How would you assess the contributions of J R R Tolkien and Mervyn Peake?
China: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is undoubtedly the most influential fantasy book ever written. It is the paradigm for the kind of cod-epic, conservative secondary world fantasies discussed above. Obviously there were writers before Tolkien who were very influential–Robert E Howard’s Conan books, for example, were written in the 1930s and they’re hardly politically radical either–but Tolkien brought various elements to fantasy that made him central. More than previous writers he constructed an elaborate history, geography, linguistics, mythology, etc for his invented world, and fitted his narrative into that. Of course world creation had gone on before–Howard’s Hyboria, Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique–but Tolkien saw the building of an internally consistent secondary world as central to the project of what he called ‘fairy’ and what we would now call fantasy. The sometimes obsessive focus on the secondary world is typical of post-1960s fantasy. It’s easy to m
