Whoâd stay to muse if Death could never wither?Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass?(Robinson, âTuberosesâ, 24)
1 Canon Creation
In the twenty-first century, fantasy is everywhere: on television, at the cinema, online and, of course, in paperback. But although literature has always been the home of the fantastic, the strange, the imaginary, the supernatural and the unreal, modern âfantasyâ is a very young shoot off this ancient tree of fancy. In the period with which this book is concernedâroughly the 1900s to the 1950sâit did not exist as a category in the British literary landscape, and the British authors under consideration here certainly did not know they were writing it.1 The familiar classification of Lord Dunsany (1878â1957), E. R. Eddison (1882â1945) and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892â1973) as âfantasyâ writers in a single British tradition is thus an entirely ex post facto one, and it was the American publisher Ballantine Books that first brought them together under the âAdult Fantasyâ rubric in the 1960s. The Ballantines launched their adult fantasy line in 1965 with best-selling paperback reprints of Tolkienâs The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954â1955), and from 1969 to 1974 the series assumed its ultimate shape under the editorship of Lin Carter. In its modern sense of âa genre of literary compositionsâ, therefore, fantasy was as much the creation of literary gatekeepers as of creative writers (âFantasy | phantasy, n.â). We owe the linking of those three names from the 1960s onwards to the search for roots, for a pantheon of founding fathers (and to a lesser extent mothers) by the self-aware critics, editors and publishers of a newly coalescing âcommercial genreâ (Stableford 449).2
That pantheon is extremely diverse (in literary, if not in any other terms). In addition to Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien, Ballantine also reprinted works by the following pre-1950 British authors: William Morris , George MacDonald , Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, David Lindsay, G. K. Chesterton, Ernest Bramah, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, George Meredith and William Beckford.3 Ballantineâs selection is the most extensive to date, but later series such as Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library (1973â1980) and Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks (launched in 2000) have expanded the list to include books by Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker, Edwin Lester Arnold, Henry Newbolt, Kenneth Morris and Leslie Barringer. Between them, the texts co-opted for these canon-making exercises represent nearly the entire spectrum of the fantastic: from horror/weird fiction and science fiction to alternative history, time-travel, retellings of or sequels to classical myths and medieval legends, philosophic thrillers and imperial adventures with elements of the supernatural, secondary-world fantasies and a few works that are simply unclassifiable. Some were bestsellers of their day, others entirely unknown. All were subsequently packaged together and sold as âfantasy classicsâ. If the editors and publishers had dug through the back issues of Victorian and early twentieth-century popular magazines such as Tit-Bits and Pearsonâs Magazine, where the works of Haggard and Hyne reprinted by Ballantine first appeared, they could have unearthed many more stories with fantastic elements for their use. But even without such extra titles, the fantasy âback-catalogueâ created by these earnest or enterprising gatekeepers has proved enough of a generic ragbag to keep critics occupied all the days since in trying to classify and theorise its contents. If after 1950 fantasy could indeed be described as a âfuzzy setââin Brian Atteberyâs seminal definitionâwhose centre was Tolkien (Strategies, 12â13), before 1950 no centre existed, and this is clearly illustrated by the contents of the reprint series. The gatekeepers were involved in an anachronistic regrouping of such works in the light of subsequent generic and publishing developments. The last thing they were interested in was placing them back into their literary-historical context. But the three authors this study focuses onâan Anglo-Irish aristocrat, a high-ranking civil servant in the Department of Overseas Trade, and an Oxford professor of Old Englishâdid not spring fully formed ex nihilo to appear between the psychedelic covers of Ballantine Books. Each came from his own particular milieu, and much recent criticism has been dedicated to exploring their cultural roots and formal achievements in their own terms, on the understanding that their work deserves to be taken out of the straitjacket of the fantasy âcanonâ retrospectively imposed upon it, and reinserted into the wider literary contexts in which the authors actually operated.4
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Dunsany was by far the most famous of the three: a transatlantically successful playwright, as well as short-story writer and novelist, and a friend of literary celebrities such as W. B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling. Eddison was never popular, but his books were also read on both sides of the Atlantic, reviewed in the mainstream press, and published by Faber and Faber until the paper shortages of the Second World War made it increasingly difficult for him to find a British publisher (he had more luck with the Americans). Tolkien, as late as 1950, when Eddison was already dead and Dunsanyâs fame a thing of the past, remained comparatively unknown. He had already spent over thirty years producing many volumesâ worth of draftsâin addition to his writing for children and academic audiencesâbut most of it had still to find its way into print. He had met Eddison and admired his work (all of which he claimed to have read) with qualifications; he had also read Dunsany (his own writing was once compared to Dunsanyâs by a perplexed publisherâs reader).5 But there is no real evidence of a relationship of influence or emulation in either case.6 It is worth remembering that these writers never constituted a school amongst themselves; each was independent and sui generis, and each was destined for a very different kind of afterlife. The reversal of fortunes was particularly striking in Tolkienâs case, who went onâthanks largely to the accidents of publishing historyâto have a major impact on the subsequent development of the mass fantasy genre. Dunsany exerted a much narrower though still notable influence as what might be called a fantasistâs fantasist7; while Eddison, admired by many, but rarely imitated, has had the fewest direct descendants.
The selection of these writers for comparative study might thus appear arbitrary, if it were not for the fact that there are two weighty reasons to bracket Dunsany , Eddison and Tolkien together that have little to do with matters of canon creation. The first is related to the scope and nature of their work; the second, to its shared thematic preoccupation. All three produced large, stylistically heterogeneous oeuvres; and all three devoted them to the exploration of mortality and temporality, in both their divine and human dimensions.
2 Scope, Nature and Theme
For all the significance it has assumed in post-Tolkien fantasy, âworld-building ââdefined in literary terms as the proliferation, as an end in itself and in superfluity to the requirements of any given plot, of detail about an imagined (alternative, secondary, other) worldâwas not a shared pursuit among practitioners of early fantasy.8 But Dunsany , Eddison and Tolkien were all masters of world-building in the literal sense. They wrote about god(s) and the creation of reality , adopting allegorical or discursive styles, and drawing upon philosophical models, as well as key theological elements from Christian , Norse, Celtic or Greek mythoi. All three also wrote narratives that took the âworldâ for granted and chronicled instead the adventures of individual heroes in it. Such texts, modelled on epics, quest romances, fairy-tales or KunstmĂ€rchen, and at times inflected by the techniques of the realist novel, include their best-known publications: Dunsanyâs The King of Elflandâs Daughter (1924), Eddisonâs The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and Tolkienâs The Lord of the Rings . But crucially, these texts are not standalone works: they are situated either within or in relation to the authorsâ broader cosmopoietic (literally âworld-creatingâ) framewor...