Tolkien's influence

It was the advent of high fantasy and, most importantly, the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which finally allowed fantasy to truly enter into the mainstream. Although Tolkien's works had been successful in Britain, it was not until the late 1960s that they finally became popular in America; however, at that point they began to sell steadily and in large numbers. Numerous polls to identify the greatest book of the century found The Lord of the Rings selected by widely different groups.
It is difficult to overstate the impact that The Lord of the Rings had on the fantasy genre; in some respects, it swamped all the works of fantasy that had been written before it, and it unquestionably created "fantasy" as a marketing category. It created an enormous number of works inspired by his books, using the themes found in The Lord of the Rings.
While fantasists had created fantasy worlds from the time of William Morris, Tolkien's influence enormously boosted them.
The impact that his books, helped cement the genre's popularity and gave birth to the current wave of fantasy literature.

 (J. R. R. Tolkien is considered to be one of the most important writers in fantasy literature)

Modern Fantasy

The modern fantasy genre first took root during the 18th century with the increased popularity of fictional travelers' tales, influencing and being influenced by other early forms of speculative fiction along the way, finally unfurling in the 19th century from a literary tapestry of fantastic stories and gaining recognition as a distinct genre (mainly due to the nigh-ubiquitous recession of fantastic elements from "mainstream" fiction) in the late 19th century. However, even "modern" fantasy wasn't like the fantasy literature that we have nowadays, it was something completely different from famous modern books that are widely known like The Lord of The Rings.
What made fantasy literature become the genre that we know today were writers from the 20th century, such as J.R.R. Tolkien (his books are considered to be a milestone for the modern fantasy genre, and they made it become famous).

  (The cover of The Lord of The Rings the book that made Tolkien and fantasy literature in general famous)

Differences between modern Fantasy and ancient myths and legends

Even the most fantastic myths, legends and fairy tales differ from modern fantasy genre in three respects:
1) Modern genre fantasy postulates a different reality, either a fantasy world separated from ours, or a hidden fantasy side of our own world. In addition, the rules, geography, history, etc. of this world tend to be defined, even if they are not described outright. Traditional fantastic tales take place in our world, often in the past or in far off, unknown places. It seldom describes the place or the time with any precision, often saying simply that it happened "long ago and far away."
2) Supernatural in fantasy is by design fictitious. In traditional tales the degree to which the author considered the supernatural to be real can span the spectrum from legends taken as reality to myths understood as describing in understandable terms more complicated reality, to late, intentionally fictitious literary works.
3) The fantastic worlds of modern fantasy are created by an author or group of authors, often using traditional elements, but usually in a novel arrangement and with an individual interpretation. Traditional tales with fantasy elements used familiar myths and folklore, and any differences from tradition were considered variations on a theme; the traditional tales were never intended to be separate from the local supernatural folklore.

Expert Project

                                             


 I decided that my expert project for school will be about fantasy literature, a genre that is related to the myths and legends of ancient times. The Fantasy genre, in its modern sense it's only two centuries long, however, its antecedents have a long and distinguished history, and I'm going to start this project by explaining the history of those "antecedents".
During ancient times, it was common to explain unnatural facts that the people didn't understood by telling myths and stories, an example is the myth of Zeus (the king of the ancient Greek gods, people believed that he caused storms) and the Mount Olympus, the Greek mountain where the Greek gods supposedly lived, according to the legends of the time.
Even if modern Fantasy literature is different from the legends of the past it's obvious that those ancients stories are the antecedents of what we see as modern Fantasy.

                                    (The Zeus of Otricoli a Roman sculpture of the Greek god.)