Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
So, every now and again you get very weird little meetings between people you wouldn't expect - in a literary context, this could be finding out that H. P. Lovecraft read Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, but also face-to-face meetings, as when L. Sprague de camp met J. R. R. Tolkien in 1967:
I had sent him a copy of my little anthology, Swords and Sorcery [1964]; he said he found it interesting but did not much like the stories in it. In particular, referring to "Distressing Tale of Thanobrind the Jeweller," he spoke of "Dunsany's worst style," especially at the end, where Dunsany for the sake of a joke, pricked his own illusion. When I said I should be in England, he invited me out.
There was more than just Dunsany's tale in the anthology, which was one of the seminal collections that helped define "Sword & Sorcery" as a genre (the term had actually been coined in 1961 by Fritz Leiber, in the Tolkien fanzine Ancalagon). It also contained works by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, and Clark Ashton Smith - seminal pioneers of fantasy, with many folks speculating whether Tolkien had read them before he composed The Lord of the Rings and what influence their fiction might have had on them (Howard and Lovecraft, natch, died before The Hobbit was published, so influence the other way was pretty nil).
However, also among the authors in that anthology was C. L. Moore - Catherine Lucille Moore, a female pulpster who had bloomed so briefly and unexpectedly in Weird Tales with her heroes Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry, but after her marriage to Henry Kuttner in 1940 had largely disappeared from fantasy; turning her hand to science fiction, teaching, and the more lucrative business of scripts for Hollywood.
Strangely enough, a manuscript survives where Tolkien took notes on the contents of the book, which largely jives with de Camp's account of his commentary, and here Tolkien mentions the Jirel of Joiry story:
Jirel of Joiry. Does create an atmosphere and [?the] sinister 'corrupt' household of Alaric was eerie and credible. But I never [sic] find phantasmal struggles such as that of Jirel with 'Undead' Andred quite unconvincing — especially when the victims escape!
The story was "Hellsgarde," first published in 1939 and the last Jirel tale that Moore ever wrote (and arguably not her best). But it is just this rare incident where Tolkien was commenting on one of the first women to write sword & sorcery.
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, September 20 - Thursday, September 26
| Top 10 Posts | score | link to comments |
|---|---|---|
| Mexico used to be a very militaristic nation just 100 years ago, most people had guns and soldiers were idolized in the media, but now almost no mexican knows how to shoot a gun, and soldiers are almost absent in all local media, how and why did this happen? | 5,292 | 60 comments |
| I am Ph.D Candidate Alexander Burns, here to answer your questions on Warfare in the Europe and North America, 1688-1789, AMA! | 2,846 | 309 comments |
| Why did clock and watch makers decide on only 12 hours instead of 24? How did a 12 hour clock face become standard? | 2,514 | 79 comments |
| This clip of the famous "Who's On First?" routine was posted on r/videos. No one is laughing. Was the routine not considered funny in its time, or seen more as clever than laugh out loud funny? | 2,500 | 90 comments |
| Why did the american colonies unite as a country while the spanish colonies did not? | 2,374 | 94 comments |
| How did people wear Victorian era clothing (as painfully restrictive and heavily layered as it was) in summer heat (and not straight up die)? | 2,317 | 73 comments |
| Did the Nazis have a plan in place on what they would do had they captured Stalin or other high ranking Soviet leaders? If they did what were they? | 1,884 | 41 comments |
| Why Was "Roman Concrete" Not Used for Centuries After the Fall of the Empire? | 1,864 | 40 comments |
| Why is this Nazi sign also in English? | 1,776 | 51 comments |
| George Washington deciding not to run for reelection is frequently taught in the US as a noble decision to establish the precedent of term limits. Were there any other factors that influenced President Washington's decision. | 1,768 | 24 comments |
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Was Edmund Burke an abolitionist? I made a thread about it a month ago, but no bites.
Can I ask why in this sub a thread can have 12 comments but then you go in and its empty save for the usual bot post and not because they've been deleted, cause they show up as such?