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Reviewed by:
  • The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy
  • Matthew T. Dickerson
The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, by Jared Lobdell . Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2005. xvi, 188 pp. $21.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 0812694589.

Jared Lobdell has been studying and writing about J.R.R. Tolkien for more than thirty years; not surprisingly, then, he has a wealth of interesting observations and insights into the shape and shaping of Tolkien's entire oeuvre. His newest book, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, accurately describes itself as a "series of reflections on the history of English literature [End Page 304] in the past several centuries . . . looking mostly at what went into The Lord of the Rings" (xi). The book especially asks "What, in English literary history, or indeed all the literary history we can bring to bear, helps explain why [The Lord of the Rings] turned out the way it did?" (19). Lobdell answers this question, exploring sources both obscure and famous. For the scholar willing to trace some esoteric paths, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy will provide a more thorough understanding of how Tolkien's literary imagination was shaped, and in what ways it helped (and did not help) to shape what followed after.

The first chapter, "Far from the Maddening Critics," gives a rambling introduction to the book, with a focus on the English traditions of pastoral, pageant, and pilgrimage. The second chapter, "Children of Mona," looks at feigned history and invented tradition in both the Augustan and Victorian ages, seeing it as one—or, rather, two—of the streams leading to Tolkienian fantasy. Indeed, Lobdell is careful not to lump these last two streams together, noting, "there is a distinction to be made in the eighteenth century between the imagining of the past and the feigning of the past, just as there is now" (27). For example, in contrasting the Brothers Grimm, Bishop Percy, and Blake as well as Shakespeare, Henry Rowlands, and many others, Lobdell is insightful in suggesting a wide variety of different purposes—but perhaps not such a wide variety in "the kind of pleasure involved"—on the part of these authors who attempt one or the other of the imagining versus the feigning of the past (25).

The subtitle of Chapter 3 gives one of the central ideas to which Lobdell returns frequently throughout the book: "Breaking and Remaking of Reality." It is also where I found his arguments—or perhaps his definitions—most difficult to follow, as he suggests that this breaking and remaking was of fundamental importance to Tolkien. Here the stream he follows includes Coleridge and the Pre-Raphaelites (such as William Morris) as well as the nonsense writers of the nineteenth century (Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll). By Chapter 4, "Pilgrimage to the Northward: Adventurers All," the reader has begun to be used to, or to be utterly frustrated by, the frequent esoteric tangents, indirections, and leaps in flow of the argument. Yet here I also found one of more eye-opening of the insights afforded by Lobdell's breadth and depth of study, in his pointing out one direct influence which I might not otherwise have discovered (though Tolkien's own letters suggest it): that between S. R. Crockett's The Black Douglas (1899) and The Lord of the Rings. The influence may be seen especially in the comparison of the closing lines of the former book with the passage describing the death of Arwen (RK, Appendix A, I, v, 344)—though Lobdell, who does not footnote his Tolkien sources, slightly alters the wording and punctuation of the Arwen passage.

Chapter 5 moves on to explore the Comic and Fantastic streams, [End Page 305] while Chapter 6 follows the curious choice of exploring George MacDonald, a very important author to modern fairy tale and fantasy, but one which Lobdell himself distances from Tolkien in several ways. Chapter 7 explores (and contrasts) the Arcadian and Olympian streams. Here again, many of Lobdell's arguments and connections are difficult to follow, because he often backtracks and sidetracks, and also takes back the very thing he gives—hinting at connections while protecting himself by simultaneously denying that they are really connections. For...

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