Eorl
The Scythians of the Hellenic era probably fit the bill.
The Scythians of ancient Greek times and the Huns (Attila!) near the end of the Roman Empire. I think the later versions of the Ostrogoths were highly equestrian, and perhaps also the first Turks to appear in the ME from out of Central Asia.
The Mongols (fl. ca. 1250-1375) were too late to trade with the Vikings, whose era may fairly be siad to have ended at Stamfordbridge in 1066. The Mongols wouild have obtained their first great numbers of caucasian slaves from the Kievan Rus, who they conquered in the 13th century.
The criticism I take seriously is that he is unreadable if you don’t encounter him until you’re over the age of say, 12.
We argued this in threads when the first LotR movie came out. My position was that the vast, overwhelming majority of Tolkien lovers first read the books when they were kids, or teens at most but the vast, overwhelming majority of those who tried to read him first as adults felt that he was at best a one-time read with nothing to make them enthusiastic. I’ve never seen any convincing evidence against this.
Most literary critics of his day and long after, until the generation that read him in paperback starting in the 60s grew up, would have encountered him as adults. Even those who were conversant with science fiction generally as a genre tend to find Tolkien a puzzling writer to champion. He is boring, wordy, meandering, low on characterization, uninterested in standard politics and conflict (in the broadest sense) except for a fetish on honor and duty, and overintent on creating a world based on the British class system and the pastoral village.
The real question is why any literary critic would do anything but place him at the bottom of the scale of literary values.
What Exapno Mapcase and the others unimpressed with Tolkien’s writing chops said. Good lord, he needed an editor with a broadaxe.
Make that about 1150-1175 for the beginning of the Mongol rise to power-- I think Genghis died in the early 1200s.
I’m glad a few dark horses have shown up to agree with me.
All SFF writers are in love with their worlds and over-invent them, Gorsnak. The good ones get over themselves and keep 95% of what they know about the world to themselves, even if they are Oxford dons who thought it would be fun to invent some languages. I have a Ph.D. in linguistics and I write SFF. Believe me, I understand.
There is a difference between liking Tolkein’s world, even liking his characters, and doing literary criticism of him.
Yep. Having readers at all was a secondary interest at best, and he would have been happy to go without some that he did acquire. Never mind editing with a mind to increasing readership!
Also, critics’ being “conversant with science fiction generally as a genre” should not have helped with Tolkien, as his work contains nothing of the sort.
Are you saying he was TRYING to be long winded? Because even the people I know who are ardent Tolkien fans generally admit that, yes, brevity was not what he did best.
Good grief, no. Lolita is brilliant. LOTR is Beowulf for children.
And who cares how many books sold, other than the Tolkiens and Nabokovs?
I use science fiction in the common generic sense used by those in the field so it includes all varieties and genres including fantasy. There once was a separate fantasy tradition that Tolkien was hewing to, but that was the province of a tiny few specialists. Fantasy and science fiction normally appeared in the same venues by the time Tolkien put out The Hobbit and were completely melded by the time of LotR. The early *Astounding *published Lovecraft and Weird Tales published Edward Hamilton. Robert Heinlein appeared simultaneously in *Astounding *and *Unknown *and at that time both were edited by John W. Campbell. Fantasy Press published nothing but science fiction and the *Avon Fantasy Reader *started its first issue with Murray Leinster. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was the most successful post-war magazine. I’m an expert on Gnome Press and that published Asimov and Clarke alongside Robert E. Howard, spending the entire 50s mixing fantasy, science fantasy, and science fiction.
The reviews for LotR when it first appeared in Britain were decidedly mixed. Some gave it the same treatment that Harry Potter got from critics. In 1973 Brian Aldiss published a major history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, but also covered fantasy. He wrote, “Tolkien’s prose, the very shaping vehicle of his story, is bland and universalised. It has no particular characteristic, apart from the joining of long sentences by “and,” which can become wearying.” He was trying to separate the book from what he called its “cult.” In the 40 years since that’s become almost impossible to do.
Well, that just seems stupid. It makes me think less of the experts. If you’re going to lump the two genres together, they fit best under a “fantasy” label, not under a “science fiction” label. You can say that science fiction is a form of fantasy using an allusion to science as a base. But you can’t have science fiction without science.
There are certainly some people who favor the use of fantasy for exactly that reason.
But that’s not the way the English language works. You can try to defend or deride a usage on the grounds of logic, but you might as well scream at a wall. The language evolves and the common speech becomes the common speech.
I notice “science fiction” means something different at the end of the paragraph than it did at the beginning.
Yes, “classic” or “mainstream” science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, and gave its name to the whole field. It’s similar to the way “whodunit” once was used to refer to the entire set of mystery subgenres, although that’s no longer common. If one referred to the entire field as fantasy, fantasy would also be a subgenre of itself.
The English language is quite fascinating once you start to study it.
And ever so very flexible! 
May I ask where you are from and what circles of literary criticism you’re reading? Could you cite an example of a critic describing Tolkien as “science fiction”? Thanks.
No critical cites, but back in the 60s the genre hadn’t been balkanized and there was nowhere else to put Tolkien. Didn’t help that hardly nobody else was writing Fantasy at the time.
Briant Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree is subtitled “The True History of Science Fiction.”
He does not label Tolkien as science fiction, nor do I. What he does is include Tolkien among discussion of the field that is broadly labeled “Science Fiction.” Just as Adam Roberts does in The History of Science Fiction. And Edward James in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.
I’m not sure how to make this clearer. Unless you are writing a specialist work, in today’s language “science fiction” is the broad term that subsumes, among many other subgenres, fantasy.