[Mister Underhill]

You do have a point though - perhaps one reason no modern fantasy is imbued with the same heroic spirituality as Tolkien's is that modern authors do give in to one or both of those pressures. The safest course seems to be to avoid any spirituality at all, and that is what most modern hacks do.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here.

How far away from the "sword and sorcery" style can one get before it's not fantasy any longer?

I think there are some exciting things happening in other mediums that can only be labeled “fantasy”. For instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel, in TV. They’re doing fresh, innovative stuff with old motifs and icons, yet there are epic storylines, good vs. evil themes as well as ones that are more complex, and even some swordplay. There are several interesting writers working in the graphic novel format, too, as I mentioned – Gaiman, Miller, McFarlane, and Moore, to name a few. All this just to say that I think you can get pretty far from the traditional quasi-Medieval setting and trappings and still have a product that can accurately be called fantasy.

But what about, for example, Beethoven's 5th symphony? There's no real content, if by content we mean allegory/applicability. Whatever the purpose of art is, it must be the same for both music and literature. Unless you want to consider one of those media not to be art, you must define the purpose of art as something common to both of them.

Well, I have two responses: (1) I think that allegory/applicability is too narrow and restrictive a definition for ‘content’. A haiku poem, for instance, cannot be said to be without content, yet most are neither allegorical nor applicable (I’m not even really sure what you mean by the latter, I confess – I think you mean something along the lines of “provides some lesson or insight which is applicable to life”. Am I right? In the ballpark?). Come to think of it, I would contend that Beethoven is not without content as well. His music certainly creates a mood or triggers emotional responses. (2) I'm not convinced that there is some abstract essence of Art which is universal to all mediums, especially since no one seems to be able to give a satisfactory definition of what that essence might be. Beethoven's Fifth is Musical Art and Citizen Kane is Film Art, but I'm not sure I can draw any meaningful universality between what makes each of them Art.