Jared Charles Lobdell, Ph.D. (November 29, 1937 - March 2019) was an American literary critic, professor, and author who has written numerous books and articles on subjects such as J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, and some of the other Inklings. He has taught at the Univeristy of Wisconsin, Pace University, Washington & Jefferson, and a dozen other colleges.
Biography[]
Lobdell was born in New York City, New York. He received degrees (BA, MBA and MS, and a PhD) from Yale University, University of Wisconsin, and Carnegie Mellon respectively.
From 1966, Lobdell was on the Board of Contributors to National Review for eight years. In 1975, he compiled the first edition of A Tolkien Compass: Fascinating Studies and Interpretations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Most Popular Epic Fantasies, a collection of essays on Tolkien's works by eleven other professors and writers. In 1981 he authored England and Always: Tolkien's World of the Rings, a look at Tolkien's personal influences. In 2004, Lobdell wrote The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien. A year later, he wrote The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy.
Throughout the 1990's, he wrote a few fiction novels.
In 2006, Lobdell contributed alongside many Tolkien scholars to Michael D. C. Drout's reference work The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. In 2010, he contributed also to Paul Kerry and Sandra Miesel's collection Light Beyond All Shadow. Then, in 2016, he wrote the two closing essays of Thomas Honegger and Maureen F. Mann's collection Laughter in Middle-earth: Humour in and around the Works of JRR Tolkien.
Lobdell was a guest speaker at the New York Tolkien Conference in 2015.[1]
He resided in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania[2] until his death in 2019.
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