[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Uh, well, I'm Caroline Harrington, and along with Stuart, we've been responsible for. Conceptualising this event. But it has to be said, most of the hard work has been done by other people, including our assistants over here and Kate Forbes, who you will have met on the front desk. So we're absolutely delighted to see you all here.
We wonder what kind of dropout rate we might find, but it looks if everybody who signed up to come has actually turned up, which is a great delight and perhaps even unprecedented. So welcome to the first Bloomsbury Publishing Oxford Summer School of Fantasy. And we very much hope this is going to be an opportunity to explore, to discuss, to anticipate and to imagine fantasy of very many kinds. A few details to start off with.
We have to thank Bloomsbury, of course, and we'll be thanking them lavishly during the course of the next couple of days. Um, we have to thank the English faculty who have afforded a great deal of help in organising, and Exeter College itself, which is, of course, our hosts in this wonderful building. There isn't a published programme for you all to have a copy of to save paper. Will no one think of the trees?
We decided, but they've all QR codes on the wall and there are programmes pasted up in different places so you can remind yourself of what's going on. And now a bit of housekeeping. So all of the talks will be in here. Um, the catering is outside. You've probably already spotted the coffee being set up for after the first session.
We have two fire exits, one through that door which you came in, um, one through this door, which seems to have, um, various constraints about being able to use it to do anything other than run for your lives. The toilets are just outside and to the right there's toilets of various kinds. And I can already sense from looking at the demographic of this room, that there will be plenty of time for the gentlemen to make use of their facilities, and the ladies will be queuing down the hall.
But there is another gender neutral set of toilets just beyond where the catering is. And that's if you go past the catering and as if you're going back to the front door, that's also a possibility. All the talks are going to be recorded and most of them are being live streamed. So this means that if you ask a question for the people in the hall, um, the question will all be recorded as well. But you can see from the setup of the camera that nobody is going to film the audience.
The cameras are trained on the speakers and for the people who are with us online, a very special welcome to you in your different time zones. Um, we hope that you will be able to get as much as possible out of the experience. Not quite the same as being in the room with us here in Oxford, but you too have the opportunity to put questions and you can put them in the chat, and our chat monitors will find some questions to, um, bring up at the end. So we have, um.
We have a mixture of formats here. We have some longer lectures with time for questions. Um, hopefully time to get a little bit of discussion going. And then we have some shorter ten minute presentations just to introduce some topics that you might not have thought about. And there there's going to be less time for questions. Um, but hopefully we'll get a couple in.
And for people who are in person here, of course, there's the opportunity to grab speakers at the meal breaks and and ask them further questions. The organisation of our three days is quite simple its past, present and future. And so today we're mostly looking at the history of fantasy up into the 20th century.
Tomorrow we'll be looking at fantasy in the present, and we've got a very special afternoon planned with our friends in Bloomsbury who are going to be talking about the state of fantasy in publishing today, and, of course, presenting some of their authors to talk to you about their own experiences with the genre. On Thursday, our final day. We're looking at the future of fantasy.
And that means that we're going to have a different set of of, um, perhaps most speculative lectures talking about where fantasy might be going. Why Oxford and why fantasy? And it's important, I think, to note before I wrap up here, that Oxford. Has a claim to be the home of fantasy. It's woven into the history of Oxford, and I'm going to be talking a bit more about this tomorrow. It's the place, perhaps, where modern fantasy began. Arguably 150 years ago with Alice in Wonderland.
And it's a place where research, study, writing and thinking about fantasy continues in the university. But as we'll also see, the streets of Oxford are thronged with people who are using. Oxford as part of the stimulus to their own imaginations, and we'll see a little bit how far Oxford has fed into the imagining of various fantasy writers, even some who've never been to Oxford, who didn't study here or teach here. Somehow Oxford has got into the genre at a very fundamental level.
So at this point, I think it probably remains for me to welcome you all once again, um, to remind you that we're all here to enjoy ourselves, to learn about fantasy, to think about fantasy and discuss our own ideas. And that means being respectful of other people's views as well. So I hope this is going to be a very friendly, very collegial atmosphere here. And nobody is going to get into enormous fights about whether something is fantasy or not.
And for this kind of definition, this is not the atmosphere that we're looking for. And so with that, I will bid you all welcome once again. Um, if there are any questions, there will be a roving mic. I don't imagine that there are any questions, particularly at this point. Um, but if you do have a question, do raise your hand. In which case going slightly early, which is always a good thing when it comes to timekeeping.
I'd like to welcome our first speaker, who is Professor Adam Roberts, who is going to be who doesn't have any slides so we don't have to put those up. Um, and who has a roving mic and we will open the floor to him. I'm going to speak to us, uh, about an introduction to fancy literature, long history and theory. Soon as I see you, just your water. Uh. Hello. It's lovely to see you all here. What I propose to do is, um. In essence, is to run through this book, which I wrote.
Quite proud of the fact that I wrote this book. Uh, it takes a lot of time to write a book in which I urge and exhort you all to buy. Buy seven copies in case you lose. Six imagine if you bought six copies and then lost all six. That extra seventh copy could make all the difference. You don't have to buy a copy of this book. Really you don't? Uh, it is published by Bloomsbury, though, so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to to flourish it.
I wrote a a history of Science fiction some years ago, and, uh, it was suggested to me that I write A History of fantasy as a kind of companion volume. And when I was asked, I thought, yes, I've been a reader of fantasy all my life. I grew up reading Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin. I will do that.
Then I started actually writing it and researching it, and I realised that there is a lot of fantasy I haven't read that I had to read in order to write this book, particularly through the 80s and 90s into the 21st century. Thousands upon thousands of volumes of fantasy. Many of them very, very large. A lot of them parts of enormous, you know, romance, love series that go on for 15 volumes. And I had to at least try to read a representative sample of all that fantasy.
It was quite a lot. What I'm going to do is summarise the argument I'm making this book, which is, in essence, a kind of historical account of how we come to that place where fantasy is now such a huge phenomenon. And I'm going to give you a potted version of that. But I'm doing that because there are questions I think my history of fantasy is is right.
I would say that you'd expect me to say that, but there are questions which I couldn't really answer as I kind of wrote it out and they still kind of puzzled me. So I'm really I'm going to ask you those questions and see if you can answer them for me, and then that will put my mind at rest, and I'll be very grateful. Um, so it's a kind of historicist account of fantasy. And to that end, uh, we can start in the 1960s and then we can run backwards.
And then that's kind of saying tomorrow and the day after, we can roam forwards into the future of fantasy. But I start in the 60s because it's in the 60s. That fantasy kind of explodes. And that's for two reasons. One is Tolkien, and there's no getting around Tolkien talking about Oxford people, uh, sitting in the the pubs in Oxford with the inklings, talking about working through writing up his, uh, his great legendarium, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
Um, the interesting thing about that, I think, is the Lord of the rings is published 1954 1955, in three volumes, but it doesn't become a big hit until the 60s, when it's released in paperback form in America. And then it becomes a campus novel and a cult book, and then it becomes a bestseller and then a global bestseller. And it's never lost that position. It still sells enough to make the bestseller lists kind of annually all the way through it.
Maybe it flagged a little in the 90s, but then the the Peter Jackson movies in the 2000 brought it back into popular consciousness. It's its enormous kind of phenomenon. So that's at the heart of the question that I'm trying to trying to answer myself, which I'm canvassing your opinions of the there's a kind of relatedness there. Why is it in the 60s that fantasy really takes off? Um, in the 60s, it's because partly Tolkien is is so influential.
And then through the 70s you have, uh, uh, Terry Brooks and Steven Donaldson and many other writers who are effectively imitating Tolkien, producing fantasies in a Tolkien Ian style. And then as we move into the 21st century, you get a kind of reaction against that with what they call grimdark George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie and so on. That aim for, uh, I'm going to put scarecrows around the word realistic, uh, kind of violent, nasty, fantastical realms, but they're still writing kind of.
In reaction to Tolkien, Michael Moorcock dismisses Tolkien as epic Winnie the Pooh and writes his own. And I'm quite stylish, but still quite cruel, quite violent fantasy novels. He's doing that in reaction to Tolkien, that the grimdark seems to me a kind of photographic negative of what Tolkien is doing, um, which is still marked by the influence of Tolkien. And now romantic is a big deal now. Uh, I read a lot of romance to see that's also often quite violent.
I was surprised, actually, to discover it's quite Bdsm. It's quite some kind of Twilight and, um, 50 Shades of Grey, but in a fantasy realm. Uh, so it's the 60s. It's two things. One is Tolkien, just the success of Tolkien, and then people read it and they want to read more stuff like that, and people write extra new fantasy series to to meet that demand. But the other thing is the Ballantine Adult Fantasy list. So Ballantine, the American publisher, uh, saw this.
The I mean, they issued the first proper paperback edition. They've been an unauthorised edition issue of Lord of the rings before Ballantine did it properly and paid royalties to Tolkien and sold, you know, shed loads of copies of his books. And they in 1965 issued the put out the Ballantine Adult Fantasy List, which is to begin with was a series of reprints. So the initial list, which came out in 65, was 19 titles. Eight of those titles were Tolkien.
So The Hobbit, the three Lord of the rings books, um, the Donald Swan music that he wrote for the songs of Lord of the rings, I think Train Leaf. Most of them were Tolkien, but they also published, uh, The Worm, Harry Burrows Edison's Great Fantasy from the 1920s. Uh, they published Gorman, Garth and Titus Grown, Mervyn Peake's 1940s kind of gothic fantasy.
Uh, and then Lynn Carter, the American writer and editor, came in and took over the Adult Fantasy list and published another 65 titles, most of which, again, were reprints of earlier books. And with those reprints in these new paperback editions, the books became big sellers, which they hadn't been before. So I'm roaming back from the 60s. So the Ballantine's list is the late 60s into the 70s, and that and Tolkien's kind of belated success really marks the arrival of fantasy as a mode.
So some of the books we're talking about that came out and were big hits in the because they were reissued in the in the Valentine's list. Uh, I mentioned The Worm, a reboot, Ross Edison's fantasy, uh, strange, the rather wonderful book, um, Don Saint. He's the king of El Flynn's daughter, which came out in 1924. Um, hope mere plays a lot in the mist, which is 1926. So these are books that were published, you know, half a century before and, uh, finding a new audience.
And, you know, it's kind of disseminating. One of the things I talk about in my history is the way fantasy, which starts as a, as a written form of art, uh, jumps into all different media in the, in the 20th 21st century. And that starts in the, in the 1970s.
So the The King of Elf Lands daughter, which is a great fantasy novel, was made into a kind of prog rock album with Christopher Lee, of all people, singing in his deep voice and various other people in the 70s, um, and television and film and video games. And this is all now colonised, as it were. Bye bye fantasy, fantasy. A mode is everywhere. That's where it starts from. But what's interesting to me is these are books that were written in the 1920s.
So if we if we wanted to come up with a kind of. Core canon of fantasy novels through the 20th century. What I think you find is they are marked in a particular way by World War One. So we can talk about talking. Talking, of course, served in World War One and rather mournfully reported that all but one of his friends was killed in the war, and he survived the war. Uh, came back injured.
Uh, he started working on his legendarium in the 19 teens as the war was going on, and he starts writing it up seriously in the 1920s. Now we've we've got all this posthumously published Tolkien, Diana, The History of Middle Earth, which, if you are Tolkien not, is absolutely wonderful.
You can really, uh, kind of immerse yourself in that. But one thing, just the sheer size of it, the cliff face of books that have been issued, show how meticulously and thoroughly Tolkien worked and reworked over and over this material to get it into the state that he wanted it to be. But he was writing as someone who had fought in World War One, and he was writing, I think, in reaction to World War One, that the horrors of industrialised mass slaughter, that this was modern warfare.
Uh, he writes, instead of, uh, an earlier, nobler, more chivalric time where war is, uh, is romantic and heroic and you're fighting evil and a very real evil. John Garth, in his book on Tolkien and the Great War, which is a very good book, and I recommend it, explores the ways that Tolkien specific experiences, uh, fed into the descriptions of Mordor, that Sam and Frodo have to fight their way through, um, the horrors of of of what Sauron is capable of, that that's what is to be defeated.
The. Essence, I think of of what Tolkien is doing, and that what appealed to and continues to appeal to people is a re enchantment of the world. And in a nutshell, that's my thesis. So disenchantment, which is a phrase that Max Weber, the sociologist, uses to describe the conditions of modernity. This is where we live. He says we live in a disenchanted world. It used to be an enchanted world full of magic and wonder, but also terror and supernatural peril.
But now we were secularised, and we think science describes the world accurately, and there's no room left for any of that magic. We have become disenchanted and in several senses of that word. For my history, I lean quite heavily on Charles Taylor, who is a Canadian philosopher. He's still alive. He's quite old, who wrote a book called The Secular Age, which is a very large, uh, investigation into the conditions of effectively disenchantment.
How do we go from being a religious culture society, uh, to being a secular one? I mean, people are still religious. That religion hasn't gone away, Taylor says. But we don't really live in a religious world in the way that people did in the Middle Ages. Let's say we live in a secularised scientific world. The way that Taylor describes that is we have moved from and these are his terms from a porous sensibility to a buffered sensibility.
It used to be that our sensibilities were porous and things kind of got inside it. So we lived in a world of magic and marvel, but also terror and alarm. You believe there were genuinely nasty things lurking in the woods that might steal your babies. You. You might be damned and go to [INAUDIBLE]. You you could be frightened by demons and hobgoblins and ghosts. Um, we have, Taylor says, buffered our sensibilities.
And as to how that's happened and why that's happened. His nearly a thousand pages long a secular age. It's very worthwhile reading. It's fascinating to see whether you agree with his account of how that's happened, but I think it's hard to deny that that has happened. So now we don't have these poor sensibilities. We're not affrighted in the way that, uh, we're also not capable of the kind of wonder, uh, and the the the marvel and the magic.
C.S. Lewis is very good on this, actually, in his, uh, his non-fiction works, his accounts of medieval literature. So we have, I suppose, gain something because we're not scared of the creatures that might look under the bed. But we have lost something as well. We've lost that sense of kind of marvel, of wonder. So the argument I make in the book, and I steal this argument from the American scholar Alan Jacobs.
Uh, but I figure he's in America, and that's a long way away. So he's not going to, you know, be able to get at me. Uh, he's a he's a friend of mine, and he's a very mild mannered guy, but, uh, I do credit him. He says that's what fantasy provides. It provides a kind of, um, buffering of our sensibilities. It provides us of access, uh, a way of really enchanting the world.
And it gives us a fictional world that is enchanted and that transcendence, that marvel at wonder is at the heart of the appeal of fantasy. And that's that chimes with my experience. I don't know how it is for you when you read fantasy. When I was reading fantasy as a as a kid, which I did obsessively over and over. My problem in writing the book was that I then I grew up, uh, into a man, and then I put away childish things and fantasy, just kept producing more and more books.
So when I had to read them all in a great hurry to write this book, it was a bit of a cram. But when I was a kid, I would read Tolkien over and over again. I read Tolkien, Lord of the rings every year, and that was I think that was a huge part of the appeal. It for me was I was just living a dull, decimated suburban life. And Middle-Earth just seemed so wonderful. And I remember feeling as a kid a desire to go there.
Uh, I mean, that's one of the things I find hard to, to quite fathom about grimdark, actually. Who would want to go to Westeros? I mean, it's a horrible place. It's nasty, brutish and short life there. And yet people do that. It's been enormously successful. Some the Fire and ice and the and the TV Game of Thrones.
There's something going on there that desire, I mean, in a, in a pure sense, to escape into this, this more wonderful, more marvellous, more magical world is at the heart of what I think Tolkien was providing. And you can see having the experiences that he had in the First World War, that he then writes what is a war novel? It's about the War of the ring, but it's not a war in the way that the the Somme was the war.
So there's a clutch of fantasy written in the 1920s in the aftermath of World War One. And that, I think, is it's kind of written in reaction, I think, to World War One and to modernity and the disenchantment of modernity. And that, I think, is in the baked into the DNA of fantasy. All the fantasy that gets written carries that through in a kind of historical sense. And that, I think, is something C.S. Lewis, he was also, uh, he fought in World War One.
Um, and when he writes Narnia, uh, in the 19, he starts writing in the late 40s and publishes the 1950s. The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe is also a kind of war novel of the big battle and the last in the series. It's called The Last Battle. Um, and he's, you say, collecting his experiences as a soldier. Um, he's also writing as a, as a Christian, uh, as well as Tolkien, of course, working that sense of Tolkien's word for it was sub creation, where, uh, he takes this idea from Coleridge.
God is the creator. God made the world. What an artist does is sort of in imitation of that divine act of creativity in a sort of ratio, inferior. It's still creative, but it's a sub creation kind of creating his particular kind of world. And it's shot through with his, his religious, um, sensibilities as well as is the case for Narnia. Dunsinane, uh, the king of Alfred's daughter.
Uh, he served in the he served in not only World War one, he was also in, um, the Boer War because he was a bit older than Tolkien and Lewis. Um, Edison was a Civil war during a civil servant, excuse me, during the war. So he didn't see a lot of action on the front, um, lines, but he was kind and very marked by the war. Um. And there's a larger sort of literary. Historical. I mean, this is to be very sketchy about it because I don't want to take up too much time.
There's a larger kind of literary historical account that places modernism and the modernist experiments of writers like Joyce, T.S. Eliot, um, Virginia Woolf in the aftermath of World War One. The fascination with experimenting and a fracturing narrative and breaking up and of poetic modes is itself seem, uh, there's quite a lot of criticism on this as, uh, as a reaction to what the war was doing. Now, my argument, I suppose, is that fantasy is also marked in that way.
So this leads me back to my the question which I can't quite answer. Um, you know, Dennis, I love fantasy, I read fantasy. Um, I was born in 1965, so I was I was reading fantasy through the 1970s and 1980s. Um, reading often the same fantasy over and over again. That was just an accident of my chronology. I'm interested in the larger question. Why is there this gap between what happened in World War One and then the the writing that emerged out of that?
Is that the argument I'm making, uh, that we call fantasy, that feeds the big contemporary, popular, uh, phenomenon of fantasy, why does it only take off in the late 60s? That that gap seems interesting to me. What was it about the 60s? Um, and the 70s. That meant this is the time when fantasy kind of explodes. So it's not it doesn't. It's there throughout the 20th century.
And in fact, uh, I in the history, I have, uh, a section exploring the roots of modern fantasy and in part that's quite well trodden ground. Critics have talked about this so that both Tolkien and Lewis talk about, um, MacDonald's fantasies, which I think it'd be good to have a slide deck, actually. Then you can see what these books were. I don't know, though. I just if some of the lectures are just standard elective and read out a prepared script,
you're thinking, well, just give me the paper and I'll read it in half the time. And, um. So Jordan, The Old Fantasticks, which is 1858. So right in the middle of the Victorian period, which is a story about a character called Uno. Dos, rather unusual name, who is in his study in a regular, um, Victorian house. And it turns into a fantasy kingdom, and he's able to move from our world into into this marvellous magical fantasy realm. Um. Foreign Mendelsohn's book Rhetorics of Fantasy.
I don't know if anyone has come across that this is a kind of whistle stop tour of some of the kind of key critical works on fantasy. Uh mendelsohn's book identifies four. It's a kind of structuralist account of fantasy, in a way. She identifies four types of fantasy. Um, but I think what's really clever about her book is that it turns out that all four kind of the same. So she says there are what she calls immersive fantasies, like the Lord of the rings, which take place in their own world.
And we can't go from our world to their world. It's just its own self-contained place. And they are what she calls portal fantasies. Where you starting out in our world, as the children do in The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, and you go through a portal of wardrobe in that book into the fantasy realm. It's very cleverly pitched by Lewis. I think that whole scene, in fact, I think one of the things.
I'm not happy. Not so happy about in the later books in the Narnia series, is that Lewis feels he has to go back and kind of explain all the features of The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Why a wardrobe? Why the why is the first thing they see a lamp post? And I think that he does explain it all, and I think that kind of robs it of some of its amazing kind of marvel and mystery. And actually, there's a it's a sort of dreamlike process, isn't it?
They go through the wardrobe and inside the wardrobe are fur coats because it's winter on the other side, and it's always winter, never Christmas, of course. So they put on the fur coats, and then they come out into a forest of fir trees, like a sort of conceptual pun, which is what happens when when one dreams, it feels. It kind of rings true. Uh, so portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, portal fantasies.
And then the other two kinds of fantasies are actually just another way of saying portal fantasy. So, uh, one is intrusion fantasy where there is a portal, but instead of us going into the fantasy realm, creatures from the fantasy realm come into our world. And then the final section, which is the shortest section in Mendelsohn's book, is called liminal fantasies that take place in the kind of ambiguous borderline between our world and the fantasy world.
But what she points out, and I think this is important, is that even in immersive fantasies, there is a kind of portal, almost always. So if we think of Lord of the rings or, you know, The Hobbit, we think of middle earth. It's its own realm. And you immerse yourself as a reader in this imagined world. Nonetheless, the story takes us from a kind of recognisable, cosy, uh, suburban, slightly modern world of the hobbits.
And they have to leave the Shire and they have to move out into the perilous realm, into the wider world, where all that excitement and adventures and magic and marvels happen. And it's not literally a portal. It's not a wardrobe they have to go through.
But there is still that trajectory. Um, so my my kind of pre-history of fantasy, if we go back, uh, I think it probably it's one thing I say right at the beginning is I could have written a book about, uh, almost everything, because we could argue that fantasy is a sort of default logic of storytelling for human beings. We could argue the Epic of Gilgamesh is kind of a fantasy. We could argue that Homer and Beowulf and medieval romances are all kind of fantasies.
I don't think that's true because I, as I say, I think modern fantasy is its is as we read it now, as it's constructed now, is written out of that logic of, of disenchanted modernity. And actually it's quite a modern form fantasy. It feels older because it's often set in the medieval, a medieval ized world or an ancient world, but actually it's quite a contemporary. It's newer, I think, than science fiction. In my science fiction history, I say science fiction starts in about 1600.
It goes back a long way. Fantasy, I think, really doesn't get going until the later 19th century. And there were, I say, there were three kind of roots that feed through then into 20th century fantasy. Uh, and one is you mentioned Alice in Wonderland, one is children's fantasy in the 19th century. So Lewis Carroll and and, um, the Water Babies and lots of other stories like that which are set in their own fantastical realms. Another is the, uh, the revival of Arthurian literature.
So last year in literature, which was very popular in the Middle Ages, just falls out of fashion. No one really writes anything Arthurian for hundreds of years. It's quite an odd kind of observation about literary history. John Milton thought, I'll write a great epic of England, and it will be about King Arthur. And then John Milton thought, no, no, I won't do King Arthur. I'll do God and Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden.
And so he writes Paradise Lost. And there aren't really any the Arthurian fantasies or epics until the 19th century. And then for some reason in the 19th century, there's a huge glut of them. Suddenly everyone's writing Arthurian literature again, and that's continue through, that's continue to be popular through the 20th and into the 21st century. Those the myths and legends associated with King Arthur, which you can trace into lots of classic fantasy novels as well.
Um, and that's, uh, Tennyson's Atlas of the King and and William Morris, uh, writing poetry, particularly in Arthurian mode and William Morris prose fantasies at the end of the 19th century, which Tolkien was very, uh, full of praise for and influenced by, uh, but it's also Faulkner's ring cycle. Um, and his testament is old, which, of course, is an Arthurian story. Um, why Arthurian literature kind of came rushing back in the 19th century.
And it's an interesting question, which I could go on at greater length. The third strand, I think, is John Bunyan and The Pilgrim's Progress, and that, again, it's an argument I make. So Bunyan published his book much earlier, but it's in the 19th century that that book becomes an absolutely global phenomenon. And it's partly because it was, uh, it was widely reprinted.
It was taken by missionaries and evangelicals all around the world because it's a religious allegory, and it's there to make us more godly, um, and so on. But it's also a fantasy, a compellingly written fantasy quest through this really vividly imagined. I mean, it is an allegory, and everything in it stands for something else. But the world comes alive as you read it, and it was so popular in the 19th century.
It's hard to overstate how popular The Pilgrim's Progress was, and I think these things then feed into the way fantasy gets written. Not that Tolkien or Lewis were writing allegories. I don't think they were. So Tolkien in The Lord of the rings, in the preface says it's not an allegory. Lord of the rings I cordially dislike allegory, he says, and have done so ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. People think the Narnia books are allegory.
They think The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe is an allegorical tale about the Passion of Christ and the death and resurrection of Christ. I don't think it is. I don't think Lewis thought it was a there's a difference there, which I don't want to get too kind of super fine about, but I think it's sort of important. Um. The Narnia books are Lewis, uh, indulging his lifelong fascination with the idea of talking animals.
Um, he was called Jack by all his friends, even though his name is Clive Staples Lewis. You know why he was called Jack? Because his pet dog he has a boy was called Jack, and he identified really, really strongly with this dog and he wished the dog could talk. And he was fascinated by the idea of telling stories in a land where the animals can talk. Okay, so he writes lion, the witch and the wardrobe, and it's set in a fantasy land where the animals can all talk.
Not all of them. Some of them can't, but most of them can. Uh, what then happens is he thinks, as a Christian, uh, in our world, Christ incarnated ism as a man because ours is a human world. Um, and that's that's important. If you're a Christian. That's a really important point of of belief. Christ was God incarnated in bodily form. He wasn't like a symbolic representation of Paul. He didn't represent God. He wasn't an allegorical version of God. He was God.
This is incarnation. So Lewis says, well, what would it look like in a world of talking animals? How would Christ incarnate in such a world? But he would incarnate as a talking animal. We have Aslan the lion. It is that story. It's a Christian story, but it's not an allegorical retelling of that Christian story. And that logic of incarnation is central, I think, to both what Lewis and Tolkien are doing.
Tolkien's emphasis, I think, is a little different. There are lots of Christian parallels in the way he writes his narrative, and I think that does something to to what Bunyan is doing in The Pilgrim's Progress. But again, it's about bodying that into an imagined world. Um. So I traced these kind of 19th century roots. But I think it is the catalyst is then the First World War.
And then what happens after the First World War is people write in reaction to that and just wondering how much longer I have to. I don't want to go rambling on. I mean, I'm going to come back to my question. If anyone has an answer to this question, please shout it out and I will reward you, um, with, uh, gold and silver. But my question. So why do we think that was? I mean, I think I'm right in saying this, okay.
I mean, you could disagree saying I misunderstood the history of fantasy across the 20th century, but I don't think so. I think fantasy is a kind of small scale thing for most of the century, and that it explodes in the late 60s and in the 70s, and then it just keeps exploding. There's a delta of a vast number of fantasy novels are published through the 80s and 90s, and that's just continuing its changing mode.
It's now as popular. And I mean, video games are full of kind of the tropes of fantasy. Some of them very mean. Some of them are actually literally based on Tolkien. Many are just based in a kind of Tolkien in fantastical universe. Uh, the movies have been very successful in TV series. Um, uh, comic books and games.
I talk quite a lot about Dungeons and Dragons and how that has kind of part of the sort of the, the flow, the river of the fantasy through the, uh, into the modern day fantasy has become much more global. So there's a much greater diversity and variety of fantastical realms. It's not all now based on kind of an idea of the Anglo-Saxon, the medieval, uh, bits of Northwest Europe, which is what Tolkien was interested in for a long time.
That was the the default of fantasy. But now you get fantasy realms and kingdoms that are based on, um, you know, African and Indian and, uh, East Asian and, uh, South American, uh, traditions and cultures and heritages. And it's become a much more diverse, which I think is a very good thing, but it continues in popularity in a way that it wasn't before. So let me summarise and then we'll see if you can answer my question for me.
And I will indeed be grateful, although possibly I may have overstepped stated when I said I would reward you with gold, because the only gold I've got is my wedding ring, and my wife would kill me if I gave that away. Uh, and I shouldn't give away a ring that would, given the topic of the summer school here today. So I think that there's there is a sense in which we could call Fantastica is kind of the default of human storytelling.
We like stories about fantastical things. There is a tradition of writing which you can call realist. I generally fight shy of realism as a term because it means something quite specific. Actually. It's it refers to a particular school of novelists in the late 19th century, mostly in France.
People like Zola, um, Tolstoy, George Eliot, who were aiming to the naturalism they were aiming to absolutely reproduce the the kind of qualia of lived experience, a sort of documentary verisimilitude was underlying their work. Well, when we say realist, what we really mean is books that are that don't have fantastical elements in them, books that are set in a kind of recognisable world, such as the one that we live in.
That is a strand in literature that's important, but I think there are many, many more stories going right back to the beginning of storytelling that include elements of fantasy, magic and monsters and, um, and quests and treasure and so on. Um, but even if we if we limit it to the roots of modern fantasy, the explosion of fantasy in the, in the 60s and 70s and where we are now with this global fantasy culture, why is there this lag? Why is it that fantasies that are germinated.
Uh, sometimes literally in World War one. But out of the experience of that war, written and published in the 20s and 30s, uh, and then through into the 40s and 50s and the 50s are talking. And, Lewis, why do they only take off in the late 60s and 70s? What is it about that generation? Uh, well, that historical moment, that means that when fantasy becomes a huge deal, because it's working in a with a kind of creative relatedness. The Ballantine List was republishing books published way back.
I mean, they republished, um, some Morris's, uh. Romances in the 1890s, but they published a lot in the mist, which is 26, and one, the reverse, which is 24th. So this is a long lag. Do we know anyone? One idea. Go. I'm going to go on my, uh, knowledge of history as many books by Ken Follett. Okay. Okay. Can we have a second while we bring you a rope? Okay. Uh, just before you answer, let's. Right. Very much. Right. We have a roving mike. So which you now have.
So do answer that the question for us. Go go go. I suppose a few thinks going off with more creative freedom. So an obvious example being the Beatles, um, for creative expression at that time, as I wonder if that's not enough to have that creativity to choose a bit more, but not being ashamed of your choices? Very interesting idea. I wonder if you know that they were slated to appear in a film of Lord of the rings. Yes, the jump and jump as well.
Yeah, but no, it's I'm not to interrupt your your questions, but it's certainly true that the the initial kind of boom the great success, the popularity of Lord of the rings was kind of it correlated with the counterculture, with students and hippies, and it's Vietnam War. It was kind of anti-war protests, a kind of ism. And maybe it is because you're right. And then it feeds almost immediately through into pop music.
When LED Zeppelin released songs that are all about escaping from Mordor and, uh, prog rock, is that more creative freedom? Do we think there was more creative freedom in the 60s? I think so. Yeah, maybe. Except that the creative freedom is the things like the Lady Chatterley trial, which was 63. So that then said, after that you can put sex in your novels now. You couldn't do that before because it was fall foul of the.
It would be obscene and would be prosecuted for it. And now there's a lot more sex in fiction. That's a kind of creative freedom, I suppose, but not really in classic fantasy. Not until you get to romantic. Did you have another point to drop? My second theory was, I suppose this is the last time a change and has the ruling classes. The, um, the feeling that if you put your minds about to something you maybe can start to achieve.
And if you look at the main protagonists of those, the treatment program, very ordinary individual to achieve great things, a lot of those maybe a bit more of a. Connection. But yeah. Do you think the common. Yeah. I mean, you can classically remember romance in the medieval sense is about. Kings and princes and great knights and warriors. There's quite a lot of that in Lord of the rings. I mean, it's sometimes hard because I work in University of London. I teach for Royal Holloway.
Um, and it's it's it can be hard for students to get their heads around the, the way a class articulates itself in the Lord of the rings that Frodo and Sam Reed, to a lot of people today, is all their friends going off on a they're not, though photos of a master, and Sam is the servant. And it's modelled actually, I think on on a kind of military logic, not explicitly, but I think that's what's behind it. It's a father's like an officer, and Sam is like, Is Batman not Batman in that sense?
In the traditional, the old fashioned sense? That's really interesting. So something about. Yeah. Well, I mean, the world is changing and it's changing more rapidly, I suppose, across that period. So something about the common man do we think something about creative freedom. They've got some more questions like here in here. Um, then we'll take an online question after this one if you have some sort of I mean, what gold and silver. And we'd have to have a go at that.
Okay. Perspective of, um, uh, psychologist, historian and cultural historian and, uh, picturing myself simple. I think of two boxers, uh, playing in the 60s and 70s. The first one is, um, really traumatisation with the Second World War. This is site history and so on. Um, because that way the audiences can then connect with the, um, the First World War generation.
Um, you like to kind of really chime in with, um, the concerns and with these narratives and then, you know, there's lots more to be said about. But the second one, I think we if we look at it from the point of memetics, kinetic theory, this is a time when, uh, um, through development of technology, um, also becomes a sort of, um, uh, meme fix. So it's not just one meme, it's a series of means which kind of co involve, uh, co-evolved.
Um, I'm sorry. Um, so, um, I think what happens is that this is a time when you can actually start producing, um, High fidelity, these things before that, they are very much information about the oral culture we've got. Okay. From, um, uh, book printing onwards, there's a high chance of producing, um, high flying bees. But I think once, um, fancy code falls into this category of culture, um, and becomes a meme, this is what it takes off.
Okay, that's really interesting. I certainly think there's there's a there's a hospitality in in Tolkiens writing invites you into his world, and it's a major part of the kind of reception the fantasy is, not just people sitting in in their bedrooms reading these novels, although that's part of it. Obviously. It's also, you know, fan engagements where you can dress up as your favourite character from from Lord of the rings. It is. Sharing means it's having a kind of share thing in common.
Them basically. Yeah, but some taxable a better that that than others aren't they. Um, for some reason, you know, Star Wars, Harry Potter, uh, Lord of the rings are endlessly memed and they're everywhere with lots of other perfectly good texts and all. I mean, I think that's where the Queen's Earthsea books are amongst the greatest fantasy novels ever written, but no one means them, and they've been adapted.
They've had various television film adaptations. They're widely read the great novels and why those books don't. But somehow Tolkien does. And I suppose Narnia does to a certain extent. That's really interesting. I mean, the generational question seems. A little blurred to me because it is the generation that first embraced Tolkien was a generation that grew up after the war. It was their parents who fought in the war. They were the first generation kind of free of war.
Um, I mean, the Vietnam War was obviously going on. So they went not the war is going away, but that kind of complete saturation of a generation by the experience of war. I think you're quite right. I think that speaks back to the First World War. And then I think of it, the upheaval generation. I'm younger, but we we grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and the fear of a Third World war, you know, all kind of nuclear stuff.
So for them, you know, see reading the Ring as the nuclear bomb or whatever. So I think it's very much the response to the poetry from the Second World War. Yeah. Oh, sure. No, no, no, that's really interesting. Can we have another question from the online campaign? See, do we have all male victims? Yeah. And I'll repeat the question for the benefit of the online viewers. Yeah. Okay. So you okay? So that can be heard.
I won't repeat the question. This works. Um, there are quite a lot of people offering answers to this question. Um, and a lot of, oh, I haven't got going through all that. I can't, but yeah, I have to go kill a lot of them over that.
Okay. So, um, one point that's brought up quite, um, repeatedly is the idea that perhaps an increase in leisure time in the 60s, um, due to some home technological advances, might have increased, uh, need for escapism, um, with the energy of everyday life sort of freed up with free time. That's one point. Um, someone has suggested access to, um, drugs during the 60s. Might have helped, um, drug. Um, uh, where was it? Actually? Several people suggested drugs.
Mhm. Um, I can't imagine what it was about. A novel that contains kind of smoking is pipe and tumble stick around and appeal to drug culture. Oh, yes. Interesting. Um, someone has pointed out perhaps it's, uh, access to cheaper paperbacks. Um, with the cultural dominance, dominance of the U.S. and protracted conflict in Vietnam. A greater need for entrapment as that conflict continued, the two sided putting something to do with it.
I think the fact that it does, it takes off in America in the first instance at that time, and the Vietnam War is the. Is the it's not the kind of, you know, the it's not like the Second World War. It's not a kind of just war. It's a a war that you that you can protest and that kind of shapes a particular identity. I think there is something in I mean, youth culture emerges after World War two. There isn't because young people for the first time have disposable income.
That's why pop music comes about. Then, um, I mean, the history of pop music is, again, very interesting. It's kind of intertwined, the fantasy in strange ways. But the, um, the initial invention of the what was in the day, in my day, vinyl records, uh, the companies that produced them assumed that they would be used for dictation, so people would dictate and then their secretaries would write up.
So that's why the record companies all have names like Parlophone over His Master's Voice, um, that we would record on to records as a, as dictation devices. They had no idea the people would want to buy pre-recorded music and listen to it. But of course they did. And he knew in huge numbers in the 60s, that's the that's the Beatles coming to to fame.
And that's because for the first time, there was, uh, a group of generation that had leisure time and disposable income in a way that hadn't been true before. Um, fantasy, I suppose, has something to do with that. It's the. Yeah, these are all good answers, but I'm sorry I'm not giving out my gold ring because it's it's not making me invisible. No questions over here. So we try to if you want to pick one of that cluster that there at the back.
And uh, another move in the 60s was environmentalism. So spring in the early 60s. And I wondered if you see a connection between that and, and the group in fantasy, like I find early fantasy, especially the Lord of the rings, so concerned with the moral value of the natural world. And. Yeah, that's that's a really good point. I mean, again, it's a question as to why it was in the 60s that environmentalism, they used to call it ecology, and now we call it environmentalism and green ideas.
It changed with the publication. Uh, well, that was in the 60s. That 65 gene was published. But. That's right. And he that he sent kind of a dedicated team to dry land ecologists, which is such a great dedication. I generally dedicate my novels to, you know, my wife or my kids or something, but, um, but yeah, it's an idea, isn't it, that that kind of again, it's not that people have been concerned about the natural world, uh, for a long time, but it becomes a real concern.
I suppose that's reactive. I suppose that's the sense that industrialisation is accelerating and that the world is more polluted than it was. And it's racial. Carson's Silent Spring, and certainly it seems to me well, it seems to me Lord of the rings is really quite, uh, quite keenly engaged with a valorisation of the natural world. It's one of the ways that you can see the different emphasis, um, in the movie adaptations.
It's not just that Peter Jackson cuts out Tom Bombadil, although he does tragically, it's that those movies, the emphasis is much more on the on the fighting, on war, and in the there is fighting. There are battles in the novel, but the novel is kind of more interested in, like trees, let's say, uh, that seems more important to Tolkien than than war, in a way. Uh, and he loves his trees and walking trees, so. That's. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't connect with the drugs, though.
You're not saying people became okay? That's true. Okay. Herbal things. One more question from that corner, and then, um, we may have to wrap up. Yeah, I spoke to Mike from the religious angle a little bit. I think, um, at that time, 60s and 70s, you were kind of seeing a wave of securitisation projects, and I think Judge Sentence was kind of falling off a cliff at that time.
So for young people, there's, you know, heritage and the kind of distrust of traditional structures, but they also want transcendence, that kind of spiritual leaders see fantasy, a kind of a way to get that transcendence. And I think it's big, not quite all things that are fundamentally religious work. And I think even people who couldn't stand policies that might be attracted by the end of the human sense. Well, yeah, he said he said that in a letter to a Jesuit priest.
And the priest had written, a friend who happened to be a Jesuit priest had written to Tolkien saying, I'm just puzzled as to why are there no churches or temples in Middle-Earth? Why does nobody pray or go to worship? And it's true in the middle earth. That's he. The world is really detailed in its world building and the social structures and the landscapes and the languages, and everything is carefully mapped out. But there are no temples of our churches.
No one seems to have a religious life. And that's strange is rare. Most fantasies written in imitation of Tolkien include. That is because that's part of human life. And Tolkien said, no, I deliberately left all that out because the work is fundamentally Catholic and religious in conception. If I put the religion into the work as well, that would just kind of confuse matters. That would tangle things up. It's the work itself is is kind of religious, but it is.
I think it is. Yeah, I think it in fact, I'd say something kind of more than just that. I think that is right. I think part of the appeal of fantasy is it it gives in a kind of ecumenical sense of that kind of transcendence, that enchantment, that wonder, um, without needing to be specifically religious.
But I also think that. One of the three lines that I trace in the book has to do with, uh, Varner, uh, who also wrote a series of great text, great operas about, uh, about a magic ring, and it has a dragon in it and a dwarf and all sorts of things going on. It's the ring of the navel on the totems which I cross, which people said, oh, you were influenced by Wagner went. You said, no, no, my ring. Both rings were round. And there the resemblance ends, is what he put it.
But it clearly is kind of influential. But I think it's also a very potted history of the reception of Gardner is he was he was. I mean, he's still a very towering figure in music. Um, but he was he was in almost through the late 19th century, uh, and through the first half of the 20th century. He was a towering kind of artistic figure, and he kind of isn't so much after World War two because he's so German, because his myths are so kind of tied to German.
This, uh, in a, in a way that is polluted by the Nazis. The Nazis very fond of father, uh, his two attended, uh, performances of The ring, the neighbourhood and so on. German heroism and, uh, the German folk. That's okay, I think. I mean, I make this argument and I'm a little bit less secure in this, I think. But I still will make the argument that Tolkien provides some of the satisfactions of Wagner without being tied to a specific national. Ethos or culture. So it's not nationalist.
It is kind of about England, isn't it? Lord of the rings. And he says it's he's providing a mythology for England and so on. But in a, in a kind of non-denominational way, it means you don't have to, you know, have any particular affection for English nationalism, uh, to connect with all those, uh, elements in, in Lord of the rings. But yeah, it was I'm straying from the point, which is a kind of chronological point, isn't it? Which is? I think you're right.
There's a there is an increase in secularisation through the 60s and 70s and this maybe that's this is a kind of it's tied up with that. Right I think. But my rambling on, I'm sorry to wrap it up. Um, do you see Adam outside later for your gold and silver or, uh, or other fine reward for your answers? If we got a definitive answer here. We could all go home. Yes. Maybe it's the case that we then have to. But let's thank Adam once again. Thank you.