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Possible Echoes of Blackwood and Dunsany in Tolkien's Fantasy

J Lobdell’s A Tolkien Compass (1975) published Tolkien’s “Guide to the Names in the Lord of the Rings,” but a reference that Tolkien makes to Algernon Blackwood, in the manuscript of his “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings” (to use Tolkien’s own title for the essay), was omitted from Lobdell’s book. Tolkien thought that the “Crack of Doom” might have been derived from something written by Blackwood that he was unable to remember more precisely (Anderson 106). However, Lobdell himself, in his 1981 book England and Always: Tolkien’s World of the Rings, suggested that Tolkien was influenced by “The Willows” and “The Glamour of the Snow,” two stories of the supernatural by Blackwood (1869-1951). These stories appeared in 1907 and 1912 collections of Blackwood’s tales. Lobdell could have suggested that a third Blackwood story, the oftreprinted “The Wendigo,” from The Lost Valley (1910), also left a mark on Tolkien’s imagination. In this story, Fifty Island Water, a remote region of Canada, is haunted by a “great Outer Horror,” the embodiment of the “Panic of the Wilderness,” which steals its victims even from their tents, bearing them aloft to race across the skies with it, their anguished cries of pain and terror descending to appall their erstwhile companions. Défago, the guide of a party of hunters, is reft away, leaving them bewildered. Blackwood’s idea of a rapidly flying horror that crosses the skies, bringing dread to those who hear it and sense its presence, is much akin to Tolkien’s conception of the soaring, mounted Nazgûl who appear from time to time to strike panic in the hearts of Sauron’s opponents. Here is a passage from Blackwood: