The A to Z of Fantasy Literature

by Stableford, Brian M.

  THURBER, JAMES (1894–1961). U.S. writer and illustrator, famous as a humorist. His classic account of escapist fantasizing, “The Secret Life

  TIE-IN • 405

  of Walter Mitty” (1939; reprinted in My World and Welcome to It, 1942), was followed by the similarly ironic Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time (1956), which wryly invert, subvert, or pervert the formal morals of traditional fables. Following precedents set by the picture books Many Moons (1943) and The Great Quillow (1944), his longer prose fantasies were marketed as children’s books, but they are highly sophisticated and equally subversive. The theriomorphic fantasy The White Deer (1945) recycles familiar folktale motifs, but the Gothic fantasy The Thirteen Clocks (1950) is remarkably inventive, and the sentimental fantasy The Wonderful O (1955) is an exuberant exercise in wordplay.

  TIECK, JOHANN LUDWIG (1773–1853). German writer, one of the central figures of German romanticism. Abdallah (1795), a graphic Arabian fantasy modeled on William Beckford’s Vathek, has never been translated, but many of the transfigured folktales included in Volksmärchen (1797) and Phantasus (3 vols., 1812–17) are well known.

  The bibliography of his translations is confused by misattributions, but his most notable short stories are included in Tales from the Phantasus, etc. (1845), including a striking allegory of thinning, “The Elves”

  (1811); the couplet comprising the verse/prose hybrid “The Faithful Eckhart” (1797) and “The Tannenhäuser” (1799, about the legend of the Venusberg), and the delusional fantasies “The White Eckbert (1796),”

  “The Runenberg” (1802), and “The Love-Charm” (1811). The last item in The Old Man of the Mountains: The Lovecharm and Pietro of Albano (1831)—first published in 1824—is a melodramatic historical fantasy novella.

  TIE-IN. A book associated with a film, TV series, or game. Novelizations of successful silent movies first appeared in the 1920s, a notable fantasy example being Achmed Abdullah’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924), but such items of spin-off did not become commonplace until the 1960s. Game tie-ins are by far the most significant within genre fantasy, where they complete a tight feedback loop; role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are extensions of conventional literary fantasy into narrowly confined lifestyle fantasy, which plunder almost all their raw material from fantasy literature, so books based on the games are effectively recycling that material. Tie-ins to computer games and war games have to be more inventive, because their literary spin-off has to add far more sup-plementary material to the basic image sequences and rule books.

  406 • TILTON, LOIS

  TILTON, LOIS (1946– ). U.S. writer in various genres. Vampire Winter (1990) is revisionist vampire fiction. Darkspawn (2000) is an epic fantasy with a vampire hero. Written in Venom (2000) is a Nordic fantasy in which the god Loki tells his own story.

  TIME REVERSAL. Reversing the flow of time within a story is a common fantasy motif, featured in Albert Robida’s L’Horloge des siècles

  [The Clock of the Centuries] (1902), Eden Phillpotts’s A Deal with the Devil, Michael Maurice’s Not in Our Stars (1923), Malcolm Ross’s The Man Who Lived Backward (1951), Oliver Onions’s The Tower of Oblivion, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), Daniel Quinn and Tim Eldred’s The Man Who Grew Young (2001), and Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2004).

  TIMESLIP. An arbitrary dislocation in time, usually—but not invariably—a “fall” into the past. The device is frequently used to facilitate transtemporal love affairs, as in Théophile Gautier’s “Arria Marcella,”

  Robert W. Chambers’s “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” A. Merritt’s “Three Lines of Old French,” Gerald Bullett’s “Helen’s Lovers,” and Erica Jong’s Serenissima (1987), for which reason such stories are often described as “timeslip romances” and are now a staple element of paranormal romance. They also figure extensively in novelistic contes

  philosophiques like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, G. G. Coulton’s Friar’s Lantern (1906), Katharine Burdekin’s The Burning Ring, Christopher Morley’s Thunder on the Left, and Terence M. Green’s The Shadow of Ashland, where they facilitate arguments about historical cause and effect or assault nostalgic delusions.

  A variant of the theme that involves protagonists slipping back to an earlier point in their own personal histories, as in J. M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus, Louis Marlow’s The Devil in Crystal (1944), P. D. Ous-pensky’s The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1947), and Thomas Berger’s Changing the Past, is a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

  Folktales in which abductions into Faerie involve severe time dislocations are timeslip fantasies of a sort, although the effective movement is forward rather than back. Timeslip romances are sometimes

  complicated by continual slippages, as in Margaret Irwin’s Still She Wished for Company, Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie, Ken Grimwood’s Replay, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003).

  TOLKIEN, J. R. R. • 407

  Timeslips in children’s fantasy are usually educational, as in Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1939), W. Croft Dickinson’s The Eildon Tree (1947), Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes, Jill Paton Walsh’s A Chance Child (1978), Robert Westall’s The Wind Eye (1977) and The Devil on the Road (1978), and various works by Margaret J. Anderson, William Mayne, Helen Cresswell, Jane Louise Curry, and Theresa Tomlinson.

  TOLKIEN, J. R. R. (1892–1973). British scholar and writer. An academic specializing in Old English, he regretted the usurpation of

  British myth and legend by Norman invaders, whose imported traditions of romance had spawned the Arthurian tradition and polluted the Celtic traditions echoed in the Welsh texts translated as the

  Mabinogion. In the wake of World War I, when re-enchantment was in vogue, he began work on his own mythos to “replace” the lost heritage, in a body of work whose epic core was ultimately to become The Silmarillion. Along with Owen Barfield, he was co-opted by C. S.

  Lewis into the Inklings discussion group before he published The Hobbit; or, There and Back Again (1937), a children’s/quest set against the backcloth of his English mythos, which became a key exemplar of

  modern immersive fantasy. The literary theory behind the work was elaborated in a 1939 lecture “On Fairy Tales,” reprinted in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), and revised as “On Fairy-stories” in Tree and Leaf (1964), where it appeared with the exemplary “Leaf by Niggle.” This essay, which defined such terms as secondary world and enchantment and proposed that the three functions of fantasy were Recovery, Escape, and Consolation, became the foundation stone of modern fantasy theory.

  Following the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien set out to write a sequel; this grew by degrees into The Lord of the Rings, whose three volumes were issued as The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). Its reputation grew slowly until paperback reprints issued in the United States in the mid-1960s became huge best sellers, followed by a British paperback omnibus in 1968.

  Tolkien labored for the rest of his life preparing a version of The Slmaril-lion for publication but was never fully satisfied with it; the posthumous version of 1977 was edited by his son Christopher, who went on to publish numerous spin-off volumes, including Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth (1980) and a set of textual commentaries issued under

  408 • TOMLINSON, THERESA

  the collective title of The History of Middle-Earth, comprising The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983), The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984), The Lays of Bele-riand (1985), The Shaping of Middle-Earth (1986), The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings 1 (1988), The Treason of Isengard: The History of the Lord of the Rings 2 (1989), The War of the Ring: The History of the Lord of the Rings 3 (1990), Sauron Defeated: The History of the Lord of the Rings 4

  (1992), The Later Silmarillion
1: Morgoth’s Ring (1993), The Later Silmarillion 2: The War of the Jewels (1994), and The Peoples of Middle-Earth (1996).

  The other children’s fantasies Tolkien published—all slight by comparison with The Hobbit—are Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Other posthumous publications include The Father Christmas Letters (1976), Poems and Stories (1980), Mr Bliss (1982), and Roverandom (1998). In the meantime, imitations of The Lord of the Rings—imitations that retained the quest element and most of the casual narrative trappings while ignoring its basis in a synthetic English mythos—were published in sufficient profusion in the United States as to constitute the core of a commercial genre. Although the reduction of the archetype to a repeatable formula is undoubtedly a degradation, the influence of the book and its accompanying literary theory is by no means restricted to that process of formularization; the measure of Tolkien’s achievement has been its tremendous inspiration to other writers ambitious to develop the artistry of fantasy literature.

  TOMLINSON, THERESA (1946– ). British writer. A series of timeslip fantasies for young readers dramatizing the effects of the industrial revolution in Yorkshire comprises The Errand Lass, Meet Me by the Steel-men, Night of the Red Devil, and Scavenger Boy (all 2003). The Forestwife Trilogy, transfiguring the legend of Robin Hood, comprises The Forestwife (1995), Child of the May (1998), and The Path of the She-Wolf (2000). The Moon Riders (2003) and The Voyage of the Snake Lady (2004) are concerned with the involvement of amazons in the Trojan war. Blitz Baby (2004) features infectious dreams.

  TOURNIER, MICHEL (1924– ). French writer whose novels usually have marginal but complex elements of fantasy. The novel translated as Friday; or, The Other Island (1967; tr. 1969) is a metafictional/transfiguration of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The Erl King (1970; tr.

  TRAVELER’S TALE • 409

  1972) is an account of a modern ogre’s search for truth in a world seemingly overladen with signs and symbols. Gemini (1975; tr. 1977) is an extrapolation of the doppelgänger motif. The Four Wise Men (1980; 1982) is an elaboration of the account of the magi in the second chapter of the biblical book of Matthew. Gilles & Jeanne (1983; tr. 1987) is a historical fantasy about the relationship between Jeanne d’Arc and Gilles de Rais. Tournier’s short fiction, sampled in The Fetishist (1978; tr. 1983) and The Midnight Love-Feast (1989; tr. 1991), makes more explicit use of fantasy material, establishing him as one of the principal fabulists of the late 20th century.

  TRANSFIGURATION. The routine recycling of folktales and other well-established stories within fantasy literature inevitably gives rise to a measure of transfiguration, whereby such stories gradually mutate and the most successful mutations—in terms of audience appeal—become

  built into future recyclings. It seems probable that the versions of folktales that were first written down were themselves the products of some such selective process, but the historical record tends to preserve all subsequent variants, making far more copies of some than of others. The potential scope of transfigurative exercises was demonstrated at the end of the 19th century by such far-ranging exercises as Jules Laforgue’s Six Moral Tales (1887; tr. 1928), in which erotic fantasies are drawn from myth, legend, and literature in a flamboyantly parodic fashion.

  Fantasy writers routinely recast old stories in order to extract

  presently relevant morals, import presently relevant metaphors, update or culturally revise the settings, demonstrate artistic virtuosity, or simply because they have licence to do it and it saves creative labor. Frequently transfigured stories often give rise to whole subgenres, including such portmanteau subgenres as Arabian fantasy, fairy tales, and classical fantasy, as well as more narrowly defined ones such as Odyssean, Orphean, and Promethean fantasies.

  TRAVELER’S TALE. One of the oldest forms of narrative discourse, ever prone to exaggeration and—especially in its tall story variants—

  fantasization. Journeys, or quests, of discovery that provide a crucial tempering of the mind and spirit are central to hero myths and are often narrated in the form of traveler’s tales. Allegories of maturation presented in this form retain a significant role in modern fantasy literature.

  A key example of the fantasized traveler’s tale is The Voyage

  of St. Brendan (c850), whose Latin original—presumably written in

  410 • TRAVERS, P. L.

  Ireland—was widely translated into French, English, and Welsh as vernacular languages began to spawn natural literatures; it describes a series of marvelous islands culminating in the paradisal Island of Promise and may be regarded as the archetype of the modern tradition of fantastic sea voyages spawned by Rabelais and Swift. Its terrestrial equivalent, The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Maundeville, Kt. (c1355

  in French; tr. 1385), took considerable inspiration from a letter widely circulated between the 12th and 14th centuries, allegedly from a Christian emperor of India named Prester John, inviting the Byzantine emperor Manuel to visit his domain. Descriptions of this fabulous land varied as the letter was copied and transfigured, and the kingdom migrated from Asia to Africa; it may be regarded as an archetype of the moderrn lost-race story.

  TRAVERS, P. L. (1899–1996). Stage name and pseudonym of Australian actress and writer Helen Lyndon Goff. She is best known for a series of children’s fantasies about a magically gifted nanny, initially comprising Mary Poppins (1934), Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935), Mary Poppins Opens the Door (1943), and Mary Poppins in the Park (1952). After several volumes of trivial spin-off, the series resumed with Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane (1982) and Mary Poppins and the House Next Door (1989). Her other works include the historical fantasy Friend Monkey (1971), the recycled materials collected in About the Sleeping Beauty (1975) and Two Pairs of Shoes (1980), and several essays on literary uses of myths and folktales, some of which are assembled in What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story (1989).

  TREMAYNE, PETER (1943– ). Pseudonym of British scholar and writer Peter Beresford Ellis. His nonfiction—issued under his own name—includes a great deal of material about Celtic history and legend, including a Dictionary of Irish Mythology (1987) and A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (1992). His fiction includes horror, medieval mysteries, and sf as well as three prequels to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1977–80) and a sequel to H. Rider Haggard’s She, entitled The Vengeance of She (1978). The trilogy comprising The Fires of Lan-Kern (1980), The Destroyers of Lan-Kern (1982), and The Buccaneers of Lan-Kern (1983) is a Celtic fantasy set in Cornwall, while Ravenmoon (1988, aka Blood-mist) and Island of Shadows (1991) employ an Irish setting. Raven of Destiny (1984) is a historical fantasy set in the 3rd century B.C. His short fantasies are sampled in The Lady of Hy-Brasil (1987).

  UNDERWORLD • 411

  TURGENEV, IVAN (1818–1883). Russian writer. His relevant works are mostly in the borderland between fantasy and horror, often making use of the ambiguity identified by Tzvetan Todorov as the definitive characteristic of the fantastique. The 1864 title piece of Phantoms and Other Stories (1904) is an ambitious, didactic timeslip fantasy. “The Dream” (1877) is a visionary fantasy. “Clara Militch” (1882) is a languidly philosophical ghost story. Some of the poems in prose he published in 1878–82, translated in Dream Tales and Prose Poems (1897), also have fantasy elements.

  TWAIN, MARK (1885–1910). Pseudonym of U.S. writer Samuel Lang-horne Clemens, best known as a humorist. The classic timeslip fantasy A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) examines with a sardonic eye the career of a 20th-century handyman in 6th-century England. The various manuscripts cobbled together by Twain’s literary ex-ecutor as The Mysterious Stranger (1916; restored text as Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, 1969) is an eccentric metaphysical fantasy. Twain’s comic fantasies are mostly satires on religion, including Extracts from Adam’s Diary (1893; book 1901) and Eve’s Diary (1905; book 1906)—assembled with others in The Diar
ies of Adam and Eve (1997)—and the afterlife fantasy Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1907; book 1909). He also wrote some notable tall stories, including “The Canvasser’s Tale” (1876) and “A Horse’s Tale” (1906).

  – U –

  UNDERWORLD. A term that once referred to the world of the dead and is nowadays used metaphorically to refer to the society of professional criminals. It retains its literal implications in fantasy literature, which makes extravagant use of subterranean spaces of various kinds, but associations with death and deviance remain common features of the underworlds of fantasy, as in the subgenre of Orphean fantasy. In works that deal in the dualism of Light and Dark, underworlds belong to the latter side, often constituting havens of primitive ignorance contrasted with enlightened cities that overlie them. The underworlds most likely to escape this kind of stigmatization are those that play host to miniaturized populations like Elisabeth Beresford’s wombles and Mary Norton’s Borrowers.

  412 • UNICORN

  The common use of caves and tunnels as portals in folktales—reflected in such literary works as Lewis Carroll’s first Alice book and Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935)—identifies many secondary worlds as underworlds. Although Faerie was less frequently represented as an underground realm after its Shakespearean makeover, certain fairy races—especially dwarfs—retained their reputation as

  dwellers underground. Underworlds have become markedly more vari-

  ous and more versatile in recent times, as illustrated by the phantasmagoric extrapolations of Michael Shea and such subtly various versions as Gert Hoffman’s “A Conversation about Balzac’s Horse” (1981), James Morrow’s City of Truth, Nick O’Donohoe’s Gnome series, Jessica Rydill’s Children of the Shaman (2001), David Herter’s Evening’s Empire (2002), Suzanne Collins’s Gregor the Overlander (2003), and N.