A Brief History of the Fantasy Genre

Today’s guest post is by author Jeff Shear (@Jeff_Shear).


George R.R. Martin says, “Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab.”

While fairy tales are ancient, dating back to the Bronze age, fantasy turns out to be a revival movement, rising from the grave of the recent dead. Mention of the word fantasy is minimal through through the twentieth century, with some peaks here and there depending on your source. Around 1945, fantasy took flight, soaring up and up, well into the twenty-first century. Why the change? What summoned the word fantasy back to life in 1945?

The first people I called on for an answer was my house painter, Rob Cordones, who was then painting my kitchen (lemon). He replied instantly to the question, “Edgar Allan Poe.” He then quoted him, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” He added Mary Shelly (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Dracula) to the list, all of whom wrote well before there was much mention of the word fantasy. Poe was dead by 1849, Shelly by 1851, and Stoker made it into the twentieth century, dying in 1912. Still, fantasy had a stake through the chest for another 35 years.

I put the question to Jane Friedman; her answer: “That sounds like a mystery worth chasing,” she said. “I wonder if Tolkien might’ve had something to do with it?” J.R.R. Tolkien hit the sweet spot all right. He and C.S. Lewis were members of a writers group called the Inklings, which met for nearly twenty years. The Lord of the Rings took 12 years to complete, not reaching print until 1949. The Hobbit published in 1937 might have served as kindling.

Ian J. Simpson, a brilliant Brit who’s known as the “Librarian” at the protean site known as the Geek Syndicate, says, “I suspect the term fantasy rose after World War II in part due to an increased optimism and need for release from the horrors of that time,” he wrote. “However, I’m thinking you could also attribute it to the publication of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, first published in 1949. And then there was the publication and popularity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and Lord of the Rings (1954).”

Simpson is spot on. The word fantasy does not appear in the English language used as a word for “a genre of literary compositions,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, until 1949. And its first usage as such appeared in a title: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Added up, fantasy’s sudden growth in popularity was born of talent and terror in the 1940s, and specifically, I would argue, from singular event.

I’ve been haunted by it for many years by an introductory line from a five-time Emmy Award winning two-season HBO series, Carnivàle. Airing from 2003 to 2005, its story arc connected a dust-bowl depression narrative to an epic battle between good and evil. What stirred me was the show’s prologue, which opens on a very tight shot of the dimly lit visage of Samson, a lead character played by Michael J. Anderson. Samson is a little person who manages the carnival, and he has his own theory of fantasy. As he lifts his gaze to the camera in the show’s opening seconds, he grows oracular. His lips move before he speaks, and he slowly pronounces his lines, his voice like gravel stirred into sentences: “Before the beginning,” he intones, “after the great war between heaven and hell, God created the Earth and gave dominion over it to the crafty ape he called man. In each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness, and great armies would clash by night in an ancient war between good and evil.” Samson tilts his head sadly, takes a pause, and tells us. “There was magic then… nobility… and unimaginable cruelty. So it was until the day when a false sun exploded over Trinity and man forever traded away wonder for reason.”

Trinity was the name of the first atomic blast, a second sun described then as a “cosmic light” that rose over ground zero at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in a valley called Jornada del Muerto (“Journey of the Dead Man”). This other sun was visible for 180 miles. But Samson, I fear, missed a beat. Humans did not trade away wonder for reason in that awesome moment. Reason is a good thing and in short supply. The opposite is true. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, reason evaporated in a fireball as hot as the stars and rose into an iconic mushroom cloud requiring shelter, beneath the wings of fantasy.

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Rachel Thompson

I think super hero comic books did a lot to entice readers into fantasy. As a comic reader ages and matures he or she wants more complex reading, longer more detailed stories. Certainly the onset of sci-fi short story pulps bridged the gap from comic book to epic novels.

Jeff shear

That’s really a sharp idea. Thank you. It’s beginning to look like lots of elements piled on to get fantasy into the public discourse.

Charles Kiernan

We can’t talk about early fantasy without taking about Lord Dunsany. He first published in 1905 and “invented” the voice of the genre. We are beholding to him, as rather wacky as he was.

Jeff shear

And he lived until 1957, so, yes, he was in the sweet spot. BTW, I’m no authority on fantasy. I fell over a trend line and when I got back up, I got curious. Thank you for your insight!

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[…] Welcome to Elfpunk! Abby Hargreaves explains what elfpunk is and has 5 books to get you started. Speaking of elves, Jeff Shear has a brief history of the fantasy genre. […]

Thank you for your attention! I am constantly astonished at the brilliance of “fantasy” writers, and I’m so glad you passed this article along. Thank you!

Peter Selgin

Most informative. Thank you.

Jeff Shear

It’s good to hear from you, Peter. I’m a great admirer of the first-page items. It’s a terrific idea.

Jeff Shear

I should have linked to this — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cAWT3CsATc: Carnival Open

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[…] This originally appeared in A Brief History of the Fantasy Genre […]

Sue Boulais

I just found this site as I was researching the fantasy genre. I hope it isn’t too late to pose a thought or two.

Our book club has just finished reading “The Hobbit”–most of us are in our 70s, and I was flabbergasted at the number of people who had never read the original. In any case, the young man who led the discussion was a definite Tolkien afficianado, and seemed to be of the opinion that fantasy only existed from The Hobbit onward.

Of course, no writer creates in a vacuum. And Tolkien is squarely positioned in a continuum. Before The Hobbit was published these fantastical novels had been published and had become accepted classics.
1865 – Alice in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll
1872 — The Princess and the Goblin – George MacDonald; Scots writer: remarkable innovator, adept in
reproducing the strange logic of dreams and in creating early versions of secondary worlds; was a
huge influence on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis
1883 – Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi
1885 – King Solomon’s Mines — H. Rider Haggard
1886 – She – H. Rider Haggard
1900 – Wizard of Oz – Frank. L. Baum
1904 – Peter Pan – J. M. Barrie
1908 –The Wind in the Willows
1910s and on – Lord Dunsany
1912 – Tarzan

Every one of them presents a world complete in itself. Each has its own guide. And the story
line is very similar for them all: an unsuspecting protagonist sets off on a journey, has hair-raising adventures, finds inner reserves of resourcefulness, then goes home somewhat changed. (Bilbo, of course, writes his memoirs!)

For myself, I see some very strong resemblances between Oz and Middle Earth: the golden brick road and the road that goes ever on; the bumbling scarecrow and the bumbling dwarves; Dorothy and Bilbo, both of whom get a journey that they don’t want thrust upon them; Gandalf and Glinda; the poppy field where the Lion falls asleep and the wood where the dwarves are imprisoned (and, in both instances, the problems happen because the characters leave the path which they have been strictly adjured to stay on and follow).

How, then, would these be classified? Are they not part of the fantasy genre? or do they have some other designation? I would appreciate any thoughts you might have on this angle.

Thank you.

Paul Inglis

“Fantasy” was used in the name of a magazine well before 1949. There was a magazine published in 1931 called “Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories”. It didn’t survive very long, but it does indicate that the term existed before World War II.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Science_and_Fantasy_Stories

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[…] creator. If you are here for a history of fantasy and it’s inception, then I might suggest this post from a fellow blogger, written by Jeff Shear. As the post explains, fantasy was largely borne from […]