Fantasy without Tolkien

 So, here's an interesting thought experiment: what would fantasy literature look like if there had been no J . R. R. Tolkien?

To which my immediate reply wd be to paraphrase Mark Twain's response when asked what men would be like without women, to which he replied that they'd be 'mighty scarce'.

A more measured response wd note that we'd certainly still have fantasy if Tolkien had died in the Somme in 1916 (as he v. nearly did).  Morris and Dunsany and Eddison, et al. wd still have written THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END, THE BOOK OF WONDER, THE WORM OUROBOROS, &c. But we'd have very little sense that these books belonged together in a genre called 'fantasy'. Aside from writing THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Tolkien's greatest contribution to fantasy was to create a sense that there was such a thing. In THE LORD OF THE RINGS he provided the paradigm that transformed all the rest into precursors and followers. That is not to say THE HOBBIT and THE SILMARILLION were not important. They were. But they lacked the transformative power of his masterpiece.

A second take on this wd be to assume Tolkien survives the Somme and writes all the works he did write in the real world up until circa 1930. That year he for the first and, as it wd turn out, only time in his life, had a complete draft of all the constitute parts that he intended made up the 1930 Silmarillion: the Quenta, the Annals of Valinor, and the Annals of Beleriand. What if Tolkien had devoted the years 1930-1932 to polishing, submitting, and getting published his mythology?

The result, I think, wd have been that THE SILMARILLION wd now be remembered as one of those rare, quirky works like LUD-IN-THE-MIST or THE BOOK OF THREE DRAGONS, magnificent in their isolation. We'd have no HOBBIT, no LORD OF THE RINGS, no 'Tolk-clones but also no shelves in the bookstores labelled 'fantasy/sci fi' 

Anyway, here's the link to the original publication; Thanks to Paul W. for the link.

https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/...

--John R.

current reading: Evageline Walton's THE CHILDREN OF LLYR (1971)