Douglas A. Anderson’s collection of stories gathered in Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy appears to be more from before Tolkien’s works were published than “classic stories that inspired the author of The Lord of the Rings” but I can’t fault the publisher for trying to drum up sales.
Of the 21 stories that make up this collection, there were only a handful I enjoyed and four that I truly loved:
“The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton
“Black Heart and White Heart: A Zulu Idyll” by H. Rider Haggard
“The Dragon Tamers” by E. Nesbit
“Chu-bu and Sheemish” by Lord Dunsany
More on those later, but my lack of love for the other 17 isn’t Anderson’s fault. It’s more reflective of my modern fantasy conditioning. Tolkien is a personal favorite and over the last decade I’ve read through a good portion of Terry Brooks’ literary offerings. If Tolkien is the turning point towards “modern fantasy,” then Brooks is a favorite son.
The fantasy in this collection isn’t just old, it’s more traditional and more in line with the original faerie tales, tall tales, legends of old than it might be with any modern fantasy. At their heart, all of the stories in this collection are great stories, so it’s down to personal preference to determine which ones speak to you.
In the event that they don’t speak to you, there’s no reason to think that it’s something you’re just not getting because it’s difficult to go backwards. I may have grown up with a Nintendo Entertainment System or its Super big brother, but that doesn’t mean I can just grab one of those controllers after being used to everything that has evolved since the two directional sticks. Most of that is practice. I find that movies are similar. I make attempts to watch movies from the 60s and 70s because they are different. They have different pacing and are shot and written in different ways because of both the people involved and when they were created. Fantasy, as this collection has revealed to me, is no different.
This collection was a great taste, but I think I’m good with modern fantasy as it relates to things after Tolkien, but that won’t stop me from revisiting the four I mentioned. They are all short stories of various lengths; some are more subtext and some are more story. They are the four, however, that I most enjoyed in this collection.
Stockton’s tale reminds me that society as a whole may always be more of a problem than the good nature of our individualism. Haggard’s yarn is something that reads like an epic film. Nesbit’s story is the origin story of a certain animal I didn’t know I needed. And Dunsany’s offering is an allegory for at least three different things.
This is, of course, subjective and you can get something completely different from those four short stories. You could also enjoy a collection of completely different stories shared here.
I don’t know that I want to recommend it as much as I want to tell you that if you were ever curious about pre-Tolkien fantasy, this is a pretty wide swath that gets painted. There’s always more, but this is a pretty eclectic and varied selection with which to start. After all, Anderson did the hard work of finding and collecting these short stories together. The least you could do is pick up a copy in your local library or perhaps even at a used book store.