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Originally Posted by HarryT
Plainly fantasy written before Tolkien (eg Charles Kingsley's "The Water Babies") cannot be derivative of it. A single counter-example being sufficient to disprove a statement that "All something is true", we have disproven his statement. QED.
If you're asking "is all fantasy written after LOTR derivative of it", the answer again is "no". Clearly, modern fantasy writers are influenced by Tolkien - nobody can not be influenced by such a giant in the field - and clearly there is some fantasy which is indeed derivative of Tolkien (Terry Brooks' "The Sword of Shanara" being the most obvious example), but that certainly doesn't mean that subsequent fantasy is derivative. Authors like Stephen Donaldson, Ursula Le Guin and Raymond Feist have taken the genre down completely different paths to Tolkien.
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Yep. There is a lot of different fantasy genres. Tolkien wrote in what some call heroic fantasy or high fantasy. Some of the high fantasy written prior to Tolkien that I like are works like "The Worm Ouroboros" by ER Eddison. (1922) Another is "The Well at the World's End" by William Morris.
Some of the fantasy writers who have nothing in common with Tolkien are writers such as Roger Zelazny (The Amber series, The Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness), Brian Daley (the Coramonde series). For that matter, the whole urban fantasy genre is in a totally different direction with different roots than Tolkien.