Modern fantasy is largely derivative of J.R.R. Tolkien. This Science Fiction Weekly Interview with Michael Moorcock harks back to when he was the other fantasy writer:
I’ve noticed I don’t read a lot of fantasy — I never did. I just started writing it. I just happened to have the facility. Pretty much all the other stuff in that form has been published since I started writing it. So I’m not particularly interested in it as a genre. I didn’t start writing it because there was a big genre out there to write into. There was me and Tolkien. Basically, at the beginning, me and Tolkien were selling about the same, which was very, very few. Tolkien was regarded as just another writer, like [Mervyn] Peake, who had an enthusiastic following, but wasn’t in any way mainstream or likely to take off.
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In a sense, I started writing Elric as much in contrast to Tolkien as I was writing it in contrast to Conan. I didn’t like Tolkien because it had a fairy-story quality. It didn’t have what I would regard as a properly tragic quality. It was too sentimental for my taste. I’m attracted to lyrical, romantic, tragic kind of stuff, rather than the five-people-solve-a-problem-together, which is essentially the Tolkien formula. It’s the formula which most people prefer. It’s the one that goes into RPG games and stuff like that. I’m writing about alienated individuals who are fundamentally solitary, who don’t really want do an awful lot with other people. And again, it’s my own experience. I pretty much brought myself up, and I pretty much looked after myself on my own feet from a very early age. I was earning my own living from the age of 15. I don’t think in terms of five friends getting together to solve a problem.