Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 1474470" data-attributes="member: 1645">The list isn't done, and, from what I can tell, he's trying to emphasize lesser-known but highly influencial works.  Also, by "fantasy" I believe he means quasi-medieval fantasy -- stories that hark back to medieval romance (in the style of Tolkien), not the original legends, and not "weird tales" in a modern (or nonsense) setting.If I may repeat some excerpts from the essay on <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=books/dnd/classics" target="_blank">The Well at the World's End</a>, by William Morris (1896): 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.</blockquote>

Verification