Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842
U.S. National Gallery of Art
All views in this blog are my own and represent the views of no other person, organization, or institution.
Nine years ago this list started a pretty interesting conversation, so I thought I would see if it might do so again.
The initial post was inspired when I discovered that a good friend of mine, an accomplished, published fantasy author who has also worked as an editor and a book reviewer, had at that point NEVER read anything by R.E. Howard. I found this disconcerting!
So, I wrote up a quick list of the authors who considered foundational to the genre, authors that I thought all serious fantasy fans should read at least once. The sorts of writers where you read one of their works and think "that's a cliché" then discover it wasn't a cliché until others copied them...
This isn't about gatekeeping, anyone should and can enjoy fantasy without this reading list, But if one wants to really know and understand the genre, then I think this list covers all the bases.
In no particular order:
On reflection, after the discussion from nine years ago, I would add these to the list:
I may have missed one or two but those are the big ones, IMO. Influential writers whose work was ground breaking in some way and/or had a profound impact on the genre. There is a bias for older works, writers who came up towards the birth of the modern genre in the first half of the 20th century. I think that is natural and only to be expected.
This is not a list of the "best" fantasy authors, or my favorite writers. I left many of my favorites off the list, as heart-breaking as it was to do so.
That said, there are some names that I have a tougher time defending, whose influence may be more personal for me than widespread in the genre. Stewart, Renault, Cooper, and Alexander are perhaps not as widely influential as I believe they should be.
So, this is a personal list. Others are likely to have a very different list. In fact, the purpose ofthis list is really to generate debate and discussion, not as some sort of litmus test or dogmatic declaration of "How Things Are or Must Be."
Comments encouraged!
I would recommend David Eddings. Primarily his Belgariad and Sparhawk series. But as to understanding the genre, in the Riven Codex, Eddings openly admits referring to "Papa" Tolkein's methodology in world building. "First you make a map..."
ReplyDeleteI am a big fan of Eddings work, though the revelation of his and his wife's child abuse conviction casts a pall over his works. I plan a future blog post on my views of controlversial artists like him and Bradley. He talks aboiut Tolkien extensively there. “Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration—and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth.”
Delete― David Eddings, The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon