Without further ado, let us commence the Great Monsters & Manuals Group Research Project 2026.
The 'prologue' as such is a concept that goes back at least to ancient Greece. But a fairly recent innovation in fantasy fiction has come in the form of the action-packed prologue chapter, often taking place in media res, which gets the reader hooked from the outset and tees up the narrative proper. I am not talking here about a framing device like the introductory sequence to The Worm Ouroboros, or a preliminary infodump like in The Fellowship of the Ring. I am talking about a teaser taking place 'before the opening credits', as it were, often filled with violence and derring-do and causing the pages to turn from the very outset.
The most famous and notable example nowadays may be the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which each begin in this way. Off the top of my head, others would include The Eye of the World, The Name of the Wind (which I confess I have not fully read), Gardens of the Moon, The Dragonbone Chair... if you have read a great deal of high fantasy fiction, you know the drill.
I have done some Googling, and even consulted Satan himself (in the form of Claude.AI for higher education, for which I have super-duper access through my day job) and have not been able to find a definitive starting point for this practice. I think it has to have become fashionable sometime between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Eye of the World. But when?
A datapoint: Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume in David Eddings's The Belgariad, includes a preliminary infodump prologue about the creation of the world. It was published in 1982, and it is safe to say that since Eddings was self-consciously trying to ape epic fantasy fiction, he can be used as a bellweather. This would indicate the action-packed prologue chapter was not in vogue at that time. The Eye of the World, which on the other hand definitively has what you would call an action-packed prologue chapter of the type I am describing, came out in 1990. This would narrow the search down to some point between 1982-1990. But I might be wrong.
Does anybody have any ideas? Fly, my pretties!
