By early fantasy literature I mean pre-Tolkien fantasy, more specifically pre-Lord of the Rings fantasy, so any fantasy published up to 1954, when The Fellowship of the Rings came out. Tolkien’s first published prose fantasy was of course The Hobbit, which appeared in 1937, but it wasn’t a game changer in the same way as LOTR.
After LOTR, fantasy became a self-conscious commercial genre, instead of a loose literary tradition, and much of what has been written since has been imitation. Much hasn’t, of course, but I’m specifically interested in writers who were working before Tolkien or at the same time and who were unambiguously not influenced by him, or who were influenced by him as a fellow writer, rather than as a dominant master.
What fascinates me about this era of fantasy is the sense of buried treasure. There really is something exciting about discovering an obscure author who turns out to have written something wonderful. What’s also wonderful is the originality of vision of many of these writers. Some seem familiar, but some are like nothing you’ve ever read. Many are a combination of both kinds of elements. For example, The Worm Orouboros by E. R. Eddison reminds one of LOTR in terms of its basic plot, but it expresses a pagan morality completely different to the Good versus Evil Christianity of Tolkien’s work.
It’s a huge field, especially if you have a broad definition of fantasy, and I’m still finding my way through it. I am, however, well-acquainted with the “big names” of early fantasy, particularly with writers who were an influence on Tolkien and his contemporaries (like C. S. Lewis) and therefore had an influence on the development of mainstream fantasy – so in this blog I’ll start with a list of those writers, accompanied by occasional notes, and then give you a list of resources to start collecting and reading. I’ve confined this list largely to adult fantasy, partly because it’s my particular area of interest, but also because a considerable proportion of nineteenth and early twentieth century children’s fantasy was ghastly didactic fiction intended to inculcate Victorian values.
To my mind, the key writers, in terms of influence/achievement/fame are as follows:
E.R. Eddison (If you only read one early fantasy novel, read The Worm Ouroboros. It has become beyond a cliché to say this, but it really is on a par with The Lord of the Rings - it reads like Tolkien written in a Shakespearean style. It’s also the first fantasy novel to have a chronology at the back, as LOTR would later have. For the three books of the Zimiamvian Trilogy, get the one-volume edition, Zimiamvia – A Trilogy, rather than the three separate books. The one-volume edition has a more complete text.)
Sara Coleridge (Writer of Phantasmion, the first high fantasy novel in the English language.)
Lewis Carroll (Author of the two Alice books of course.)
George Macdonald (A friend of Carroll’s and a great influence on C. S. Lewis.)
William Morris (Possibly the strongest influence on Tolkien.)
Lord Dunsany (Another probable influence on Tolkien. Tolkien certainly read him, and he preceded Tolkien in the creation of an invented mythology in The Gods of Pegana.)
James Stephens (One of the pioneers of Celtic fantasy.)
Sir Henry Newbolt (Producer of a single beautiful novel, Aladore, in the tradition of William Morris.)
A.E. Waite (Primarily a writer of occult non-fiction. He produced a mystical novel, The Quest of the Golden Stairs, very lovely to read, but hard to understand.)
H. Rider Haggard (The founder of Lost World fiction, much of which is also fantasy. Creator of the characters of Allan Quatermain and Ayesha, A.K.A. She.)
William Hope Hodgson (A probable influence on H. P. Lovecraft.)
F. W. Bain (Wrote a series of gorgeous novellas inspired by Hinduism and Indian folklore.)
Ernest Bramah (Creator of the comic character of Kai Lung, the ancient Chinese storyteller.)
Kenneth Morris (A pioneer of Celtic fantasy. Only get the Cold Spring Press edition of Book of the Three Dragons – it’s the only one that’s complete.)
James Branch Cabell (Writer of the darkly humorous series The Biography of the Life of Manuel – both funny and bitterly sad.)
Francis Stevens (A pioneer of dark fantasy.)
A. Merritt (A pulp writer and master of purple prose.)
David Lindsay (An influence on C. S. Lewis, and writer of the strangest book I have ever read, A Voyage to Arcturus.)
Arthur Machen (An influence on H.P. Lovecraft.)
Hope Mirrlees (Wrote only one fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist, about a town on the borders of Faerie. It has similar themes to Dunsany’s classic, The King of Elfland’s Daughter.)
D. O. Fagunwa (The first African fantasist. He wrote in Yoruba, but his first novel, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, is readily available in an English translation.)
Amos Tutuola (A disciple of Fagunwa and author of the first African novel in English, The Palm-Wine Drinkard.)
L. Frank Baum (Creator of Oz.)
J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan.)
Robert E. Howard (Still well known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Read the original Conan stories by Howard, rather than the version of the series that was edited and added to by Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp.)
H.P. Lovecraft (Wrote fantasy as well as horror, mostly in imitation of Lord Dunsany. His fantasy is underrated.)
Clark Ashton Smith (To my mind the greatest of the American pulp fantasy writers of the 1920’s and 30’s, surpassing even Howard and Lovecraft.)
C.L. Moore (Creator of the first female Sword and Sorcery hero, Jirel of Joiry.)
Fritz Leiber (With the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, added complexity to the model of Sword and Sorcery established by Howard.)
T.H. White (He wrote The Sword in the Stone, still regarded as a children’s classic, but the first in the rather more adult Arthurian series The Once and Future King – probably still the best Arthurian fantasy series out there. The last book is The Book of Merlyn, which White wrote during World War II. His publishers wouldn’t publish it – their excuse was the paper shortage caused by the war, but the real reason was probably the book’s strong anti-war themes. When his publishers wanted to put out a one-volume edition of the series – minus the last book – White took the opportunity to revise The Sword in the Stone to include scenes from The Book of Merlyn, and this is the version that appeared in the original one-volume edition of the series. Meanwhile the original version of The Sword in the Stone continued to be published in a standalone edition, and still is today. The Book of Merlyn was eventually published, both alone and as part of a new one-volume edition of the series, but the revised version of The Sword in the Stone was still kept in the new one-volume edition, so if you read that edition as is, you’ll find the same incidents occurring in both the first and last books, and the last book will be spoilt. The middle three books of the series are now only in print as part of the one-volume edition, so you can’t easily avoid reading it. The trick is to read the standalone edition of The Sword in the Stone and then switch to the one-volume edition of the series.)
Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast)
C.S. Lewis (Narnia of course, but also the Cosmic Trilogy/Space Trilogy and the standalone Till We Have Faces.)
Charles Williams (One of the three great fantasy writers who belonged to the Inklings writers’ group, along with Tolkien and Lewis. A better writer of Christian fantasy than Lewis.)
I haven’t provided lists of works for these authors because a wonderful resource exists which gives far more information than I could. It’s the online edition of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. This was published in 1997 and hasn’t really been updated since, so it’s obviously way out of date as far as contemporary fantasy goes, but for the classic stuff, it’s wonderful. It not only gives lots of detail about individual authors on this list (as well as many others), but has articles on different themes and subgenres, to enable you to start exploring in whatever direction you choose.
Most of these writers are in the Public Domain, and their books can be found for free on the following sites:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ (Project Gutenberg – one of the biggest collections of public domain books on the Internet.)
http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty.html (Project Gutenberg Australia - it has different books to the main Gutenberg site.)
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/meta/authors.html
I will add the usual disclaimer that these are very old books, and reflect the values and tastes of the past. Make of them what you will.
Enjoy!
Theodore Singer