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ItemEpic fantasy and global terrorism(Rodopi, 2006)There are many cues for an article like this, which looks at J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings - and in particular, the recent films of the trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson - alongside recent commentaries on, and anxieties about, the rise of global terrorism and the ‘war on terrorism’. There have already been links drawn between these events and literary texts, of course: for example, Jason Epstein has compared the United States, in its pursuit of terrorists, to Melville’s Ahab. But a more relevant cue comes from an article in the New Left Review by Mike Davis, which situates the aeroplane bombings of the World Trade Centre buildings in New York on September 11th 2001 in the context of fantastic images of the fire-storming of Lower Manhattan in a work by H.G. Wells, War in the Air, published eighty-four years earlier in 1907. Under zeppelin attack by Imperial Germany, ‘ragtime New York’, as Davis describes it, ‘becomes the first modern city destroyed from the air’. Davis is one of a number of commentators on S11 who reads the reality of the event through the logic of fantasy, as if it was a moment of terror, or terrorism, that made it impossible to distinguish between the two: ‘the attacks on New York and Washington DC were organised as epic horror cinema with meticulous attention to mise en scene. Indeed, the hijacked planes were aimed to impact precisely at the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ (p.37). That phrase - ‘the vulnerable border between fantasy and reality’ - also resonates with anxieties about terrorist activity itself, planned and executed (in this case) from within the borders of the US, and so speaking to America’s own sense of border vulnerability: of the possibility that the outside is already or always inside.