Monday, June 4, 2007

New essay on Tolkien and MacDonald published

For those who might be interested, I have a new essay in print:

“Reluctantly Inspired: George MacDonald and the Genesis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major.” North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies 25 (2006): 113-20.

Unfortunately, the George MacDonald Society website hasn't been updated in some time, so I can't link you directly to the journal issue in question. But if you'd like to read it and don't have ready access to the journal in your local library, drop me a comment or an email, and I can send you a copy.

2 comments:

  1. Looks like a good paper - - I've just scanned a copy received by interlibrary loan.

    As a Faerie Queene fan, I liked to see your Spenser-vs.-Shakespeare discussion about fairies.

    The most "Spenserian" great 20th-century fantasy I know is the Narnian Chronicles (and That Hideous Strength, if you will).

    Maybe Tolkien should have written am introduction to an edition of "The Golden Key" years earlier; perhaps he'd then have been somewhat more comfortable with MacDonald's fantasy. Of course one wouldn't want to lose "Smith of Wootton Major."

    I wonder if his complicated feelings about C. S. Lewis had anything to dow ith Tolkien's eventual assessment of MacDonald. After CSL's death Tolkien seems sometimes to have brooded on his disappointment with Lewis on several counts, and of course Lewis was THE great advocate of MacDonald in their lifetimes...

    ... although Roger Lancelyn Green's nice edition of the major tales, for Gollancz I believe, should be remembered.

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  2. > As a Faerie Queene fan, I liked to see your Spenser-vs.-Shakespeare discussion about fairies.

    Thanks. My friend Gary is the greatest Faerie Queene expert I know. He might certainly have more to say on the subject.

    > The most "Spenserian" great 20th-century fantasy I know is the Narnian Chronicles (and That Hideous Strength, if you will).

    Ah yes, absolutely! And quite apart from his fiction, Lewis did a good deal of scholarship on Spenser, notably The Allegory of Love (1936) and Spenser's Images of Life (published posthumously in 1967).

    > I wonder if his complicated feelings about C. S. Lewis had anything to dow ith Tolkien's eventual assessment of MacDonald.

    Yes, I certainly think so. Tolkien also had mixed feelings about Charles Williams — connected to Lewis as well. But we want to be careful about oversimplifying the matter.

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