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
Reave the Just
Stephen R. Donaldson
Of all the strange, unrelenting stories which surrounded Reave the Just, none expressed his particular oddness of character better than that concerning his kinsman, Jillet of Forebridge.
Part of the oddness was this—that Reave and Jillet were so unlike each other that the whole idea of their kinship became difficult to credit.
Let it be said without prejudice that Jillet was an amiable fool. No one who was not amiable would have been loved by the cautious people of Forebridge—and Jillet was loved, of that there could be no doubt. Otherwise the townsfolk would never have risked the unpredictable and often spectacular consequences of sending for Reave, merely to inform him that Jillet had disappeared. And no one who was not a fool would have gotten himself into so much trouble with Kelven Divestulata that Kelven felt compelled to dispose of him.
In contrast, neither Reave’s enemies—of which his exploits had attracted a considerable number—nor his friends would have described him as amiable.
Doubtless there were villages across the North Counties, towns perhaps, possibly a city or two, where Reave the Just was admired, even adulated: Forebridge was not among them. His decisions were too wild, his actions too unremitting, to meet the chary approval of the farmers and farriers, millers and masons who had known Jillet from birth.
Like a force of nature, he was so far beyond explanation that people had ceased trying to account for him. Instead of wondering why he did what he did—or how he got away with it—the men and women of Forebridge asked themselves how such an implausible individual chanced to be kinsman to Jillet, who was himself only implausible in the degree to which likable character was combined with unreliable judgment.
In fact, no one knew for certain that Reave and Jillet were related. Just recently, Jillet had upon occasion referred to Reave as, “Reave the Just, my kinsman.” That was the true extent of the information available in Forebridge. Nothing more was revealed on the subject. In an effort to supply the lack, rumor or gossip suggested that Jillet’s mother’s sister, a woman of another town altogether, had fallen under the seduction of a carnival clown with delusions of grandeur—or, alternatively, of a knight errant incognito—and had given Reave a bastard birth under some pitiful hedgerow, or perhaps in some nameless nunnery, or conceivably in some lord’s private bedchamber. But how the strains of blood which could produce Reave had been so entirely suppressed in Jillet, neither rumor nor gossip knew.