Fantasy – Definition, History, Characteristics and Meaning

© Frank Weinreich, May 2011

I hear the horns of Elfland every day.

(Lord Dunsany: The King of Elflands Daughter)

Abstract

A short overview of the genre of fantasy literature and art regarding its
development and its relation to reality. Lecture given at the University
of Aachen, May 2011

Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

Fantasy – the genre of unlimited possibilities – in fact is one of the

most successful genres in literature, media and arts in the last 50 years
and we all know what fantasy is – or do we? Well, on closer inspection
and especially seen through scrutinizing academic eyes, we see that it
is not quite as easy to define fantasy as one may think at first glance.
Fantasy – yeah, of course – it is Tolkien and Middle-earth and Hobbits
and Gandalf, it is Harry Potter and Hogwarts and Voldemort. Yes, and
of course dragons and stuff. But what about Bella and Edward? Is that
fantasy? Well, I know people who are quite offended by that idea. And
what about Luke and Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala and Obi
Wan Kenobi? Is that fantasy? No – so people have told me. They told
me: “You could also call James T. Kirk an Elfking or Spock a wizard if
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you say that Star Wars is fantasy. No, that´s Science Fiction”, or so I
was told at least. Okay – but I´d still insist that Star Wars is fantasy
and Star Trek is not. Though you could also make a point in insisting
yourself that what happens at space station DS9 is not SciFi any
longer. So what do we make of all this?

A friend of mine, the highly experienced editor of fantasy literature

Helmut Pesch from the Lübbe Verlag, Cologne, argues convincingly
that there is no such thing as a fixed canon of genres in literature
(personal communication). We still need genres when discussing art
and literature, he´d go on, but we have to face the fact that they do not
possess fixed boundaries and instead are floating corpuses which tend
to mingle not only at the edges. Genres exist within boundaries which
they try to break free from, because that is what the creative process of
writers and artists is about: breaking free and building something new.
So what makes you think that you are able to constrain works of
creative thinking within well defined spaces? Forget about that.

But this does not mean that genre is not a useful term to think about.
There is no such thing as a discussion about art and literature which is
able to abstain from classifying their topics. So go ahead and classify,
define, build genres. You should only keep in mind that the terms are
a bit fluid and that one time or another you will have to repeat and
perhaps re-evaluate your understanding of genres and their
boundaries.

Having said this, I hope it seems to still make sense to have invited me
to give a talk about the genre of fantasy literature and, to a lesser
extent, about its kin in the department of fantastic literature and art,
such as for example science fiction, fairy tale, horror, myth and legend.

I would like to proceed as follows. First I will give a definition of

fantasy, then I will briefly sketch the history of fantasy literature and
art. In this step I will give a very few and very short examples of
outstanding works of fantasy. Outstanding not necessarily because of
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their artistic quality, but because of the impact they have had.

Please let me apologize in advance for not mentioning your favourite

authors, directors, movies and books – this is a totally subjective
choice and you can easily exemplify what I will point out in the
following with most works of fantasy, just as you see fit.

What I do want to come to after talking about the history of fantasy

are the potential functions fantasy may fulfil for its audiences. For
many people fantasy is not just entertainment, but runs deeper, and I
will talk about that in the third section of my talk before concluding
with an observation about fantasy and fantastic literature and art as a
whole: the fantastic is not fantastic.

Before I begin with the definition, please allow me one word about my
somewhat annoying habit of talking all the time about fantasy
literature and art. I think it is important to thus emphasize that I do
not talk about just books, but about all artistic media the fantastic can
appear in. What I say applies to books just as well as it applies to
movies, and computer games, pen and paper role playing games or
live re-enactments. And it also applies to music, pictures and
sculpture.

But now let´s get down to work. What is this thing called fantasy? A
very early attempt to characterize fantasy from Everett Frances Bleiler
in 1948 (Checklist, 3) states that “Fantasy may be almost all things to
all men”, and Helmut Pesch, in a canonical dissertation on fantasy in
1982 (Fantasy, Kap. 1), reiterates that there is no such thing as a
widely agreed upon definition of fantasy. There are many more
attempts in literature to avoid the definition problem with
observations of this kind. They still do not seem very helpful, though.
Although I said at the beginning that genre definitions and boundaries
are fluid and need to incorporate a certain kind of flexibility, it would
nonetheless be nice to do better than just saying that fantasy are the
books which the bookseller places in the shelf that is labelled fantasy.
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And, of course, there are definitions around out there in secondary
literature, earlier mentioned concerns notwithstanding. But most of
those do not cover the whole terrain of fantasy. Fantasy tells chivalric
tales as well as talking about demons in post-apocalyptic settings or
taking us on voyages imaginaires into brains of otherdimensional
beings. Fantasy tells of books coming to life and depicts the wizard
living next door. So the definition has to cover all this ground and
more, and most definitions do not succeed in accomplishing this.
Darko Suvin published a study on science fiction in 1979 (Suvin
Poetik, 42) in which he called the fantastic as a whole “metaphysical
literature”, and I thought that this was the track on which fantasy as a
specific sub-genre of the fantastic might be found. Science Fiction can
be metaphysical literature, but it must not and for the most part is not
metaphysical. But Fantasy … that´s quite another thing.

By metaphysical literature Suvin refers to literature and art that deals

with or depicts supernatural phenomena, things, beings, actions which
are not compatible with natural laws. Orwell's 1984 in its time was
science fiction of course, but there is nothing supernatural about it, as
modern public relation campaigns prove. But dragons and wizards
and sparkling vampires are supernatural things and wars in heaven or
hell are supernatural events, and these are exactly the things which
inhabit fantasy stories. They inhabit fantasy to an extent which marks
the occurrence of supernatural content as the defining attribute of the
genre. Fantasy is a story, movie, game or piece of art, which
incorporates supernatural phenomena as an important part of its
content, which can assume different roles, but without which it would
not function.

This is one half of the definition of fantasy. Please let me dwell one
moment on a particular aspect before I introduce the second part of
the definition. I said the supernatural is to be found in the content of
the art in discussion. That´s an important point, since this means that
the definition is dependent on an act of interpretation regarding what
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is told or shown in fantasy. There are other approaches of scientific
analysis, especially in literature, and if you take one of those paths, the
definition of fantasy as I have given it does not make sense anymore.

One approach is the structuralist approach with which you are to

some extent familiar, I assume. Structuralist theories have proven
especially fruitful in researching fantastic literature which fantasy, of
course, is part of. Russian structuralists and their predecessors have
analysed fantastic literature since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Then, in 1970, Tzvetan Todorov published his Introduction á
la literature fantastique, the most influential work on fantastic
literature, which just recently has been significantly augmented by two
studies by Uwe Durst, Theorie der phantastischen Literatur and Das
begrenzte Wunderbare. Durst and Todorov define and analyse
fantastic literature by looking for certain defining traits within the
structure of the texts. They do not look at its content. One time Uwe
Durst told me that basically he is just not interested in the content of a
story, only in its structure and the way it is composed. When working
with a piece of art in the structural way of thinking you still have to do
some interpretation, but to a much lesser extent than if you try to
show in an objective way what the text actually is about. Using the
structuralist way of analysis, you get harder data. Todorov
characterizes his approach as an analysis of the structure of the text
which scrutinizes its “poetics” and terms the analysis of the content of
a text as the “interpretation” of its “meaning” (141), which of course is
always wide open to discussion.

What I do when I work on a piece of fantasy is the interpretation of its

meaning, as disregarded by Todorov and Durst as soft data with little
or no objective value. But I think it is nonetheless the only way to
reach the core of fantasy and what fantasy is about. And it is in fact the
approach which the vast majority of researchers in fantastic literature
have chosen, because fantasy is about meaning and not much more.
People enjoy and consume fantasy less because of some traits of its
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structure than because of its contents. People long for the thrill of
supernatural horror, they search for the beauty of invented fairy
worlds and they want to witness epic struggles of good against evil
which extend beyond the physical world into the realms of gods,
demons and magic. Whatever fantasy may do with its audiences, it
does it because it tells stories in which the supernatural is an essential
thing, and so you have to take the interpretational path in approaching
fantasy if you want to get to know what fantasy does. As a result of this
approach, you may gain not much more than a “fuzzy set” of
descriptions with the wondrous at the core of a given story, as Brian
Attebery has pointed out (“defined not by the boundaries but by a
center”; Attebery 12), but that can be enough to get hold of the genre.

And in fact it is not as arbitrary to interpret the contents of a fantasy

story or movie as Todorov or Durst seem to believe. Actually, we do
know a lot of things in our time and we especially can be quite certain
about what the supernatural is and what it is not. We do know that
biology and the physics of flight make it impossible for the classical
dragon to exist, even though Anne McCaffrey in Dragonflight tries to
give a scientific explanation (Dragonflight, by the way, is science
fiction, not fantasy, and with regard to the explanation of men-
carrying lizards it is not very good science fiction). We do know that
magic is not going to work in reality, though what magic is may be the
topic of discussion as Arthur C. Clarke has observed so brilliantly. We
do know that no fairies appear in the real afternoon sun of our world
to grant wishes, regardless of how great one's need of them may be. As
always, there are some things and topics at the limits of reality and
imagination, which may be hard to pin down on either side, but in
general it is very easy to discern whether a story talks about things
supernatural or whether it does not.

Whether or not it is possible to discern this on the other hand depends

on the level of knowledge the audiences possess. Therefore what is
fantasy at one time may not be regarded as fantasy in another time.
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Take for example every hard core space flight novel from the twentieth
century and tell it to people from before the time Copernicus had
published the Commentariolus. Before then, people were convinced of
the truth of the geocentric world view and a story in which a space
ship takes off from a planet orbiting its sun would be a story set in an
absolutely weird and twisted universe, probably of satanic origin and
thus fantasy of the most despicable kind. What fantasy is may thus
shift in hindsight, but for most sorts of analysis and research you have
to take into account what author and audiences knew when a story or
piece of art was conceived, and then it is comparatively easy to discern
whether or not a given thing is fantasy or not.

With regard to the second half of the definition of fantasy, which I

have not given so far, it is also crucial to know what levels of
knowledge the authors and audiences possess. It is important since
there is something like ‘true fantasy’ – in a certain sense. By true
fantasy I mean myth and mythological beliefs in times gone by and
faith back then as well as today.

Myth back then was believed to tell true stories, faith today expresses
beliefs about certain supernatural things and circumstances. Religious
and mythological assumptions are not compatible with the scientific
and empirical world view in the same way as the matter of fantasy
stories is not compatible with it. As well as myths once did, faith today
claims that its legends, parables and the history it tells about are true;
that they did and do happen exactly as they are told. The decisive
point with fantasy is that fantasy does not claim its stories are true.
Fantasy stories necessarily are fiction. Good fantasy does have a claim
of utter sincerity and tells coherent stories which take their
mythopoeic endeavours seriously. There is truth in fantasy, but it lies
within the stories. With reference to the real world we live in, its
contents are fiction.

And so we can expand our definition of fantasy as follows: First:

Fantasy is a story, movie, game or piece of art which incorporates
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supernatural phenoma as an important part of its content which can
assume different roles but without which it would not function. Second:
Fantasy is fiction.

With regard to the history of the genre, about which I would like to
talk now, one can say that fantasy is the progeny of myth. Myth in
ancient times was a means to explain the world as a whole. And
myth´s task also was to console and cheer people in the face of the
dramatic tides of fate, which man could not comprehend in the way
we do today: famine, war, plague, injustice, natural disasters as well as
more pleasant incidents like a plentiful harvest, health and numerous
offspring. But myth was also entertaining. From the beginning, myths
also were good stories, which made for a good time at the campfires in
the stone age, on the agorae of ancient Greece, the forums of the
Roman Empire and in front of the fireplaces of medieval castles. It is
my belief that the folk that listened eagerly to the myths of ancient
times did so not only for their spiritual and educational value but also
because they liked a good story the same way we do today; and myths
regularly are good stories which tell of those things which move
mankind most effectively. There are only so many gripping topics –
love, hate, betrayal, courage, sacrifice, greed, altruism – and myths tell
them all. And they tell them on a scale larger than life, which makes
for an astounded and fascinated audience back than as well as today.

So in a way fantasy begins in the caves and at the camp fires of the
stone age, but only in the sense of being the progeny of the myths told
then. Fantasy is not myth because no spiritual effects are intended and
an educational moment might be intended, but it is by no means a
defining or necessary characteristic as it was in myth. Fantasy is myth
no one believes in. Though one might say it is myth no one should
believe in, because time and again I do experience fans who seem to
forget that fantasy is fiction.

But fantasy is fiction and this also distinguishes it from one of its
direct predecessors, the gothic novel, which very much likes to play
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with the ontological status of the occurrences it reports. Fantasy in its
beginnings abstained from playing with reality, instead it invented
whole different worlds of magic and weirdness, which stated
unmistakably that they lead beyond the borders of reality. Which
fantasy´s most influential cousin in the realm of the fantastic, the
genre of science fiction, deliberately does not. Its other direct
predecessor is romanticism, which instead shares the supernatural
topics of fantasy. Romantic authors most of the time were in search of
the supernatural and the enigmatic, but they searched for it in our
world. The best expression of this attitude is to be found in a saying of
Novalis, when he claimed: “Indem ich dem Gemeinen einen hohen
Sinn, dem Gewöhnlichen ein geheimnisvolles Ansehen, dem
Bekannten die Würde des Unbekannten, dem Endlichen einen
unendlichen Schein gebe, so romantisiere ich es” (Novalis II, 334).
Fantasy instead invents its own worlds, fantasy is an act of sub-
creation as J.R.R. Tolkien put it in 1937, when fantasy thanks to
Tolkien himself began to outgrow its first clothes.

At the beginning of the genre fantasy George Macdonald and William

Morris have to be mentioned, who wrote the first full-scale fantasy
books in the second half of the of the nineteenth century. Especially
Morris with The Well at the World´s End (1970; first ed. 1896) and
The Wood Beyond the Worlds (1992; first ed. 1894) “shows already
many characteristics that have come to be permanently identified with
fantasy” (Mathews 2002, 38) – a medieval setting, magic, a quest and
supernatural influences. Today McDonald and Morris are mostly
forgotten insofar as fantasy is concerned, in other aspects both are still
influential thinkers, especially Morris who was a noted artist, architect
and political reformer besides his work as a writer. And the fantasy of
both writers is not very noteworthy, since it did little else other than be
the first of their kind.

The first really great work of fantasy, which captures the probably
strongest effect of fantasy literature, is Lord Dunsany´s masterpiece
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The King of Elfland´s Daughter from 1924, still one of the best books
of fantastic literature ever written. And the effect I am talking about is
the power of enchantment. J.R.R. Tolkien who, besides being the most
influential fantasy author with his Lord of the Rings, also was one of its
most important theorists, called enchantment the crucial and most
noble function of fantasy. And indeed, besides certain aspects I will
dwell upon later, this is probably the most attractive thing about
fantasy: it tells about wondrous and magical worlds and events and
thereby enchants its audiences for the duration of their stay in the
books or the films or the games. Enchantment is what Novalis in the
quote above described as mysterious appearance, as the unknown, and
as infinity.

And that is exactly what The King of Elfland´s Daughter is about.

Elfland as story is a visit to this otherworld, which carries the reader
into this unknown which reveals itself as a most beautiful albeit
perilous realm. It tells the story of a young prince of our real world
who enters fairyland, wins an elfish woman for a wife, brings her into
our world and has to discover that despite love and care neither can
live in the world of the other one. Elfland and reality are incompatible
and it turns out that this is the great tragedy of both worlds. Dunsany
finds that the project of romanticism has failed and that this failure
dooms man to a world so poor that it is nearly unbearable. The King of
Elfland´s Daughter was written after World War I, in which Dunsany
served as officer in the infantry. In my opinion the book has to be
counted among the great works inspired by the Great War, like for
example T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. As a side remark let me point out,
that The King of Elfland´s Daughter is written in a thoroughly poetic
language of unsurpassed beauty, which alone makes it a worthwhile
reading, at least as long as you read the original book.

There are other examples of fantasy from the time after the Great War,
even very distinguished ones like The Worm Ouroboros by E.R.
Eddison or the really fantastic, weird and disturbing Voyage to
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Arcturus by David Lindsay. Both had a strong impact on the genre at a
later point. But with regard to the timeline of fantasy what came next,
was the development in the USA in the Twenties and Thirties of the
Twentieth Century.

This was the time of pulp magazines and with them came the Golden
Age of Science Fiction. But it was not only about SciFi in those days, in
fantasy also some remarkable authors made their appearance. The
most popular of those were Howard P. Lovecraft and Robert E.
Howard.

While it is not quite clear if Lovecraft and his Cthulhu-Myths are

fantasy, especially regarding the given definition, Lovecraft´s works
still contributed greatly to the genre. There are no overt metaphysics
in Lovecraft. Instead he mostly tried to give at least pseudo-scientific
explanations for the strange things and beings he invented. But the
powers and powerful beings of his myth contradicted even the
scientific knowledge of his time and his work is often described as
supernatural horror. It can be said that Lovecraft at least ventured on
the borders of fantasy. On these borders he created his own, very dark
and disturbing kind of enchantment, but an enchantment nonetheless.
This inspired a whole branch of fantasy literature (August Derleth,
Clive Barker, H.R. Giger, Wolfgang Hohlbein), which makes up an
important part of dark fantasy, although Lovecraft was not the first
author in this territory. Lovecraft for example was inspired by Clark
Ashton Smith, a British author of dark fantasy (the Zothique series),
who began his work a decade earlier than Lovecraft (though later on,
Lovecraft inspired Smith).

Robert Howard´s heroes constitute a fine and underestimated piece of

fantasy, especially his most successful protagonist, Conan, the
Barbarian. Howard had a very brief time to write his stories since he
committed suicide at the age of 30. And this short time was
overshadowed by personal and countrywide economic disasters
during the Great Depression in the Thirties. Patrice Louinet remarks:
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“The biggest part of Howard´s work can be understood as variations
on the topic ‘barbarism versus civilization’, and Howard definitely
stood on the side of the barbarians” (Louinet 19, my translation).
Howard´s heroes face treacherous and sinister adversaries which
impersonate civilization, and they rely only on their personal strength
of mind and body in these struggles. Howard´s heroes take their lives
in their own hands relying on no other thing than themselves – that
was something which the thousands of people in the unemployment
lines of the early Thirties might very well have dreamed of.

This aspect is an important point one finds throughout all of fantasy:

struggle as a very personal issue. All of fantasy is characterized by
personal struggles. In Howard it is epitomized as physical prowess,
which overcomes the machinations and plots of tyrants and sorcerers,
which rely on soldiers or the summoning of armies of the dead to do
their work for them, but not on their very own personal strength.

The topic of struggle as personal issue can be found everywhere in

fantasy. Whether it is Frodo´s fight against the power of the Ring or
Harry Potter versus Voldemort – the depicted conflicts are always a
test of the strength of the protagonist. And although the protagonist
might be a sorcerer with deadly fire bolts at hand or a warrior wielding
a sword with supernatural power – the power of the bolts and the
power of the sword usually are determined by the power of the
wielder. It is a topic known from saga: the sword was plainly there,
embedded in the stone, but only Arthur had the strength to acquire it.

Not all of fantastic literature works like this, although saga, legend and
fairy tale certainly do, but these are very close to fantasy, anyway.
Horror on the other hand usually plays with the breakdown of
personal strengths and beliefs. And Science Fiction with regard to
conflict is a kind of an antagonist to fantasy, at least the philosophical
and political works of SciFi. In SciFi conflict more often appears as a
struggle between the individual and circumstance or it discusses the
competition of concepts and ideas.
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SciFi therefore has the means to criticise certain socio-political
developments, as for example Jewgenij Zamjatin did in We, as George
Orwell did in 1984 or Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. SciFi also is
a great testing field of sociological, technological and political ideas.
Nowadays discussions in bioethics seldom forego the chance to
explain their arguments by revealing scenarios taken from SciFi and
with their aid showing which turns developments might take. Fantasy
can do this also, and SciFi can also focus on the individual and their
strengths and needs and fears. But typically fantasy focuses on the
individual and explores his behaviour. This dates back to the Greek
philosopher Plato, who told fantasy stories in order to explain his
system of ethics. It also was the Greeks who coined the motto which
might as well stand above fantasy literature in general: Gnothi
seauton. That means “know thyself”, and indeed fantasy explores the
self of man by putting him in existential situations which threaten not
only his life and that of his beloved ones and his people, but also his
immortal soul which, in contrast to reality, in fantasy can be presented
as a matter of fact.

The importance of the individual and his or her struggles are of course
an observation which is true for many genres, and so it would make a
poor criterion for the definition of fantasy. But it is an aspect which
explains some of the appeal fantasy holds for its audiences. Modern
life is just not a life where personal strength of mind and will makes a
difference, since we experience that impersonal powers in unknown
offices filled with faceless bureaucrats are the driving forces behind
everyone´s daily lives. The reality of modern life is much more akin to
SciFi dystopias than to fantasy. So diving into a preindustrial world
and witnessing examples of personal bravery make for a fine
entertainment or even a good role model. Especially when it is made
up so touchingly and offers scope for identification like Frodo´s
struggle with the Ring. Frodo is the embodiment of common man,
which makes the key difference. It is no wonder that since then, Frodo
has lived through a thousand incarnations such as Pug the Magician,
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Shea Ohmsford, Eragon and other folks like those.

Frodo was a Hobbit, and Hobbits are people that possess an inner
strength that their author, J.R.R. Tolkien wished his fellow man to
have, and which he saw in some people, especially during World War
I. While Conan had just conquered his world in grand style, Tolkien
in 1937 invented these small heroes, which in effect turned out to be
the most attractive heroes in all fantasy. But it was not until a few years
following the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 that fantasy
grew into the successful genre it is today. And this overall success
depended to a great extent on the single success of LotR.

The Lord of the Rings is the epitome of fantasy literature and some
people said that after the Ring you could only write fantasy like
Tolkien or deliberately not like Tolkien. This is due to a variety of
facts. The first thing is that Tolkien created a world of great depth,
which appears both credible and desirable. Two years ago I undertook
a content analysis of LotR and found that 34 % of the text consist of
mere descriptions, which do nothing to drive on the plot. The second
point is an optimal balance between familiarity and enchantment in
Middle-earth. The world Tolkien created is very similar to our world
but still has enough components of Elfland in it to provide the
fascination which makes the reader enter it as far as possible. The
third point is the epic structure of the plot, which derives from the
millennia old corpus of sagas, which has captured man's imagination
at all times. This Tolkien combines with modern aspects like the
crucial role of common man and the importance of friendship and
cooperation throughout the story. This appeals to our modern
understanding of individuality and society and thus facilitates
identification and compassion with people and events. The fifth point,
and this is not necessarily the end of the list of important reasons for
the success of LotR, the fifth point is the timelessness of greater as well
as minor topics the story tells of. By that for example I think of the
struggle of good versus evil, which Tolkien does not talk about in plain
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pictures of black and white. I think of the ethics as are expressed in the
behaviour of Gandalf, Denethor, Saruman, Frodo and Gollum. I think
of the wider scope he provides in the background material as
published in the Silmarillion or in the more or less 6,000 pages of the
Complete History of Middle-earth. There for example immortality is
made a topic, as well as art and creativity discussed. And one must not
forget that Tolkien wrote about writing and the creative act in an
enlightening way, which inspired a host of authors to try their luck in
the sub-creative process, though this is beyond the narrower reasons
for the success of LotR. All in all, Tolkien´s writings are a rich trove to
dig in, and this Professor from Oxford University definitely is the one
who had the single greatest impact on fantasy art.

This, by the way, was not known as fantasy in the times of Tolkien´s
writing. In the Sixties of the last century Lin Carter published a series
of books under the title of “adult fantasy” and it was not before then
that the genre received its name (Weinreich 63). Up till then some
good fantasy was written independently from Tolkien. Some is still in
print, like for example Fritz Leiber´s stories about Fafhrd and the Grey
Mouser. Or the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, which is
absolutely not mainstream fantasy and definitely hard to understand.
But most fantasy from 1965 on had a Tolkienian flavour for the next
thirty years. In 1965 LotR became a roaring success in the USA
because of an unauthorized publication by ACE Books and its
aftermath. After that it spread throughout the world and became the
bestselling work of fiction of all times. And many authors followed in
that wake.

Most of those were entertainment only, and some of them were good
entertainment. But the most remarkable works of fantasy after Tolkien
had little to do with his style of High Fantasy. Despite a permeating
sense of melancholy, Tolkien´s work at the core is an optimistic one.
Tolkien himself once wrote that fantasy mirrors the great Christian
story of creation and salvation and thus has to have a happy ending as
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had the arrival of Christ, albeit possibly accompanied by tragic events
(cf. On Fairy Stories). But there is true tragedy in fantasy and those
usually are more noteworthy than the common happy-go-lucky-
hack´n-slash as is found in John Norman, Alan Burt Akers (or Simon
Green, to name a boring example from Urban Fantasy). Michael
Moorcock´s novels about Elric of Melniboné come to mind for
example. Elric is a weakling, a drug addict and still wants to change
the world he lives in for the better. But all his endeavours result in
tragic losses and unintended betrayals, and in the end he destroys the
world. Or try your hand at Stephen R. Donaldson´s Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, whose hero is a leper and a rapist,
who most of the time is trying to flee his vocation though the world is
doomed when he abandons his role. Both series by the way have found
an audience: Donaldson sold more than 10 million copies of his books
on Thomas Covenant and Moorcock also sold millions of Elric-novels.

Moorcock's original Elric-series was written between 1961 and 1972,

Donaldson´s first two Chronicles were written between 1977 and 1983.
Since then the genre has become much more diverse and it even is
hard to keep track of all sub-genres that have been spawned, let alone
read only a tenth of it. And it is not only books I am talking about.

Movies like Clash of the Titans or Krull have contributed to the history
of fantasy. Admittedly these movies have not been a great source of
growing diversity in the genre, but that is easy to explain. Where it is
mandatory to take up a couple million dollars to produce a film,
producers are not very likely to try out their luck with lepers and drug
addicts as the main hero. But fantasy has benefited from movies
enormously with regard to publicity and public attention. Though I
have had a lot of discussion about it, Star Wars in my opinion is
crystal clear and unpolluted fantasy, not science fiction. And thus the
six movies, and the first three from the Seventies and Eighties much
more than the second trilogy, had a great impact on the genre.
Millions of people learned for the first time how fascinating fantasy
16
can be while they were following Master Yoda, Luke, Han Solo and the
ways of the evil Emperor. While LotR was still somewhat intellectual
and very, very thoughtful at times, Star Wars was popcorn and party
and fun. And it was a revolutionary experience from a technical point
of view, a movie like no one ever seen before, comparable to Avatar
nowadays, which by the way carries its own share of fantasy elements.
The public awareness Star Wars had found was accomplished
regarding LotR not before Peter Jackson brought out the movies in
2000, and those do differ in comparison to the book in many ways.

The next big thing in fantasy was of course Harry Potter. And this is
because it takes up all the topics which fantasy makes so appealing:
magic, mystery, heroism, love, and friendship on the first level and the
topic of the struggling individual which has to rely on nothing but its
inner strength on the level underneath. Harry versus Voldemort is an
archetypical fight, which gains even more relevance for the audiences
when in the later books it becomes clear that Voldemort is not only an
epitome of evil but also a human with very human motivations.
Joanne K. Rowling wraps up all this in a gripping story and puts that
story in a language and a setting which especially young people are
familiar with and which concerns them. And even old people like
myself enjoy the really intelligent and enthralling structure of the plot,
at least along the line of the first five books.

The books by Joanne K. Rowling and the movies by Peter Jackson are
two important pillars on which fantasy today stands, and from which
derive most successful works within the genre. There are
independently successful works like Stephanie Meyers's Twilight
stories, which led to the current wave of former horror protagonists
like werewolves, vampires and so on, but it might be too early to
estimate their impact on the fantasy genre. For now I am tempted to
say that at least Meyers will make no lasting impression on the genre
since her books are really not about the supernatural and the fantastic

17
but naïve love-stories in fantastic disguise.1 The only positive effect
Meyers´s work has on fantasy is that their success led to the
rediscovery of mature fantasy writers like Tanya Huff, who invented
excellent vampire stories, which came to broader attention only after
the hype around Twilight.

But there is another important pillar on which the genre stands, and
by that I mean the whole universe of fantasy games and whatever is
connected to them. Mainly this kind of fantasy consists of pen & paper
as well as live action role playing games (LARPs) and of computer
games, beginning with Richard Garriot´s Ultima series in the Eighties
and leading to the massive multiple online role playing games
(MMORPGs) of today like World of Warcraft and its rivals.

Gaming in fantasy worlds is usually the reenactment of comparatively

simple or even primitive fantasy plots, but the quality of the stories is
the least important point. What gaming is about is the activity of
formerly purely receptive audiences, which not only let themselves be
enchanted by fantastic worlds and events, but which also play an
active part in these and let the audiences become directors and
storytellers in their own right. The latter point might not be true for
computer games, in which players follow a line of given scripts which
in turn trigger certain events with little or no degree of freedom to
imprint their own ideas on the story and the fantastic world. But it is
absolutely true for pen & paper and live role playing games, in which
the given script of the game master is always changed in unforeseeable
ways by the characters in the game. The players contribute their own
ideas, traits, and character traits, which, taken all together, allows
every group of players to experience their own story. Even though
bestselling adventure stories may be played thousands of times around
1Cf. Schneidewind: “Weil das eigentlich gar keine Vampire sind. "Twilight" würde genauso gut funktionieren,
wenn man irgendeine andere Art von Fabelwesen genommen hätte - die Eigenschaften der Vampire spielen bei
den Protagonisten keine wesentliche Rolle, das ist nur ein bisschen Szenario außenherum, Staffage. Bei
"Twilight" geht es um Romantik [...] Es geht um ewige Liebe – ob das nun Vampire sind, ist zweitrangig.”; 2011,
http://www.weser-kurier.de/Artikel/Freizeit/TV/Reportage/339466/Der-Vampirologe-Friedhelm-Schneidewind-
beschaeftigt-sich-im-Interview-mit-%22True-Blood%22,-%22Twilight%22-und-Co..html)

18
the world, every single game is unique.

The world of role playing games in turn had an impact on fantasy in

the way that it in part changed the way in which stories are told, but
first and foremost gaming opened up a really big pool of talent, since
in gaming people learn and are encouraged to invent events and whole
stories. My guess is that at least three quarters of all fantasy authors
today are also gamers and most young authors were introduced to
fantasy by gaming. And especially the young authors tend to stay in
close contact with the other gamers, which in fact means that they are
in close contact to their readers. And this kind of contact is no one
way street with admiration being channelled from audience to star,
but a real dialogue in which story-teller and audience interact and
together weave a net of fantasy worlds and stories. The advent of the
Internet and social networks of course facilitated this process
enormously, and a phenomenon like community building was first
and most thoroughly adapted by gamers and fantasy aficionados.

That is where we stand today with fantasy: an enormously successful

genre which is enthusiastically embraced by mostly younger people of,
let´s say, below the age of forty. But why is that so? What is so
attractive about nonsensical worlds and events?

Invented worlds filled with fancy imaginings cannot be anything but

nonsensical, since they so obviously have no relevance to the real
world. „Dragons and Hobbits and little green men – what´s the use of
it?“, asked Ursula Le Guin (43), probably the most thoughtful and
intelligent storyteller alive, in both Science Fiction and fantasy.

Le Guin herself gives more than one answer to that question but on
top of her list is this: “The use of it is to give you pleasure and delight”
(43). So have the critics of fantasy been right? Is it a genre for
entertainment only? (And we all know, the critic might add, that in
entertainment unfathomable shallows are observable.)

19
I think that indeed entertainment is the function of fantasy that is
most sought after. But there are reasons why it is fantasy that is visited
when entertainment is sought. And in these reasons the real appeal of
fantasy and its possible functions are to be found.

In a short but seminal work on fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien gave some really
convincing reasons for the attractiveness of fantasy. In 1937, when he
himself had just finished The Hobbit, he gave the lecture On Fairy
Stories in which he identified fantasy, recovery, consolation and escape
as main functions of fairy stories (which is a term that can loosely be
equated to fantasy as it is understood today).

Fantasy, Tolkien said, is the ability to see the common world anew and
let oneself be enchanted by this uncommon, new way of looking at the
world. Fantasy is a prerequisite of the audience of fantasy. And in fact
fantasy worlds are nothing other than a different perspective on the
real world, and you have to be able to let the fantastic parts of a story
carry you away, else you will not be able to experience it.

The real world is distorted in fantasy, perhaps put together following

newly defined natural laws, and created with very great liberties. But
the authors are humans relying on human experiences when they are
in the process of inventing. So they cannot do anything other than
take the good old real world and make it anew within certain limits.
These limits still grant the freedom to focus on things and perspectives
at the author's will, and if the author has found an attractive
perspective which others want to look at his work is a success. This
new perspective is what Tolkien meant when he mentioned recovery
as a function of fantasy. G. K. Chesterton said: You may look from the
inside of a café upon the door leading to the street. You will see the
word Mooreeffoc printed upon this door, and if you are inclined to do
so, this miniscule distortion may let you see your everyday world anew
and feel recovered.

Consolation is a very special function stemming from Tolkien´s

20
Christian faith. Fantasy, he believed, would always only mimic the one
great fantastic story of mankind´s history: the story of Christ, which
with salvation had a happy ending for all of us. That belief, of course,
would be a great consolation, but there may be a majority of fantasy
audiences which would not follow Tolkien down this path. But
consolation still may be found in other ways in fantasy.

Escape is the big topic of every critic of fantasy. They say fantasy is
escapist literature, which is sought after because of its reality denying
value. There is some truth in this point, because one can use fantasy to
escapist means, especially now where there are whole computer worlds
which one can dive into in a way that lets one neglect one's real world
responsibilities. But the same can be said about almost all other
fiction, and there are much more effective means to escape reality if
you wish to do that. The escapist problem is a problem of the fugitive,
not of the means he or she tries to use for the escape. Tolkien was
aware of this accusation and he took it head on. He compared the
escapism, that fantasy allows for, with the escape of a prisoner who is
unrightfully sentenced to jail (On Fairy Stories 148). Would he not be
expected to try to flee? Fantasy offers an escape from the trite modern
world, but only, one should carefully add, on the basis of a vacation.
We are people of the here and now and have to cope with the real
world. But it is absolutely okay to take a short trip to Middle-earth in
the evening, after the work is done. Providing the means for this trip is
a function of fantasy, most akin, but not similar to its entertainment
value.

Another function which Tolkien did not mention, is the explanatory

or descriptive function fantasy inherited from myth. Myth once was a
way of explaining by story-telling. Myth once explained the world and
the worlds above and beyond the real world. Fantasy does not do that.
It cannot do that, since we know today that the worlds above and
beyond are matters of belief, so there is really not much to explain, but
only to believe in. But fantasy can provide a speculative ground based
21
on metaphors through which one can tell stories about what man
would do if he faced certain situations. The answers authors and
directors give to these what-if-situations may be very enlightening and
I will come to that in a minute in more detail.

If the reasons given above are true for the audiences or at least parts of
them, it is probably the case that every reader, gamer or viewer has
one or more reasons of his own and that it is a very personal bunch of
impressions and uses the individual seeks and finds in fantasy. But
even if the reason for the consumption of or the engagement in
fantasy is just entertainment, it still is a question why of all things
impossible realms and worlds that never can be entered or
experienced are so attractive. Would not something closer to personal
experiences be of much more interest than cloud-cuckoo-land?

Yes, I guess that would be so if fantasy was cloud-cuckoo-land. But in

fact, and this is the last point I want to talk about today, in fact the
fantastic is not fantastic. Science Fiction tells about the not yet
possible, fantasy tells about the totally impossible, but in reality both
genres tell about our real life and the human condition. Again Ursula
le Guin was the one who made the best point of this, when she said:

“[R]ealism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or

portraying the incredible realities of our existence. A scientist who
creates a monster in his laboratory; a librarian in the library of Babel; a
wizard unable to cast a spell; a space ship having trouble in getting to
Alpha Centauri: all these may be precise and profound metaphors of
the human condition. The fantasist, whether he uses the ancient
archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones of science and
technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist–and a good
deal more directly–about human life as it is lived, and as it may be
lived, and as it ought to be lived” (58).

And on another occasion she pointed out:

22
“[T]he work of people from Zamyatin to Lem has shown that when
science fiction uses its limitless range of symbol and metaphor
novelistically, with the subject at the center, it can show us who we are,
and where we are, and what choices face us, with unsurpassed clarity,
and with a great and troubling beauty.” (135).

Le Guin was talking about science fiction in this last quote, but the
same holds true for fantasy. In fact a really “limitless range of symbol
and metaphor” is the domain of fantasy which can tell us about
everything including the supernatural and myth, which is the deepest
trove of metaphors and symbols man has invented. Take for example
the One Ring in Tolkien, which on the one hand lends absolute power
to its bearer and on the other hand tries to subvert the bearer to an evil
end: that is a fantastic metaphor with the subject Frodo as substitute
for humanity at its center. This telling metaphor shows, in a much
more condensed way than history could, the meaning of Lord Acton´s
all too true observation: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely” (Appendix). In Fantasy the jump to supernatural
powers can take pictures and observations to heights that otherwise
could not be achieved. In fantasy eternity itself can be threatened if it
seems necessary to make a certain point. That may seem childish since
reality delivers enough material to explain a circumstance. But man
does not learn on the path of rationality alone. Appealing to emotions
reaches deeper levels. That of course can also be abused, and has been
abused in exploiting fantasy for indoctrination. But that is a point I
will not dwell upon today.

Instead I would like to encourage you to give a little thought to the

peculiar relationship between reality and fiction. You may include all
of fiction, if you like, but think especially about fantastic fiction and
fantasy literature and art. The thoughts of man have always been
drawn to the fantastic. That was no wonder back when the wondrous
was the only means to try to understand what the world and life is
about. But today? Amazingly the fantastic still holds big appeal in a
23
time in which most phenomena in the universe can satisfactorily be
explained by scientific knowledge. Or can they?

No – I do not want to give you mystic thinking. I am not such a

person. In fact I strongly believe in scientific discoveries and the
insurmountable wealth of scientific knowledge. But there are
boundaries in principle to scientific knowledge. Fantasy then can be a
fascinating means to step over these boundaries in a playful way and
thereby discover some important things about human desires and
dreams. By applying “what-if-scenarios”, fantasy also can speculate in
an enlightening ways about human behaviour and ethics. And if you
feel that this is too strong or boring for a little stroll on foreign
borders, then fantasy still is a great entertainer giving you mile high
waterfalls, in front of which the most touching dramas unfold on a
regular basis.

Thank you very much for your attention 

Literature:

Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press. 1992.

Dalberg-Acton, J.E.E. Historical Essays & Studies. Ed. By J.N. Figgs.

London: Macmillan. 1907.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night. Essays on Fantasy and

Science Fiction. Ed. by Susan Wood. New York: Putnam´s sons. 1979.

Mathews, Richard. Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination. New York,

London : Routledge. 2002.

Morris, Williams. The Wood Beyond the Worlds. The Collected Works
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William Morris, Vol. 17. London: Routledge. 1992.

Morris, Williams. The Well at the World's End. 2 Vol. New York:
Ballantines. 1970.

Schneidewind, Friedhelm (Interview). “Sexy Raubtier und

Massenmörder.” Weserkurier 10.3.2011. URL: http://www.weser-
kurier.de/Artikel/Freizeit/TV/Reportage/339466/Der-Vampirologe-
Friedhelm-Schneidewind-beschaeftigt-sich-im-Interview-mit-
%22True-Blood%22,-%22Twilight%22-und-Co..html

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Monster & the Critics and
Other Essays. London: HarperCollins. 1997. 109-161.

Weinreich, Frank. Fantasy. Einführung. Essen: Oldib 2007.

Weinreich, Frank. “Die Phantastik ist nicht phantastisch.” In: L.

Schmeink, H.-H. Müller (Hrsg.) Fremde Welten. Wege und Räume
der Fantastik im 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2012. 19-
35.

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