Deke Parsons

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and the Birth of Modern Fantasy is a book that promises much, and while it does deliver to a certain extent, it also seems maddeningly incomplete. The basic format of the book is mostly laid out in the title: The first few chapters are about J.R.R. Tolkien, the next few are about Robert E. Howard, there is a chapter about Superman and the development of superhero comics, and finally chapter that gives fairly cursory overview of the development of fantasy following these three influences. While the author does cover the handful of elements he focuses on reasonably well, for a work that promises an exploration of the birth of modern fantasy, this book seems like a relatively perfunctory treatment of the subject, with at least as much left out as is included.

Parsons opens the book with a chapter that is principally a biography of Tolkien followed by a chapter of analysis of The Lord of the Rings. In the first chapter the author focuses heavily on the Boer War, World War I, and World War II as formative events in Tolkien's life, accompanied by a great deal of exposition concerning Tolkien's Catholicism and how this positioned him as something of an outsider in English society of the time. But the narrative also delves a bit into the influence the collegial groups the "Tea Club and Barrovian Society" and the Inklings had upon Tolkien, demonstrating just how difficult it is to maintain that a tenured professor at Pembroke College in Oxford was actually an "outsider". The tone of much of this chapter is adulatory, with the biography veering into hagiography at times. On the whole, it is a fairly decent summary of Tolkien's life, but it falls well short of being comprehensive.

In the second chapter, Parsons mostly analyzes The Lord of the Rings, and following up on the ground work laid in the first chapter, spends much of his efforts focused upon the connection between Tolkien's Catholic faith, the events of World War II, and the book. It is in this chapter that the worshipful attitude of the author towards Tolkien becomes most apparent, as he spends a fair amount of the chapter refuting the opinions of those who have been critical of the book in the past. A noticeable portion of this chapter is also spent contrasting Tolkien's book with the film adaptations made by Peter Jackson and others, usually to dismiss the films as being made without understanding the source material, although he makes an odd gaffe where he appears to think that the song Where There's a Whip There's a Way appeared in the Ralph Bakshi animated version of the story. It did not, it appeared in the Rankin-Bass animated movie The Return of the King. One weird quirk displayed by the author is that he seems to think The Hobbit was overly long, which is a criticism of that I don't think I have ever seen anyone make except in reference to the Peter Jackson adaptations. Except for a few instances in which specific authors who studied under Tolkien are referenced as having been his students, this chapter is entirely lacking in an evaluation of how Tolkien's work helped to birth and influence modern fantasy fiction. In fact, at several points Parsons takes great pains to distinguish The Lord of the Rings from the works of fiction that would come after it, explaining how the themes and symbols used by Tolkien are markedly different from its alleged successors. Between the sometimes sloppy fact-checking, and the lack of explanation concerning the development of fantasy from this root, this section seems disappointing.

Parsons then turns his attention to Robert E. Howard, taking much the same tack as he had with Tolkien: First a chapter that is mostly biographical information about Howard, and then a chapter that is mostly an examination of Howard's writing that spotlights his stories about Conan. As revealed by Parsons, Howard provides a stark contrast with Tolkien. While Tolkien lived in southern Africa, moved to Britain, fought in World War I, was orphaned relatively young but still educated at some of the finest institutions in England before becoming a professor for much of his life, Howard seems to have essentially never left a tiny section of rural Texas, never gained any education beyond high school, and tied to an ailing mother until shortly before he died. While Tolkien lived the comfortable life of an Oxford professor, Howard scraped out a meager living writing for pulp magazines that were at best sporadic in paying him. All that said, much of the chapter serves not as a contrast to Tolkien, but rather an exploration of, and to a certain extent apologetics for, Howard's fairly pervasive racism and his brief relationship with Novalyn Price Ellis. While Parsons doesn't seem to place Howard on quite the same pedestal as he has placed Tolkien, he does go to great lengths to soft-pedal Howard's racist attitudes, at times using them to explain Howard's rage at his relatively marginal position in society, but at others going to great lengths to explain that they weren't really an issue because even though he took great pains to detail the ethnicities of the characters in his stories, they were all portrayed as variations of Caucasian, and thus could not be seen as racist. Despite this, the biographical chapter on Howard is much more interesting than that on Tolkien, mostly because it presents a much more complex view of the subject.

Parsons elected to focus his attention concerning Howard's writing heavily upon his selection of Conan stories, which seems reasonable given that he is Howard's most famous creation. The odd thing that even though he spends a fair amount of time discussing Howard's failed novel Post Oaks and Sand Notes and gives little more than a perfunctory examination of his stories featuring characters such as Solomon Kane, Kull, or Bran Mak Morn, which seems like a strange oversight. Much of the chapter is taken up with an analysis of how Howard used Conan as a vehicle to comment upon the corruption of civilization and the relative purity of barbarians such as the Cimmerian, which a significant portion of the balance is taken up with a broadsided attack upon L. Sprague de Camp and some fairly sharp criticism of the various Conan films that have been produced over the years. In what appears to be an unintended twist, the chapter makes a much better case for de Camp's efforts having a greater influence on the development of modern fantasy than Howard, as without the work put in by de Camp in reprinting Howard's stories, writing new tales featuring Conan, and licensing works in other media such as comics, it seems likely that Howard's work would have fallen into obscurity. The thinly veiled contempt that Parsons seems to hold for de Camp seems like it would be more appropriate for a book attempting to defend the purity of Howard's vision, rather than a work intended to examine the initial development of modern fantasy and trace the origins of its foundational works.

After evaluating Tolkien and Howard and their respective works, Parsons turns his attention to Superman, the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. This seems like an odd choice, as the only substantive relationship the Kryptonian seems to have with The Lord of the Rings or Conan is that he was created in the 1930s. Although Superman did more or less spawn the modern super-hero, and as a result the fictional universes published by DC and Marvel Comics, he doesn't really seem to fit into the fantasy genre unless one defines it in the broadest and most generous terms possible. The development of Superman, let alone super-hero comics in general, is simply a topic that is too broad to be adequately tackled in one chapter of a book, and the inadequate nature of the treatment in this volume is readily apparent. After Parsons describes the nature of the earliest Superman stories, and then covers the genesis and early development of Batman and Wonder Woman, he launches into a discussion of the influence of Dr. freric Wertham and his crusade against the comic book industry. Finally, Parsons delves into the filmed representations of the super-hero, and at least with respect to the 1978 film, he is reasonably satisfied with the portrayal. Unfortunately, Parsons fails to connect the mythos spawned by Superman to the development of modern fantasy in any but the most tenuous manner. Superman certainly spawned a host of imitators in comic book form, and multiple fictional universes for his successors to inhabit, but they aren't really so much fantasy fiction as they are the representatives of their own genre.

What makes the digression into Superman and other comic book super-heroes disappointing is that the author gives little or no attention to many of the critical figures in the development of early fantasy. In the final chapter, titled "The Inheritors", Parsons covers work by Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and George R.R. Martin. Edgar Rice Burroughs is referenced in passing at one point, but almost entirely ignoring his contributions to the shape of modern fantasy seems like an egregious oversight. Further, including material about those authors makes the absence of commentary concerning such pioneers of fantasy such as Fritz Lieber, Poul Anderson, and Michael Moorcock all the more glaringly obvious, especially given the fact that so much of Moorcock's writing is so directly in dialogue with Tolkien's and Howard's. The final chapter of the book surveys so an extended range of time and material while discussing so few examples that it seems both overly broad, and perfunctory at the same time. More crucially, the book once again doesn't really do much to explaining or analyzing the birth of modern fantasy fiction, in part because it omits such large portions of the roots of the genre, and in part because it spends more time giving biographies of the authors and assessing film adaptations than it does focused on how the works created and influenced fantasy fiction.

In general, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and the Birth of Modern Fantasy is not a bad book, but it is a somewhat disappointing one. What there is of the book is reasonably well presented, but the author doesn't seem to actually want to focus on how modern fantasy came into being so much as he wants to discuss the lives and books of what seem to be his favorite fantasy authors. As a summary biography of Tolkien and Howard, and a brief examination of The Lord of the Rings, Conan, and Superman, this book is reasonably satisfactory. On the other hand, anyone looking for an in-depth exploration of the roots of the modern fantasy genre is advised to look elsewhere.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.… (mere)

This book has 6 chapters. The first two are a biographical summary of J. R. R. Tolkien followed by a discussion of his major work, The Lord of the Rings. The second two chapters are a biographical summary of Robert E. Howard, followed by a discussion of his major work, the Conan stories. The remaining chapters are relatively brief chapters about Superman and The Inheritors (that is, other fantasy writers of the early-mid 20th century, such as Dr. Seuss, Disney, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and ends with a few paragraphs on George R. R. Martin and Game of Thrones).

The book's discussion of Tolkien and LotR frequently references WWI and WWII, pulling the choice of setting into the context of the time it was written. Tolkien himself rejected attempts to read into his work "direct symbolic representations of the real world." This author then reviews what other critics have said about LotR, and his own discussion brings in threads from Tolkien's Catholic upbringing and his love of the natural world of trees and lakes and flowers.

the biggest influence on Robert Howard's early life seems to be Texas, where he was raised, Adventure magazine, which inspired his mind, and his rabid racism that inspired his attitudes.

The chapter on Superman is really about all comics of that time, with tidbits about their creators, and how they, too, reflected their times in their stories.

These chapters were fine, and I gained some insights I had not had before. But I wanted something more from a book of this title.

This book focused on the influences of Tolkien's and Howard's lives and world views and on how this affected their fiction and world-building. I wanted more of how their world-building affected modern fantasy, in the form of their influence on other fantasy authors. That is, I expected this book to focus more on the topic covered so briefly by the last chapter.… (mere)

This book is a collection of essays by the same author, including biographical sketches of Tolkien and Howard, overviews of critical though on their works, and a short section about the creation of Superman.

I'm afraid I found it a disappointment on several levels.

I did quite enjoy the chapters on Howard, especially the biographical sketch, but also the discussion of the stories inspired me, like several of the other reviewers, to finally get around to reading some of the original stories in Howard's words. I did, however, find the frequent framing of his discussion of Howard's racial and political views to be somewhat shallow and offputting - it seems to boil down to "yes he was racist, but not racist racist, so it's ok" rather than putting any real intellectual effort toward the problems of racism.

That said, I have far less context for the Conan parts than for Tolkien or Superman, so I can't really judge how accurate or facile it was in general.

That's possibly the best summing-up of this book: I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it if, say, I was helping an undergrad who had never read a fantasy novel or comic book and had been assigned an essay on Tolkien; it's an OK overview of the basic basics that I'd expect anyone vaguely interested in criticism of fantasy to be aware of.

It doesn't go much beyond that, though; and especially for things which have had such a massive amount of critical effort expended on them - like Superman and Tolkien - that's a serious weakness. Especially as the author doesn't seem to be aware of the range of analysis that's out there and occasionally presents ideas that have been argued over for decades as if they're new to him.

Also, despite the implications of the title, it does very little in the way of cohesive argument about fantasy as a genre and its origins. Each of the authors are compared to a few contemporary writers (not all working in fantasy) and to later adaptations of their work, but there's almost no sense of a wider community or genre of fantasy or where these works fit within it. Nor is there any acknowledgement, to speak of, of Tolkien's other fictional works, or Tolkien's critical writings on fantasy and myth.

And then there's the inaccuracies. Not just small factual errors, as other reviewers have pointed out, but also things like conceptualizing the ending of The Lord of the Rings as merely a damaged Frodo leaving Sam to live out his last days among the Elves while Sam stays in the Shire- which could be argued as not entirely inaccurate from a certain point of view, but it leaves out all of the complicated meanings of the Grey Havens and the West, not to mention Sam's own ending, and all of the writing that has been done about those ideas, which is particularly galling given that Parsons had just spent a great deal of time trying to read the novel in terms of Tolkien's Christian beliefs.

I'd like to think he did better with the writing on Howard - I certainly enjoyed it more - but that kind of blithe simplification and inaccuracy makes me disinclined to trust him on the writers where I don't have the background to catch those problems.

tl;dr : this is a reasonably good crash course for somebody who knows nothing about Tolkien or Superman but for some reason needs to fake it, but I would not recommend it for people who already have more than a basic grounding in the genre, nor is it readable enough that I'd suggest it to someone as just a casual read; there are more interesting and thoughtful volumes of fantasy criticism readily available.… (mere)

J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy (Critical…
by Deke Parsons, Donald E. Palumbo, C.W. Sullivan III is 47 in the Critical Explorations in Science Ficion and Fantasy. My impression is that this would make a good text reading for an introductory fantasy class. It tackles J.R.R. Tolkien, R. E. Howard and DC's Superman, subjects that have been explored full volumes over the years.
Parsons for the most part is providing an overview of these works while adding some of his own perspectives and insights. Maybe I am more forgiving than other reviewers but his ideas did not put me off enough to fact check with a fine tooth comb nor cringe when a fact didn't quite fit my understanding.
Although my tendencies are towards fictional reading now a days, I enjoyed this dissertation as it has been called. Gaining some insight into the foundations of my favorite genre to read. If nothing else it provides a list of works for the reader to explore if they want to read about the subjects in depth… (mere)