REH and other omissions aside, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature a worthy listen

Note: This post originally appeared on The Cimmerian website.

Slowly—too slowly and decades overdue, in my opinion—fantasy literature is gaining a foothold in colleges and universities. Long ignored and/or the subject of sneering intellectuals and defenders of the literary “canon,” works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are finally starting to appear on a handful of college syllabi. (To geek out a moment and quote Gandalf the Grey, “that is an encouraging thought.”)

For this slowly building acceptance of fantasy literature in academic circles, one has to acknowledge the work of the college professors who have cajoled, pled, or insisted that it be allowed into the hallowed halls of academia. These include men like Tom Shippey (former Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University and author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth), Corey Olsen, aka., The Tolkien Professor, an English Professor at Washington College, and Michael Drout, Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Drout is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and a co-editor of Tolkien Studies. At Wheaton he teaches Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, medieval literature, fantasy, science fiction, and writing. He also writes a blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, which is definitely worth adding to your list of links.

Drout also wrote and narrated a fine entry in The Modern Scholar audio book series, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is the subject of this post. I recently had the pleasure of listening to it during my commute to work and found it immensely enjoyable, lucid, thought-provoking, and ambitious. It offers prima facie evidence for why fantasy literature deserves to be the subject of academic study.

Drout begins by outlining  the origins of modern fantasy literature, including Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, and then continues the fantastic journey all the way up through J.K. Rowling’ Harry Potter series.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters spends most of its time offering an excellent appraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien and his works. Tolkien has cast a long shadow over all fantasy literature since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1950s, and Drout explains why in detail here, illuminating the timeless themes that place works like The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings among the best novels of the 20th century. He also delves into Tolkien’s seminal works of scholarship, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and “On Fairy-Stories.”

Drout places Tolkien in a semi-holy trinity of fantasy authors alongside Ursula LeGuin and Robert Holdstock. I agree with the choice of LeGuin, whose Earthsea books are a marvel, but Holdstock gets a firm “?” from me, as I have not read any his works. But Rings, Swords, and Monsters has convinced me to give Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985) a try. So I won’t be too quick to deal out judgment on this claim.

But the reach of Rings, Swords, and Monsters extends beyond just the heavy hitters of fantasy. For example, it offers the first serious, critical treatment I’ve ever seen (or more accurately, have heard) of authors Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks. Both fell under the spell of an “anxiety of influence” while laboring in Tolkien’s long shadow: Donaldson (of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever fame) was one of the first post-Tolkien writers to write in reaction to The Lord of the Rings, while Brooks’ Sword of Shannara was the poster-child of Tolkien clones.

Drout also spends considerable time detailing the golden age of young adult fantasy fiction, a period that ran from roughly the late 1960’s/1970s and included Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. No arguments here: I enjoy and continue to enjoy all three series, which still hold up as fine reading for both children and adults. He also spends time analyzing C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

Drout classifies Arthurian literature as a subcategory of fantasy. Arthurian literature is considered more “serious” because in it magic and world-building are subordinate to male-female relationships and ethical dilemmas, which share more in common with romance. Drout calls T.H. White’s masterful The Once and Future King the most substantial and important work of Arthurian fiction since Malory, an assessment with which I wholeheartedly agree. He also touches on Malory, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Mary Stewart in this lecture.

Refereshingly, Drout is not only a medieval scholar but an obvious fan of the fantasy genre. Frankly, this is nice to see. He not only analyzes the books, but interjects personal opinion about them and reads passages aloud for their lyricism and beauty. Listening to Drout’s meticulous pronunciation of the Sindarian and Quenya tongues, or the first several lines of Beowulf in Old English, was an aural pleasure.

Drout concludes Rings, Swords, and Monsters with some brilliant commentary on what makes fantasy fiction “fantastic,” including how and why fantasy differs from realism. Broadly, Drout says that fantasy is about stories that physically cannot happen, while realistic fiction/historic fiction is about things that could have happened, but did not. He rejects the idea that fantasy is inherently conservative or religious, noting that Tolkien’s ideology differs from LeGuin who differs from Donaldson, for example, and that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is anti-Christian.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters makes a strong case that fantasy should be considered serious literature, and not just escapism, though I have long argued that escapism is a worthy function of fantasy literature, as it enables us to see our own world in a clearer light. Drout says as much, too: “Fantasy literature takes us further, deeper, and higher, so that when we return, we see the old world in a new way,” he says. He also says fantasy typically focuses on larger and more existential “needs” of characters (survival, defeating forces of evil that threaten to overwhelm worlds, grappling with the reality of death) while realistic fiction focuses on the “wants” of characters (i.e., compromised freedom, broken relationships, lack of respect, etc). Fantasy literature actually wrestles with the bigger issues (death, belief in God, etc.) better than modern, realistic novels by engaging them directly, Drout argues.

Drout also has some illuminating things to say about nostalgia and its connection to fantasy lit. While nostalgia for a lost, idyllic past informs the works of Tolkien and subsequent fantasy authors, this feeling should not be conflated with infantilism. Rather, nostalgia represents an honest desire of authors to offer their readers better models of reality than our own unsatisfactory present. They’re not trying to pull us back to an “authentic” time in our own history that never existed, but to create from whole cloth a better past that never was, providing us with shining examples that can use to make our own world a better place.

“Tolkien, LeGuin, Holdstock, Donaldson, Brooks, at their best, want to examine what it means to be human, just as any mainstream writer does, but they want to do it by removing the social structures of the present world and seeing how humans in all their variety might behave in a different world,” Drout says.

Howard who? And other absences

Rings, Swords, and Monsters does contain a few glaring omissions, one of which is almost unforgivable. I almost hate to mention it around these parts for fear of turning off readers of The Cimmerian to an otherwise fine course.

Of course I’m talking about Robert E. Howard, who Drout completely overlooks, save for one wince-inducing comparison in which he calls the psychological journey of Bilbo Baggins “far more interesting than a hero like Conan the Barbarian who just smashes everything in his path.” Now, I’m almost—almost—willing to overlook this, on the grounds that Drout may not consider REH’s stories fantasy, but rather in the pulp-action/swords-and-sorcery genre (Drout’s failure to mention authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber lends further weight to this argument). He never makes this claim, but it’s a possibility.

I’m also willing to defend Drout for the simple fact that he attempts to offer a review of the entire corpus of fantasy literature on just seven CDs, each an hour or so in length. He obviously can’t cover everything.

However, I was disappointed not to hear anything about Howard, nor a few other authors whom I would place firmly among the greats in the fantasy genre, including Poul Anderson (The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions) and E.R. Eddison, whose The Worm Ouroboros must surely be considered among the greatest fantasy novels ever written. Michael Moorcock, though not one of my favorite authors, also is overlooked here. The absence of Lord Dunsany and Gene Wolfe are also head-scratchers.

Drout’s world view of fantasy fiction is dominated by Tolkien, who he calls the “father figure” of fantasy literature. I would call Tolkien the dominant figure epic fantasy, while placing Howard as the pinnacle of a second tower of realistic, grim and gritty, action-oriented fantasy (aka, swords and sorcery). Howard’s tales are not just adventure stories but also have thematic and literary depth, which make them worthy of closer analysis and study. He is certainly a critical, weight-bearing pillar of the genre.

Nor is Drout’s evaluation of epic fantasy complete. For example, regarding the Tolkien clones, how did he overlook Dennis McKiernan, whose Iron Tower trilogy is LOTR in miniature with the serial numbers filed off? You can practically see the whiteout on the pages. In comparison, The Sword of Shannara is highly original. Though Rings, Swords, and Monsters was released in 2006, Drout also fails to mention George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series seems to offer a bridge of that realism/fantasy literature gap that he spends much time explaining. Not quite epic fantasy or swords and sorcery, A Song of Ice and Fire arguably shares more in common with the grim historic fiction of Bernard Cornwell than Tolkien. It would be interesting to see where and how Drout would classify these books. For that matter, I would have liked to have seen Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles covered in the Arthurian lecture, but although its fiction, Cornwell’s trilogy contains no overt magic or monsters and is faithful to 5th century Britain and perhaps is more accurately classified as historical fiction.

In summary, Rings, Swords, and Monsters offers a highly literate, engaging and detailed look at the sub-genre of epic or high fantasy, even as it falls short of offering a review of the entire depth and breadth of the genre. Perhaps we may one day see the Modern Scholar tackle pulp-inspired, heroic/swords and sorcery fantasy as well. Like Boromir hurling a stone into the waters of the dammed Sirannon, the ripples of Rings, Swords, and Monsters may awaken further academic analysis of rougher, more savage beasts that lurk beneath the waters of fantasy fiction.