It also may be strongly connected to the formation of the modern novel. A lot of the early modern novels were fantasy.
All of those and the shift away from the Great Chain of Being conceptualization of the world. Probably the religious divisions in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries would need to be examined as well to see if they had lasting impacts based on individual Catholic/Lutheran/Calvinist/Orthodox countries (and the splits in Islam as well for those regions also). It'd make for an interesting study. I need to get around and apply for college positions if I'm ever going to have the time to even think of doing this research!
R.e.h I must say I find this topic very interesting! As I love history and finding out where things came from. I am fairly new to reading fantasy,so I cant realy comment on these rather intense discussions. But I noticed no one mentioned Robert E Howard, And i think its fair to say he was certainly one of the pioneers that started sword and sorcery as we know it today.
Fantasy's beginning is often judged by when fantasy became a genre. A long long time ago, literature was literature. Fantasy, in the form of a novel as opposed to epic poems, goes all the way back to Don Quixote, even though most everything he fought was imaginary. Then there's Gulliver's Travels. In the 19th century when 'science fiction' was declared a genre, many of the stories the sci-fi writers wrote were more fantasy than anything else. Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, Alan Quartemaine. Most of the books that were like fantasy that weren't labeled as such took place in what was then, the modern world. So that's probably why it got overlooked. Also, they all took place on the planet Earth, not in some fictional world that's all of the author's imagination. I don't think world-building started until Robert E. Howard wrote about the Hyborean and Atlantean ages.
I agree with that World building probably began with Robert Howard, but I beg to differ on both Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels. While today Gulliver's travels, with his adventures in lands of small people and giants would be viewed as childrens stories, when Swift wrote them, he intended them as serious political and social satire of the time, making fun of various world leaders, how scientists acted and behaved, and how petty the Christian sects were about their beliefs and willingess to go to war. I think this would qualify it as satire than bona fide fantasy. Also Don Quixote was a parody, a spoof of the Knight Errant tales of the time. In fact, some people consider it to be one of the first ever parody as-we-know-it to exist.
And this would make them mutually exclusive how? A significant chunk of fantasy literature of today and yesterday, category and non, is satirical. Fantasy is and has been an extremely effective tool for satire, and a satire that uses fantasy elements is, by the use of such elements, a fantasy story. It's not like you have to fulfill some sort of fantasy use regulations in order to get your fantasy license. But you do have to have something that actually is a fantastical element. Though I have not read more than excerpts of Don Quixote, my understanding is that it contains no fantastical elements. It is part of the romantic tradition, in the way that academics apply the word, and it concerns issues of knighthood, but knights are not fantastical elements, and neither are daydreams and hallucinations. It is possible that there are fantastical elements in it, but unless these can be identified by someone, it doesn't make sense to slap the fantasy label on it, in my view.
Don Quijote can be labeled as such if one applies the archaic (but current at its time) definition of fantasy as being of the realm of daydreams and hallucinations. I personally just call it a parody that has stood the test of time
For what it's worth, here's the first paragraph from Lin Carter's introduction to a book called The Wood Beyond the World: "The book you hold in your hands is the first great fantasy novel ever written: the first of them all; all the others, Dunsany, Eddison, Pratt, Tolkien, Peake, Howard, et al., are successors to this great original." The Wood Beyond The World was written by William Morris; it was first published in 1895. Morris went on to write a few more or less similar fantasies, of which The Well At The World's End is the best known (it is also generally considered his best work). Now why did Carter feel that William Morris was "the man who invented fantasy"? Well, in his introduction, he goes on to explain: "By fantasy, I mean the tale of quest, adventure or war set in an invented age and worldscape of the author's own imagination. Of course there are other kinds of imaginative fiction loosely called fantasy: the horror story, for example (...); the "lost race" yarn (...); and Morris was preceded by various writers who wrote occult or mystical or Rosicrucian* or Atlantean or Arthurian romances long before he set pen to paper. But fantasy, as such, begins with William Morris. He was the first major writer to discover and explore the potentials of the story laid in a consciously made-up world where magic works, and gods and monsters, witches and dragons, co-exist in a carefully worked out context of subreality. The basic elements of this kind of epic or heroic fantasy have existed in literature for, literally, ages. When the Babylonian hero, Gilgamesh, slew the man-dragons, (...) when Herakles ventured to the Garden of the Hesperides (...) the elements of heroic fantasy were established. Nevertheless, this kind of "fantasy" did not directly contravene known laws of the times. It was imaginative fiction, an extrapolation on a grand scale of what was believed to be reality." I think I'd tend to broadly agree with Carter. Whilst I don't believe this is a workable prerequisite for a story to be considered "fantasy" nowadays, I do believe that fantasy as a genre did not and could not meaningfully exist until the concept of consciously made-up realities was embraced. And I certainly agree with him that Morris was the first "worldbuilder", preceding Howard by about 40 years or so. ________ * Rosicrucian? I had no idea either. But here's an explanation.
Well I don't agree with Carter. Secondary world fantasy is not the be-all and end-all of the essence of fantasy, nor was it the creator of the category fantasy market. It's by and large a transplant of historical fiction and its fantastical impetus are the numerous legends, myths and folklore of a fairyland or afterworld or other realm. Morris was not the first to do it, not as late as 1895 certainly. I certainly hope that fantasy does not follow down the track of science fiction, which constantly argues about what is the pure and true science fiction, in an attempt to narrow itself down to some slender thread of philosophical agenda. And the idea that if we did not write stories about magic kingdoms, modern fantasy stories would never have developed? If we're going to go with that concept, then it makes more sense to say that whoever did come up with the original idea of Sleeping Beauty then gets the credit for inventing Western fantasy. Every culture has this idea in it -- the different place, the other place, the land of the dead or the fae or the gods, and writers always draw from it. That campfire isn't going anywhere.
Hmm. I may well be wrong, but it seems to me you're missing the point a bit? As I see it, the point made in the Carter quote isn't that secondary worlds are "the be-all and end-all" of fantasy. What he does suggest, though, is that fantasy, as a genre, did not exist until writers consciously began telling stories they knew had not and could not happen, stories that were consciously divorced from everyday reality. And he pinpoints that moment round about the time William Morris began writing his fantasies. That isn't surprising, since Morris was, as far as I know, the first writer to totally set his stories beyond the framework of reality. (As an aside: you seem to disgree with that, but what earlier examples are there?) In other words, fantasy did not meaningfully exist until we - writers and storytellers, readers and listeners - recognised it as fantasy. I think it's a valid, interesting, and generally accurate point. But having said that, I totally agree with your remarks regarding the navel staring often engaged upon by the science fiction community Bear in mind, though: Carter wasn't talking about what fantasy turned out to be, let alone what it should be. He was only adressing how it started. You're right: the campfire isn't going anywhere. The question is, when did it become fantasy?
In highly doubt that "The Wood Beyond the World" was the "creator" of what we know as fantasy today. Surely there would have been other manuscripts produced around that time or even before that detailed the same elements.
Stoned barbarians were making this stuff up around the campfire thousands of years ago, and you know it.
"that fantasy, as a genre, did not exist until writers consciously began telling stories..." -- as in, be all and end all of fantasy. The problem is always the word "genre" -- a word that has developed multiple meanings when it comes to fiction. The word is used in the academic/dictionary sense which is a group of authors/artists who are stylistically similar. Having fantasy elements does not make authors stylistically similar, having similar fantasy elements (sub-categories) does not make authors stylistically similar, but you can talk about sets of authors who are similar in style, tone, language use, theme, etc. as genres. The New Wave in science fiction was a genre in that sense. Then there is the use of "genre" as a synonym for type. This use of the word is applied to all fantasy fiction, and means that the fiction has some sort of fantastical element to it, which is all it means. It doesn't have to be a particular kind of fantastical element or a particular amount. And the last meaning of the word as used in fiction refers not to a type or a style, but to a market -- the fantasy category market, which became called a genre market, as in type, but the word morphed into meaning that fantasy which is sold to the fan audience from specialty publishers in special sections of bookstores, etc. It's sort of a historic meaning that became a common way to refer to books by the way that they were sold. And that use of the term, for fantasy, started in the West in the 1960's. What the original poster is looking at is the start of fiction -- when we went from author-less legends and parables to one, known author making up a narrative. And there, you have to decide whether you are going to consider narrative poems the start of that, or only straight narrative text and plays -- whether you are going to accept the fiction of ancient cultures for whom some authors are still known, or insist on the medieval period, where the transition to narrative began. For fantasy further, there's an attempt to measure the point in Western history -- and that's an important distinction -- when the majority of people didn't believe that fantastical things are real, didn't believe, for instance, that ghosts were real, so that if an author made up a ghost story, it was not only fiction, but something that people did not believe could be true in real life. The difficulty with this is that many people never did believe in ghosts, demons, fairies, and other fantastical and supernatural things throughout history, and authors were not necessarily writing fantasy stories that they believed could happen in real life. And many people continue to believe that many fantastical things are real, including imaginary, alternate worlds. There wasn't a one time switch. I'm not sure there was even a gradual cultural switch, but the OP is going to try and find that one in the industrialization of Western culture. Carter is claiming that Morris threw the switch to give writers the idea that they could make up a place, a whole world that did not exist, that it was a psychological revelation. But this occurred regularly. They'd write about Germany and call it something else. Fairy tales happen in imaginary kingdoms with imaginary names. Culturally, the idea of a world that is not like our world has existed for millenia, and people wrote about it, not necessarily presenting it as true. The idea that there is an enormous difference between making up a world -- drawn from mythology, history and current culture -- in which fantastical things happen, and making up an imaginary kingdom on Earth where fantastical things happen or making up a story where fantastical things happen in Germany, seems to me to be a highly shaky notion. There really isn't a lot of difference between them, except as different ways to frame and orient a story, and that bag of tricks has been around for as long as people have been making up stories, which is a long time. What Carter is also saying is that Morris started the secondary world sub-category by his success, that he created a sub-genre, as in type of fantasy. I think that it would be hard to prove this to be true. If it somehow were, though, the start of the secondary world fantasy sub-genre is not the same thing as the creation of fantasy as a genre, as in type of fiction. Fantasy as a type of fiction existed long before Morris and it was regarded as fiction with fantasy in it. It's an exaggeration of importance, meant to show that Morris had an impact. I'm quite sure that Morris did have an impact with his writing, but he didn't create fantasy fiction, or real and pure fantasy fiction. I think it would also be difficult to name Morris the father of "modern" fantasy either. I don't think we've got just one author on that front, as we can sort of consider for Mary Shelley with Frankenstein for science fiction, as fantasy was simply too prevalent in fiction, as well as culture.
As far as I am concerned, fantasy began when people began to make up storied that included made up creatures etc.
