/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20820608]

What was the first fictional world that didn't bear any relation to the real world?
When you look at fiction pre-Tolkien, no matter how fantastical the story is, it's always either on earth, or on a place you can get to from earth, or in the Earth's past. But modern fantasy often takes place entirely in constructed worlds.
I'm asking mostly because I'm trying to develop a theory for why no one developed role playing games prior to the 70s, despite the technology existing for thousands of years. My idea is that genre fiction explicitly based on non-real places and things gave people the media literacy to conceptualize "secondary realities" as narratively meaningful in a way they weren't able to do prior to, as far as I can tell, the mass popularity of Tolkien.
>inb4 arda is ancient earth
That idea never made it out of his letters

[Anonymous No.20820834]

>>20820608
>>inb4 arda is ancient earth
>That idea never made it out of his letters

>The mother of our particular hobbit ... what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards.
page two of the hobbit

[Anonymous No.20820872]

>>20820608
>one google search
>The Well at the World's End
ur welcum

[Anonymous No.20820985]

>>20820608
I think this is really based OP.

I can think of many fantasy geographies going back to the Greeks, but none which are not divergences from contemporary known reality.

>Hell
>Lucian's Vera historia
>Odyessy
>Alice in wonderland
>Narnia
>After London

Are all situated in the fringes of this dimension, spatial or temporal

[Anonymous No.20821063]

>>20820872
Is it explicitly set on a different world from our own with a different history that no one from our world travels to?
Most fairy stories are set in a kingdom of some kind, but it's almost always implied to be earth or somewhere earthlings could travel to. Was this the first one to diverge explicitly?
>>20820834
Eh, sure it's there, but originally there was a train in hobitton as well. He addresses the "arda as pre-earth" explicitly in his letters, and said he thought about including it but decided against it. It's related to his ideas about fairy stories.
>>20820985
Yeah, I think the answer might be something really far back, a rennaissance era tale or something. It sucks that only the very best stuff was preserved

[Anonymous No.20821091]

>>20820608
To add on, he describes "distance" from reality as the main prerequisite of a fairy story in "On Fairy Stories". My question is what the first story was to make this distance complete, whether it's LOTR or something else, though I'm confident if it's anything post LOTR, it would have been inspired by it.

[Anonymous No.20821221]

>>20820608
Try digging through the decades worth of ssf pulp published before Lord of the Memes.

Also D&D was directly sprung out of Gygax board games, just as an abstraction where figures and boards were optional (but still came with the box).

[Anonymous No.20821241]

>>20820608
I think a big thing you're missing is that the concept of there being other worlds requires the knowledge that other worlds can exist. When people were only really aware of this world, obviously any fantastical world is going to exist in some sort of relation to this one.

[Anonymous No.20821256]

>>20821241
How did we go from "once upon a time in a far away kingdom" to "in westeros"? That's what I'm asking. Are you implying the answer is that the concept of, like, parallel universes didn't exist yet? I don't think the public was literate in that stuff when alternate-world settings became popular, at least for fantasy and scifi.

[Anonymous No.20821263]

>>20821221
>D&D was directly sprung out of Gygax board games
That just makes it even weirder. Why was "chance and skill mediated collaborative storytelling" only approached from this ass backwards "what if my chess pieces had personalities" angle, y'know? That's like if we didn't invent the guitar until after the harpsichord.

[Anonymous No.20821297]

>>20821256
Westeros exists on its own planet. The frame for this kind of thinking did not exist until very recently. We had literally had no evidence that planets existed outside of the solar system until the 70s and no definitive proof until the 90s. In the early 20th century people talked seriously about Mars having civilizations on it because its ice trenches looked like roads and railways through telescopes at the time, the same way you would talk about a faraway continent. Everything existed in relation to Earth because there was no real life conception of anything existing in any other way. How are you going to come up with "in this completely different world" if you have 0 concept of how a completely different world could exist? At that point "a far away kingdom" might as well be a completely different world. Within the context of the knowledge of the time the framing is the same.

[OP No.20821320]

>>20821297
That's where it make sense to me, the proliferation of knowledge of other planets. That's almost certainly what did it, thank you. I hadn't considered that knowledge of other planets lays subconscious groundwork for making the jump to "this is a world that doesn't exist"; even a fictional setting that has no planets is made more legible of the audience understands that other planets exists, since it engenders the hypothetical "what if a world like ours existed in some different way", like a separate path of development along every human and environmental axis. The world went from being entirely within the horizon of human travel, to consisting mostly of places humans can't go, which unlocked the understanding of fictional worlds which were inaccessible whether that fiction involved planets and outer space or not. Ultimately then, like Tolkien suggested, it's a question of the willing suspension of disbelief, which was expanded to include "places with no terrestrial relation to me", which in turn made it easier to accept "places which have no relation to my universe"

[OP No.20821337]

>>20821297
>>20821320
Also, the concept of hell as an alternate dimension or plane of existence rather than a big cavern underground, as seen in eg Dante, is probably an index of how developed an audience's cosmology is. Maybe Dante himself could have swallowed "Middle Earth", but his audiences at large wouldn't have been able to accept it long enough to suspend disbelief. Aeneas travels beneath Mount Etna in real Sicily; Dante travels generically and metaphorically through "a forest", but not a specific one, and hell itself isn't places anywhere in particular other than "underground"; and in the latest evolution, Westeros isn't a place anyone from our world could go.

[Anonymous No.20821474]

>>20821241
>>20821256
im not very well versed in this thing but i think there has always been somewhat of subtle, to mild, to quit literal 'who the fuck does this guy think he is inventing his own world like he's (literally) god?' mentality in the mass. a shit ton of /lit/ and art and culture in general is paying homage to your predecessors, not 'lol fuck all that other shit that came before me, im just going to make my own.'