February 10, 2009
I am currently writing what will no doubt be lumped into the Fantasy genre and so have a particular interest in the expectations of the modern Fantasy readership. And yet I do not read enough modern Fantasy. In fact, all the fantasy that I have read published within the past decade has been George R R Martin and Stephen R Donaldson. And both of these writers were born in the late 40's (48 and 47 respectively), and both originally published in the 70s. While Martin has lately turned his pen to Fantasy, Donaldson is revisiting a series that helped inaugurate Modern Fantasy in the 70s. (1977 may have been the year Modern Fantasy was truly born into the market. Before that, only Tolkien sold well. In 1977 (Besides the release of The Silmarillion), Donaldson published the Covenant Series (all at once), Terry Brooks embarked on his Shannara series, and "Star Wars" was released in theaters. These each demonstrated to publishers that non-Tolkien-written fantasy could also sell, and sell well. Since then of course the genre has exploded.)
I read most of my Fantasy Fiction in middle school (in the very late 80s) and a little in high school, and my introduction to it is a strange story itself. In middle school (6th grade, I believe) I discovered several 20-dollar bills stuck in a few of the old books that my mom had inherited from my uncle after his death. Those books were The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and others. Discovering that money gave me reason to read them: what would be a better way to check every single page for more money than to simply read the books? So I read them. Very very quickly, I forgot all about finding cash. I had found something immensely more valuable.
After that, I read everything and anything I could get my hands on with Tolkien's name on it. "The History of Middle Earth" series had only gotten through a few volumes by then, but I read every page of them. I read The Silmarillion and I loved it (in middle school, no less). I read Unfinished Tales, the History, Humphrey's Tolkien Biography, The Lord of the Rings again, and again, and again. I read The Sword of Shannara (in essence a retelling of The Lord of the Rings). On a trip to Wisconsin, my grandmother bought me a book: Lord Foul's Bane, the first in Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (because it had a map in it: very important to me at the time). I read that on a driving trip to Minnesota (the glue in the binding melted from the sun on the rear window of the car, and the mass-market book fell apart while I was still reading it, but I pushed through). I bought the second, then the third volume of the First Chronicles, and then the entire Second Chronicles at once.
And then I languished. I tried some other Fantasy, but I never again found anything that held my imagination like those first books. I read the Shannara series to its then-published end, but by the time I caught up with it (that was in college, actually), I had lost interest. I read other non-fantasy books, and some of that had its fantastic elements, even when they were not "fantasy fiction" (Stephen King, Anne Rice, and eventually I read Dune).
Yet very quickly after reading Tolkien and Donaldson (and Brooks, though he was less an influence than those two), I began to compose my own stories like them. I had been writing other childish tales of sharks (told from the shark's point of view, oddly enough), and various other stories, but Tolkien introduced me to the idea of world-building.
I made up history and touched on myth. I invented languages. In high school I found every book in the library that dealt with language (we used the card catalog system back then) and I read them. I taught myself most of the features of Linguistics which I later learned formally at the University of Florida. (It was not, and for many years has not been, Tolkien's Philology, which was what I was actually looking for. I loved Historical Linguistics, which UF never offered while I was enrolled there. I recently found out that a professor in the classics department had begun to offer an historical linguistics course at UF in 2001--the year after I graduated.) In middle school I carried around a notebook with "Dwarves" written on the cover, inside of which was a sketch of my invented language and an invented alphabet--copying Tolkien. The "Dwarves" became the Yor, and now they are the Yoria (they never really were "dwarves" standing seven feet tall). (The Shayatsi were once the Shaez, and before that I called them Elves). I think I can safely say that I have been inventing the mythology and languages of Raya (in pieces and spurts) since I first read the Lord of the Rings--over 20 years ago.