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

[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.