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I think it's D&D that made so much modern fantasy fiction Tolkienesque.

I think it's because both of them totally ripped off Warhammer.

i think from my perspective that unlike lewis in addition to targeting a more mature audience tolkien created character archtypes and classes. the ranger, the elf, the fighter etc...he also set it in a grandios epic rather than a fun little story.

 

more than just a name we know what a ranger is, what kind of personality it bequeths and how they behave. in this way later works like D&D could take something we know as a ranger and use it as a character class because what it was is already famliar to our mindset.

I don't think that D&D is the beginning of Tolkien's influence over the Fantasy genre by any means.

What elements are taken from Tolkien in the typical derivative novel? The Elves and Dwarves, for certain. Wizards. Dragons. The quest, which involves a dangerous journey.

Tolkien developed the elves and dwarves to such a point that no-one who read them could forget their essential attributes. They were so well-defined that it became easy for anyone to simply plug them into their story and reasonably expect the reader to know what an elf is, to know what a dwarf is.

In contrast, Lewis' "races" (the Beavers, the Fauns, etc.) were not at all distinctive; they simply behaved like little anthropomorphic middle-class English people. There's nothing to rip off there.

Ahtman: "The characters in Narnia come across more as symbols then as people. LotR also taps into to pre-Christian cultural concepts and may have a broader appeal, if only by a bit. As much as it chagrins some Christians, they don't own the concepts of good and evil in the world. LotR's good and evil is more broad and can appeal more easily to all people, as opposed to "Oh, Jesus ate that witch"."

The counterpouint to Lewis is not Tolkien who essentially shared his theology, but Pulman. Lewis depicts Chritianity as the univeral force of good, Pulman depicts Chritianity as the ultimate force of dogmatic control.

Orlanth, I think you're missing his point.

Ahtman wasn't saying that Lewis or Tolkein were *opposed* philosophically, but rather that Lewis was writing within a more specific moral and philosophical framework (a Christian one), and Tolkein was writing from/about a broader and more universal cultural/philosophical viewpoint.

I can attest from my personal subjective experience with them as a child that Lewis' philosophical/religious framework was definitely an obstacle to my enjoyment of his work. Whereas Tolkein's portrayals of the conflict of good vs evil in a more universal sense connected much more deeply with me.