Three Hearts and Three Lions focuses on Holger Carlsen, an American-trained Danish engineer (shades of Anderson’s own Scandinavian-American identity here) who becomes involved with the Danish resistance to Hitler during the Second World War and, after being shot, is transported to a parallel universe modelled on early French romances of Faerieland. Instead it’s a novel that doesn’t even run to 200 pages in my edition ( Three Hearts & Three Lions (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) ). Despite its title promoting the ‘rule of three’ not once but twice, this was not a huge three-decker novel on the scale of The Lord of the Rings, nor the first novel in a vast trilogy. That novel was Three Hearts and Three Lions. A year before that, however, Anderson had published another fantasy novel, which drew inspiration from Tolkien’s earlier The Hobbit but which moved fantasy into a new direction. One of these novels, The Broken Sword, was published in 1954, the same year that the first volume of Tolkien’s novel appeared. Tolkien published his landmark novel The Lord of the Rings, the Danish-American author Poul Anderson wrote two short fantasy novels which would have less of an influence on the course of fantasy fiction, but which now read as considerably more ‘modern’, in many ways, than Tolkien’s three-books-in-one epic. In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a formative early work of fantasy fiction
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