Earlier this week, Anne reminded us of an old post where she discussed her earliest, fantasy inspirations. It reminded me of my own fantasy genre prehistory. I wrote a bit about it in my very first post on this blog back in 2009:
In my personal pre-history (which is to say the mid-seventies to the dawning of the eighties), there was already in my brain a nascent cauldron of fantasy abubble: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz conjured by the voice of a babysitter, King Arthur for boys illuminated by NC Wyeth, four-color barbarians on spinner-racks, Myth and legend sifted by Bullfinch and Harryhausen, singing hobbits and rotoscoped orcs, power swords split in twain on not one, but two, alien worlds; an elf, a dwarf, a giant--and a slayer named Hawk, the doom that came to Vermithrax Pejorative, fantasylands with oracular pigs and messianic lions.
I also not in the post the inspiration for my first character (in AD&D): An elf fighter/magic-user inspired by the protagonist in the Endless Quest book by Rose Estes, Mountain of Mirrors.
That's not the only thing in my gaming history I can trace to a specific source. For another example, I've used flightless birds as mounts in several campaign worlds I created, I suspect all traceable to this cover by James Gurney for a book I haven't read:
There are numerous things like that. Some probably borrowed from sources so long ago, I don't even remember their origins.