Here Be Dragons (42 page)

Note: These works were all tagged as novels although some of them are short story collections. The collections have been kept in the sample because some of them (for instance, the Conan books) actually come equipped with maps. Although the incidence of maps in collections may vary from that in novels, a work's status as a collection does not appear to decide whether or not it contains a map, and simply being a collection was thus not deemed to be sufficient grounds for exclusion. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (
www.isfdb.org
) has been used to supplement information that was missing from the SF-Bokhandeln database.

Notes

1. INTRODUCTION

1
. See, for instance, Michael Moorcock,
Wizardry and Wild Romance
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), ch. 2; Colin N. Manlove, “The Elusiveness of Fantasy,”
The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 63; Robert J. Branham, “Principles of Imaginary Milieu: Argument and Idea in Fantasy Fiction,”
Extrapolation
21, no. 4 (1980): 328.

2
. According to Schlobin, fantastic settings “take on powers and attributes that are normally assigned to characters”; see his “The
Locus Amoenus
and the Fantasy Quest,”
Kansas Quarterly
16, no. 3 (1984): 29; quoted in Roger C. Schlobin, “‘Rituals' Footprints Ankle-Deep in Stone': The Irrelevancy of Setting in the Fantastic,”
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
11, no. 2 (2000): 156. Mathews explains how fantasy geography and setting “function almost as characters and symbols,” and Clute describes how a “land” “is not a protagonist but has an analogous role”; see Richard Mathews,
Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 39, and John Clute, “Land,”
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, eds. John Clute and John Grant (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999). Both Mendlesohn and Rosebury observe how Tolkien's landscape is “a participant in the adventure,” even the novel's “hero”; see Farah Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics of Fantasy
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 35, and Brian Rosebury,
Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 34. Mendlesohn makes similar points about C. S. Lewis's Narnia (a “character in and of itself”), and in Bram Stoker's
Dracula
“the landscape becomes a character […] with moods and emotions of its own” (Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics
, 34, 129).

3
. John Clute, “Notes on the Geography of Bad Art in Fantasy,”
Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm
(Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2011), 111–12.

4
. Don D. Elgin,
The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985).

5
. Ibid., 180.

6
. Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer, “The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy,”
The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art
, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

7
. Many of these studies are presented in more detail in chapter 2.

8
. The most thorough of such Tolkien studies is Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans,
Ents, Elves, and Eriador
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). For a truly excellent reading of a natural environment, see Verlyn Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth,”
J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary
Resonances: Views of Middle-earth
, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).

9
. Schlobin, “‘Rituals' Footprints',” 154.

10
. “With the setting in focus,” compare
matrifocal
, “based or centred on the mother”; see “matrifocal, adj.,”
OED Online
, December 2011 (Oxford University Press). Schlobin uses Bachelard's term
topoanalysis
for a focus on setting (Schlobin, “‘Rituals' Footprints',” 155, citing Gaston Bachelard's
The Poetics of Space
, trans. Maria Jolas [1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1994], 8). Bachelard's term is closely tied to psychoanalysis, however, and thus implies an almost exclusive focus on the relation between place and personal subject.

11
. It should perhaps also be mentioned that however interesting a diachronic examination may be, such an examination is—regrettably—beyond the scope of this book.

12
. For a wide range of opinions on how to define or describe ecocriticism, see the position papers on the topic at the website of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE): Michael P. Branch and Sean O'Grady, eds.,
Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice
, ASLE, 1994,
http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/
.

13
. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds.,
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

14
. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,”
The Ecocriticism Reader
, xviii–xix.

15
. Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine,”
The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism
, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000).

16
. Ibid., 160.

17
. J. Hillis Miller,
Topographies
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Franco Moretti,
Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900
(London: Verso, 1998); Robert Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

18
. Gary K. Wolfe,
Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 38–40.

19
. Mendlesohn,
Rhetorics
, xiii. Not all critics agree that the debate over definitions is laid to rest, however; see, for instance, A.-P. Canavan, “Calling a Sword a Sword,”
The New York Review of Science Fiction
(May 2012): 1; and Marek Oziewicz,
One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L'Engle and Orson Scott Card
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), ch. 1.

20
. Kathryn Hume,
Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature
(New York: Methuen, 1984), 21. Note that Hume uses the word
fantasy
for what is here called
the fantastic
. Other critics who use the fantastic in a similar sense include W. R. Irwin,
The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 8, and Brian Attebery,
Strategies of Fantasy
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3 ff., esp. 11–12; and it is this broad definition that is referred to as “a general term for all forms of human expression
that are not realistic” by Gary Westfahl, “Fantastic,”
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
. Rabkin's definition, although related to the one just given, is stricter: to him, “the fantastic” is a “diametric reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world”; see Eric S. Rabkin,
The Fantastic in Literature
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 28–29. Also note that Todorov sees the fantastic completely differently, defining it as a hesitation about whether occurrences have a natural or supernatural explanation; see Tzvetan Todorov,
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33. Todorov's term, while of interest when discussing a certain body of work, has no bearing on the discussions in this book.

21
. Wolfe refers to this as perhaps “the most frequently cited defining characteristic of fantasy” and notes that the term is problematic in its imprecision (Wolfe,
Critical Terms
, 57; see also 38). For examples of scholars who have used
impossible
in their definitions, see Irwin,
Game
, 9; Attebery,
Strategies
, 14; Brian Attebery,
The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 2; Colin N. Manlove,
Modern Fantasy: Five Studies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 10, and John Clute, “Fantasy,” in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, 338.

22
. Shippey, while accepting “known to be impossible” as a rule of thumb for identifying fantasy and its precursors, problematizes the concept, noting that views on what is impossible change over time and from person to person. He concedes, however, that regardless of cultural context, “the unseen or the non-material always remains in a separate category from the everyday”; see Tom Shippey, introduction to
The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories
, ed. Tom Shippey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), x.

23
. Even a hybrid such as
science fantasy
may exist, although it could be argued that adding something impossible to science fiction would turn it into fantasy. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Changing Kingdoms: A Talk for the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 17–21, 1993,”
Trajectories of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts
, ed. Michael A. Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) for a discussion of this topic.

24
. Irwin describes how “writer and reader knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness” to “make nonfact appear as fact” (Irwin,
Game
, 9). Whether dream stories can be thought of as fantasy generally depends on whether the dream is taken seriously or whether it is used, as Tolkien suggests, as a device to discount the fantastic: J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,”
The Tolkien Reader
(1947; orig. lecture 1938; New York: Ballantine, 1966), 13–14.

25
. Obviously, individual readers could happen to believe fiction to be true; if they believe a fantasy work to be true, however, they do so despite the way it is presented, not because of it.

26
. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37. He emphasizes that he is discussing the instilling of belief, not “willing suspension of disbelief,” which he believes to be something more passive; cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria
, vol. 7:2 (1815; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 397–98 [ch. 14].

27
. Irwin,
Game
, 9. Tolkien also stresses the rationality of the fantasy world, going as far as to say that “[t]he keener and the clearer the reason, the better fantasy it will make” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 54); and Elgin mentions how the reality of a “parallel world” is “drawn from its own internal consistency” (Elgin,
Comedy
, 180).

28
. Attebery,
Strategies
, 12–14. He draws on cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson's use of fuzzy sets and prototypes to discuss categorization; see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 122–24. It is worth noting that in order to make Lakoff and Johnson's categories work as literary genres, Attebery adapts them by combining the fuzzy-sets idea with prototypes, by adding a spatial dimension to the fuzzy-set metaphor, and by suggesting that genres can have (a number of) individual works as prototypes. For an overview of Lakoff's view of categories, see George Lakoff,
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2.

29
. Attebery,
Strategies
, 14–16; cf. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 57.