Jared's ENGLAND AND ALWAYS

So, I'm finding it hard to sum up my friend Jared in a single piece, and have decided to make a series of smaller posts and see how that works.

As a Tolkien scholar, Jared had three main claims to fame.

First, he had briefly corresponded as a youth with C. S. Lewis and later J. R. R. Tolkien, writing  a fan letter to each and receiving a reply both times, although unfortunately neither letter survives.

Second, he had edited one of the earlier books on Tolkien and his works, 1975's A TOLKIEN COMPASS, which is famed for printing Richard West's article on Tolkien's use of interlace narrative in LotR (still one of the best essays on Tolkien all these years later) and Bonniejean Christensen's piece on THE HOBBIT, the first to point out in detail the changes in the Gollum chapter between the first and second editions of that book. And, in those days when the publication of any new material from JRRT himself was prized as a pearl beyond price, Jared's collection included as an appendix GUIDE TO THE NAMES IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS by JRRT himself, a piece the Professor put together for the aid of translators.

Third, he had set forth his own ideas on Tolkien in a 1982 book ENGLAND AND ALWAYS, which argued that the three most important things about Tolkien were (a) his strong affinity with Edwardian adventure stories, (b) his being a philologist, and (c) his being a (conservative) Xian.

Jared himself provides a single-page summary of his argument in ENGLAND AND ALWAYS in his later book THE RISE OF TOLKIENIAN FANTASY (2005), so I can give this in his own words rather than through the lens of my rephrasings:

Appendix:

Sequels in the Edwardian Mode: A Problem in Calquing

In my original study of The Lord of the Rings as as an "adventure story in the Edwardian mode" I defined that mode by a number of characteristics . . . These characteristics, it seems to me, present a particular problem for sequels, or even additional works, by the authors of Edwardian adventure stories. This problem, in turn, suggests some reasons for the nature of The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales—including their unfinished state—as well as suggesting that it may be worth-while to consider the ways other authors dealt with it, or failed to deal with it. All this is my topic here.

The characteristics of the adventure story in the Edwardian mode were these: First, the story is framed in familiarity. In this, it is like a fairy-tale, but unlike the fairy-tale, its action is time-specific. Second, the characters are types, though they may rise to the dignity of archetypes. Third, and connected with the second characteristic it is the character of nature, not the character of the actors, that are "realized" (in the French sense of the word). Fourth, the adventurers are not solitary, but they are frequently (in fact, almost universally) a happy few. Fifth, the adventurers are narrated (frequently in the first person) by the most ordinary of the happy few. Sixth, there is a recurring motif (perhaps the recurring motif) of the past alive in the present. And seventh, the world of the adventurers is essentially an aristocratic world. It might also be argued that there are fewer shades of grey in the actions of the characters than we are accustomed to seeing in our present-day world."

—Jared Lobdell, THE RISE OF TOLKIENIAN FANTASY, 2005, p. 167

More later
--JDR
current reading: re-reading (for the fourth time) Jared's ENGLAND AND ALWAYS (1982)