S.T. Ockenner
Istar
I don't drink coffee
Conan was definitely not a children's book. There were a lot of...non child appropriate things in it.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.
Epic Fantasy, yes. High Fantasy, no. High Fantasy means it is set in an imagined fantasy world, which also describes a few earlier works.Tolkien being the father of modern high/epic 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.As for why Tolkien is the father of modern fantasy.
How about William Morris? Not really arguing with what else you said, just wondering.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)
Quite arguably the inventor of High Fantasy as we know it today, a completely self-contained fantasy world with no reference to our own.How about William Morris?.
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.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.
Sure, but the old stories about Zeus and Thor are not fantasy. They are religious texts.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.
Thor is not Greco-Roman. Thor is Norse.Greco-Roman mythology.
Thor is not Greco-Roman. Thor is Norse.