Major fantasists before Tolkien

[Alchemist]

By "major" I mean with some lasting impact, influence, and works that are considered significant in the history of fantasy literature. The reason I ask is that I'm working on an impossible project: Compiling a list of the 100 or so "greatest" fantasists and/or greatest fantasy novels (still not sure the parameters I want to use). It is actually easier to do this with older authors as their impact and output is essentially set-in-stone.

By before Tolkien, I really mean before The Lord of the Rings, so authors whose output was mainly before the 1950s. I'm also including only those authors who did a significant amount of fantasy, and who are generally considered "fantasy writers"--or genre writers who did a lot of fantasy. I'm also emphasizing adult fantasy. So authors that I'm not looking at include: L Frank Baum, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll, JM Barrie, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. All of these authors, and others, are either considered children's authors, adventure writers, science fiction authors who included fantastical elements, gothic authors, etc. I considered all of them, and some I was really unsure whether to include them or not...I could change my mind!

One little bit of trivia that I found interesting: Tolkien was born (1892) 14 years before Robert E Howard (b. 1906), but Howard's entire body of work was written before The Hobbit was published in 1937, as Howard died in 1936. For the sake of this list, I consider Howard "before Tolkien."

Finally, I'm using the somewhat arbitrary--but often considered--Phantastes (1858) by George MacDonald as my starting point. There were novels being written before Phantastes, obviously, many of which had fantastical elements, but a lot of scholars consider Phantastes to be the first true "fantasy novel," perhaps because it was by around that time that realism had emerged as the dominant form, thus fantasy became a genre to realism, where in the 16-17th century and before, stories were generally fantastical in nature. So while The Epic of Gilgamesh may be the first written "fantasy story," Phantastes is a good choice, in my opinion, for first modern fantasy novel.

Feel free to discuss, argue, etc. But again, I'm not trying to be comprehensive, but distinguish between "major" and minor authors. There are probably hundreds of pre-Tolkien fantasy authors whose work has been out of print for decades. In a way, these are all authors that made a comeback in the "Golden Age" of fantasy after Tolkien, the 60s and 70s, and have stuck around as being worthy of note, to varying degrees.

Enough of that. Here's my list of major fantasy authors before Tolkien, with years of life and some major works. I'm listing them in terms of their birth year.

1. George MacDonald (1824-1905): Phantastes (1858), Lilith (1895)
2. William Morris (1834-1896): Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World's End (1896)
3. Arthur Machen (1863-1947): "The Great God Pan" and other short stories
4. Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951): Various short stories
5. David Lindsay (1876-1945): Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
6. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918): The House on the Borderlands (1908)
7. Lord Dunsany (1878-1957): King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), The Book of Wonder (1912)
8. James Branch Cabell (1879-1958): Jurgen (1919)
9. E.R. Eddison (1882-1945): The Worm Ouroborus (1922), Zimiamvia Trilogy (1935-58)
10. Abraham Merritt (1884-1943): Ship of Ishtar (1926)
11. Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978): Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)
12. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937): Cthulhu mythos, staring with "Call of Cthulhu" (1926)
13. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961): Zothique, Hyperborea, various short stories
14. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963): Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56), Space Trilogy (sf; 1938-45)
15. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936): Conan stories in Weird Tales (1932-36), Soloman Kane, Kull, etc
16. Mervyn Peake (1911-1968): Titus Groan (1946) and sequels
17. C.L. Moore (1911-1987): Jirel of Joiry stories (1935-39), compiled as Jirel of Joiry (1970)

A few more comments. One author that was born within this group is Evangeline Walton (1907-1996), whose Virgin and the Swine was first published in 1936, but wasn't reissued--with sequels following--in 1970 Island of the Mighty, when it became the first novel of the Mabinogion tetralogy and is better known as an author of the 70s.

You might also take issue with my inclusion of Lovecraft, who is equal (if not greater) parts horror and even science fiction, but I think that Lovecraft is best considered as "dark fantasy" and his work--as spanning multiple sub-genres--is best classified, in my opinion, within the "mother genre" of fantasy.

Merritt is another author that might be closer to Haggard and Burroughs than many on this list, but I think he veers over the line enough to be considered primarily a fantasist.

Lindsay too could probably be classified as scifi, but I think his influence is primarily--at least equally--on the fantasy world.

You might also notice the lack of Fritz Leiber. Even though many of his stories were published in the 30s and 40s, I'm including him in the next group because the vast majority of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories were published in the 50s and later.

So I'd love to get feedback. The next group on my list is longer, and includes authors who published mainly in the "post-Tolkien" world up until the commercialization of the late 70s, although one or two (e.g. Jack Vance) published just before Tolkien, but mainly wrote after. There is no real easy way to separate eras, or even before and after Tolkien, but I did my best!

 

[KatG]

I think you'd have to put in T.H. White. I don't know that you can leave The Once and Future King out, as it is a work of considerable impact and influence on fantasy authors afterwards. And you'd need Poe in there, but I don't know what the parameters are exactly, but if you have Lovecraft, then you'd need Poe too, I think. Randy might be helpful with this list if he sees it.

 

[Alchemist]

I have T.H. White in the next list, as The Once and Future King was published in its revised and expanded version in 1958, a few years after LotR. But yeah, The Sword in the Stone was 1938, so a year after The Hobbit.

I'll think about Poe. I tried explaining the parameters, but basically if we look at cross-genre authors in a Venn diagram, I tried to imagine whether an author "primarily" belonged to fantasy, or at least had a large enough segment of their corpus in fantasy. I felt that Lovecraft qualified, but not Wells, Verne, etc. I think Poe is far less a fantasist than other things. And then there's the pre-Phantastes factor.

 

[KatG]

Well, you are going to have a tricky issue with horror. Because horror is made up of fantasy, science fiction and non-SFF stories. Poe wrote mainly fantasy horror, some non-SFF horror and brushed science fiction gently a few times. But fantasy horror is basically part of the fantasy field and Poe was a seminal author in establishing that. Poe affected a lot of dark fantasy and other fantasy authors just like Lovecraft and Howard.

You also have Fritz Leiber who was a major influence on the fantasy field and who started a chunk of his career before LOTR pub date. And there's also the issue that LOTR, while popular before Ace did their illegal pub followed by Ballantine's legal pub, didn't really become the gigantic fantasy influence until those editions, so more around 1963-1965. And much of the impact he had came in part because the early sixties were when the U.S. publishers decided to launch a distinct fantasy category market and put out a lot more fantasy titles. But I'm still unclear what the parameters here are, so whatever works for your purposes.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

T.H. White? Hell, yes. And Hannes Bok, Leslie Barringer, John Meyers Meyers, Francis Marion Crawford, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Bramah, Kenneth Grahame, maybe Eric Linklater (kid stuff, but good). Going way back, Voltaire for Candide, Samuel Johnson for Rasselas, Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queen. Malory for Le Morte d'Arthur, anonymous (that ever so prolific fellow) for Beowulf.

These roots run deep. If you want a good grounding in pre-Tolkienish fantasy, collect the Ballantine classic series edited by Lin Carter from the late sixties and early seventies, before Terry Brooks et alia dumbed the genre down.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Lieber

Leiber. Lieber ist nicht richtig.

I'm sensitive to the spelling because I used to mispronounce it as LEE-ber until one day my rudimentary grasp of German broke through the fog of habit and I realized it ought to be LYE-ber

 

[Alchemist]

Well, you are going to have a tricky issue with horror. Because horror is made up of fantasy, science fiction and non-SFF stories. Poe wrote mainly fantasy horror, some non-SFF horror and brushed science fiction gently a few times. But fantasy horror is basically part of the fantasy field and Poe was a seminal author in establishing that. Poe affected a lot of dark fantasy and other fantasy authors just like Lovecraft and Howard.

You also have Fritz Lieber who was a major influence on the fantasy field and who started a chunk of his career before LOTR pub date. And there's also the issue that LOTR, while popular before Ace did their illegal pub followed by Ballantine's legal pub, didn't really become the gigantic fantasy influence until those editions, so more around 1963-1965. And much of the impact he had came in part because the early sixties were when the U.S. publishers decided to launch a distinct fantasy category market and put out a lot more fantasy titles. But I'm still unclear what the parameters here are, so whatever works for your purposes.

That's a good point about LotR not really making a huge impact until the 60s. I considered that. Actually, I probably presented this wrong in that what I'm doing is a much larger project--trying to define the 100ish most influential fantasy authors and their major works as a personal reference. I'm basically trying to simmer down all fantasy authors to only those who had a significant and at least somewhat lasting impact on the genre. "Pre-Tolkien" is only the first group of that list; by separating them out, I'm starting a conversation that I didn't really intend to have--about nitpicking what is pre-Tolkien, contemporary to Tolkien, and what came after.

A bit more (edited in half an hour later)...I agree about horror. It is tricky. I like John Clute's probably failed attempt to introduce the term "Fantastika," which includes fantasy, horror and science fiction as three "cousins." But I do think we can more closely link the dark fantasy of Lovecraft or Machen to fantasy than we can the popular lit with supernatural twists of King and Koontz.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

I'm starting a conversation that I didn't really intend to have--about nitpicking what is pre-Tolkien, contemporary to Tolkien, and what came after.

You have to start with an understanding that before the Ballantine editions of Tolkien, fantasy for adult readers was a pretty rare bird. I got the Ballantines in early 1966 and I can remember reading one of them in Grade 12 math class -- the teacher was insane and spent the period reminiscing out loud about his early life -- when the guy behind me asked me what I was reading.

Now, he was one of the brightest kids in the school, maybe even brighter than I was (my IQ score was in the top third of one per cent back then) but I had to stretch a little to explain the books to him. I couldn't say, "Adult fantasy," because the publishers' marketing departments had not yet invented the term. I remember telling him it was "kind of a fairy tale for adults." Which satisfied his curiosity at the time.

Before Tolkien, adult fantasy was a niche market within "speculative fiction" -- as yet also an uninvented term, and itself a niche market. Its practitioners were almost as thin on the ground as its readers. Here's a clue: there was no such thing as a World Fantasy Award until 1975.

Tolkien created the appetite, which was initially partially satisfied by reprints of Victorian, Edwardian, and early 20th-century authors. Then came Terry Brooks and the dumbing down, followed by an avalanche of everything from Tanith Lee to Karl Edward Wagner and all the others since.

So I think you'll find that none of the pre-Tolkiens were all that influential. They had few readers and therefore little impact. As I've said in another post, if you think of Tolkien as Jesus and Brooks as Saul of Tarsus -- one providing the content, the other the marketing to the whole wide world -- you'll have the picture about right.

 

[Alchemist]

T.H. White? Hell, yes. And Hannes Bok, Leslie Barringer, John Meyers Meyers, Francis Marion Crawford, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Bramah, Kenneth Grahame, maybe Eric Linklater (kid stuff, but good). Going way back, Voltaire for Candide, Samuel Johnson for Rasselas, Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queen. Malory for Le Morte d'Arthur, anonymous (that ever so prolific fellow) for Beowulf.

These roots run deep. If you want a good grounding in pre-Tolkienish fantasy, collect the Ballantine classic series edited by Lin Carter from the late sixties and early seventies, before Terry Brooks et alia dumbed the genre down.

Yes to the last, but I also stated in the OP that I'm looking at modern fantasy starting (around) George MacDonald. If we include Spenser and Malory and Dante and Shakespeare while we're at it, we might as well include Virgil, Homer and whoever wrote Gilgamesh and...well, it goes on.

I can't remember where I read it, but someone said that fantasy--as a literary genre--really only emerged in the 19th century when realism was established as the dominant form. Before that almost all stories were "fantasy." But when the novel emerged and trended towards realism, fantasy returned--perhaps arising from the fertile soil of Romanticism.

As for your list, Myers Myers is probably an oversight and should be included. Bramah, too. Burroughs I already spoke of as being on the border of my criteria as to what is fantasy. Certainly influential, though...but then that opens the door to Haggard. Not sure if the others--Barringer, Crawford--pass the muster of influence, though. And of course Grahame is a bit more towards the children's lit side of things.

 

[Alchemist]

You have to start with an understanding that before the Ballantine editions of Tolkien, fantasy for adult readers was a pretty rare bird. I got the Ballantines in early 1966 and I can remember reading one of them in Grade 12 math class -- the teacher was insane and spent the period reminiscing out loud about his early life -- when the guy behind me asked me what I was reading.

Now, he was one of the brightest kids in the school, maybe even brighter than I was (my IQ score was in the top third of one per cent back then) but I had to stretch a little to explain the books to him. I couldn't say, "Adult fantasy," because the publishers' marketing departments had not yet invented the term. I remember telling him it was "kind of a fairy tale for adults." Which satisfied his curiosity at the time.

Before Tolkien, adult fantasy was a niche market within "speculative fiction" -- as yet also an uninvented term, and itself a niche market. Its practitioners were almost as thin on the ground as its readers. Here's a clue: there was no such thing as a World Fantasy Award until 1975.

Tolkien created the appetite, which was initially partially satisfied by reprints of Victorian, Edwardian, and early 20th-century authors. Then came Terry Brooks and the dumbing down, followed by an avalanche of everything from Tanith Lee to Karl Edward Wagner and all the others since.

So I think you'll find that none of the pre-Tolkiens were all that influential. They had few readers and therefore little impact. As I've said in another post, if you think of Tolkien as Jesus and Brooks as Saul of Tarsus -- one providing the content, the other the marketing to the whole wide world -- you'll, have the picture about right.

Good stuff, Matthew. I hope it was clear that I am going from the understanding that adult fantasy was rare before Tolkien, which is why I'm not including others like Carroll, Barrie, Baum, and Graham.

What you say about "Brooks and the dumbing down" partially explains why I love the fantasy produced in the era from Tolkien to Brooks (mid-50s to late 70s) so much: it was a bit of a Golden Age, in my opinion, especially from the late 60s on, sort of fantasy's equivalent of the scifi New Wave. It actually seemed like many of these authors weren't trying to ape Tolkien, but instead emboldened by his success. But when it also became clear that there was no clear commercial heir to Tolkien, Terry Brooks came in and did what he did.

I think the Jesus/Saul analogy works, for the most part.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

the 19th century when realism was established as the dominant form.

I'd say eighteenth century. Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Sterne, et al, even Defoe, were all writing within the world they and their readers knew.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

we might as well include Virgil, Homer and whoever wrote Gilgamesh

I'm being picayune, but those guys may well have believed they were writing history.

 

[Alchemist]

I'd say eighteenth century. Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Sterne, et al, even Defoe, were all writing within the world they and their readers knew.

Yes, agreed. I only meant that by the time you get to the 19th century, realism is the firm and dominant form.

I'm also curious if there is any known link between Romanticism and the rising of fantasy as a genre. If we look at Romanticism as partially being a rebellion against Enlightenment materialism and rationalism, that arose in the late 18th century and lasted into the mid-19th century, then fantasy--as a modern literary genre--could be seen as one of its offspring.

 

[Alchemist]

I'm being picayune, but those guys may well have believed they were writing history.

Yes, true. I think the lines were more blurred, especially with Homer and even more so with Gilgamesh. But it also seems likely that they were legends based upon history, yet conveyed in mythic form, rather than fantastical imaginings of ancient fantasy writers.

 

[hawkwind]

Don't know if this was major but definitely one of the firsts. Read this back in college.

1764 - The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

 

[Matthew Hughes]

I'm also curious if there is any known link between Romanticism and the rising of fantasy as a genre.

That takes us back to KatG's discussion of when "genre" becomes an applicable term. I think you can certainly make a connection between 19th-century romanticism and the rise of what we might call "literature of the fantastic." The gothic novel arrives and becomes hugely popular. Mary Shelley, about as capital-R romantic a writer you could imagine, pens Frankenstein. The Arthurian cycle gets a reboot and Walter Scott propounds medieval knights' tales that may lack elves and dwarves but are otherwise fantasies. As mainstream an author as Dickens writes A Christmas Carol.

Then there are all the parallel tracks: the rise of the spiritualist movement, same for the invention of druidism, Christian revivalism, the morbid Victorian fascination with death. The 19th century is steeped in both romanticism and the fantastical. Links all over the place.

 

[KatG]

Thanks for catching the misspelling, Matt. Late at night, etc. I'll fix.

Alchemist: There is a difference between authors who impacted with seminal and lots of works, and fantasy books themselves which had great impact on the fantasy field of writers. You'll get somewhat different lists from that, because some of the big impact books are from authors who weren't constantly writing fantasy fiction (which actually includes Tolkien.) Writers doing fantasy and fantasy horror were also usually writing SF, for instance, and a lot of fantasy got sold as SF or under its umbrella until the 1960's when we got the fantasy category market as more distinct from SF. Andre Norton's Witch World series, which was certainly influential to fantasy fiction, was sold as science fiction initially. So on the pre-1950 or early 1950's front, there's also A.E. Van Vogt, Fletcher Pratt and Jack Williamson, but you might not count those, etc.

Fantasy fiction isn't technically a literary genre. It's a type of story. There have been many literary genres that include or that are based in fantasy elements -- gothic, magic realism, etc., but the only reason 20th century or near to it fantasy works might be called modern is a combo that we call the post-industrial age the "modern" age, and so literature within it modern, and that the book and other types of print stories publishing industries as a whole developed in the 20th century into a more cohesive and organized industry, with better copyright laws and means of production and distribution, and also developed more sub-markets as methods of selling. We started to call these sub-markets genres as well, which became an additional meaning of the term and basically just means general type of story.

Romanticism -- which included fantasy stories -- and realism both existed side by side as stylistic ideas of storytelling for several centuries. The formal literary genre movement of realism went from mid-1800's to early 1900's, so using that mid-1800's time around MacDonald as the contrast breaking point makes sense, I guess. But romanticism as a formal literary genre movement started in the 1700's and went to the mid-1800's. Realism was a reaction to romanticism, not the other way around. Realism was one literary movement -- not the entire field of fiction. The "romances" -- which included fantasy stories -- continued on, even if the genre movement (the authors and works of the Romantic era) came to an end. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889, for instance, and pretty much all of his books were considered in the romantic mode -- adventures, romances, fantasies, horror, etc. Not very realistic potboilers were a staple throughout the 1800's and into the 20th century, though we stopped calling them the romances in the early 1900's.

For pre-1930's fiction, the children's issue gets tricky. While children's publishing technically started in the 1700's with Newberry, in a scattershot sort of way, books that became children's classics often were simply books written for adults. The Wind in the Willows wasn't published as a children's book originally. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was. And both were very influential to adult fantasy writers. The full out children's book-selling genre coalesced sort of in the late 1800's into the early 20th century with more concrete children's publishers. Before the 1920's or 1930's, it can be hard to say what was what. (And sometimes it still also is, since it's basically just a book-selling organization and books bounce back and forth in marketing between children's/YA and adult all the time.)

But since it is a personal list that is avoiding children's fantasy, despite its influences on the overall fantasy field, you can leave off any work you feel is too kid or teen oriented. You can also leave out fantasy horror if you don't want it, which means leaving out Stephen King, who would normally have to be on a list of 100 modern fantasy writers of great impact, for Dark Tower alone, but also his horror titles, The Green Mile, Eye of the Dragon, and The Stand, etc.

What you might want to do is move the cut off date simply to 1900. That knocks a few of the older, influential but Old World authors off your list to make more room for the 1930's on authors. And you are mostly then dealing with modern book-selling categories, which makes identifying the types of titles you want a lot easier.

 

[Alchemist]

It is an impossible task, really. And I too struggled with the difference between a list of the most influential books vs. authors. For instance, in the former list I'd have to include Dune, while in the latter Frank Herbert wouldn't register. But for me the real impetus behind it is self-education. In a way I want to compile a hybrid list that includes every seminal author that influenced the development of fantasy in some at least moderately significant way. Maybe I should envision it more as akin of tree, and focus on "epic fantasy" as the tree that "sprouted" with Tolkien, with the roots being all that came before. I don't know, just playing with ideas. I think ultimately I'm probably to be too linear and need to accept the messiness of it all. Still, a mega-list would be nice for reference (I've been looking at the list of works in the back of Mendlesohn & James' A Short History of Fantasy, which in my mind is the only really good historical survey of fantasy--at least in recent years. Very helpful, but maybe not as in-depth as I would like).

As for your statement that "realism was a reaction to romanticism," I don't think this is completely true--especially if you look at Romanticism (capital R) as more than a literary trend, but as a cultural and artistic movement. Also, I was using "realism" as a small r, meaning not referring to the literary movement of the late 19th century that was, indeed, a response to Romanticism. I was using the term to describe the "realism" of Enlightenment rationalism, which arose in the 17th century. Through a couple centuries of rising materialism, Romanticism arose as a response--bringing the juice back into things, so to speak, saying "We're not just bags of flesh on balls of dirt--we are living, feeling, dreaming souls." And it was merely a large wave within an overall current that could be said to include German Idealism, English Romanticism, and American Transcentalism, and others besides. Actually, there's been a back and forth--at least going back to the 17th century, and probably before in different ways (perhaps to Homer; see Jaynes' Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)--between the "realistic/rational" and the "imaginative/romantic." I think one way to look at it is as a dialogue (and even conflict) between our right and left brains (so to speak).

This is going far afield, but I see fantasy as the "literature of the right brain," whereas science fiction is of the "left brain." They can mix, but I think one way to rephrase what Jemisin was getting at is that you can't reduce the former to the latter. Or at least when you do, you in essence "kill" it. It would be like saying that Romanticism is just fluff that can be explained rationally, or reducing "love" to brain chemistry.

 

[Alchemist]

That takes us back to KatG's discussion of when "genre" becomes an applicable term. I think you can certainly make a connection between 19th-century romanticism and the rise of what we might call "literature of the fantastic." The gothic novel arrives and becomes hugely popular. Mary Shelley, about as capital-R romantic a writer you could imagine, pens Frankenstein. The Arthurian cycle gets a reboot and Walter Scott propounds medieval knights' tales that may lack elves and dwarves but are otherwise fantasies. As mainstream an author as Dickens writes A Christmas Carol.

Then there are all the parallel tracks: the rise of the spiritualist movement, same for the invention of druidism, Christian revivalism, the morbid Victorian fascination with death. The 19th century is steeped in both romanticism and the fantastical. Links all over the place.

Maybe one way to envision this is that what we now call "fantasy" took awhile to come into focus, and what Tolkien did--among other things--was formalize and centralize the genre around epic fantasy. Not unlike how Babe Ruth completely changed the way baseball was played, even though there was professional baseball for half a century before him. Tolkien : fantasy :: Babe Ruth : baseball.

This analogy can be extended further, because baseball's evolution didn't stop with Ruth, and it has changed in other ways--the DH, night games, influence of steroids, better training regimes, relief pitchers, etc. But no single player impacted baseball like Ruth did.

So with that in mind, maybe my attempt to separate out the related fields--or create my own arbitrary dividing line--is misguided. Maybe I should rather look at pre-Tolkien fantasy as a broad umbrella, a vast network of roots that came together, coalescing into a single "tree," but could only be seen as such with the publication of LotR.

Now of course fantasy is much broader than Tolkien-influenced epic fantasy, but it remains the "trunk" off which other branches are connected.

Hmm...this makes me want to create a vast tree chart of fantasy authors...

 

[Hobbit]

Hmm...this makes me want to create a vast tree chart of fantasy authors...

Would be happy to see that....