# Who Invented Fantasy?



## Lancasrer (Oct 10, 2020)

HOW far does fanasty go back?


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## CupofJoe (Oct 10, 2020)

To the first prehistoric person sitting around a fire trying to explain the noises in the dark 
Other than that, you take your pick from a dozen places, starting with the Greek mythos or Gilgamesh
"Modern" fantasy [maybe] started with *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley in 1818. But that has probably started a huge new debate


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## Kasper Hviid (Oct 10, 2020)

Tolkien.

Man, that one was easy!


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## Insolent Lad (Oct 10, 2020)

'Modern fantasy' I might argue begins with William Morris's 'The Wood Beyond the World,' from the 1890s. But it very much depends on how one defines 'modern.' He certainly wasn't Modern in the cultural sense (Modernism begins around 1910), but he was the first to create a completely self-standing fantasy world—world building as we understand it today—with no references to our world, no 'it's all a dream,' no attempts at 'scientific' (no matter how far fetched) explanations. Or maybe we could move back a little further in time and look at George MacDonald's books, which are certainly fantasies as well. Anyway, there is a pretty long tradition of  modern fantasy before Tolkien came along and a much, much longer fantasy tradition behind that. Back to when mankind first used its imagination.


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## Malik (Oct 10, 2020)

I like to think it goes back to when we first made contact with the faerie realm and decided it was safer to tell the stories as "made-up" cautionary tales.




​


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## A. E. Lowan (Oct 10, 2020)

Ever notice that cave art is often not exactly on par with the real world? I think it goes back far enough to tell stories with the stars as you desperately try to keep the fire alive. Somewhere in the darkness is a noise you don't know, and from it comes another story.


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## Ned Marcus (Oct 11, 2020)

It's the first genre of fiction.


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## A. E. Lowan (Oct 11, 2020)

Ned Marcus said:


> It's the first genre of fiction.


Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.


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## Ned Marcus (Oct 11, 2020)

A. E. Lowan said:


> Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.



I am biased


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## Insolent Lad (Oct 11, 2020)

This reminds me of a Nabokov quote:
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels. Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.


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## Prince of Spires (Oct 12, 2020)

CupofJoe said:


> "Modern" fantasy [maybe] started with *Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley in 1818. But that has probably started a huge new debate


I think Frankenstein is actually a science fiction novel. It's about technology and the impact of that technology on society. Yes, it's fantastical technology, but it's still technology. So, SciFi. 

As for who started it, I think telling stories is what makes us human and able to live and work together in larger groups. And many of the first stories told were religious / fantastical in nature. The illiad by Homer has a lot of fantasy elements in there, and he was part of a long tradition of story tellers. So it's hard to say who was first.

As for modern fantasy, I have no idea. Define modern fantasy first and then we know where to start looking. 

Or just go with Tolkien...


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## WooHooMan (Oct 12, 2020)

I’d say fantasy started with dreams.  I think it’s probably safe to say most dreams would fit more neatly into that category than thriller, realism, sci-fi or what have you.
So fantasy predates humanity, language and all other genres, I guess.

I think a better question would be when did folklore/mythology become what we now know as fantasy fiction.  It seems to me like it was a pretty gradually shift.

To me L. Frank Baum was the first modern fantasy writer as he was arguably the first to create a unique constructed world in which he set multiple and often unconnected stories.  He published his first Oz book roughly 20 years before Tolkien “officially” got Middle-Earth started.


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## Nighty_Knight (Oct 14, 2020)

Nobody invented it, just changed the way they told the stories. modern day guys like William Morris, Robert Howard, and of course Tolkien all changed fantasy for the better. By going back we have Beowulf and the King Arthur tales which are all much much older. Then there were Greek plays and Authors like Homer. And I almost forgot to mention word of mouth folktales, such as the stories the Brothers Grimm gathered or Hans Christian Anderson wrote stories on.


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## S J Lee (Oct 14, 2020)

Either Homer or the writer of the book of Genesis, or Gilgamesh? Or whatever came before that?


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## skip.knox (Oct 14, 2020)

Lancasrer said:


> HOW far does fanasty go back?



Lancasrer, how far back do *you* think it goes and why do you think that? As you can see from the replies, much matters on how one defines fantasy as a literary genre.


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## Prince of Spires (Oct 15, 2020)

A. E. Lowan said:


> Hard to say if that's speculative fiction or romance. World's oldest profession engenders the world's oldest genre. And the oldest fantasy tales very often involve romance.


I've been thinking about this, and I think the oldest genre would be horror. Things which go Boo! in the night. Stories about the terror lurking just beyond the light of the fire or outside the cave at night. 

Just look at kids. You don't have to tell them to be afraid of the dark, but they still are (some of them at least). And they still get nightmares.


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## skip.knox (Oct 15, 2020)

If we look at the earliest literary forms, they're mostly adventure stories. Plenty of fantastical elements (think Odyssey), but for the most part they're not what I would classify as fantasy. 

I wouldn't call it fantasy as a genre until we have novels. Parzival or the Niebelungenlied are as much history as fantasy, or maybe call them morality plays. Njal's Saga and related works are in much the same vein--great heroes on epic quests, all larger than life but still closer to Alan Quartermain than to John Carter.

But it really does depend on definitions, for what we're doing here is trying to find a line of demarcation between stories with fantastical elements (which do go right back into pre-history), and a literary genre (which I wouldn't put any earlier than the 17thc because there were no novels earlier than that). With room for fudging all round.


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## S J Lee (Oct 15, 2020)

A fantasy short story is still fantasy. It doesn't stop being fantasy just because it's not a novel. If the novel dies, the genres will still remain....?


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## A. E. Lowan (Oct 17, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> If we look at the earliest literary forms, they're mostly adventure stories. Plenty of fantastical elements (think Odyssey), but for the most part they're not what I would classify as fantasy.
> 
> I wouldn't call it fantasy as a genre until we have novels. Parzival or the Niebelungenlied are as much history as fantasy, or maybe call them morality plays. Njal's Saga and related works are in much the same vein--great heroes on epic quests, all larger than life but still closer to Alan Quartermain than to John Carter.
> 
> But it really does depend on definitions, for what we're doing here is trying to find a line of demarcation between stories with fantastical elements (which do go right back into pre-history), and a literary genre (*which I wouldn't put any earlier than the 17thc because there were no novels earlier than that*). With room for fudging all round.


Just going to pick on you for a second. _The Tale of Genji_, by Lady Murisaki and which I still need to read all of, dates back to the 11th? century.


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## psychotick (Oct 17, 2020)

Ooh! Ooh! Was it me? Memories not as good as it used to be!!!

Yes I remember now. I went back on my time dragon and started telling my stories to the smelly beardy guys sitting around campfires - though I think it was actually a travelogue at the time. But always happy to take the credit!

Cheers, Greg.


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## skip.knox (Oct 19, 2020)

11thc is right. Whether or not that's a novel is out for discussion. I'm not sure the Japanese (or Chinese or any other culture) came up with the idea of a novel. The word is Western and it's only been recently (a hundred years or so?) that folks have looked around at other cultures for analogous literary forms. It's a really complicated topic and I ain't no literary historian. 

One way of looking at it is, fantasy is a literary genre. You don't have literary genres until you have something more than "poetry" and "literature", which was pretty much the full slate until the 18thc or so. Then we start to see people speak of a new form--a "novel" form--of literature. I'm not sure when Pilgrim's Progress got tagged as the granddaddy of the novel, but my money's on the 19thc. That's the century when we really start seeing genres of literature, and that's when "fantasy" starts popping up as one of them.

IOW, fantasy as a literary construct is 19thc and after. Stories with fantastical elements are very old. Then we can start a discussion of what might be called fantastic in a world where the audience readily believed in the real existence of angels, miracles, demons, and monsters, and where the line between "real" and "unreal" was not nearly so brightly drawn as today. We might call a particular story a fantasy where someone in the 9thc would call it a story about what happened in a village in the next valley.


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## Insolent Lad (Oct 19, 2020)

One of the characteristics of the novel when it first appeared was that it presented fiction in a realistic manner. This bothered some folks who felt this was akin to lying, but it does mark the beginning of realism in writing, and its clear differentiation from the romances that had preceded it. Until we had 'realism,' I don't think we could have 'fantasy' as something different from it.


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## Malik (Oct 19, 2020)

Insolent Lad said:


> One of the characteristics of the novel when it first appeared was that it presented fiction in a realistic manner. This bothered some folks who felt this was akin to lying, but it does mark the beginning of realism in writing, and its clear differentiation from the romances that had preceded it.



Adding for anyone who got here late that "romance" as it applied at the time doesn't refer to ripped bodices and sweaty bodies making squishing noises in a steaming humping mass. "Romance" referred to romantic prose: old-school adventure stories of heroes and knights and chivalrous feats of valor and whatever. If that's not fantasy, I don't know what is.

One of the defining features of the novel as opposed to romance literature was--and, arguably, still is--that the novel provides allegorical commentary on some aspect of life or society through a fictional narrative. This was the difference between novels and romances at the outset. Novels employed literary devices--subtext, allegory, imagery, irony, hyperbole, metaphor, the stuff of poetry--to create unspoken commentary. The words in a novel mean more than the concrete definitions of the words on the page. (This is still true today. If you have a 60,000-word book that has no subtext, i.e. written entirely concretely, you don't have a novel. You have a novel-length story. Which is great, but it's not the same thing.)

In this respect, novels were initially seen more like poetry: flowery, superficial, even vacuous. This is one of the reasons they were pooh-poohed in the early days. They weren't considered "serious" literature until later. Initially, many were considered scandalous as well for their commentary. Eventually, analyzing novels became an intellectual's game: "What he really meant was . . ." and so on, arguing over brandy late into the evening, and once it became the hip thing to do, well, here we are now.

But those fantasy stories were already around long before the novel. They were romantic literature, adventure stories of heroes and monsters with their roots going back twenty-five hundred years. The Odyssey was written in the 8th Century B.C. Heck, A Thousand and One Nights may date back to the 8th Century A.D., and it's full of magic and djinn and flying carpets and all that. We're standing on the shoulders of giants.


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## skip.knox (Oct 20, 2020)

Insolent Lad said:


> One of the characteristics of the novel when it first appeared was that it presented fiction in a realistic manner. This bothered some folks who felt this was akin to lying, but it does mark the beginning of realism in writing, and its clear differentiation from the romances that had preceded it. Until we had 'realism,' I don't think we could have 'fantasy' as something different from it.



I'd be interested to know when you would date the first appearance of novel as a literary form. I won't argue it, as there's plenty of room for opinions on this one. Whole dissertations have been written on it. Just idly curious.

Also, and equally idly <g>, when you reference romances, do you mean the _roman_ of the early modern era?

With apologies to the OP. As you can see, there's a huge range of possible answers to that question, but it would almost certainly not be one individual.


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## psychotick (Oct 20, 2020)

Ooh! Ooh! Again it was me on my time dragon. And it was last Friday when we went back. Don't remember exactly what date we arrived though. Dragons don't have dials! But I think it was some time after I invented the wheel!!!

Cheers, Greg.


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## skip.knox (Oct 20, 2020)

psychotick said:


> Ooh! Ooh! Again it was me on my time dragon. And it was last Friday when we went back. Don't remember exactly what date we arrived though. Dragons don't have dials! But I think it was some time after I invented the wheel!!!



I admit a time dragon is a novel idea.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Oct 27, 2020)

Kasper Hviid said:


> Tolkien.
> 
> Man, that one was easy!


TOLKIEN DID NOT INVENT FANTASY! FANTASY EXISTED FOR YEARS BEFORE TOLKIEN!


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## S.T. Ockenner (Oct 27, 2020)

A lot of people are using mythology as an example, however I would like to stress the fact that mythology is not fantasy, as it is religious in origin. You wouldn't call Abrahamic Mythology (the religious stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) fantasy, so don't call things like Hellenist Mythology or Old Norse Mythology fantasy. It is important to respect all religions.


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## Mad Swede (Oct 29, 2020)

Please define what you mean by fantasy. Mythology can be regarded (in modern terms) as a form of fantasy, but it is an area where sometimes faith/religion/belief and stories about people overlap as in Homer's The Odyssey and in the Elder Edda. Legends can also be seen as a form of fantasy, as with King Arthur and Beowulf, but are themselves sometimes connected to folklore as with Wayland. With legends and mythology it is important to note that for the people of the time those were often seen as true history and not as fantasy. So a lot depends on how you define fantasy.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Oct 29, 2020)

Mad Swede said:


> Please define what you mean by fantasy. Mythology can be regarded (in modern terms) as a form of fantasy, but it is an area where sometimes faith/religion/belief and stories about people overlap as in Homer's The Odyssey and in the Elder Edda. Legends can also be seen as a form of fantasy, as with King Arthur and Beowulf, but are themselves sometimes connected to folklore as with Wayland. With legends and mythology it is important to note that for the people of the time those were often seen as true history and not as fantasy. So a lot depends on how you define fantasy.


I agree that legends (such as Beowulf) are fantasy, but mythology is not.


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## Mad Swede (Oct 29, 2020)

Dark Lord Thomas Pie said:


> I agree that legends (such as Beowulf) are fantasy, but mythology is not.


Except that I don't classify mythology or legends as fantasy. As I wrote, for the people of the time they were real, not fantasy. And that was also why I asked Lancasrer for a definition of what they mean by fantasy.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Oct 29, 2020)

Mad Swede said:


> Except that I don't classify mythology or legends as fantasy. As I wrote, for the people of the time they were real, not fantasy. And that was also why I asked Lancasrer for a definition of what they mean by fantasy.


Myths were believed, but legends were not.


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## Mad Swede (Oct 29, 2020)

Dark Lord Thomas Pie said:


> Myths were believed, but legends were not.


Wait one. If I remember my teachers correctly, myths were used to explain the world around people and usually had a basis in some form of belief system. Legends were based on fact, though they often had larger than life descriptions of people and events. Both were believed by the people of the time, though for differing reasons.


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## Alexander Knight (Jan 30, 2021)

If you're looking for a technically correct answer, then I think many possibilities have already been described.
Generally speaking, I believe Tolkien is considered the father of fantasy because he was the first author to create a widely popular book in the genre.


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## Toby Johnson (Feb 8, 2021)

tolkien, then JK, then GRR


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

TOLKIEN DID NOT INVENT FANTASY!


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

MODERN FANTASY has been AROUND SINCE GEORGE MACDONALD and JOHN RUSKIN!!!!!!!!!1


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

MODERN FANTASY has been AROUND SINCE GEORGE MACDONALD and JOHN RUSKIN!!!!!!!!! IN 1841!


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

MODERN FANTASY has been AROUND SINCE GEORGE MACDONALD and JOHN RUSKIN!!!!!!!!! IN 1841!
 I CANNOT REITERATE THIS FACT ENOUGH: TOLKIEN. DID NOT. INVENT. MODERN FANTASY!!!!!!!!!!


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## A. E. Lowan (Feb 8, 2021)

Somebody's had a bit too much coffee this morning.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

I don't drink coffee


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## A. E. Lowan (Feb 8, 2021)

Coffee is life. *raises mug* Cheers.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 8, 2021)

Sounds like you have a bit of a coffee problem.  Have you tried tea, the superior beverage?
Also, TOLKIEN DID NOT INVENT MODERN FANTASY!


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## A. E. Lowan (Feb 8, 2021)

What, drink soggy leaf water? I take caffeine pills with coffee, thank you very much. Breakfast of champions.


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## skip.knox (Feb 8, 2021)

Coffee yes, but since discovering Scottish breakfast tea, I've been turning to that while I write. I have a Yeti mug, which keeps the liquid hot for an hour or even two. Let's me sip at it in a way that just doesn't work with coffee (I should add that I have an espresso machine and pretty much never drink American-style coffee any more. Unless there's donuts).


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## Prince of Spires (Feb 9, 2021)

Why not both? 

My day starts with an espresso and a cup of tea. Drink the espresso while the tea cools to the ideal drinking temperature. Best way to start the day.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Feb 9, 2021)

This started as a discussion about who invented fantasy (hint: NOT TOLKIEN!) then became the official tea and hot, inferior bean juice (otherwise known as coffee) thread. 
 On this topic, I must say I have become quite partial to the hot cocoa I have recently drank a few days ago.


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## Darkfantasy (Feb 10, 2021)

There is no inventor that we are aware of if you're talking about originality. Elves were invented long before novels even existed. Many fantasy creature existed in people's minds before we even wrote about them.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Mar 2, 2021)

Tolkien did not invent modern fantasy. In fact, the fantasy genre had already existed for YEARS maybe even DECADES before Tolkien, beginning in the form of Swords & Sorcery, and some early High Fantasy.
Here are some PRE-TOLKIEN Fantasy authors: 
 George MacDonald (_*The Princess and the Goblin*_ )
William Morris, who wrote _*The Well at the World's End*_ , which some believe to be the first High Fantasy novel
 Lewis Carroll (Alice In Wonderland) 
Robert E Howard (Conan The Barbarian)


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## Prince of Spires (Mar 4, 2021)

But Tolkien invented Fantasy! Everyone knows that... /s

On a more serious note, no one can claim to have invented fantasy. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. But there is a good argument for Tolkien being the father of modern high/epic fantasy. Though, that of course comes down to a definition of what modern fantasy actually is. I'll go with fantasy as we know it today. 

For starters, two of the tales you mentioned were childrens tales. And that is what much pre-Tolkien Fantasy was, children's tales. Conan was mainly novellete's published in magazines, not novels. Which doesn't mean they don't count, but it did limit the audience. I don't know the fourth, so I'll not comment. 

As for why Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy. His work defined the fantasy genre as we know it today. With his work, he codified what fantasy is. And for fantasy the decades between the publication of Lord of the Rings and 2000 were filled with either people trying to recreate Tolkien or a reaction to Tolkien. I think most of the tropes you find in fantasy in those years and today can be traced back to the Lord of the Rings. 

The Lord of the Rings also did something else. And that is show the world that Fantasy is a real and viable genre for adults. It showed that it was not just fairy-tales, children's stories and pulp tales. It made Fantasy main stream both for the readers and for publishers. 

I don't think you can find a western high / epic fantasy work today that is not influenced either by Tolkien directly, or by those who either copied him or reacted to him. And that is not something you can say about many other fantasy works. (Yes, technically you can say that about all the works which influenced Tolkien, but they lack the other two aspects I mentioned above, and those come together in Tolkien and from there he is the one writer from whom it branches out again)


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## S.T. Ockenner (Mar 4, 2021)

Prince of Spires said:


> For starters, two of the tales you mentioned were childrens tales. And that is what much pre-Tolkien Fantasy was, children's tales. Conan was mainly novellete's published in magazines, not novels. Which doesn't mean they don't count, but it did limit the audience. I don't know the fourth, so I'll not comment.


Conan was definitely not a children's book. There were a lot of...non child appropriate things in it. 



Prince of Spires said:


> Tolkien being the father of modern high/epic fantasy.


_Epic_ Fantasy, yes. _High_ Fantasy, _no_. High Fantasy means it is set in an imagined fantasy world, which also describes a few earlier works. 



Prince of Spires said:


> As for why Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy.


He is  not canonly regarded as beginning modern fantasy. Again, you're thinking in terms of modern meaning 20th and 21st century, but the 19th century was modern too, and brought us the beginning of modern fantasy, with children's fantasy books, and Swords & Sorcery. I do agree that Tolkien made it much more popular and commercially viable, and inspired most authors after him, but he did not invent it, nor did he ever claim to.


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## Nighty_Knight (Mar 6, 2021)

Prince of Spires said:


> But Tolkien invented Fantasy! Everyone knows that... /s
> 
> On a more serious note, no one can claim to have invented fantasy. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. But there is a good argument for Tolkien being the father of modern high/epic fantasy. Though, that of course comes down to a definition of what modern fantasy actually is. I'll go with fantasy as we know it today.
> 
> ...


How about William Morris?  Not really arguing with what else you said, just wondering.


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## Insolent Lad (Mar 7, 2021)

Nighty_Knight said:


> How about William Morris?.


Quite arguably the inventor of High Fantasy as we know it today, a completely self-contained fantasy world with no reference to our own.

As far as modern 'epic' fantasy goes, Eddison was certainly writing it before Tolkien. The Worm Ouroboros is an epic in every sense.


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## LAG (Mar 8, 2021)

Oral fantasy is as old as humanity.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Mar 8, 2021)

LAG said:


> Oral fantasy is as old as humanity.


Mythology is not Fantasy because it is religious. Would you call the Bible fantasy? No? Then don't call the ancient belief systems of humankind fantasy either.


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## LAG (Mar 8, 2021)

S.T. Ockenner said:


> Mythology is not Fantasy because it is religious. Would you call the Bible fantasy? No? Then don't call the ancient belief systems of humankind fantasy either.



If a father tells his son: "Son, in that cave, there lives a three-headed monster, so don't go in there," he is creating a fantastical narrative. We did not live in those ages, yet surely every myth revolves around a tale. Science Fiction did not exist from the beginning, that's for sure, yet, with so many eons of human existence, storytelling for the sake of storytelling surely did. Today, we have a very minuscule amount of total human existence recorded over all those many thousands of years--myths and legends transcribed from ancient civs which developed methods of data retention. Most of what is recorded from those times is 'mainstream', and then we don't even touch upon human cultures without a written language. Look at San and Australian paintings of anthropomorphic creatures, fantastical events, and tell me how such art is 'mythical' but not fantasy.

If you tell me that, for all the tens of thousands of years before the epic of Gilgamesh, and for a long time after that, humans did not invent fantastical tales to tell one another, I'd have to strongly disagree. The capability of artifice, narrative creation, and warping of reality for the sake of entertainment/moralizing did not suddenly pop up when Guttenberg set up his printing press, it has come with humanity all the way.

One must not see the surface of the ocean and ignore the fact that mountains exist beneath the waves.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Mar 8, 2021)

LAG said:


> If a father tells his son: "Son, in that cave, there lives a three-headed monster, so don't go in there," he is creating a fantastical narrative. We did not live in those ages, yet surely every myth revolves around a tale. Science Fiction did not exist from the beginning, that's for sure, yet, with so many eons of human existence, storytelling for the sake of storytelling surely did. Today, we have a very minuscule amount of total human existence recorded over all those many thousands of years--myths and legends transcribed from ancient civs which developed methods of data retention. Most of what is recorded from those times is 'mainstream', and then we don't even touch upon human cultures without a written language. Look at San and Australian paintings of anthropomorphic creatures, fantastical events, and tell me how such art is 'mythical' but not fantasy.
> 
> If you tell me that, for all the tens of thousands of years before the epic of Gilgamesh, and for a long time after that, humans did not invent fantastical tales to tell one another, I'd have to strongly disagree. The capability of artifice, narrative creation, and warping of reality for the sake of entertainment/moralizing did not suddenly pop up when Guttenberg set up his printing press, it has come with humanity all the way.
> 
> One must not see the surface of the ocean and ignore the fact that mountains exist beneath the waves.


Sure, but the old stories about Zeus and Thor are not fantasy. They are religious texts.


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## LAG (Mar 8, 2021)

S.T. Ockenner said:


> Sure, but the old stories about Zeus and Thor are not fantasy. They are religious texts.



Never made a succinct statement about Greco-Roman/Germanic mythology. Aesop's fables are a good example of non-religious storytelling from that era. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey up there too. Merely because a work references figures who were viewed in a religious sense at the time does not mean that the entire work should be considered a myth and ipso facto without fantastic elements. I wasn't there when Homer wrote his works, and just because his tales have historical and religious tie-ins don't mean that they can't be considered fantastical.

While the trails of Hercules had nationalistic and mythological meaning to the Grecians, Romans, and in a looser sense the Carthaginians, it doesn't mean that a rice farmer from the Qin Dynasty will not view them as pure fantasy and their own set of myths they grew up with as true.

Anyway, lotsa folk in the thread said about the same as me on the ageless nature of such tales and I tend to agree with them. I'm out.


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## S.T. Ockenner (Mar 8, 2021)

LAG said:


> Greco-Roman mythology.


Thor is not Greco-Roman. Thor is Norse.


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## LAG (Mar 8, 2021)

S.T. Ockenner said:


> Thor is not Greco-Roman. Thor is Norse.



Corrected to Germanic few minutes ago lol, missed it on first read : 3

Interesting that further south Odin was named Wotan/Wodan ... far too little info on ancient germanic myths, bit more with the celts. Norse had their sagas, which in turn inspired Tolkien greatly. Wonder to what extent and when Norse and Celtic myths intermixed in the Germanic tribes, not much written about their pantheon compared to the Celts.


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## Prince of Spires (Mar 9, 2021)

S.T. Ockenner said:


> Sure, but the old stories about Zeus and Thor are not fantasy. They are religious texts.


I'm not sure we can make that as a blanket statement or that they shared a similar purpose as the bible for instance. We don't know nearly enough about those texts and how they were used or interpreted. Especially on the Norse mythologies, we only have a few surviving bits and pieces and very little knowledge of what they did with them. For comparisson, if society collapses tomorrow and in a thousand years the only surviving text people dig up is the Silmarillion, then you will have people claim we worshiped the Valar and believed elves used to rule the world and so on. 

There is definitely religious components in there and they played a part in the religious believes of people. But parts of those stories are also just about Thor and Loki doing weird stuff for instance. Or about dwarves and gnomes and giants and so on doing stuff. It is by no means certain that all those tales were told as religious texts and were not simply a storyteller making up some fun tale to tell around a campfire at night. 

The telling of stories was a serious business, especially before the printing press came around and everyone could read. Take the Kalevalla for instance, the Finish epic folk tale which in part inspired Tolkien. It's a tale which in various forms was passed down through generations. There's a bunch of religious parts in there as well. But it's mainly just a tale which singers performed at gatherings. And this tale was only codified in the 1800's. Before then, it would change with each telling and each performer. Same with much of the mythologies. The versions we have are those which were written down at some point. But before that each town had its own version and the stories would change with the telling. Homer didn't create the Odyssey, he just wrote down a version which was performed. You can still see the evidence of that in the way phrases and descriptions are often repeated, which is a common trick of folk storytellers to remember stuff.


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