Jared Charles Lobdell (29 November 1937 – 22 March 2019) was an American author and one of the first Tolkien scholars. He is best known for some thirty academic books on American history and the Inklings including

J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (, 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson ...

C. S. Lewis Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) was a British writer, literary scholar and Anglican lay theologian. He held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalen ...

, and Charles Williams.

Biography

Jared Lobdell was born to Charles and Jane Elizabeth (Hopkins) Lobdell in New York. He was educated at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. He wrote many books on aspects of American history, and on each of the three major

Inklings The Inklings were an informal literature, literary discussion group associated with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis at the University of Oxford for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949. The Inklings were literary enthusia ...

, the Oxford literary society centred on

, with his friends

and Charles Williams. He died at Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

Tolkien scholarship

Lobdell's 1975 edited collection, '' A Tolkien Compass'', was one of the first books of Tolkien scholarship to be published. at a time when "in the United Kingdom at least, professing an interest in Tolkien was almost certain death for any hopeful candidate seeking entrance to a department of English". Shippey described the essays as written in the "Age of Innocence" before Tolkien studies became professionalised, and as such offering "freshness, candor, and a sense of historical depth" that cannot be repeated. He noted that some of the early predictions were wrong – for instance, Tolkien had not written much of ''The Lord of the Rings'' before the Second World War – but many others have been substantiated, such as Richard C. West's account of Tolkien's use of medieval-style interlacing as a

narrative structure Story structure or narrative structure is the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified, including in a particularly chosen order and sometimes specifically referring to the ordering of the plot: ...

Works

Books

Lobdell wrote some 30 non-fiction books, including: * '' A Tolkien Compass'' (editor) ( Open Court, 1975) * ''England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings'' (

Eerdmans William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company is a religious publishing house based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 1911 by Dutch American William B. Eerdmans and still independently owned with William's daughter-in-law Anita Eerdmans as presid ...

, 1981) * ''The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams, 1930-1935'' ( McFarland, 2003) * ''The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien'' ( Open Court, 2004) — an expansion of ''England and Always'' * ''The Scientifiction Novels of C. S. Lewis: Space and Time in the Ransom Stories'' ( McFarland, 2004) * ''The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy'' ( Open Court, 2005) * ''Eight Children in Narnia: The Making of a Children's Story'' ( Open Court, 2016)

Encyclopedia entries

Lobdell wrote 23 of the essays in the 2006 '' J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment'' including ' Angels', 'Dreams', ' England, Twentieth Century', and '

Sauron Sauron () is the title character and the main antagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings'', where he rules the land of Mordor. He has the ambition of ruling the whole of Middle-earth, using the power of the One Ring, which he ...

Articles

Among Lobdell's many scholarly articles are: * "Words That Sound like Castles" (Rally, August, 1966) * "A Medieval Proverb in The Lord of the Rings" (American Notes and Queries Supplement I, 1978) * "Mr. Bliss: Notes on the Manuscript and Story" (Selections from the Marquette J.R.R. Tolkien Collection, 1987) * "C.S. Lewis's Ransom Stories and Their Eighteenth-Century Ancestry" (Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, 1991) * "Ymagynatyf and J.R.R. Tolkien's Roman Catholicism, Catholic Theology, Religion in The Lord of the Rings" (Light Beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work, 2011) * "Humour, Comedy, the Comic, Comicality, Puns, Wordplay, 'Fantastication', and 'English Humour' in and around Tolkien and His Work, and among the Inklings" (Laughter in Middle-earth, 2016)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lobdell, Jared 1937 births 2019 deaths Tolkien scholars 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers