Lord of the Rings, moreover, concludes with one of the longest, most depressive fade-outs in genre fiction. There may be a message here but it is hardly pat or didactic. A decent man is driven to dark deeds because he believes it will be for the long-term benefit of humanity. TolkienвЂ™s world building, in contrast, had space for nuance and complexity, such as when Boromir, believing the One Ring can be used for good as well as evil, turns on Frodo and tries to wrest it from him by force. The Narnia adventures were often (if not always) enfeebled by sanctimony. Nonetheless the moral outlook of their work diverged sharply. Tolkien and Lewis were friends and contemporaries at Oxford. Indeed there has of late been a tendency to conflate TolkienвЂ™s views on good and evil with the sermonising of CS Lewis, author of the heavily allegorical Narnia novels. Yet, even setting aside the prominence unjustly accorded to Tolkien, Lord of the Rings is nowhere near as black and white as is often claimed, usually by those who surely have not read the book. (It is no coincidence that George RR Martin played Dungeons and Dragons through the late seventies and early eighties). Indeed, a much bigger influence on later swords and sorcery writers was the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, another American innovation that drew on the вЂњlow fantasyвЂќ settings of Howard, Leiber and others.

Tolkien without question casts a shadow, but more outside fantasy than within. It is Howard and his peers that we have to thank for the tropes and cliches upon which later generations of writers and filmmakers would build: the brawny warriors, the hooded magic wielders, the medieval cities teeming with thieves and plotters.

Swords and sorcery is overwhelmingly an American genre, rooted in the early 20th-century work of Robert E Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), L Sprague De Camp, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl and others. For starters, Tolkien was not the father of modern fantasy but rather an outlier. Yet this argument,which you can expect to hear rehashed in the countdown to the return of Game of Thrones on April 29th, flows from several flawed presuppositions. How can the delicious nuance of GoT exist in such a binary universe? In Middle Earth, by contrast, we are led to understand that characters are defined by their morality: Hobbits and elves are predetermined to be вЂњgoodвЂќ, orcs born вЂњevilвЂќ. Nobody in Game of Thrones is truly good or bad вЂ“ they are merely grubby strivers getting by in a cruel and heartless world. While George RR MartinвЂ™s A Song Of Ice And Fire sequence is regarded as mature, complex and reflective of real human life, Lord of The Rings is felt to be fusty, puritanical and cheesily moralistic.

And just like that Middle Earth is in the firing line.Д¬entral to the whispering campaign against Tolkien is the idea that he peddled a reductive world view. Invariably the only other fantasy novel with which mainstream commentators are familiar is TolkienвЂ™s Lord of The Rings. Ergo George RR MartinвЂ™s work must be different вЂ“ that is to say superior вЂ“ to the rest of the milieu. Game of Thrones is fashionable and, despite the ongoing mainstreaming of вЂњnerd cultureвЂќ, fantasy novels are not. This vogue for Tolkien bashing is easily explained. Inevitably in the weeks ahead some expert or other will be trotted out to explain why the Westeros romp and the George RR Martin cycle from which it is adapted represent a category apart from other fantasies, and in particular JRR TolkienвЂ™s Lord Of The Rings. Season six of Game Of Thrones will shortly be upon us, bringing sweet relief to those who have spent the past 12 months fretting whether Jon Snow lives (probably), Arya Stark has been permanently blinded (probably not) and if Ser Jorah Sadface is ever going to get it together with Daenerys Targaryen (big fat nope).Д«ut while readers of fantasy fiction are typically as keen on HBOвЂ™s small screen blockbuster as anyone, the annual outbreak of Thrones fever does have a downside for devotees of the genre in its literary form. Good news for fans of beards, battle axes and bare chests.

Is game of thrones low fantasy