>Surveying the last thirty years, [J. R. R. Tolkien] felt he could say that his most permanent mood, though often overlaid or suppressed, had been since childhood the desire _to go back_. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads; or to survey it, as men may see the world from a mountain, or the earth as a living map beneath an airship. But in any case to see with eyes and to hear with ears: to see the lie of old and even forgotten lands, to behold ancient men walking, and hear their languages as they spoke them, in the days before the days, when tongues of forgotten lineage were heard in kingdoms long fallen by the shores of the Atlantic.

Christopher Tolkien, _The Lost Road and Other Writings_.

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