Fantasy: Pre and Post Tolkien

[Rumil]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone had read any pre-Tolkien 'modern' (ie not Homer, the Edda or mediaeval) fantasy. I'm thinking of Lord Dunsany here who I've heard of but never read. How does pre-Tolkien fantasy compare to Middle Earth? Are they forgotten masterpieces or as formulaic as some of the current crop? Did they influence Tolkien?

Most of all is it worth my while seeking them out at the bookshop?

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I personally have no problem with fantasy writers doing a nod to Tolkien. If they do, though, I like it to be nice and subtle. Not too stare in the face obvious. The sort of thing where a select few will say "Ah! I know what that is a reference to! " and be tremendously happy about it.

The problem comes in the fact that the older fairy tale style of telling a fantasy seems not so popular these days. It doesn't seem to matter how compelling the story or interesting the events, if not told in the grant Tolkienesque way, publishers don't want to know. I handed someone a copy of The Golden Key recently and when he gave it back he said 'Not very good is it? I mean the story's okay, but the guy talks like its all made up and not real.'

Perhaps that is the issue. Maybe the wider audience want the realness. I myself like the unrealness of The Golden Key and others, for me it is part of the appeal.

Another thing is the 'visitor from our world goes to other world' premise is a useful plot device, really. There always has to be that ignorant party through whom the reader learns about the world. Tolkien is a little more subtle in the way he goes about this. There are many ignorant parties, but none so blindingly obvious. All of the Hobbits have their field of expertise which they exploit to give us information about The Shire. Once they are out of it, Strider then gives them the information. But it is different. The Hobbit's stories and Aragorn's tales are given to them on a level the characters understand, first and foremost. Which explains why one friend of mine once said 'I'm always amused when Tolkien goes off on one. You know, mentions some random person you've never heard of and tells you his life story. I remember thinking "Who the hell is Feanor?" and "What on earth is Earendil?"' Here is Tolkien's genius! The characters have some sense of what it is, but you do not. The mystery is in the lack of knowledge. Not everything is unveiled, there is darkness around the edges.

Originally Posted by Rumil

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone had read any pre-Tolkien 'modern' (ie not Homer, the Edda or mediaeval) fantasy. I'm thinking of Lord Dunsany here who I've heard of but never read. How does pre-Tolkien fantasy compare to Middle Earth? Are they forgotten masterpieces or as formulaic as some of the current crop? Did they influence Tolkien?

Most of all is it worth my while seeking them out at the bookshop?

George MacDonald and Andrew Lang are two that I have read.

[Lalwendë]

Think I see what you're getting at now It's the way the stories are told. The way of fantasy/sci-fi is that somehow the writer has to lead the reader into the new world, and Tolkien does seem to choose to just dump the reader in the midst of it - there are no magic wardrobes to go through, no weird dreams or altered states. You just open the book and Middle-earth exists without any intervention from some contemporary person we might know or even be.

Even so, it's not quite that simple - Tolkien has the Hobbits be recognisable as being like English people for a very good reason I think, to give us something even vaguely familiar to take us deeper into the world he creates. We can identify with Hobbits to a greater extent and along with them, we are learning about all this mad stuff like Elves, Balrogs, Wizards etc. Hobbits are like us for a very good reason.

Still, I like the way Tolkien does this. The story is immediate, compared to Narnia, which is not. I'm slightly suspicious of stories where other worlds exist only via portals or dreams or whatever - something about them doesn't ring true to me, as though the protagonist/narrator is experiencing this because they ahve a mental problem or are an overly-imaginative child or something. I prefer to skip all of that and just open the page in the midst of the new world - it allows me to suspend my rational mind.

[Meriadoc1961]

L. Frank Baum wrote his Oz stories of fantasy before Tolkien. If Tolkien was influenced by him I can not say other than that The Hobbit was written for children, as were the Oz books. Although the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings came to symbolize English society in many ways, I do not believe that was how they were originally portrayed in The Hobbit. I believe they were intended to be children. It was only through the (accidental?) introduction of deeper things in The Hobbit, such as Elrond, Gandalf, the Necromancer and eventually the ring itself that an adult fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, was born.

Some would also say that Jules Verne predated Tolkien in fantasy writings, although one could say he was more scie-fi than fantasy. Still, Vernes does employ monsters in his writing, as we all know does Tolkien.

I believe it was a combination of Tolkien's religion and his knowledge of European mythologies, particularly Norse and Scandanavian mythologies, that influenced the direction of his epic tale of Middle-earth. Some complain because they say there is no religion in the books. I see religion throughout it. Does anyone recall Frodo feeling rustic because hobbits did not observe the Standing Silence that looked towards the West that always was, as Faramir instructed him to do before they ate their meal? What is that but a moment of prayer to the Provider? What did Gandalf mean when he said that Frodo was meant to have the ring, and that was good, if he did not mean that God was behind him having it?

Merry

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Although I haven't read much pre-Tolkienian fantasy, I did find this article about British uses of Norse myth before JRRT [EDIT: this used to link to Andrew Wawn's lecture Philology and Fantasy Before Tolkien at the Sigurður Nordal Institute, which is no longer online]. I think that what this points out very clearly is that the re-use of Germanic mythology, often combined with a rejection of modern idiom, was already well established and popular long before Tolkien began to write. In terms of language, what Tolkien seems to have done is to adopt a far more readable form of 'watered' archaism than some of his predecessors. William Morris in particular sometimes allows his own learning to get the better of him, and on those occasions his prose becomes either completely unreadable without a Middle English or Old Norse dictionary, or so cumbersome that it loses all beauty. His style may have been what Tolkien had in mind when discussing correct word usage in Beowulf translation, although Tolkien did have good reasons to think well of Morris in general.

Of course, William Morris' generation was caught up in the flush of newly discovered territories of myth, legend and history that were being opened up by the emerging science of comparative philology. The excitement of people brought up on Classical myths on finding another legendary world far closer to home can only be imagined these days, but the reactions of contemporary authors survive in often surprising works of fiction and historical romance. What has changed since Tolkien is that reactions to this material have tended to follow him, in that many authors began to write in that style who knew nothing of Ing or Finn, the Wulfings or the Nibelungs. Their reactions were to the same material, but as seen through Tolkien's vision, so that Tolkien replaces his beloved northern myths as the emulated source. Alongside this motive is the legacy of his popularity, which makes him difficult to ignore, and which presents the eternal temptation to react to his work.

Since this is really not my area, I'll leave others to continue the argument. To my mind, Tolkien fits into a long tradition of English writing that stretches back into the Anglo-Saxon period, and which revolves around imaginary landscapes and strange adventures among supernatural beings. That many people respond so his work so strongly suggests that there is as much a taste for such writing in the modern world as there was in the Middle Ages, and fully justifies the earlier work of the storytelling philologists and the dream-weavers of the fantastic who were Tolkien's predecessors.