The History (& Golden Age) of Fantasy

How fortunate that we live in a Golden Age of Fantasy! I mean, truly, is there any doubt? Fantasy literature has passed from a little-noted genre to a mainstream phenomenon, given large sections of all bookstores and libraries, a whole theme park in the case of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, with GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire recently breaking into the world of TV series in the form of HBO's The Game of Thrones. Indeed, following The Game of Thrones came the The Shannara Chronicles as an adaptation of Terry Brooks' Original Shannara Trilogy, tailed by BBC's TV adaption of Sir Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Then one has phenomenally popular authors like Garth Nix,  Brandon Sanderson, Patricia A. McKillip, Rachel Hartman, Tamora Pierce, Mercedes Lackey, Patrick Rothfuss, Diana Wynne Jones, Christopher Paolini, Michael Scott, John Flanagan, Kristen Britain, Kristin Cashore, Alison Croggon, Neil Gaiman, Jo Walton, Kelly Barnhill, Brian Jacques, Jonathan Stroud, and so many others (and these are just the ones I personally have heard of). All of whom have in the last decade or two written amazing works with substantial and dedicated fandoms.

Furthermore, all the while the old masters remain readily popular and available. The Founder of Modern Fantasy J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings of course, but also others just as the recently deceased Ursula K. Le Guin whose Earthsea Cycle took a different approach to the genre. Much like Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence and Pullman's aforementioned His Dark Materials. Actually, several of the authors listed above are old masters; I merely listed them up there because have until recently or still are writing.

But now I think a bit of history is in order. How did we find ourselves in this wondrous Golden Age of Fantasy? The answer, unsurprisingly, begins with J.R.R. Tolkien.

No one denies that Fantasy literature owes its bones to The Lord of the Rings; it essentially swamped all previously written works of Fantasy, and it unquestionably created "Fantasy" as a marketing category. Indeed, all the authors I have listed site Tolkien as a defining influence, from GRRM to Jones, from Rowling to Paolini, from McKillip to Croggon. Knowing that Tolkien came first, you cannot read any other books without seeing his hand-print. Indeed, in the immediate years following LOTR, its popularity created an enormous number of Tolkienesque works (using the themes found in The Lord of the Rings).  

Then, in 1977, Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara came out. Some now call the it a LOTR imitation, but I disagree utterly; it is Tolkienesque, for a certainty, yet is its own story and the Four Lands has a  history/lore unique to that of Middle-earth and populated by engaging characters; furthermore, to call the two subsequent books in the Original Shannara Trilogy LOTR imitations is nothing short of madness. Regardless, however, the key fact is that Brooks' was breakthrough success that publishers had been yearning for: the first true master Fantasist since Tolkien and Shannara became the first Fantasy novel to appear on, and eventually top the New York Times bestseller list. As a result, the genre saw a boom in the number of quite popular titles published in the following years, such as the Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey and Terry Pratchett's Discworld. (Pern actually came out about a decade before Shannara did, but since it took Brooks' success to establish McCaffrey's I list it as after; both for that reason and because subsequent Pern books helped Fantasy along.) Then came The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb (which is on my to-read list) and The Blue Sword and its companion The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. Meanwhile, though Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle received less critical attention because they were (wrongly) considered children's books, they laid the groundwork for future authors. (People talk about Harry going by train to Hogwarts, but first Ged had to travel by ship to the School of Roke.)

Yet the Golden Age had yet to begin. It needed a push. Well, several pushes, actually, and the next of those was Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (which took decades to complete), followed by the more swiftly finished Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series by Tad Williams. Both international bestsellers, with Williams' work setting the seeds of inspiration in the mind of George R. R. Martin and the much later and regrettable rise of Grimdark Fantasy.

Yet still the Golden Age had not begun. Fantasy was present and popular, yes, but it needed, frankly, another Tolkien; another The Lord of the Rings. Another undeniable literary classic that transcended the term and became a cultural phenomenon so as to inspire another whole generation of readers. And we got it in The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. Hence the reason I have always called her the Heir of Tolkien. One does not need me to list the virtues of Harry Potter nor how it differs from LOTR, but it was the classic which (drew from such previous masters as Le Guin, Jones, & Tolkien and) started the Golden Age of Fantasy – pushing the genre forever into the canon of Great Literature, increasingly intertwining with mainstream fiction. A process aided by the international popularity of other works such as Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, John Flanagan's Ranger's Apprentice, and so many others that I have listed.

Now, with both Rowling and Tolkien to draw upon, Fantasy has blossomed into a still-growing and flourishing garden of authors and worlds one can spend literal decades reading (I speak from experience). Truly the popularity of the Fantastic is not lessening but rather the opposite, as noted in the first paragraph. Let us glory in this Golden Age of Fantasy! This Golden Age of Imagination!

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want your children to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." – Albert Einstein 

"The Road goes ever on and on 

Down from the door where it began. 

Now far ahead the Road has gone, 

And I must follow, if I can, 

Pursuing it with eager feet, 

Until it joins some larger way 

Where many paths and errands meet. 

And whither then? I cannot say." 

- J.R.R. Tolkien's Walking song

 

But the wheel of time does not stand still and, as Moiraine Aes Sedai says, "No eye can see the pattern until it is woven." 

Hence the Golden Age of Fantasy is no more static than the genre itself, which like all literature changes as the wheel turns. The Golden Age began with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, a global phenomenon that equal to that of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: forging generations of readers and pushing genre forever into the canon of Great Literature.

Yet being historian-trained means I known that history does not stand still. So, now that entire generations have been born and grown to young adulthood since Harry Potter ended, one must ask:where does Fantasy now stand? How is the genre shaping and changing as the years go by?

Winterfell

An answer which begins, for all that the first book was published in 1996, when A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin truly broke into the scene. A work as stunningly original as it was skillfully written, it paved the way for a new type of Fantasy perfectly characterized by GRRM's Cersei Lannister: "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground." A subgenre of Fantasy soon named the Grimdark which Tor Fantasy reviewer Liz Bourke characterizes as "a retreat into the valorization of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action (...) as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility. Finally, British journalist Damien Walter wrote in The Guardian his own view of GRRM’s Grimdark brand of Fantasy: "bigger swords, more fighting, bloodier blood, more fighting, axes, more fighting," and, he surmised, a "commercial imperative to win adolescent male readers." He sees this trend as being in opposition to "a truly epic and more emotionally nuanced kind of fantasy" that delivered storytelling instead of only blood and porn. In this I also utterly agree, for Fantasy literature is not supposed to revolve around the concept of constantly dodging death. Granted that, in Grimdark books, the possibility of character deaths in far greater and thus the suspense is higher. Mark Lawrence, author of the The Broken Empire Trilogy, attributes his own inspiration from George R. R. Martin. “I was impressed by how ruthless he was with characters we were invested in and how exciting that made reading the series,” Lawrence states. “Because you never felt safe and never knew for sure that things would work out in the end. It felt real and powerful.”  

Powerful indeed, enough that, for a time, it seemed to take over the genre, A Song of Ice and Fire – aided by its HBO Game of Thrones show adaptation – seeming to match the global popularity of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. And, like Tolkien, GRRM's work spawned a host of authors who followed his example: Mark Lawrence's Prince of Thorns trilogy, Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, Anna Smith Spark's The Court of Broken Knives, and the works of Joe Abercrombie and so many others. A subgenre perfectly described as Fantasy author Genevieve Valentine, who called Grimdark a "shorthand for a subgenre of fantasy fiction that claims to trade on the psychology of those sword-toting heroes, and the dark realism behind all those kingdom politics." Valid considering how court/political intrigue is the beating heart of the Grimdark. More to the point, however, its popularity soared. Filling bookstore shelves at so stunning a rate, and staying there, that for a while it seemed unconquerable. Though it should be noted that, given its inherently gritty nature, the Grimdark never crossed over into Middle Grade Fantasy – staying firmly on the YA and Adult shelves.

This lasted a long time, and I would compare the struggle between High and Grimdark Fantasy to the 19th century one between Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism. The former being belief that people and nature are inherently good, while the latter emerged as both the inverse of and reaction against Transcendentalism – questioning the inherent goodness of humankind and focusing on the less-noble aspects of humanity such as sorrow, sin, guilt, corruption, and madness. Not unlike how the Grimdark was a reaction against the Tolkieneque and Rowling-style approach.

Then, after many years, a shift occurred – one partly owed to an unsettled world and the fact that GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire remains floundering and unfinished while end of the HBO version left a soar taste on many mouths.

Until seemingly overnight between 2022 to now, the Grimdark has been overthrown by the almost simultaneous rise of Romantasy and Asian-inspired Fantasy.

What is Romantasy? A new word that, in brief summation, is the fusion of Romance and Fantasy which gives each equal importance. Yes, yes, yes, all the best Fantasies usually have a strong romantic subplot, yet in Romantasy there is nothing sub about the romance. These are tales where slow-burn love stories unfold alongside a sweeping Epic Fantasy adventure, each no less critical than and in fact complimenting the other. A harmonious wedding of high-stakes fantasy world-building with compelling romance plotlines. A subgenre that is as likely to have LGBTQIA+ protagonists as otherwise, which is called Queer Romantasy.

Then there is Asian-inspired Fantasy. Back in 2017 I said that "the lore of Eastern cultures remains a largely untapped goldmine within the Fantasy genre. A goldmine that, when used, tends to immense popularity." No longer is that mine untapped. Oh no. From Tasha Suri's Burning Kingdoms trilogy to the Song of the Last Kingdom by Amélie Wen Zhao, to Axie Oh's The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea to Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan, to Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, to Elizabeth Lim's Spin the Dawn and Six Crimson Cranes and truly countless others, Asian-inspired Fantasy has uncoiled like the Azure Dragon of the East – wrapping Fantasy literature in its shinning and unique scales.

"Yin and yang. Good and evil. Great and terrible. Two sides of the same coin, Lián'ér, and somewhere in the center of it all lies power. The solution is to find the balance between them." - Dé’zì, grandmaster of School of the White Pines.

And then there is when the two meet in Asian-inspired Romantasy, which in some ways seems to be more prevalent than either of the other two. Indeed, now when I go to bookstores the shelves are packed with Romantasy and Asian-inspired Fantasy, thus making these two the unquestionable current co-monarchs of the Fantasy genre. Is Grimdark gone? Hardly. But its stranglehold is broken and I like to think that the Rise of Romantasy and Asian-inspired Fantasy was and remains a direct reaction against its dark cynicism and naked brutality. For in an unsettled world, they offers readers a powerful form of escapism to alternate universes where magic exists and love can conquer all.

Which shows that, for all the Fantasy genre is changing, it still remains loyal to the ideals of its founder:

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter." – J.R.R. Tolkien

And of course, the works of Tolkien, Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Ursula K. Le Guin and many of the old guard remain on shelves and popular.

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[1] Author of The Chronicles of Prydain

[2] I say “near all” because there are always books that blur the lines, most notably (in my experience anyway) the works of Diana Wynne Jones.

[3] I say “near all” because there are always books that blur the lines, most notably (in my experience anyway) the works of Diana Wynne Jones.