[Quiet Man Cometh]

We'd still have fantasy in the children's books area though. Lewis was a contemporary of Tolkein's after all and I think it's reasonable to assume that Narnia would still be present without LOTR involved. With things like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the OZ books, there would still be a fair amount of magic realism going around in the younger books, and it would likely be a matter of time before someone started writing such things for adults.

That sort of skirts the idea of outright fantasy those, since each of those books is effectively world hopping through some mystical or imaginary means from the normal world we live in (hence Magic Realism). The myth structures would still be there though, like the Arthurian Legends and the building blocks for what Tolkein did.

Not sure what would happen with TSR and DnD if LOTR had never been written. I think the concept would still be around, but the details might be different. One might look to the third party stuff that deals with other cultures or specific points in time, mythical stories, etc.

We could hit a domino thing here. If no Tolkein means no DnD as we know it, then that means no Dragonlance since the books were first based of a DnD game, or so I've read, and no shared world stuff. That covers about half the fantasy sections that I've looked through. What would the absense of Tolkein/TSR/DnD also mean for things like Blizzard and Bioware games? I think I should pause here before I get too far ahead of myself. The gamer world as we know it will shift inevitably for want of Lord of the Rings!