Certain kinds of stories seem to set their own agendas as far as style is concerned; you ignore the demands of the material at your peril. If you write a story about princesses, dragons and magic rings in the style of Ernest Hemingway, for example, you may have an interesting story, but it is unlikely to feel much like fantasy. — Lisa Tuttle in Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction (2001)
Can simple language be used to effectively tell a Fantasy tale? I wrestle with this every time I write what I consider Sword & Sorcery fiction. My style tends toward the modern, unadorned and fast-moving. I call this “The Curse of Ernest Hemingway” because he is usually acknowledged as the writer who simplified 20th Century diction. F. Scott Fitzgerald also gets credit. Personally, I think it happened in the Pulps with writers like Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Cornell Woolrich, but WHO is not as important as the fact that it happened. Suddenly, wordy meant Victorian, and therefore old-fashioned. Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith and many earlier writers get dinged for being poor stylists (style being defined by Hemingwayites, of course.)
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster 3:From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly