A History of Fantasy-Fiction: The Tolkien Revolution

I had considered writing a brief blog-post on the history of fantasy-fiction - its evolution and how it came to occupy the place that it does in today's modern literature. I very quickly realized, however, that there could be no such thing as a "brief blog-post" on such an expansive topic, and the crux of the matter - how fantasy-fiction came to be popularized in the manner that so many of us are familiar with today - really revolves around one formative event.

It may come as a surprise to some younger readers (those under the age of seventy), but fantasy-fiction as we know it today owes its existence to one particular turning point in modern literature, and to one particular author: the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. All of fantasy-fiction can be divided into two periods of modern history: those that came before Tolkien and "The Lord of the Rings" and those that came after. Before Tolkien, the world of fantasy-fiction was a wasteland. There were a few outstanding authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley, that had strayed into the periphery of this domain, but the landscape of fantasy-fiction had largely been ignored by both authors and publishers as being of little consequence, the subject of children's "fairy tales" and nothing more.

Tolkien himself wrote about this sad state of affairs in his essay "On Fairy-stories" - originally delivered as a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in 1938 - long before The Lord of the Rings was written or published. This lecture was later reproduced as part of a collection of Tolkien's writings in The Tolkien Reader. As Tolkien observed at the time,

"What, if any, are the values and functions of fairy-stories now? It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories."[1]

The landscape of English-language literature at the time, was in this respect very similar to how animation was treated in the United States throughout most of the 20th century. In the world of animation, cartoons were viewed as the province of children. The idea that animation could be exercised as a story-telling medium - to convey stories with adult themes and universally human messages - would remain alien to most audiences until Japanese anime began to make serious inroads during the latter 1990s. Fantasy-literature was at a similar impasse until the 1960s, when The Lord of the Rings emerged onto the American marketplace - defining a new genre expansive enough for the publishing industry to finally take this medium seriously.

As Tolkien observed himself in his 1938 lecture,

"It is true that in recent times fairy-stories have usually been written or 'adapted' for children. But so may music be, or verse, or novels, or history, or scientific manuals."[1]

Tolkien saw in the realm of fantasy-fiction an opportunity to redraw the boundaries of the world, and in so doing to allow us to see our own world, our own human experience, with fresh eyes. The act of writing or reading fantasy-fiction was not seen by him as the special reserve of children - but as an art form that could be exercised to illuminate topics that have plagued the human soul since the dawn of mankind.

I can remember myself, devouring the works of Tolkien when I was younger, indulging in the broad richness of the literary world that he had created. And if I later went on to enjoy the works of other authors who likewise followed in this genre of literature, it was made possible only by these earlier works that paved the way before them.

All of us who have followed, as either readers or writers of fantasy-fiction, therefore owe an immense debt to the persistence and vision of this one author in particular, that opened the way for the rest of us to explore our world and our human existance within this art form.


References:
[1] J.R.R. Tokien, The Tolkien Reader, Ballantine Books, New York, 1966.