How to Read Fantasy

To read fantasy is to read literature. Therefore, you read fantasy much the same way you might read any other type of literature. If you have taken previous literature courses (such as ENGL 203, Writing About Literature), then you should be able to discuss character, setting, plot, themes, style, etc. In any case, check out this volume’s sister volume Surface and Subtext to equip yourself with the skill to discuss literature in general. Once you’ve grasped those foundational elements, you will be ready to start learning the specific tropes and conventions of fantasy.

Narrative Structure

One of the most commonly employed narrative structures in fantasy literature is the Hero’s journey. According to Joseph Campbell, the hero’s journey is a monomyth, an archetypal story that serves as the structure for many subsequent stories. Following Campbell, the hero goes through several stages, beginning in the safe and comfortable world before finally answering the call to adventure and crossing the threshold into the world of danger and magic. Along the way, the hero will find special items to aid them on their quest, they will make acquaintances of all kinds who aid or hinder in some way, and every hero must venture to the abyss and confront their true self. After they have self-realized, they will face atonement, before finally returning from the dead—returning from the land of danger to the safe and comfortable realm from which they began. Master of the world of danger, to master the safe and comfortable proves an easy task. Tolkien’s Frodo is an excellent example of the hero’s journey, starting in the Shire, traveling to Mordor, then returning home again.

Though more an aspect of setting than narrative, worldbuilding should be mentioned here for the direct effect it has on the narrative structure of fantasy literature, especially when that fantasy is fully virtual. Consider Tolkien. He begins with a fantasy map, crucial to the reader’s ability to locate themselves in the narrative, but also a literary framework that eases the reader out of reality and primes their imagination to not be shocked by the wonders contained within. This world-building continues as part of the narration, which typically employs some fashion of direct authorial address to the reader. In The Hobbit for example, just after the arresting strangeness of the opening line (“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”), Tolkien goes on to explain to the reader who the hobbits are, what they look like, a few customs, all in just enough detail that the reader begins to grow tired at their recitation. A huge part of this world-building is taken up in fashioning fantasy races, an aspect of fantasy that has made the genre useful for studying questions of the Other, a socio-political concept that refers in part to people and groups who are other to the socio-political totality. In a white supremacist society, Blackness is Othered; in a patriarchal, woman is the Other; in a heteronormative society, homosexuality is othered; and so on.

Conventions

Fantasy relies on a number of strategies to enter the reader into the virtual world with full conviction, but perhaps none is more iconic than the portal. A portal could be a door, as is the case with Michael Ende’s film The Neverending Story (1979), or it could be an old closet, as is the case with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The mechanism never explained, the portal serves to shuttle the hero back and forth to the fantasy world. Some fantasies abandon the portal strategy altogether, instead cultivating a heady dose of arresting strangeness by immersing directly into the fantasy world.

Magic also serves as an important vehicle for arresting strangeness and wonder. In some fantasies, the magic can be highly systematized, just as systematized as a level-based RPG, while in other fantasies, magic is understood as a physical phenomenon, capable of being studied in the same ways as biology, chemistry, or physics. Whatever the presentation, it would be hard to imagine a fantasy world without magic. Magic should not be confused with enchantment, which Tolkien connects to a certain use of language that borders on Elvish craft and generates secondary belief. Magic, conversely, seems to be about power and will.

A few other conventions happen at the stylistic level. Tolkien insisted that a fantasy story must enchant, a semi-magical power that Tolkien gives to words and language. The Elvish craft, an ability with words, is at the heart of an author’s ability to produce believable enchantment, which for Tolkien must reach the stature of secondary belief (full belief in the secondary world of the fantasy). It is not enough to merely suspend disbelief. An author’s ability to master the Elvish craft (or what Ursula K. le Guin calls the Elfland accent), is key to whether the reader believes in that world. At the heart of fantasy is, finally, a certain poetic license. All past stories are free to be re-made in Fantasyland. None are too vulgar, and none are too sacred; all past stories are made equal in the fantasist’s imagination. The author’s skill might very well be judged for its ability to combine and re-make old stories until they are unrecognizable as such. When that happens, the author has truly broken with all known referent and entered the vast virtual realm of the untethered imagination.

Themes

Many fantasy works are allegorical in nature, representing deeper moral or political ideas. For example, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings embodies what might be called an “Arthurian-Toryism,” a union between artisan-craftsmans and landed gentry on one side and the nobility on the other regulated by mythos built around “the return of the king”^[1]. Think here, the relationship between Frodo and Aragorn, or Bilbo and Thorin  Fantasy literature seems ideally suited to the creation of a world that confirms the author’s beliefs, though clearly the fictionalization of those beliefs appeals to enough people that it truly is a form of myth-making. But unlike old national and religious myths, fantasy provides a way for authors to create quite private, individual myths, myths as divorced from the old stories as Fantasyland is divorced from reality.

Myth-making more than adequately describes the Tolkienian tradition of fantasy literature, but the Tolkienian tradition is not the only tradition. There is also the “Anti-Tolkien” tradition (see figure x.x above to refresh your memory). Instead of producing secondary belief in the fantasy world, many fantasy works in this vein employ estrangement as a literary technique that relies on a sense of otherness and disrupts the enchantment of the reader. To learn more about estrangement, see the “Theoretical Terrain” in Chapter 2 on Science fiction.

The estrangements of fantasy are of a different type than the estrangements of science fiction. Where science fiction ostensibly relies on known material reality as a baseline (it does not usually question the ontological basis of reality itself), fantasy breaks with that reality. As such, the only baseline is the imagination of the author. While such self-generated fantasies do often tend towards confirming the beliefs of the author in fictional form, fantasy has still proven a powerful tool for exploring the Other. This theme and others like it are often explored through the construction of fantasy races.

Theoretical Terrain

One of the foundational works of fantasy criticism is Brian Attebery’s Strategies of Fantasy. In this section, we will review the basic parameters through which he views fantasy literature. In short, he narrows down his description of the genre to three main features: content, structure, and reader response. After reviewing these three concepts and how Attebery uses them, this section will end with a short discussion of the “anti-Tolkien” tradition, which he seems to mostly ignore in favor of a platonic ideal—Tolkien.

When discussing content, Attebery argues that the most basic, common aspect of fantasy is the violation of what the author knows to be reality. Though Attebery comes dangerously close to conflating the fantastic with fantasy, he does go on to state that fantasy “demands a sharper break with reality.” As discussed above, some fantasy texts start from a baseline reality, but others break with it so sharply that we must question what role that baseline reality plays in the fantasy world. Take The Hobbit. Before you start even reading, you are given a map that automatically pulls you away from your own reality. This map does not seem impossible in the same way that a wizard performing magic seems impossible; after all, how do we know the shape of geographic reality if not through maps? Because of the map, the locus shifts—even before the reader has begun to read—from impossibility to immersion.

The structure of fantasy literature is, following Attebery, essentially comedic. This comedic structure is tied to the eucatastrophic endings of fantasy literature—an overall happy ending that ushers catastrophic changes to the status quo (Frodo succeeds in defeating Sauron, but Elves must leave Middle-Earth forever). In short, if we follow the plot of the comedic structure, “It begins with a problem and ends with a resolution.” This resolution is not always an entirely happy one, but it is responsible for generating feelings of joy, consolation, and recovery, the seeing of things as we first saw them. Finally, a new order is established, this being the pinnacle of the comedic structure. How would you interpret a work of fantasy literature that did not end in the establishment of a new social order? How would such a work challenge Attberry’s interpretation?

Finally Attebery considers the reader-response, quite simply the reader’s intellectual and affective responses to the text. Central in these affective responses is recovery, which relies on a sense of wonder that restores familiar objects, “to the vividness with which we first saw them.” The feeling of wonder that creates this sense of recovery relies on the Romantic notion of the sublime, a sense of awe and wonder. Attebery also asserts that estrangement is simply an alternative formulation of the sublime; like recovery, its opposite, estrangement begins with the trembling holy fear of the sublime.