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

Introduction Jane Yolen

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.

I am too old to have read Tolkien as a child, but I first heard about his books from a British friend. And then I read about them in Peter Beagle’s delightful book about his ride across America on a motorcycle—I See By My Outfit. When my husband and I decided to camp across Europe and the Middle East for as long as our money held out in 1965 and 1966, I got hold of a hardcover British edition of The Lord of the Rings and read it as we sailed to England on the Castel Felice. While the other passengers danced to the music of “Anastasio E Sui Happy Boys,” I devoured the books. Ten days later, when we docked in Southampton, it did not surprise me in the slightest that the houses all looked like hobbit holes and I restrained myself—but barely—from asking a publican to take off his shoes so I might examine the tops of his feet for hair.

As changed as I was by my first reading of Tolkien, I was only a microcosm of the changes wrought on writers in general and fantasy writers in particular, for after the success of The Lord of the Rings, there was a rush to profit. Publishers and booksellers together invented the market for fantasy as a genre. Fantasy writers became—like it or not (and it must be admitted that there are some fantasy writers who despise Tolkien and vociferously distance themselves from his influence)—a Post-Tolkien Fellowship. We wrote books whose very natures proclaimed them to be Tolkienesque: books marked by the mythic quality of the stories, the background of saga and folklore, the often pastoral and/or pseudo-medieval setting, and the underlying assumption that magic has consequences as surely as the ring carried to the dark mountain wore down its wearer. And whether or not the influences went well beyond Tolkien, back to the misty dark ages of myth, folktale, legend and the like, the books all carried apothegms (printed or assumed) declaring “In the style of J. R. R. Tolkien.”

Of course given such parameters, what began in grace and power easily degenerated into a kind of mythic silliness—elves in fur loincloths, pastel unicorns, coy talking swords, and a paint-by-number medieval setting with the requisite number of dirty inns, evil wizards, and gentle hairy-footed beings of various sexual persuasions. Tolkien would not have been amused.

Amused? He would have been horrified.

Still, amidst the post-1960s flood of Post-Tolkien fantasy writing, a few authors stand out, writing the kinds of stories that Tolkien himself might have looked favorably on and enjoyed. Writers like Andre Norton, the queen of the fantasy adventure novel; and Poul Anderson who set his own thumbprints on the mythic North; and Robert Silverberg that protean storyteller; and Peter S. Beagle whose debt to Tolkien was so unabashedly limned in his nonfiction book and the splendid few—too few—novels that followed. They, and the other wonderful authors in this volume, were asked specifically to write a Tolkienesque story, not in imitation of the master—for none of us are imitators—but in honor of his work. A birthday volume, a festschrift, a present for the 100th anniversary of his birth—and for his many readers.

We hope those same readers will feel about these stories as did the electrician at Oxford who was called to repair some wiring in the English Faculty Library. Noticing the bust of Tolkien, he put down his tools and walked over to it and clapped an arm companionably around the bronze shoulder. Then, speaking to it unembarrassed, as if talking to a dear old friend, he said, “Well done, Professor! You’ve written a smashing good yarn.”

—Jane Yolen

Phoenix Farm

April 1991