high fantasy and must be ranked with Tolkien’s books, seems, at the very least, a bit too
preachy when compared to the more subtle ethics and morality in The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings.
Any listing of books by genre opens the doors for debate, and a category as narrow as
high fantasy has very disputable borders. Still, some of the following books, in addition
to the ones mentioned above, may well be listed among the twentieth-century classics of
high fantasy when literary history passes judgement: Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn,
John Bellairs’s The Face in the Frost, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon,
Gillian Bradshaw’s Arthurian trilogy, Emma Bull’s The War for the Oaks, Joy Chant’s
Red Moon and Black Mountain, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, Jane Louise
Curry’s The Sleepers, Charles de Lint’s Moonheart, Stephen R.Donaldson’s Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane, Guy
Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Louise Lawrence’s The Earth Witch, Ursula Guin’s Earthsea books,
R.R.MacAvoy’s Tea with the Black Dragon, Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of
Eld, Kenneth Morris’s The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed and Book of the Three Dragons,
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Celtic and Iron Age novels, and Roger Zelazny’s Amber series.
The current popularity of high fantasy and the quality of the best books in that genre
today are due in large part to Tolkien’s being in the right place at the right time—twice.
From the 1920s to the early 1950s, he was in the right place and time to acquire the
education and interests that inform The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the 1960s
and after, he, in the person of his books, was in the right place and time to influence a
whole generation of readers and writers who took his works as the model for high
fantasy. What Tolkien had succeeded in doing, as reading the books aloud clearly
demonstrates, was wedding the oral tale’s style and content to the novel’s format,
creating an epic every bit as large as The Iliad and The Odyssey. Those who would be
Virgil to his Homer are fortunate to have a climate hospitable to high fantasy.
The future of high fantasy lies in the past. Because it is a form which draws so heavily
on the past for virtually all of its context, content, and style, there can be little literary
innovation in the genre. Rather, the best high fantasies to be written will be written by
those authors who, like Tolkien, can most successfully synthesise their knowledge of the
traditional narratives and the cultures in which they were popular and who can also tell
a story well.
ReferencesBisenieks, D. (1974) ‘Tales from the “perilous realm”: good news for the modern child’ Christian
Century 91:617–618, 620.
Cameron, E. (1971) ‘High fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea’, The Horn Book 47:129–138.
Carter, L. (1973) Imaginary Worlds, New York: Ballantine Books.
Dégh, L. (1972) ‘Folk narrative’, in Dorson, R. (ed.) Folklore and Folklife, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Helms, R. (1974) Tolkien’s World, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
——(1981) Tolkien and the Silmarils, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Herm, G. (1979) The Celts, New York: St Martin’s Press.
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