Why does the fantasy genre have such a bad reputation?

[Mervi]

It's not just that some people feel all fantasy is bad Tolkien knock-off (although I have to agree that a part of it IS, sadly), there's also people who think that Tolkien himself is "juvenile trash" and even ~dangerous and so anything in the same genre is as well.

I wish I was kidding. Just last week, there was a radio show in Finland where the topic of discussion was the Lord of the Rings, and although the guests and most people who called in were very enthusiastic about the book, there were a few people who heavily emphasized they had read it only because they had read it aloud for their children, and one caller who warned that it was a nice story, but it would be dangerous to become "too involved" in it. Or another example, this article about how Tolkien as C.S. Lewis were not ~real~ artists.

I know I've recced this before, but Tom Shippey's excellent book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (that's a BD affiliate link) deals with these prejudices and criticism amongst other things, and discusses why the literati think fantasy is not real literature.