: Fantasy isn't defined only by magic. I was a fan of fantasy literature for many years before coming across anyone trying to define "fantasy" as "stuff involving magic", which I've never really

Fantasy isn't defined only by magic.

I was a fan of fantasy literature for many years before coming across anyone trying to define "fantasy" as "stuff involving magic", which I've never really understood. For me, being set in an alternate world (including a fictional world-within-a-world like Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl) was always a bigger fantasy indicator than the involvement of magic. Of course that's not a perfect indicator either. The boundaries of any genre are fuzzy and hard to define, science fiction and fantasy perhaps more than most. (We know this over at the Science Fiction & Fantasy SE, where we don't even try to nail down a firm definition of the genre(s) and essentially adopt an "I know it when I see it" approach.)

But it may depend on exactly how you define "magic". For example, does the appearance of a ghost count as magic? (Is Shakespeare's Hamlet fantasy?) Does a prophetic dream which comes true count as magic? (Those happen in real life too.)

My go-to example of "fantasy without magic" would be the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, at least assuming that your answer to the two questions above is no.
Another good example would be some of the stories of Borges, many of which are surely wacky enough to count as "fantasy" without involving anything that could be described as magic. "The Library of Babel" is a short story describing a possibly infinite library containing books with every possible combination of characters, meaningful or not. That doesn't require any magic, but I'd sure as hell call it fantasy.

Even the Great White Whale of fantasy literature, The Lord of the Rings, has very very little magic involved. The only magic that's really important to the plot is the nature of the One Ring itself; most of the story is about ordinary people, unaugmented by magical powers, struggling to achieve great deeds. But that's very little magic rather than none, and there's more in the backstory that lays out Tolkien's legendarium in more depth.

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