J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) is one of the most significant fantasy works of all time. Without his publisher's prodding for a sequel to what had become a popular children's book, Tolkien (1892-1973) would never have written The Lord of the Rings. Without Lord of the Rings as inspiration, example of excellence in prose, imaginative depth and internal integrity, and an unattainable mark-to-aim-for, the fantasy genre would most likely never have reached the heights of popularity it has today, or the literary quality that many of its authors seek to achieve.

For a thorough discussion of Tolkien's creative processes, or to appreciate fully the depth, richness, and consistency of his world, the complexity of his moral and spiritual concerns, his themes, his literary skill, and his vision of humanity, there are no better books than T.A. (Tom) Shippey's: The Road to Middle-Earth (1982, 1992; for full bibliographic details, see the listing for this essay on my website) and J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). This essay, however, will concentrate mostly on Tolkien and his friend Lewis as writers read by children: why these two professors of language and literature wrote for children, and what children generally take away from reading them.

Tolkien's first love was language. Both of Shippey's books, as well as Humphrey Carpenter's excellent J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977, 2002), explore this passion, which was for Tolkien both scholarly calling and a personal creative outlet. Suffice it to say here that he was an expert in Old and Middle English, among other "dead" languages. In the course of his academic career he was first Professor of English Language at Leeds and then held two prestigious Oxford Chairs in succession, as Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Professor of English Language and Literature. He also spent a great deal of time from his adolescence onwards developing languages of his own, which achieved most complex form in the two elfish languages found in Lord of the Rings. From these languages arose a land, a history, and a body of myth and heroic legend, given most polished form in the posthu-mously-published prose Silmarillion (1977) and as poetry both rhymed and alliterative in The Lays of Beleriand (1985). The characters of the Hob bit - sequel, who would eventually become Frodo and his companions, were drawn into this world, though the first edition of The Hobbit had little apparent connection to the mythology and legends which Tolkien had by then been working on for decades. He revised the book for later editions, "correcting" various points, such as Bilbo's account of how he came by the ring, to bring them into line with the story as it developed in Lord of the Rings. LOTR turned out to be a novel for which all the linguistic and legendary material to which he had devoted his creative life provided the historical background. The Hobbit is the first book by Tolkien most children are likely to read, or to have read to them. The adventures of the tamely middle-class, middle-aged hobbit Bilbo Baggins with the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves, in pursuit of vengeance and dragon-gold, has in recent years been relegated to a "prequel" to LOTR, and is found more often in the science fiction section of a bookstore than on the children' s shelves. It is, though, a children's book, suitable, with some pleasantly scary bits and some sad bits (the death of Thorn), for reading to many children of six or seven, those at least who are used to being read something more complex than picture books. Certainly most children of eight and nine should be quite capable of reading it on their own, though for some it may be a vocabulary-broadening experience. It also contains a great deal of comic irony which a child-reader may only discover on a later rereading, but it is full of excitement, suspense, wonder, terror, and humour enough to satisfy any reader and make the reality of many other fantasy books seem very thin by comparison.

Many children do go on from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, which is considered an adult book. (Always intended by Tolkien to be one book, when it was first published in 1954-1955 it was issued in three volumes to keep the cost down. These are The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. It was 1968 before it came out in one volume.) There are some elements of LOTR that simply go over children's heads on a first or later reading, but there is much that sinks in and stays, establishing a lifelong instinct for the rhythms and variety of the English language, among many other things. And the subtler themes and ironies, the complexities that underlie the plot, will become apparent on later readings as the reader's awareness and experience of life expands to comprehend them. There is so much to be enjoyed in LOTR on so many levels, that if a child approaches it without being told it is "too hard", those that are ready for it will devour it, and all their subsequent reading experienc es will be the richer. The book is, at its most fundamental level, an epic of desperation, courage, and hope, danger and friendship, with a goodly measure of homely humour and hobbit common-sense to complement the concerns of the great and the mighty. People who read it as children, their palates unspoiled by the derivative and often poorly-written fantasies which flourished in the seventies and even early eighties, before adult fantasy emerged from its imitative adolescence, will discover that it offers much more as they mature, but the excitement of that first reading will never leave them.

The Silmarillion (1977), in contrast, is unlikely to be read through by many younger children no matter how good their vocabulary, because it is not a novel. It reads like, and is meant to read like, a collection of mythology and legend, relating the matter of the First Age of Middle Earth. The narrative is not "personal" in the way that we expect in a novel, and a modern novel in particular; it does not take us deep into the emotions of a character, but simply presents their choices and their actions, and accounts for them with less emotional immediacy - think of the experience of reading the Iliad, or the Eddas, or the Mabinogion. By the time someone has reached their teens, they usually have a wider exposure to different modes of narrative, and those who have enjoyed LOTR and have a desire to explore Middle Earth further will find many stirring stories in The Silmarillion then. It contains an account of the creation of the world, and tales of the elves and humans, heroes, vengeance-seekers, and lovers, who se deeds shaped the past to which characters like Elrond, Gandalf, and Aragorn refer in passing in LOTR. Galadriel takes part in the rebellion of the Elves; the story of the lovers Beren and Luthien, his quest for a gem stolen by Morgoth, Sauron's master, and her rescue of him from Morgoth's dungeons, was of deep personal importance to Tolkien, as well as being an enthralling tale in its own right; Elrond's parents are central figures in one of the most important stories, that of Earendil and Elwing and the defeat of Morgoth.

Aside from The Hobbit, Tolkien's only book specifically for children published in his lifetime was Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), a very short novel about a farmer who defeats a giant with a blunderbuss (an early firearm), is awarded an unfashionable sword which turns out to be a famous dragon-slaying blade, and, overawing a dragon with it, makes himself king with the dragon's aid. There are many levels of humour at work in this book, but as a fairy tale it can be enjoyed by most children capable of reading it themselves. The clever, pragmatic hero who bests both monsters and the stuck-up knights and courtiers who think him a country bumpkin has a universal appeal.

Another very short novel, written for adults but which some older children may enjoy, is Smith of Wootton Major (1967), a story of a village smith's journeys in fairyland and an allegory in part of Tolkien's own thoughts on the creative life, among other things. In spirit, though, this story looks back on life from the end, and so many children find its themes too distant from their own experience for complete empathy. Another allegorical story on a creative life, by this writer who disliked allegory, is "Leaf By Niggle" (1945, subsequently in Tree and Leaf, 1964, and The Tolkien Reader, 1966), which will have a great deal of appeal to teens considering art and its place in the private and public worlds, with its story of the painter Niggle and the fate of his one great and unregarded creation. The collection of poems, some comic, some delicately beautiful, called The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962; also in The Tolkien Reader), will also find eager readers among the young, while "The Homecoming of Beorhtnot h Beorthelm's Son" (1953 and in The Tolkien Reader) is a drama on the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon in 991, a contrast of poetic ideals of glorious last stands with the realities of battle. Tolkien wrote of war from experience: he survived the Battle of the Somme, while most of his friends did not. The play has a grim beauty and will appeal to teens who have never read even a translation of the Old English poem on Maldon, though it may lead them to seek one out.

Tolkien wrote several works intended for children which were not published until after his death. The Father Christmas Letters (1976) is a selection of the letters he wrote and illustrated for his four children over many Christmases, purporting to be from Father Christmas, one of his elves, or the North Polar Bear. They recount the adventures of the North Pole community, everything from goblin raids to the Polar Bear's frequent disasters. Another posthumously-published story originally written and illustrated for his children is Mr. Bliss (1982), the tale of an accident-prone driver and a chaotic road-trip. A third posthumous publication, Roverandom (1998) is a short novel relating the adventures of a dog turned by a wizard into a toy, and his subsequent adventures in the sea and on the moon with wizards, dragons, and the Man-in-the-Moon, before he finally finds his family and his proper form again. It was begun to console one of Tolkien's sons on the loss of a toy dog. The illustrations for this are among To lkien's finest. (He was a fairly accomplished artist with a distinctive style. The Unwin Hymen 1987 50th anniversary edition of The Hobbit contains his original illustrations, as does HarperCollins' 1995 hardcover with the ISBN 0261103288.) Some teens may also enjoy reading Tolkien's Modern English translations of the Middle English poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (1975), and may even be inspired by them to take an interest in the language of the originals, one of those that fuelled Tolkien's creative drive.

It was Tolkien's example that inspired his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) to write fiction. Lewis taught English Language and Literature at Magdalen College at Oxford, and in 1954 became Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His fiction was not as influenced by his scholarly interests as Tolkien's was, though the courtly Narnian world, with its chivalry and tournaments, is much in the spirit of the High Medieval and Renaissance Romance-world - Chretien de Troyes and Spenser. (Tolkien's world in its medieval as opposed to Edwardian aspects evokes more the feel of the literature of the Early Middle or Dark Ages - Beowulf, the Norse and German sagas and the Eddas.) Both Lewis' reasons for writing, and his approach to his work, were also very different. Whereas Tolkien had been raised a Roman Catholic from an early age, Lewis was Protestant Irish by upbringing and an avowed atheist in his younger years; he returned to Christianity largely due to Tolkien's influence and became on e of the most widely-read Christian apologists of the mid-twentieth century. Tolkien's beliefs underlay his own writing but were not the impulse that drove it, whereas when Lewis turned to fiction, he used it as a vehicle for his beliefs.

In the late thirties Lewis wrote a science fiction trilogy, in which he intended to give the Christian story a new interest for modern readers. These novels of the scholarly Ransom's interplanetary travels, adventures on Mars and Venus, and creation of a harmonious society of all living things in at least his own household on Earth, can be read as science fiction about possible worlds and societies, or as an exposition of Lewis' conservative religious beliefs. Out of the Silent Planet (1938),Perelandra/Voyage to Venus (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945), are still in print and still find readers among adults and teens today, as science fiction adventure and/or as reflection on religious issues.

Lewis' significant contribution to literature was, of course, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew (1956), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), The Horse and his Boy (1954), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), and The Last Battle (1956). From the start he intended them to be novels that explored the Christian story within the context of another world. The Lion, the first written, sends four children into Narnia, where they are caught up in a civil war leading to the self-sacrificial execution and resurrection of the lion Aslan. The Magician's Nephew has two turn-of-the-century children witness the creation of Narnia and introduce evil into this Eden, in the person of Jadis, empress and destroyer of her own world and White Witch of The Lion. The final volume, The Last Battle, is the end of the world and the Last Judgement, in the context of invasion and civil war. In between, there are adventures in Horse, Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader, and Silver Chair, featuring both the characters from Lion and other children, which further explore the Narnian world. It is one where chivalry blends with the European fairy tale tradition in creatures such as dwarves and giants, and with classical mythology in dryads, fauns, and GrecoRoman gods. It even recalls Wind in the Willows; Lewis' presentation of his Talking Animals makes them seem characters who by and large would be right at home dropping in on Ratty and Badger.

Magician, The Lion, and The Last Battle can be read as retellings of the three most central points of the Biblical story (Creation, Resurrection, and Apocalypse), but they are also fully-fleshed out tales in their own right, as the other four books are, and it is not necessary to share Lewis' beliefs to fully enjoy them. All seven send the characters on quests of one sort or another, all test their courage, resolve, integrity, and wit. Throughout, the boys and girls remain very realistic young people, with all their strengths and failings. (Except, of course, when the four Pevensies grow up within Narnia, and appear as Romance kings and queens for The Lion's final chapter and as background characters in Horse.) All also contain a cast of engaging and unforgettable Narnians: the Beavers, Mr. Tumnus the Faun, Reepicheep the courtly mouse, Bree the snobbish and self-doubting horse, Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle. Lewis, like Tolkien, is able to evoke a vivid reality through attention to telling detail; everything from landscape to scent and taste combines to aid in Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief', essential to coherent fantasy.

Part of the contribution of these two masters of storytelling to children's fantasy lies in just that attention to the internal integrity of their creation: in taking it seriously. The fantastic, in their writing, is not a device to facilitate the adventure, as in Nesbit, or a whimsical what-if, as in Lofting or even Baum; it is not a blurring of the possibilities of dream and wish and waking, as in Masefield. Their fantastic reaches back to myth, legend, and fairy tale; they build worlds upon that foundation of possibilities both grimmer and grander than those encompassed in "what-if" magic stories. By doing so, they create worlds that live in the imagination forever, and make possible stories exploring the full range of human experience and potential. MacDonald approaches this, but the kingdom of Curdie and Princess Irene remains a fairy-tale one, indefinite in form. De la Mare's Three Mulla-Mulgars offers a fully-realized created world, but his book never won the popularity and influence of The Hobbit and The Lion. It is only through Tolkien and Lewis that children's fantasy claims a wider terrain to explore. After them, secondary world fantasy becomes more common, serious concerns enter into it more often, and even stories where magic enters the "real" world take that fantastic more seriously. From the fifties onwards, there begin to be children's writers who specialize primarily in fantasy, whereas before, it is not seen as something separate.