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Good old Diamonds, as you have taken the liberty of labeling modern Fantasy as Barbaric and unintelligent, should nobility really be grouped with barbarians?
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Well, I didn't mean to sound quite
that harsh about it. I'm sure there is some very good modern Fantasy, and by saying "less intelligent" I didn't mean to label it all Barbaric. I've read and enjoyed other Fantasy, and I write my own. (Eeep!)
However, I often don't get past the cover-art of modern Fantasy because it does so turn me off, with its scantily clad females standing on snowy cliffs in nothing more than a leather bikini and a shawl of fur draped casully about their shoulders, shooting firebolts out of their eyes. And I could go on about that, but you get the picture. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
But I thought it a shame that Fantasy should be so degraded in our eyes that the Daddy of All Fantasy should not be called Fantasy anymore. Maybe we need two genres of Fantasy, "Good, Original Fantasy" (Tolkien, Lewis, LeGuin, et al) and "Cheap Imitation Fantasy". [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]
Kalimac: At my library Tolkien is actually not only in adult fiction, but also young adult fiction and adult non-fiction (HoME). But our YA contains a lot of copies of adult, so I usually just disregard that section when I think about it. Mainly I think the reason is that we just have so many copies, they thought they'd spread them about a bit. I do believe we have at least five or six different versions of LotR alone. (Oh, and
The Hobbit is in Adult, YA, and Juvenile Fiction. That one puzzles 'em. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] )
Personally, I rather like thinking of Tolkien as belonging more with the Dickens and Sir Walter Scotts of the literary world. But it
is Fantasy.