By the 20th century, the fantasy novel as we now understand it had begun to take form. The rise of the pulp magazine would provide a home for the “weird fiction” of H. P. Lovecraft and the “sword and sorcery” of Robert E. Howard — stories of mighty barbarians and tentacle monsters stitched together from everything that had to be cut out of the serious novel in order to keep it serious. As Jamie Williamson has detailed, many of these pulp stories, along with some late-Victorian fairy tales, would later be collected and reprinted by Ballantine Books following the wild popularity of its 1965 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, easily the most influential fantasy novel of all time. Lin Carter, editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, would claim that the “mania” of fantasy readers was unsurpassed. “I believe that a hunger for the fabulous is something common to the human condition,” he wrote in his study of the genre, Imaginary Worlds. “To be a human being is to possess the capacity to dream; and few of us are so degraded or brutalized that we have no thirst for miracles.” For Carter, the fantasy novel was a distillate of readerly desire: not just the desire to read about strange worlds and exotic beings but the desire to return to the “original form of narrative literature itself.”
The Ballantine series ended in 1973. The next year, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax, a laid-off insurance underwriter in Wisconsin, had previously worked on a medieval-themed war game called Chainmail. Its rule set had included a brief “fantasy supplement,” encouraging players to “refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and other fantasy writers” — or else devise their own “world.” One such player was Arneson, a recent college grad living with his parents in Minnesota, who began running a heavily modified campaign about a group of feudal lords charged with protecting their fiefdoms from invading armies. Between battles, Arneson gave his players the option of exploring dungeons to fight monsters and find magical treasures, while he himself took on the unusual role of “referee.” Before long, players had gotten so absorbed in dungeon delving they began to neglect the defense of the realm. “Well, all that running around in the dungeons finally got the castle wiped out while our flock of heroes went looking for adventure and treasure,” Arneson drolly reported in his newsletter. “Our priest got drunk and engaged in a totally debauched orgy in Wizard’s wood while Swenson’s freehold burned to the ground.” Gygax thought this sounded like a game in its own right; his daughter liked the name Dungeons & Dragons.