Do most fantasy novel nowadays have traceable elements of Tolkienism in them?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by jallanite

For example, there is Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland's Daughter or William Morris’ A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark which in different ways may seem Tolkienish, but any influence in these books might have inspired Tolkien, not the reverse.

I was going to mention Morris and his prose romances myself; in fact I've been meaning to start a "Morris and Tolkien" thread for some time. Morris' The Roots of the Mountains and The Glittering Plain are also very Tolkienesque, but in fact came first, and in Letter 226 the Professor attests Wolfings and Roots as influences. Given that these were meant to evoke Norse sagas and such Tolkien is very much the mediator between the traditional Romance and the modern fantasy novel. It puts me in two minds about how much Tolkien influence there really is in modern fantasy. The detailed, functioning imaginary worlds with invented histories and cultures, spiritual crises (good people vs a dark lord or diabolus-figure) etc. are the more superficial fantasy elements which have definitely been extracted largely, I would argue, from Tolkien, but in terms of tone and style I think they tend much more towards the storytelling methods which are in a conventional novelistic vein which Tolkien eschews.

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Rune Son of Bjarne

I must join the chorus of people who are not genre readers, and therefore cannot say anything about the patterns of development withing fantasy.

It seems clear that Tolkien is the most influential fantasy writer there is, and some argue that he is the father of the modern genre.

First you say you can’t say anything, then you say something. You might better have followed your first instinct and not said anything. Tolkien may be “the most influential fantasy writer there is” but there are many fantasies that don’t have Elves at all, not to speak of Tolkien elves. Have you read all the fantasy mentioned on this thread which readers claim is not particularly Tolkien? Have you read any of it?

I would agree that Tolkien is “the father of the modern genre” in that his writing vastly increased the amount of fantasy published. But that was mainly in creating a market for similar works to his, into which works which were not very similar could also be fitted by book sellers. But there remains much fantasy published that has little of note connecting it to Tolkien’s work. For example the works of Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, arguably the two most popular of obviously non-Tolkien fantasists.

You might show examples of their work which you would claim derive mainly from Tolkien, and not from other writers, or is not mostly original, if you wish to make your point.

One has to remember, that even though Tolkien him self did not invent his concepts, he altered many of them, and any subsequent fantasy seems to be based on his depictions. The way elves are depicted, is probably the best example of how Tolkien significantly altered an existing concept, and how it caught on.

For elves in previous fantasy I suggest Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland's Daughter and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword which predates The Lord of the Rings. True, Anderson’s Elves are more like Tolkien's Orcs than his Elves, but they are not little people. Or go back to the man-sized Elves in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Tolkien did not alter any concepts. The idea of man-size Elves is common in medieval works.

Still, I am convinced that the popular fantasy authors can mostly be placed within the confines of "inspired by".

Then show how Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Eowyn Ivey, Tanya Huff, and Josh Whedon are primarily inspired by Tolkien. Well Eowyn Ivey’s first name comes from Tolkien, but not her novel The Snow Child.

Perhaps you have only read Tolkien-inspired fantasy. But there is lots more modern fantasy works out there that are not particularly Tolkien-inspired.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

The detailed, functioning imaginary worlds with invented histories and cultures, spiritual crises (good people vs a dark lord or diabolus-figure) etc. are the more superficial fantasy elements which have definitely been extracted largely, I would argue, from Tolkien, but in terms of tone and style I think they tend much more towards the storytelling methods which are in a conventional novelistic vein which Tolkien eschews.

Quite so, more-or-less. Tolkien was not “the father of fantasy” which some claim, but do not argue, because in fact those people have not read much in previous fantasy or they would not make such an absurd claim. Before Tolkien published The Hobbit there were James Branch Cabell, William Hope Hodgson, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber (barely), Eric Rücker Eddison, Lewis Caroll, Charles E. Caryl, John Ruskin, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie, Edith Nesbit, Carlo Collodi, Beatrix Potter, Felix Salten, A. A. Milne, Hugh Lofting, Walter R. Brooks, P. L. Travers, and L. Frank Baum to name only those writers I can think of at the moment that I have not already mentioned in my two posts on this thread and whose fantasy writing is still widely read.

If some of these works of fantasy writing are known primarily as children’s books, I do not apologize, because the same is true of The Hobbit. There was a period where, except for dark fantasy, fantasy was mostly only publishable as children’s literature. Among more recent works Ursula K. LeGuin’s original Earthsea trilogy and Richard Adams’ Watership Down were originally published as children’s books.

I admit it quite possible, counting strictly by books published, that most fantasy published contains elements that most would accept as imitative of Tolkien. I don’t think this is true for the most popular fantasy.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by jallanite

I would agree that Tolkien is “the father of the modern genre” in that his writing vastly increased the amount of fantasy published. But that was mainly in creating a market for similar works to his, into which works which were not very similar could also be fitted by book sellers. But there remains much fantasy published that has little of note connecting it to Tolkien’s work. For example the works of Stephen King or Neil Gaiman, arguably the two most popular of obviously non-Tolkien fantasists.

First off, I wouldn't exactly consider King a "fantasy" writer primarily, though he does dabble in it, perhaps.
Second, at least the Dark Tower series owes a serious debt to Tolkien. In King's Introduction to the revised edition of The Gunslinger, he says:

The Dark Tower books, like most long fantasy tales written by men and women of my generation (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, and The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, are just two of many), were born out of Tolkien's.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Before Tolkien published The Hobbit there were James Branch Cabell, William Hope Hodgson, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber (barely), Eric Rücker Eddison, Lewis Carol, Charles E. Caryl, John Ruskin, Kenneth Grahame, James Barrie, Edith Nesbit, Carlo Collodi, Beatrix Potter, Felix Salten, A. A. Milne, Hugh Lofting, Walter R. Brooks, P. L. Travers, and L. Frank Baum to name only those writers I can think of at the moment that I have not already mentioned in this post and whose fantasy writing is still widely read.

It's a quibbling detail, but are Lovecraft and Poe "fantasy" authors too? I'd always consigned at least Lovecraft to the Horror genre.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

It's a quibbling detail, but are Lovecraft and Poe "fantasy" authors too? I'd always consigned at least Lovecraft to the Horror genre.

Based on the few of Lovecraft's stories that I've read, I'd actually put him under sci-fi, with a little bit of fantasy and horror sprinkled in. Maybe I just haven't read the right stories, though.

[Zigûr]

If it's Lovecraft we're talking about I think the safest classification might be the one which was used at the time, "Weird fiction", a genre classification which isn't really used these days. It's a sort of blend of horror, fantasy and sci-fi styles from before the genres became as delineated as they are today. If you look at Lovecraft, his earlier Dream Cycle stuff has a very heavy element of what we would today classify as pure Fantasy: a world beyond this world with its own peculiar societies and inhabitants, although they were never extensively detailed. His 'Cthulhu mythos' stuff, by comparison, is more "horror/sci-fi" given that it often involves the horror being of extraterrestrial nature (see The Color Out of Space, The Shadow Out of Time, The Call of Cthulhu, The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness etc.) while other stories are more pure horror with a more 'magical' explanation for the supernatural elements. His later writings strive to tie the Cthulhu mythos and Dream Cycle stuff together with explanations involving other dimensions and such, returning back, as it were, to the hybridity of 'Weird fiction'.

In my opinion the influence of Professor Tolkien's work is primarily to be found in what is called "High Fantasy", involving imaginary worlds/societies, an epic scale, good versus evil, saving the world, long quests or some combination thereon. I think the overwhelming majority of "High Fantasy" novels contain some element of "Tolkienism" but that Fantasy as a whole is too broad a genre to argue that Fantasy novels in general owe something to Tolkien. I think he codified a very specific sub genre of Fantasy but not all Fantasy. Personally I think High Fantasy is an increasingly exhausted genre; indeed I think it's been the case since Eddings' Belgariad deliberately produced the most generic High Fantasy story imaginable (orphan with mysterious past and group of mismatched friends finds magic device with which he kills evil god) in what was effectively a pastiche of the tropes which had so encapsulated High Fantasy storytelling. It makes things like The Wheel of Time seem utterly irrelevant, in my opinion (outside of the gender issues stuff which didn't need fourteen massive volumes to be explored). As I've said in the other thread I'm no fan of George R.R. Martin but, and correct me if I'm wrong, at least his books (seemingly) shake up some of those very weary tropes a bit.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

In my opinion the influence of Professor Tolkien's work is primarily to be found in what is called "High Fantasy", involving imaginary worlds/societies, an epic scale, good versus evil, saving the world, long quests or some combination thereon. I think the overwhelming majority of "High Fantasy" novels contain some element of "Tolkienism" but that Fantasy as a whole is too broad a genre to argue that Fantasy novels in general owe something to Tolkien.

Perhaps, in the end, there's simply too much subjective interpretation involved when one reads to say definitively whether this or that is the result of influence by a particular author (unless such is indeed admitted by a writer).

Maybe one can simply define Tolkien's achievement in terms of what the Beatles did for rock 'n roll. They took what was perceived by many as a juvenile form of music and elevated it to Art, giving it both maturity and wide acceptance.
Could it be said that Tolkien, with LOTR, took Fantasy fiction and showed that it could not only be popular, but also respectable?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Could it be said that Tolkien, with LOTR, took Fantasy fiction and showed that it could not only be popular, but also respectable?

Only partially. Previous fantasy tales that had already been very popular including notably William Morris’ romances and Lord Dunsany’s many tales. James Branch Cabell was also reasonably popular.

These were very respectable writers.

What is surprising is that their success was not followed up by other authors. The conventional wisdom was that fantasy just didn’t normally sell, except in children’s books. The conventional wisdom may have been true. George MacDonald’s two adult fantasies sold poorly. Evangeline Walton’s first Mabinogion romance was published in 1936 and died.

People seemingly were really not interested in romances about magic which didn’t exist.

Sf changed that. People were ready to read tales about marvelous adventures that possibly really might happen, some day, even if many sf tales were badly written. Sf had reached the level of penetration of the market where obvious and outright fantasy could be appreciated and would be purchased.

Then the genius who had written The Hobbit produced an immense work for adults. It sold, and sold incredibly once it was available in paperback. But no-one was repeating Tolkien at once. He stood alone. Ballantine could at first only reprint older adult fantasy in an attempt to cash in on Tolkien.

Then very gradually new works of fantasy began to be printed. At the same time hardcover sf began appearing in bookstores. Sf had itself become respectable and in potential carried fantasy with it as it was mostly printed by the same paperback publishers.

But it was not until 1969 that Ballantine published Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place and The Last Unicorn. Then Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shanarra was published in 1974. It was from then onward that publication of new adult fantasy works became normal. But many Tolkien fans also do not consider liking The Sword of Shanarra to be respectable. (I agree.)

Considering that The Lord of the Rings saw its first complete publication in hardback in 1955, if Tolkien is compared to the Beatles, this is as though The Rolling Stones did not appear until 1970 instead of in 1962.

Tolkien is still not respectable according to many academics. They see The Lord of the Rings just as a flash-in-the-pan like Harriet Beacher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reputably the most popular novel in the 19th century. They keep waiting for the bubble to burst. That it hasn’t yet is to be blamed on the poor taste of current readers.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Based on the few of Lovecraft's stories that I've read, I'd actually put him under sci-fi, with a little bit of fantasy and horror sprinkled in. Maybe I just haven't read the right stories, though.

Yes, it really depends which of his stories you’re talking about– and genre boundaries weren’t as defined then as they are now anyway.

Thinking about the main question, it seems to me that there’s two traps to be avoided. One is that of assuming that every similarity is due to copying, and the other is that of assuming that none are. (Not that I think anyone here is literally doing either of these, by the way.)

I’d say there are four classes of similarity:
a.) Pure coincidence.
b.) Similarity due to use of the same sources.
c.) Actual influence.
d.) Direct copying.

There are still problems with this– exactly where c.) ends and d.) begins can be a matter of dispute. And you need to be careful about b.), because, for example, there is a difference between Elves or goblins as traditional folklore races and Tolkien’s versions.

Originally Posted by jallanite

For elves in previous fantasy I suggest Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland's Daughter and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword which predates The Lord of the Rings. True, Anderson’s Elves are more like Tolkien's Orcs than his Elves, but they are not little people. Or go back to the man-sized Elves in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Tolkien did not alter any concepts. The idea of man-size Elves is common in medieval works.

True– but it is none the less quite common for post-Tolkien fantasy writers to feature Elves who are obvious direct copies of Tolkien’s (often filtered through D&D). As I said, there’s a difference.

[jallanite]

In my opinion horror authors are more properly called horror fantasy authors. After all, they are usually writing about things which most people think can’t actually happen. Trying to define fantasy fiction as different from realistic fiction puts most horror fiction on the fantasy side, not on the realistic side.

Science-fiction is vague by that definition, though supposedly a science-fiction story should also seem to be scientifically possible, even if it involves time travel or faster than light travel. So is Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon hard science-fiction rather than fantasy when Verne knew that his method of space travel really couldn’t work, or only when we do? Or does it remain science-fiction with an unfortunate error in the science.

I see Lovecraft as mostly writing fantasy with a science-fictional cover over it. Same with Stephen King. But his Dark Tower series is very fantasy in my opinion, unless all alternate word stories are to be classed as realistic fiction which seem just wrong to me. His The Shining seems to me to be very much fantasy. So does Carrie. Is Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows really science-fiction set in a parallel world in which animals can talk?

Quibble away if you wish. And remove most of Lovecraft, and Poe, and King from my lists if you wish to fit your definitions which don’t agree with my definitions. It doesn’t matter very much to me.

You will not be able to find any definitions of fantasy and horror that are universally accepted. I was at a conference here in Toronto last weekend at which academic Robert Runte discussed writer Margaret Atwood who has very much denied being a science-fiction writer and has been blamed for making up a definition of science-fiction of her own which no-one else uses. Runte showed that the definition Atwood was using was the same one Robert Heinlein used, but that since the date when he put it forth science-fiction criticism has moved on.

So drop all the horror-fiction and Hugh Lofting from my list if you wish. But I hope you now understand why I disagree.

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Based on the few of Lovecraft's stories that I've read, I'd actually put him under sci-fi, with a little bit of fantasy and horror sprinkled in. Maybe I just haven't read the right stories, though.

That seems to me to be an adequate way to look at much, perhaps most, of Lovecraft’s work.

But there are exceptions in his writing.

Consider Lovecraft’s story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. That seems to me to be very much a fantasy tale by any definition, despite the horror elements. The definitive version, with corrected text is published by Arkham House in At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels and by Penguin Classics in The Dreams in the Witch-House and Other Weird Stories.

See a discussion of this story by John D. Rateliff ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rateliff ) at http://web.archive.org/web/200307040...sicsdreamquest .

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by jallanite

Science-fiction is vague by that definition, though supposedly a science-fiction story should also seem to be scientifically possible, even if it involves time travel or faster than light travel.
...
You will not be able to find any definitions of fantasy and horror that are universally accepted. I was at a conference here in Toronto last weekend at which academic Robert Runte discussed writer Margaret Atwood who has very much denied being a science-fiction writer and has been blamed for making up a definition of science-fiction of her own which no-one else uses. Runte showed that the definition Atwood was using was the same one Robert Heinlein used, but that since the date when he put it forth science-fiction criticism has moved on.

I've heard that Atwood is keen to have her work regarded as "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" (to avoid the alleged 'genre ghetto', perhaps?). I once had a brief discussion with another student in an undergraduate tutorial years ago about Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and whether or not it was "science fiction", my view being 'not necessarily'; it was motivated by the discussion the novel's characters have about the genre of their own (meta)fictional alternate-history narrative and whether or not it was sci-fi. My suggestion was that if we strictly classify a novel like that as science-fiction without flexible boundaries, we may as well call something like Atlas Shrugged science-fiction as well.

I myself am presenting a paper (my first one ever, woo) on Tolkien and Orwell next month in the hope that we can read The Lord of the Rings etc as something other than just "Fantasy" by some loose definition, more specifically in regards to 'Secondary Worlds' as a commonality rather than what conventional genres may prescribe.

[jallanite]

[quote=Nerwen;684340]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

True– but it is none the less quite common for post-Tolkien fantasy writers to feature Elves who are obvious direct copies of Tolkien’s (often filtered through D&D). As I said, there’s a difference.

The first such story that I recall reading was Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_%28novel%29 ) and I thought it was atrocious. It was a copy of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams, almost a paint-by-numbers story, in which in one incident the protagonist entered another world which was pure mock-Lothlórien, though this was implied to be an American aborigine fantasy world. Personally such sloppy fantasy writing simply doesn’t interest me.

But I realize that many readers don’t even notice.

For man-sized Elves or Fairies, one may also go to Lewis Carroll’s Bruno and Sylvia, which I feel was very bad, but for other reasons. I realize that Tolkien’s man-sized Elves in The Hobbit didn’t surprise me at all when I first read it. I suppose I must have encountered similar beings in other books that I no longer remember. I do remember the human-sized Fairy of the Turqouise Hair in the original story Pinnochio, whom in Disney’s version becomes the winged (but still human-sized) Blue Fairy.

For fantasy I can think of two other older writers missing from my list: William Shakespeare (not only for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest but for Hamlet and Macbeth) and E. E. Chesterton. And might as well add Sir Thomas Malory, as a writer still much read outside of university course work untranslated. Perhaps also add Howard Pyle.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I've heard that Atwood is keen to have her work regarded as "speculative fiction" rather than "science fiction" (to avoid the alleged 'genre ghetto', perhaps?).

For Margaret Atwood’s own definitions of what she writes, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=129324791 and http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/...ptic-optimist/ .

But others have different definitions for speculative fiction. See Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_fiction and a talk page which largely disagrees at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Speculative_fiction .

Personally speculative fiction seems to be normally used as a more pretentious term for what most people simply call science-fiction or sf. After all, all fiction is speculative, or it would not be fiction. Fictional fiction?

I once had a brief discussion with another student in an undergraduate tutorial years ago about Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and whether or not it was "science fiction", my view being 'not necessarily'; it was motivated by the discussion the novel's characters have about the genre of their own (meta)fictional alternate-history narrative and whether or not it was sci-fi. My suggestion was that if we strictly classify a novel like that as science-fiction without flexible boundaries, we may as well call something like Atlas Shrugged science-fiction as well.

Sure, call Atlas Shrugged science-fiction if you want. The conference actually got into stories set in the supposed near future which were mainly about politics. The consensus seemed to be that they were not really sf books.

So invent a new name like political thriller. Genres are invented when a lot of works are seen as so similar that they belong together, and they provide a reasonable handle to talk about them and compare them. But there are always works on the fringes of a genre, however you define it, and peoples’ definitions differ somewhat from one another.

For example, I note that no-one has called me out for implicitly including dream-tales among my fantasy works by including Lewis Carroll and Charles E. Caryl among my fantasy authors. Well, I feel these stories are dream-stories but are also fantasy stories. Note that in his essay “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien writes that dream-tales are not fairy-tales, not that they are not fantasy.