Two other fantasy writers whose works deserve reading: Lord Dunsany, and ER Eddison.
Edward Plunkett, Baron Dunsany, created that epical fantasy language for which Tolkien is so admired, in in the first two decades of the 20th century--roughly fifty years before Tolkien. He was enormously popular during that period. Consider this typical sentence from one of his novels:
"And now the sun had set, and all the colours of the world and heaven had held a festival with him, and slipped one by one away before the imminent approach of night. The parrots had all flown home to the jungle on either bank, the monkeys in rows in safety on high branches of the trees were silent and asleep, the fireflies in the deeps of the forest were going up and down, and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of Yann."
Pure Tolkien? No: pure Dunsany.
Dunsany also "recreated" the elves, who were either bedtime sprites for kids (talking in nauseating imitation babyspeech), or pixeish lesser creatures attached to the land, not unlike Shakespeare's Puck (or for that matter, Kipling's). Dunsany's elves were magical beings, keepers of the woodland, more related to air than earth, and in perennial distrust with humans. They were dextrous but not strong, superb archers, and users of magic.
There's a bit of Dunsany up on the web, if you know where to look. The short story collection, Book of Wonder (1912), which is out of print, can be found at
http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/l_wonder.htm His short story, the Idle City, is at
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimhenry/won ... lecity.htm There's a collection of short stories also up at
http://literature.gothic.ru/eng/classic/dunkani/ (this being a Russian site, they spelled his title/name as Dunsani; the material is still under copyright, but who is going to sue a little Russian site?) This is later material, and some of it is inflected with Dunsany's growing sense of irony and satire at modern times. The Hashish Man and Chu-Bu and Sheemish are particularly attractive.
Another writer who is neglected today is E.R. Eddison. His first major work (and probably his best novel) was The Worm Ouroboros, written in 1922--again, years before Tolkien. His works move slower than Tolkien, but possess still more music in the language. They are inspired by Nordic, Norman, and Saxon legends, also by Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights: epic tales of men and women larger than life, fighting extraordinary battles, indulging in vast treacheries, casting spells from blackened towers that summon creatures as vast and deep as the night.
Here's an example of Eddison's prose. Note, again, that this was a full generation before Tolkien:
"Now they rose up and took their weapons and muffled themselves in their great campaigning-cloaks and went forth with torch-bearers to walk through the lines, as every night ere he went to rest it was Spitfire's wont to do, visiting his captains and setting the guard. The night was without a star. The wet sands gleamed with the lights of Owlswick Castle, and from the castle came by fits the sound of feasting heard above the wash and moan of the sullen sleepless sea."
This is so beautifully written from the standpoint of rhythm that it could be quoted in a class on English, and is as good as anything in this line that Shakespeare ever wrote.
Dunsany's language may be epic, but his character's doings are intimate. Eddison conceives things always on the grand scale, even when he's concentrating on the interrelationship of just a couple of people; and each scene passes as though it were being told by the greatest of bardic skalds. There is little that's "homey" in Eddison, unlike Tolkien. Eddison wasn't writing for his children, though he shared Tolkien's hatred for modern times. Instead, he was writing for those who yearned for great fantasy, told with a sense of language as few could match, and none could surpass. There are flaws in his work, but fewer in The Worm Ouroboros than in its later companions. It's magnificent stuff, IMO.
