In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy
It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use the same tropes, character types, or plot structures, and either rewrite them from within or poke fun at them (as Pratchett himself did in the early Discworld books). So the quest gets subverted, the avenging hero never gets the chance to achieve his revenge, the handsome prince turns out to be a nasty piece of work and the deformed magician is the good guy, and so on.