What is "middle fantasy"?

[Mishihari Lord]

I've always thought of high versus low fantasy as defined by the amount of control the characters have over the world. In LoTR and the Elric books, the characters' actions determine the fate of the world, making them the prime examples of high fantasy. The other end of the spectrum is Thieves' World, where the world is not going to change and if you just survive the challenges it throws at you you're very lucky, making it my defining example of low fantasy. Middle fantasy is presumably somewhere in the middle.

I found Umbran's explanation very educational too. (thanks!) It drew out another sense of high vs low fantasy that I was struggling to clarify in my own thought.

 

[Jhaelen]

True, before this thread I thought that the 'epicness' of stories also had something to do with the decision to label something as 'high fantasy' as opposed to 'low fantasy'.
If gods are walking the earth and conflicts span the whole world, that's surely high fantasy - even if all the gods are taken from Earth's mythology and the world IS earth?
It hadn't occured to me that something could never be 'low fantasy' if all you did was to describe daily life in medieval Britain but failed to call it 'Britain' and used a mock-up map with different coastlines instead of 'the real thing'.