The following comments are made with the understanding that I am a huge fan of George Martin's, I believe him to be an accomplished prose stylist and writer and Song of Ice and Fire is one of my favorite series.
Pratchett is, yes, but Rowling? By whom? The point you are reinforcing is that GRRM isn't as well-known outside the genre as he is in it, which certainly makes any claim for him to be the 'king of fantasy' dubious; however in a comparison of author-to-author by people who are aware of both, I do not know anyone who would contend that Rowling is more 'literary' than GRRM.
In the outside world, the opinions of people knowledgable in the category fantasy field mean buptkus, because the entire field is considered not to be literary, but commercial. Martin simply isn't known that well by scholars and literary pundits. He isn't ignored, he's studied in universities, but not as much as Rowling, or for that matter, Peter Beagle, Tolkein, Ursula LeGuin or even Michael Moorcock and Stephen King. Rowling is decried as a children's and fantasy author by many but acclaimed as a children's author by many. She has been up for and hotly debated as a candidate for major literature prizes outside the field; Martin has not yet.
If you mean as mini-series,
I mean other media -- film, t.v., comics, games. George is involved in the games market and has been a long successful screenwriter, so he does have a body of work there, but Gaiman has his fingers in more pies and King, no matter what you think personally of any of his movies, t.v. series and various projects, rules as a writer with the most alternate media franchising. So King is more influential again in the wider world. In fact, King could be said to have a higher name recognition level than Tolkein, or at least did before the LOTR movies came out; still not sure he doesn't now though.
As for awards, I didn't mean that Martin doesn't beat Rowling in awards, but that in terms of awards in the field, Martin doesn't have the highest number, compared to several other authors.
But since James has clarified his question to mean is Tolkein still the major influence of alternate world fantasy, I would say that the answer is yes and no. Tolkein did not create in a vacuum -- he drew from numerous mythological sources, from the Greek and Norse myths through Beowulf and on down, and so too did many SFF writers draw from those sources, not from Tolkein, to create early fantasy works, such as Andre Norton's Witchworld. The writers that followed drew most of the time not so much from Tolkein, as from those cultural sources and other early writers.
But the success of publishing Tolkein's work in a mass market paperback trilogy for the SF fan market provided a model for shaping the early fantasy category market. It was not a pure clone model -- most of the early alternate world stories, like Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, and Kay's Finnovar, involved a person from Earth being transported to a different world, a device that came from SF and Verne and Wells. The idea of writing a story in several parts as a series, an epic, however, of writing about war on a pre-industrial level, politics, the dying and rebirth of cultures, came from LOTR. Those early writers, though, didn't want to copy MiddleEarth; they wanted to distinguish themselves from it. Tolkein's success in the SFF field and the success of other early and non-category authors there told them there would be an audience for that type of story, but they were dealing with lots of different ideas.
King, who was the phenom of the 1980's, wrote horror and dark fantasy and he and other major writers in that field were a huge influence on fantasy writers. SF was a huge influence, especially as many of the fantasy writers were also SF authors. Historical fiction was also a big influence -- many fantasy writers who came into the field were historians and used that material, not Lord of the Rings. The material they wrote was frequently gritty and violent -- to say that Donaldson, Kay, Cook, and others were fluffy bunny clones of Tolkein is pretty demeaning. You don't have to prove the toughness of newer writers by insisting that the older authors who influenced them, and who are still publishing today, were weenies. Jordan also has quite a bit of troubling, gritty material. It's not his content that bothers you, but his writing style.
To claim that in the 1990's, alternate world fantasy suddenly metamorphisized into a new form is one of the stranger claims I've heard. What it did was simply expand, though still in a fairly whitebread Western manner. Erikson, while an excellent writer, is heavily influenced by Cook. Martin's work is no more gritty than many other early fantasy writers, plus he's got a sentimental streak, and there are obvious parallels to LOTR in his series. Lynch owes a debt to Stephen Brust, who was influenced by several older authors. Of all the newer alternate world fantasists I've read or heard about so far, the only one who's gotten really radical on the violence front is perhaps Scott Bakker.
But measuring the amount of raw violence in alternate world fantasy is a poor way to try and determine how far the sub-field has moved from Tolkein, since Tolkein's entire story was about the damage of violence, hate, the lust for power, etc. If fantasy stories were becoming less violent and raw, you could perhaps make the argument. That some of them are becoming more so, is maybe an indicator that the new authors are just developing Tolkein's focus further.
Tolkein has been pictured as a pastorial utopian with black and white characters, which he wasn't, but is that myth now become his influence? Hard to say. Any story with a quest (a standard of mythology,) a young person (which Tolkein didn't even have really,) or a dwarf in it (a common occurrence in fairy tales,) -- with the faintest of connections, gets labeled a Tolkein copy, so maybe the myth of Tolkein has become the bigger influence than the actual book.
So, do as many of the new authors use Tolkein as their jumping off point -- did they read it, did it effect them, do they keep it in mind when they write? That would be a no in the sense that many of the writers now may not have read LOTR. But they've read other authors who were influenced by Tolkein, so the chain could be said to continue.
Do we still compare all alternate world fantasy writers to Tolkein? Yes, we do, measuring how like or unlike LOTR they are. As long as we continue to do that, and as long as the amount of violence in a story is considered a critical measurement in reference to LOTR and the myth of LOTR, then Tolkein still does cast his shadow over the sub-category. If we stop saying that Erkison is cool because he doesn't imitate Tolkein, if we stop accusing fantasy writers of being Tolkein clones, then we could say that Tolkein's influence has finally wained. But so far, the body of fans doesn't seem inclined to do this. So if the measurement being taken is does Tolkein still cast a shadow over alternate world fantasy, then probably that shadow has not shrunk a great deal yet. Give it another twenty years.
)
