Andre Norton
Ursula Le Guin
Leigh Brackett
Marion Zimmer Bradley raises serious ethical issues, but before her personal life became public knowledge, she was highly influential on the genre.
The Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Thousand and One Nights
Lewis Carrol - Alice in Wonderland
Frank Baum - Oz
CS Lewis - Narnia
Hans Christian Andersen
Arthurian Legend
The Mabinogion
Various Mythologies (particularly Greek and Norse)
Christian Mythology
I think that, between those, you could probably void Tolkien from the Earth and still have everything in Fantasy pretty well covered. Obviously, Orcs wouldn’t be as well-known, but I wouldn’t say that we are dependent on Tolkien for the creation of fantasy, by a long shot. Though, certainly, he was a strong instrument in re-popularizing it as a genre for adults.*
- Re-popularizing since, obviously, Arthurian legend had been quite popular at one time and I do believe that was mostly written for adults.
Jack Vance’s work inspired George Martin among others; The magic system in D&D is based on how magic works in Vance’s Dying Earth series.
Not Safe for Work, but Google “Frazetta Eowyn” – woo! Poor old Professor Tolkien would have a heart attack right on the spot!
(And how anyone could ride with her for a week and not know she’s a woman is beyond comprehension. The Rohirrim must all be blind!)
I’ll admit that when I originally wrote my previous post, I used Franz Frazetta as a reference rather than Boris Vallejo. But then I remembered that Frazetta had done illustrations for Tolkien’s work.
That said, I think the resulting images were at least 90% Frazetta and, at most, 10% Tolkien.
I came in here to say this one as well. Not only what Sailboat mentioned but also the idea of a Troll that regenerates and hates fire comes from it as well.
Or wear much below the waist besides a chain-mail g-string.
Without Tolkien, would we still have the large-scale epic fantasy?* I don’t think any of the above really wrote the sort of single, long, large-scale narrative that Tolkien developed.
(*MHO: Yes, but later and less ubiquitously.)
I was surprised to learn that Sylvia Townsend Warner did not write Kingdoms of Elfin until 1977.
Yes, Vance’s work has had an enormous influence on later fantasy writers, probably greater than any other than Tolkien
I think TH White’s the Once & Future King was the most important Arthurian book of the Twentieth Century, until Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. (I prefer White’s, all in all, but Bradley’s feminist retelling was hugely influential.)
In re Conan, Fafhrd & Gray Mouser:
Note that Robert Howard & Fritz Lieber were friends with HP Lovecraft. Their books were influenced by what would come to be called the Cthulhu Mythos, (in ways obvious and not so.) Initially, the authors all chatted regularly about their works. After Lovecraft’s death, August Derleth took over as the doyenne of the Mythos, promoting its, for want of a better word, canon.
The Mythos itself has become a common modern touchstone that pops up in all sorts of other artistic endeavors. It’s really kind of fascinating how pervasive the ideas have become, given that the original stories themselves are kind of sketchy, quality-wise. But I think the pseudo-scholarly tone adopted in the original Lovecraft works provide an excellent sort of “foundation” for a modern mythology. That the original works feel so dated lends a certain patina of history to these stories of antique horrors.
Anyway - linkage
Overview of the Mythos-
A partial list of references to the Mythos -
TV Tropes entry for H. P. Lovecraft
And TV Tropes again with a list of tropes that include Chuluian references
E. Nesbit deserves a mention. She had a significant influence on later children’s fantasy, including that of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.
The Greek, Roman & Norse Myths are a powerful influence.
I have a copy ofHalf-Magic, & Edward Eager was inspired by Nesbit.
I think that length and realism are features of a writer’s personality more than they are an aspect of writing influences.
LoTR is basically Heart of Darkness: the Fantasy Novel expanded to 3000 pages. So certainly the “epic” part was available for readers to read even if we voided out Arthurian Legend. And Tolkien presumably wrote a 3000 page monster because that’s just how he wrote. From HoD, we know that the same story can be told in many thousands fewer pages.
And the poetic tales of the Arthurian legends are quite condensed.
What is HoD?
Heart of Darkness, an 1899 novel about a group of men who treck through a hostile wilderness towards the “heart of darkness”. In the LoTR that means taking out Sauron. In HoD, it means finding and bringing back Mr. Kurtz.
It’s been mentioned before, but Robert E. Howard… and the book covers by Frazetta… can’t be stressed enough. Conan the Barbarian was the epitome of the wandering sword swinging murder hobo, and still remains the fictional barbarian archetype in modern fantasy.
Although Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I think, still deserve their time in the sun. Why hasn’t anyone made a TV series or movie out of them yet? You’d think the rights would go for peanuts…
While it’s true that some finer works like HoD are influential, I did not read HoD until someone made me do it for a grade. Conan the Barbarian, on the other hand…
Thank god, I was afraid you meant Heretics of Dune.
In the first half of the nineteenth century there was an explosion of interest in the medieval period–The Pre-Raphaelites were founded in 1848; Tennyson wrote or began his *Lady of Shalott *and *Idylls of the King *about 1832; and a bit later Gerald Manley Hopkins renewed interest in Beowulf.
By the time Tolkien got around to writing The Hobbit, Britain had been immersed in swords and sorcery and knights and witches and monsters for over a century.