by Karen Haber
Reviewers often like to use a well-known touchstone to inform their readers of the nature of the book under review. It’s not uncommon to read a review where a mystery is compared to a work by Raymond Chandler, or a western is compared to the work of Louis L’Amour. I have, in turn, been damned by reviewers for being “too much like Tolkien” and for “not being enough like Tolkien.” I’m not exaggerating; and the ironic fact is both those reviews were forwarded to me by my publisher on the same day.
Blurb writers often fall into the trap of using “not since J. R. R. Tolkien has a writer . . .” types of copy. It’s easy, and it lets the potential reader of the book know what to expect: magic, derring-do, high adventure, etc.
Why all the constant comparison to J. R. R. Tolkien? Why is he the touchstone against which all of us in the fantasy field are struck to test our mettle? Simply put, he is considered by many to be the Father of Us All.
I disagree. From my point of view, Fritz Leiber was my spiritual father, along with any other number of writers who influenced my childhood: Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini, Anthony Hope, Samuel Shellabarger, Mary Renault, Thomas Costain, and others. For other fantasy writers it was H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, A. Merritt, or H. Rider Haggard; but Tolkien was our grandfather, no doubt. My view may be in the minority, but then again, I’m a minority of one in any event. But allow me the indulgence of giving you my reasons, and why I think, in the long run, that considering him our spiritual grandfather is a more respectful judgment for working authors today.
When I was a kid, my reading tastes were pretty thoroughly locked into what was then called “boys’ adventure books,” a curious offshoot from classical romances of the nineteenth century. I remember crouching under the covers with a flashlight when I was supposed to be sleeping, or hiding a dog-eared copy of some old novel in my notebook at school and trying to look studious. The teacher would drone on as I read Captain Blood by Sabatini, or Castle Dangerous by Scott. I remember devouring the entire Leatherstockings Saga by James Fenimore Cooper, and that experience stayed with me so long that when my publisher wanted a rubric for my first trilogy I came up with Riftwar Saga. My children will probably never understand the pleasure I took from those books. If they read any of those titles, they will most likely consider them “quaint.”
The modern realism of the early twentieth century began the decline of this delicious genre. Film and television killed it.
Cooper could spend ten pages describing a one-room log cabin, because his contemporary readers wanted details. They lived in townhouses in Boston or London, and had never seen a cabin or river houseboat. The closest they had come to an indigenous native was the cigar store Indian outside their local tobacconist. The richness of the images provided by the narrator were a requirement for success. Today’s readers have seen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone reruns, and have no need for that sort of leisurely narrative and detailed description. They want action and dialogue, and they want it now.
As I grew up—I refuse to claim I matured—I discovered “classic” adventure literature—Twain, Cooper, Scott, then the “boys’ adventure” writers. Later I chanced upon science fiction, then fantasy, and embraced them as the logical inheritors of this still-lamented genre. I even remember my introduction to science fiction and fantasy.
In the eighth grade I was required to compose a book report from a novel chosen from an approved list, books made available to my school by generous publishers via a Scholastic publication called “My Weekly Reader.” The list was short and had a couple of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew titles, as well as some other equally suspect fare; but one title drew my eye: The Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement. All I remember about the blurb was the word “adventure,” and I believe “alien” and “space” were also employed. So I checked it off the page and about two weeks later it arrived.
I was hooked. Science fiction was exactly the high adventure fare I had become addicted to, as well as providing a more modern sensibility regarding ethics and morality. Characters weren’t quite as noble as they were in Ivanhoe, nor were the issues of right and wrong always as clearly defined. But, boy, was there plenty of action and a lot of fun stuff that included spies, space battles, and huge empires. E. E. “Doc” Smith was a fair substitute for Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson in my boyish judgment. And by the time I got to Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, I was no longer interested in knights in shining armor and pirates on the Spanish Main.
It was about 1966 when I discovered Tolkien. A friend lent me the Ace edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. I wasn’t thrilled at first. The references to The Hobbit, and the rather leisurely pace of the first chapter, almost put me off. But there was a charm to the narrative; and while I didn’t know who Bilbo or Gandalf were, I was willing to stick around and see what happened to them. After a while I discovered a wonderful nineteenth-century narrative style, and it occurred to me much later that J. R. R. Tolkien had also read “boys’ adventure” novels as a youngster. His choice of style and pace was as if a favorite old uncle were reading me a wonderful tale of knights and quests.
Only the knights weren’t champions of King Arthur’s court; they were interesting little characters called hobbits, and their role in the destruction of the One Ring wasn’t quite Percival and the Holy Grail.
When the Fellowship was destroyed, I put the first book down and said, “What’s next?”
Off I went to the used bookstore I habituated, and there I found the second volume, The Two Towers. I also found The Return of the King, and decided to pick that up as well, as I figured I’d probably want to finish the entire story.
Within a day or so I had neglected my studies, and my other obligations, to plow through the final two volumes. I then went back to the bookstore and got The Hobbit. I didn’t find it as sweeping or as grand a narrative as The Lord of the Rings, but it was fun.
So I went back to the store and said, “What else has he written?”
The answer was, “Nothing.” I know now there were scholarly works and poetry, but this was an American used bookstore, remember. So I said, “What else have you got like this stuff?”
And this is how I came to know Robert E. Howard, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, and Fritz Leiber. I became as hooked on fantasy as I had been on science fiction.
BILBO STEALS THE CUP
The Hobbit
Chapter XII: “Inside Information”
What was it about The Lord of the Rings that hooked me? Foremost it was the classic motif of the underdog, the diminutive Frodo being the only stalwart to endure the breaking of the Fellowship. He, along with Sam, Meriadoc, and Pippin, were willing to brave tribulations that the larger, more “classic” heroic figures were unwilling to confront: the obvious evils of Sargon, the twisted ambition of Saruman, the tragic Gollum, and the insidious lure of the power of the One Ring itself.
This was classic stuff. This was right up there with Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods and Beowulf. It was heroic in a fashion similar to the Arthurian stories of Malory and Tennyson, of the tales of the Mabinogion, yet with a decidedly modern patina.
Frodo is no one’s first image of a “hero.” Lancelot and Orlando would tower over him. He is gentle, like the rest of his kind, fond of food, drink, and comfort. In many respects, he is the surrogate for Tolkien’s expected audience, the secure, well-educated, contented British upper-class and upper middle-class readers of the pre-World War II era.
Much scholarly enquiry has gone into the cautionary aspects of Lord of the Rings as a metaphor of Britain’s travails before and during World War II. This resonates across time as Frodo, the “everyman” of the saga confronts the mounting evil threatening his native soil. He and his companions return home as heros after the destruction of the One Ring, and that heroism and its impact is demonstrated by the cleansing of the Shire; no timid little men here, but battle-hardened veterans who take things in hand and free their homes of the domestic ty
rants who have come to plague their families while the heroes were saving the world.
It was delicious and compelling and a story that demanded rereading time and again.
And how did it impact me as a writer?
First of all, indirectly. The world of Midkemia, in which the preponderance of my work is set, is a gaming world, that is, one created by my friends in college as an environment in which we could play our personal variant of Dungeons & Dragons. As such, it’s got a lot of “Tolkien stuff” in it. Ores, for example, along with Balrogs, to name two clearcut lifts. For the purposes of the books I’ve written in Midkemia, I’ve omitted most of the obvious critters that originated with Tolkien, but the influence, the “flavor” lingers.
Midkemia has elves and dwarves, like Middle-earth, but with my own peculiar twist on them. My elven races are a little more rawbone, less mystical than Tolkien’s, and my dwarves bear far more resemblance to the hard-working Scottish coal miners who settled in western Pennsylvania than they do to dwarves in Middle-earth. My choice was for less mythic, more recognizably human variants of his prototypes; and I’m content with my choice, but I chose names right out of Tolkien’s lexicon on the language of elves, in the Silmarillion. Elves of light are eledhel, dark elves are moredhel, to cite two borrowings. It was my “tip of the hat” to the grand old master.
For me, as a working writer, the major influence of J. R. R. Tolkien on my work was his impact on the publishing industry. He is the source of all wealth from which my bounty flows.
Before Tolkien, there were no international bestsellers written by fantasy authors, at least not in the sense we think of “bestseller” today.
The success of The Lord of the Rings began slowly, and crested in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Looking back, we can now see it as a monolithic, time-compressed “event,” marked by the publication of the Silmarillion. If memory serves, the brilliant promotion by Random House/Del Rey books at the time created a demand for an American “first edition,” which resulted in a print run of around a million copies in the United States alone.
This was an heroic feat of publishing in the mid-1970s. It was followed by calendars, art books, other merchandizing tie-ins, a TV special, films, and the rest. The Middle-earth franchise is today one of Star Wars proportions. It was not always thus.
A slow, word-of-mouth growth, mostly on college campuses, was what I remember about The Lord of the Rings in the late 1960s. For a while it was almost a sign of being “hip” that you’d read the trilogy, because the books weren’t mainstream bestsellers.
They were, to put it simply, cool.
But today my success is to a large degree the result of that desire by scattered college students, hippies, and fans of literature to read something that was “cool.” To be able to go to that party where the jocks and frat guys weren’t going to show up, and to talk about that “cool” story, The Lord of the Rings.
More than the works of those authors I’ve named above, J. R. R. Tolkien’s brilliantly realized story of Frodo and his companions sparked an appetite for fantasy that led to many writers being “discovered” by readers who had missed them the first time around.
Lin Carter had edited a series for Random House under the Ballantine Adult Fantasy banner, with works by James Branch Cabell and Lord Dunsany, among others, and suddenly they were flying out of the used bookstores, eagerly devoured by the newly converted fantasy buffs. The great writers of “pulp” fantasy, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge, Robert E. Howard, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger books, and the non-Tarzan work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, were embraced decades after their original publication due to the thirst for fantasy created by J. R. R. Tolkien.
Of those writers, Robert E. Howard enjoyed a renascence that ended up surpassing his original modest success in manyfold fashion, as his Conan stories found new readership; spawned follow-up works by no less a pair of talents than L. Sprague De Camp and Robert Jordan; and created its own franchise, including two films and a TV series. And my personal hero, Fritz Leiber, found new readers for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.
But the tales of lost civilizations, ancient gods, and wandering barbarians lacked the grandeur and mythic underpinnings of Tolkien. Certainly, H. P. Lovecraft’s stories of the Ancient Ones dealt with centuries-spanning evil, lurking below the surface of our mundane world, but the conflicts were always on a personal scale, a poor soul who by circumstances found himself confronting horrors beyond imagining. And there were never stories of triumph, merely of surviving the confrontation.
H. Rider Haggard and A. Merritt wrote of great civilizations, but they were always fallen, discovered centuries later by contemporary characters of the early twentieth century who were confronting timeless evils, immortal goddesses or spirits in possession of their fellow explorers.
Only Burroughs got close with his John Carter stories, but even the heroic former Confederate officer transported to Mars, with its seven-foot-tall, six-armed Martians, and exotic princesses, was still not in the same category as Tolkien. This was still clearly “pulp” fantasy.
Tolkien stood alone atop the publishing pyramid when it came to fantasy. He had contemporaries of worth—E. R. Eddison, T. H. White, and C. S. Lewis—but somehow Tolkien had hit the mark with his mix of lore, ancient back story, and characters.
His Third Age, his “Myth for Britain,” echoed with reverberations of ancient majesty. That oddest of beings, a British Christian mystic, Tolkien possessed personal beliefs that clearly influenced his cosmology, the sense of ultimate good and evil, the timeless conflict, and the temptations of dark powers luring even the most innocent and pure. Yet it was clear that in the end, good would be triumphant.
While the pulp writers of the 1920s and 1930s dealt with modern man blundering into dangers and terrors of ancient origin, exploring lost tombs in the heart of ancient jungles or buried under the shifting sands of remote deserts, Tolkien changed that paradigm. He created a world both alien and familiar. The Shire was “home.” No matter that the reader lived far from the green meadows of the West Counties of England, or had never seen the sunset from the banks of the Thames, the Shire felt like home.
Frodo and the hobbits were “people,” simple, graceful, peaceful, and humble. They were archetypes bordering on stereotypes: Frodo the Plucky Hero, Sam the Good and Faithful, Gandalf the eminence who could not possibly be more grise, Merry and Pippin, as hale a pair of well-met fellows as you’d find in Percival C. Wren’s Beau Geste or Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, uncertain as to why they were a part of the drama but willing to put aside personal safety for friendship. They were two of my favorites in the series, two callow youths who found strength and purpose through adversity and who emerged as heros.
Tom Bombadil, the Ents, the Nazgûl, the Balrog, and the elves were the otherworldly entities within the structure of that universe that created a supernatural element in an already fanciful story. Even the human characters were made somehow alien so that the hobbits could be realized as all the more familiar to the reader.
It’s all there, heroism and humility, fear and triumph, a mysterious king returning to rule with wisdom and generosity, a princess destined to fight alongside her betrothed; it’s stuff right out of Richard Wagner.
This wondrous story created an appetite in readers for future works of truly epic proportion. While it’s an overused word in ad copy, “epic” in this context is well used, for The Lord of the Rings is a story of profound changes within a culture/society as a result of the tale. The hobbits will never quite be the same, and we can see the foreshadowing of the coming of the Fourth Age, the one we assume Tolkien meant to be our own.
My own work is more character-driven, with contemporary “actors” in costume, as it were. But the backdrop of my universe’s cosmology, the titanic struggle between ancient gods, is as large a back story as Tolkien’s. It runs through every book I write, sometimes a major part of the n
arrative, other times as a distant echo, but always there.
That desire for the Wagnerian, the grand opera, as opposed to the grand guignol of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, was the single most tangible legacy to me, as a writer, from Tolkien. I’ll leave it to posterity to decide if I’ve met the test.
In any event, no matter how we get there, we’re all obliged to admit that while Tolkien may not have truly been “the father” of modern heroic fantasy, he was certainly the grandfather, and as such his direct influences on style, readership, and market were in many ways more important to my career than the direct influences of other writers might have been to my writing. In my own humble opinion, of course.
So while I’ll point to the others as being my spiritual “fathers,” especially to Fritz, I’ll once again tip my hat to J. R. R. Tolkien as being our collective, spiritual grandfather.
Thanks, Granddad. I couldn’t have done it without you.
AWAKENING
THE ELVES
PAUL ANDERSON
We are all deeply in J. R. R. Tolkien’s debt, writers perhaps even more than readers. He gave us the greatest fantasy of our time, which also stands tall in the whole of world literature. Only Lord Dunsany is comparable, and Tolkien’s influence has been vastly stronger.
Both drew on our literary and cultural wellsprings, from Homer and the Bible onward. A little more about that anon. First I’d like to reminisce a bit. The aim is not to brag, but to offer a personal example of how that influence has worked. Many other people must have such stories to tell, in wide variety, and I hope that some of them do.
Back in the early 1950s, my wife and I met the late Reginald Bretnor and his own wife. It led to a lot of lively conversations, with considerable benefit to the California wine industry, and a friendship that endured through her untimely death, until his, eight or nine years ago. The friendship grew close enough that he not only told us about The Hobbit but lent us his first-edition copy. Thereupon we had to find one for ourselves, and presently, having heard about The Lord of the Rings, acquire and devour it.
