I've been thinking a little bit about the origins of fantasy, after noting how few games there are where you can actually play a decent barbarian. JarlFrank has said a little about how fantasy used to be much more colourful and exotic, before High Fantasy became de rigeuer. It's inspirations are also more archaic or exotic, such as real barbaric epics, like Gilgamesh and the Illiad. I've been going back and reading the early pulp stuff for a while, and I think one of the major barriers that a modern reader will have, is that the entire mind-set and thinking is different. Like with most things I've found in life, there is a certain frame or world-view that will unlock this type of fiction, otherwise lacking the cypher it will make no sense, essentially written in a different literary language. After that, pulp becomes way more exotic and interesting than the stock Lord of the Rings knockoffs that have never once approached Tolkien's genius.
Pre-Tolkien western fantasy, and later fantasy building up on that older tradition, is usually much weirder and more exotic than generic medieval-esque high fantasy.
The pulp fantasy of the 1930s had a lot of weird stuff in it, and a lot of later western fantasy authors wrote in that tradition of weird fiction. Michael Ende's Neverending Story doesn't feel out of place in that tradition at all, it's just an imaginative work of fantasy, there's nothing JRPG-y about it at all.
One of the main differences is how the pulp fantasy novels treat interior 'psychology'. Psychology was only invented in the 20th century, and pre-modern people understood the mind completely differently. The novel is obsessed with 'psychology' in the modern sense of the word, the definition of a novel is something like 'a story that shows psychological development over time'. The pre-modern version of the novel was the romance or folk epic, and lacked modernist psychologising. But people have been trained in schools to see novels that psychologise as "higher" or "elevated", when that is debatable, and it's arguably "lower" and more mired in human crap. No coincidence that the publishing industry is heavily female; and those few genres like science fiction that were male-oriented in sales, have now been eliminated by the female mafia. Pulp stories, written and dominated by men, also display a different attitude toward interiority to the novel; the outer world is of more interest.
Look at old science fiction. Procedure, ideas, speculative concepts, are more important than the interior bullshit of a character. Then comes the idea that it's not literary or high brow enough, without deep dives into their 'issues'. So science fiction gives way to soap operas that are merely in space. Then eventually you have the Hugo, Saturn, Nebula, Arthur C Clarke Awards, etc, being given to predominantly female or feminised authors writing novels about interiority, that have little to do with the grand vision of sci-fi past.
This random YouTube guy, although he is talking about wider fantasy, made some interesting points:
That's only one of the keys or cyphers, but it's a big one. Another I would say is just that a lot of these stories from the foundations of fantasy, so much fresher than the lifeless ones today, focus on Amor Fati, and a pagan embrace of life affirming struggle. Expansion, carving out a habitable world for your people and yourself. The Conan level of survival. Bronze Age morality. This is very difficult for a modern to understand, if they are trained to think modernist liberal axioms like egalitarianism are an absolute unalloyed moral good, raised to avoid conflict, avoid truths that upset, avoid analysis that is too cutting, or whatever. Pulp is frank about reality, albeit undaunted by whole new realities and worlds.
Finally looking at High Fantasy specifically and why Tolkien effects people so much, it's clear that kind of fantasy is metaphysical and spiritual, and you cannot divorce it from a metaphysical standpoint, whether Platonist or Christian or Pagan or Buddhist or whatever, or you get "what about his tax policy" GRRM type stuff that might as well be history.
