When Bilbo Baggins chooses to rush out of his hobbit-hole without his handkerchief and accompany some disreputable dwarfs on a dangerous and seemingly impossible venture, Tolkien makes it quite clear that he is choosing rightly. By opting for hardship instead of comfort and (more important still) Romance instead of everyday life, he is, we know, choosing the life of imaginative experience. Wizards, elves, dragons and treasure are, as well as being superbly real in themselves, symbols for various aspects of this life. Bilbo returns a better person for having lived it, and is promptly classed by his fellow-hobbits as "queer." Imagination, then, says Tolkien, is a good thing, but most men do not want it. It involves a conscious decision to brave not only the unknown, but also the scoffs and sneers of those "sensible" people who live right next door. Through the metaphor of the journey, and its universal associations of strangeness, discomfort and homesickness, Tolkien is able to convey with simple power a good deal of the quality of the experience, to make his readers shiver too. Really, the source of the Tolkien magic is as simple as that: few people have not felt snug at home by the fireside when the wind howls outside, and it's not hard to envisage the reverse situation vicariously.
Those who have read that curious story, "Leaf by Niggle" … will recall that in a simple allegory (and a remarkably successful one it is too) Tolkien develops these ideas a stage further. While the main point of the tale is an illustration of the theories expounded in the essay "On Fairy Stories", and contains the message that the imaginative man, the creative artist, has a responsibility towards his neighbour as well as towards his own work, there is also an explicit equation made between imaginative and spiritual experience. This time the journey is the ultimate one—Death, and the Mountains towards which the purged and perfected Niggle eventually sets off are clearly meant to correspond to Heaven.
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