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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4366138" data-attributes="member: 15538">In my view, modern fantasy's clearest ancestor is the legend of Arthur. The stories are centuries old in their recognized form, and meld religion, poetry, folk tales, history and storytelling into a complete mythology of their own. Lancelot was a fictional insertion with a known author. The tales take place in a recognizably fantastic England. More importantly in this discussion, the stories inspired by Dunsany and especially Tolkien. Dunsany inspired, well, a lot of people. And Tolkien essentially created modern genre fantasy, which absorbed, alterered, and also segregated "weird tales" and prehistorical yarns. Prior to Tolkien, swords-and-sorcery was a recognizable genre of its own, after, it became a set of motifs applicable to high fantasy. Given all this, I cannot state a clear demarcation between old fantasy and new. The tales of Myrddin, Arthur, and Bedwyr probably meant something very similar to the people of that age as Frodo and Aragorn mean to ours. Plato flatly regarded the stories of the gods as allegory, poetry, and sometimes nonsense. Particularly in The Republic, he suggests editing and censoring the tales of the Greek gods and remaking them as stories that promote social good.</blockquote>