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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4365854" data-attributes="member: 2205">The most obvious point being an awareness by both the author and the audience in modern fiction that it is purely fantasy, while Homer, Virgil, the Beowulf poet, etc. actually believed the stuff they wrote was possible.  When they were writing, they were writing heroic action fiction sorta like James Bond for their audience, not fantasy.But that's more of an external than an internal difference, and so probably insufficient.Then again, all modern fantasy authors, even Tolkien who was a dyed in the wool idealist and romantic, write fantasy with a modern point of view, and modern values, characters, plot structures, etc. suffuse modern fantasy and make it stand out from older "fantastic literature."For all their similarities, Aragorn is no King Arthur or Odysseus or Beowulf, nor is he intended to be (for that matter, those same characters in more modern fantasy novels fare very differently than they have in the past) and characters like Frodo, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or even Driz'zt are completely without precedent in "pre-fantasy" literature.</blockquote>