#eric brighteyes

“Saga of Eric Brighteyes” (1890) by H. Rider Haggard, a book that, in my view, along with Haggard’s own “She,” were the first two fantasy novels.

Fantasy novels are not the same as fairy tales or folklore, and it’s a genre that took a long time to bud off from horror and genre-fluid “weird fiction,” existing for decades before it even had a name, and is the last major genre of fiction to emerge completely in the mid-20th Century. Fantasy novels have realistic characterization and a grounded, non-dreamlike setting we are supposed to accept as “real” as our own history, yet they have the sense of adventure/romance of turn of the century adventure novels, combined with the unreal, fantastical and outright weird elements that come from horror and weird fiction, taken matter of factly as a part of the worldview of people in the past, like witches’ brews, werewolves, ghosts, and griffins.