To cut straight to the one-line review: Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy (Palgrave McMillan, 2015) is a must-read if you’re at all interested in how the popular genre now known as “fantasy” came about. Even if it’s a little difficult to obtain and get into.

Williamson is both an academic and “one of us.” A senior lecturer in English at the University of Vermont, he’s taught a number of classes that I’d love to audit (Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, King Arthur). He’s also obviously widely read, with a working familiarity of Romantic poetry, Gothic novels, and early and late fantasy writers both obscure and popular, including the likes of Robert. E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

There are some not-inconsiderable hurdles to get over with this book. First is the price. I believe I paid in the neighborhood of $70 for my copy, and at the moment the print version appears to be only available at ridiculous prices from third-party sellers (it looks like you can get a copy on the Kindle Store for a little under $40, but I’m still an e-book luddite). A second is Williamson’s dense and rather dry academic writing style. I found that this gets better as the book progresses, or perhaps I was just getting more accustomed to it. The introduction is by far the longest chapter (comprising 46 of the book’s 200 pages) and Williamson comes out swinging with a dense wall of text loaded with revelations and striking assertions about how “fantasy” as a distinct genre came to be. Once out of the way, Williamson builds his case, layer by layer and strand by strand through the centuries in a convincing and comprehensive manner. Williamson covers the forgotten past of early 18th century fantastic works, the Romantic Age, the Victorian Period, and fantasy in the 20th century including its bifurcation between the “literary canon” (Cabell, Eddison, Morris, Tolkien, et. al) and “popular fantasy” (pulp authors including Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Leiber and others).

Chapters 3-6 are quite easy to read at relative speed; I struggled a bit with the introduction and chapter 2 (18th Century: The Forgotten Past), the latter perhaps due to my unfamiliarity with many of these works (I find it hard to get excited about Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Anyssinia [1759] or William Beckford’s Vathek [1786], for example). But what Williamson does in these early chapter is show how early fantasy authors drew upon ancient texts like The Arabian Nights and used them as inspiration for their own tales of fancy.

One of Williamson’s greatest achievements is reclaiming narrative poetry and ballads like Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) as early works in the fantasy tradition. Poetry is almost always overlooked in genre studies, or at best hand-waved as a general influence by observers who don’t do the work of connecting these sources to prose fantasy. Williamson does, spending considerable effort drawing the line between the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and John Keats’ Lamia to Sara Coleridge’s Phantasmion (1837), which he calls the first true invented world fantasy (if not particularly influential).

While not conforming to our commonly accepted definition of “fantasy” (i.e., tales of war and quest set in secondary/invented worlds where magic works), these early writers, principally working in poetry and verse, were the early prototypes of authors like William Morris, who engaged with ancient medieval ballads to create seminal works of early fantasy like The Well at the World’s End (1896), which the likes of Lin Carter claims as the first true fantasy novel. Morris by the way worked in both mediums, long narrative poetry and prose romance, and is literally a bridge between these two modes of storytelling.

Williamson shifts his focus in chapters to 4-5 a lot to the work of Morris, James Branch Cabell, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, and E.R. Eddison. He describes their work as a form of antiquarianism, drawing upon ancient texts such as The Mabinogion, Beowulf, medieval Arthurian romances, and the Eddas and Sagas, made widely available in their era through the work of translators and scholars in popular editions for both adults and children. From these works these early pre-genre fantasy authors created new works of mythic resonance that serve as the foundation for many wildly popular series today. “My contention is that what we call modern fantasy was in fact a creative extension of the antiquarian work that made these older works translatable,” Williamson says.

Chapter 6, “Twentieth Century: Popular Fantasy” is probably the chapter of greatest interest to readers of DMR Blog. Here we get a solid bit of history on the likes of Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, and a few others, as well as the likes of Weird Tales and Unknown. Williamson draws a rather sharp distinction between the pulp writers and the “literary” writers (i.e., Morris, Eddison, Dunsany, Tolkien), but there’s not a big fight to be picked here. I happened to agree with most of his assertions, and you can’t really detect much in the way of qualitative distinctions, merely separate influences and traditions that resulted in very different styles of fantasy fiction.

Williamson breaks off his narrative somewhere around 1980 (our new commercial age of popular fantasy is still ongoing, and assessing it when it has not ended or substantively changed is judged as futile). He places a huge importance on the Lin Carter-edited Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, or BAFS (series proper 1969-74). Before the BAFS, Williamson claims, no one was consciously writing “fantasy,” at least as it has come to be popularly known today. That all changed with the BAFS, “the first time that fantasy was presented on its own terms as a genre in its own right.” By 1974 and the end of Carter’s editorship of the BAFS a discrete genre had demonstrably emerged, Williamson claims. I have perhaps a few minor nits to pick here; Williamson places an enormous emphasis on the BAFS while also claiming that modern fantasy developed incrementally, and in many places pokes holes in Carter’s scholarship. This perhaps slightly undercuts his extraordinary claim about the BAFS as a watershed canonization moment for the genre.

A couple other details of interest to readers of DMR Blog:

Williamson expresses a preference for what he describes as the “literary” branch of pre- codified genre fantasy, although he certainly does not downplay the excellence of the better pulp/sword-and-sorcery authors. The difference, Williamson explains, is that the former were engaging in a form of antiquarianism, and working almost entirety independently of each other, whereas the pulp authors shared the same medium and its expectations and restrictions, heavily cross-influenced each other, and were influenced by more modern sources including horror, historical adventure, and Lost World fiction. I largely agree with this distinction, although I happen to believe that some sword-and-sorcery authors consulted traditional heroic narratives including Icelandic Saga in translation (to be fair, Williamson does too, though to a lesser extent—we disagree, if at all, only as a matter of degree).
Williamson loosely groups sword-and-sorcery with science fiction, based on how publishers of the era were classifying it (a casual look at some of the spines of my S&S collection does reveal some “science fiction” and/or “science fantasy” labelling). Williamson’s claim seems based at least partially on semantics and timing; S&S could not have been a subgenre of fantasy given his timeline, as “fantasy” did not become a discrete genre until 1969.
He gives sword-and-sorcery its due as a genre that that both predated and kicked off the Tolkien boom. Its burgeoning popularity led Donald Wollheim to publish The Lord of the Rings in an unauthorized Ace edition and even describe it as “sword-and-sorcery.” S&S gets a good six dense pages of explication as well as mentions in the introduction and conclusion.
Williamson acknowledges H. Rider Haggard (and to a lesser degree, Dunsany) as a rare joint influence on the literary and popular branches of fantasy.
Williamson appears to exclude Clark Ashton Smith from sword-and-sorcery, which he narrows down to Howard and writers of muscular heroic fantasy in his wake. He places Smith and Lovecraft in a separate category, “Dark Fantasy.”
Williamson does not seem to hold most post- 1980 fantasy in particularly high regard, particularly the Tolkien-derived works of the likes of Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson. Says Williamson, “A frequent counter to charges that Brooks’s work, Donaldson’s work, or many of the ‘epic’ trilogies to come are overly derivative of Tolkien is that Tolkien borrowed, too. But what Tolkien ‘borrowed’ from was millennia of quite varied material, which he knew in the original languages: he had virtually the entire body of traditional legendary and mythic European narrative in his head.” Williamson describes the third stage of fantasy development, post BAFS (1975-1980) as one marked by formulaic appeal to bestsellerdom. Amen, brother.

The Evolution of Modern Fantasy won Best Scholarly Work in Myth and Fantasy from the Mythopoeic Society in 2016, and it’s a richly deserved honor. If you can find an affordable copy it’s worth the investment of time, effort, and money.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press). Learn more on his website, The Silver Key.