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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5082160" data-attributes="member: 80487">I think one problem is that people so often come across the stuff of fantastic tales when it has already been uprooted and laid on a slab.Dwarves and Elves and so on did not appear in D&D as "standard fantasy". Arneson and Gygax, Kuntz and Ward and Moldvay, had read not only Tolkien but also (among them) Poul Anderson, and Dunsany, and deCamp and Pratt, and Mallory, and T.H. White, and the Brothers Grimm, probably E. Nesbit and possibly Spenser; at least one (Moldvay) took an interest in the visionary poetry of William Blake.They had read at least a bit of Greek myths and Scandinavian sagas, Celtic hero-cycles and Germanic and Slavic fairy tales, the Kalevala and the Thousand Nights and a Night.On top of that were countless more modern stories of fantastic adventure in hidden reaches of the world or on distant planets.There simply was no such thing as "standard fantasy" in the early 1970s. There was not even such a clear division between fantasy and science fiction as some D&Ders cleave to today. The very same works by such writers as Andre Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley were marketed first under one 'genre' label and then under the other.I do not mean to suggest that their reading was exhaustive or scholarly, or that it was dominated by hoary classics.I do mean to suggest that what they brought to the game was what already fueled their imaginations, what had deep resonance because it had struck a chord in the first place, what was significant because there were meanings for it to signify.To take up materials with which one has no such relationship, out of some notion of an Official Fantasyland established by Committee, does not seem to me at all what the pioneers of D&D meant to encourage. A fantasist's work of world-building is not only easier but better for being built of whatever lives and breathes in his or her own dreams, whatever lurks and stalks in his or her own nightmares.</blockquote>

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