I’m currently reading the recent Tolkien biography by Raymond Edwards, newly in Kindle ebook in 2020. At least one Amazon reviewer has spluttered at the book’s occasional informed speculation, such as the suggestion that Tolkien read Ker’s classic scholarly synthesis The Dark Ages. Yes, it was a key book of the time and a highly readable and yet erudite synthesis. Edwards doesn’t put a date on it, but I’d say Tolkien probably read it and circa summer 1912 is the most likely date. The Amazon reviewer is anyway tripped up by not consulting a footnote on the matter — which reveals that Tolkien did read it and by the early 1930s, when he “quoted extensively from it”.

But for me Edwards is very usefully conversant with the ins-and-outs and ways of Oxford University life and its nomenclature, and has a keen insight into the mindset of intelligent lads of that era. Some further observations and phrasing suggest he’s writing from a traditionalist Catholic perspective, but this is offered very lightly and not laid on with a trowel. Despite its readability and seemingly reliability this is not the biography to read first, and it needs to be filled-in with the use of the Chronology (lucky Tolkien scholars have a vast day-by-day / week-by-week Chronology of his life, assiduously compiled by Hammond and Scull). But the new biography generally presents a readable and insightful narrative.

Lovecraft occasionally makes an appearance, being Tolkien’s contemporary. Here is Edwards on cat-demons and Lovecraft, about a quarter of the way through his book and at the point when Tolkien has been invalided home to Birmingham (early November 1916) after a fierce and victorious battle in France, and then stays at Great Haywood in mid Staffordshire (early Dec – late Feb 1917)…

The style of the Tales [very early First World War works, collected in Lost Tales] is a deliberate mixture of archaizing prose in the best William Morris manner, with a faintly precious Edwardian ‘fairy’ or ‘elfin’ quality, all flittermice and flower-lanterns and diminutives (partly down to [the whimsical side of the Catholic poet, Tolkien’s favourite] Francis Thompson, partly we may guess to [Tolkien’s young wife] Edith’s fondness for such things), with a dash of whimsy (cat-demons, talking hounds) that may owe something to Lord Dunsany. At moments, the effect is most like not Morris or Dunsany but, oddly, the later Randolph Carter stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which are explicit dream-narratives. The [key work in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands cycle was] not written until [1926–27]^*, and [Dream-Quest] not published until after Lovecraft’s death, so there can be no question of influence either way, but there is a certain occasional likeness of tone. Lovecraft was two years older than Tolkien, and their backgrounds were not really alike; but there was perhaps something in the air. Both men, as well, had clearly read their Dunsany.

* I’ve corrected his dating.

There is another comparison to make, and at more or less the same time. Compared to Lovecraft, Tolkien at the end of 1919 saw the…

widening of modern knowledge of the universe & consequent opening up of new fields of ideas, should more than compensate for any blunting of our capacity for imaginative appreciation of certain aspects of nature, as compared with the ancients.

By which he means the nature-appreciation not only of the Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians etc, but also the Northern tribes and peoples. And their ability to ‘spring’ imaginative stories from a local nature on which they relied for their very being. Here he also implicitly harks back to a long British Christian tradition that saw the natural sciences as a positive thing in terms of helping to reveal the works and workings of God.

Lovecraft worried about how such things might play out negatively on a longer time-scale, and in a mutually-reinforcing manner. In the mid 1920s he famously stated that…

the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

However, the Tolkien of 1919 was not the Tolkien of the mid 1930s. Later, as 1934 dawned and the darkness of the mid 1930s settled in, Tolkien too felt much as Lovecraft did about the changing times. Like…

A lost survivor in an alien world after the real world had passed away.