Howard or Tolkien, Which of them Had The Greatest Impact On Modern Fantasy ?

Randy M. said:
Thanks for the reminder, Extollager. I also remember "Ozymandias" being used to strong effect at the end of an episode of the TV show Beauty and the Beast (1980s version).

But before "Ozymandias" and "Kubla Khan" there was Vathek by William Beckford, which was inspired by Sir Richard Burton's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Something about the view of the mystery of the Orient was in the air at that time, influencing a lot of work.


Randy M.
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Wasn't Vathek written 1786 well before Burton did his translation of Arabian Nights. :confused:
 
Then there is Terry Brooks Shannara series.;)
 
Am I the only one here who first (so far as he or she remembers) encountered these lines in a Marvel comic book?
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No, you're not! I remembered that Ultron passage quite well too, Ex, and thank you for excerpting it again. Say what you (not you personally, rather, the generic "you" meaning "one") want to about him, but Stan Lee (either personally or by hired extension) had a way of working classic quotes/themes/thoughts/references into Marvel's titles.

Then there is Terry Brooks Shannara series.
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I like him (particularly the Word and Void stuff), but am not sure how many other authors I've read cite him as an influence. I expect that's the direction your wink was headed in, anyway.

For the first comparison, I'd also side with Tolkien, for the reasons already given. For the 2nd comparison, I'd need some tighter definition, too. Where would one list Zelazny, for example? Lots of authors praise his work, but where do you see it's influence? Could probably make the case for a Vance or a Le Guin, but maybe it's harder to see the comparisons to their works because there were/are so many other prominent authors in SFF at the same time as them (the field SEEMS smaller during the periods that Tolkien and Howard were penning their more notable works). I could agree with Gaiman...
 
BAYLOR said:
Wasn't Vathek written 1786 well before Burton did his translation of Arabian Nights. :confused:
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Oops.:eek:

You're right. I double-checked my memory before posting and still got it wrong. Yeesh.

So, anyway, Vathek!

(*cough*)


Randy M.
 
Grimward said:
No, you're not! I remembered that Ultron passage quite well too, Ex, and thank you for excerpting it again. Say what you (not you personally, rather, the generic "you" meaning "one") want to about him, but Stan Lee (either personally or by hired extension) had a way of working classic quotes/themes/thoughts/references into Marvel's titles.
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Stan himself included such allusions occasionally, but the writer for this Avengers story was his hire Roy Thomas. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for him uses the cover of Avengers #57 as an illustration.

Roy Thomas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roy had been an English teacher, although I see that his subjects in college were history and social science.
 
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BAYLOR said:
When I think modern fantasy, the two names that come mind first are Robert E. Howard and J. R .R Tolkien. Howard gave us Conan, Kull, Bran Mak Morn , Solomon Kane ect. What we've come to know as heroic fantasy in the pulp tradition. Tolkien gave us The Hobbit , Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin . World building , what we've come to call epic fantasy .

Which of them, do you think, had the greatest influence on development modern as we know it ? If you had to chose which of them was the more significant, whom would you chose and why? What do you think modern fantasy would be like if either one or the other of them had never been? Or If neither of them had have ever been?
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Certainly these are the best known names in the older High and Low Fantasy styles but is it really their influence or just the style that modern writers are following? Then you have to decide how much High fantasy is really just Sword & Sorcery with a bigger cast/book? Occasionally you do get a writer that wants to "go back to the original material" and says they have read some old saga and used that as their source but still they have the small band of (whatever) that have to "go on a quest" to save (whatever). Other times you will get a run of versions of Arthurian legend with some kind of twist and you know they really don't owe anything to Tolkien/Howard (maybe T H White).
Of the two names, Tolkien is definitely the bigger "influence" although that's only because I lived through the period where every generic fantasy novel had to have the name Tolkien somewhere on the cover - usually within the statement "comparable to Tolkien at his best". Then again, those were generally best avoided.
 
What about writers such as David Gemmel? Wouldn't he be in the Howard camp?
 
I do hoping that the King Conan film with Arnold will help further rekindle interest in Howard's.
 
I read LOTR because it is something you hear about so much. But when I finished it I asked myself, "Why the hell did I finish that?"

The interesting thing about books is that the reader can be made more aware of the characters thought processes than in a movie. Conan comes across as more intelligent than Gandalf the way I read the stories. I have reread Conan stories but I do not even think about LOTR. The movies are nice but movies and TV are a different experience. The Conan movies are unimpressive.

psik
 
Andrew Offutt did pastiche series based around of Robert E Howard's lesser known Character Cormac Art back in the 70's and Early 80's It's long out of print. it's Pretty good.:)
 
Fried Egg said:
I stand by my previous assertion that it is not his style as such that many sort to imitate but rather his craft for in-depth world building. It's my personal opinion of course, but of all the great fantasy writers I have read, Tolkien is one of the least memorable, stylistically speaking. His undeniably titanic legacy cannot be attributed to his writing style. But many writers have sought to imbue their worlds with as much depth and richness as he did with middle earth. Whatever you personally think of Tolkien stylistically, surely we can agree that his real impact has been in the realms of world building?
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I completely agree with this. I've never read Howard, but I did my undergrad thesis on Tolkien's Silmarillion, which is my favorite work by him actually. It's such a bizarre book, but really fascinating in the depth of the mythology he creates. I've still never read anything like it and much prefer it to LOTR, which I find mostly a boring slog with dull characters. Can anyone really tell me they like his poetry/songs in there? I've read LOTR 3 times I think and never once been able to read the entire "song" in Rivendell, or Tom Bombadil's pointless verses.
 
I bought the dvd of the 1982 film. Not a perfect film , but a pretty good film. Arnold was good in the role of Conan and yes I know Thulsa Doom was Kull's major nemesis , but It didn't matter, James Earl Jones was terrific in that role. Overall I think the film does justice to Conan. :)
 
psikeyhackr said:
I read LOTR because it is something you hear about so much. But when I finished it I asked myself, "Why the hell did I finish that?"

The interesting thing about books is that the reader can be made more aware of the characters thought processes than in a movie. Conan comes across as more intelligent than Gandalf the way I read the stories. I have reread Conan stories but I do not even think about LOTR. The movies are nice but movies and TV are a different experience. The Conan movies are unimpressive.

psik
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The 1982 filme is pretty good.:)
 
I read Conan when young and Lord of the Rings slightly older (waiting for the paperback and had been bored by The Hobbit). This was something I was already growing out of. There were a lot of Howard clones by then but Tolkien hadn't really spread further than the "Comparable to Tolkien at his best" quote that seemed obligatory for any fantasy novel. There were, and still are, a lot of other styles of "fantasy" that didn't fit with either take on heroic fantasy and, for a while at least, these seemed much fresher. Comic fantasy still had a hope of originality in the 80s when it shifted into satire but after the smoothed down approach of Pratchett that seemed to fade out entirely. If Urban Fantasy had anything really good to add, I have yet to see it. There is probably still room to produce derivative works that have enough originality to make a valid contribution but they need to take on classical mythology, Andersen and Grimm, different approaches to the gothic (no vampires/werewolves) or the lesser known children's works. There are occasionally books that step outside the norm (Susannah Clarke, Phillip Pullman) but not many and if they succeed, they are plagued with bandwagon jumpers.
 
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