The Evolution of Modern Fantasy

From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

Jamie Williamson

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137515797
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Moderne Literaturkritik

In this comprehensive study, Williamson traces the literary history of the fantasy genre from the eighteenth century to its coalescence following the success of Tolkien's work in the 1960s. While some studies have engaged with related material, there has been no extended study specifically exploring the roots of this now beloved genre.

1

Introduction

Charting the Terrain

The coalescence of fantasy—that contemporary literary category whose name most readily evokes notions of “epic trilogies” with “mythic” settings and characters—into a discrete genre occurred quite recently and abruptly, a direct result of the crossing of a resurgence of interest in American popular “Sword and Sorcery” in the early 1960s with the massive commercial success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the paperback editions of which had been motivated by the former, in the mid-1960s.

Previously, there had been no identifiable genre resembling contemporary fantasy, and the work that is now identified as laying the groundwork for it (“pregenre” fantasy) appeared largely undifferentiated in widely dispersed areas of the publishing market. In the pulps between the wars, and in American genre book publishing between World War Two and the early 1960s, fantasy by writers like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance hovered between science fiction, horror, and action adventure fiction. On the other hand, work by Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, James Branch Cabell, and Tolkien, who found “reputable” literary publishers, was not, in presentation, readily distinguishable from the work of Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Ernest Hemingway, and it was apt to seem anomalous. Other work was absorbed by that modern catchall “Children’s Literature,” whether it reflected the authors’ intentions (as with C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series) or not (as with Kenneth Morris’s Book of the Three Dragons). It was a common perception that stories with the elements of content now associated with fantasy were, by their nature, suited especially to children.

A differentiated genre did emerge quite rapidly on the heels of the Sword and Sorcery revival and Tolkien’s great commercial success, however—its form and contours most strongly shaped by Ballantine Books and its crucially influential “Adult Fantasy Series” (1969–74). By the early 1980s, fantasy had grown to a full-fledged sibling, rather than an offshoot, of science fiction and horror. By now, it has been around in more or less its present form long enough to be taken for granted. A brief account of the construction of fantasy as a genre, then, is an appropriate place to begin the present discussion.

Assembling a Genre

In 1960, there was no commercial fantasy genre, and when the term was used to designate a literary type, it did not usually connote the kind of material that came to typify the genre when it coalesced, particularly in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (hereafter BAFS).

But in the early 1960s, there was a swell of interest in what then became identified as “Sword and Sorcery” or, somewhat less pervasively, “Heroic Fantasy.” At the heart of this was reprinted material that had originally appeared in pulp magazines between the 1920s and the early 1940s,1 and occasionally later, or in hardcover book editions from genre publishers.2 Published as, functionally, a subcategory of science fiction, Sword and Sorcery rapidly became very popular. Newly identified and designated, there was not a huge amount of back material for competing publishers3 to draw on, and given the general unmarketability of such work during the preceding decade and before, it is not surprising that few writers were actively producing Sword and Sorcery.4 Demand soon overtook supply.

In this context, Ace Books science fiction editor Donald Wollheim became interested in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which had generated something of a cult following among science fiction fans, though it had been released in hardcover in 1954–56 as a sort of prestige item by literary publishers (Unwin in the United Kingdom, Houghton Mifflin in the United States). The elements it had in common with the Sword and Sorcery that had been appearing were sufficient for Wollheim to suppose it would be popular with aficionados of the new subgenre. Duly described as “a book of sword-and-sorcery that anyone can read with delight and pleasure” on its first-page blurb, Ace Books published their unauthorized paperback edition in early 1965.

The minor scandal attending the unauthorized status of the Ace Books edition, and its replacement later that year by the revised and authorized Ballantine Books edition, no doubt drew some crucial initial attention to the book, but that can scarcely account for the commercial explosion of the following year or two, which has now sustained itself for five decades. The Lord of the Rings sold quite well to Sword and Sorcery fans, but it also sold quite well to a substantial cross section of the remainder of the reading public, and it became a bona fide bestseller. The Tolkien craze in fact ballooned into something quite close to the literary equivalent of the then-contemporary Beatlemania.

The result of this was something of a split phenomenon. There can be little doubt that the Tolkien explosion bolstered Sword and Sorcery to some degree and drew new readers to the subgenre who may otherwise have remained unaware of it. But Sword and Sorcery never became something that “everyone” was reading, as was the case with The Lord of the Rings, and its core readership remained centered in the audience that had grown up prior to the Tolkien paperbacks. In presentation, there was little to distinguish those Sword and Sorcery releases that followed the Tolkien explosion, through the second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s, and those that had preceded it. So there was Sword and Sorcery, and there was Tolkien.

Ballantine Books clearly recognized this dichotomy. Not a major player in the Sword and Sorcery market, the firm was eager to strike out in a more Tolkien-specific direction. The initial results over the next few years were a bit halting and haphazard. The Hobbit followed The Lord of the Rings in 1965, and the remaining work by Tolkien then accessible was gathered in The Tolkien Reader (1966) and Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham (1969). The works of E. R. Eddison, a writer Tolkien had read and enthused on, appeared from 1967 to 1969. The year 1968 saw the less Tolkienian Gormenghast trilogy of Mervyn Peake, as well as A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. Like The Lord of the Rings, these works were originally released by “reputable” literary publishers. The Last Unicorn, a newer work by young writer Peter S. Beagle published in hardcover by Viking the previous year, appeared in 1969. The more impressionistic cover artwork of these releases served to distinguish them from the Sword and Sorcery releases of Lancer, Pyramid, and Ace: no doubt Ballantine wished to attract Sword and Sorcery readers, but they were also attempting to attract that uniquely Tolkien audience that Sword and Sorcery did not necessarily draw.

Enter Lin Carter. A younger writer who had begun to publish Sword and Sorcery, including Conan spin-offs in collaboration with de Camp, during the mid-1960s, Carter approached Betty and Ian Ballantine in 1967 with a proposed book on Tolkien. This was accepted and published as Tolkien: A Look behind the Lord of the Rings in early 1969. One of the chapters, “The Men Who Invented Fantasy,” gave a brief account of the nonpulp fantasy tradition preceding Tolkien, which dovetailed with what Ballantine had been attempting with their editions of Eddison, Peake, Lindsay, and Beagle. Sensing a good source for editorial direction, Ballantine contracted Carter as “Editorial Consultant” for their subsequent Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which commenced in spring 1969 (see 1Carter 269).

The importance of the BAFS in the shaping of the fantasy genre cannot be overestimated. It was the first time that fantasy was presented on its own terms as a genre in its own right. Though the volumes were inevitably destined for the science fiction sections in bookstores, the “SF” tag was gone, replaced by the “Adult Fantasy” Unicorn’s Head colophon;5 the garish, often lurid cover art became softer colored, drifting toward the impressionistic and the surreal; the muscle-bound swordsmen battling ferocious monsters (with the free arm around a scantily clad wench) were replaced by Faerie-ish landscapes. It was also the first time the peculiar cross section of work now considered seminal in the genre was drawn together under a unified rubric; to this day, it stands as the most substantial publishing project devoted to (mainly) pre-Tolkien fantasy.

Sheer quantity also lent the BAFS indelible impact. With 66 titles in 68 volumes published between 1969 and 1974 (regularly one and sometimes two a month before a slowdown in late 1972), the BAFS rapidly became the dominant force in fantasy publishing (whether tagged “SF” or not). There was no real competition. The bully pulpit engendered by this dominance gave the BAFS far-reaching influence in two crucial respects.

First, it gave the BAFS the power of defining the terrain. In Tolkien: A Look behind the Lord of the Rings, Imaginary Worlds (a study of the newly demarcated fantasy genre published in tandem with the BAFS in 1973), and in dozens of introductions to Series titles, Lin Carter repeated an operative definition of what was now simply termed “fantasy”: “A fantasy is a book or story . . . in which magic really works” and, in its purest form, is “laid in settings completely made up by the author” (1Carter 6–7). Carter further stipulates that fantasy circles around the themes of “quest, adventure, or war” (2Carter ix). Some four decades later, a wildly prolific body of work unambiguously reflects the terms of this template, then newly formulated under the aegis of the BAFS.6

Second, the quantity of titles, with primary emphasis on reprints,7 gave to the BAFS the power of determining a general historical canvas and implicitly shaping a “canon” of fantasy. Carter’s introduction to the 1969 BAFS edition of William Morris’s The Wood beyond the World begins with the portentous declaration: “The book you hold in your hands is the first great fantasy novel ever written: the first of them all; all the others, Dunsany, Eddison, Pratt, Tolkien, Peake, Howard, et al., are successors to this great original” (2Carter ix). This basic contention, like the aforementioned definition, was repeated over and over again in Carter’s commentaries and books, with Cabell, Clark Ashton Smith, de Camp, Leiber, Vance, and a few others rotating into the list of Morris’s followers, depending on which recitation you encountered. The dispersal by author of the BAFS titles suggests how the canon-shaping nature of Carter’s declarations were given body. The “major authors” were William Morris (four titles in five volumes), Lord Dunsany (six volumes), James Branch Cabell (six volumes), E. R. Eddison (four volumes), Clark Ashton Smith (four volumes), and Tolkien (six volumes).8 That the relevant work by Howard, Pratt and de Camp, Leiber, and Vance included in the BAFS was minimal in quantity9 reflects the fact that it was already available in editions by Ace, Lancer, and so on at the time, and Ballantine was not interested in issuing competing editions. On the basis of Carter’s oft reiterated “list,” however, those authors’ work should rightly be considered part of the BAFS canon, though little of it actually appeared in Series releases.

Like the BAFS template, this informal canon has held through the succeeding decades. Despite its massive proportions and the breadth of the permutations of fantasy covered, John Clute and John Grant would declare in the introduction to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) that the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors representing “the heart of this enterprise” were “George MacDonald, William Morris, Lewis Carroll, Abraham Merrit, E.R. Eddison, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber . . . and so on” (Clute and Grant viii). This is, more or less, the Carter/BAFS canon.10 Since the millennium, no doubt partly spurred by the renewed Tolkien boom following the Peter Jackson films, small publisher Wildside Press has mined the BAFS for titles for its classic fantasy series—even reprinting some Lin Carter introductions. It doesn’t always seem to be remembered that this “canon” was functionally constructed by Carter and Ballantine Books three to four decades ago, cobbled together from work of widely disparate publishing backgrounds.

By 1974, then, a discrete genre, with a definition and a canon, had demonstrably emerged. Such a thing had not existed at all in 1960, and even in early 1969 it had consisted of a cross section of work appearing as a subbranch of science fiction (Sword and Sorcery) or as books for young readers,11 with a few titles presented as loosely “Tolkienian.” But while the discrete genre that emerged was predominantly shaped by Lin Carter and the BAFS, the series itself was not to last.

BAFS releases decreased markedly through the latter part of 1972 and 1973, and in 1974 they ceased entirely.12 The degree of Ballantine’s dominance in the field can be seen in the partial vacuum left in its wake.13 No new BAFS appeared in the commercial market, though a small press, the Newcastle Publishing Company, followed Ballantine with its Forgotten Fantasy Library, augmenting but not repeating BAFS titles with 24 trade-sized volumes between 1973 and 1979. Elsewhere, Bantam Books and Avon Books released a few newer books in BAFS style.14 But when a refurbished Ballantine reentered fantasy publishing in 1976, with a new look marked by the “fantasy realism” of the Brothers Hildebrandt and Darrell Sweet, and now edited by Judy Lynn and Lester del Rey, initial reprints were as often culled from work previously revived by the now defunct Lancer and Pyramid15 as from the former BAFS, and the latter usually appeared in garb reflecting the new aesthetic, with the Carter introductions eliminated.16 These works, and particularly the pre-Tolkien titles, were clearly no longer the core focus of Ballantine’s fantasy-publishing agenda.

The major shift in focus from the mid-1970s on was an increasing emphasis on new rather than “classic” titles. As noted, few writers had been actively producing such work in the 1960s. But by the mid-1970s, this had begun to change fairly rapidly. While newer work and first publications had been in the minority in the BAFS, the frequency of reprints suggests that they were among the bestselling titles. Unlike the bulk of the “classic” reprints, Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Katherine Kurtz’s initial three Deryni books, H. Warner Munn’s Merlin’s Ring, Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain, and Evangeline Walton’s tetralogy based on The Mabinogion17 all continued to be reprinted frequently through the del Rey period, with Kurtz’s series spawning uncounted sequels. In a reversal of previous proportions, five of the final seven BAFS titles in 1973–74 had been new titles. With an established genre, new writers began more frequently to write to its specifications, and when the distillation of a more formulaic, Tolkien-derivative approach produced two major bestsellers a couple years later,18 the “classic” BAFS authors and titles were overshadowed. The BAFS volumes were less frequently reprinted and became progressively more difficult to find.

Since the focus of this study is the “canon” that was assembled by the BAFS—augmented by the relevant work available at the time through Ace Books, Lancer Books, and so on and hence not included in the series—I will break off the chronology here. Suffice to say, the bestseller genre that mushroomed in the late 1970s and early 1980s was an outgrowth of (and dependent on) developments in publishing that stretched back to the early 1960s. At a point in time when this bestseller genre has been around long enough to be taken for granted, it is important to note that it is not simply a timeless, unchanging entity, but was constructed, quite deliberately, to meet a new demand. The basic stages of the genre’s construction can be summarized thus: (1) the revival of interest in American Sword and Sorcery and the sudden commercial explosion of Tolkien’s work in the 1960s; (2) the isolation, naming, definition, and canonization of fantasy as a discrete genre between the late 1960s and mid-1970s...