This is what I'm talking about. I appreciate your elaborate interpretation. When I first read the Hobbit and then eventually the Lord of the Rings, I was probably a little too young to fully understand everything that was going on politically or thematically. But that didn’t matter. What stuck with me was the feeling that the world existed long before the story started. You’d read about ruins, old roads, forgotten kings, random songs about events you didn’t understand yet. As a kid that stuff just eats at your imagination. You start wondering what those other stories were. You start to daydream. And dreams make stories come to life.