BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Douglas A. Anderson is an independent scholar who has explored many authors but is especially known for his work on the Inklings. His first book was The Annotated Hobbit (1988; revised 2002). In 1990, it won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies. His other books include Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction. Anderson has edited new collections or reissues of works by such authors as Kenneth Morris, Evangeline Walton, William Hope Hodgson, and Leonard Cline. Many of these collections appear through his imprint, Nodens Books.

He co-founded two scholarly journals devoted to Tolkien: Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (of which he was co-editor for the first nine volumes) and The Journal of Tolkien Research (of which he has been the Book Review Editor since its founding in 2014). He also runs the blogs Tolkien and Fantasy and (with Mark Valentine and occasional guests) Wormwoodiana, which explores “literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent.” Other blogs cover under-researched speculative fiction authors (Kenneth Morris, Leonard Cline, Lesser-Known Writers) and new research discoveries about various authors (A Shiver in the Archives).

He was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions

How did you first hear about the Inklings?

I first read Tolkien, including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in the summer of 1973 when I was thirteen. For years afterwards, I sought other authors who gave me a similar literary satisfaction as Tolkien did. I didn’t find many authors that reached the same heights, but I read widely and did encounter many interesting books. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was wound down in the spring of 1974, but the books were still to be found in bookstores for many months afterwards. At the time I read H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and much preferred the latter. I loved the tales of Lord Dunsany. Outside of the Ballantine series, I especially enjoyed the early books by Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and what became her Riddle-Master trilogy, and I loved the Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin (there were only three of them in those days).

I also started to read C.S. Lewis at the time—first, a few of the Narnia books, but I felt that I was a bit too old for them, and they seemed like watered-down Tolkien. A few years later, I found the Ransom books and they have long been among my favorite Lewis books. I was also rereading Tolkien a lot, and reading anything I could find by or about him, but I do not recall when I learned of the Inklings. It was probably around my junior or senior year of high school. In my sophomore year, my English teachers threw a bunch of Neil Simon plays on a table and said we were to, in groups, select one to perform for the class. I had a disgust for Neil Simon even then, so I said I wanted to do The Hobbit, but the teachers told me (incorrectly) that there was no dramatization of it. I said I’d write one! And surely to humor me, they said if I wrote one, then me and my friends could perform it. So, I wrote it and we performed it, and the teachers liked it so much that they arranged for us to perform it at some local elementary schools. The play is best forgotten; its only interesting aspect being that it was something begun and actually completed by a fourteen-year-old. (I have never been inclined to write another play.)

How did you shift from enjoying the Inklings as a reader to writing scholarship on their work?

My interests evolved over the years, though they stayed centered on Tolkien. In high school, I was initially interested in the incredible details of Tolkien’s invented world, and gradually as I read things about him (Daniel Grotta-Kurska’s 1976 biography of Tolkien, and Humphrey Carpenter’s vastly better one that came out the spring of the following year), I wanted to read more books that served as background to Tolkien’s creative writings. I didn’t find Beowulf in my high school library, but I found John Gardner’s Grendel, which was quite a different thing. I read other books like Par Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, and Robert Southey’s four-volume translation of Amadis of Gaul, which my small town library was able to get for me via interlibrary loan—one volume at a time, so I read all four volumes in succession. The medieval materials interested me more than the modern reworkings.

After my freshman year at college, I attended a summer program at Oxford. In England. I met members of the Tolkien Society and used the Bodleian Library to track down every rare Tolkien item that I could, while I used the Oxford public library to get many reviews and articles about Tolkien. I don’t think I had any ambitions to do scholarship on Tolkien until after I met Humphry Carpenter that summer and we became friends. He was beginning to work on his biography of W.H. Auden, and needed an assistant in the U.S. to help him with the research. Over the next several years we had an extensive correspondence. I tracked down Auden’s American friends, and a good number of his various publications. Humphrey and I met up in New York City to research at libraries. This was my first real taste of literary research, and I learned an incredible amount from Humphrey, just as I learned much from a long and extensive correspondence with Christopher Tolkien, after Humphrey put us in contact with each other. At the same time he was working on the Auden book, Humphrey was compiling the Tolkien Letters volume, and I helped a lot with that too, contributing finds (like the 1938 letter describing hobbits, which turned up in the Houghton Mifflin archives) and making an extensive commentary on the typescript. All these things gave me a real taste of literary research, and I found the work intoxicating. I still do.

I don’t think I read Charles Williams or other Inklings until after Humphrey’s book The Inklings came out. (I still have the inscribed copy he sent me in October 1978.) After that, my interest kept growing and evolving—from the fantasy writings Tolkien would have known to those written afterwards; to the works of his friends; to his complicated publishing and textual history (which brought about The Annotated Hobbit); to the biographical elements that intertwined Tolkien’s life with his works.

For many years I stayed out of academia, having been told my interests were unworthy of study. Jane Chance brought me back in to present at the annual Medievalist’s Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2001. That was the first year that the Congress allowed sessions on Tolkien. (My paper from that year, on Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, is collected in Jane’s volume, Tolkien the Medievalist.) I’ve attended every year since (save for the cancelled COVID year). It’s a great gathering of Tolkienists, where I get to see and catch up with many friends. In recent years, there has been a growing number of sessions devoted to C.S. Lewis.

Not many people realize today that The Hobbit went through radical changes in later editions. What are some of the surprising changes you discovered were made over time?

I knew, doubtless via Bonniejean Christiensen’s 1975 article in A Tolkien Compass, that Gollum in the first edition text was made into a more sinister character in the second and later editions. So, no real surprises. After I had the appropriate editions of The Hobbit, I photocopied each text and taped the pages next to each other on some foot-and-a-half by four-foot sheets, and read them across, highlighting all the changes with variously colored pens and markers. My thought had been to do a variorum edition, but having documented all the changes, I realized there weren’t enough differences to make a variorum edition. I told Austin Olney of Houghton Mifflin (with whom I had previously worked on correcting the Lord of the Rings text) that there were lots of other interesting things to say about the book, and with the fiftieth American anniversary of The Hobbit coming up the next year, would he be interested in an Annotated Hobbit? And so that book came about.

Tales Before Tolkien explores a variety of authors who influenced Tolkien. Were there any authors you were surprised by while doing the research?

No. The fact is that I’d read everything in the book well before I even thought of doing the book. So, I had a very pleasant time re-reading lots of things and making (when possible) the connections with Tolkien. This was the first anthology I’d compiled, and I worked hard to arrange the flow of the book from story to story, beginning to end. This somewhat influenced the selection process. But I thought it came out well. But only one person ever noticed; not surprisingly, it was another professional editor, who wrote me complimenting the story progression in the book.

My original title for the book had been Roots of the Mountain: Fantasy before Tolkien, but that was nixed by the marketing department. I was given a short list of alternate titles, and I chose the least objectionable one. I chose to offer it to Ballantine Books as an homage to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. When I proposed it, Peter Jackson’s first film of The Lord of the Rings was out, with two more to come, so it was an easy sell. The book came out about four months before the third film. Similarly, I proposed Tales Before Narnia after the first Narnia film had been released, and the second (Prince Caspian) was forthcoming.

Tales Before Tolkien has done very well over the years. Tales Before Narnia, less so. I suspect it is because most Lewis readers are more interested in his Christian apologetics than in his fiction. Yet Tales Before Narnia has a good number of discoveries, including a chapter from Roger Lancelyn Green’s still-unpublished children’s novel, The Wood That Time Forgot, which was one of the inspirations for Lewis’s Narnia books.

Any influential authors you did not expect to see when you were researching Tales Before Narnia?

Tales Before Narnia was compiled differently, in that I had to read a good many stories for the first time to see if they were candidates for inclusion. I nixed lots of stories because they weren’t relevant but kept possibilities in a separate pile, and then reread that pile to make the final selection. I was, from the start, pretty much open to including any author whose story turned out to be relevant. I think the book came out well—sadly, there was one story I wanted to include, but I didn’t get any answer to my query from the elderly author (who turned out to have passed away not long before I had written), so it had to be cut. The story, “Island of Fear” by William Sansom, would have been the final one in the book.

It took some work to get a copy of Charles F. Hall’s “The Man Who Lived Backwards” (which Lewis himself described as an influence in the preface to The Great Divorce, though Lewis could not recall the title or author but only its plot). In 2017, I reprinted all three known Hall stories in a chapbook, The Man Who Lived Backwards and Other Stories.

One of the more surprising authors mentioned in Tales Before Narnia is someone who has become better known since the 2010s: Joy Davidman’s ex-husband William Lindsay Gresham. How did you become familiar with his work?

I read a bunch of Gresham in the early 2000s and tried doing some work on him, but resources were limited. I did not know then that his widow was still alive, or that she had retained an archive of his papers. These papers are now catalogued and held in the Wade Center at Wheaton College.

For Tales Before Narnia, I read Gresham’s stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from the 1950s, when Lewis was known to have been a reader (and contributor) to the magazine. As soon as I read “The Dream Dust Factory,” I knew I had to include it. The content is very Lewisian, though the style is not. I am looking forward to other scholars writing on Gresham.[1]

While you’ve done extensive work on lesser-known authors, there are a handful that you return to—particularly Leonard Cline and Kenneth Morris. Any thoughts on what draws you back to these authors?

Kenneth Morris I discovered in the early 1980s. He is remembered for two volumes reworking the Mabinogion, and for those books he has been hailed as the inventor of Celtic fantasy. The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (1914) is the first, and Book of the Three Dragons (1930), its follow-up. I love his tales the best. They range through the mythologies of the world and are like a cross between Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood—they have the perfected style of Dunsany’s fantasies combined with the mystical aspects of Blackwood. I collected them into a volume called The Dragon Path (1995). Among his manuscripts was a complete fantasy novel of the Toltecs of ancient Mexico, and of the coming of Quetzalcoatl, titled The Chalchiuhite Dragon (that word means “jade”), which I got Tor to publish in 1992. There is nothing else like it. And with his manuscripts, I discovered the unpublished last third of Book of the Three Dragons, which was included in a new edition in 2004. I am currently nearing completion of a volume of his translations (Morris called them “recensions”) of classic Chinese poems. A few more Morris books are in the works.

Leonard Cline I discovered later, and was enraptured by his style and versatility. He wrote stories, poems, plays, and lots of newspaper work (music and book reviews, as well as news reports). He published three very different novels before his early death in 1929 at the age of thirty-five. The first, God Head (1925), mixes Finnish legends from the Kalevala with the story of a superman in the upper peninsula of Michigan. It is the finest forgotten book I have ever encountered. His third novel is a kind of modernist Gothic entitled The Dark Chamber (1927), which was highly praised by Lovecraft (who otherwise misunderstood the book, explaining it via the supernatural whereas the novel is strictly realistic). Cline had a tragic life. In 1927, during Prohibition, he was involved in a drunken quarrel and fatally shot the friend he thought was attacking him. He served nearly a year in jail for manslaughter, during which time he reconverted to his youthful Catholicism and wrote pseudonymous pulp thrillers to pay his fine and save his Connecticut farm.[2] I got to know his daughter very well in the last years of her life. Cline was a first-rate talent, and had he lived and written for another thirty or forty years, I think his name would be well-known today.

What are some ways you can tell if an author is someone you will want to re-study over time?

I suppose it is almost completely by instinct. There aren’t that many authors that will pull me back to study further once I have written them up. Such is the case with most of the authors I have covered on my Lesser-Known Writers blog, and books that I covered in my column “Late Reviews” in the sadly discontinued journal Wormwood, published by Tartarus Press of the U.K. (My columns from Wormwood, plus a lot of additional such reviews, are collected in a 2018 volume, Late Reviews.)

Some such authors published some genuinely rare books—not necessarily expensive or valuable, but ones that survive in few copies. Though it is not always possible, I try to consider an author’s complete works before I write about them. Once done, I trade or sell those books for other books that I need to read for some other article or blog post. My library is very much a working library, and things circulate in and out.

One nice thing about my Lesser-Known Writers blog is that people related to various authors, or people who knew them, occasionally write in to say hello or to add information or corrections. For one Scottish author, his daughter wrote in to tell me that her father was not a pseudonym and used his real name on his books. I told her that the information about the name being a pseudonym (and who the supposed author was) came from the catalogue at the National Library of Scotland. She got involved, and the National Library of Scotland corrected their records, and I corrected my entry. Thus, small progress in scholarship can be made.

It’s clear from your various blogs that you enjoy contributing research for online readers as well as the more traditional print journal article route. What motivates you to use multiple avenues to publish your research instead of focusing on one or two?

That’s a difficult question to answer. There are several aspects at play. One could be timeliness (like celebrating a book’s anniversary). Another could be that certain journals are more focused on a particular and relevant subject. Most of the Tolkien-related stuff I put online is more like Tolkienian footnotes—some small self-circumscribed aspect that came up during my research on Tolkien. It’s nice to get such minor pieces out there and to have some reactions.

With one complicated historical and bibliographical article (including a number of photos and scans), I put it up directly on my Academia.edu page. I couldn’t think of a print journal that would publish it, and it didn’t seem to work as a blog post. The article is “Charles Williams’s Novels and Their Early American Editions.” Other things of possible interest that I have posted there include a document of “Corrections to the Printings of Tolkien On Fairy-stories” and a play, “The Archdruid” by Kenneth Morris, which was given a play reading at Mythcon 30 in 1999.

A few months ago I happened upon an undocumented and otherwise unknown poem by Charles Williams. The best way to share it seemed to me to post it at my blog of research discoveries, A Shiver in the Archives. The poem, a reworking of Psalm 46 entitled “Put Not Your Trust in Human Strength,” originally appeared in Harry H. Mayer’s The Lyric Psalter: The Modern Reader’s Book of Psalms (Liveright, 1940).

What helps you decide when to publish research as a blog post, when to take the more traditional journal route, or when to go further and write a book?

Sometimes I choose the blog route because I have illustrations (book covers, photographs, etc.) that I would like to accompany my research. A print article almost never allows for the use of color reproduction, but color illustrations are great to use in blog posts.

A few of the blogs, e.g., on Kenneth Morris and Leonard Cline, are places for me to pull together threads from larger projects. I don’t usually have to think much about where something belongs.

Any upcoming projects you can share?

I have just published a restored edition of Evangeline Walton’s novel of the conflict between the pagan Vikings and the Christian Saxons in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. It is titled Dark Runs the Road. It centers upon Sweyn, the son of a Norwegian Jarl, and his spiritual evolution. When it was first published in 1956, it was cut by one third and retitled, against the author’s wishes, as The Cross and the Sword. Walton’s four books reworking the Mabinogion are deservedly called classics, but I think Dark Runs the Road equals, if not surpasses, them in quality.

A sequel to my anthology Tales Before Tolkien is expected to come out soon, after several delays. The title, More Tales Before Tolkien, isn’t very imaginative, but it describes the book. There are a number of exciting and virtually unknown selections in it—like a story about trees who move about in a forest and gather together in moots and have names like Enteth; and a children’s story that has a magic ring that makes its wearer invisible but also has sinister aspects, very much like Bilbo’s ring.

A listing of Douglas A. Anderson’s blogs can be found on Blogger. His books, including new releases from Nodens Books, can be found on Amazon.

(Article first published on April 1, 2025).

Interviewer Footnotes

[1] For a list of recent scholarship on Gresham, see G. Connor Salter, “William Lindsay Gresham: A Recommended Reading List.”

[2] For one of these works, see Nodens Books’ reissue of The Cult Murders by Leonard Cline writing as Alan Forsyth.