I've been working on this list for about six months now, and so I thought I'd ask you fine lads and lasses if you had any contributions for the list. Given the nature of genre (that is to say, science-fiction, fantasy, and horror were not particularly separate until at least Wells and Verne, and arguably not entirely until Tolkien), some of these are very horror-oriented, and some of these are light science fiction. Basic idea here, though, is fantasy-esque works which came around the time of or before J.R.R. Tolkien. Before the genre was defined by Lord of the Rings, if you will. The Super Fantastic List: Most, if not all, of these authors have a number of other works. I merely listed their most famous, or fantastic, pieces.. J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan) L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) William Beckford (Vathek) Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of Forking Paths) Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita) Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Coming Race) Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars; also Tarzan of the Apes) James Branch Cabell (Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice) L. Sprague de Camp (Land of Unreason, Harold Shea series; co-author) Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass) Robert W. Chambers (The King in Yellow) Arthur Conan Doyle (The Captain of the Polestar, Lot No. 249; also Sherlock Holmes and The Lost World) Alexandre Dumas, père (The Wolf Leader; also The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers) Lord Dunsany (The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Charwoman's Shadow) Eric Rücker Eddison (The Worm Ouroboros, the Zimiamvia trilogy) Ethel Cook Eliot (The Little House in the Fairy Wood) Guy Endore (The Werewolf of Paris) Charles G. Finney (The Circus of Dr. Lao) Michel de Ghelderode (La Balade du grand macabre) Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows, The Reluctant Dragon) Henry Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines, She) William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland) E. T. A. Hoffmann (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, Der Sandmann) Ludvig Holberg (Niels Klim's Underground Travels) Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies) C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) Matthew Lewis (The Monk) H. P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror) George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin) Arthur Machen (The Bowmen, The Great God Pan) Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer) Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla) George du Maurier (Trilby) George Meredith (The Shaving of Shagpat) John Milton (Paradise Lost) Hope Mirrlees (Lud-in-the-Mist) Thomas More (Utopia) C. L. Moore (a Weird Tales contributor; one of the early women writers for the genre) William Morris (The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World's End) Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Story of the Amulet) Jan Patocki (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa) Mervyn Peake (the Gormenghast trilogy) Edgar Allan Poe (where do you even begin?) John William Polidori (The Vampyre) Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock) Fletcher Pratt (see L. Sprague de Camp) Ann Radcliffe (arguable; but she's important historically, so she's on the list) Herbert Read (The Green Child) John Ruskin (The King of the Golden River) William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth; also Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, etc.) Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) Clark Ashton Smith (a famous Weird Tales contributor) Edmund Spencer (The Faerie Queen) Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) Bram Stoker (Dracula - classic.) William Makepeace Thackeray (The Rose and the Ring; also Vanity Fair) J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit) Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) Austin Tappan Wright (Islandia) William Butler Yeats ( my favorite poet) Also, Aeschylus (Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound) Hans Christian Andersen Dante (The Divine Comedy) Euripides (Medea, Phoenician Women) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust) Brothers Grimm Hesiod (Theogony) Homer (Illiad, Odyssey) Lucian of Samosata (True History) Thomas Malory (Le Morte d'Arthur) Ovid (Metamorphoses) Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels; also A Modest Proposal) Virgil (Aeneid) "Beowulf" Codex Exoniensis ("The Phoenix", "The Wanderer", etc.) Englynion (Canu Urien, Canu Llywarch Hen, Canu Heledd, etc.) "The Epic of Gilgamesh" "Kojiki", "Nihon Shoki" Mabinogion (Three Romances, The Dream of Rhonabwy, etc.) "Nibelungenlied" "One Thousand and One Nights" "Prose Edda", "Poetic Edda" Sagas. ("Egils saga", "Volsunga Saga," "Njáls saga", etc.) "Táin Bó Cúailnge" "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" "Urashima Tarō"
