In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a formative early work of fantasy fiction
In the early 1950s, shortly before J. R. R. Tolkien published his landmark novel The Lord of the Rings, the Danish-American author Poul Anderson wrote two short fantasy novels which would have less of an influence on the course of fantasy fiction, but which now read as considerably more ‘modern’, in many ways, than Tolkien’s three-books-in-one epic. One of these novels, The Broken Sword, was published in 1954, the same year that the first volume of Tolkien’s novel appeared. A year before that, however, Anderson had published another fantasy novel, which drew inspiration from Tolkien’s earlier The Hobbit but which moved fantasy into a new direction. That novel was Three Hearts and Three Lions. Despite its title promoting the ‘rule of three’ not once but twice, this was not a huge three-decker novel on the scale of The Lord of the Rings, nor the