The Wizards of the Coast books page generally discusses upcoming Wizards of the Coast books -- so I never gave it a look. Then, one day, a web search brought me to one of their excellent "Classics of Fantasy" articles. I found a number of "Classics of Fantasy" articles in the archives:
Yes, it's absolutely fantastic isn't it. I only saw it when it was linked to on the boards, not being that interesting in Wizards' fiction. John Rateliff really knows what he's talking about and, so far as I know, there's no-one else attempting anything like this anywhere else on the net.
Thanks for linking to all the articles, it beats having to trall the archive. They should give it it's own page.
Morris not only served as Tolkien's personal role-model as a writer but is also responsible for fantasy's characteristic medievalism and the emphasis on what Tolkien called the subcreated world: a self-consistent fantasy setting resembling our own world but distinct from it. Before Morris, fantasy settings generally resembled the arbitrary dreamscapes of Carroll's Wonderland and MacDonald's fairy tales; Morris shifted the balance to a pseudo-medieval world that was realistic in the main but independent of real-world history and included fantastic elements such as the elusive presence of magical creatures.
Ironically, Morris did not intend to help create a new genre but was seeking to revive a very old one: He was attempting to recreate the medieval romance -- those sprawling quest-stories of knights and ladies, heroes and dastards, friends, enemies, and lovers, marvels and simple pleasures and above all adventures. The most familiar examples of such tales to modern readers are the many stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but these were merely the most well-known among a vast multitude of now-forgotten tales. Morris deliberately sat down to write new stories in the same vein and even something of the same style, right down to deliberately archaic word choice. But just as the creators of opera thought they were recreating classical Greek drama a la Aeschylus and wound up giving birth to a new art form instead, so too did Morris's new medieval tales belong to a new genre: the fantasy novel.
[...]
Then too, the book contains a number of striking scenes, characters, and motifs that could be transplanted into an ongoing campaign and are worth reading in their own right: the Champions of the Dry Tree, which is a slightly sinister Robin-Hood like band of greenwoods robbers; their mortal foes, the men of the Burg of the Four Friths, who wage constant raids on their neighbors to acquire sex-slaves; the rebellion of the slave-women (the Wheat-Wearers), who take up arms to save themselves when no one else is willing to help them; the Lady, a sexy yet ambiguous figure whose history forms a novella within the work as a whole; the Well whose waters grant youth, beauty, and longevity but not immunity to a violent death; and perhaps above all the chapters describing Ralph and his lover's grisly journey across the Thirsty Desert, which drives home the point that many undertake the quest but only the fortunate few, the destined heroes, achieve it. [3] The Dry Tree at the heart of the desert is also a striking motif and is encountered many times as a sigil or emblem before revealed to actually exist in physical form.
[...]
[3]SPOILER:
In one of the book's most striking scenes, the young lovers crossing the desert begin to find the bodies of those who failed in the quest before them -- first one or two whom they stop to bury, then a whole line of desiccated corpses marking a grisly path across the wasteland where they laid down to die along the way. The Dry Tree itself, when they finally reach it, is revealed as a vast dead tree rising up out of a pool of water at the heart of a natural amphitheater, every seat filled with the bodies of men and women who fell under the Tree's allure, questers who sat down to die here with a smile on their faces. Along with the vivid depiction of the Wheat-Wearers' mistreatment and rebellion and the sudden brutal death of one of the three main characters, the Dry Tree remains in the reader's memory after the details of the rest of the book have faded.
The intro to the essay on The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip (1974), states some interesting opinions on fantasy:
Not every "classic" of fantasy was written a century ago. Books as good as any ever published by the late great masters of the genre -- Dunsany, Eddison, Morris, Cabell, et al. -- were also being written in the 1960s (The Face in the Frost, A Wizard of Earthsea), the 1970s (Watership Down), the 1980s (The Bridge of Birds) and even the 1990s (The Golden Compass), many of them by authors still alive today. All are remarkable not just for their exceptional excellence but because they break new ground rather than follow current trends (masterpieces always defy conventional wisdom), although ironically some of them have themselves become much imitated in turn.
One book that stands alone is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, as it has no obvious precursor nor inspires a subgenre or "school" of followers; there is nothing else quite like it, even among McKillip's other writings. Whereas some fantasy classics dazzle the reader by the twists and turns of their plot or enthrall them with a seductively appealing subcreated world, McKillip's stands out by the sheer beauty of the writing. Some say that modern fantasy is today's equivalent of the pulp novel of the 1920s and 1930s, and readers who have become accustomed to the adequate prose of a generic trilogy manipulating standard characters through a conventional plot, where the villain dies in the next-to-last chapter with the final few pages for happily-ever-after, may have their breath taken away by McKillip's evocative, lapidary style:
"The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone,
and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind,
and he died of what he saw there."
I've read a few of these already... based on the excerpts posted, I'll be getting The Well At World's End out of the local uni library the next time I'm there.
The Hobbit: No Comment. Tales of Averoigne: Ashton Smith is really... disturbed. Averoigne is good, and it's not even his best stuff - that would be Zothique. Really macabre and creepy. And some of his stuff is a huge influence on D&D, and www.eldritchdark.com is a fantastic website. Outclassed both Howard and Lovecraft. A Wizard of Earthsea: It was a long time ago. I didn't think it was that great them, but I was young. I remeber some of the tomb stuff being cool and the magic system is interesting. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: There's not really much you can say about Lovecraft. Weird stuff. Collected Ghost Stories: Very finely crafted and understated horror. I while ago I spent a lot of time reading classic victorian ghost stories, and along with JS LeFanu, this is the best. The ghosts themselves are very well thought out and effectively used.
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: Just bought. I'll let you know which are the good stories when I've found them.
It's interesting to note who hasn't been done: Peake, TH White, Howard, Moorcock... It'll be interesting to see what he says.
