I would think "high fantasy" to be defined as "tolkienesque" (great evil to defeat and save the world).
But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant".
Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)
> there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time"
We must see different things. As I see the wheel of time:
- Great lost past. This one's obvious; the Age of Legend is a huge focus of the books.
- The dark empire. Doesn't exist in the present, but it is a feature of the great lost past.
- All good on one side and all bad on the other: this seems to describe the wheel of time well? The whole story arc is Rand fulfilling the separate prophecies of every ethnic group in the world, bringing them all under the same government (his), and taking them to battle the even more unified forces of evil.
Yes, the age of legends is the same trope, but I don't think the rest matches.
There is one Big Evil but the lesser ones are all scheming against each other. In Tolkien there's just a bit with Saruman and the spiders, but you don't really have factions amongst the ringwraiths, for example. It's all just a battle between Sauron/everyone or Melkor/everyone.
The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms, or some elven clans just standing on the sides.
In Tolkien's universe you 99% of the time know who is evil and who is not (elf, dwarf, hobbit, ent, eagle, northern man = good; orc, goblin, troll, dragon, great spiders, eastern man= bad).
Yes, a couple human characters are ambiguous, but it's a pretty small minority.
In WoT you have a couple evil races and you, the reader, have a clear view of who is good and who is bad.
But in-world people want to kill other people because each thinks the other is evil: that looks a substantial difference to me.
Re: pure heroes, I meant that the main characters basically are all 100% good. This is the same in both universes too, just not a constant in all high fantasy. At least I think, I didn't finish the wheel of time ;)
In the wheel of time, good and evil are objective. (Well, evil is objective.) Everyone, good or evil, agrees on what it means to be evil. By definition, everyone evil ultimately reports to the same leader. Good is a little less unified than that, but they likewise all agree that they're on the same side. If one good person in the wheel of time wants to kill another good person for being evil, that doesn't reflect different views of what evil is; it's just a simple mistake of fact.
And that's pretty much what I understand by "all good on one side and all evil on the other", I guess.
> The good ones in WoT don't simply start separated but actively hating and fighting each other, Rand has to go to war with many nations and specific groups within nations, and some of them just split and start killing each other. This is not the same as Gondor and Rohan being on bad terms
On the other hand, it is the same as e.g. the relationship between the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves, as depicted in The Hobbit.
“Thomas Covenant” scarred my early teenage years. It definitely took the genre into places it wasn’t meant to be. I think only The Witcher has done something similar since (although I’ve not read the books).
I normally define high vs low fantasy as a setting, differing by the level of magical infusion to the fictional universe -- a world where magic is thoroughly embedded into its structure is high fantasy (eg magic is not simply a power source of wizards, but a system that influences all things, and magical creatures/objects are the norm, not the exception).
The closer you get to reality -- the more magic becomes a tool, rather than a rule ala gravity, the "lower" your fantasy gets; the lowest essentially being the one guy who stumbles into magical powers, but no one else has anything close, or a portal dimension opens and thrusts magical creatures upon our universe for a bit.
tolkienesque would be more specifically the tropes of LOTR, as you've described.
But essentially any modern high fantasy film/tv/game (I don't read much fantasy, so I can't comment on books) either mimics tolkien's systems and races (elves are slender long-lived creatures of the forests, dwarves are short hole-digging mountain-men, glowing weapons and runes scattered throughout the lands, wizards as wise-men etc), or it is best described as a reaction to tolkien -- deliberately trying to be NOT-tolkien.
In my mind, the failure to detach wholesale from tolkien, but still exist as "high-fantasy", is because few attempt a more holistic attempt at it -- to craft the rules of the universe, run the (mental) simulation, to set the stage for whatever plotline. Instead the world is crafted in the void, but because the rules are never clearly defined, it naturally defaults to similar rules as tolkien (randomly broken to fit the story, because they were never defined well-enough to review).
However, there are stories more derived from gods & myths that would fit my given definition of high fantasy, though I'm not sure I'd put them under the same umbrella as tolkien
But there's a ton of fantasy where the other important tropes of Tolkien (great lost past, the dark empire, all good on one side and all bad on the other, the pure heroes) is missing. The first that come to mind are "the wheel of time" and "the chronicles of Thomas covenant".
Also if you move from high fantasy there's a ton more interesting stuff, imvho :)