fantasy fiction

fantasy fiction, Since the middle of the 20th cent. fantasy fiction has become one of the most productive and commercially successful of literary genres in English but its origins go much further back. Literature containing elements of the fantastic includes such works as Beowulf, with its fire-spewing dragon and man-eating ogres, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its enchantresses and shape-shifting giant, or Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, with their respective complements of enchanted swords, elvish knights, fairies, and wizards.

Literature of the fantastic should, however, be distinguished from fantasy fiction, a genre in some respects decisively modern. Readers and writers in a period dominated by science and by a rationalistic world-view face problems in entertaining such concepts as those listed above, now generally thought to be impossible or non-existent. The problems were until recently increased by the low rating given to fantasy and the fantastic by practitioners of the realistic novel.

Major writers within this marginal/non-adult mode include George Macdonald and Lewis Carroll (see Dodgson). Fantasy fiction, however, began to win a kind of autonomy as early 20th-cent. authors ceased to try to locate elements of the fantastic within the real world, and followed the late romances of W. Morris in creating frankly imaginary otherworlds as locations for their narratives. A major lead was given by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, whose volumes of short stories began with The Gods of Pegana (1905), but whose most influential novel, The King of Elfland's Daughter, did not appear until 1924. The location of Dunsany's fictions is characteristically unstated. They could be set on earth in the far and forgotten past, in the far and unknown future, in some simply unknown country, or on the borders of Elfland or Faerie. The essence of fantasy fiction is liberation from the constraints of what is known, coupled with a plausible and persuasive inner coherence.

Fantasy fiction continued to be developed by writers such as E. R. Eddison (1882–1945), whose most popular work has remained The Worm Ourobouros (1922), a tale of war between Demonland and Witchland; or Peake, whose Gormenghast trilogy is set for the most part within the politics and rituals of a single gigantic castle. Both these writers were isolated figures. Fantasy fiction began to create a readership for itself with the appearance of collective schools of writers supporting regular publication in (usually) monthly magazines in the USA.

The first of these was the group centred on Weird Tales, a magazine which began publication in May 1923, and included the work, primarily, of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who pioneered the tale which exploits an imaginary mythology; Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), who created a series of imaginary lands in far past or far future, including Atlantis, Hyperborea, and Zothique; and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), whose work had the most influence on the future, through his creation of the character Conan the Barbarian, and his image of violent prehistoric civilizations in which warriors are pitted against wizards and magicians. The sub-genre of ‘sword and sorcery’ has remained prolific ever since, the best of its practitioners including Fritz Leiber (1910–92), with his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series begun in 1939; Jack Vance (1916– ), whose The Dying Earth (1950) borrows its far future setting from Smith; John Brunner (1934–95), Larry Niven (1938– ), and Michael Shea (1946– ), authors respectively of The Traveller in Black (1971), The Magic Goes Away (1978), and Nifft the Lean (1982).

The other major early fantasy magazine was Unknown, which lasted for only 39 issues (1939–43). Unknown took up the challenge of relating fantasy to the real world of logic and science, its authors typically working from the premiss that magic could have been developed into a controllable technology and used in parallel with, or totally replacing, conventional science, in some imagined parallel universe. ‘Worlds where magic works’ were created in Unknown by Robert Heinlein (1907–88), and in the Incomplete Enchanter series of L. Sprague de Camp (1907– ) and Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956), in which modern scientists find themselves able to move into the worlds of Norse, Finnish, or Irish mythology, or the romance settings of Spenser or Ariosto. The Unknown tradition has been continued since by such authors as Poul Anderson (1926– ) and Randall Garrett (1927–87). It is notable that all these authors have also been prominent in science fiction.

The greatest influence within the fantasy genre has been Tolkien. His first published fantasy, The Hobbit (1937), was written for children, but its three-volume successor, The Lord of the Rings (1954–5), caught the attention of a mass adult readership and inspired generations of imitators. Tolkien used his scholarly knowledge of Old English and Old Norse to recreate the world of Germanic folk tale, with its dwarves, elves, trolls, barrow-wights, and wizards, as a consistent and coherent whole. To this he added creatures of his own invention, such as hobbits, ents, and wraiths, a complete mythology, chronology, and cartography, and a compelling plot centred on the fear and rejection of power and the Ring.

Among the most significant of Tolkien's followers are Stephen Donaldson (1947– ), whose seven-volume Chronicles of Thomas Covenant sequence, begun in 1977, develops the ecological motif already strong in Tolkien; David Eddings (1931– ), with the Belgariad, Malloreon, and Elenium sequences begun in 1982, 1987, and 1989 respectively; and Michael Scott Rohan (1951– ), with his Winter of the World trilogy (1986–8).

Three other trends within fantasy fiction deserve mention. One is the continuing production of high-quality ‘children's literature’, or writing for young adults, such as the four-volume Wizard of Earthsea sequence (1968–90) by U. Le Guin. A second is the revival, often by feminist authors such as A. Carter, of the ancestral form of the fairy tale. The third is the continuing ability of fantasy writers to write comically, now best exemplified by the Discworld books of Terry Pratchett (1948– ). The first volume in this sequence, The Colour of Magic (1983), relied on overt parody of Leiber, Lovecraft, and others, with Howard and Tolkien not far away, but the series has gone on to create a world of its own.

Reasons for the popular appeal of fantasy fiction no doubt include discontent with the mundanity of everyday life in consumer societies, openly voiced in Le Guin's The Beginning Place (1980), and the associated yearning for more natural and colourful environments, as for instance in the Mythago Wood sequence of Robert Holdstock (1948– ). Fantasy has dealt with questions of the utmost contemporary importance, such as the nature and origins of evil. T. H. White declared that the theme of his Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, mainly written between 1938 and 1941, was to find ‘an antidote to war’. Fantasy fiction has shown itself capable of dealing with topics which seem outside the range of the traditional realist novel, and speaks for and to a contemporary mass audience whose taste it has itself created.