Blustar said:
Ummm, are you serious when you state that Tolkien has been regulated to history?
First, the term you are looking for is "relegated", not "regulated". Sorry for the nitpick, but it is important for the discussion...
Did I use the term "relegated" anywhere in my last post? I said they were products of history, not that they don't exist anymore. You can't talk about Tolkien's works without discussing the various things that influenced him. Tolkien was a scholar of lingusitics, was famous for his writings about the legends of Beowulf (in particular, he was the first person to look at it as a story crafted by a storyteller, rather than something which has always existed), and the Lord of the Rings trolgy was crafted around the time of WWII (which certainly had some influence, even if Tolkien asserts that his story is not meant to be an allegory for the war). Perhaps even more significantly, Tolkien wrote his stories in an era where pretty much the only fantasy writing came in the form of fairy tales (both new and old), old myths, and re-imagined folktales. Many characters in Tolkien's works, such as the character of Tom Bombadil, show the immense influence of those kinds of stories on his works.
In the half-century since Tolkien wrote his stories, the very idea of "fantasy" has changed beyond recognition. Fantasy got mixed up with the feel of the "pulps" and science-fiction, fused with countless different ideas and inventions, and slowly began to change. In no small part this is because Tolkien paved the way for "fantasy" to be detached from myth and folktale and transformed into something far more rooted in the personal imagination of the author. Along the way, we get influences from other kinds of myths and legends. Tolkien was rooted in English folktales, Norse myth, and Christian beliefs, but in recent years countless ideas taken from all over the world has seeped into English-language fantasy and diluted those influences completely.
To put it into simple terms, we have gone from the days where C. S. Lewis populated the magic world of Narnia with the talking animals of folktales and the creatures of Greek myth, and entered into a world where D&D is populated by a thousand creatures that never even existed until a game designer put it down on paper.
If you want to see this change in the meaning of fantasy yourself, just look at the movie adaptations of the Lord of the Rings. They have omitted a lot of the "old fantasy" elements of Tolkien's works (like Tom Bombadil), and added in a lot of "new fantasy" elements (like Legolas's superhuman feats). This was done so that the Lord of the rings would appeal to more modern sensibilities.
Are you also implying the same for Leiber, Howard and the like?
Well, for them, yes. They have been relegated for the past. I am aware that Howard (I think) is the creator of Conan, his creation only is alive today because of countless re-imaginings across the years, in a variety of forms. Howard's vision is kept alive because of comic books and recent videogame adaptations, not because of his books. For the rest of them, I don't even have the slightest clue who they are. In all of the time I have wandered libraries and bookstores, I have never even
once seen a book written by Leiber, Vance, or Moorcock. Not
once. They are dead to modern audiences, and their works have not stood the test of time anywhere near as well as Tolkien.
I think you are seriously over-inflating the popularity of modern fantasy. I consider myself a fantasy afficionado and I still havn't read anything modern that I would say regulates the great fantasy authors to history. Actually most popular fantasy is drivel and bubblegum. Sans a few select authors.
90% of
everything that has ever been written is drivel and bubblegum. That is hardly an argument. Anyways, you are making a
severe logical mistake by equating "fantasy" with "written books". These days, some of the most popular forms of fantasy take the form of television shows, movies, comic books, videogames, and, well, D&D.
If you think Vance, Leiber, and Moorcock have had even a
tenth the influence on modern fantasy as Gygax did, you are deluding yourself. Gygax took his influence from them, but he changed it and made it his own, and passed on something uniquely his. That is what has been carried on into mainstream fantasy, not the old works themselves. If anyone relegated those authors to history, it was E. Gary Gygax himself, along with the many other creators of D&D.
Also, if you think Vance, Leiber, and Moorcock have more influence on modern fantasy than the Final Fantasy series of videogames, or even the movie Star Wars, you are similarly deluding yourself.
The best selling fantasy movie (and most popular) is Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit will sure to be a blockbuster too. I don't think great fantasy will ever get regulated to history. I mean I still think the Odyssey and The Illiad are the greatest fantasy stories ever written.
Well, they have stood the test of time. Again, I never said that Tolkien was relegated to history. He stands up there with Shakespeare as far as I am concerned. But fantasy has changed since the days of Homer, it has changed since the days of Shakrespeare, and it has changed since the days of Tolkien. None of those three can be equated as sharing the same kind of "fantasy", and works of the modern day have changed, and will continue to change.
Can you list this newer popular fantasy influencing D&D that I seem to be missing...
Older versions of D&D, Star Wars, Tolkien, modern fantasy works (including D&D novels), Magic the Gathering, Hong Kong action movies, fighting videogames (Soul Calibur was explicitly listed as an influence on the Tome of Battle), videogame RPGs and Tactical RPGs, the Japanese Tokusatsu genre, superhero comic books, shonen fantasy action anime, old myths and legends, and any particular bit of creativity and inspiration ever known to a 4E designer. Seriously, it must be a
really long list.
