[littlemanpoet]

Lobdell doesn't say a lot about the "we few, we happy few", but he does say something.

...the adventurers in the Edwardian adventure story are, in general, not solitary. They may indeed be "we few, we happy few," but (if only so that one may tell the story of the others), they are at least two in number -- Holmes and Watson, for example. They are likely to be more than two: indeed, the charateristic Edwardian adventure story is that of Sir Henry Curtis, Captain Good, Allan Quatermain, and Ignost, or of G.E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Edward Malone, and Professor Summerlee -- the band of (very different) brothers. And the narrative is in the first person, eve if it involves that first person's bringing in parts of the story of which he had no firsthand knowledge. That is, there is a convention that the story should be told by those whose story it is. In general, the narrator is the most ordinary member of the band of adventurers (Allan Quatermain, Edward Malone, John Watson), and the tone of the narration tends to be self-deprecating.

Obviously, there are aspects of this description that clearly do not apply to LotR. However, Lobdell does say:

I find this [by this Lobdell means "Englishmen abroad in the wide and mysterious world ... looking for ... not so much the Holy Grail or the Golden Fleece as ... the wide world itself} this parallels LotR: it does not seem to me that Frodo sets out on a quest much more than Bilbo set out on one in TH. Certainly, Frodo and Bilbo, though they are Hobbits, are Englishmen, and to them the "back again" in the subtitle of TH is as important as the "there".

This second quote does not strictly adhere to the sub-issue of "we happy few", I grant. What it does is show that Lobdell keeps trying to tie LotR back into the Edwardian adventure mode after showing ways in which it clearly departs from it. Nevertheless, I found the book interesting and worth discussing, at least in order to soundly reject much if not all of what Lobdell says.

There is one thing that he said that I found rather persuasive, though I have not given it a great deal of thought:

Tolkien's

mind was chiefly attuned to languages and the past -- which is not, I should emphasize, the same thing as being interested in words and history.

I think Lobdell was onto something with this, and I rather wish that he had proceeded to write a book about that instead of his pet theory about Edwardian adventure stories.

So what do you think? There is a difference between word and language, and between history and the past. It seems that Tolkien used the respective former, in each case to create at least a sense of the respective latter, in the two pairs.

Does this distinction seem important to anybody else? What's there? Curious to learn what others think about this...?