I loved this essay from The Rabbit Room because I think it captures the genius of Tolkien’s strategy really well. I elaborate here not because I think it needs additional commentary but because I can’t help myself after reading such a helpful essay.

Lewis like many other fantasy authors before and after wrote about mere mortals finding their way into a magical realm.  The one exception is the story of Shasta, except that Calormene is somehow as secular and magicless as any modern place so that the effect is the same.  So the story of Shasta comes closest to resembling Tolkien’s strategy.

Tolkien starts The Hobbit as well as The Lord of the Rings with a magical creature that is quiet, short, and lives in a hole.  That is all a misdirection.  The Hobbits are actually comfortable English middle class.  They know virtually nothing about the heroic and magical world of great men, elves, dwarves, and dragons (Note to Mozilla: get your spell checker to recognize Tolkien’s revision of the dwarf plural just as you have done for his revision of elves and elven rather than elfin.)

In other words, the Hobbits for all their exoticism are actually just us.  Magic is great for fireworks but the perils are not recognized.  Their general insularity and xenophobia does not actually amount to realistic fear of the dangers around them (it just means that they are over-confident in their self-sufficiency).  As I point out in my forthcoming biography, Tolkien shows the only Hobbits capable of resisting tyranny from the outside are those who left the Shire to face the outside.

Disbelief in dragons just makes you easy prey to them.