After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

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Sometimes it is difficult to remember that there were fantasy books written before J. R. R. Tolkien’s work burst onto the literary scene. Yet there were landmark volumes, stories of childhood, such as The Wind in the Willows and The Jungle Books. There were adult books of mythic proportion such as The Well at the World’s End and of Gothic proportion such as Dracula and the delicious anachronisms of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There were family fantasy books to be shared at the hearthside by well-known writers like Charles Dickens and unknown mathematicians such as the Reverend Charles Dodgson.

The history of literature is a mindfield of fantasy books.

But what John Ronald Reuel Tolkien created at his typewriter in his garage study, this “great but dilatory and unmethodical man” as his friend C. S. Lewis called him, was the phenomenon of fantasy as market genre.

He thought that he was only making up a world, peopling it, chronicling its lineages and laws. Middle-earth, he always insisted, was not an allegory. In fact he loathed allegory. And though he was a critic and a professor, he abhorred the symbol-hunting that went on about his books. He came down firmly and finally on the side of pure storytelling. What he forgot was that, as a god, he might create a universe, but then that universe would, clockworklike, go on without him.

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