Sources of Fantasy - Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism, a movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was a dramatic reaction to Classicism, challenging the priority of religion and promoting the importance of imagination. Its success in rehabilitating imagination was of fundamental importance to the evolution of fantasy, and its interest in medieval romances providing many motifs to modern fantasy.

In the later part of the Romantic tradition, in reaction to the spirit of the Enlightenment, folklorists collected folktales, epic poems, and ballads, and brought them out in printed form. The Brothers Grimm were inspired in their collection, Grimm's Fairy Tales, by the movement of German Romanticism. Many other collectors were inspired by the Grimms and the similar sentiments. Frequently their motives stemmed not merely from Romanticism, but from Romantic nationalism, in that many were inspired to save their own country's folklore: sometimes, as in the Kalevala, they compiled existing folklore into an epic to match other nation's; sometimes, as in Ossian, they fabricated folklore that should have been there. These works, whether fairy tale, ballads, or folk epics, were a major source for later fantasy works.

Despite the nationalistic elements confusing the collections, this movement not only preserved many instances of the folktales that involved magic and other fantastical elements, it provided a major source for later fantasy. Indeed, the literary fairy tale developed so smoothly into fantasy that many later works (such as Max Beerbohm's The Happy Hypocrite and George MacDonald's Phantastes) that would now be called fantasies were called fairy tales at the time they written. J. R. R. Tolkien's seminal essay on fantasy writing was titled "On Fairy Stories."

Ossian and the ballads also provided an influence to fantasy indirectly, through their influence on Sir Walter Scott, who began the genre of historical fiction. Very few of his works contain fantastic elements; in most, the appearance of such is explained away, but in its themes of adventure in a strange society, this led to the adventures set in foreign lands, by H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Although Burrough's works fall in the area of science fiction because of their (often thin) justifications for their marvels, Haggard's included many fantastic elements. The works of Alexandre Dumas, père, romantic historical fiction, contained many fantasy tropes in their realistic settings. All of these authors influenced fantasy for the plots, characters and landscapes used—particularly in the sword and sorcery genre, with such writers as Robert E. Howard.