I'd really like to see counter-examples though; I feel like I haven't dived into the genre enough, in part because I'm turned off by the sheer volume of some book (series) on the one hand, and the juvenile tropes (generic hero's journey formula) on the other.
Elevator pitch for you: you know the epic good vs. evil showdown where the good guys charge epically against the likes of Sauron and his evil army? Well, the good guys lost. It’s 1,000 years later and the evil dark lord is running the show. Now a team of magic wielding (illegal) misfits is planning an ocean’s 11 style heist to get filth rich and topple the evil empire at the same time!
Again, fantastic series. I was hooked just a few dozen pages in. The Magic also has a crazy interesting mechanic/rule set that makes it more of a strategy issue in some ways.
There's perhaps no direct borrowing of names and character types, but by George R.R. Martin's own attestation, he sought to write a story with a scope approaching Tolkeins but disposing of Tolkiens idealism and dualism. He was deeply influenced by Tolkiens writing, and sought to correct it's flaws.
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2019/09/george-r-r-martin-i-k...
But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant".
Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)
We must see different things. As I see the wheel of time:
- Great lost past. This one's obvious; the Age of Legend is a huge focus of the books.
- The dark empire. Doesn't exist in the present, but it is a feature of the great lost past.
- All good on one side and all bad on the other: this seems to describe the wheel of time well? The whole story arc is Rand fulfilling the separate prophecies of every ethnic group in the world, bringing them all under the same government (his), and taking them to battle the even more unified forces of evil.
- The pure heroes. Not sure what this means.
There is one Big Evil but the lesser ones are all scheming against each other. In Tolkien there's just a bit with Saruman and the spiders, but you don't really have factions amongst the ringwraiths, for example. It's all just a battle between Sauron/everyone or Melkor/everyone.
The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms, or some elven clans just standing on the sides.
In Tolkien's universe you 99% of the time know who is evil and who is not (elf, dwarf, hobbit, ent, eagle, northern man = good; orc, goblin, troll, dragon, great spiders, eastern man= bad).
Yes, a couple human characters are ambiguous, but it's a pretty small minority.
In WoT you have a couple evil races and you, the reader, have a clear view of who is good and who is bad.
But in-world people want to kill other people because each thinks the other is evil: that looks a substantial difference to me.
Re: pure heroes, I meant that the main characters basically are all 100% good. This is the same in both universes too, just not a constant in all high fantasy. At least I think, I didn't finish the wheel of time ;)
In the wheel of time, good and evil are objective. (Well, evil is objective.) Everyone, good or evil, agrees on what it means to be evil. By definition, everyone evil ultimately reports to the same leader. Good is a little less unified than that, but they likewise all agree that they're on the same side. If one good person in the wheel of time wants to kill another good person for being evil, that doesn't reflect different views of what evil is; it's just a simple mistake of fact.
And that's pretty much what I understand by "all good on one side and all evil on the other", I guess.
> The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms
On the other hand, it is the same as e.g. the relationship between the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves, as depicted in The Hobbit.
The closer you get to reality -- the more magic becomes a tool, rather than a rule ala gravity, the "lower" your fantasy gets; the lowest essentially being the one guy who stumbles into magical powers, but no one else has anything close, or a portal dimension opens and thrusts magical creatures upon our universe for a bit.
tolkienesque would be more specifically the tropes of LOTR, as you've described.
But essentially any modern high fantasy film/tv/game (I don't read much fantasy, so I can't comment on books) either mimics tolkien's systems and races (elves are slender long-lived creatures of the forests, dwarves are short hole-digging mountain-men, glowing weapons and runes scattered throughout the lands, wizards as wise-men etc), or it is best described as a reaction to tolkien -- deliberately trying to be NOT-tolkien.
In my mind, the failure to detach wholesale from tolkien, but still exist as "high-fantasy", is because few attempt a more holistic attempt at it -- to craft the rules of the universe, run the (mental) simulation, to set the stage for whatever plotline. Instead the world is crafted in the void, but because the rules are never clearly defined, it naturally defaults to similar rules as tolkien (randomly broken to fit the story, because they were never defined well-enough to review).
However, there are stories more derived from gods & myths that would fit my given definition of high fantasy, though I'm not sure I'd put them under the same umbrella as tolkien
The novel owes absolutely nothing to Tolkien; it's entirely its own thing, subverting generic fantasy tropes left and right, while providing a clever variation on the classic hero's journey. And the same time it has this magnificent aura of otherwordliness, like a mythological narrative written thousands of years into the future (which it purports to be). It's an absolute masterpiece.
Wolfe really made a career out of subverting fantasy tropes. His Latro series [2] (Soldier of the Mist, etc.) is set in Ancient Greece, and features an amnesiac mercenary whose memory resets every day. The Wizard Knight is another good one; essentially a riff on Tolkienesque Norse mythology and Medieval romances, it features a prepubescent boy who is accidentally transported to a fantasy dimension, and then into the body of an adult knight. It's absurd, but also deliciously weird, just like some of Wolfe's other books (the Long Sun and Short Sun books, etc.).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075JL493G
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Mist-Latro-Book-1-ebook/dp/B0...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Knight-Gene-Wolfe-ebook/dp/B08...
A lot of it is very Tolkien-esque, given Tolkien's influence on D&D and its influence on RPGs that followed, but it has a different feel than the fantasy of the 70's-90's that lived deep in his shadow.
UKLG's Earthsea is the series that I hear most often loved by other authors, although I'm not familiar with it myself.
Then there is Pratchett, who set out to do simple parody of high fantasy and ended up creating a deeply humanist character-driven universe.
As a side note in my opinion this series is an example of how the current phase of thinking someone has to be of a group to understand the group is wrong. The female author brilliantly captures a young male's journey towards a strong, compassionate, brave and very masculine manhood with all the mistakes along the way. As I grew up (and indeed still grow up) I often reflect on what Ged would do at different phases of his growth. So essentially the female UKLG is guiding me in my life. (Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's).
> Or maybe men and women are even more similar than I'm accounting for and a young woman's journey is just that similar to a man's
You're almost there; the point is not that you have to be in a group to understand a group, but that because of the power structure some are much more visible and celebrated than others. A female writer is more likely to be able to see what the male journey is like (due to thousands of examples) than a male writer, who is in turn more likely to project his own prejudices than actually find out what it might be like.
(In turn, there have been a number of literary fights lately about white female authors doing terribly bad racial stereotypes of their nonwhite characters...)
I take issue with this statement. It's essentially a variant of the No True Scotsman. I constantly see the OP's statement asserted, in various contexts, by various parties, in the same way he worded it.
I don't doubt that you've seen a more refined version of it. "People" are a fairly heterogeneous bunch, and when it comes to race/gender stuff I constantly see nuanced (whether or not agreeable) arguments filter out from academic circles into the general public and to activists, where they're distorted or simplified.
You're absolutely welcome to raise a more refined version of the argument and point out where it's more valid - I think that's a healthy contribution to any discussion. But you don't get to unilaterally assert that the version of the argument that is constantly being put forward ... isn't being put forward, or isn't "the real" argument.
They've got more than a few roots in fantasy gaming, which in turn does owe something to Tolkien, but they're unquestionably high fantasy, and they certainly struck me a very diffent from Tolkien.