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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9208915" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Without Tolkien fantasy doesn't have the surge in popularity that it saw in the 1970s, and so maybe we don't even get D&D or much of the fantasy to follow. So in the sense that it made fantasy a really viable publishing genre rather than a fringe niche, its influence was positive.I see the negatives in terms of its impact on how a lot of subsequent fantasy was written: basically as unimaginative knock-offs. And not only that, but knock-offs written in a weirdly anachronistic style, a sort of quasi-King James-ian English that I find cringe-inducing. Kinda like Thor in Marvel comics. Tolkien's prose is famously contrived and archaic, but he makes it work because his stories, at their best, attain the grandeur of actual myth and so his weird writing style becomes a feature rather than a flaw. I can't immediately think of any other writer who has come close to pulling it off, and a whole lot who try and fail.Edit: Maybe Frank Herbert and Marion Zimmer Bradley.</blockquote>