Good point, I think,
HI, to point out that Tolkien worked specifically within European traditions of myth to create his fantasy. This makes me wonder what forms of fantasy, if any, exist in other cultures that might not have been influenced (at least until recently) by Tolkien. Can it be said that the genre of fantasy exists in, say, Chinese, Japanese and Indian literatures?
There is also another way to think about this comment from
Keeper, which perhaps reflects much of the thought here that the 'content' or type of characters is what marks fantasy:
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I think inclusion of dwarves, elves, wizards and goblins are what make fantasy fantasy, and therefore can't count as ripoffs, because without them it wouldn't be fantasy anyway . . . I do see a lot of characters and themes based on them repeated.
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In this regard, Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories" is very interesting, for Tokien specifically says that fantasy is not based on content, on the simple inclusion of elves or beasts. Part of his arguement is as follows:
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The definition of a fairy-story--what it is, or what it should be--does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country.... The magic of Faërie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.
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Perhaps one way of thinking about how other writers use fantasy is to consider what they add to this idea, or whether they ignore it.