Tales Before Tolkien

So I decided on another category for the blog, classic fantasy. Many of the books in this category would be considered science fiction by their authors, but in today's modern world they seem more fantastical than science fiction. I will also review a few myths in this section as well. Today we know these stories to be fantasy, but at the time they were written they were taken for the truth. My criteria is simply this: these stories came out before J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the 1930s. In that vein I will start this off with a book entitled Tales Before Tolkien.

This collection edited by Douglas Anderson has many stories that Anderson thinks may have influenced Tolkien. In some of them like the Story of Sigurd, Tolkien actually acknowledged the influence. Others Anderson simply thought had similar themes to Tolkien's work.

 One of my favorite stories in this collection is the story of Puss-Cat-Mew, a story based very loosely on the nursery rhyme of the same name. The nursery rhyme goes as follows: Pussy Cat Mew jumped over a coal/And in her best petticoat burnt a great hole/Poor pussy's weeping, she'll have no more milk/Until her best petticoat's mended with silk. In the story Puss Cat Mew is a fairy maiden who to falls in love with a young man. When her petticoat is burned, she is captured by a horrible ogre and her husband has to go save her. It also has an interesting origin of Stonehenge. It suggests that Stonehenge is the ruins of the Ogre's fortress.