the structure and content of legend as well as elements of myth, and from a novel in
which there is a finalising conclusion to a novel which points to events both previous
and subsequent to the story told within its pages and whose conclusion is, at best, a
temporary victory for the main characters. In short, The Lord of the Rings is written for a
more mature and experienced reader who can deal with its complex and highly textured
story.
If the initial publication of The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings were important
steps in the development of high fantasy, their paperback publication was crucial to
high fantasy’s current status. That publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
in the mid-1960s created a popular market for high fantasy, and for fantasy in general,
which continues to this day. As Ruth Nadelman Lynn’s Fantasy Literature for Children
and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography (1989) illustrates, there are many books
which might fall under the general heading of fantasy. Her chapter entitled ‘High fantasy
(heroic or secondary world fantasy)’ runs approximately eighty pages and is divided into
three sections: alternate worlds or histories, myth fantasy, and travel to other worlds.
All three sections contain books immediately recognisable as children’s or young
adults’ books as well as books usually considered adult reading. The first section
contains Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books as well as Richard
Adams’ Shardik and Gene Wolfe’s Torturer series. The second section contains Natalie
Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting and White’s The Sword in the Stone as well as Terry Bisson’s
The Talking Man and Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion tetralogy. And the third section
contains L.Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and Andre Norton’s Witch World series as well
as Greg Bear’s The Infinity Concerto and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Not only is Lynn’s definition of high fantasy more inclusive than most, the second set
of works mentioned for each section includes books written and marketed for an adult
audience. The reader who moves easily and naturally from The Hobbit to The Lord of the
Rings moves just as easily from any of the obvious children’s or young adults’ books in
Lynn’s bibliography to many if not most of the adult books also listed there. The fact that
adults read The Hobbit and young readers work their way through The Lord of the Rings
points up a major feature of this kind of writing: high fantasy appeals to a kind of reader
rather than a reader of a certain age. High fantasy’s reliance on traditional form and
content makes it accessible to the younger readers and, at the same time, invests it with
thematic significance for the older readers who will appreciate it on a different level.
The popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings not only created a popular
interest in high fantasy, it also created an academic interest in fantasy. That interest
supports one major scholarly organisation, the International Association for the
Fantastic in the Arts, as well as dozens of fantasy subgroups within other scholarly
organisations. The fantastic is the subject of articles appearing in a variety of academic
journals, and there are fantasy literature courses on most university campuses in the
USA.
But the most important thing that Tolkien did in those two books was to set the
standard by which other high fantasy would be judged. Numerous book covers
pronounce this or that offering to be ‘in the Tolkien tradition’ or ‘the next Lord of the
Rings’ or the author to be ‘the next Tolkien,’ but in truth, few even merit comparison and
the vast majority fall far short. Even C.S.Lewis’s Narnia series, which is itself a classic
308 TYPES AND GENRES