ABSTRACT
Criticism of the fantastic is now an ongoing concern that has moved beyond only occasional and erratic output. The contemporary critical discourse of the fantastic remains, however, unfortunately hermetic-too often the discussion turns inward, responding to and building on itself alone. Tolkien describes the fantastic as a wind blowing from beyond the world, felt but unseen, which may move the reader to look for something which cannot be found in the text at all. The fantastic, even as enchantment or the marvelous, has a quality of indefiniteness which expresses for Tolkien a longing for something which can only be glimpsed, but never directly known, in the fantastic image itself. The idea that the fantastic, through estrangement, allows a rediscovery of the ordinary world is a long-standing claim of critics of the fantastic and one crucial to many defenses of the genre.
