I will sometimes say things like, ‘the modern fantasy genre all comes from Tolkien.’ And I will usually immediately get people being like, but there was lots of other fantasy before Tolkien! Of course there was! But that’s not the point. The point is, it wouldn’t matter if those had been, if it hadn’t been for Tolkien. The only reason that fantasy has become what it is, and means what it means, and functions as it does within modern society, is because of Tolkien. All of those other fantasy writers deserve all of their props, but if they wouldn’t have done it, it wouldn’t have mattered at the end of the day.
--Corey Olsen, The Tolkien Professor

Very few people love and venerate J.R.R. Tolkien more than I. I think Tolkien is the finest fantasy author who ever lived, and no. 2, whomever that may be, is not all that close. The Lord of the Rings is not just the greatest work of fantasy, but one of the finest works of literature in English or any other language. It belongs on the same shelf with the likes of Tolstoy and Shakespeare and Melville.

But, even I wouldn’t go so far as did Corey Olsen, aka., the Tolkien Professor, on a recent podcast. See above quote. This is taken from “Other Minds and Hands, Episode 1,” at about the 27 minute mark, and it’s something I felt obligated to push back on.

The danger is I’m taking a few sentences from a guy who has produced thousands of hours of verbal content on Tolkien, and built up a large and loyal fanbase with hundreds of informative and engaging lectures. I’ve greatly enjoyed Olsen’s work and will continue to do so. But his comment stopped me cold, literally caused me to press the pause button on my iPhone and begin writing this piece. I realize I have become the person shouting there was lots of other fantasy before Tolkien! And, it’s hard to parse exactly what Olsen meant here. Also, when you put out that volume of content, inevitably you are going to make mistakes, or say something carelessly that you didn’t mean.

But I also believe what he said implies that fantasy would not have mattered without Tolkien. If so, this deserves rebuttal. So here goes.

The modern fantasy genre does NOT all come from Tolkien, and it would have arrived even without him. In fact, it already had. And pre-Tolkien fantasy matters.

To set the stage, early fantasists Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald, and H. Rider Haggard were writing long before Tolkien. Tolkien himself read and loved many of these authors and his work bears their influence. As it should; much of their work is great.

Sword-and-sorcery existed long before The Lord of the Rings (1954) and even The Hobbit (1939). Starting in the late 20s and early 30s, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, and Fritz Leiber produced an amazing body of work that attracted fanbases in pulp magazines Weird Tales and Unknown.

H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs were both writing pre-Tolkien, and today remain both popular and incredibly influential. And to say that neither would not have ultimately had their day—rescued and unearthed by scholars and fans, re-released in paperback, and eventually filtered into comics and video games and heavy metal music—stretches the belief.

Although The Lord of the Rings was published in hardcover in 1954, Tolkien was not read on a truly mass scale until 1965, when Ace published cheap and pirated mass paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings. Well before this much-chronicled Tolkien boom, fantasy was showing clear signs of a resurgence, and a budding renaissance. Arkham House, albeit in small print runs, was republishing the likes of Howard and Leiber and Smith and Lovecraft throughout the 1940s. Gnome Press published Conan in the early 50s (and does anyone believe that the enterprising L. Sprague de Camp was not going to get these works into greater circulation in the Lancers a decade later?) The fanzine Amra was founded pre-Ace Tolkien mania, and for most of its run dedicated the bulk of its page count to Conan, not Frodo. Magazines like Fantastic and Science Fantasy were publishing new sword-and-sorcery authors like Michael Moorcock, whose first story of Elric (1961’s “The Dreaming City”) appeared four years before the Tolkien boom.

In addition, the Burroughs boom had begun. From Black Gate, “According to Life magazine, in 1962 the Tarzan novels being reprinted in paperback were runaway best-sellers. That year, Burroughs books sold more than 10 million copies – roughly 1/30th of the total of all paperback sales for the year.”

That’s 10 million copies in a single year, three years prior to the unauthorized Ace editions of The Lord of the Rings. Now, Burroughs is not straight up fantasy as we understand that term today, but he’s definitely fantastic to the core. John Carter leaping about on Mars slaying white apes is not all that different from Conan stalking through jungles battling great gray apes in “Shadows in the Moonlight.” Lovecraft was getting published in paperback anthologies in the 1950s, and collections by 1963. The wave was slowly building, and the fantasy genre would have been birthed even without the Tolkien explosion of the mid-1960s.

To say that none of this would have mattered at the end of the day were it not for Tolkien is not true. Fantasy was already on our shores. Not Tolkien-inspired fantasy, but fantasy of a weirder, wilder, more swashbuckling sort. And some would say, of a better sort.

For the record I would not agree. Again, as I stated at the outset of this missive, Tolkien is the man. Today it’s hard to even conceive of fantasy without him. No one has done it better, before or since. I’m even inclined to say, no one ever will. To repeat the unique circumstances that produced Tolkien—born with an extraordinary facility for language, achieving a mastery of philology, deeply versed in medieval literature and ancient myth, seasoned with his experiences serving in World War I and living through the industrialization of England and the rise of Nazi Germany—is incredibly unlikely. We have had his like; we shall not again.

Tolkien’s impact on subsequent fantasy authors is immense, incalculable. See Meditations on Middle-Earth for many eloquent defenses of why Tolkien matters, from some of the best in the genre. Tolkien produced straight-up clones (Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara, Dennis McKiernan’s Iron Tower trilogy) and countless works that bear the clear stamp of his works. Unless they are living in Gollum’s cave in the sightless dark beneath the Misty Mountains, every fantasy author working post 1965 has had to deal with him. The fantasy “trilogy” publishing phenomenon replete with maps that is now a cliché and the subject of mockery from the likes of The Onion comes from Tolkien. Had Tolkien opted to stick with academia and not written his legendarium, it’s hard to even conceptualize the impact of his absence. We’d have a massive Middle-Earth-sized hole that we probably would have somehow felt, but no one else could have filled. Tolkien did something entirely new with fantasy, and added a mighty verse that even his most ardent imitators have never replicated, but succeeded only at swiping its surface elements (if this is what Olsen meant with his statement by the way, I agree with him).

I think the real issue is that Tolkien’s formidable presence has been with us now for such a long time, longer than many of today’s readers’ lifetimes. Tolkien myopia is a common, understandable malady. Today many believe he created fantasy single-handedly.

But, the truth is that fantasy does not all come from Tolkien, and it does matter that these authors had been. Modern fantasy is fueled not just by Tolkien, but by the same ancient myths and primal urges that gave us the likes of Beowulf and the Kalevala, Icelandic Saga and the tales of King Arthur, and later John Carter of Mars, Conan, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The works of pulp writers, bolstered by the small presses, loyal fandom, the Burroughs Boom, and the Lancer Conan Saga, would have ushered in the modern fantasy genre, even without Tolkien and the Ace scandal.

It would have looked far different, as subsequent authors would have taken the lead of Howard and Leiber, and Burroughs and Lovecraft, and not Tolkien. It may not have been as large, or as profitable. But we’d have had it, all the same.

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