/lit/ - Literature

Been researching America's fantasy tradition a bit more lately; while Europe (specifically England) has Tolkien, who specifically drew from Norse and English myth and legends to craft The Lord of the Rings, America doesn't really have a mythic historical period like those countries do, so I wanted to examine what fantasy was like before Tolkien's influence. Most pre-Tolkien fantasy in America came from the pulp magazines from that in the early 20th century, and it was dominated by the big three: Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft, and Clarke Ashton Smith. Robert E Howard was the only one who was mostly writing what we recognize today as "fantasy"–Lovecraft mostly wrote mostly cosmic horror stories, and Smith's work was a little bit of both, taking the pre-historical constructed worlds of Howard's work, and combining it with the weirdness and cosmic imagery of Lovecraft's work.

England has the medieval period to draw from to furnish their myths–castles and knights and dragons (and most of your standard vanilla fantasy tropes) are all taken from England's past. The closest thing America has to a "mythical period" is 'the wild west' (Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is a very good example of taking the mythology of the West West, rendering it in a very mythological, epic light a la Paradise Lost and Dante's Inferno, and subverting it at the same time. The connection between McCarthy's mythical west and Howard's western-inspired mythical Hyboria is a very interesting one, and something I am definitely want to examine more closely). Howard seemed to be aware of this, as one of the primary inspirations for his Conan stories were the western fables and tall tales he heard as a child living in Texas (The character of Conan came to Howard as he was traveling through the west: "[Conan the Barbarian] simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande.") His Conan the Barbarian stories, and the world they take place in, are essentially a combination of the western tall-tales he heard as a child, combined with his interest in ancient history, ancient mythology, (he drew heavily from Bullfinch's Mythology while writing The Hyborian Age) and theosophy (an occult, esoteric new-age religion that draws on teachings from ancient civilizations and secret societies). HP Lovecraft's influences were more literary, taking heavy influence from gothic macabre tales Edgar Allen Poe and the creepy, homely folktales of Washington Irving.

So it seems that, where England's fantasy tradition (through Tolkien, Dunsany, MacDonald and Lewis) lies in more idyllic. archetypal works, America's fantasy tradition lies in the weird and the macabre. Where England created High Fantasy, America created Sword and Sorcery and Cosmic Horror. What this says about each country and their culture is up for debate, but I think this is an interesting observation.