Celebrim said:
Oh, there's little I like beater than defending a seemingly tenously rhetorical position. Dunsany? Who are we talking about here that doesn't have elves? I think that it would be pretty hard to argue that fantasy pre-Tolkien isn't dominated by the fairy tale.
Would you really say there's a very narrow space of literature between European fairy tales and post-
Hobbit fantasy literature? Even after Dunsany, there was Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Hell, don't forget how much fantasy Lovecraft wrote, even.
And even after Tolkien, I'd still argue that it's only in RPGs (and, to a lesser extent, in the fantasy literature that grew out of gaming roots) that elves are such an assumed component of "fantasy". I never pick up a book and find myself remarking "Huh! There's no elves in this. I wonder why."
Celebrim said:
A tremendous percentage of fantasy set on modern Earth is of the genera, 'urban fairy tale', and features all manner of elfin creature.
That certainly
exists, but in such cases, it's the
inclusion of elves that's the conscious choice. In fact, when it's done, it's often a central feature of the book, rather than just an inevitable consequence of the existence of magic.
Of course, I can't honestly claim to know what is or isn't a conscious decision on the part of some author I've never met. All I can say is that, if
I was writing a fantasy story, I wouldn't at any point even consider including elves unless I was doing some kind of
Discworld-esque parody or writing game fiction for some RPG. The use of elves in any halfway serious modern fantasy novel generally looks to me like the mark of a hack.
