Sit down, Bay 12, around the fire, if you will. I need to have a little talk.
We all know wizards cast fireballs. Right? Whoosh, boom. Fireball. It's bread and butter. It's in very nearly every video which includes both wizards, and violent conflict. It's a hallmark of pen-and-paper roleplaying. By the time of Dungeons and Dragons 3 if not earlier, wizards and other magic users have a long, long list of spells which produce huge, over-the-top displays. Lightning, chain lighting, magic missiles, burning hands, acid arrows, orbs of various harmful stuff, wall of swords that are chopping constantly (what?), giant cyclinder of gnawing ghost fish (what?), all the way up to things like Prismatic Spray, which spews colorful light with a laundry list of different harmful effects, and Meteor Storm, which is basically a localized apocalypse. This has influenced games and fantasy writing all over and it's a hallmark of fantasy fiction now that wizards can do lots of ridiculously over-the-top flashy magic.
But if you read older fantasy fiction, or really anything pre-Dungeons and Dragons, something doesn't add up. In The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gandalf never shoots a fireball at anybody. He uses his staff to light up a room, I think. He sets some pinecones on fire. He might control the weather sometimes? He certainly has some kind of connection to an invisible spirit world and can read minds or whatever, but nothing so big and flashy as our DnD wizards. He even fights with a sword. He sure could have used a lightning bolt against the hordes of goblins in Moria, or countless other occasions! In Conan, one dude causes an explosion one time, but he threw a glass globe with stuff in it so he was probably just an alchemist. It seems that there used to be an idea that magic was much more subtle, a way of getting in touch with some hidden part of the world, and if you wanted to kill forty dudes at once you'd have to resort to more conventional means.
So what the hell happened? This transition seems to have happened in the blink of an eye, compared to the history of the supernatural as depicted in literature. Is it all down to Dungeons and Dragons, or is it something else? I do know that Dungeons and Dragons was based on a war game called Chainmail- that game had cannons and mortars (line and area attacks) and the fantasy supplement for Chainmail had wizards casting lightning bolts and fireballs, which behaved exactly like cannons and mortars respectively. Do we owe our modern idea of the fireball-slinging wizard entirely to that? It seems like such an odd thing.
Perhaps one of you has some insight, or a deeper knowledge of the lore than I. Discuss.