[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Our next speaker is a terrific complement to Professor Pacini. She is, um, Professor Carolyn Langton, emerita research fellow at Saint John's College, Oxford. She has published very widely on Game of Thrones, including Winter is Coming, All Men Must Die, both with Bloomsbury Publisher. She's also published a book on memory and medievalism in George R.R. Martin.
She researches widely in medievalism and medieval literature, and that part of that a lot of her research has been on Old Norse myth, which was another hugely influential strand of influence in 20th century fantasy. And I'm sure she'll bring that up in her talk, which she is beginning on myth and legend. Thank you very much. And I will stop panicking now that I couldn't find my my slides here.
So, uh, in this ten minutes or so, what I want to address is a number of questions about myths and legends and their relationship to fantasy. And as you can see from this opening slide, I'm going to sit very squarely on the fence here. Can we call myths and legends fantastic? Yes, I think obviously we can. And if we think back to what Stuart said earlier about definitions.
Fantasy. A fantastic world is a world in which impossible things happen, and myths and legends are full of impossible things. Um. In myths, and I'll talk mostly about myths for the moment. We have a world of the gods very often, which is quite different, quite separate from the worlds in which humans exist. And if you like, that's a kind of early version of immersion fantasy.
And uh, particularly, I'd say here, North Smith, where the gods and the giants are busy getting on with fighting each other, stealing off each other, and so on without bothering all that much with humans in legends and the Old Norse heroic, well, it's slightly different. The gods do sometimes contend with humans. In Greek myth, the gods are always popping up, interfering, watching the the war and for Troy from a distance, an intervening turning up.
Suddenly there's great Athena um, coming in that she talking to people so we can see ways in which the worlds of myth intersect with the worlds of humans. And we can also see ways in which, um, they imagine a different space. We don't exactly have a portal fantasy model here, but we do have an intrusion fantasy. Um, so we have different spaces in math. And we also, as we'll see in the moment, have different time schemes.
Um, but I also want to point here a little bit to the idea of world building that the mythological and the heroic, but particularly the mythological, builds a different kind of world, the world in which things, different things become possible. And, um, here I'm, I think I just want to mention one quite influential modern fantasy trilogy that takes place in a world of not the Greek gods, but of the gods in general. And that's, um, N.K. Jamison's 100,000 Kingdoms.
I don't have it. How many people have read that? I know so many. Um. Well, I was quite intrigued by this, and I started reading it, though I thought 100,000 Kingdoms. Actually, that's probably a bit too many kingdoms there. And, um, mostly we did with that Three Kingdoms, which is. Yeah, you can go bigger than that if you talk to our Martin. But 100,000.
Uh, um, and there's a very early scene in this where the protagonist has come from the more humble place where she lives into this grand palace. It's the world of the gods. She's she is one of them herself. But she's been kind of alienated and and this is something that then kind of broke the world building fantasy for me. Um, she ventures into a bathroom. Now, obviously, in the world of the gods, people have to use bathrooms. Um, but this is a bathroom with stools.
And so there's the kind of classic high school kind of thing where a girl is inside a cubicle doing whatever it was she was doing, and some of these talking at the wash basins outside and gives a crucial piece of information away. And at this point, my faith in this new world was completely shattered. It took a long time to rebuild. So, um, does Olympus have bathrooms? Might be a question that we might well come back to at some point.
Um, and it's also, I think, useful to think about different time schemes here as well. We've heard about how time moved differently had the numenoreans had longer lives. And what's very typical in myth, but particularly in legends and folk tales, is that when you go to that different place, if you go to the undersea kingdom of the Dragon King, for example, in Japanese myth, or if you're ocean in Irish legend, you go away with a lovely woman to a different place to have adventures.
And you think only three days or three years or three months have passed, but it turns out to be 300 years, and when you come back, everyone is dead. So all of these elements about world mythology are ones which might encourage us to say, yes, it is fantasy, but I think we also have to think of the the kind of no side of this, the original audiences for which these myths and legends were created didn't hear them within a binary of truth and fiction or of realism versus the fantastical,
which is what we've been talking about so far today. Um, but rather they saw myths as explanatory. Why? Does the sun exist? Why? This is the sun move through the sky. Why do metals produce condensation when they come from a cold place into a hot place? Why are there men and women, for example? So many myths are designed as an explanation. And an explanation which doesn't say this is the real, true scientific explanation, but rather something that talking with certainty say, was poetic.
Um, or the legend might be part of a distant history when men did walk with gods, and when, um, the barrier between the everyday and the divine was enchanted in the way that Adam was talking about earlier, where these beings are moving amongst us. Or they may be symbolic, understood to as a way of talking about philosophical or abstract truths, which again, are, um, quite distinct from that. Is it true? Is it fictional?
Um, nevertheless, all of these concepts, whether it's explanatory or part of ancient history or whether it's symbolism or all, quite useful when we think about the ways in which fantasy is shaped today. Myth and legend is, however, a quarry for contemporary and historical fantasy writing. And, um, you might think of the many, many new writings or rewriting of Greek myth, particularly taking the point of view of women.
So, for example, Madeline Miller, who I think really take this off in some ways with Song of Achilles and then her extraordinary novel Sersi. Um, but we also have Pat Barker's The Silence of the girls, um, telling of events from the Trojan War, and followed that by another two novels. So let's of the girls, though, although, um, it has a strong belief that the gods exist.
It doesn't, as I recall, have have a kind of magic happening in the world as we find the Miller Sersi, where people, men can be turned into pigs. This is what curses magic can do. We don't have. We have kind of a sliding scale of fantasy in novels of this kind. Um, Kate Harp Fields recent novel, The Valkyrie, talks about Valkyries. You wouldn't be surprised to learn. And that, along with Genevieve, Connor checks the witch's heart.
Two novels based on women in Old Norse myth and legend both make ample use of what we would call the impossible. So it helps, I think, if we think of. Fantasy is capacious, and we've already seen Stuart's remarkable list of all the subgenres of fantasy. Fantasy is a broad church. It can contain many things, and it's fuzzy. It intersects with other genres as well as being a thing in itself.
So we can see how with books like this, fantasy is intersecting with the historical novel, for example, or at the other end, a kind of mythological retelling, depending on how far you have a sense of making it new, going back to the archetype as opposed to. Um, just doing a new version of the story is already familiar in the ways that BP so usefully pointed out to us in Tolkiens treatment of Atlantis. So classical math, as we can see from this, has been on the roll recently.
And no, Smith has to I think even more recently, though perhaps that's more the case in visual genres or young adult fiction than in novels, though, um, these two are sort of case in point. Um, I've mentioned the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms already and its sequels, and this is a fantasy world in which the protagonist is defined with all the kinds of can people be killed or not be killed? Um, that suspends the fundamental rule of human life, if you like.
But in fact, in some ways, what we have in 100,000 Kingdoms is just a family drama that could take place in the human world, um, with or without bathroom stalls. It might even have improved it a bit, so I don't know. Um, and then we also have examples like Studio Ghibli. I've been on the Studio Ghibli cake recently, and so I rewatched Spirited Away, um, a story which is rooted in Japanese myth and folk tale, but which is kind of new in itself.
Um, Princess Mononoke, which does take a story from, um, Japanese legend and make it into a world which is and is not part of, uh, what we might see as a historical Japan. Myth and legend also allows us to think in terms of archetypes. Again, refer quite a lot about this already. Um, so we got the hero, the princess, the dragon monster, the evil counsellor, the best friend. All of these are quite familiar to us, I think, as staples of fantasy.
And along with the rise and fall and rise again of the heroes of the external supernatural threat. It might be the dragon, it might be the angry God, it might be some other kind of monster. Um, but we also get from myth, I think, the possibility of the long view. I hear that the myth doesn't have to take place, or fantasy doesn't take place normally across five days.
No, it happens across aeons. And that kind of possibility of expansion and writing more and more into your world is an important one. And so, um, finally, I guess, um, to sum up, myths and legends are both a precursor in some ways, but also an enormously generative source for fantasy. They provide models for world building with or without bathrooms. Um, they inspire these epic chronological scales that we find in in so many fantasy writers.
They generate archetypes and storylines and, um, will recognise many of those as the, um, the summer school wears on. Um, Fantasy Feeds two. And this is my final and quite important plot point, not just on the distant past, not on the original texts themselves. Original that they may be, but it also feeds on its own early history. Fantasy writers don't just read myths and legends, they read other people's fantasy. And so there's a kind of feedback loop going on there. Um, with that, I will stop.