Er, actually, those aren't fantasy. They don't fit in the fantasy genre at all. See, those are what we call mythology, folklore, and lengends...
Again, the term fantasy my apply to works of more modern literature, but the modern fantasy genre shares nearly all it's elements, it's structure, and it's thematic style with many elements of classic mythology and legends.
People of the time actually believed them. They weren't fiction, and last I checked, that's what the genre known as fantasy was classified under.
This is highly debatable, and I simply don't believe it's true. People of the time may have paid lip-service to their local myths and folklore, as we in this country do with some of the more fanciful elements of our religions, but that doesn't mean that they really believed them. An author now may write a book about angels and demons, mythic elements of a popular religion that many people subscribe wholeheartedly to, but it doesn't mean that the book is anything more than a work of fiction. As Gracchuss said regarding the Roman gods in "Spartacus," "Privately, I believe in none of them. Neither do you. Publicly, I believe in them all." Classic authors may have taken figures of popular beliefs of their time, as we might take the character of the Devil, and spun them into works of fiction which, when passed down through centuries of retelling, slowly became myth.
And, what's more, to more modern fantasy authors those classic works of myth and legend can only exist as fiction. So modern fantasy authors can certainly be accused of aping the classic mythic archetype, and we can certainly classify classic works we now view as fiction as having very strong fantasy elements.
Third? Except for mythology, which was more or less the religious beliefs of a culture, they were all based on real events, and real people, the stories of whom, as the centuries went by, were blown out of normal proportion into the world of legend...They were never written to be published until centuries after the original bard or whoever who made it into legend, and the original people who did the actions, died.
While this might be true for most cases (the works of Homer for example, may have been based loosely on a real war, but the vast majority of his characters and events were figments of his imagination) it really doesn't matter. At some point someone wrote down these loose collections of myths and legends in a cohesive manner. It is usually these revised and collected works that we know and often treasure as classics today, and it is most often from these collected works that the influences of modern fantasy can be found.
It's because they're the single two best examples of Anti-Transcendental literature in America. And it's because they were both literary greats.
Well, I didn't write the quote you were responding to here, but I'd say your response is agreeable.
However, you obviously cannot detect the presence of deep philosophic ideas in Tolkien.
It's surprisingly hard to detect that which does not exist.
I'd explain it to you, but such is beneath my dignity.
And as we've already known, you usually don't feel the need to explain your reasoning to others. Why should this time be any different?
And there's no accounting for lack of grey matter, either, I suppose...
You're the expert. I imagine you'd know.
-Phil.
