Tales Before Tolkien

by Douglas A. Anderson

  And be as deaf! while I address these maids.

  Your ear must not receive what is not for it—

  What do you hear?

  Nightshade. (in a cowed voice) I hear that primal silence before creation!

  Quite safely you may speak!

  Titania. Yet you hear my question, cunning one!

  (She makes a second pass.)

  Now she’ll not hear!—

  (to the three sisters) Our meeting must break up.

  Your parents are alone, though I have soothed them

  With a false supposition. Tell them now

  The truth of where you’ve been, and what has happened—

  Improbable though it seem, they shall believe it.

  Ere Candlemas is come you’ll meet your husbands,

  Ere Pentecost you’ll marry them!

  Take you no thought to prepare for your three weddings,

  An unexpected letter before long

  You’ll have. And also I will send to you by night,

  In bed, my very most distinguished fairy,

  Experienced in human marriages.

  With her you shall consult, and do what’s right.—

  Now you must go. A fairy sleigh is waiting

  Outside the cave, with fairy ponies four,

  And fairy coachman—Emerald shall ride with you.

  Before you know that you have started home,

  You will be there!

  (making a pass over the Witch) Now be your ears unseal’d!

  (Mother Nightshade puts her hands to her head as if dazed. Sudden loud fairy music sounds, proceeding triumphantly. But in another minute it becomes by transition the different theme of the winding-up song.)

  ENSEMBLE.

  Rosa, Lila. ’Tis natural that the heart of maiden

  Should dream of marriage proud and splendid.

  Violetta, Yet when the heart with pride is laden

  Emerald. They say its happiness is ended.

  Nightshade. Unlike your pride, hate isn’t senseless

  Contrivances it ever knows—

  It’s not, like happiness, defenceless,

  But deathless as the tropic glows!

  Titania. The heart of maid was ne’er intended

  To dream of aught else but its loving.

  Before high love her knee is bended,

  Before high love her smiles are moving!

  All. Let each one follow what road she may,

  It will come somewhere, upon a day!

  Rosa, Lila. ’Tis fitting that the heart of woman

  Should take a peep where it is going.

  Violetta, Yet when its sight becomes not human

  Emerald. Sad is the token of blood’s unflowing.

  Nightshade. Human is hate, o’er all the others

  From soul to soul it ever calls—

  The tide of its blood everything smothers,

  In cataracts and fearsome falls!

  Titania. The heart of woman is ever growing

  Towards the love which is its heaven—

  Years shall not stay it, ’tis ever doing

  The same thing o’er, from life’s morn to even.

  All. Let each follow what road she may,

  It shall come somewhere, upon a day!

  Curtain.

  ENDNOTES

  * I think I must be indebted to Novalis for these geometrical figures.

  * Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s.

  * The royal salute of the Zulus.

  * Guardian Spirit.

  * Hebrew, “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?”

  * The Lapp sledge of wicker and skin, capable of holding one man sitting with legs stretched out, and guiding the reindeer with a single thong of rein.

  AUTHOR NOTES

  AND RECOMMENDED READING

  This listing follows similarly from the principles outlined in the introduction, the major point being that only authors born five years or more before Tolkien are included. Authors with an asterisk after their names have work included in this volume.

  Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75)

  Danish writer, best known for his fairy tales, originally published in four collections. A fine selection, translated into English by R. P. Keigwin, can be found in Eighty Fairy Tales (1982), a volume of the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library.

  Baum, L[yman]. Frank* (1856–1919)

  American children’s writer and creator of Oz. His fourteen Oz novels tend to overshadow some of his other work of high quality, including the novels Queen Zixi of Ix (1905), a traditional fairy tale about a magic wishing cloak, and The Sea-Fairies (1911), which takes place in the underwater kingdom of the Mermaids. Baum’s Mother Goose in Prose (1897) presents some of the stories behind traditional Mother Goose rhymes, while in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) Baum invented a mythology surrounding Santa Claus, much as Tolkien would do in letters to his own children, collected as The Father Christmas Letters (1976, expanded in 1999 as Letters from Father Christmas).

  Blackwood, Algernon (1869–1951)

  British writer of mystical stories, including two classics, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” Blackwood published many collections, but several early volumes contain his best work: The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories (1906); The Listener and Other Stories (1907); John Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908); The Lost Valley and Other Stories (1910); Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories (1912); and Incredible Adventures (1914). A recent and representative selection of Blackwood’s best short fiction is Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Tales (2002), edited by S. T. Joshi.

  Buchan, John* (1875–1940)

  Scottish writer and politician, best remembered for his suspense novel, The Thirty-nine Steps (1915), later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Some of Buchan’s fantasy and supernatural stories were collected in The Watcher by the Threshold and Other Stories (1902), The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies (1912), and The Runagates Club (1928). Of his many novels, the most interesting are Witch Wood (1927), set in seventeenth-century Scotland and concerning an ancient and magical forest, and The Gap in the Curtain (1932), which deals with fate, free will, and J. W. Dunne’s theories of time travel (the latter being as well an interest of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis).

  Cabell, James Branch* (1879–1958)

  American writer, best remembered for his novel Jurgen (1919), which became a cause célèbre when it was put on trial for obscenity. Jurgen is the slightly bawdy tale of a poet/pawnbroker in Cabell’s fantastic medieval French province of Poictesme, a place about which Cabell would write many volumes, later collected in the eighteen-volume set The Biography of Manuel (1927–30).

  Carroll, Lewis (1832–98) [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]

  British writer and mathematician, author of the children’s classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). Tolkien did not consider the Alice books to be fairy tales because of their dream frames and dream transitions, yet he considered them successful stories. Tolkien was also fond of Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). Christopher Tolkien has written that his father knew these works well and occasionally recited verses from the books.

  Coleridge, Sara (1802–52)

  British writer and editor, daughter of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her novel Phantasmion (1837), about the travels of a prince in Faerie, was the first fairy-tale novel written in English.

  Coppard, A[lfred]. E[dgar]. (1878–1957)

  British writer, who specialized in the short story, many of which fancifully describe rural England. While Coppard published numerous collections, his own selection of his best work, The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard (1947), was very successful, and it provides a good introduction to the author’s writings.

  Crockett, S[amuel]. R[utherford]. (1859–1914)

  Scottish writer. His thirteenth novel (out of fifty), The Black Douglas (1899), was read by To
lkien in his youth. In a letter Tolkien remarked that the episode of the wargs in The Hobbit was in part derived from The Black Douglas, calling the book “probably his best romance and anyway one that deeply impressed me in school-days, though I have never looked at it again.” An excerpt from one chapter (“The Battle of the Were-Wolves”), showing Tolkien’s indebtedness, can be found in note 10 to chapter 6 of the revised edition of The Annotated Hobbit.

  de la Mare, Walter (1873–1956)

  British writer and poet. De la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910) is a children’s fantasy about three royal monkeys on a quest, which some have considered a precursor to certain elements of The Hobbit. De la Mare’s strengths are most evident in his short stories, many of which contain fantastic or supernatural elements. A series of three volumes will collect his entire short fiction, Short Stories 1895–1926 (1996), Short Stories 1927–1956 (2001), and Short Stories for Children (forthcoming).

  Dunsany, Lord* (1878–1957)

  Anglo-Irish writer, dramatist, and poet. Several of Dunsany’s earliest collections of short stories contain the very best fantasy stories in the English language. These collections include The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915), Tales of Wonder (1916; U.S. title The Last Book of Wonder), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919). Of Dunsany’s novels, the best are The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), The Blessing of Pan (1926), and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). The recent British omnibus in the Fantasy Masterworks series Time and the Gods (2000) contains six of the aforementioned collections. Another sampler of Dunsany is In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Stories (forthcoming), edited by S. T. Joshi.

  Eddison, E[ric]. R[ucker]. (1882–1945)

  British writer and civil servant. Eddison’s first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), is perhaps his best book, a fully imagined secondary world described in an ornate and dense prose. His later books make up the Zimiamvian series, Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). These are much more ambitious and difficult than Eddison’s first book and only partially successful. Yet they remain Eddison’s major works. Eddison’s second novel, Stybiorn the Strong (1926), is an excellent historical work whose subject matter is similar to that of an Icelandic saga. In 1930, Eddison translated Egil’s Saga, one of the major Icelandic sagas. In 1957, Tolkien wrote of Eddison as “the greatest and most convincing writer of invented worlds that I have read.”

  Forster, E[dward]. M[organ]. (1879–1970)

  British writer, predominately of realistic fiction, including Howard’s End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924). Forster’s short stories include a large number of excellent fantasies, collected in The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911) and The Eternal Moment (1928).

  Garnett, Richard* (1835–1906)

  British writer and librarian, prolific scholar, and biographer. The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888, sixteen tales; expanded 1903, twenty-eight tales) contains Garnett’s only fiction.

  Grahame, Kenneth (1859–1932)

  British writer and banker, author of the classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows (1908), which Tolkien called an “excellent book.” Grahame’s other books, including The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), are explorations of Edwardian childhood. The latter includes Grahame’s famous fairy story “The Reluctant Dragon.”

  Haggard, H[enry]. Rider* (1856–1925)

  British writer and civil servant. Haggard was a very prolific novelist and one of the most successful writers of his time. He spent much of his early life in South Africa, and a number of his writings have African settings. His two most famous novels were King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886), each of which has been filmed several times. Another of Haggard’s novels that interested Tolkien is Eric Brighteyes (1891), written in the style of an Icelandic saga. In a lecture, he referred to it as being “as good as most sagas and as heroic.”

  Hodgson, William Hope* (1877–1918)

  British writer. As a youth, Hodgson went to sea and found the sailor’s life to be one of misery. Much of Hodgson’s fiction is supernatural and shows an obsession with the sea, as in The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and the collection Men of the Deep Waters (1914). His best book, however, is The House on the Borderland (1908), about a remote house haunted by hog-like creatures from another dimension.

  Hoffmann, E[rnst]. T[heodor]. A[madeus]. (1776–1822)

  German writer and music composer. Hoffmann wrote a large number of literary fairy tales, some of which have been made into ballets and operas. Good selections are found in The Best Tales of Hoffmann (1967), edited by E. F. Bleiler, and Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1972), edited and translated by Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight.

  Housman, Clemence* (1861–1955)

  British writer and wood engraver. Clemence Housman published only three novels, each of which is a Christian fantasy. The Were-Wolf (1895) is a minor classic of werewolf literature, while her final novel, The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis (1905), remains her supreme achievement. It is a remarkable psychological reconstruction of the life of Aglovale, a minor rogue knight in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Out of print and largely unavailable for many years, it was reprinted by Green Knight Publishing in 2000.

  Housman, Laurence (1865–1959)

  British writer and dramatist. Laurence Housman was by far the most prolific of the three writing Housmans, who include his sister Clemence and his brother A. E. Housman, the poet. Laurence’s original fairy tales were collected in several volumes, some of which contain wood engravings by his sister, including A Farm in Fairyland (1894), The House of Joy (1895), All Fellows (1896), Gods and Their Makers (1897), The Field of Clover (1898), The Blue Moon (1904), and The Cloak of Friendship (1905). A Doorway in Fairyland (1922), Moonshine and Clover (1922), and The Kind and the Foolish (1952) are reprint collections.

  Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936)

  British writer and poet. Kipling’s fantasies for children, including The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1896), and Just So Stories for Little Children (1902), are rightly acclaimed as classics. Also of interest to Tolkien readers would be Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), which involve mythological characters and the history of England.

  Knatchbull-Hugessen, E[dward]. H[ugessen].* (1829–93)

  British writer and politician. Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Lord Brabourne) wrote fourteen books of fairy tales, beginning with Stories for My Children (1869). Another tale out of this collection can be seen to have resonances in Tolkien. The story “Ernest” presents a slight analogue to Bilbo’s speech with Smaug in The Hobbit (see note 5 to chapter 12 of the revised edition of The Annotated Hobbit). “Ernest” has recently been reprinted in Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books (1997), edited by Carolyn Sigler.

  Lang, Andrew* (1844–1912)

  Scottish writer and editor. Lang is perhaps best remembered for editing (with significant assistance from his wife) twelve volumes of colored fairy-tale books, ranging from The Blue Fairy Book (1889) through The Lilac Fairy Book (1910). The series was immensely popular. Lang also wrote some original fairy stories, including Prince Prigio (1889), which Tolkien found “unsatisfactory in many ways” but which he felt had some admirable qualities.

  Lindsay, David* (1876–1945)

  British writer. Lindsay’s major works are all attempts to combine philosophy with various types of the novel. His most imaginative work, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), uses Wellsian space travel to another planet as a template for a spiritual quest. Lindsay’s other novels are more conventional but still powerful. The Haunted Woman (1922) is a kind of haunted house story, where some people are at times able to see and enter a staircase leading up to a nonexistent part of the house. Devil’s Tor (193
2) concerns the worship of the Great Mother and the reunion of a magical talisman associated with her worship that was broken in ancient times.

  MacDonald, George* (1824–1905)

  Scottish writer and minister. MacDonald was a prolific writer of novels for adults, but only a few are fantasies, including Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), his first novel, and Lilith (1895), his last. His children’s novels include The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883), both of which were influences upon The Hobbit, particularly in the depiction of goblins. MacDonald also wrote a number of fairy stories, recently collected as The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Stories and Fairy Tales (1996), edited by Glenn Edward Sadler. The volume edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and published as The Complete Fairy Tales (1999) contains only MacDonald’s shorter fairy tales.

  Machen, Arthur* (1863–1947)

  Welsh writer and newspaperman. Machen wrote both supernatural fiction and fantasy, including The Great God Pan & The Inmost Light (1894), The Three Imposters (1895), and the collection The House of Souls (1906). Machen’s best book, The Hill of Dreams (1907), is a kind of spiritual autobiography, written in a superb style. An omnibus containing much of his best work is Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1948).

  Macleod, Fiona [pseudonym of William Sharp] (1855–1905)

  Scottish writer and editor. In the 1890s, Sharp’s shadowy double, “Fiona Macleod,” emerged, though Sharp pretended she was real for the rest of his life. Macleod’s writings, unlike Sharp’s, are mystical Celtic fantasies, heavy with nostalgia and atmosphere. The best tales are collected in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales (1894) and The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities (1896). Her allegorical novels include Pharais (1894), The Mountain Lovers (1895), and Green Fire (1896).

  Merritt, A[braham].* (1884–1943)

  American writer and editor. Merritt published only a handful of novels and short stories, most of which appeared in pulp magazines. The best of his works are The Moon Pool (1919), which concerns a mysterious portal activated by moonlight, and The Ship of Ishtar (1924), in which a man is taken by an ancient ship to an alternate world.