I am a little concerned about this notion that fantasy was invented by Tolkien. There are many examples of stories which are clearly fantastic, which predate Tolkiens work. The Narnia chronicles are an obvious example. Beowulf from which Tolkien borrowed much of his stylism is another example which predates Tolkien by around a millenium.
It is true that Tolkien is the source of many of the cliches of the current fantasy scene. The obligatory map, and worse still the glossary can I think be fairly attributed to Tolkien.
First I would say that yes, fantasy does predate Tolkien; however we are saying that it "came into its own" (became a separate genre) after Tolkien. Second, that Beowulf was part of the mythic tradition and not a fantasy. Third, that Narnia antedates, not predates The Hobbit.
I still think you are placing too much primacy on Tolkein. I am not sure how you are distinguishing "mythic tradition" and "fantasy". You are right about Narnia. Let me suggest the search for the Holy Grail instead, which definately predates Tolkein!
The 19th century was a hotbed of fantastic literature. Ignoring such patently popular and fantastical works as
Bram Stoker's
Dracula, there was a body of research conducted by people such as [Andrew Lang]
?, [Hans Christian Anderson]
?, [The Brothers Grimm]
? etc. All of the foregoing were tremendously popular in their own right, and their work documents fantastic literatures which predate Tolkien by hundreds of years. I would therefore argue that to say that fantasy literature came into its own only on the publication of Tolkien's work is to ignore the reality surrounding fantasy literature.
I agree that it is not honest to attribute the invention of fantasy as a whole to Tolkien, but AFAIK he was the first to set his fantasy in a complete, independent fictitious world. And that's what makes his books different from "Dracula" or works of "mythic tradition", which play in our very world, though sometimes a few centuries in the past (I know that Tolkien conceived of Middle Earth to represent our earth in a distant past, but this is not comparable to, e.g., Beowulf, since this connection to our world is not immanent to Tolkien's tales but rather a piece of extra information given by him).
Even Narnia is not comparable to Middle Earth (or rather Arda), since it is a "parallel universe" or a "dream world", and as such rather ancillary to "the real world". In Tolkien's works, there is no separate "real world", since Arda is "the real world". And I think this independence is what sets Tolkien off from the above-mentioned books. Tolkien may not have invented fantasy, but he liberated it.
PS: Could we perhaps agree on the spelling "Tolkien"? The i precedes the e, not the other way around!
Of course, the
real founder of the fantasy genre was Homer.
Ha! Homer was writing history, not fantasy.
- What's funny about the suggestion that he was writing fantastic stuff? The ancient Greeks had no notion of "fantasy" per se, but they had a rich mythology that is not based in reality. The Odyssey was probably looked at as a good yarn, not history.
I'm thinking this page should be on fantasy fiction. "Fantasy" is also a topic in psychology, of course. --LMS
What do we do about the fact that while there may be a prevailing common distinction between Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction, and there might also be a prevailing sense that each of those genres has a distinct set of signifiers associated with them, academic study in these fields do not necessarily agree with that common definition, and sometimes don't even agree with each other? Which is the encyclopedic--the common or the academic (perhaps plural academic) idea? Some literary scholars, for example, is a proponent of the idea that Speculative Fiction might be a better term, and that all of it can be related to Freud's notion of the Fantastic or Uncanny. That is, the Fantastic is to find the unfamiliar in a familiar setting. In which case, "fantasy" fiction of the type proposed by Tolkien, which is wholly outside of the familiar, might be better defined as Pastoral. But in a way, the study of literature is about categorizing in the sense that botanist might see it. This isn't empirical stuff we are dealing with. Rather these terms, which have been abused by advertisers as "categories" for sales tracking purposes, are more descriptive modifiers that give us a frame work for discussion. This is frequently why humanities academics are misunderstood on the point of categories. When someone says, "I am reading Tolkien in a Freudian way" they don't mean that Tolkien's work IS Freudian. More they are using Freud and Tolkien in combination to discuss something else, something ephemeral, about the human condition, which can only be seen when those two ideas are brought together. Or, at least, that is what the good academics do. I am not here to defend stupid people who say stupid things in the name of Academia, but to point out that what is viewed from the outside as very static and empirical really isn't. Dracula IS a fantasy Novel in the sense that Freud and Rabkin mean. But it is a Horror novel in the popular sense. And ultimately, from a political point of view, it is very Marxist. So where does it go?
This is all, of course, IMHO. --trimalchio
While I'm not certain, I believe that the claim Tolkien created the first "stand-alone" fantasy world may be wrong. E.R. Eddison's first books pre-date
The Hobbit by a couple of years, and I think they have no connection to the Earth.
The world in James Branch Cabell's Something About Eve also occurs to me. Cabell's Poictesme books are connected to Earth -- Poictesme is supposed to be in southern France -- but I believe the world in this book is self-contained. -- Paul Drye
Lord Dunsany created "secondary world" fantasy fiction in the early 1900's.
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Dunsany created his own mythology in a narrative form before Tolkien put down the roots and seeds that would become the Silmarilian. Tolkien intended a modern English mythology, but clearly he used existing traditions. As a storyteller first of all, in the epic and fantastic mode, how much does Tolkien's cultural artifact differ from Homer's? Before Dunsany there were the penny dreadfuls such as Amadis of Gaul, and concurrent with these and pre-dating them there is oral folklore, which Homer drew from. Perhaps there is no first and original when it comes to story - perhaps it exists in a place removed from time, with ancient urges returning to manifest in the present, and present fabulations rooting down into the darkness of the collective mind.
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