This book reveals the unique contribution made by the three founding fathers of British fantasyLord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and J. R. R. Tolkiento our cultures perennial reassessment of the meanings of time, death and eternity. It traces the poetic, philosophical and theological roots of the striking preoccupation with mortality and temporality that defines the imagined worlds of early fantasy fiction, and gives both the form of such fiction and its ideas the attention they deserve. Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien raise some of the oldest questions in existence: about the limits of nature, human and divine; cosmic creation and destruction; the immortality conferred by art and memory; and the paradoxes and uncertainties generated by the universal experience of transience, the fear of annihilation and the desire for transcendence. But they respond to those questions by means of thought experiments that have no precedent in modern literary history.
This book has won the '2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award' for Myth and Fantasy Studies.

Anna Vaninskaya is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author ofWilliam Morris and the Idea of Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and over forty articles and book chapters on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, politics and history.

1. Introduction.- 2. Lord Dunsany: The Conquering Hours.- 3. E. R. Eddison: Bearing Witness to the Eternal.- 4. J. R. R. Tolkien: More than Memory.

Winner of the 2021 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies>