The Human Dress

Graydon classifies this as a response to Tolkien: I'll start there and branch out.

I suspect that most of us have been either canalized (for those born later) or persuaded (for those of us born sooner) that "response to Tolkien" involves elves, magic trinkets, quests made up of various "races", Dark Lords, and (frequently) big battles: The Sword of Shannara and the extruded fantasy that followed it have a lot to answer for. None of these are found in The Human Dress. What you will find is a response to "the Northern theory of courage" which inspired Tolkien from an early age (the pattern of heroism which isn't banking on winning at all), existential threats that are more than human, and, above all, the capturing of a pivot age which is changing from one state of human affairs to another. (One of the very core Tolkienian themes is an elegiac retrospective on an unrecoverable past.) There is even, at one point, a direct (though modernized) quotation of the line from The Battle of Maldon which Tolkien picked up[1] and found not only appealing but important: "Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre, mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað": and this is a story full of that kind of courage.

It takes its own time. For all that the novel begins somewhat in medias res it takes time for the nature of the threat to become clear, and both time and trouble to address it. The reader requires a willingness to be accomodated to a deliberate pace and an eye for detail. A good memory helps, too, as much happens where the full significance is visible only retrospectively.

As with Tolkien, this is about world-building: although reminiscent of our world's Norse past as refracted through the Eddas this is decisively different, although it takes time before this becomes clear. Part of the pleasure of the book is the unfolding of those differences. (There are no Aesir here... quite: nor Jotuns, quite. And the wildlife is distinctive.)

It is also a book about transformations. People can cross existential boundaries in this world, and several people do, in one way or another.

You shouldn't look here, either, for traces of the Commonweal. This is different, grimmer (though still optimistic) and more elemental, although some of a common awareness of the variant possibilities of social organization underlies both worlds. This work is a significant achievement all on its own, sui generis.

[1]Notably in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son.