Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy

Douglas A. Anderson, Ludwig Tieck, George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, Richard Garnett

Random House Publishing Group, Jan 13, 2010 - Fiction - 528 pages

Terry Brooks. David Eddings. George R. R. Martin. Robin Hobb. The top names in modern fantasy all acknowledge J. R. R. Tolkien as their role model, the author whose work inspired them to create their own epics.

But what writers influenced Tolkien himself? Here, internationally recognized Tolkien expert Douglas A. Anderson has gathered the fiction of authors who sparked Tolkien’s imagination in a collection destined to become a classic in its own right.

About the author

Douglas A. Anderson, a leading American Tolkien scholar, is acknowledged as the worldwide expert on the textual history of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and has contributed the textual notes for all Houghton Mifflin editions of these titles for more than a decade. He has been a bookseller, in Ithaca, New York and northwest Indiana. He now lives in southwestern Michigan. He is the editor of The Annotated Hobbit.


From the Hardcover edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy
• Authors: Douglas A. Anderson, Ludwig Tieck, George MacDonald, E. Nesbit, Richard Garnett
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2010
• ISBN: 0307547892, 9780307547897
• Length: 528 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors); Fiction / Fantasy / Epic; Fiction / Fantasy / General