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Ok, briefly...
1) Lord of the Rings
2) Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirlees. Fantastic fairy tale in the English tradition.
3) Time & the Gods by Lord Dunsany. Beautifully written tales of the fantastic, & a whole new mythology pre-Tolkien.
4) The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson. Appeared in the same year as LotR & drawing on the same sources of Norse & Celtic myth.
5) Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance. Beautiful, clever, amazingly sharp, smart, funny, & in terms of scale & perfection the next best thing to LotR, yet totally different. ("The single remaining warrior rode pell-mell down into the swale, where the Kaber warriors cut off first his legs, then his arms, then rolled him into the ditch to ponder the sad estate to which his life had come.")
Then again, ask me tomorrow & I might come up with a different list...
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