“And I’d grown up not just in England, but in a land of fantasy. Though I was the kind of child who (like you, perhaps) read anything and everything, my true love was deep make-believe, from fairy stories to all the buried archetypes of folk tale and myth. Then when I went to the University of Oxford to study English literature, two professors named Tolkien and Lewis made sure that our syllabus stopped at the year 1832, so that we were soaked in the earliest fantasies of all: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Spencer’s The Faerie Queene. As a friend of mine said, ‘They taught us to believe in dragons.’”
– Susan Cooper, preface to the The Dark is Rising.