User blog comment:CutieOwl/Who will win?/@comment-4769743-20120330140137/@comment-1728211-20120402182620

Actually, we can extend that into a generic point to mark the point of distinction between "high" fantasies such as LOTR and "low" fantasies such as ASOIAF. The high fantasies have battles for world domination and sharply-drawn distinctions between good and evil, deriving from the old English tradititions of travellers' tales and chivalry, filtered through Morris, Eddison and Dunsany before it reached Tolkien. By contrast, the low fantasies seldom seem to involve quests to save the world and feature mostly amoral characters. I would propose that this is because low fantasy is an American tradition, originating in pulps such as Weird Tales and drawing on a culturally different set of concepts. Much of the American "breakaway" libertarian spirit can be seen in the stories of low fantasy, even in its degraded present-day form of "swords and sorcery", with a kind of frontier setting being prevalent. The English tradition, by contrast, has always had the undiscovered country as somewhere over there, which may account for the tendency of high fantasy authors to dedicate extensive periods of time to mapping out a fantasy world while many low fantasy worlds are much "sketchier" in outline, concentrating on a few notable locations (Lankhmar being probably the most famous example).