Tolkien's impact on fantasy
One of the first was Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series of novels, starting in 1968, which used Tolkienian archetypes such as wizards, a disinherited prince, a magical ring, a quest, and dragons.
J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar of English literature, a philologist and medievalist interested in language and poetry from the Middle Ages, especially that of Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Europe.
His professional knowledge of works such as Beowulf shaped his fictional world of Middle-earth, including his high fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.
The heroes encounter multiple sentient races, including both free peoples like elves and dwarves, and monsters like trolls and giant spiders.
[15] The impression of depth in particular helps to make Middle-earth feel like what Tom Shippey has called "a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world about which [Tolkien] had no time [then] to speak".
[8] As another example, the heraldry helps to convey impressions such as the "evident majesty" of the hero Aragorn:[16] upon the foremost ship a great standard broke, and the wind displayed it as she turned towards the Harlond.
He established as stock fantasy elements, familiar and attractive to readers, the distinct races of Elves, Dwarves, Ents, Trolls, Orcs, and Hobbits.
[28][29] Tolkien's works brought fantasy literature a new degree of mainstream acclaim; numerous polls named The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the century.
[30] The author and editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Brian Attebery, writes that fantasy is defined "not by boundaries but by a centre", which is The Lord of the Rings.
Lin Carter edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series from 1969, reprinting Morris, Dunsany, MacDonald, and Mirrlees, alongside some new works.
[24] Among these were Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld and Jane Yolen's The Magic Three of Solatia, Tolkien-inspired fantasies for young adults written in the mid-1970s.
[38] Yolen comments that while some of the writing was good, "what began in grace and power easily degenerated into a kind of mythic silliness", with "pastel unicorns, coy talking swords, and a paint-by-number medieval setting with the requisite number of dirty inns, evil wizards, and gentle hairy-footed beings of various sexual persuasions.
It's a format that accounts for an awful lot of what appears on the fantasy shelves of our bookshops, from The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks to the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling.
The format may be safe and comfortable, but it represents only a very tiny proportion of what fantasy can do...[39] — Paul Kincaid In 1977, Lester Del Rey, seeking to mirror Tolkien's work, published Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara.
[40][41][42][a] Despite this, it gained the sort of breakthrough success that Del Rey had hoped for;[32] it became the first fantasy novel to appear on, and eventually to top, the New York Times bestseller list.
[44] Guy Gavriel Kay, who had assisted Christopher Tolkien with the editing of The Silmarillion, later wrote his own Tolkien-influenced fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry (1984–86), complete with dwarves and mages.
[45] Fantasy series such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld and Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker were "undoubtedly" influenced by Tolkien.
[46] In 1992, Martin H. Greenberg edited a festschrift collection of short stories by 19 fantasy authors including Yolen, Stephen R. Donaldson, Terry Pratchett, Poul and Karen Anderson, and Peter S. Beagle on the centenary of Tolkien's birth.
Stirling's "Emberverse" series includes a character obsessed with The Lord of the Rings who creates a post-apocalyptic community based Tolkien's Elves and Dúnedain.
[32] Other prominent fantasy writers including George R. R. Martin, Michael Swanwick, Raymond E. Feist, Poul Anderson, Karen Haber, Harry Turtledove, Charles De Lint, and Orson Scott Card have acknowledged Tolkien's work as an inspiration.
[50][48] Pullman states that he disagrees with Lewis's answer to questions about the existence of God and the purpose of life, and asserts that Tolkien "doesn't touch [those issues] at all.
"[57] The scholar of folklore Dimitra Fimi suggests a third group of Tolkien-influenced authors, the British fantasists Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and Diana Wynne Jones.
Peter Jackson's 2001–3 The Lord of the Rings film series brought Tolkien to the cinema screen, gaining him, and fantasy in general, a new and very large audience.
