top of page

"It is plain enough that fairy stories (in wider or in narrower sense) are very ancient indeed… they are found universally, wherever there is language."

 - J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories

The Origins of Mythopoeia

The origins of mythopoeia are not easy to trace. Simply searching for the term ‘mythopoeia’ throughout history will not yield many results. It will look as if mythopoeia simply appeared in the year 1892, in a book called The Natural Genesis by Gerald Massey. But to trace the true meaning of the term - the birth of a legitimate and believable mythology - one must go back to the origins of myth. The ancient Greeks devised two ways of thinking, which they called mythos and logos. Although logos - involving scientific reasoning - was important, mythos was primary because it explained the “origins of life, with the foundations of culture, and invested human existence with meaning” (Oziewicz 3). Out of mythos comes mythology, dating back to those Greek gods whose mischief explained the origins of the world and everything in it. And there were not only Greek myths, but those of the Irish and Celtic cultures, with their stories of Cuchulain and Fin Mac Cool. There were other sources, too, such as Germanic, Norse, and Icelandic myths of Thor and Odin. Many, many other cultures created their own mythologies as well, and modern fantasy owes much to the principles created through these stories. Fantasy “has developed in a multi-layered way originating from religious mythology, folk wonder-tale and heroic song” (Esberk 2).

This timeline is a comprehensive list of important moments in the history of the mythopoeic tradition. It is only a brief glimpse into the rich history of myth-making, but clearly demonstrates the rise of popular fantasy literature.

Timeline of Important Mythopoeic Moments

  • 2100 B.C. - The epic of Gilgamesh can be traced back to this time, and may
    have been the first ever recorded [written] fantasy (West 3).
     

  • 850 AD - It is believed that Beowulf, the old English poem by an unknown
    author, was written around this time. It holds many of the elements of a
    modern fantasy - a hero, a quest, a dragon to slay - even though it was written
    decades before the first fantasy stories.
     

  • Late 1600s - Telling fairy-tales becomes a popular aristocratic pastime - a game,
    even - in France. Elders describes how these interactions would go: “Players
    would take turns composing tales, often around a requested motif, with the aim
    of making the tale seem as natural and formless as possible, as if it had been
    spontaneously composed    ” (Eilers 1).
     

  • 1690s - Fairy-tale writers began publishing the stories they created during
    these games - the most notable being Madame d'Aulnoy, 
    Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier, and Charles Perrault (Eilers 1).
     

  • 1697 - Madame d'Aulnoy's Tales of the Fairys is published. Charles Perrault’s Tales of Past Times is also published.
     

  • Early 1700s - French fairy-tales were translated and published in different languages, sparking excitement and interest in the genre.
     

  • 1780s - Persecution of the fairy-tale genre reached a new high after decades of steady growth. A band of children’s writers attempted to fight against faiy-tales by releasing their own stories that taught children “diligence, obedience, and good manners in their readers” (Eilers 2).
     

  • 1786 - Vathek by William Beckford, considered by some to be the first example of fantasy writing, is published (Eilers 1).
     

  • Early 1800s -  The romantic movement began, which helped to revive the popularity of fairy-tales and fantasy. It was effective in this because it encouraged “as wide a conception of reality as possible” (Eilers 2). The Romantic movement “instigated a shift in the cultural temper, symbolized by a change in the meaning of the word ‘fantasy’” (Eilers 2).
     

  • 1818 -  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is published.
     

  • 1823 - Edgar Taylor translates a few tales from Jakob and Wilhelm
    Grimm’s Kinder und Haus-Märchen (German Popular Stories) into
    English and publishes them.
     

  • 1837 - Phantasmion by Sara Coleridge is published.
     

  • 1843 - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is published.
     

  • 1846 - The first English translation of Hans Christian Andersen's
    Wonderful Stories for Children is published by Mary Howitt. Thanks to
    Andersen’s works, “the writing of fantasy and folk-tales became
    acceptable and even admirable” (Eilers 2).
     

  • 1855 - The Rose and the Ring by William Thackeray is published.
     

  • 1858 - Phantastes by George MacDonald is published, a work associated
    with the “emergence of the genre” of fantasy (Eilers 1).
     

  • 1863 - Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is published.
     

  • 1894 - The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris is published. This and other works by Morris were “set entirely in imaginary worlds that were not presented as dreamscapes or spiritual journeys”, as they usually were in fantasy novels (Wolf 13).
     

  • 1941 - Carl G. Jung and Carl Kerenyi's Essays on a Science of Mythology is published, which approaches mythologies from a psychological perspective.
     

  • 1947 - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake by Northrop Frye discussed the importance of a “rich mythopoeic structure” in Blake’s work. (Oziewicz 1)
     

  • 1949 - Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is published. Campbell proposed that “mythologies are creative manifestations of the human need to be intimately in touch with our universal psychological and spiritual realities”. In the same year, Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return argued that myth is a narrative which enables man to “participate in a transcendent, perennial existence” (Oziewicz 1).
     

  • 1950 - The first book of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series is published. Lewis is one of the forefathers of modern fantasy, and his Narnia series is one of the most well-known mythopoeic works of all time.















     

  • 1954 - J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings - a groundbreaking work in the fantasy genre - is published. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is an excellent example of mythopoeia in literature - quite possibly the first legitimate example. Tolkien is responsible for the resurgence of the term mythopoeia.
     

  • 1969 - Ballantine Books began reprinting classic fantasy novels under the name ‘Ballantine Adult Fantasy’. Their publishings introduced their readers to the “rich variety of the English and American fantasy tradition” (James 13).
     

  • 1970s - Fantasy became a literary genre, giving a special place within literature to works such as The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia (Oziewicz 3).
     

  • 1980s - The rise of fantasy literature is one of the most “spectacular literary developments of the twentieth century” (Oziewicz 9).
     

  • 1996 - A Game of Thrones, the first book of the A Song of Ice
    and Fire series by George R.R. Martin, is published.
     

  • 1997 - The first installment of the wildly popular Harry Potter
    series by J.K. Rowling is published.
     

  • 2005 - Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight is published, putting vampire
    fiction on the map. To date, it has sold 22 million copies worldwide.
     

  • 2007 - Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, the first installment of The Mortal Instruments series, is published. The book was made into a movie in 2013, and a television show based on the series is in production.
     

  • 2012 - Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas is published.
     

  • 2015 - Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard is published.

© 2023 by EK. Proudly created with Wix.com

  • w-facebook
  • Twitter Clean
  • w-flickr
bottom of page