apogee

まどほむ by Shru [pixiv] [twitter] 

"We lay, my love and I, beneath the weeping willow. But now, alone I lie..

The fantasy genre as we understand it, as a movement, was fixed into form that we would presently identify it by a locus of friends and fellow writers in Scotland, not England, a generation before Tolkien published the Hobbit. Take for example, the Worm Ouroboros from 1922:

How about the Voyage to Arcturus, from 1920, by Scotsman David Lindsay?

Why did the fantasy genre as we know it emerge in Scotland? Well, part of it was the "Scottish Renaissance" of the 1920s, where Scots writers were encouraged to reject realism and modernism after the war, and go for unique and distinctively Scottish subjects that sometimes verged into outright surrealism, and a few took their love of the surreal and distinctively Scots subjects like fairies to creating true fantasy as we would know it today. In other words, all the pieces were there to do it. A good way to describe the Scottish Renaissance was that it was a revival of romanticism, in that it was a rejection of the modern world and technology that caused the Great War. The 1920s also saw the first American fantasy fiction writers like Virginia's James Branch Cabell, and it's no coincidence to me he is from Virginia, which has a long standing Transatlantic upper class that looked to Europe for leadership culturally.

Another 19th Century figure who's intellectual influence and approach that I think really made the fantasy genre possible - a Scotsman, obviously - was Andrew Lang. He was a classicist who was such a sensation in his own time that he created a movement of Zuluphilia in the British Isles. Basically, his point, which transformed classics and the analysis of pre-modern traditions, is this: we cannot understand Homer in terms of our own culture. Rather, Homer was a product of a "primitive" world where the real blended with the unreal, where the fantastic was treated as grounded fact, where prophecies by witches and the appearance of gods are treated as much a part of history as battles and kings. Andrew Lang said specifically that the Zulus, who's life story of Shaka Zulu involves prophecies and shapechanging sorcerers, was a much better model to understanding Homer than the very hyperrational Western culture we have now.

In other words, Andrew Lang set up the fundamental intellectual framework with which to create the fantasy genre. I do believe he was the most forgotten and important person of the 19th Century, and is the transition between academic folklorists like the Brothers Grimm who recorded Iron Age oral stories, and the fantasy novel as we know it. The bridge was Andrew Lang's best friend, H. Rider Haggard, a member of the Victorian Occult Revival. Haggard, I have argued, wrote the first two true fantasy novels in the 1880s, the Saga of Eric Brighteyes and She, in consultation with his friend Andrew Lang (who he co-wrote a book with, The World's Desire), where he took fantastical concepts like an immortal sorceress and treated it like you would any other topic for a realistic adventure novel. The difference between fairy tales and fantasy is that fairy tales don't have to convince you.

Wikipedia's "official answer" as to who the first ever fantasy novelist was is Scotsman George MacDonald, although Wikipedia is much better at giving empty flat answers than acknowledging controversies, and this is one I absolutely disagree with. For example, Big Mama Thornton is often said to be the first Rock and Roll musician, and...well....to my ear, she's just not there yet. It's essentially guitar-driven jazz. It feels like the discovery of all the elements of rock was inevitable and she was a step in that development to an inevitable end, and I feel the same way about George MacDonald and the claim he is the first fantasy novelist: his stories are, to me, too much like adult aimed traditional fairy tales. Like Mama Thornton did jazz with a swing music beat, all the pieces weren't there yet: a big part of rock and roll was getting the melody from black American Gospel music, which she didn't do.

I think the key part of the fantasy novel where it cleanly broke off from earlier traditions of fairy tales and folklore is that despite the presence of the fantastic, it is treated in grounded terms due to the influence of the realistic novel that are thought through, something fairy tales don't do....and something MacDonald does not do. So, to me, his stories are essentially fairy tales for adults, not fantasy. The fantasy novel has not arrived yet.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince