Tolkien Definitely Read Burroughs

So, after I posted my previous piece on Tolkien's familiarity with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar work, I've been reminded by several people* that there's much more direct evidence than that of JRRT reading ERB: Tolkien himself says so in a letter about a decade before his death.

Ironically enough, this turns out to be something that I once knew and had since forgotten; following from those reminders I found, by way of Tolkien Gateway, that the relevant information is included in Richard West's TOLKIEN CRITICISM: AN ANNOTATED CHECKLIST [1970], one of the very first Tolkien books I ever read** and for years my bible for tracking down other stuff (pieces by and about Tolkien). Under entry B109, page 34, RW gives Tolkien's reply to a query regarding whether he'd been influenced by Burroughs in his own writing:

"Source hunting is a great entertainment but I do not myself think it is particularly useful. I did read many of Edgar Rice Burroughs' earlier works, but I developed a distaste for his Tarzan even greater than my distaste for spiders. Spiders I had met long before Burroughs began to write, and I do not think he is in any way responsible for Shelob. At any rate I retain no memory of the Siths or the Apt."
I haven't read Lupoff's book,*** but Doug points out that the Siths and Apt appear in the third of the John Carter books, which I also have not read (PRINCESS OF MARS being the only one I've read of that series).

So the evidence seems to be that Tolkien read a good deal of Burroughs' works but that like many readers gave up on the various series as they became increasingly formulaic. He definitely read a number of the Tarzan books and some of the Pellucidar books; there doesn't seem to be enough evidence to say whether he read any of the Mars books -- he might have read some and just happened to miss that one volume or he might have given them a pass altogether.

From what I have read of Burroughs' work, I have to agree with Tolkien that I don't see any influence on the Middle-earth stories, but admittedly there's a lot of Burroughs I haven't read so I may be missing something. Still it's nice to be able to confirm another bit of Tolkien's reading and his awareness of his contemporaries.

--John R.


*thanks to Doug for pointing this out, and to both Doug and Charles for providing me with the quote.

**this is back in the day when there were only five books out about JRRT: Isaacs & Zimbardo, Ready, Carter, West, and Kocher, with a sixth (Ryan) reported to be out there but which none of us had ever seen.

***though I have read Fenton's 1967 biography of ERB