And Now, A Rant About Tolkien...

Okay. This is a big pet peeve of mine, and one I've ranted about recently in the Keenspace forums. (Although not too recently, since I haven't checked the forums in the last week or two while I've been housesitting for my parents in Orange County. Sometime soon I'll probably go back and see what I've missed.) But I just ran across it again, in an article by someone I really would have expected to know better. (Though, to be fair, the wording in the article is somewhat ambiguous and he may have been referring to something else--but regardless, even an ambiguous apparent propagation of this myth is annoying.) So I've decided to go ahead and rant about it here so if it comes up again I can refer people to this rant instead of writing the whole matter out over again.

I refer to the myth that Tolkien invented the fantasy genre.

He did not. Not even close. The fantasy genre was around long before Tolkien. Exactly who did invent it is, well, probably not really possible to definitively decide, because of course there were a lot of early writings that had some fantasy characteristics, but whose classification as "fantasy" would be fuzzy. I will certainly not go so far, however, as to claim that such ancient works as Ovid's Metamorphosis and the 1001 Arabian Nights qualify as fantasy; it seems to me that inherent in the definition of fantasy is the conscious knowledge that the things described are outside the natural order, and for that to be possible there must be a clear conception of what the "natural order" is, which wasn't really the case before the development of the scientific method. Therefore, for true "fantasy" to exist, science must have existed first so it would have something to contrast with. Some have numbered Gothic romances such as The Castle of Otranto (1764, by Horace Walpole), Vathek (1786, by William Beckford), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794, by Anne Radcliffe) among early works of fantasy, on the grounds that they contain many supernatural elements, but most people would consider them to compose a separate subgenre, not really "fantastic" enough to be considered true fantasy. Among the earliest writers I know of who can with fair certainty be classified as fantasy writers, however, are:

George MacDonald (whose first novel, Phantastes, was published in 1858)

MacDonald wrote two fantasy novels and a number of shorter "fairy tales", all of them with a somewhat dreamlike atmosphere but clearly set in a fantastic imaginary world. Like the much later C. S. Lewis (who acknowledged MacDonald as a major influence), MacDonald was a religious man who peppered his work with Christian allegories, but it's certainly fantasy nonetheless. MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (not one of his adult fantasy novels, but a fantasy children's story he wrote) is said to have been one of Tolkien's childhood favorites.
More information about MacDonald is available here, here, and here. His works have fallen into the public domain, and are available at gutenberg.org and similar e-book sites, though of course not all of his writing was in the fantasy genre.

William Morris (whose first fantasy novel, The Glittering Plain, was published in 1890)</i>

Those who discount MacDonald as the first to set a novel in a well-developed imaginary world on the (somewhat questionable) grounds that his fictional world is only intended as a dreamworld and not a literal place name Morris, instead, as truly the first to set a fantasy novel in a wholly imagined world. Whether or not this is true, Morris's stories certainly played an important role in the early days of the fantasy genre, though he also is noted for his work in the visual arts and other fields.
More can be found on William Morris here, here, and here. His works are also available at gutenberg.org.

Lord Dunsany (whose first novel, The Gods of Pegana, was published in 1905)

Enormously popular in his day, though not well known now, Dunsany--Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett the 18th Baron Dunsany, to give his full name--was a prolific author and playwright who Lovecraft in particular cited as an important influence. His works were brilliantly atmospheric and evocative, attaining a sense of the otherworldly matched by few other writers.
More about Lord Dunsany here, here, and here; many of his works, too, are available at gutenberg.org.

H. P. Lovecraft (whose first "Dreamworld" fantasy story was published in 1920)

H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos and inventor of the Necronomicon, is of course most often thought of as a horror writer. Many of his stories, though, his "Dreamland" works in particular, are probably better classified as fantasy (albeit somewhat horrific fantasy). Admittedly, in his later life Lovecraft, an avid amateur scientist, seemed to rather regret his fantasy stories, and considered them among his poorest works.
More information on Lovecraft is available here, here, and here. Lovecraft's work is still under copyright by Arkham House Publishers, and therefore is not available at gutenberg.org and related sites. (There are, in fact, some independent sites that have made them freely available online apparently without knowing or caring that they're still under copyright, but since those sites are technically illegal I won't link to them here.)

Robert E. Howard (whose first fantasy short story was published in 1925; his first Conan the Barbarian story saw print in 1932)

Of all the authors listed here (aside, of course, from Tolkien), it's probably Robert E. Howard whose fantasy work is best remembered today. (Lovecraft may be better known in general, but mostly as a horror writer, not fantasy.) This is largely because of one particular character he created, "Conan the Barbarian", who has been adapted into comic books, movies, and other media. Most people have heard of Conan the Barbarian, but may not realize how old the source material really is--Conan beat Bilbo Baggins into print by several years.
More information is available about Robert E. Howard here, here, and here. Howard's works are not available at gutenberg.org and similar sites, because they're not unambiguously in the public domain--though their actual copyright status is rather sticky.

Other important early fantasy writers included George Meredith (The Shaving of Shagpat, 1856), James Branch Cabell (a number of books beginning in 1904), Abraham Merritt (many books and short stories starting in 1917, though much of his work is better classified as science fiction than fantasy), E.R. Eddison (several novels and series from 1922 on), and many others. Tolkien was a relative latecomer to the genre, The Hobbit not being published until 1937, and The Lord of the Rings, on which his reputation was built, not until 1954.

Those who think Tolkien founded the genre sometimes try to back up their claim with the observation that he had a hard time getting The Lord of the Rings published. Surely if the fantasy genre had already been a thriving concern, publishers wouldn't have been so reluctant to touch it? Well, the truth is that publishers were reluctant to take on The Lord of the Rings--it wasn't until six years after he wrote it that Tolkien finally managed to get it published. But the reason had nothing to do with its genre. The success of The Hobbit certainly shows that--if Tolkien's earlier fantasy work was such an unqualified hit (and it was), why would the publishers be leery about publishing another fantasy work? Well, there were two reasons. First, because it was, after all, a sequel to a book that had come out well over a decade before. After the initial success of The Hobbit, Tolkien's publishers were clamoring for a sequel--but he took so long in producing one that by the time it was finished, it didn't seem there would be much demand for it. Second, because of its length. Epics of the length of the Lord of the Rings, fantasy or not, were very rare, and publishers weren't at all sure that there was a market for them.

And, at first, there wasn't. The Lord of the Rings was far from an immediate success. But its reputation grew over time, until eventually, for better or for worse, for a time it seemed that every other work of fantasy fiction had to be a LotR-esque epic, with a painstakingly crafted world over which the characters traveled at length to defeat an ancient evil. And of course even today this epic fantasy subgenre remains popular.

So in that respect, at least, Tolkien can be claimed as a true innovator. He did not found the fantasy genre, but he did found the epic fantasy subgenre. And, moreover, he was the first to really take the time to plan out his world and its backstory in detail before he wrote. (A little too much detail, perhaps, since that's primarily what caused the big delay between the publication of The Hobbit and the completion of The Lord of the Rings. (He hadn't laid all that groundwork for The Hobbit; it was only on starting the sequel that he decided that this time he wanted to have the world planned out in great detail ahead of time.)) True, other fantasy authors before him had set series of books in the same world, but in their cases they were basically making the worlds and the stories up as they went along with each book; they weren't writing coherent epics like The Lord of the Rings set in worlds they had already developed in depth.

Now, Tolkien is also sometimes credited with, if not creating the whole fantasy genre, at least fixing it in its modern form, with the common tropes of elves and dwarves and bearded wizards and a medieval society. And to this, there's some grain of truth...but not really all that much.

First of all, that stereotypical view of the fantasy genre really isn't all that common in fantasy literature. It is, in fact, primarily found in fantasy games--both computer games and pencil-and-paper role-playing games set in fantasy worlds are almost certain to be brimming with orcs and elves and feudal civilizations, but fantasy literature is generally set in more original worlds. For this reason, I'll refer hereafter to this particular fantasy subgenre as "ludic fantasy", for lack of a better name. (It's sometimes called "high fantasy", but that same term is used for three or four other, contradictory meanings, so it seems to me to have become less than useful.)

Secondly, The Lord of the Rings doesn't include most of the common ludic fantasy tropes. Elves and dwarves? Check. Orcs? Check. Quasi-medieval feudal governments? Uh...nope. Tolkien's civilizations bore very little resemblance to the typical fantasy structures; there's nary a knight to be found in The Lord of the Rings, and while there's the occasional king they're certainly very different from the feudal kings of ludic fantasy. Wizards? Well...yes and no. Yeah, there's Gandalf and Saruman, but they're not wizards in the typical ludic fantasy sense; they're a breed apart, a whole different class of being, not humans who've put in long hours of study to learn the magical arts as is the case in most ludic fantasy. And frankly, the whole feel of most ludic fantasy is far different from Tolkien. It's much more magic-heavy, more brimming with all sorts of different kinds of monsters, much more, in some ways, fantastic...

So where do all the other elements of ludic fantasy come from, if not from Tolkien? Well...most directly, I'd say they come from Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons was immensely popular back in the seventies, after all, so I don't think it's unreasonable to propose that it has had such an impact on a common cultural phenomenon, especially since, as noted above, said impact on that cultural phenomenon is confined mostly to games anyway. D&D certainly has the medieval feudal structure; Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the game, is an avid amateur historian, and continues to this day to insist (rather irrationally, in my opinion) on "historical accuracy" of medieval cultures in fantasy settings. Moreover, there are many ludic fantasy commonplaces--the gnome, the kobold, the spell-casting cleric--that quite demonstrably did not come from Tolkien, but were certainly in D&D. (Yes, yes, I know gnomes and kobolds were mythological creatures, but the original mythological versions were very different from the modern ludic fantasy versions, which are basically identical to the D&D versions.)

In the first-edition Dungeon Master's Guide, Gygax included in an appendix a list of the authors whom he had drawn upon for inspiration in creating D&D. Tolkien was certainly on the list; it would have been quite surprising if he had not been. But...Gygax also included a shorter list of the authors who had been particularly important influences on his work, and from this list Tolkien is completely absent. True, some of the authors on the shorter list--L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson--came after Tolkien, and it could be argued that they had themselves been influenced by him, but frankly I don't think that any of those authors do show much Tolkien influence. And several of the authors Gygax cites as particular influences--Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Abraham Merritt--preceded Tolkien.

I don't think Gygax was being at all dishonest in excluding Tolkien from the list of his most important influences. True, D&D's elves, dwarves, orcs, and halflings are clearly Tolkien-derived, along with a smattering of other creatures. (Again, yes, of course there were elves and dwarves in mythology, but the D&D elves and dwarves are far closer to Tolkien's versions than to the original mythological ones--though much of that is the fault of later contributors to D&D who gave the elves and dwarves Tolkienic characteristics, rather than of Gygax himself.) But very little else is. The D&D magic system bears absolutely no relation to anything out of Tolkien. (It is, in fact, derived from the book The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance.) The whole feel of D&D, with its dungeon crawls and its derring-do, owes much more to Howard's style of sword-and-sorcery than Tolkien's statelier mythic tale. There is a clear Tolkien influence on D&D, but it's no larger than the influence of any number of other authors. And there's really nothing in most modern ludic fantasy that came from Tolkien that wasn't in D&D, and there's a whole lot in most modern ludic fantasy that was in D&D and wasn't in Tolkien. That being the case, I think it's pretty safe to say that for the most part all that ludic fantasy got from Tolkien it got from him only indirectly, through Dungeons & Dragons, along with a lot of other things that had nothing to do with Tolkien. So if one must choose a father of ludic fantasy, I'd nominate Gary Gygax. Tolkien is, at best, a grandfather, and only one of many.

So Tolkien didn't invent ludic fantasy, and he certainly didn't invent the fantasy genre as a whole. But he did found the subgenre of epic fantasy, and he did pioneer the art of in-depth fantasy worldbuilding. So let's leave those quite significant accomplishments to his name, and not try to additionally credit him with having invented things he didn't.