Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  Fantasy, in short, is fiction acknowledged by reader and writer to contain “impossible” elements that are accepted as possible in the story and treated in an internally consistent manner. This description is clearly very inclusive, and would result in a large number of works being classified as fantasy. But some of these works would be more typically fantasy than others. Brian Attebery introduces the idea of seeing genres as “fuzzy sets,” a “cloud” of works defined by a number of central “prototypes” with which they have some qualities in common (although no qualities are necessarily shared by the entire set). The closer to the center of the cloud, the greater the similarity to the prototypes. The fuzzy edges shade into other genres, explaining why certain works are difficult to place generically, as well as why some works are unarguably fantasy while others only vaguely suggest belonging to the genre.28 Attebery maintains that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is one of the prototypes of the fantasy genre, and identifies in it three features that “have become dominant in modern fantasy”: a concern with the impossible; a comic structure, which begins with a problem and ends with a resolution; and the process that Tolkien calls “recovery,” whereby the familiar is restored to “the vividness with which we first saw [it].”29

  I would like to add a fourth feature that can be found in all manners of literature but is particularly common and noticeable in fantasy stories: the widespread reliance on material ladled from what Tolkien calls the “Cauldron of Story.”30 He employs this metaphor to show that even though it may be fascinating to examine a tale’s source materials, it is of greater interest to consider the story as it is served. Fairy stories, he asserts, are not the result of myths dwindling into epics, which then dwindle into folktales, but are the outcome of various ingredients having boiled together in the Cauldron. Over time, and as new bits are added to the pot, the various flavors combine, until it makes little sense to try to determine how each contributed to the final tale. One example would be Arthur, who, Tolkien explains, simmered in the Cauldron “for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faërie, and even some other stray bones of history […] until he emerged as a King of Faërie.”31 Tolkien also notes how the author or teller of a story—the Cook—chooses carefully among the many ingredients in the Cauldron of Story,32 and even though Tolkien’s focus is not explicitly on fantasy literature at this point, I would claim that fantasy writers in particular rely on material from the Cauldron. As a rule, they are also quite frank about using such material, selecting from old myths, legends, and tales in the Cauldron, as well as from more recent material, adding their individual spices to the mix. Typically, many ingredients have been boiled down beyond recognition while others have retained some distinct characteristics. Stories of varying degrees of antiquity are used and reused;33 magical creatures appear, altered yet recognizable, so that, for instance, dragons can enter a story in shapes either mighty or meek, taking the part of protagonist, antagonist, or both—but, nevertheless, clearly related to the wyrm in Beowulf or to St. George’s adversary;34 and, as the following chapters point out, settings are borrowed and adapted from numerous places. Tolkien himself picked medieval tales and characters from the Cauldron and served us Merlin and Arthur as Gandalf and Aragorn. Other writers ladle up bits from Shakespeare or Dante, from Eastern myths or Celtic fairy tales, and from urban legends or medieval romances.35 Fantasy is a genre where old tales, motifs, and characters are brought to life again, in ways that make them relevant to their contemporary readers.

  The texts that provide examples for the following chapters are mostly located close to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in the fuzzy set of the fantasy genre. They do display some structural differences, however, and Mendlesohn proposes a subdivision of the genre into four (equally fuzzy) categories. She bases her divisions on how the fantastic is introduced into the story, observing how, in (successful) fantasy stories, the manner in which a story is told depends on which category it belongs to.36 The portal–quest fantasy introduces the point-of-view character into a fantasy world, either from a version of our own world (through, for instance, a wardrobe) or from a place in the fantasy world that, like the reader’s world, is “small, safe, and understood”37 (such as the noneventful, comprehensible Shire). The story is told from this point of origin, and the reader learns about the alien world along with the main character(s). In immersive fantasy, the characters, unlike the reader, are at home in the strange world, and the world is described as if totally familiar; the reader has to puzzle out how it works from the clues that are given. Intrusive fantasy is set in a world (often our own) into which the fantastic intrudes, causing chaos and confusion. Neither protagonist nor reader is familiar with the fantastic intrusion, and the story is a process of coming to terms with it. The ghost story is a typical intrusion fantasy. In the final category, liminal fantasy, the reader’s expectations are used to create worlds where the commonplace comes across as strange and wonderful, and the alien is portrayed with an everyday triteness bordering on the blasé. These fantasies are stories in which stylistic manipulation is central to the experience of the fantastic.38

  These four categories, although helpful in understanding and discussing some basic structures of fantasy stories, do not provide a set of hard and fast rules to which all works in the genre adhere; nor do they offer a comprehensive description of fantasy literature. They are, in themselves, fuzzy sets, each with its own prototypes, and it is quite possible for a work to slip from one category to another, or to combine categories.39 Mendlesohn observes how intrusions can occur in immersive fantasies, for example, as in the case of the murderous slake moths in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000).40 So whereas Mendlesohn’s categories and Attebery’s fuzzy-set perspective offer ways in which the fantasy genre can be understood, neither critic claims to have established the nature of fantasy once and for all. Even so, both viewpoints have proved useful in circumventing problems caused by genre definitions that are either too inclusive or too exclusive, and in avoiding the patchwork of subgenres that have arisen from a profusion of categorizing principles,41 and they have come to inform my own view of the genre. Furthermore, Attebery’s singling out of Tolkien as a genre prototype was one of the reasons for the inclusion of The Lord of the Rings as a recurrent example in this book.

  Any starting date given for a genre will be largely arbitrary, and critics have made a number of suggestions depending on their respective definitions of what fantasy is. On the whole, the closer a fantasy definition lies to what in this book is referred to as the fantastic, the farther back in time the starting point is set, in extreme cases as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh of some three millennia ago. It is more common, however, to set the emergence of the fantasy genre to sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, often with the insistence that an awareness of some literature as fantastic requires the awareness of other literature as “realistic.”42 Rather than trying to identify the decade, year, or work that constitutes the beginning of the genre, I prefer to regard the emergence of fantasy as a fuzzy process, where various authors and movements contributed to what would eventually become the genre of today.43

  Regardless of when fantasy may be said to have emerged as a genre, there is a general consensus about the enormous influence that The Lord of the Rings has had on today’s fantasy literature. Elgin, for instance, claims that the novel “introduced fantasy to the general public,”44 and according to Wolfe, fantasy did not develop a market identity in America until after the U.S. paperback editions of Tolkien’s work appeared in 1965.45 Much as Attebery sees Tolkien’s work as a prototype for the fuzzy set of fantasy, Wolfe refers to Tolkien as the genre’s “central ideological lynchpin,” suggesting that “the dialectic of the […] genre” defines itself by recapitulating or reacting against his worldview.46

  Although critics may disagree about why Tolkien’s magnum opus should be considered pivotal to the development of fantasy literature, they agree tha
t the publication of The Lord of the Rings changed the genre dramatically. My own view is that although fantasy works had been written for one or even two centuries previously, depending on how one chooses to define the genre, the publication of Tolkien’s novel marked the beginning of seeing fantasy as a genre, and its influence has shaped modern fantasy and reader expectations alike. That influence and the fact that most people who pick up this book will be familiar with The Lord of the Rings are two further reasons why the novel is discussed throughout the following chapters. Fantasy is an enormous field, with no definitive canon. In selecting my examples, I have tried to draw on widely read authors; but even so, I realize that few of my readers will have read every work discussed here. By including Tolkien’s novel, I can be reasonably certain that everyone is acquainted with at least one of the example texts.

  Some terms used in the following chapters concern the construction of fantasy worlds on a very basic level. In fact, the most basic of these terms is world, by which I mean a universe or space in which all positions are, at least in theory, accessible to a person (fictive or otherwise) by means of (nonmagical) travel: by foot, boat, or spaceship, travelers should be able to make their way from one place to another even if it would take them millennia or more. In “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien introduces the concept secondary world to designate the literary creation of a story maker. It is a world that the reader’s mind can enter, a world of internal consistency. To Tolkien, any setting for a story constituted a secondary world. The primary world was the world of the reader and writer, the “real” world.47 As Wolfe observes, however, secondary world has come to mean fantasy worlds that are different from our own,48 and a story is even sometimes said to be set in the primary world. Brian Stableford tries to circumvent this problem by talking about settings as “simulacra of the primary world,”49 but the term is somewhat unwieldy.

  To avoid confusion between a literary setting and the world around us, I will borrow a term from possible-worlds semantics and refer to, on the one hand, the actual world (the world inhabited by the reader and the writer50) and, on the other, the primary world. The latter is a literary construct whose setting imitates, on a general level if not in every detail, the actual world. The primary world thus contains the main social, geographical, and historical features of the actual world, although its population, and laws of nature, might differ.51 James Bond, no matter how fantastic his adventures, lives in a primary world, as do Molly Bloom and Jonathan Harker. By contrast, secondary worlds provide homes for Frodo Baggins as well as Aslan the Lion and Taran the Assistant Pig-keeper. It should be noted that though a given work can contain any number of secondary worlds, it can contain only one primary world, and no work of fiction is set in the actual world. Also, sometimes a tenuous connection (spatial and/or temporal) is suggested between the fantasy setting and the primary world. The connection could be expressed as a formulaic expression (“Once upon a time” implies such a vague connection, for instance), or it is implied or explained in the text how the story is set in the far future or the distant past. Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series and Terry Brooks’s Shannara books are examples of the former, The Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories of the latter. Such distant settings, not clearly recognizable as a specific place and time from the actual world, Zahorski and Boyer call “remote secondary worlds,”52 and although there is no need for the subclassification here, I similarly refer to these worlds as secondary. Furthermore, Zahorski and Boyer suggest a main division of fantasy according to setting; what they call low fantasy has a primary-world setting whereas high fantasy is set mainly in a secondary world.53 These terms are also used in this book.

  Worlds can be divided into separate domains. Lubomír Doležel explains how what he calls “dyadic worlds” are fictional worlds divided into two domains “in which contrary modal conditions reign.”54 Depending on modality, the domains differ in terms of, for instance, contradictory value systems, knowledge, or natural or social laws. Nancy H. Traill uses the concept of dyadic worlds to discuss the fantastic, dividing fantastic worlds into natural and supernatural domains.55 However, Traill defines natural as having “the same natural laws as does the actual world,”56 which leaves her with a “fantasy mode” consisting of a supernatural domain only. I find that even fantasy worlds—in particular secondary ones—can consist of more than one domain, but that the dividing line between the domains does not necessarily run along what accords with the laws of nature in the actual world. Rather than attempt to come up with a blanket term for domains, relevant names for the worlds in question are employed here, such as the land of the living and the land of the dead, Faerie and mundanity, or Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom. Geographically divided domains will be the topic for chapter 3, the domains of nature and culture that of chapter 4, and the domains of myth and mundanity make an appearance in chapter 5.

  Finally, it should be mentioned that words like realm, land, and landscape are used only in a nonspecific sense. Although The Encyclopedia of Fantasy uses land with the restricted meaning of “a secondary-world venue whose nature and fate are central to the plot,”57 I use the word in its general meaning. Similarly, a realm is quite simply an area (often a country) ruled by someone or something, and a landscape is taken quite broadly to mean “the shape of the land.”

  Each chapter in this book applies its own viewpoint, focusing on different types of divisions on various levels within a setting. The general progress is from large scale to small, beginning with fantasy maps, moving on to divisions between geographical domains, then looking at the interrelation of two domains in an urban setting, and ending with the link between land and people. The four main chapters are written to work independently of one another, however, and can be read in any order. Together, they offer a way in which to understand fantasy literature from a topofocal perspective and demonstrate how readings of fantasy settings can contribute to our understanding of the genre in general, as well as of particular fantasy works.

  The map is one of humankind’s oldest methods of dividing our physical environment into ours and theirs, safe and perilous, known and unknown, and any number of other categories. The fantasy map, while able to express the categorization of actual maps, also brings up questions about other divisions, such as those between presentation and representation, text and image, and fact and fiction. The fantasy map is a work of fiction, as is the text it accompanies; it is often taken to be a hallmark of fantasy and one of the genre’s most distinctive characteristics. Chapter 2 presents what previous research there is into fantasy maps and briefly discusses how to regard maps that are not representations of actual places. A survey of the maps found in a random sample of two hundred fantasy novels is then presented, followed by a reading of two maps from The Lord of the Rings. The results of the survey are discussed in terms of what is characteristic of a fantasy map, but the text also pays attention to less frequent features, with special focus on what these features can tell us about the worlds they portray. The readings of the Tolkien maps discuss what assumptions and unspoken values become evident from the (relative) location, presentation, and absence of various map features. These findings are also related to the Tolkien text as a whole.

  Chapter 3 deals with divisions that are possible in a fantasy world but do not occur in the actual world. These divisions are discussed in terms of borders, which separate two domains from each other, and boundaries, which circumscribe a domain—I decided to pay special attention to the domains known as polders, whose rules are such that the surrounding world would destroy them if the boundary were ever breached. Borders divide life and death in two of Steven Brust’s Dragaera novels (Taltos 1988, The Paths of the Dead 2002); mundanity and Faerie in Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s Stardust (1997–98); and the domains of magic and technology in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix (1995–2003). The polders examined are Tolkien’s Lothlórien, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984–2009), and Terry Pratchett’s Djelibeybi (in
Pyramids 1989). Many fantasy plots are constructed around the crossing of such dividing lines; but a particular characteristic of boundaries is that they connect geography with history, and they are components that help construct a world that extends in time as well as in space.

  Western civilization has long divided the world into nature and culture, tending to consider the latter superior to the former. Fantasy worlds are not bound by divisions that spring from a Western worldview, however. Chapter 4 examines how the relation between nature and culture is expressed in four fantasy cities: Tolkien’s Minas Tirith, Charles de Lint’s Newford (novels and short fiction 1988–2006), Miéville’s New Crobuzon (mainly Perdido Street Station 2000 and Iron Council 2004), and Patricia McKillip’s Ombria (Ombria in Shadow 2002). A city provides the most obvious interface between nature and culture; on a very basic level, the nature outside meets the culture within at the city wall. In most cities, the meeting between the two domains is not that simple, with nature and culture interrelating in a variety of ways. In a fictive city, these interrelations are not restricted to what can be found in the actual world; in such places, nature can relate to culture in ways limited only by the author’s imagination. The four cities display quite varied relations between the two domains; but in each case, the manner in which the relation is portrayed can be linked to central concerns in the stories.

  The final chapter deals with the question of how the division between people and their environment, which we perceive in the actual world, is bridged in fantasy stories. The focus in chapter 5 is on the way in which ruler and realm are directly linked to each other in much fantasy. After providing an overview of how rulers and realms may be associated, in different ways and to varying degrees, I discuss how the direct link between the sovereign and the fertility of the land, embodied in the Fisher King figure, is put to use in Tim Powers’s Last Call (1992). Then I turn to Lisa Goldstein’s Tourists (1989), in which the struggle for control expresses itself as palimpsests in a city’s topology, the signs of one ruler overwriting the signs of another. The final section of the chapter examines the landscapes associated with Dark Lords, including a brief historical background to the predominant imagery of these places of evil. Sauron and Mordor (Tolkien), Lord Foul and Foul’s Creche (Stephen R. Donaldson: The Power That Preserves 1977), and Shai’tan and the Blight (Robert Jordan: The Eye of the World 1990) provide the main examples. The section demonstrates how superficial similarities may be misleading when examining the manner in which a land functions, and how a reading of a landscape of evil may promote an understanding of the nature of evil in the work.