Pastoral

I've been wondering whether thinking about Pastoral, especially in its post Elizabethan Crabbe/Wordsworth and Hardy/Morris sense, isn't the key to unlock Fantasy writing. Tolkien, it seems clear enough, was writing in a specifically pastoralised Romance mode (different to a pasteurised Romance mode, of course). Raymond Williams City and the Country book in particular seems to me to articulate a wealth of fascinating points that illuminate a great swathe of post-Tolkien Fantasy writing ...