ABSTRACT
N orthrop Frye points out in The Secular Scripture that early nonrealistic texts-the very body of work that "forms the mainstream of Western literature until the Renaissance" (Kratz, 3)-provided rich mythic soil not only for the growth of later romance literature but for the eventual evolution of the popular realistic novel, which Frye says was" a realistic displacement of romance, and had few structural features peculiar to itself" (Frye 1976, 38). The similar dialectic with or displacement of the popular realistic novel that shaped modern fantasy was, as we have seen in chapter I, both revolutionary and recursive. Frye observes that the structural shifting of fantasy
The modern tradition rapidly developed two complementary but distinct thematic branches-secular and religious-and the resulting differences may be more fully appreciated through a look at the archetypal modern mythic heroes that emerge as fundamentally different in the work of Morris and Tolkien.
