A Brief Guide to Pre-Tolkien Fantasy | Part I

You’ve heard all about . Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but how about the stories of Lord Dunsany? Or E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia? Or Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist? As much as Tolkien gets credited as the father of fantasy, there were several authors in the decades prior to The Lord of the Rings who wrote comparable stories about magical, invented worlds. Without the template set by Tolkien to guide them, what sort of bizarre, imaginative stories did they come up with? Or, we might find that many of the tropes that we associate with Tolkien are older than we typically assume. Bibliography: (I was too lazy to split out the bibliography between Part I and Part II, so you can also get a sneak peak of the stuff I’ll discuss in the next video) Script: