What came before Tolkein?

[Dilbertian]

I’m revisiting Middle Earth for the first time in decades, and realise for the first time how derivative so much of the swords-and-sorcery genre is, how influential Tokein’s books have been. I realise that stories of wizards, elves, dwarves and orcs etc have been around since forever, but was Tolkein the first to combine them all in one three-dimensional mythological universe, each group with its own mythology and language?

I think he pretty much invented the modern fantasy industry.

Unfortunately, he has been a victim of his own success, and of the industry he spawned. Today, we think of fantasy as childish and silly. We associate it with Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons. And Tolkien gets lumped in with that. But he was a serious scholar. He was an Oxford Professor ffs, a man who used to read Dante in Italian and the Icelandic Sagas in Old Norse. He even translated Beowulf from Anglo-Saxon! LOTRs is a serious work. You could write a PhD on the numerous literary influences, from The Divine Comedy to The Iliad and Wagner’s Ring cycle (which Tolkien had read in the original German btw).

Nothing childish or silly about Tolkein. His language is as lush as Dickens’, and his plots far less laboured and sensationalist.

TBH I have never thought of this genre as childish or silly. Some of the writing is, but that can surely be the case in any genre. I suspect it’s seen as easier to write.

A lot of the pieces were in German myths (which had come from Norse but then been more fragmented) which was being developed with the rise of Germany as a single country in the 19th century (eg the ‘Nibelunglied). Tolkien took this and turned it into a much more established mythology.

Lord Dunsany (The King of Elfland’s Daughter) was an earlier fantasy writer. I have vague memories of a book of his being in the library when I was a teenager but I can’t remember if I actually read it.

Then there’s George Macdonald Fraser’s children books that write about goblins underground.

There was also a literary trend for women especially to write fairy stories in 18th century France (Beauty and the Beast is the one that is still read) and then there is Hans Christian Andersen’s work. There’s also lots of poetry on fantasy themes (eg Christina Rossetti Goblin Market or Tennyson’s Arthurian poems).

So I think there was definitely fantasy writing of various sorts before him (as opposed to collecting fairy stories etc like the Brothers Grimm) but you would need to read a biography / critical writing to see which ones were direct influence & how original his work was. I suspect what makes his work so enduring is the combination of fantasy themes with his academic knowledge and the influence of his war experience. As you say, he had to be a great writer to make it all work.

There were others - mostly British, it seems to me - like Lord Dunsany, George MacDonald, and E. R. Eddison, but none seemed to get a grip on the mainstream before then.

William Morris (1834–1896)

Somebody once pointed out to me the similarities between LOTRs and Dante’s Divine Comedy. They are really striking. Tolkien and C S Lewis used to read Dante out loud to one another (in the original Italian of course). On top of that, there is the influence of Anglo-Saxon literature, the Icelandic sagas, Germanic myth, etc. Tolkien’s knowledge of Northern European myth was staggering. He knew it inside out.

C S Lewis’ knowledge was even deeper than Tolkien’s. The Narnia books, as well as being beautifully written, are so full of literary echoes and allusions that people have written PhDs on them.

I came across Lord Dunsany in one of John Julius Norwich’s collections and in case others have not had the pleasure:

And were you pleased?” they asked of Helen in Hell.
“Pleased?” answered she, “when all Troy’s towers fell,
And dead were Priam’s sons, and lost his throne,
And such a war was fought as none had known,
And even the gods took part, and all because
Of me alone? Pleased?
….”I should say I was!”

Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (and the anthology of his shorts, Time and the Gods) would be my first choice, but since that’s already been suggested, you could try Clark Ashton Smith, who’s more in the weird fiction category, but a bit Tolkienesque.

There are two standout women fantasy writers whose work was mostly published in pulp magazines in the 40s and 50s, CL Moore and Leigh Brackett. Their work, like Dunsany’s and Ashton Smith’s, is presently in print in collections by Gollancz.