What is Fantasy?

This includes a fairly wide range of tales that might be considered fantasy - would a culture's mythology count? The answer here depends, I think, on the extent to which the story-teller (and the story audience) believe the mythology. If it's widely believed that the gods on Olympus interfere with our lives, tales of the gods are probably considered regilious observance. If they are widely believed not to exist, tales of their exploits become entertainment - fantasy.

Early Fantasy

Early fantasy might include popular myths, the Iliad, or Pilgrim's Progress. When minstrels spun out fabulous epics of knights saving damsels from dragons, they were exercising their fantastic abilities. Tales of King Arthur, of the Holy Grail, unicorns, fairies - many naive listeners might chose to believe these stories as literal truths, or at least non-fantasy fiction in the sense that they wish to believe that somewhere there might be unicorns and so on.

Becoming a 'Genre'

Fantasy fiction became a 'market' in the mid-part of the Twentieth Century, with J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and its imitators. Suddenly it became okay again for adults to read about elves and dwarves and wizards and quests.

The Subgenres

A modern-day epic of the 'high fantasy' genre might have these features: an earth-like setting, a feudal or medieval social structure, usually European, technology at the cross-bow stage and a system of magic that follows defined rules. In this setting, an individual is called to perform some task, for which he or she assembles a team (or they come together for seemingly random reasons). For the tale to be truly high fantasy, the task should be something involving the fate of the world, or a nation, and the enemy is motivated by lust for power, greed and general-purpose evil. Shades of grey aren't usually found in a High Fantasy epic.

Dragons, unicorns, fairies, elves, dwarves, orcs, and other non-human yet sentient species can be found to inhabit High Fantasy as well as other subgenres.

Sword and Sorcery tales differ from High Fantasy in 'feel' more than actual setting/milieu. The hero is typically a Mighty Thewed Warrior with a teutonic or celtic sounding name, beset by evil wizards as he attempts his herculean task - in fact, you might say Hercules was the defining example of the Sword and Sorcery hero. These tales are typically devoured by young males, while High Fantasy appeals to both genders but had more female readers than male.

There are numerous subgenres of fantasy: Urban (elves on harleys), Gothic (vampires, werewolves and shapeshifters, and a lot of people typically die), Comic or humorous Fantasy, etc.

Cover Art: An Indication of Genre

Most fantasies can be fairly accurately placed in genre by 'tone'. Cover art is a good indicator, too. If the cover evokes Maxfield Parrish, with heroines in flowing, many-layered robes with ropes of pearls - High Fantasy. A leering gnome offering coins to an embarrassed-looking young stalwart - comic fantasy. An impossibly-muscled, loincloth-clad slab of beefcake holding a two-hundred pound sword over his head, threatened by an ogre? Clearly Sword and Sorcery. Sometimes the publisher will screw up and put the wrong sort of cover on a book, or mischaracterize it on the cover as part of the 'joke', in comic fantasy. So read the blurbs carefully - "I never laughed so much in my life" is probably not blurbed on the back of a High Fantasy Battle of Good versus Evil epic.