Jared Charles Lobdell (29 November 1937 – 22 March 2019) was an American author and one of the first Tolkien scholars. He is best known for some thirty academic books on American history and the Inklings including J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams.[1]
Jared Lobdell was born to Charles and Jane Elizabeth (Hopkins) Lobdell in New York. He was educated at Yale University. He wrote many books on aspects of American history, and on each of the three major Inklings, the Oxford literary society centred on C. S. Lewis, with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. He died at Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.[2][1]
Lobdell's 1975 edited collection, A Tolkien Compass, was one of the first books of Tolkien scholarship to be published. at a time when "in the United Kingdom at least, professing an interest in Tolkien was almost certain death for any hopeful candidate seeking entrance to a department of English".[3] Shippey described the essays as written in the "Age of Innocence" before Tolkien studies became professionalised, and as such offering "freshness, candor, and a sense of historical depth" that cannot be repeated.[3] He noted that some of the early predictions were wrong – for instance, Tolkien had not written much of The Lord of the Rings before the Second World War – but many others have been substantiated, such as Richard C. West's account of Tolkien's use of medieval-style interlacing as a narrative structure.[3]
Lobdell wrote some 30 non-fiction books, including:
Lobdell wrote 23 of the essays in the 2006 J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment including 'Angels', 'Dreams', 'England, Twentieth Century', and 'Sauron'.
Among Lobdell's many scholarly articles are: