Dear Gods, here we go, all over again. (sigh) I'm going to post, here, an altered and summarized version of three posts I did in a thread under BG2, where I wrote that Tolkien isn't, in effect, the basis of modern fantasy, and that the published works of what are now considered major fantasy authors since Tolkien's day bear this out.
One point, if I may. I hope nobody thinks I'm attacking their personal hygiene, right to exist, or parents by suggesting the above. Apparently, some people in that thread thought so, because I received threatening email and promises at the time that I would be given ratings of "1" by some fantasy lovers who said I was throwing a certain substance on their god. My hands were clean. I wish I could say as much for their mouths.
Here we go:
First, let's remember that Tolkien's LOTR, arguably his most influential work, didn't take hold in the US (home of many great fantasy authors, and one lame president) until 1967-68, after the American publication of a pirated edition of the trilogy. (I still have my copy!) If we agree Tolkien is the basis of modern fantasy, then we could logically conclude that little popular fantasy existed before Tolkien, or that what did exist was either poorly read or not influential.
The literature of the time, the popularity of it, and the reviews show that not to be the case. Great fantasy writers of the 1940's through 1970's like Vance, de Camp, Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Blish, Van Vogt, Zelazny, Delaney, Anderson and others were exceedingly well-read, and even occupied rather more of many bookstores that I recall than modern fantasy does. (Not that they took up necessarily more floor space, but that there were more titles out there, on the shelves. Mass marketing has led to displays of ten copies of a given novel, instead of two or three copies of three novels, IMO.)
So what did these authors, and others, create? Just about everything you'll find in modern fantasy: dwarves, elves, bard songs, shifty thieves with magical tools, barbarian fighters, decrepid, decadent cultures, cursed jewels, plotting gods, priests casting blessing and curses, mages blasting the elements and summoning demons, guilds of assassins, battles royal, brotherly betrayals, shapechanging druids, giants and trolls, and a wonderful variety of writing styltes that seem to have largely been left behind in these days of TSR clones. All this, before Tolkien's LOTR hit the college and counter-culture folks around 1968.
In the 1970's, Tolkien's influence was still not paramount. I was a reviewer at the time, and I can't recall a single book published by Avon, Ace, Ballantine, or DAW (Don Wollheim's label, and nice folks, too) that emulated Tolkien, except for the first Shanara book: a horrible piece of near-plagirism. (I don't much care for the author's later works, but they're a damn sight more original and better written than The Sword of Shanara.) But that didn't show up until 1978, and it didn't start a trend.
What did start a kind of trend was Gary Gygax's idea that second and third-rate authors could be bought up, fed his own cliched RPG ideas, and forced to write in whatever reality he gave to them. This, unfortunately, worked. Many writers who otherwise couldn't sell a novel of theirs simply took Gygax's commandments and turned out whatever he wanted, in order to get paid. Some of them were Tolkien fans, of course, and that began filtering into the genre during the 1980's and 90's.
But it would be an exaggeration, I think, to claim that Tolkien forms the basis of modern fantasy. Go into any bookstore; a lot of fantasy work on the shelves has nothing to do with the most prominent elements that Tolkien could claim for his own: hobbits, and creating original languages. What else can be claimed for Tolkien? Someone wrote in another thread that he invented Elves in modern fiction, but this isn't the case. Off the top of my pointy head, I've read the following, all quite popular and influential:
Dunsany's The Kith of the Elf Folk (better still, The King of Elfland's Daughter)
Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill
Philip K Di*k's The King of the Elves (gods, I can't believe that the system won't let me write this author's name)
Tieck's The Elves
Pratt & de Camp's Land of Unreason (elves drawn out of a brilliant realization of Oberon and Titania and their courts, from The Midsummer Night's Dream)
Most of the pre-1960's fantasy fiction of Jack Vance...or hell, the newer fantasy, as well. (The Green Pearl is an excellent example. His elves are decidedly alien in character and attitude, being air elementals.)
If any single person could actually claim to have had an enormous impact on modern fantasy, it would be Lord Dunsany. He invented the now familiar pseudo-medieval landscape, populated with elves, dwarves, and humans, traveling through darkened corners of peril, fame and extinction--and all this, during the early part of the 20th century. His influence upon Tolkien and Eddison (whose The Worm Ouroboros is a magnificent work of fantasy) was profound.
Here are some great, all too neglected fantasy authors I recommend as good reading:
Fletcher Pratt, the great American historian of the American Civil War and Scandanavia, wrote The Well of the Unicorn. I think in its single, complex novel there's arguably more context that Tolkien provided--because Tolkien was an historian of cultures, while Tolkien focused on languages.
ERR Eddison was a member of the same group as Tolkien. He's even less original, if possible, than his friend, but still more colorful and more flavorful in his use of language. He wrote three novels, but his masterpiece is The Worm Ouroboros: slow-moving and brilliant. (The chapter of the summoning by the evil king is a flat-out masterpiece of fantasy.) Where Tolkien was attracted to a host of northern European medieval sources, Eddison drew as well from the English Renaissance.
James Branch Cabell was an early 20th century Virginian with a very different view, both romantic and ironic. His writing style was colored by medieval French sources, of whose poetry and prose he was a master translator. He wrote 25 books(!) in one long series, detailing the history and descendants of two fictional fantasy characters, Dom Manuel and Jurgen. The prose is brilliant, the mind behind it, learned as all hell, the humor (when it occurs) excruciatingly funny. Talk about contextual depth: one of Cabell's books is nothing but a lineage for his two main characters! Cabell also focuses on a quality not found in Tolkien and Eddison: the sadness of evanescent pleasures taken by mortals.
Here's a brief sample of his prose:
"From what you tell us, Emperor Jurgen," said all the demons, "your wife was an acidulous shrew, and the sort of woman who believes that whatever she does is right."
"It was not a belief," says Jurgen: "it was a mania with the poor dear."
"By that fact, then, she is forever debarred from entering Hell."
"You tell me news," says Jurgen, "which if generally known would lead many husbands into vicious living."
"But it is notorious that people are saved by faith. And there is no strong faith than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own infallibility. Plainly this wife of yours is the sort of person who cannot be tolerated by anybody short of the angels. We deduce that your Empress must be in Heaven."
Cabell also had a sly way with sexual innuendo. It actually got what was probably his best book (and a favorite of Mark Twain), Jurgen, banned in New York City by the Society for the Prevention of Vice. It took a group of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the day to take the matter to court, before the ban was lifted.
Then, there's the Gormenghast trilogy of Mervyn Peake. Personally, I've never liked it, but there's no denying it's a wonderfully oddball, completely unique fantasy world, incredibly deep and unlike any other. Think of what D!ckens might have done if he had decided to create a series of novels peopled by almost nobody but dead folk, all treated like the strange, delightful secondary characters that occur throught in his works; that's the Gormenghast trilogy.
Then, there's the Lankhmar group of fantasy novels by the great Fritz Leiber, with that pair of highly flawed, disreputable and thoroughly likeable heroes, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. They read so easily that it's simple to overlook all the depth Leiber packed in them; but if you spend time concentrating on the narrative and descriptions, you soon realize this is a fully developed universe with its own series of social mores, political relationships, overarching themes, etc. There were six, I think, all structured as a series of short interlocking stories or novellas, and all but the last can be highly recommended.
About Tolkien: I think he has great virtues and great flaws as a writer. He was a brilliant craftsman from earlier materials. He had a great sense of the use and manipulation of English, within a limited pastoral framework. He was a master of the music of English. He was a great literary architect, and knew how to build and pace a huge novel naturally. His larger than life characters have a mythic appeal. His sense of atmosphere is strong. He knows and uses the right word at all times: a rare virtue.
He also has recourse to deus ex machinas all too often (Gandalf's reappearance; the multiple rescues by eagle; etc). He had no knowledge of, or interest in, combat, even though he uses it: he just gives a vague sense of what's going on, and concentrates on a few people's activities. His notion, woven into his fiction, that "the average people must be protected from the horrors of reality" makes me personally sick to my stomach; and that same opinion still underscores much of politics in many lands, I'm afraid. His villians tend to ridiculous stereotypes, especially the lesser ones: I still can't forget the orcs sneering at Frodo in standard English public school fashion, "He can't take his medicine."
I also don't care for his universal way of depicting specific races; but that may be because I know the nasty shadow of the Edwardian background Tolkien derived from. It's the same one that fostered a whole ton of books (including some by the likes of GK Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle--but not his Sherlock Holmes series) in which individuals are all depicted, positively or negatively, by supposed hereditary groups: all Russians were subtle and violence prone, all Jews were envious and spiteful of their "betters," all Celtic types were noble and fearless, etc. And there is *some* of that under the skin of Tolkien's books, with his oh-so-noble-and-magical elves, or his grumpy, secluded, suspicious, money-grubbing dwarves. An isolated elf or dwarf (Gimli, for example) may be different, but only to point out the uniformity of all the others. Damn it, I want elves with adenoid problems! Beautiful, sensitive dwarven priestesses!
Enough. I'm sure there's plenty to attack me upon, up there. Have fun.
[ 06-20-2001: Message edited by: fable ]
