Tolkien on de Camp's "Swords & Sorcery" Anthology

In July 1964, L. Sprague de Camp sent J.R.R. Tolkien a copy of his anthology, Swords & Sorcery, which had been published in December 1963. It is a collection of eight stories, with an introduction by de Camp, and colored cover art and eight interior black and white illustrations by Virgil Finlay.
 

Tolkien already knew the art of Virgil Finlay because his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had in early 1963 solicited a sample illustration by Finlay for a proposed (but unrealised) illustrated edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien commented on Finlay’s sample in a letter from 11 October 1963, noting that  “Though it gives prospects of a general treatment rather heavier and more violent and airless than I should like, I thought it was good, and actually I thought Bilbo's rather rotund and babyish (but anxious) face was in keeping with his character up to that point. After the horrors of the ‘illustrations’ to the translations [of The Hobbit] Mr. Finlay is a welcome relief. As long (as seems likely) he will leave humour to the text and pay reasonable attention to what the text says, I expect I shall be quite happy.”

Finlay sample for The Hobbit

Unfortunately, Finlay’s cover and interior illustrations to the anthology are rather undistinguised, and do not showcase Finlay’s talent, perhaps owing to the medium of reproduction in a mass market paperback on cheap paper.

With his copy of the Swords & Sorcery book, Tolkien left some jotted notes, difficult to read (see illustration at bottom). Some bits of these notes are quoted below. His main criticisms of the book he made in a 30 August 1964 letter to de Camp, which has only partially been published. In it, Tolkien noted that he was interested in practically everything save literary criticism, and he said of contemporary fantasy that “I will not pretend that it gave me much pleasure.” In particular about de Camp’s book he noted:  “Though I might say, I suppose, as a purely personal aside, that all the items seem poor in the subsidiary (but to me not unimportant) matters of nomenclature. Best when inventive, least good when literary or archaic. (For instance Thangobrind and Alaric, both singularly inapt for their purpose) . . . Also I do wonder why you chose that particular tale of Dunsany’s. It seems to me to illustrate all his faults. And the ghastly final paragraph!”

In his notes, Tolkien had written: “Found [the anthology] interesting but did not much like the stories in it.” Also: “Most of these things are overheated & exaggerated ([?...] bigger or [?would be] bigger, [?’...’] is [?...] than the purposes warrant) Also obviously over or ill-written.”

Of the eight stories, Tolkien commented upon four specifically, with a later conversational comment about a fifth as reported by de Camp. Tolkien did not comment on deCamp’s introduction, nor on the stories by Kuttner, Leiber and Lovecraft.  His comments on the four are here considered sequentially, in the order they appear in the book.

“The Valor of Cappen Varra” by Poul Anderson.  “Cappen Varra. Nomenclature v. bad. Let us have genuine Scandinavian/Norse ‘barbarians’ or something invented.”

“Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller” by Lord Dunsany. “Dunsany at his worst. Trying so hard for the shudder. But not for a moment making the tale ‘credible’ enough to make a background for a strong [?]. And the ending lamentable — in that [?setting]. In a world in which a Thangobrind could even begin to be (let alone Hlo-hlo or [?all the rest]) early 19th century Riviera [?milleau] is surely utterly impossible — or vice versa. And what is meant by selling his daughter’s soul.” And “Dunsany’s is one of his worst. That final ghastly paragraph!”

De Camp suggested that: “I suppose Tolkien meant by ‘ghastly’ Dunsany’s leaving his ‘secondary world’ to drag in a dig at a type of contemporary person he disliked.”  

In the first paragraph of the story, Dunsany wrote: “Now there was a Merchant Prince who had come to Thangobrind and had offered his daughter’s soul for the diamond that is larger than the human head and was to be found on the lap of the spider-idol, Hlo-Hlo, in his temple of Moung-ga-ling; for he had heard that Thangobrind was a thief to be trusted.”  The final paragraph of the short tale reads:

And the only daughter of the Merchant Prince felt so little gratitude for this great deliverance that she took to respectability of a militant kind, and became aggressively dull, and called her home the English Riviera, and had platitudes worked in worsted upon her tea-cosy, and in the end never died, but passed away at her residence.

“Hellsgarde” by C. L. Moore. “Jirel of Joiry. Does create an atmosphere and [?the] sinister ‘corrupt’ household of Alaric was eerie and credible. But I never [sic] find phantasmal struggles such as that of Jirel with ‘Undead’ Andred quite unconvincing — especially when the victims escape!” And: “Jirel of Joiry [pp.] 140 – 146 is good but needs a deft story (and explanation) to make it valid.”

“The Testament of Athammaus” by Clark Ashton Smith. “The Athammaus monster wholly unbelievable [?…] disgusting [?... ... …]. There are lots of ways of being [?...] nastily, without all this tooraloo of nonsense.”

De Camp met Tolkien in Oxford in February 1967, and de Camp later reported that Tolkien had said he “rather liked” the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard.  It is an odd comment, considering that Tolkien had earlier claimed that he did not much like the stories in the book, and there is no evidence to support the idea that he had read any other Conan story.  De Camp elaborated this view in a letter to John D. Rateliff on 14 January 1983:  “During our conversation, I said something casual to Tolkien about my involvement with Howard’s Conan stories, and he said he ‘rather liked them.’ That was all; we went on to other subjects. I know he had read Swords & Sorcery because I had sent him a copy. I don’t know if he had read any other Conan besides “Shadows in the Moonlight,” but I rather doubt it.”

 

Lord Dunsany as Lord Insany

The poet John Betjeman (1906-1984) had two volumes of his letters published posthumously, the first, covering 1926-1951, published in 1994; and the second, covering 1952-1984, published in 1995. John Rateliff covered some aspects of them in a blog post over at Sacnoth’s Scriptorium. In particular, he noted Betjeman’s nickname for Dunsany, “Lord Insany,” used during the 1940s when Betjeman was friendly with the man but also exasperated by him too. John notes that “Lord Insany” was a behind-the-back nickname of Dunsany used by colleagues at Athens University in Greece, where Dunsany taught as the Byron Chair of English in 1940-1941.*

Betjeman’s views on Lord Dunsany were somewhat complex, and the moniker “Lord Insany” actually came from Dunsany’s own family, and predates his time at Athens University. Here are a few details that bookend Betjeman’s views of Dunsany in the 1940s, one from the early 30s, the other from the late 50s.

Betjeman apparently met Dunsany in the very early 1930s, according to Elizabeth Longford’s autobiography, The Pebbled Shore (1986). Longford had become friends with Betjeman, Maurice Bowra, Evelyn Waugh, David Cecil, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Frank Pakenham, when she was at Oxford, beginning in 1926. She married Frank Pakenham in 1931, and by her marriage she became a relative of Dunsany, whom she knew as “Uncle Eddie.” (Frank Pakenham would later become the Earl of Longford, and his wife, Lady Longford.)

In August 1931, before her marriage to Pakenham, Longford writes of a gathering at Pakenham Hall in County Westmeath in Ireland (one county west of Dunsany Castle, in County Meath):

My sister Kitty, Maurice Bowra, Evelyn Waugh and I played tennis together. We were all about the same height but Kitty was the one who could hit the ball. Uncle Eddie, the poet and writer (Lord Dunsany), came over for lunch one day and conducted a literary seminar with Maurice, David Cecil and the rest of us. Accidentally the maestro [Frank?] referred to Tolstoy’s novel as “Peace and War”. This put Maurice in a quandary. A few minutes later he took the deferential way out and also referred to “Peace and War”. “War and Peace, not Peace and War,” thundered Uncle Eddie. “They always said Oxford was no good, and now I see they’re right.” The Pakenham children loved him, calling him Lord “Insany”, a title which endeared him to John Betjeman. (p. 130)

After Dunsany died in October 1957, Betjeman devoted the first paragraph of his regular Spectator column, “City and Suburban”, to Dunsany's passing, with clear affection:

Many authors, when one meets them for the first time, are comparatively unimpressive compared with their books. But Lord Dunsany, who died last week, never disappointed. He was every inch a poet, playwright, storyteller, Irish peer, big-game hunter, painter, modeller in clay, Conservative politician, soldier and country gentleman, all of which occupations he followed in the busiest and most-enjoyed life I have seen. He was a tall, splendid-looking man with a young voice, decided opinions and boundless energy. He was very happily married and had the good manners of an Edwardian autocrat. Unexpected things roused his anger. One of them was manufactured salt in advertised brands (he mistrusted everything that was branded and advertised)—if he found this on a dinner table, no matter whose house it was, he would say, “Send for some ordinary kitchen salt and bring two glasses of water.” He would then pour some of the branded salt into one glass and the kitchen salt into another. The kitchen salt dissolved, but the branded salt left a white deposit at the bottom of the other glass which he said was either chalk or ground-up bones. He was one of those people who made you feel on top of the world and that all those who disagreed with you were petty crooks who would be beaten in the end. He talked with all the fantasy of his own Jorkens stories. (1 November 1957, p. 13)

Dunsany was clearly larger than life in many ways. 

* Olivia Manning and her husband were in Athens at the time Dunsany was there, and her character Professor Lord Pinkrose in The Spoilt City (1962), the second volume in her six-part series, Fortunes of War, is believed to have been based on Dunsany. See here.

 

News and Notes

The contents of Tolkien Studies volume 8 have gone live at Project Muse (the subscription database accessible in most universities and some public libraries). Jason Fisher first noted this on his blog, but you may need (for a time) to finagle the URL a bit to access the newest issue (read the comments at his blog entry).  Jason and a couple other people have also commented on the length of the review-essay of The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of“The Lord of the Rings”.  Yes, indeed, it is large. But there are various reasons. In fact the first half was done and should have appeared in volume 7 last year, but we had to cut something, for a too large issue came together very late.  And usually a volume of essays has something like ten to twelve essays in it, so in order to have an in-depth reviews, one needs space, often 3,000 to 5,000 words.  And with the one hundred essays in the massive two-volumes of The Ring Goes Ever On,  well, you can easily do the math.  I'll leave the matter there--personally I think the extended coverage is justified in many ways.  And it is so much more than a book review, which is why it was given the header of review-essay.

John Rateliff gave this new blog a kindly welcome at his own blog. John's most recent (as of this writing) entry tells of the passing of the 20th Lord Dunsany, the artist and architect Edward John Carlos Plunkett (1939-2011), the grandson of the fantasist. I had been going to post a note about this, but John has said most of what I would have, so I'll merely refer readers to John's post and add a few points here.  First, one of Dunsany's late fantasy stories, a partial return to the form of thirty years earlier, was written in 1946 for his seven-year old grandson. This is "The Dwarf Holobolos and the Sword Hogbiter" which John has described in his thesis on Dunsany as a “blending of ‘Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth’ with Don Rodriguez, borrowing its style from one and the flavor of its marvels from the other. Amusing but not up to Dunsany’s usual standards.” It was first published in Collins for Boys and Girls no. 1 (July 1949), and reprinted in Worlds of Fantasy & Horror (a temporary re-titling of Weird Tales magazine), Summer 1994. The other point I'd like to make is that it's worth checking out this link to see examples of the artwork of Edward Plunkett. (Click on the header “Catalogue”.) 

I'd also like to make mention of the passing of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the last of the original surrealists. She died in Mexico, where she had lived for almost seventy years. A major figure in twentieth century art and sculpture, her fantasy fiction hides in the shadows of her other achievements, but it does have a following. Perhaps her most notable literary work is the novel The Hearing Trumpet (translated into French in 1974 and published in English in 1976, with illustrations by one of her sons, Pablo Weisz-Carrington). Here's the cover from my 1977 Pocket books edition, sporting the ubiquitous (even in those pre-Sword of Shannara days) blurb comparing it to Tolkien.  Among her other writings are the short novel The Stone Door (French translation 1976; English original 1977), and the collections The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below (1988), and The Seventh Horse and Other Tales (1988). Obituaries appear in The Guardian and in The New York Times.

And a new book on the horizon is the long-awaited anthology of essays from Oxford University Press, From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, edited by Michael Adams.  Tolkienist Arden R. Smith contributes the opening chapter on "International Auxiliary Languages", and the chapter on "Tolkien's Invented Languages" is by Edmund Weiner, one of the three co-authors of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary.  The new collection is scheduled for November.  See the Amazon page.