Meditations on Middle-Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

the author enjoyed anything like those sales in that brief moment.) The Saturday Evening Post , weekly voice of the middle class, published almost no fantasy unless by Stephen Vincent Benét. And so on.
    Even markets catering to the imaginative devoted themselves mainly to science fiction, or at any rate what they could label science fiction. This was not the sea change one might think. During his editorship of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , Anthony Boucher once remarked to me that, to judge by the mail he got, most of his readers preferred fantasy to science fiction, but didn’t know it. You can, for instance, in terms of present-day scientific knowledge, make a somewhat better case for a life after death, and at least one God than you can for the possibility of time travel or travel faster than light.
    In other words, the reading public kept an unexpressed desire for pure fantasy. And then Tolkien burst upon the publishing world. The rest is history.
    The revival included what its devotees call heroic fantasy. In this, heroes, usually male but occasionally female, do battle against terrible odds in an archaic setting. That setting may be historical, but is most often imaginary; there has been no scientific or industrial revolution; supernatural forces and beings are real. Eddison wrote it on a high level, Robert E. Howard for the pulps. As always, borderline cases occur, for exmple, certain stories by L. Sprague De Camp and/or Fletcher Pratt, but I shan’t elaborate on those except to give these particular ones my highest recommendation.
    The Lord of the Rings is heroic fantasy. It is much else as well, but such elements are definitely integral to it. Its astonishing popularity revealed the latent demand for more. Supply was quickly forthcoming, and has been pouring out ever since.
    We can pass by the derivatives, the derivatives of the derivatives, and whatnot, stuff that has prompted the scornful term “generic.” They have been hilariously satirized by Esther Friesner and Diana Wynne Jones, among others. Let’s simply recall Theodore Sturgeon’s dictum, “Ninety percent of everything is crud,” and judge the field by its best rather than its worst, as we judge the love story by Romeo and Juliet rather than by the soap operas. First-rate work has been and is being done in it.
    Some old-timers have benefited, too, perhaps most notably Jack Vance and Robert Silverberg. Now let me get personal again, because my experience leads back to Tolkien himself.
    Long, long ago, I think probably in 1948, I wrote a heroic fantasy novel, The Broken Sword , which drew on Northern myth, saga, and folklore. Editor after editor rejected it, a few with regret, because they didn’t believe it could sell. At last it found a publisher, who gave it one printing—coincidentally, in 1954, the same year that The Fellowship of the Ring came out—and let it die.
    The post-Tolkien boom enabled the late Lin Carter to reprint a series of older fantasies with Ballantine. Among them eventually was The Broken Sword . Having meanwhile learned more about writing and, for that matter, medieval combat, I took the opportunity to revise it—same story but, I hoped, better told. The new version first appeared in 1971. Subsequently, I’ve been free to roam the fantasy field whenever I like. That’s a reason close to home for acknowledging a debt to Tolkien.
    A major source of his was identical with mine. He drew on others as well, especially the Bible and Christian tradition. More about that later. Still, in his professorial capacity he was a scholar and translator of Old and Middle English literature. His long essay “On Fairy-stories” explores the meaningfulness and power of the folk tales from that era, which likewise inspired him.
    His ores and trolls come straight out of the North. I don’t think his elves do, quite, and this seems worth examining.
    I return to The Broken Sword only for comparison. Elves and trolls figure in it