Modes of Fantasy

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Today’s academic papers were very interesting. I don’t want to go into every paper in detail here as it would bore most of you. However, I do want to highlight a couple of ideas that came out of the discussion on Jyrki Korpua’s paper on Tolkien.

Firstly we are all used to thinking of The Lord of the Rings as the archetypal secondary world fantasy. However, Adam pointed out that one of the functions of the hobbits in the story is to stand in for the modern, middle class novel reader who can then visit the far stranger medieval and Anglo-Saxon worlds of Gondor and Rohan. When Tolkien tries to do without our hobbit intermediaries, such as in The Silmarillion, we find his books much less accessible. This makes LotR much more of a portal fantasy.

We also discussed the whole idea of the novel as the story of a character’s life journey, the Bildungsroman, and how this is actually a Renaissance invention that was possible only when people abandoned the medieval world view of an unchanging society and started to see the world as something that could and should be changed.