INTRODUCTION

For many readers, fantasy begins with J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), the world-renowned creator of Middle-earth, whose history is recounted in The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), and The Silmarillion (1977). Fantasy literature, however, did not begin with Tolkien, though he developed it in a manner such that there exists almost a dividing line between fantasy written before Tolkien and fantasy written afterward.

The roots of fantasy extend back to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and on through the medieval literatures that were Tolkien’s specialties as a professor at Oxford. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which concerns a hero and his fight with monsters (including a dragon); the Arthurian romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which Tolkien edited in Middle English and also translated) and those by Chrétien de Troyes; the medieval legends of Alexander the Great (who discovered the Trees of the Sun and Moon in the Far East, the inspiration of Tolkien’s Two Trees in Valinor); and the Icelandic Eddas and sagas, these are the cornerstones of the medieval genre of heroic romance, with heroic exploits, quests, interlaced stories, and various intrusions of something beyond the natural—that is, elements of fantasy. Tolkien himself followed in this tradition, and The Lord of the Rings, as its author rightly noted, is more properly called a heroic romance than a novel.

Tolkien also drew upon folklore and the folktale traditions, as they were recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After this process of the writing down of oral materials there naturally developed the German kunstmärchen, or “literary fairy tales”—that is, fairy tales artistically composed by a single author rather than stories merely recorded from oral tradition. From these folktales and fairy tales came the further development of fairy tales as children’s literature and, in addition, of fantasy as a mode of literature for adults.

It is from this latter tradition, beginning with the kunstmärchen, that this anthology derives. The stories are arranged in chronological order as to when each item was written. One of the criteria by which I selected stories for this anthology was that each item must have been written before The Hobbit was published in 1937. Another guideline that I have followed in a more general sense is that I have wanted each author to be at least slightly older than Tolkien—that is, not one of his contemporaries—so I somewhat arbitrarily restricted myself to writers born at least five years before Tolkien. Some of the stories that I have chosen can be seen specifically to have inspired Tolkien, and these connections are detailed in the headnotes to the appropriate stories. I have also selected some stories whose content seems especially Tolkienian, even though there is little or no evidence that Tolkien knew the writers. And I have also chosen other stories that Tolkien almost certainly did not know in order to show some of the diversity of fantasy as it existed before The Hobbit.

This anthology begins with what is perhaps the best of the kunstmärchen, “The Elves” by Ludwig Tieck. German romantic fairy tales were a great influence on George MacDonald, and it was through MacDonald that the idea of literary fairy tales entered into English literature. In this anthology MacDonald, along with E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Andrew Lang, E. Nesbit, and E. A. Wyke-Smith, represent British children’s writers. British adventure fiction is exemplified in the stories of H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan, while the literary side of British fantasy is seen in the selections by Richard Garnett, William Morris, Clemence Housman, Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, Kenneth Morris, Arthur Machen, and David Lindsay.

Examples of American children’s fantasy are found in the stories by Frank R. Stockton and L. Frank Baum. American adventure fantasy is represented by the tales of Francis Stevens and A. Merritt, while the selections by James Branch Cabell and Austin Tappan Wright exemplify more literary American fantasy.

I have kept my headnotes to the stories in this volume brief, intending them to serve more as guiding directions than as critical analyses. Background information on the various authors can be found in the notes at the end of the book, together with recommendations for further reading.

   

Tolkien’s greatness lies in how he brought together the various existing strands of fantasy—heroic romance, folklore, fairy tales, and adult fantasy—and extended the scope of fantasy across the board in a historical as well as novelistic manner. Doing so brought a new depth to the genre, and Tolkien’s elaborate history of three Ages of his invented world has raised the bar for his successors. To better appreciate Tolkien’s achievement one needs to better understand Tolkien’s own roots and the roots of modern fantasy. This anthology merely represents a first step in doing so, while making a number of fine stories, long unavailable, more easily accessible to readers who will enjoy them.

Douglas A. Anderson
November 2002