In Memoriam

Jared Charles Lobdell (29 November 1937–22 March 2019) passed away at his home in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, at the age of 81. He earned his B.A. from Yale University, his M.B.A. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. He was proud of sharing both his birthday and his Anglican faith with C. S. Lewis, and he was active in societies dedicated to Lewis and Tolkien and a frequent attendee of conferences on the Inklings.

Dr. Lobdell was among the first scholars to champion the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, in reviews and short articles for National Review and other magazines from the late 1960s on. He edited one of the earliest collections of critical essays on Tolkien, A Tolkien Compass (Open Court, 1975), mostly but not entirely selected from the best contributions to the 1969 and 1971 Conferences on Middle-earth (these now-legendary gatherings were organized by the late Jan Howard Finder); for this volume he also obtained permission to include Tolkien's own "Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings" for its first publication. Dr. Lobdell published nearly thirty books, most of them dealing with American history, but it was his ambition to write at least one major book on each of the three major Inklings and he more than succeeded in that goal. His England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings (Eerdmans, 1981) he revised and expanded as The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien (Open Court, 2004), both versions concentrating on Tolkien's own oeuvre, while The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy (Open Court, 2005) considers multiple traditions (from classical and medieval to contemporary) drawn on by Tolkien. The Scientifiction Novels of C. S. Lewis: Space and Time in the Ransom Stories (McFarland, 2004) and Eight Children in Narnia: The Making of a Children's Story (Open Court, 2016) are significant contributions to Lewis scholarship. His edition of The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams, 1930–1935 (McFarland, 2003) gathers these fugitive pieces to demonstrate an important component of Williams's mind while also furthering scholarship on mystery novels in English published between the two world wars (a period often called "the golden age of detective fiction"). Dr. Lobdell also researched the Inklings circle in general and published a number of valuable essays on lesser-known figures such as Nevill Coghill. He contributed several articles to the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2007) edited by Michael D. C. Drout.

Amused friends delighted him by observing that his prose style seemed to be more influenced by what the Inklings called the "clotted glory" of Charles Williams than by Lewis or Tolkien, but, like that literary group, he was a lover of language including its oddities. Lewis's description of his invented language of Old Solar as having "words that sounded like castles" was one of Dr. Lobdell's favorite phrases. He could be quirky in his critical opinions but his mind was always erudite and penetrating: his contention that the Hobbits were "an accidental goodness" rather than essential to The Lord of the Rings has not found much favor, but there is wide agreement with his argument that the Edwardian adventure novel was an important ingredient in the rich and variegated leaf-mold of Tolkien's mind.

He will be missed. His marriage to his beloved Janie Lobdell (née Jane Elizabeth Starke) for almost 21 years brought him much happiness, and we his fellow scholars offer our condolences to her and their relatives and friends.