"Stardust" and the fantasy genre.

The NYTimes had this interesting article a week or so ago about the new movie "Stardust" and how, among other things, it violates fantasy genre expectations that arose post-1970s:

Set in two parallel worlds, a quaint Victorian village named Wall and the fantastical kingdom of Stormhold, and with a plot that involves both a witch and a posse of murderous princes chasing after a fallen meteorite that is really a young woman, “Stardust” is also written in a consciously old-fashioned manner. Mr. Gaiman composed it in longhand, using a fountain pen and a leather-covered notebook, he said in New York recently, and the result was that he eliminated “a lot of computery bloat.” His aim was to evoke the manner of early-20th-century writers like Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees, who wrote fantasy stories of a sort that was sometimes called “faerie.”

“In the first half of the century there was no genre distinction,” he said. “People who wrote fantasy were just novelists. Hope Mirrlees, for example, was a friend of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. In this country you had someone like James Branch Cabell, who was a very distinguished figure. There was no sense that fantasy was in any way less than respectable. Then in the middle of the century you get Tolkien, who at first wasn’t pigeonholed as a fantasy writer either. But by the early ’70s ‘Lord of the Rings’ was a cult, and it spawned a whole genre, with genre expectations.”

“Stardust,” in other words, was intended to be pre-Tolkien, a fantasy novel that didn’t read like one, and the movie’s creative team — the director, Matthew Vaughn, and the screenwriter, Jane Goldman — have attempted much the same thing: a fantasy film that can be watched not just by the “Lord of the Rings” crowd, or even by Mr. Gaiman’s worshipful following, but also by people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a fantasy film.

It's interesting to think of a time when Dungeons and Dragons-type things weren't a given, or even on the radar. For many people my age, or at least up until a few years ago for many people my age, it must have been like imagining the Catholic church without John Paul II at its helm.