Myth, Fairy Tales, & Children: A Brief History of
Fantasy
By Katie Behrens. May 17, 2015
If you were to play a word association game with the word “fantasy,” your brain would
probably jump to things like magic, dragons, heroes, wizards, quests, monsters, mythical
creatures, other worlds, and so on. In only a few decades, fantasy has declared itself loudly
to the public consciousness as an established genre that's demanded to be heard. Where
did the human fascination with such stories begin?
The answer largely depends on what qualifications
are needed for a piece of literature to be considered
part of the fantasy genre. In reality, the oldest stories
of humanity – myths – ought to be considered
fantasy. Tales of the creation of the world, powerful
gods and goddesses, heroes battling monsters – the
tradition of myth laid the groundwork for our
ancestors’ love of imagination and wild fancy. As far
as written literature, The Epic of
Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Odyssey are often
credited as the first fantasy works. It is interesting,
then, that Homer’s other work, The Iliad, is not
usually considered to be in the canon, even though
the epic war story includes meddling gods, their
magic, and superhuman warriors.
Other stories oft cited for their fantasy quality include Beowulf, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le
Morte D’Arthur, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If one were trying to be
inclusive, one could also list books such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (an
allegory), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (a satire), and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (Gothic horror). However, the works that would create the concepts
of the modern genre began appearing in mid-18th century England.
Without a doubt, fairy tales and children's books are the roots of the modern fantasy genre.
George MacDonald was a Scottish author and minister who found literary beauty in the
style of the fairy tale. He is best known for The Princess and the Goblin, but his legacy really
lives on in the work of authors like Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Madeline
L’Engle. MacDonald was a mentor to Carroll and urged him to publish Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. Although written for children, Alice’s stories were enjoyed by people of all
ages. Nearly a hundred years later, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis both cited MacDonald as a major
literary influence, and it shows in their connection to the world of fairy tales.
Of course, it’s not a surprise to readers of the genre that Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord
of the Rings were the spark that lit the fire for modern fantasy. While The Hobbit may have
been written for children, The Lord of the Rings was decidedly not. It caught the attention
of adult readers and brought millions into Tolkien’s immersive world of Middle Earth.
Tolkien was obsessive in creating his world, filling it with imagined languages, species, and
history. It was surely this intensity of world-building that set the books apart from their
fairy tale, mythology, and children’s story predecessors.
Tolkien, like MacDonald before him, challenged the very
concept that fairy tales and fantastic stories were only for
children. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien compares
them to the old Victorian furniture that filled children’s
nurseries at the time: “Fairy-stories banished in this way,
cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined;
indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have
been ruined.”
Luckily for modern-day readers, fantasy was given the full
attention of adult art in the second half of the
20th century and was raised to the level of its own genre.
Source: https://blog.bookstellyouwhy.com/myth-fairy-tales-children-a-brief-history-offantasy