Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

  3. John Clute, “Notes on the Geography of Bad Art in Fantasy,” Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2011), 111–12.

  4. Don D. Elgin, The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985).

  5. Ibid., 180.

  6. Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer, “The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy,” The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

  7. Many of these studies are presented in more detail in chapter 2.

  8. The most thorough of such Tolkien studies is Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans, Ents, Elves, and Eriador (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). For a truly excellent reading of a natural environment, see Verlyn Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth,” J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).

  9. Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ Footprints’,” 154.

  10. “With the setting in focus,” compare matrifocal, “based or centred on the mother”; see “matrifocal, adj.,” OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press). Schlobin uses Bachelard’s term topoanalysis for a focus on setting (Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ Footprints’,” 155, citing Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1994], 8). Bachelard’s term is closely tied to psychoanalysis, however, and thus implies an almost exclusive focus on the relation between place and personal subject.

  11. It should perhaps also be mentioned that however interesting a diachronic examination may be, such an examination is—regrettably—beyond the scope of this book.

  12. For a wide range of opinions on how to define or describe ecocriticism, see the position papers on the topic at the website of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE): Michael P. Branch and Sean O’Grady, eds., Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice, ASLE, 1994, http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/.

  13. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

  14. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii–xix.

  15. Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine,” The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000).

  16. Ibid., 160.

  17. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998); Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  18. Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 38–40.

  19. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xiii. Not all critics agree that the debate over definitions is laid to rest, however; see, for instance, A.-P. Canavan, “Calling a Sword a Sword,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (May 2012): 1; and Marek Oziewicz, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), ch. 1.

  20. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984), 21. Note that Hume uses the word fantasy for what is here called the fantastic. Other critics who use the fantastic in a similar sense include W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 8, and Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3 ff., esp. 11–12; and it is this broad definition that is referred to as “a general term for all forms of human expression that are not realistic” by Gary Westfahl, “Fantastic,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Rabkin’s definition, although related to the one just given, is stricter: to him, “the fantastic” is a “diametric reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world”; see Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 28–29. Also note that Todorov sees the fantastic completely differently, defining it as a hesitation about whether occurrences have a natural or supernatural explanation; see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33. Todorov’s term, while of interest when discussing a certain body of work, has no bearing on the discussions in this book.

  21. Wolfe refers to this as perhaps “the most frequently cited defining characteristic of fantasy” and notes that the term is problematic in its imprecision (Wolfe, Critical Terms, 57; see also 38). For examples of scholars who have used impossible in their definitions, see Irwin, Game, 9; Attebery, Strategies, 14; Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 2; Colin N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 10, and John Clute, “Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 338.

  22. Shippey, while accepting “known to be impossible” as a rule of thumb for identifying fantasy and its precursors, problematizes the concept, noting that views on what is impossible change over time and from person to person. He concedes, however, that regardless of cultural context, “the unseen or the non-material always remains in a separate category from the everyday”; see Tom Shippey, introduction to The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, ed. Tom Shippey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), x.

  23. Even a hybrid such as science fantasy may exist, although it could be argued that adding something impossible to science fiction would turn it into fantasy. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Changing Kingdoms: A Talk for the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 17–21, 1993,” Trajectories of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Michael A. Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) for a discussion of this topic.

  24. Irwin describes how “writer and reader knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness” to “make nonfact appear as fact” (Irwin, Game, 9). Whether dream stories can be thought of as fantasy generally depends on whether the dream is taken seriously or whether it is used, as Tolkien suggests, as a device to discount the fantastic: J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” The Tolkien Reader (1947; orig. lecture 1938; New York: Ballantine, 1966), 13–14.

  25. Obviously, individual readers could happen to believe fiction to be true; if they believe a fantasy work to be true, however, they do so despite the way it is presented, not because of it.

  26. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37. He emphasizes that he is discussing the instilling of belief, not “willing suspension of disbelief,” which he believes to be something more passive; cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7:2 (1815; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 397–98 [ch. 14].

  27. Irwin, Game, 9. Tolkien also stresses the rationality of the fantasy world, going as far as to say that “[t]he keener and the clearer the reason, the better fantasy it will make” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 54); and Elgin mentions how the reality of a “parallel world” is “drawn from its own internal consistency” (Elgin, Comedy, 180).

  28. Attebery, Strategies, 12–14. He draws on cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson’s use of fuzzy sets and prototypes to discuss categorization; see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 122–24. It is worth noting that in order to make Lakoff and Johnson’s categories work as literary genres, Attebery adapts them by combining the fuzzy-sets idea with prototypes, by adding a spatial dimension to the fuzzy-set metaphor, and by suggesting that genres can have (a number of) individual works as prot
otypes. For an overview of Lakoff’s view of categories, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2.

  29. Attebery, Strategies, 14–16; cf. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 57.

  30. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 26 ff., 19–20, 23.

  31. Ibid., 28–29.

  32. Ibid., 30.

  33. For example: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand (1986) portrays the Trojan War from Cassandra’s point of view; Neil Gaiman offers the Queen’s perspective of Snow White in “Snow, Glass, Apples” (1995); in Robert Holdstock’s Celtica (2001), a young Merlin joins Jason and the Argo for the Celtic tribes’ invasion of the Balkans; in Caliban’s Hour (1994), by Tad Williams, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is revisited; and Lisa Goldstein has Doctor John Dee help Rabbi Judah Loew fashion a golem in The Alchemist’s Door (2002).

  34. Examples of these respective dragon varieties can be found in, for instance, Erik Granström’s Svavelvinter (Brimstone Winter; 2004), Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (2007), Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (1976), Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), and the Dragonlance Chronicles (1984–85), by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

  35. Many writers appear to have misunderstood the Cauldron of Story and have tried to use someone else’s—frequently Tolkien’s—recipe, only adding the literary equivalent of a sprig of parsley, generally with scant success.

  36. The categories are thoroughly presented and discussed in Mendlesohn, Rhetorics.

  37. Ibid., 2.

  38. Ibid., 182; see also earlier discussions of liminal fantasy in Farah Mendlesohn, “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13, no. 2 (2002); Farah Mendlesohn, “Conjunctions 39 and Liminal Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 15, no. 3 (2005). The outline here only hints at the complexities of liminal fantasy, given that this category has no bearing on the discussions in this book, but interested readers are encouraged to refer to Mendlesohn’s book for a more exhaustive description.

  39. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xv–xvii; for a discussion of texts that exist simultaneously in several categories, see ch. 5 of Mendlesohn’s work.

  40. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 114. It could even be argued that the episodes narrated by Yagharek, the stranger who has journeyed to the city on a mission of his own, are brief instances of a portal–quest voice.

  41. John Clute and John Grant, eds., The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), contains some forty types of fantasy, labeled according to, e.g., setting, plot structure, origin of source material, handling of source material, portrayal of magic, type of protagonist, age of (intended) reader, and story themes.

  42. See, e.g., John Clute, “Taproot Texts,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 921; Attebery, Fantasy Tradition, 5–9; Wolfe, Critical Terms, xviii; John-Henri Holmberg, Fantasy: Fantasylitteraturens historia, motiv och författare [The history, motifs, and authors of fantasy literature] ([Viken, Sweden]: Replik, 1995), 14; and Mathews, Fantasy, 2–3. Although he does not call attention to this fact, the earliest “modern fantasy” work Manlove discusses is George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858); see Manlove, Modern Fantasy.

  43. In-depth discussions of some of the genre’s historical development can be found in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and detailed accounts of the evolution of fantasy literature can be found in, e.g., Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), and Attebery, Fantasy Tradition. For briefer overviews, see, e.g., Shippey, introduction to Fantasy Stories, and Mathews, Fantasy, 5–20.

  44. Elgin, Comedy, 31.

  45. Gary K. Wolfe, “Evaporating Genres,” Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 24, 30. He acknowledges the existence of previous fantasy literature, though, in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (1923–54 and later revivals) and Unknown (1939–43), digests such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949–current), and the books of individual writers.

  46. Wolfe, “Evaporating,” 24.

  47. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37 et passim.

  48. Wolfe, Critical Terms, 115.

  49. Brian Stableford, “The Discovery of Secondary Worlds: Notes on the Aesthetics & Methodology of Heterocosmic Creativity,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (August 2004): 6.

  50. As employed by philosophers such as David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology, eds. Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes (1978; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); and in applications to literature, see, e.g., Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2 ff.; Nancy H. Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 8–9.

  51. For a more in-depth discussion of how the actual world relates to its fictional counterpart(s), see Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 2.

  52. Zahorski and Boyer, “Secondary Worlds,” 58–63.

  53. Ibid., “Secondary Worlds,” 56. The authors make clear that high and low are not to be taken as evaluative terms. Alternative terms, e.g. indigenous fantasy (Attebery, Strategies, 129), have been suggested but are not as frequently employed.

  54. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 128.

  55. Traill, Possible Worlds, ch. 1.

  56. Ibid., 8, citing Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Its Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 6.

  57. Clute, “Land.”

  2. MAPS

  1. Elizabeth M. Ingram, “Maps as Readers’ Aids: Maps and Plans in Geneva Bibles,” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 44.

  2. Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, eds. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 261–62.

  3. See, e.g., Padrón, “Mapping,” 265–66.

  4. In a piece from 1981, Walker claims that the interest in fantasy maps engendered by the Middle-earth maps has meant that “a map has become almost de rigeur [sic] in new and reprinted fantasy” (R. C. Walker, “The Cartography of Fantasy,” Mythlore 7, no. 4 [1981]: 37). A quarter of a century later, Padrón expresses the same opinion: the influence of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis has made maps “standard fixtures of the genre” (Padrón, “Mapping,” 272). Kaveney concurs that “[i]n imitation [of Tolkien], almost all modern genre fantasies come equipped with a map, to the extent that maps are only much noticed when absent” (Roz Kaveney, “Maps,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 624.)

  5. Kaveney, “Maps,” 624.

  6. J. B. Post, An Atlas of Fantasy (1973; New York: Ballantine, 1979).

  7. Diane Duane, “Cartography for Other Worlds: A Short Look at a Neglected Subject,” SFWA Bulletin 11, no. 5 (1976).

  8. Lee N. Falconer, A Gazet[t]eer of the Hyborian World of Conan, Including Also the World of Kull, and an Ethnogeographical Dictionary of Principal Peoples of the Era, with Reference to the Starmont Map of the Hyborian World (West Linn, OR: Starmont House, 1977), vii–xiii.

  9. Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (New York: Firebird-Penguin, 2006), [x].

  10. Frank W. Day, “The Role and Purpose of the Map in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature” (M.A. thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1979), 3.

  11. Clare Ranson, “Cartography in Children’s Literature,” Sustaining the Vision: Selected Papers from the Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship (Worcester, UK: International Association of School Librarianship, 1996), 166.

  12. Ranson, “Cartography,” 165.
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  13. Walker, “Cartography,” 37.

  14. Such as the additional maps that have been created for The Lord of the Rings; see Karen Wynn Fonstad, “Writing ‘TO’ the Map,” Tolkien Studies 3 (2006).

  15. Peter Hunt, “Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1987): 11.

  16. Ibid., 11.

  17. Ibid., 13.

  18. Myles Balfe, “Incredible Geographies? Orientalism and Genre Fantasy,” Social and Cultural Geography 5, no. 1 (2004): 82–83.

  19. Pierre Jourde, Géographies imaginaires de quelques inventeurs de mondes au XXe siècle: Gracq, Borges, Michaux, Tolkien [Imaginary geographies by some twentieth century inventors of worlds: Gracq, Borges, Michaux, Tolkien] (Paris: José Corti, 1991), 113–32.

  20. Ibid., 126–27.

  21. Ibid., 131.

  22. See, e.g., Jourde, Géographies imaginaires, 125, in which the gulf of Lhûn’s shape is simplified to look more like a ship—which better fits the author’s argument. Jourde also makes too much of the linguistic similarity between Lhûn/Lune and “la lune” (128–29).

  23. Deirdre F. Baker, “What We Found on Our Journey through Fantasy Land,” Children’s Literature in Education 37 (2006): 239.

  24. Ibid., 240.

  25. Ibid., 242.

  26. Padrón, “Mapping,” 276, 279.

  27. See, for instance, Padrón, “Mapping,” 272–74. Calling Sauron an evil wizard and referring to the “folksy names” of the Shire (275) also detract from the force of his argument by suggesting that he is either not completely familiar with the text or prone to oversimplification.

  28. Padrón, “Mapping,” 286.

  29. Nicholas Tam, “Here Be Cartographers: Reading the Fantasy Map,” Nick’s Café Canadien (blog), April 18, 2011, http://www.nicholastam.ca/2011/04/18/here-be-cartographers-reading-the-fantasy-map/.

  30. International Cartographic Association, “ICA Mission,” last modified March 18, 2012, http://icaci.org/mission.