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Summary: Great fantasy from the good old days
Review: Once upon a time, the fantasy field wasn't covered with identikit tract housing trilogies as it is today. Its tales were unique, idiosyncratic, homely dwellings. In the wake of Tolkien's rise to popularity in the 1960s, various enterprising editors, like local historians, have put together reprint collections of fantasy as-it-was."Tales Before Tolkien" has the special value for the Tolkien reader of putting the stories in a Tolkienian context. Some of them are stories he read himself; some handle themes he was later to make his own; some just illustrate the breadth of the field he worked in. All this is explained in succinct headnotes. Anderson derives the high-fantasy tradition from Germanic kunstmaerchen (literary fairy-tales): Tieck, MacDonald, Buchan, Stevens, and Merritt are in that tradition: each portrays the longing for Faerie, often in ways strikingly reminiscent of Tolkien. Stockton and Nesbit have humorous tales of Faerie coming to us (as Tolkien did in his poem "The Dragon's Visit"); Knatchbull-Hugessen, Lindsay, and Wyke-Smith give original but traditional-style children's fairy tales; Lang and the two Morrises explore the cold northern realms in stark somber tales; Haggard, Housman and Baum take the epic fantasy principles to further-off lands; Hodgson and Machen apply the mysteires of fantasy to modern times (as does Buchan), as in Tolkien's "Sauron Defeated"; Wright tells a purely historical story of his imaginary realm of Islandia, as Tolkien wrote of Numenor; Cabell, Garnett, and Dunsany are snide and satirical about quests and religion - very unlike Tolkien, but he's known to have read and appreciated Dunsany's story. As Tolkien is to today's fantasists - the giant in whose footsteps they tread - the writers in this book are to Tolkien: the ones who inspired and showed him the way. The formal prose, the elaborate frame stories, the treatment as wondrous of what modern fantasy readers may take for granted, the condensed quality of short fiction telling epic tales, may take a modern reader by surprise. But I urge you to read these stories with care and sympathy. These authors, more than many of Tolkien's followers, are saying the same things he is. To appreciate them is to understand what Tolkien wanted you to get out of his books.
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Summary: A Nice Collection of Early Fantasies
Review: Tales Before Tolkien is a nice collection of fantasy tales dating from the period just before Tolkien's birth to just before he began publishing his own works. Some of the stories, like Puss-cat Mew, Tolkien actually acknowledged having read and enjoyed as a youth. Others are not actually mentioned by Tolkien but possibly had an influence on him, while still others were probably not read by him but are indicative of the state of fantasy at the time he was active. None of these stories really measure up to Tolkien's standards (but then, what does?) but many are quite interesting and enjoyable to read. Each story has a brief sidebar giving some details about the author, and there is more information in a suggested reading section at the back. This is a very nice look at the state of fantasy writing just before Tolkien broke new ground.
Rating: 
Summary: some tastey tidbits
Review: This collection of tales has a couple of real gems ("The Elves" and "The Dragon Tamers") for people looking for sources of Tolkien's ideas, and a number of ones we've all read before ("The Story of Sigurd"). As a whole, I think the collection is a bit misleading because Anderson admits in his introduction that some of the tales don't really have any connection to Tolkien at all, they are just included to show you what was being written in the field of fantasy around the turn of the century. I would rather he excluded those and just concentrated on the ones that Tolkien either said he had read or that he very likely did read. That gripe aside, the book is very well designed and presented. I liked the brief "sidebar" that opens each tale, but would have preferred a bit more depth there.
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