#tolkienesque renaissance

[mask131]

About the "Tolkienesque renaissance"

The term "Tolkienesque renaissance" is of my own invention and creation, but it is a name I use to designate a very specific wave of fantasy fiction, or rather a specific phenomenon in the evolution of fantasy in the English-speaking literature.

As we all know, Tolkien's shadow cannot be escaped when doing fantasy. Tolkien's works being published began the modern fantasy genre as we know it today. D&D, the other big "influencer" of fantasy, would not have existed without Tolkien. The Peter Jackson trilogy began the fantasy renewal of the 21st century. Epic fantasy is a sub-genre explicitely designed after Tolkien's work.

And the massive influence of Tolkien over fantasy is the most felt in the second half of the 20th century, in English-speaking literature, through something I would call the "Tolkien cold-war". When you take a look at the fantasy books of the second half of the 20th century, you notice a fundamental clash and divide splitting it all in some sort of silent feud or discreet conflict. On one side, you have the "Tolkien followers" - as in, the authors who walk in Tolkien's footsteps ; on the other side, you have the "counter-Tolkien" offering what is essentially a counter-culture in a Tolkien-dominated fantasy.

We all know that Tolkien's success was huge in the early second half of the 20th century. The success of "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Hobbit" and the "Silmarillion" was especially important during the 60s and 70s - Gandalf for president and all that... People loved Tolkien's fantasy, people WANTED Tolkien's fantasy, and so publishers and others were happy to oblige. This began the "Tolkien followers" movement - but this beginning was a very unfortunate one, because it was one that relied on not just homage, imitation or pastiche... But in pure copy-cat and sometimes complete rip-off. Since people wanted some Tolkien, people were given LITERAL Tolkienesque fantasy. The most famous (or unfamous example of this would be the 1977 's "The Sword of Shannara" novel. This novel was designed to literaly be a simplified "The Lord of the Rings" with only a few details changed here and there. In fact, this is most of what people recall about this book - how blatant of a Tolkien rip-off it is. And yet, this book was a BEST-SELLER of the 70s fantasy, and it was a huge success, and everybody loved it, precisely because it did the same thing Tolkien did, and so you got to enjoy your favorite series all other again. Afterward, Terry Brooks, the author of the novel, expanded it into a complete series moving into much more original and personal directions, as he admitted himself that doing a Tolkien copy-paste was more of a publishing and editorial decision to make sure he would sell and settle himself in the literary landscape rather than an actual artistic project or personal desire. "The Sword of Shannara" got its own sequels, and became its own thing (though VERY reflective of what the 80s American fantasy was in terms of style, tone and content), but nowadays everybody remembers it for being the "Tolkien rip-off" in its first novel.

And yet being a Tolkien rip-off can sell well, and if the "Shannara" series hadn't proved it, "Dungeons and Dragons" did, since its first edition in the late 70s went as far as to just take Tolkien's inventions such as orcs, Balrogs and hobbits, and include it in its game. The same way the Shannara series then found its own tone and content, through the successive editions Dungeons and Dragons then began to build a world of its own... But it confirms what I said: it was the era of the Tolkien rip-offs.

In front of these "Tolkien followers", which were back then "Tolkien imitators", there was another movement that drove fantasy forward - and it was the "counter-Tolkien movement" so to speak. Works of fantasy that willingly chose to depart from Tolkien's formulas and archetypes and tropes, to do their own thing. Sometimes they did it out of an actual dislike of Tolkien's books: for example the "Elric Saga" was created because Moorcock hated the paternalist, moralist tone of The Lord of the Rings, and so he countered Tolkien's world with a protagonist serving the Lords of Chaos, using a soul-sucking evil sword, last remnant of an empire of cruel, decadent and demonic elves, in a tragic world doomed to endless falls and oblivions... (Though, ironically, Moorcock would end up initiating a genre of dark fantasy that Tolkien himself had explored in his unpublished texts...). Others did it not because they disliked Tolkien but wanted to prove you could do something else: for example Ursula Le Guin admired and appreciated Tolkien's works, but she was fed up with all the imitators and pastiches, and so she created her "Earthsea" world. No European setting dominated by white people, but an archepilago of islands with dark-skinned characters. No big war or political manipulations, the stories being about about the life, journeys and evolution of individual people. No sword-wielding hero or horse-riding paladin, but wizards and priestesses as the protagonists. No big prophecy about the end of the world, flashy magical sword or evil overlord ready to destroy the universe (well... almost), but rather philosophical and existential battles doubling as a fight against oneself and one's very existence...

This counter-Tolkien genre definitively peaked with the other big name of "dark fantasy" and what would annonce the "grimdark fantasy" a la Game of Thrones: Glen Cook's The Black Company.

But what about the titular "Tolkienesque renaissance" I speak of?

Well, if the "Tolkien followers" had only done bad rip-offs, it would have never lasted, ad the "counter-Tolkien" movement would have won. In fact in the 80s, it almost did! Tolkienesque fantasy was thought of as cliched and stereotyped and overdone and dead. People had enough of these blatant-rip offs, as the hype of the 60s and 70s had died out, and the 80s folks turned to other forms of fantasy - such as The Black Company (Dark Fantasy), or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Sword and Sorcery), or various parodies and humoristic fantasies, but all far from the "epic fantasy". And yet, something happened... The "Tolkien imitators" became "Tolkien followers" or rather "Tolkien reinventors", and began the "Tolkienesque renaissance".

The Tolkienesque renaissance is this group of fantasy authors, most predominant in the 90s though they began their work by the late 80s, that decided they would make the Tolkienesque fantasy live on. Not just by copying it as their predecessors did, a la Shannara, no. But by reinventing it, freshening up the old ways for a modern audience and new times. They took back all the key ingredients, and the famed archetypes and the usual tropes of the epic fantasy a la Tolkien, and they reused them without shame... But in new ways, with twists and turns, playing on the codes of the genre, while carefully avoiding the cliches and stereotypes of the time. Giving what people liked about epic fantasy, while also producing new works that felt fresh and went into opposite directions - taking lessons from the counter-Tolkien movement.

It is commonly agreed that the series that began this renaissance was David Eddings' The Belgariad, published between 1982 and 1984. Just a look at the Wikipedia article mentions this best-selling, very influential fantasy series was the "last gasp of traditional fantasy, and the founding megasaga of modern fantasy"... Now, I actually have to disagree with Wikipedia's words. I do not consider it a "last gasp of traditional fantasy" since it already began the Tolkienesque renaissance and thus a new generation of fantasy ; and the other qualificative is ridiculous since modern fantasy already began with Tolkien, and the Belgariad is not a mega-saga, but just five average-sized books. But the idea of it being a link between an older and a newer generation of fantasy books is very true.

While The Belgariad has to be put first, second comes Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, which probably is the most famous of the Tolkienesque renaissance works of the 90s and became this behemoth of fantasy literature. And to make a trilogy of iconic works, I will add another 90s success: Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn". Another iconic work of the Tolkienesque renaissance, though lesser known today than the Belgariad or The Wheel of Time - which is a shame, because Williams' work as a huge and heavy influence on a famous fantasy story of today... "A Song of Ice and Fire", which takes a LOT from "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" (I even call this trilogy the "missing link" between LotR and ASoIaF).

The thing with these Tolkienesque renaissance series is that today, to an audience that was nourished by Tolkien and D&D and Pratchett and other things of the sort, a superficial glance might make them seem like "yet other rip-offs, yet other stereotyped, yet other clichéed" fantasy series. You just have to see the reception of the first season of "The Wheel of Time" tv series - here there was a clash between two generatons of fantasy.

And what these people who take a superficial glance will miss is how inventive and fresh and interesting these series felt back then because they played with or subverted the tropes and the codes of the traditional fantasy. They all played by the usual archetypes - you have an everyman young chosen one, a magical mentor who must "die" at one point, an evil overlord in an ominous half-disembodied state, evil black-clad horsemen going after the hero, elves and dwarves and trolls... And yet, these series twisted these same ingredients they used to bring new flavors.

Let us take the Belgariad briefly, to see how the whole Tolkienesque formula was subverted. Like in Tolkien you've got an order of wizards appeared as elderly, bearded men - but here, they are definitively human beings unlike the otherwordly Istari, and their appearance is explained by them being the disciples of a god that likes to take the appearance of a bearded old man, and who by divine influence made them look like him. You've got a dangerous, all-powerful item the big bad is seeking to destroy the world - but here it is no evil, or corrupting thing. It is rather an item dangerous because of the sheer scope and range of its power, and the temptation isn't becaue it is "evil" power, but just because it is a power so massive it can break the world. You've got a missing king with a stewart/regent holding the throne for him until the lost heir returns - but when said heir returns, the stewart/regent is no evil vizir or scheming usurper, and gladly offers back the throne to its legitimate owner. Belgarath, your Gandalf-stand-in, is far from being the dignified guide and noble mentor of Tolkien, as he is a half-werewolf drunkard that hates any kind of official ceremony or garb and prefers running through the woods or rolling under a table in taverns. And while everything is designed as a Tolkienesque setting, you've got no elves or dwarves or orcs - but humans. And that's a big change compared to more traditional 80s fantasy (like D&D or the Krondor series or Shannara). You have your Nazgûl stand-ins, but they're humans. You've got your Istari, but they're humans. You've got your dwarves equivalent, but they're humans. You've got your orcs equivalents, but human too. And it is shown that it is all a human vs human combat, despite being a world of magic and gods, placing some relativism into it all. (Though the fact they decided to subvert the Tolkienesque good vs evil wordlbuilding by having humans on both sides did cause other aspects of the series to age badly but that's another topic).

I can go on and on but I think you see my point - and this same subversion can be found in the other two series I talked about.

The Wheel of Time begins with the chosen one going on a quest... But which chosen one? That's the problem - there are multiple candidates, and so we begin with a guessing game. And the Aes Sedai are clearly an answer to Tolkien's Istari - but all women instead of all men, and much more numerous and pro-active. As for "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" we have benevolent trolls that are actually more akin to Tolkien's dwarves and have some Inuit-influence, while the Tolkienesque-elves turn out to either be the big bads of the series and the evil guys ; or to be sheltered, useless side-characters that are not helping anyone and cause more problems than anything (I'm exaggerating a bit here, but you get the subversion). Spoilers - but the Galadriel equivalent literaly gets murdered during her second actual appearance, to make it very clear what kind of subversion we are into.

Because this was the game of these books - and the reason they were such huge successes. It wasn't about avoiding or setting themselves free from the tropes and code and archetypes of the genre. Rather it was about reappropiating them, reusing them, twisting them and modernizing them in order to get rid of the stale cliches and frozen stereotypes. It was all a game of imitation yes, but also of derailing - a subtle, discreet, derailing so that everybody got on board of the same type of train, but said train took different tracks to another landscape and worked on a different fuel. (If it makes sense?). It is a game of subtle twists - but unfortunately it is often this subtlety that makes these series overlooked, as people just focus too much on what is identical/similar and not much on what is different... Despite the differences being key here in this effort of renewing what was a dying style. Placing back these books in their context highlights even more how "fresh" they felt back then.

I have one specific point that illustrates this, but I'll need to write a whole post for it...

[mask131]

This is the famous talk I keep speaking about! Remember?

So I was looking up whether Ursula K. Le Guin was in influenced by Terry Pratchett when she wrote Tehanu when I came across this transcript of a talk by him. Pretty interesting and if you're like me and miss Terry with a heartaching intensity, the comedy is like coming back home. This is before he publishes Equal Rites two years later, and before Le Guin subverts her patriarchal world 5-ish years later with Tehanu.

[crowandmoonwriting]

Are you back from hiatus? I'm going through my dash to see which writeblrs are active so I can send STS asks and I saw a post from you. So this is me checking in.

When you do officially come back, here's an STS waiting for you<3

What is your favourite genre to read? Is it the same as your favourite genre to write?

What subgenres within that genre are your favourite to read? Are they the same ones you like to write?

Sort of back! I'm going to be on more than I was last week tho! Lovely to hear from you <3

My favourite genre to read is high fantasy! I loooove falling into a new world, exploring a new magic system, learning all the little worldbuilding tidbits! This is followed very closely by horror and historical fiction, which are tied. And yes lol, these are also my fav genres to write!

So for subgenres, I do love some Tolkienesque fantasy (I am a fool in love with elves, as always), and I reread the Silmarillion an unhealthy amount. XD For horror, I am a southern gothic fiend and I must read allll the southern gothic horror books I can get my hands on. For historical fiction, I like a large variety of subgenres, but anything on the Italian Renaissance or 18th century Italy has me in a chokehold. I definitely love to write all of these as well! I've written more of high fantasy, southern gothic, and historical fiction set in Italy than anything else easily.

[him-e]

hi i’m really confused why people who hate ben say the first order/ben is/are nazis? like ???? how does that even exist or work in this story? am i just dumb and don’t ~see it~? i hope you don’t think this is me baiting you into something else (regarding your last ask) that’s what made me ask this since it mentions nazis in the article. i really am just confused since i loved tlj and didn’t see any problem with it.

It’s okay, don’t worry. First off, don’t let the discourse get in the way of your enjoyment of fiction, especially when it’s comprised essentially of guilt-tripping, manipulative buzzwords. 

Now. The nazi coding in the First Order (and the Galactic Empire in the OT) is there—from the uniforms to the insignia to Hux’s speech to the troops in TFA, everything screams “evil space nazis”—but it’s mainly for the aesthetics. It’s window dressing. It’s a literary trope. 

It’s make up, essentially, a shortcut to help the audience identify easily the bad guys as, indeed, Bad Guys. It’s the equivalent of dressing up your villains as monstrous, stinky orcs in tolkienesque fantasy. That’s because Star Wars is a mash up of different literary and cinematic genres, and one of those is classic WWII movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s, the ones that established the trope of nazis as action/adventure/historical drama villain material. The original trilogy in the late ‘70s was targeted to a young audience, an audience entirely born after wwii, who grew up with the imagery of nazi as fictional villains rather than present, tangible real world threat.

So basically the nazi imagery in Star Wars is a homage to a certain movie genre and its tropes and trappings more than a political statement. And the sequel trilogy deconstructs those tropes, which adds an extra layer of distance from actual political discussion of *real life* nazism. (please note that both TFA and TLJ were written before Trump’s election and before alt-right became a pressing matter in the us political scene).

This doesn’t mean Star Wars doesn’t have a political message. It absolutely has one, and it’s powerful precisely because it’s universal, not necessarily localized to this or that specific ideology or political climate: it’s a statement against imperialism, militarism and antidemocratic oppression, which applies to WWII nazi Germany just as much as it does to other (present-day) dictatorships or to the current rise of populism across the world, BUT most of all it refers (in its original intent) to post-wwii US’ politics. In fact, despite the undeniable pseudo-nazi-fascist aesthetics, George Lucas conceived the Empire as a parody/criticism of the united states’ imperialistic politics in the 60′s–70′s and of the Vietnam war, with Palpatine as a Nixon-like figure.

The superficial nazi metaphor, decontextualized from the other influences and taken in isolation as the only possible real world parallel to the First Order, is neither a particularly deep nor an accurate political reading of it. I would also add it comes from a shallow, imprecise idea of what makes nazism different from other fascist ideologies. Consider this: the most defining aspect of the nazi party—the belief in a superior race and the systematic extermination of Jewish people through the Holocaust—has no recognizable in-universe equivalent neither in the Empire nor The First Order ** (we can guess both are sorta racist—the term would be speciesist—towards non-human species, given the fact that you can’t see a single alien among their ranks, but it’s never a Plot Point, and in any case I hope nobody is under the impression that alien, aka non human or subhuman, creatures can be an acceptable metaphor for Jewish people. Right?). 

** and by the way: no, the destruction of Alderaan or the Hosnian System is not an equivalent to the Holocaust. The intention there was to wipe out a political/military target, not an entire race because of their race. The real life equivalent to the death star and starkiller would be the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guess who dropped those?

So what makes a nazi analogy effective, exactly? Just generic imperialism and world domination? Evilness™? War crimes? The use of weapons of mass destruction? Aren’t other real life ideologies and military superpowers guilty of those things too? How do you strip a fictional representation of nazi ideology of its most important and atrocious aspect, antisemitism, and still expect the audience to take that metaphor literally? 

Spoiler: it isn’t supposed to be taken literally.

It doesn’t have to, in order to speak to the heart of the audiences all over the world. The nazi coding might be superficial, but this doesn’t mean that the First Order as presented by the new trilogy isn’t absolutely, unequivocally bad. Why is it bad? The narrative doesn’t get too specific about it—in fact many criticized how vague the politics both in tfa and tlj are—but we know they’re bad: they have a rigid militaristic structure, they blow up planets and entire solar systems, they oppose democratic-looking entities called the Resistance and the Republic (names are important just as coding is), they summarily execute prisoners. We just KNOW that those things are bad—we aren’t sure what their political vision is (beyond obvious galactic domination. To quote GRRM, what is the First Order’s tax policy?), but if they do those things, it must be bad, period. That’s all we need to know to understand this story.

The nazi aesthetics help broadcasting this evilness to the audience loud and clear, because we’re all children of the same culture that (thanks to the aforementioned movies and tropes) taught us to instantly recognize those black-dressed, seriously-looking guys marching in lines and swearing allegiance to an ominous-looking red-and-black symbol as evil incarnate (except we fail to recognize fascist and nazi ideology when it manifests in other, less obvious forms).

BUT here’s the thing that antis constantly get wrong, like abysmally wrong. While the First Order is portrayed as bad and unsympathetic, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo isn’t. 

Kylo Ren being made of a different cloth was clear since TFA (you cannot deny the truth that is your family) and insisting to claim otherwise at this point is willfully misinterpreting canon and loudly communicated authorial intent.

Aside from the stormtroopers (who were groomed into their role and are used as cannon fodder by the Order, and who I think will be eventually liberated by Finn), Kylo is the one part of the First Order who is clearly REDEEMABLE, because his nature is essentially extraneous to it. He’s a Skywalker. He’s the last of a breed of wizard-warriors who worship the Force and whose political views, for better or worse, will be always secondary to the way they perceive this energy in the galaxy and their role in it. His enormous power might be dark, but it’s not evil, and right now he’s misplacing it in the hands of an evil organization which he erroneously considers as a chance to bring “a new order” to the galaxy.

Is Kylo a nazi, or at least is he as superficially nazi-coded as the rest of the first order is? Let’s see:

there is no indication of Kylo being racist (or speciesist). Classist? Hell yeah, you can see it mostly in his interactions with Rey (which are, however, complicated and in part contradicted by the fact that Kylo seems to respect and value force users more than “regular” people, including those on his own side). Racist? There’s zero reason to believe that. Or at least there’s no satisfying in-universe equivalent of real world racism emerging in Kylo’s character.

the only group of people Kylo wants to exterminate (like Snoke, and like Anakin before him) is the Jedi order, but the Jedi aren’t an ethnicity or a species. You aren’t born a Jedi. You become one. Destroying the Jedi order is a purge, not a genocide. It’s like killing all the members of a political party, or the supporters of a religious heresy. STILL BAD! (and definitely something nazism, as many other dictatorships, did.) But not steeped in racism or eugenetics. It’s interesting that upon meeting Rey and discovering her force powers, Kylo proposes to teach her. He doesn’t have a problem with force sensitive people per se, he has a problem with those who adhere to the Jedi order. This grudge against the Jedi exists in the context of the eternal hostility between lightsiders and darksiders in star wars canon. It’s not the first time that one side of the Force tries to completely destroy the other, and yes, the Jedi have tried to exterminate the Sith too.

Kylo’s outfit marks him as different than the rest of the First Order, and specifically different from Hux (who is, in many ways, the epitome of the “evil gay nazi” trope, which in turn is a bastardization, mostly for the lulz and/or for fictional purposes, of nazism). Kylo doesn’t wear an uniform or display any official first order insignia indicating that he is, indeed, a believer of that ideology. His TFA costume is reminiscent of a monk or a knight templar (see also how his saber is essentially a red cross shape) while also evoking the classic image of the Grim Reaper (when he’s in full cowl+mask attire), while his TLJ one, while not very different from its earlier version, gives him a dark prince vibe, with the long, willowy black cape and the elegant shorter tunic resembling a medieval/renaissance doublet. Not a lot of nazi coding here, and believe me, how a character looks is very, very important to convey this sort of messages.

So.

What makes a(n allegedly) nazi-coded character convincing, aesthetics aside? 

His politics.

Do we know what Kylo’s politics are? 

No.

If the First Order’s political vision is vague because it works essentially as a stand-in for “evil organization” and we don’t need a lot of details about it, Kylo’s political views are more than vague, they’re non-existent. That’s because Kylo isn’t a political figure, at all. He got involved with this organization because his dark side master was the Supreme Leader, but we have no way of knowing whether his political ideas really align with those of the First Order, or if he has any at all. We believe they must align, to an extent at least, because why would he stick with them for so long if they don’t. The problem is that Kylo is too fucked up to discuss him this way. We actually see in TLJ how he keeps doing things that “split his spirit to the bone” just because his master asked, and because he sees no choice. He just keeps rolling like a wrecking ball towards complete (self) destruction. He’s a mess. He’s the opposite of a political thinker.

Antis insist to see Kylo as the embodiment of the first order when he’s actually (probably) the seed of its destruction. He exists at the margins of the organization, as a scary, but essentially extraneous presence, who follows his own rules and whims (proof of this is Hux’s seething hatred and distrust for him). We now see him rise as its Supreme Leader, but he, like Snoke before him, is an outsider, a custodian and wielder of an ancient magic/religion that the First Order is very willing to use for their own profit, but seems to be inherently skeptical of. And this conflict is 100% going to come to fruition in IX, make no mistake.

Framing Kylo as a nazi is such a massive misunderstanding of how his character is constructed, his role in the story and what he’s meant to represent to us. And of course it creates a VERY unfortunate dissonance in the fact that we’re EVIDENTLY meant to sympathize with him and root for his redemption. 

This is a character who isn’t meant to represent a political allegory, but an existential one. He’s an archetypal figure—the prodigal son, now become the Usurper. His political views remain largely unexplained and unexplored because they don’t matter. What matters is the archetypal ball of negative, destructive energy he represents, as well as the psychological horror of his personal and familial drama, which is the bulk of his motivation in everything he does. Kylo lashes out because of his unresolved trauma with his family and with Snoke, not because he knows what he’s doing or because he wants to achieve a specific goal. Even at the end of TLJ, he’s using the First Order war machine as a weapon to enact his personal, and deeply masochistic, vendetta against Luke, who tried to murder him, and Leia who (in his mind) rejected and betrayed him for the Resistance. He’s also externalizing the blind terror, the hurt, the confusion of having just killed his mentor and long time abuser to save someone who (from his point of view) only used him and then dropped him like a sack of potatoes (yeah, that would be Rey).

There’s no sound military strategy or even logical thinking in his almost delirious attack on the resistance base on Crait, to the point that even Hux is appalled. This isn’t a man who is pursuing a political ideology. This is a deeply broken individual who is fumbling to deal with some major unresolved issues from his past and childhood and who for some reason believes that burning everything to ashes is the only way to achieve some sort of peace. The “order” he wants to restore is more on a personal scale than on a galactic one. The galactic scale is always a byproduct of the personal, as it’s always the case with these thrice damned Skywalkers, tbh.

so to summarize

the nazi aesthetic is superficial and is meant to convey that the first order is Evil

the political message of sw is more universal than “fight the nazis”, not because the nazis aren’t bad, but because the nazis aren’t the only form of political evil people should fight against, and depending on where and when you are in the world, there might be more immediate forms of imperialism and oppression that the local audience might want to see reflected in the First Order (note that the current nazi discourse is incredibly westerncentric and especially us-centric, because that’s where we’re unfortunately experiencing a resurgence of these ideologies, but other parts of the world might have their own oppressive powers to fight that have nothing to do with nazism)

the First Order is 100% evil but Kylo isn’t integrated within it, and even as the Supreme Leader he represents an outsider

Kylo’s relevance in the story is broader than his affiliation with the First Order

in fact, the main themes of his character aren’t political at all

Kylo matters as an archetypal and tragic figure, the continuation of the very archetypal and tragic familial saga of the Skywalkers

Kylo is neither a “literal” nazi nor nazi-coded

insisting that Kylo is a nazi makes you (not you, anon, those who propose this interpretation) look stupider and stupider as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s a HUGELY sympathetic character who is on a redemptive (and romantic) arc

seriously, disney ain’t gonna “normalize” nazis

stop saying that

stop worrying about that

this is the least of your problems

the first order will eventually be destroyed as it should be. Kylo, who is not a nazi, will not

end

[d33-alex]

A Game for Our Time

The eerily contemporary morality of HBO’s Game of Thrones

In 2011, HBO gambled. It launched a massive, sprawling fantasy franchise around a story — George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire book series — that was popularly known mainly in the nerd circles that read epic fantasy. Sure, the books were hits, but they were also difficult to adapt for any screen, big or small. And if HBO wanted to capitalize on the recent, runaway box-office success of the film adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, one could think of any number of books better suited for television.

But HBO rolled the dice anyway. Backing then–relatively unknown creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, it went anti-Tolkien. Indeed, if you dared to call their creation “Tolkienesque,” the esteemed deceased English author might well rise from the grave in protest.

No, HBO’s show — called “Game of Thrones” after the first book in Martin’s series — bears little resemblance to Tolkien’s fantastic tales. Tolkien launched an entire literary genre of world-building fantasy, and after decades of thinly veiled copycats, fans had grown used to its customs. Plucky heroes in magic-filled worlds would take on the forces of darkness — often with the indispensable aid of powerful artifacts and talismans. The books and stories were fun, and I devoured more than my share of similar novels, but after almost 60 years of the same thing, it all seemed just a little bit tired.

Enter Martin. Like Tolkien, Martin is a master at creating vivid fictional worlds, complete with their own extensive backstories, religions, languages, and customs. But there the similarity ends. In Tolkien’s tales, magic is of paramount importance, the good is very, very good, and the evil is obvious and horrifying. Tolkien was a veteran of World War I, and he’d seen his own Mordor. The descriptions of the Black Land have eerie echoes in the blasted earth and industrial destruction in the trenches of the Western Front. In Tolkien’s time, great good faced great evil (often against seemingly overwhelming odds), and great good triumphed.

Martin, by contrast, was born after the world wars. His work instead calls back to an earlier time, to the struggles for dynastic succession in old England. Loosely based — very loosely — on the Wars of the Roses, his books pit warring families against each other in a vaguely Britain-shaped land called Westeros. Seven great houses rule seven regions, which are united under the rule of a single king who sits on an iron throne in a capital called King’s Landing. The fundamental question is deceptively simple: Who will rule? Early in the first book (and early in the first season), the king dies, setting off the war for succession and dominance that is the “game of thrones.”

This game has but one rule, “You win or you die.” The politics are gritty, good men are hard to find, and honor and virtue are often rewarded with swift death. While magic exists and terrible enemies lurk, the story centers on the politics and personalities of the great houses. In fact, the brilliant first three books of Martin’s series often read more like Renaissance political thrillers than fantasy novels. Alliances are made and broken, palace intrigue trumps battlefield results, and even magical creatures are shockingly vulnerable to the most mundane of defenses. In other words, don’t look for magic artifacts to save the day. In Martin’s world, people rule, people fight, and people make the decisive difference.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t think it would work as a television show. The world was too big and complicated. The politics were too intricate. And for the first few weeks, I didn’t watch — for good reason. Perhaps fearing that the show would flop without a little extra help, HBO used its full premium-cable powers to lard it up with graphic sex and violence. Martin’s books aren’t for the squeamish, but HBO took the lewd elements to the next level. Comedians and critics even coined a term, “sexposition,” to describe the show’s habit of using extended sex scenes as a mechanism for explaining plot points and developing characters. In family-friendly social-conservative circles, the word went out: HBO once again was using sex to sell, and Christians especially shouldn’t be buying.

Yet as the show progressed, people I trust kept saying — no, demanding — that I should watch. Ignore the sex, they said. Focus on the story. So I gave it a chance, and, like tens of millions of my fellow citizens, once I started watching I never stopped.

HBO’s gamble was a success, and then success turned into sensation. The first season’s finale drew a respectable 3 million viewers. But by the end of season six, the show was an unstoppable ratings juggernaut, watched by upwards of 25 million Americans each week. It’s arguably the most watched show on television today. In the blue-state coastal enclaves — where Game of Thrones is most popular — it’s a true water-cooler show in the old style. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is debating it, and entire recapping and podcasting empires have sprung up around it.

But why? Why all the fuss? In the so-called platinum age of television, when dozens of outstanding shows are available at the click of a mouse, why has this one resonated so strongly? Season seven (out of eight) starts on July 16, and its ratings will likely surpass everything but the NFL playoffs. A true cultural moment is at hand.

The short explanation of the success is that the show’s creators have accomplished what few television or film producers have ever achieved — they have improved upon classic books and have, quite simply, mastered the art of storytelling. They tightened the sprawling tale while keeping Martin’s sense of scope and grandeur, they cast the multiple important roles perfectly, and they have shown a knack for delivering during the big moments. The plot twists, betrayals, and epic battles aren’t just watchable, they’re rewatchable. In fact, classic clips garner millions of views on YouTube as fans go relive the highlights in much the same way that Patriots fans no doubt relive the last five minutes of Tom Brady’s epic comeback in Super Bowl LI.

But the storytelling is only part of the appeal. The story itself matters too, and in many ways it is the right story at the right time, holding up a mirror to modern American sensibilities and showing the consequences of modern American morality. To understand how, let’s once again contrast Tolkien and Martin. In Tolkien’s world the stakes are immense, the moral battle lines are clear, and victory actually means victory, the end of a distinct evil force. In this respect, as noted above, Tolkien was a man of his age. He published Fellowship of the Ring in 1954 — after the Allies vanquished the great evil Adolf Hitler. When Tolkien wrote of the triumph of good over evil, it all felt real. Victory didn’t usher in utopia, but victory meant something substantial. Sauron was real, and when Sauron died, the world revived.

Tolkien’s world isn’t Martin’s world. Whereas Tolkien’s work represented a literal journey with a fixed destination, Martin’s can feel like a treadmill of conflict where squabbling lords and ladies ignore looming threats and greater dangers for the sake of momentary advantage in a seemingly never-ending battle for control. The stakes can seem small — what’s the real difference for humanity between Lannister or Targaryen rule? — but the conflicts are still intense.

Whereas the typical high-fantasy novel might end after a hero defeats her enemies and frees entire cities’ worth of slaves, in Game of Thrones, Martin (and the show’s creators) ask, “What comes next?” And the answer, instead of a glorious celebration of freedom and liberty, is a period of chaos and vengeance.

And where the typical high-fantasy novel centers on the most honorable of heroes and writes him to victory against insurmountable odds, in Game of Thrones, the honorable hero loses his head unless he’s honorable and shrewd or honorable and violent. And whereas the typical high-fantasy novel casts its heroes and villains in clear and unmistakable terms, in Game of Thrones you sometimes find that your rooting interests evolve in interesting ways. Just as in life, people change — especially in response to shocking events.

What results is a moral universe of surprising complexity and nuance, one that is true to life in a way that conservatives especially should understand. Think of it as Calvinism without Christ — natural human depravity unleashed. The realities of human nature mean that evil is very, very evil, and good is also touched with the weight of sin. You see the reality of the Paul’s Epistle to the Romans unfold on screen. Time and again, characters don’t do the good they want to do. Instead, they achieve the very evil they sought to avoid.

Certain timely themes emerge, perhaps most salient among them the constant, vivid reminders that the ends do not justify the means. When a lord named Theon Greyjoy launches a surprise attack to restore the glory of his house — and in so doing betrays his deepest friendships — he transforms himself first into a murderous fiend and then into a cowardly husk of a man. When one of the great houses ends a vicious war by violating the most sacred rules of honor in the land, it creates undying enmity and sows the seeds of vicious retribution.

Indeed, Martin has revealed a key truth — that pursuing virtuous ends by vicious means can so transform a person that the ends themselves change. Virtue is redefined, and ultimately virtue is lost.

Game of Thrones, moreover, is dominated by a very human, overwhelming sense of entitlement. The sense of victimization feels modern, yet it also taps into ancient truth. The characters are obsessed with settling scores and vindicating their honor. If there is a guiding ethic, it is “I have a right to what’s mine.” The sense of entitlement drips from the worst of the characters, and even the best sometimes struggle to see beyond their own rights.

The great heroine of the story — at least so far — is Daenerys Targaryen (wonderfully played by Emilia Clarke), the last surviving child of the deposed Targaryen dynasty, and her seasons-long quest is simple: to take back what the “usurpers” stole from her. She wants to rule justly. She desires a better world. But that’s in many ways secondary to a single animating reality: The Iron Throne is hers. She wants it back. In fact, even the evilest of characters have their own tales of woe. They can always find a murder or a conflict or an act of defiance that justifies the next vengeful act. Just as in real life, evil has a reason for its rage.

As a direct consequence, the show also demonstrates the truth that in a world dominated by evil, virtue is hard. There are good characters in the show. Daenerys, for all her flaws, is the show’s great liberator. Jon Snow has grown into a leader of men, but he had to (literally) die to learn how to lead. Tyrion Lannister, perhaps the fan favorite, is a master of realpolitik who’s made more than his share of compromises to survive. These are flawed people, possessing partial information and confronting perilous enemies. While watching, one can’t help but be reminded of Christ’s admonition that even his followers should be “wise as serpents.” Good and evil alike play the game of thrones, and forsaking the game entirely can mean not just losing your life but also unleashing the hell of evil triumphant.

A conservative can’t watch the show without understanding that it is, at times, almost shamelessly Burkean: Disrupt the established order at your peril. In the backstory to the series, several of the great houses launched a rebellion (“Robert’s Rebellion”) to depose a mad king. By any measure, it was a just war against a homicidal maniac, but one does not cast away a 300-year-old dynasty without consequence, and the consequence here was to throw the entire established order into chaos. The questions are endless. Everything is in doubt. Why must there be but a single king? Can’t different regions govern themselves? Can’t any great house lay equal claim to the Iron Throne?

The thrill of disruption is replaced by a feeling of dread. The old order existed for a reason. The old customs sustained life. And chaos brings with it the search for the political savior, the person who can once and for all set things right.

Perhaps we’ll get that kind of classic fantasy ending, but somehow I doubt it will be that neat, that clean. I could be wrong, but I suspect we won’t see anything like the collapse of Mount Doom in Return of the King. Maybe we’ll get justice, but it will likely be angry justice, and when the series ends, the last person on the Iron Throne will wear the crown uneasily, knowing that she (or he) left a trail of bodies on the path to power and that those souls not only cry out for vengeance but have living descendants who hear their call.

There’s always a temptation to read too much into fiction, to draw too-neat comparisons to our times. Sometimes a good story is just a good story and there are no larger lessons. But Game of Thrones feels different. It has its dragons and its magic, but it also feels real. It feels relevant.

Not long ago I was at dinner when yet one more moral debate broke out about our own political ends and means — including the high moral cost of “winning.” At issue was the question of political tactics. Did the “high road” work anymore? Don’t the nice guys always lose, and when they lose don’t the virtues they believe in ultimately lose as well? In that moment, the nerd in me was transported to Westeros, to an increasingly amoral society, unmoored from its traditions and full of entitled and ambitious men and women who compete for power with unrestrained viciousness. Does that sound at least vaguely familiar? Is it any wonder that Game of Thrones resonates in the modern American heart?

When season seven launches, it will still be violent. It will still have too much sex (though HBO has limited the lewdness as the series has grown more popular). And it will still tell a fantastic and engrossing story. But it will give us something else as well — a lesson that entitlement and rage have a price, and that justice gets lost when victory is the only goal. Perhaps the true rule of the game of thrones isn’t “Win or die” but rather “Win and die.” The quest for power, unmoored from virtue, is the doom of us all.

 — David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney. This article originally appeared in the July 31, 2017, issue of National Review magazine: https://goo.gl/kTxP3p

[mask131]

This was tagged by my side-blog ( adarkrainbow) but given this is about fantasy, I’ll form an answer here.

Good question! I myself went on a "let's collect some fantasy classics" recently, to read the fundations of the fantasy genre. And... I was actually quite surprised to see that I couldn't find many literary works that were about the “cliche fantasy” you described above. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are works that revel in this classic fantasy... BUT these are actually “late” works that precisely try to emulate and bring back the “Tolkien-style” at a time it was seen as a cliche thing. To quote an example: The Belgariad, by David Eddings. The purpose behind this series was to create a book series that had ALL the cliches of the high fantasy genre, and yet still worked as a fresh thing, strong on its own. (And if you ask me, it works). So if you want something that feels like a “cliche Tolkienesque story” while also being actually a good series on its own and a classic, I can advise The Belgariad, the living proof that at one time it was still possible (at least back in the 90s) to still create an interesting and entertaining fantasy series taking back all the “classic” ingredients.

I also started recently Tad William’s “Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” series, which is also an attempt in the 90s to recreate a “Tolkienesque” fantasy that takes back all of the classic elements - but I haven’t read much of it (though the few I read I liked greatly).

But this is not what you asked - you asked for the ones that began it all, the sources of the cliches, the origins of the tropes. Works with a similar role to Tolkien’s. And... so far I haven’t found many of them? I do think that, actually, Tolkien’s vast influence might have been the real source of those cliches. Tolkien’s ideas, imitated by other authors, and then widespread through roleplaying games like D&D... Falling into desuetude at one point due to the amount of imitators, and then revived in the 90s by the authors of the “high-fantasy Renaissance” like David Eddings, a revival pursued in the 2000s by the Lord of the Rings movies...

One also has to realize that while, those cliches and stereotypes and “classic ingredients” are as old as Tolkien himself (and in fact far, far older - you know very well that they come from the epics of mythology and the medieval knight tales and things of the sort), they were actually fought in the literary domain at a quite early time... I am speaking here of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea which, already by the late 60s, was created in hope of avoiding and twisting what was becoming a cliche formula. Le Guin greatly loved Tolkien, but she also wanted to prove that there was more than his works to fantasy - and prove it she did, as “Earthsea” itself became a great classic of fantasy! But here’s the twist... Despite being a classic of fantasy, it bore little of the cliches and stereotypes that we know associate with the genre. In fact, quite recently people have rediscovered her books in France and admire it as a game-changing work breaking the “Tolkien mold” we have since the early 2000s... But these books have been a classic since the 70s! And yet their “formula” didn’t became as widespread and re-used ad-nauseum, unlike the Tolkien books, which led to them still feeling fresh and new and trope-breaking, even today. 

And even then, it is a game of false perspectives, because several elements created by Ursula Le Guin actually became recurring elements of fantasy, or cliche of fantasy - though more discreet and subtle ones than the Tolkien ingredients. For example she was the first to my knowledge to invent the concept of a “school for wizards”. Decades before Rowling came with her Hogwarts - and even when Pratchett created his parody of “wizarding schools”, with the Unseen University, he wasn’t actually referencing Rowling (who hadn’t yet published anything) but rather Le Guin and her own magic school... Le Guin was also the one to introduce the use of “Names of Power”, and the use of names in magic as potent elements. But beyond all that, Le Guin had broken all of the easy cliches - she did a classic of fantasy without a European setting (a world of islands where the main populations are dark-skinned), without any lost heir to the throne (she was the first to decide to tell a story with a wizard as a hero instead of a sidekick), without any dark lord (as the threats and antagonists range from personal, psychological evils to cosmic, metaphysical, philosophical horrors - the two often intertwined). 

But when it comes to the “classics of classics”, to the “roots of it all”, to the origins - if you do not want to go back to mythological texts such as the Kalevala, then I am afraid that Tolkien is indeed the Alpha and Omega, that all either recreate, avoid or parody (Eddings, Le Guin, Pratchett). 

... At least for “high fantasy”. Because “fantasy” isn’t so much a genre in itself than a vast span of numerous sub-genres nowadays, and the sub-type you described, the one with lost heirs to the throne, chosen ones fighting dark lords, in a pseudo-Europe filled with crowned farmboys, is very clearly what people refer variously as high fantasy/epic fantasy. I can quote many other classics of fantasy that started their own tropes and cliches, such as Conan or the Elric saga - but since they are from alternate types of fantasy (heroic fantasy ; dark fantasy), I do not know if this is what you are looking for? 

But at least, I can tell you that if you want a good series that took back all the typical ingredients of a Tolkienesque fantasy, and created with them an epic series purposefully trying to emulate epic fantasies and revive the dying high fantasy genre - I can advise you David Eddings’ The Belgariad. It is a series that is very fast to read, and quite satisfying. Many people actually were introduced to fantasy thanks to Eddings’ series, it was their teenagehood-fantasy series, and it works well on its own ; while on the other side, if you know your Tolkienesque fantasy you will have fun seeing the things they reference, but also the things Eddings avoids or plays with (Eddings notably completely reinvented the wizard archetype of fantasy books with his character of Belgarath, who is very clearly a Gandalf homage and YET actually deconstructs and twists several key elements of the “Gandalf archetype”. So an easy read, a fast read, fun and neat, and perfect if you want a classic high-fantasy story playing by the rulebook from beginning to end.

And if you want a classic that influenced a lot fantasy literature and yet doesn’t feel like an actual “classic high fantasy”, Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series. All the other “cliche-starters” and “stereotype-roots” classic works I know of are of other fantasy subgenres.

Guys, I need reading recommendations.

Every time the fantasy genre is discussed online, the cliches of the genre are always pointed out. "European middle ages, chosen ones, dark lords, lost heirs of the monarchy, farmboys becoming kings, the hero's journey", etc.

But I have to ask, what were the stories that turned these tropes into cliches?

I know the vast influence of Tolkien, which is already on my list, but I want more.

Can someone give me more examples of classic fantasy novels that defined the genre? I want to know them more.

@ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @princesssarisa @the-blue-fairie @adarkrainbow

[hopespringsevents-blog]

Other Renn Faire Info

Building a Character (Persona) The Shoulds A character should begin with a name and occupation. The name and occupation should be fairly historically accurate. Your character's name should be a REAL name, not a goofy, cutesy name like Lillian Lottaboobs for a wench or Black N. Decker for a carpenter. Your character's name should be easy to pronounce and easy to remember. Your character's occupation should be immediately identifiable from 40 yards away by a patron (ex.: if you are a hairdresser for the Queen, you should be covered in velvet and carrying a lot of brushes and combs and whatever else a 16th century hairdresser might have!). Your character should have some burning need to interact with patrons (ex.: If you are a pirate, you should be asking patrons to join your crew or tell you where to find Grace O'Malley's treasure. If you are a milkmaid, you should poll patrons for their opinions on what breed of cow gives the best milk). After that, build all the history for the character you want. You'll find this is a real easy way to build a really awesome character. The Should Nots Your character should not be something obscure from a cult movie. Fantasy characters like elves, fairies, orcs, dragon catchers and most wizards are just too "out there" to be entertaining to patrons. Mongolian tree druids just don't mean anything to the paying customer. While terribly romantic on the movie screen, queen's paramours, king's mistresses, illegitimate children of royalty, wanton whores and the like are often negative choices for a character in the faire venue. Melancholy runaway orphans are only interesting in novels. Your character's name should not be yet another Tolkienesque take-off like Livia Stardancer or Silver Feather Moon. It's just goofy. If your name is Gaelic or Welsh, have a pronounceable and memorable nickname. Titles and Forms of Address

While at the Renaissance Faire only, traditional roles (Dominant, Switch, sub) will not matter, what will matter is their role in the Renaissance society.  Ex. A Dominant who is a knight would be expected to call the King and Queen by title and show them the due respect of their position.

Knights are "Sir". Female knights are "Dame." The wife of a knight is addressed with her first name, then Lady (married name) as in Katherine, Lady Latimer. She is NEVER addressed as Lady Katherine Latimer. That is reserved for the wives and daughters of Barons/Baronesses and above. Barons/Baronesses and above are "My Lord/Lady." Dukes/Duchesses, Cardinals, Bishops and Archbishops are "Your Grace" or "My Lord/Lady." Princes/princesses are "Your Grace" or "Your Highness." Kings/Queens are "Your Grace", "Your Highness" or "Your Majesty". Majesty is preferable for Kings/Queens. Only the King is Sire or Dread Sovereign.

[ciathyzareposts]

The Last Works Before the Renaissance

By 1993, textual interactive fiction was reaching the fag end of the unsettled, uncertain half-decade-and-change between the shuttering of Infocom and the rise of a new Internet-centered community of amateur enthusiasts. Efforts by such collectives as Adventions and High Energy Software to sell text adventures via the shareware model had largely proved unfruitful, while, with the World Wide Web still in its infancy, advertisement and distribution were major problems even for someone willing to release her games for free. The ethos of text and parsers seemed about as divorced as anything could possibly be from the predominant ethos in game development more generally, with its focus on multimedia, full-motion video, and ultra-accessible mouse-driven interfaces. Would text adventures soon be no more than obscure relics of a more primitive past? To an increasing number even of the form’s most stalwart fans, an answer in the affirmative was starting to feel like a foregone conclusion. Few text-adventure authors had serious ambitions of matching the technical or literary quality of Infocom during this period, much less of exceeding it; the issue for the medium right now was one of simple survival. In this atmosphere, the arrival of any new text adventure felt like a victory against the implacable forces of technological change, which had conspired to all but strangle this new literary form before it had even had time to get going properly.

Thankfully, history would later mark 1993 as the year when the seeds of an interactive-fiction rebirth were planted, thanks to an Englishman who repurposed not only the Infocom aesthetic but also Infocom’s own technology in unexpected ways. Those seeds would flower richly in 1995, Year Zero of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance. I’ll begin that story soon.

Today, though, I’d like to tell you about some of the more interesting games to emerge from the final days of the interstitial period — games which actually overlap, although no one could realize it at the time, with the dawning of the modern interactive-fiction community. Indeed, the games I describe below manage to presage some of the themes of that community despite being the products of a text-adventuring culture that still spent more time looking backward than looking forward. I’m fond of all of them in one way or another, and I’m willing to describe at least one of them as a sadly overlooked classic.

The Horror of Rylvania

The hiking trip across Europe has been a wonderful experience for two recent college graduates like yourself and your friend Carolyn. From the mansions of England to the beaches of Greece, you’ve walked in the footsteps of the Crusaders and seen sights that few Americans have ever seen.

Carolyn had wanted to skip the Central European nation of Rylvania. “Why bother?” she’d said. “There’s nothing but farmers there, and creepy old castles - nothing we haven’t seen already. The Rylvanians are still living in the last century.”

That, you’d insisted, was exactly why Rylvania was a must-see. The country was an intact piece of living history, a real treasure in this modern age. If only you hadn’t insisted! As night fell, as you approached a small farming village in search of a quaint inn to spend the night, the howling began. A scant hundred yards from the village, and it happened...the wolves appeared from the black forest around you and attacked. Big, black wolves that leaped for Carolyn’s throat before you could shout a warning, led by a great gray-black animal that easily stood four feet at the shoulder. Carolyn fell to the rocky path, blood gushing from her neck as the wolves faded back into the trees, unwilling, for some unknown reason, to press their attack.

If she dies, it will be your fault. You curse the darkening sky as you cradle Carolyn’s head, knowing that you have little time to find help. Perhaps in the village up the road to the north.

The Horror of Rylvania marks the last shareware release from Adventions, a partnership between the MIT graduate students Dave Baggett and D.A. Leary which was the most sustained of all efforts to make a real business out of selling interactive fiction during the interstitial period. Doubtless for this reason, the Adventions games are among the most polished of all the text adventures made during this time. They were programmed using the sophisticated TADS development system rather than the more ramshackle AGT, with all the benefits that accrued to such a choice. And, just as importantly, they were thoroughly gone over for bugs as well as spelling and grammar problems, and are free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings that were once par for the course in amateur interactive fiction.

For all that, though, the Adventions games haven’t aged all that well in my eyes. The bulk of them take place in a fantasy land known as Unnkulia, which is trying so hard to ape Zork‘s Great Underground Empire that it’s almost painful to watch. In addition to being derivative, the Unnkulia games think they’re far more clever and hilarious than they actually are — the very name of the series/world is a fine case in point — while the overly fiddly gameplay can sometimes grate almost as much as the writing.

It thus made for a welcome change when Adventions, after making three and a half Unnkulia games, finally decided to try something else. Written by D.A. Leary, The Horror of Rylvania is more plot-driven than Adventions’s earlier games, a Gothic vampire tale in which you actually become a vampire not many turns in. It’s gone down in certain circles as a minor classic, for reasons that aren’t totally unfounded. Although the game has a few more potential walking-dead scenarios than is perhaps ideal, the puzzles are otherwise well-constructed, the implementation is fairly robust, and, best of all, most of the sophomoric attempts at humor that so marked Adventions’s previous games are blessedly absent.

That said, the end result still strikes me more as a work of craftsmanship than genius. The writing has been gone over for spelling and grammar without addressing some of its more deep-rooted problems, as shown even by the brief introduction above; really, now, have “few Americans ever seen” sights advertised in every bog-standard package tour of Europe? (Something tells me Leary hadn’t traveled much at the time he wrote this game.) The writing here has some of the same problems with tone as another Gothic horror game from 1993 set in an ersatz Romania: Quest for Glory IV. It wants to play the horror straight most of the time, and is sometimes quite effective at it — the scene of your transformation from man to vampire is particularly well-done — but just as often fails to resist the centrifugal pull which comedy has on the adventure-game genre.

Still, Horror of Rylvania is the Adventions game which plays best today, and it isn’t a bad choice for anyone looking for a medium-sized old-school romp with reasonably fair puzzles. Its theme adds to its interest; horror in interactive fiction tends to hew more to either H.P. Lovecraft or zombie movies than the Gothic archetypes which Horror of Rylvania intermittently manages to nail. Another extra dimension of interest is added by the ending, which comes down to a binary choice between curing your friend Carolyn from the curse of vampirism, which entails sacrificing yourself in the process, or curing yourself and letting Carolyn sod off. As we’ll shortly see, the next and last Adventions game perhaps clarifies some of the reasons for such a moral choice’s inclusion at the end of a game whose literary ambitions otherwise don’t seem to extend much beyond being a bit of creepy fun.

The Jeweled Arena

You let out a sigh of relief as you finish the last paper. “That’s the lot.”

“Good work, ma’am,” says Regalo, your squire. “I was almost afraid we’d be here until midnight.”

“Don’t worry, Regalo, I wouldn’t do a thing like that, especially on my first healthy day after the flu. In any case, Dora wants me home by eight. The papers look dry, so you can take them to Clara’s office.”

As Regalo carries the papers to the adjoining office, you stand up and stretch your aching muscles. You then look through the window and see a flash of lightning outside. It looks like quite a storm is brewing. “I’m beginning to think my calendar is set wrong,” you say as Regalo returns. “Dibre’s supposed to be cool, dry, and full of good cheer; so far, we’ve had summer heat, constant rain, and far too many death certificates. Perhaps this storm will blow out the heat.” “I hope it blows out the plague with it, ma’am. I’ve lost three friends already, and my wife just picked it up yesterday. No one likes it when the coroner’s staff is overworked.”

“It doesn’t help that Clara and Resa are both still sick. If we’re lucky, we’ll have Resa back tomorrow, which I’m sure your feet would appreciate. I presume Ernando and Miranda have already left for the day?” “Yes ma’am.”

“Now I’m really worried. The only thing worse than being the victim of one of Miranda’s pranks is going a day without one of her pranks -– it usually means you missed something. Perhaps she decided to be discrete [sic] for a change.”

“I didn’t get the impression her sense of humor was taking the day off, but I don’t know what she did. It can wait until tomorrow. Is there anything else you need me to do before I leave?”

Written by David S. Raley, The Jeweled Arena was the co-winner of what would turn out to be the last of the annual competitions organized by AGT’s steward, David M. Malmberg, before he released the programming language as freeware and stepped away from further involvement with the interactive-fiction community. Set in a fantasy world, but a thankfully non-Zorkian and non-Tolkienesque one, it’s both an impressive piece of world-building and a game of unusual narrative ambition for its time.

In fact, the world of Valdalan seems like it must have existed in the author’s head for a long time before this game was written. The environment around you has the feeling of being rooted in far more lore and history than is explicitly foregrounded in the text, always the mark of first-class world-building. As far as I can tell from the text, Valdalan is roughly 17th-century in terms of its science and technology, but is considerably more enlightened philosophically. Interestingly, magic seems to have no place here, making it almost more of an alternative reality than a conventional fantasy milieu.

The story takes place in the city of Kumeran as it’s in the throes of a plague — a threat which is, like so much else in this game, handled with more subtlety than you might expect. The plot plays out in four chapters, during each of which you play the role of a different character. The first chapter is worthy of becoming a footnote in interactive-fiction history at the very least, in that it casts you as one half of a lesbian couple. In later years, certain strands of interactive fiction — albeit more of the hypertext than the parser-driven type — would become a hotbed of advocacy for non- hetero-normative lifestyles. The Jeweled Arena has perhaps aged better in this respect than many of those works have (or will); it presents its lesbian protagonist in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way, neither turning her into an easy villain or victim, as an earlier game might have done, nor celebrating her as a rainbow-flag-waving heroine, as a later game might have done. She’s just a person; the game takes it as a given that she’s worthy of exactly the same level of respect as any of the rest of us. In 1993, this matter-of-fact attitude toward homosexuality was still fairly unusual. Raley deserves praise for it.

Unfortunately, The Jeweled Arena succeeds better as a place and a story than it does as a game, enough so that one is tempted to ask why Raley elected to present it in the form of a text adventure at all. He struggles to come up with things for you to really do as you wander the city. This tends to be a problem with a lot of interactive fiction where the puzzles aren’t the author’s primary focus; A Mind Forever Voyaging struggles to some extent with the same issue when it sends you wandering through its own virtual city. But The Jeweled Arena, which doesn’t have a mechanic like A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s commandment to observe and record to ease its way, comes off by far the worse of the two. Most of the tasks it sets before you are made difficult not out of  authorial intention but due to poor authorial prompting and the inherent limitations of AGT. In other words, first you have to figure out what non-obvious trigger the game is looking for to advance the plot a beat, and then you have to figure out the exact way the parser wants you to say it. This constant necessity to read the author’s mind winds up spoiling what could have been an enjoyable experience, and makes The Jeweled Arena a game that can truly be recommended only to those with an abiding interest in text-adventure history or the portrayal of homosexuality in interactive media. A pity — with more testing and better technology, it could have been a remarkable achievement.

Klaustrophobia

You are standing at the top of an ocean bluff. Wind is whipping through your hair and blowing your voluminous black cape out behind you. You can hear the hiss of the surf crashing far below you. Out towards the horizon, a distant storm sends flickers of lightning across the darkening sky. The last rays of the setting sun reflect red off the windows of the grey stone mansion to the East. As you turn towards the house, you catch a glimpse of a haunting face in one of the windows. That face, you will never forget that face......

> wait The surf and cliffs fade from sight............ You awake to find yourself in your living room,lying on the couch. Your cat, Klaus, is chewing and pulling on your hair. Static is hissing from the TV, as the screen flickers on a station long off the air. You look at your watch and realize that it is 3 AM. You must have fallen asleep on the couch right after you got home from work, and settled down to read the newspaper.

I noted earlier that the Adventions games are “free of the gawky authorial asides and fourth-wall-breakings” that mark most early amateur interactive fiction. That statement applies equally to The Jeweled Arena, but not at all to Carol Hovick’s Klaustrophobia. The other winner of the final AGT competition, its personality could hardly be more different from its partner on the podium. This is a big, rambling, jokey game that’s anything but polished. And yet it’s got an unpretentious charm about it, along with puzzles that turn out to be better than they first seem like they’re going to be.

What Klaustrophobia lacks in polish or literary sophistication, it attempts to make up for in sheer sprawl. It’s actually three games in one — so big that, even using the most advanced and least size-constrained version of AGT, Hovick was forced to split it into three parts, gluing them together with some ingenious hacks that are doubtless horrifying in that indelible AGT way to any experienced programmer. The three parts together boast a staggering 560 rooms and 571 objects, making Klaustrophobia easily one of the largest text adventures ever created.

Like the Unnkulia series and so much else from the interstitial period, Klaustrophobia is hugely derivative of the games of the 1980s. The story and puzzles here draw heavily from Infocom’s Bureaucracy, which is at least a more interesting choice than yet another Zork homage. You’ve just won an all-expenses-paid trip to appear on a quiz show, but first you have to get there; this exercise comes to absorb the first third of the game. Then, after you’ve made the rounds of not one but several quiz shows in the second part, part three sends you off to “enjoy” the Mexican vacation you’ve won. As a member of that category of text adventure which the Interactive Fiction Database dubs the “slice of life,” the game has that time-capsule quality I’ve mentioned before as being such a fascinating aspect of amateur interactive fiction. Klaustrophobia is a grab bag of pop-culture ephemera from the United States of 1993: Willard Scott, Dolly Parton, The Price is Right. If you lived through this time and place, you might just find it all unbearably nostalgic. (Why do earlier eras of history almost invariably seem so much happier and simpler?) And if you didn’t… well, there are worse ways to learn about everyday American life in 1993, should you have the desire to do so, than playing through this unforced, agenda-less primary source.

The puzzles are difficult in all the typical old-school ways: full of time limits, requiring ample learning by death. Almost inevitably given the game’s premise, they sometimes fail to fall on the right side of the line between being comically aggravating and just being aggravating. And the game is rough around the edges in all the typical AGT ways: under-tested (a game this large almost has to be) and haphazardly written, and subject to all the usual frustrations of the AGT parser and world model. Yet, despite it all, the author’s design instincts are pretty good; most of the puzzles are clued if you’re paying attention. Many of them involve coming to understand and manipulate some surprisingly complex dynamic sequences taking place around you. The whole experience is helped immensely by the episodic structure which exists even within each of the three parts: you go from your home to the bank to the airport, etc., with each vignette effectively serving as its own little self-contained adventure game. This structure lets Klaustrophobia avoid the combinatorial explosion that can make such earlier text-adventure epics as Acheton and Zork Zero all but insoluble. Here, you can work out a single episode, then move on to the next at your leisure with a nice sense of achievement in your back pocket — as long, of course, as you haven’t left anything vital behind.

Klaustrophobia is a game that I regard with perhaps more affection that I ought to, given its many and manifest flaws. While much of my affection may be down to the fact that it was one of the first games I played when I rediscovered interactive fiction around the turn of the millennium, I like to believe this game has more going for it than nostalgia. It undoubtedly requires a certain kind of player, but, whether taken simply as a text adventure or as an odd sort of sociological study — a frozen-in-amber relic of its time and place — it’s not without its intrinsic appeal. Further, it strikes me as perfect for its historical role as the final major statement made with AGT; something more atypically polished and literary, such as Shades of Gray or even Cosmoserve, just wouldn’t work as well in that context. Klaustrophobia‘s more messy sort of charm, on the other hand, feels like the perfect capstone to this forgotten culture of text adventuring, whose games were more casual but perhaps in some ways more honest because of it.

The Legend Lives! A pattern of bits shifts inside your computer. New information scrolls up the screen. It is not good.

As the impact of the discovery settles on your psyche, you recall the preceding events: your recent enrollment at Akmi Yooniversity; your serendipitous discovery of the joys of Classical Literature – a nice change of pace from computer hacking; your compuarchaeological discovery of the long-forgotten treasures that will make your thesis one of the most important this decade. But now that’s all a bit moot, isn’t it?

How ironic: You were stunned at how *real* the primitive Unnkulian stories seemed. Now you know why.

David Baggett’s The Legend Lives! is the only game on this curated list that dates from 1994, the particularly fallow year just before the great flowering of 1995. The very last production of the Adventions partnership, it was originally planned as another shareware title, but was ultimately released for free, a response to the relatively tepid registration rate of Advention’s previous games. Having conceived it as nothing less than a Major Statement meant to prod the artistic growth of a nascent literary medium, Baggett stated that he wished absolutely everyone to have a chance to play his latest game.

Ironically, the slightly uncomfortable amalgamation that is The Legend Lives! feels every bit as of-its-time today as any of the less artistically ambitious text adventures I’ve already discussed in this article. Set in the far future of Adventions’s Unnkulia universe, it reads like a checklist of what “literary” interactive fiction circa 1994 might be imagined to require.

There must, first and foremost, be lots and lots of words for something to be literary, right? Baggett has this covered… oh, boy, does he ever. The first room description, for the humble dorm room of the university student you play, consists of six substantial paragraphs — two or three screenfuls of text on the typical 80-column monitor displays of the day. As you continue to play, every object mentioned anywhere, no matter how trivial, continues to be described to within an inch of its life. While Baggett’s dedication is admirable, these endless heaps of verbiage do more to confuse than edify, especially in light of the fact that this game is, despite its literary aspirations, far from puzzleless. There’s a deft art to directing the player’s attention to the things that really matter in a text adventure — an art which this game comprehensively fails to exhibit. And then there are the massive non-interactive text dumps, sometimes numbering in the thousands of words, which are constantly interrupting proceedings. Sean Molley, reviewing the game in the first gush of enthusiasm which accompanied its release, wrote that “I certainly don’t mind reading 10 screens of text if it helps to advance the story and give me something to think about.” I suspect that most modern players wouldn’t entirely agree. The Legend Lives! is exhausting enough in its sheer verbosity to make you long for the odd minimalist poetry of Scott Adams. “Ok, too dry. Fish die” starts looking pretty good after spending some time with this game.

And yet, clumsy and overwrought though the execution often is, there is a real message here — one I would even go so far as to describe as thought-provoking. The Legend Lives! proves to be an old-school cyberpunk tale — another thing dating it indelibly to 1994 — about a computer virus that has infected Unnkulia’s version of the Internet and threatens to take over the entirety of civilization. The hero that emerges and finally sacrifices himself to eliminate the scourge is known mostly by his initials: “JC.” He’s allegedly an artificial intelligence, but he’s really, it would seem, an immaculate creation, a divinity living in the net. An ordinary artificial intelligence, says one character, “is smart with no motivation, no goals; no creativity, ya see. JC, he’s like us.” What we have here, folks, is an allegory. I trust that I need not belabor the specific parallels with another famous figure who shares the same initials.

But I don’t wish to trivialize the message here too much. It’s notable that this argument for a non-reductionist view of human intelligence — for a divine spark to the human mind that can’t be simulated in silicon — was made by a graduate student in MIT’s artificial-intelligence lab, working in the very house built by Marvin Minsky and his society of mind. Whatever one’s feelings about the Christian overtones to Baggett’s message, his impassioned plea that we continue to allow a place for the ineffable has only become more relevant in our current age of algorithmization and quantization.

Like all of the Adventions games, this one has been virtually forgotten today, despite being widely heralded upon its release as the most significant work of literary interactive fiction to come along since A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. That’s a shame. Yes, writers of later text adventures would learn to combine interactivity with literary texture in more subtle and effective ways, but The Legend Lives! is nevertheless a significant way station in the slow evolution of post-Infocom interactive fiction, away from merely reflecting the glory of a storied commercial past and toward becoming a living, evolving artistic movement in its own right.

Perdition’s Flames *** You have died. ***

All is dark and quiet. There is no sensation, no time. Your mind floats peacefully in a void. You perceive nothing, you feel nothing, you think nothing. Sleep without dreams.

All is hazy and gray. Sensation is vague and indistinct. Your mind is sluggish, sleepy. You see gray shapes in a gray fog; you hear distant, muffled sounds. You think, but your thoughts are fleeting, disconnected, momentary flashes of light in a dark night. Time is still frames separated by eons of nothing, brief awakenings in a long sleep.

All is clear and sharp. Sensation crystalizes from a fog. You see, you hear, you feel. Your mind awakens; you become aware of a place, and a time.

You are on a boat.

Last but far from least, we come to the real jewel of this collection, a game which I can heartily recommend to everyone who enjoys text adventures. Perdition’s Flames was the third game written by Mike Roberts, the creator of the TADS programming language. While not enormous in the way of Klaustrophobia, it’s more than substantial enough in its own right, offering quite a few hours of puzzling satisfaction.

The novel premise casts you as a soul newly arrived in Hell. (Yes, just as you might expect, there are exactly 666 points to score.) Luckily for you, however, this is a corporate, postmodern version of the Bad Place. “Ever since the deregulation of the afterlife industry,” says your greeter when you climb off the boat, “we’ve had to compete with Heaven for eternal souls — because you’re free to switch to Heaven at any time. So, we’ve been modernizing! There really isn’t much eternal torment these days, for example. And, thanks to the Environmental Clean-up Superfund, we have the brimstone problem mostly under control at this point.”

As the game continues, there’s a lot more light satire along those lines, consistently amusing if not side-splittingly funny. Your goal is to make the ascent to Heaven, which isn’t quite as easy as your greeter implies. Achieving it will require solving lots and lots of puzzles, which are varied, fair, and uniformly enjoyable. In fact, I number at least one of them among the best puzzles I’ve ever seen. (For those who have already played the game: that would be the one where you’re a ghost being pursued by a group of paranormal researchers.)

Although Perdition’s Flames is an old-school puzzlefest in terms of categorization, it’s well-nigh breathtakingly progressive in terms of its design sensibility. For this happens to be a text adventure — the first text adventure ever, to my knowledge — which makes it literally impossible for you to kill yourself (after all, you are already dead) or lock yourself out of victory. It is, in other words, the Secret of Monkey Island of interactive fiction, an extended proof that adventure games without deaths or dead ends can nevertheless be intriguing, challenging, and immensely enjoyable. Roberts says it right there in black and white:

Note that in Perdition’s Flames, in contrast to many other adventure games, your character never gets killed, and equally importantly, you’ll never find yourself in a position where it’s impossible to finish the game. You have already seen the only “*** You have died ***” message in Perdition’s Flames. As a result, you don’t have to worry as much about saving game positions as you may be accustomed to.

I can’t emphasize enough what an astonishing statement that is to find in a text adventure from 1993. Perdition’s Flames and its author deserve to be celebrated for making it every bit as much as we celebrate Monkey Island and Ron Gilbert.

Yet even in its day Perdition’s Flames was oddly overlooked in proportion to its size, polish, and puzzly invention alone, much less the major leap it represents toward an era of fairer, saner text adventures. And this even as the merciful spirit behind the humble statement above, found buried near the end of the in-game instructions, was destined to have much more impact on the quality of the average player’s life than all of the literary pretensions which The Legend Lives! so gleefully trumpets.

Roberts’s game was overshadowed most of all by what would go down in history as the text adventure of 1993: Graham Nelson’s Curses!. Said game is erudite, intricate, witty, and sometimes beautifully written — and runs on Infocom’s old Z-Machine, which constituted no small part of its appeal in 1993. But it’s also positively riddled with the types of sudden deaths and dead ends which Perdition’s Flames explicitly eschews. You can probably guess which of the pair holds up better for most players today.

So, as we prepare to dive into the story of how Curses! came to be, and of how it turned into the seismic event which revitalized the near-moribund medium of interactive fiction and set it on the path it still travels today, do spare a thought for Perdition’s Flames as well. While Curses! was the the first mover that kicked the modern interactive-fiction community into gear, Perdition’s Flames, one might argue, is simply the first work of modern interactive fiction, full stop. All of its contemporaries, Curses! included, seem regressive next to its great stroke of genius. Go forth and play it, and rejoice. An Interactive Fiction Renaissance is in the offing.

(All of the games reviewed in this article are freely available via the individual links provided above and playable on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux using the Gargoyle interpreter among other options.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-last-works-before-the-renaissance/

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I just identified who Cadrach was supposed to be.

To explain what I mean: "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" is one of the most prominent "Tolkienesque fantasy" series around, aka taking back the universe created by Tolkien as a main inspiration and model (canvas if you will) to weave a new fantasy series ; and as a result taking back worldbuilding elements, character archetypes and plot points, but mixing them, twisting them and shifting them to create something new (it is a process that has been very regularly done throughout the history of fantasy, from Shannara and Fionavar to the Belgariad and the Wheel of Time).

And with most people within "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn", it is obvious who is who, even though characters gets fused or split up a LOT. Like Gandalf: he is literaly broken into Morgenes, Jarnauga and Geloe. Or Galadriel who is divided between Amerasu and Utuk'ku (I love how Tad Williams with Utuk'ku did the insane move of saying "What if Galadriel as the "beautiful and terrible queen" was the same character as Ungoliant"). Elias and Josua are a fucked-up version of Boromir and Faramir, Pryrates is a more vicious Saruman with some shades of Sauron in his "right-hand of Morgoth" days, Ineluki is a LOT of people, etc etc...

But I had to wait until arriving at the last book (well the first part of the last book) to suddenly have the revelation of who Cadrach was based upon in The Lord of the Rings. It is not at all obvious, it was well hidden, but I saw it.

Cadrach is basically a benevolent and human version of Gollum. Think about it, and it makes sense.

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The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her, from her stern and harsh personality, to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë - who also has a few elements of Baba-Yaga in her most positive incarnations. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".

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As I said in a previous post, one of the main strengths and virtues of the Belgaria, and what made it such a success at the time, was how it subverted the typical "Tolkien archetypes "that had become prevalent thanks to the LotR copycats. (I spoke about this in my Tolkienesque Renaissance posts).

It showed how you could reuse the "Tolkienesque formula" and the tropes popularize by Lord of the Rings... while still switching, twisting, reinventing what had already turned into cliches and stereotypes. Yes, now the Belgariad series seems like a cliche because we are used to modern fantasy... But you have to put this back in the context of the 80s. The time of the early D&Ds. In fact, comparing The Belgariad and the early stages of D&D is quite revealing - you should try, if you have time.

But just to highlight the way the Belgariad subverts the "Tolkien mold" some highlights (WARNING, spoilers):

The Orb of Aldur VS The One Ring. Both magical items sought after by the God of Evil, and key to his destruction - but the Orb has to be preserved and used against the God of Evil, not destroyed. Both are sentient items of ungodly power that can easily corrupt their owner into becoming world-destroying tyrants... But whereas the Rings willingly corrupts out of evil, the Orb of Aldur is actually just trying its best to please its owner and grant its wishes, simply lacking a sense of scale and not realizing the consequences of its divine powers. (Oh, an army is following you and you want to escape? LET'S SPLIT THE CONTINENT IN HALF, an endless chasm should stop them)

Belgarath vs Gandalf. Both nearly immortal magic-users, who have wandered the earth for a very long time, are some of the strongest magic forces around and appear as elderly, grumpy bearded men who act as a mentor figure to the hero and guide to the protagonist-party. But Belgarath, unlike Gandalf, is a human being, and his human nature is shown in full force. He is far from being perfect - he is notably lustful and a drunkard. He had once a family, and still has a daughter. Becoming immortal and wandering the earth for millenia, seeing empires rise and fall, and the bad guys committing atrocities, and idiots being idiots, left him bitter, cynical and filled with anger and disdain at many things in the world. And his fight against the bad guys is something personal, vengeful and filled with rage.

Polgara vs... no one. As I said in my previous posts, about the Tolkienesque Renaissance and the "woman-wizard", Polgara was one of the first attempts in fantasy literature at the time to subvert this sexist cliche that had installed itself in the post-Tolkien fantasy, and that Pratchett denounced several times (in his article "Why Gandalf never married" or his novel "Equal Rites"). Because Polgara was one of the rare powerful female magic users of the 80s to be A) just as powerful and a full equal to the male magic user ; and B) a good person on the side of the heroes. And it was quite a BIG step to have a literal "female Gandalf" back in the 80s.

Zedar vs Saruman. Zedar is just like Saruman a wizard (sorry "sorcerer" because another Tolkien subversion, in this world "wizard" is an insult) who betrayed his order to follow the local Evil God. But unlike Saruman he is not a great mastermind trying to cross everybody: he is almost a ghost of a character who keeps fleeing in front of the heroes, and when we finally see him, we discover not an arrogant bully, but a broken and sad man who deeply regrets siding with the Evil Overlord, because as it turns out, becoming the minion of an evil deity is like being in a VERY abusive relationship.

The Disciples of Aldur vs The Istari. The sorcerers of the Belgariad are also five magic-users part of an order who all appear as old bearded men... One heroic one, one betraying one, one weirdo an two coming as a package deal. But here, the idea of the Istari is played around: the reason they have their power is because they are human beings who became the personal disciples of the god of magic, and the reason they all look like old bearded men is precisely because Aldur, their god and master, looks like this, and his divine influence ended up "shaping" his disciples in his likeness.

All of the points above are why I personally enjoyed reading The Belgariad. You can literaly take it as a fun take on the Lord of the Rings-copycats. Not high literature, not great literature, unfortunately carries with it some of the problems of 80s American fantasy with it... But you know, for a Tolkien fan, it can always be a fun read as a "spot the differences and similarities, and see through the narrative what the author tried to say or highlight about Tolkinesque cliches".

[And then came the Malloreon which... *sigh*

In all honesty, the only virtue of the Malloreon as a sequel is that it extends and adds to the worldbuilding, and works at fighting the unfortunate trope of "Good White guys from the West vs Evil swarthy Easterns" that the Belgariad inherited from Tolkien and DID NOT THINK OF SUBVERTING. The Malloreon does explore this "evil East", the variety and complexity of its population, shows that not all of them were behind the Evil overlord, that they existed before and after said Evil Overlord came - in fact said God of Evil literaly destroyed a lot of thriving cultures in his attempt at complete continental domination ; and we get to see the various religious, cultural and phlosophical currents making a vast tapestry ot countries.

And that's more exploring of the "evil East" than Tolkien himself ever did, so kudos for that! But unfortunately it has to arrive in what is obviously a very bad sequel series that is badly written half of the time, has the characters reduced to caricatures, has such an obvious plot contrivence and deus ex machinas because the Eddings didn't know how they could logically lead their story where they wanted to, and where the Eddings old-fashioned sexism rears up its head alongside the first hints of the vaguely pedophile-like vibes I got from later Eddings books...]

[mask131]

It is very true, however I do think a certain nuance should be brought because, while Tolkien's influence is VERY prevalent, it is not as prevalent as one would think. As in the phenomenon you described (and I described before you) does exist... but at the same time, a lot of the "Tolkienesque parentage" is self-imposed by audiences.

When it comes to the legacy of Tolkien on fantasy, you have three broad categories, and I will be using solely 20th century examples for the simplicity of the demonstration. There are the copycats/heavy homages (Shannara style). There are the subversions, reinventions and "freshening" that I describe personally as the "Tolkienesque renaissance" (Belgariad, Memory Sorrow and Thorn, Wheel of Time, etc). The two are quite similar and thus it can be hard to clean-cut between them ; Shannara is definitively a "copycat", and the Belgariad a "subversion", but where does the Fionavar Tapestry stands? Anyway... And the third group is the "anti-Tolkien", a la Earthsea and Elric.

But there are also works of fantasy that were key to the genre, and literaly had no Tolkien bearing whatsoever, and one would have some pretty strong bad faith to consider them "Tolkienesque". To take back a series I evoked above: The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance. Series of the 50s. Very influential in fantasy even though people forgot it today - but it literaly was one of the key ingredients that saw the birth of D&D. Still remembered and praised today by authors like J.R.R. Martin (? I'm not quite sure it's him I might be wrong) and Neil Gaiman (I am mostly referring to the anthology of tales recently published taking place in the Dying Earth). And yet there is not a single trace of Tolkien whatsoever.

So while Tolkien IS one of the big shadows looming over fantasy, the idea one is stuck into Tolkien is literaly false - or rather it is something the audience was trained to learn and expect, and something authors were forced into by publishers or themselves. By either writing copies of Tolkien's work, or deliberately putting themselves out of Tolkien. But there are so many fantasy works out there that are not related to Tolkien in any way. It is just that people tend to not speak about them much PRECISELY because everybody talks about/searches for "things that are like Tolkien" or "things that are not Tolkien".

One should also definitively not forget the influences of other "early behemoths" of fantasy literature whose influence kept spreading throughout the 20th century. One of them being the Conan stories. It is quite an interesting case because today the Conan stories are quite "forgotten", as in everybody knows they exist, but they do not have the same dedicated love and carefully "revival" as the Tolkien works, and people usually just stay stuck at the 80s Conan movies or the D&D Barbarians and that's it, they don't go further. And yet the Conan stories were a VERY huge influence on fantasy. I said "The Dying Earth" has no Tolkien in it whatsoever. But you can feel the presence of a certain Robert E. Howard influence, a la Conan or Solomon Kane. Elric? It was created to counter BOTH Tolkien and Howard's Conan, deemed at the time equal in rank in the world of fantasy. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? That's an anti-Conan first and foremost, with very little Tolkien in it - if any Tolkien there is AT ALL.

If I had one conclusion to provide I would simply say: yes, Tolkien is the grandpa of fantasy... But one should remember that in a family there are always several granddads. And so while everybody likes to shorten it up to Tolkien, there was truly a sort of "indirect collaborative effort" by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Poul Anderson, Lord Dunsany and many more. While yes, a lot of fantasy in the modern sense of the term IS Tolkien, fantasy ITSELF is not Tolkien and existed long before it and still exists outside of its scope. Truly any work taking inspiration from mythologies, legends, fairytales, folktales and whatnot is fantasy. People just tend to forget that.

The thing that I always found abominably fascinating and insanely mind-blowing with the Earthsea series is that it breaks all the worn-out, over-used, “seen everywhere” cliches of fantasy people complain about today and try to avoid. 

Tired of your typical Europe-setting? Here is a world of islands influenced by a lot of various non-European civilizations!

Tired of having a white-predominant cast? Here is a series where people of color are the dominant ethnicities and the white are the minority and bizarre barbarian foreigners from far away!

Tired of having the heroes go on grand and perilous monster-slaying quest to fight some dark overlord or fetch a magical item? Here are books where the villains are elusive, abstract and philosophical threats, where the quests to defeat them are very down-to-earth, solitary and rely more on self-search and the understanding of human nature rather than great exploits. 

Tired of seeing the same old-worn out fantasy races tropes? None of this here! 

This book series was created with the intention of subverting, avoiding or breaking the new tropes and stereotypes that were rising up with the success of Tolkien’s work. It was made to be different and ground-breaking and stereotype-crushing, and it worked extremely well, becoming a classic of fantasy literature and influencing the genre massively… And yet, people only rediscover it today, and know about it today somehow. (Well a “large” today including the dozen of last years of so).

This series is the perfect example of the “new” fantasy that rises up in the modern era, as an attempt to “break off” from the “traditional” or “cliche” fantasy… And the first book has been sitting there since the END OF THE 60s!!! 

There are more examples I could point out of books that present to us a completely out-there, trope reinventing, stereotype breaking form of fantasy - and that yet have been there since the 70s or the 80s, or even before! As I went back in time to see several of the “classics” of fantasy literature, I came to understand something - a lot of the “cliches” and “stereotypes” and “over-used tropes” of fantasy people complain about today were not at all dominant for a very long time. If you believe the words of many people out there, you imagine fantasy never had black characters or queer characters or non-European settings or non-Tolkienesque plotlines until the 2010s or something… Which is not true. Fantasy was such a varied, bizarre, diverse genre in its literary form all throughout the 20th century, and many “old” works of the first generations of the post-Tolkien fantasy are basically what people want to see today as “pattern-breaking and fresh new fantasy”. 

The Tolkienesque-fantasy and all of its cliches and stereotypes were not so much dominant as just present in a handful of massively popular and widespread works - the case of the Shannara series can be pointed out, as its first book was PRAISED at the time for being able to recreate a Tolkien story in the 70s, and it was because it was mostly a copy of the Lord of the Rings that it got so popular (and why it is not well-liked today). And then the 80s rolled and early D&D reignited the flame of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy. By the 90s, it seemed Tolkien had been used and over-used to death, and people didn’t trust it all anymore… Which is why David Eddings’ Belgariad series was created. Its key point was to take back all the elements of the traditional epic fantasy story, but reassemble them, freshen them up, twist them slightly, all of that to re-create a by-the-book BUT fresh, new and interesting series. It was an attempt at prooving that, with innovation and some twists and modernization, the Tolkienesque fantasy would not die - and it worked massively well. And then in the 2000s, the Lord of the Rings movie sealed the deal. 

All these works make it look like fantasy had always been copying or taking inspiration from Tolkien. But it is false. It is true that most of the classics are tied to Tolkien, but not always in imitation or re-creation - in the case of “Earthsea”, there was a willing attempt at getting away and inverting the Tolkienesque fantasy to create a fantasy that went the very opposite direction. Same thing with the Elric Saga, also designed to be the reverse or opposite of The Lord of the Rings, and which in turn became the classic of another new genre of fantasy: dark fantasy. And Conan in all that? People forget that the Conan the Barbarian series were just as influential for fantasy works as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was. The Elric Saga, again, was created to completely reverse and avoid the Conan-like fantasy. A similar thing was done with Leiber for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series, which was designed to break away from the Conan “heroic fantasy” style and reinvent the genre in a new direction. 

There are so many “old” and “classic” works of literary fantasy that actually do not feel like a “classic” at all because they have all the vibes, elements and expectations one has from a non-classic, non-traditional fantasy… BUT THEY ARE THE FOUNDATIONS, they are the basis and classics and inspirations of fantasy. And it all shows this huge gap between what people think fantasy is, and what fantasy really was - it is a fascinating case study of how one specific trend somehow got over the entire genre. Imagine a world where people think Gothic novels can only have a vampire or the ghost of a judge, and must be Bram Stokers-inspired, and that everybody points out they are tired to see Dracula-expies everywhere… Only to discover the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and be baffled by them and their “inventivity” and “breaking of patterns”. I’m sorry, that’s the fastest comparison I can make, but this feels just like that. There is this strangely specific idea of what fantasy is today forged on a few items… I think, beyond the massive success of Tolkien and imitators, D&D probably is also to “blame” for how people see fantasy today.

But even then, D&D took inspiration from so many non-conventional works of fantasy… Yes many became “classics” now, though often ignored by the masses - The Elric Saga, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were big influences. But take the Jack Vance series “The Dying Earth”, another big inspiration on early D&D. Take that. This series is from the 50s - FROM THE 50S - and yet it is a unique genre of sci-fi fantasy that I haven’t seen much being done around, and it creates such a weird, whimsical, bizarre, surrealistic fantasy world, it feels completely unique. And again, it is a classic of the 50s and 60s. 

I don’t really know where I try to go with this but the important thing is: when someone wants to read “non-traditional” or “non-Tolkienesque” fantasy, or “non-stereotyped” fantasy, it is possible, instead of searching for every new author nowadays (not a bad thing to do that though), it is possible to just go back in time, look back at the books of the 70s, 60s and 50s, and find there a novelty, a freshness and an inventivity that is lacking in a mass production of modern day fantasy. And that such a thing is possible is truly crazy for me. I don’t know if such a thing happened with other literary genres, but it is insane that sometimes in fantasy, to see “new” things you just have to look back into the past. 

[themousefromfantasyland]

@ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @princesssarisa

About the "Tolkienesque renaissance"

The term "Tolkienesque renaissance" is of my own invention and creation, but it is a name I use to designate a very specific wave of fantasy fiction, or rather a specific phenomenon in the evolution of fantasy in the English-speaking literature.

As we all know, Tolkien's shadow cannot be escaped when doing fantasy. Tolkien's works being published began the modern fantasy genre as we know it today. D&D, the other big "influencer" of fantasy, would not have existed without Tolkien. The Peter Jackson trilogy began the fantasy renewal of the 21st century. Epic fantasy is a sub-genre explicitely designed after Tolkien's work.

And the massive influence of Tolkien over fantasy is the most felt in the second half of the 20th century, in English-speaking literature, through something I would call the "Tolkien cold-war". When you take a look at the fantasy books of the second half of the 20th century, you notice a fundamental clash and divide splitting it all in some sort of silent feud or discreet conflict. On one side, you have the "Tolkien followers" - as in, the authors who walk in Tolkien's footsteps ; on the other side, you have the "counter-Tolkien" offering what is essentially a counter-culture in a Tolkien-dominated fantasy.

We all know that Tolkien's success was huge in the early second half of the 20th century. The success of "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Hobbit" and the "Silmarillion" was especially important during the 60s and 70s - Gandalf for president and all that... People loved Tolkien's fantasy, people WANTED Tolkien's fantasy, and so publishers and others were happy to oblige. This began the "Tolkien followers" movement - but this beginning was a very unfortunate one, because it was one that relied on not just homage, imitation or pastiche... But in pure copy-cat and sometimes complete rip-off. Since people wanted some Tolkien, people were given LITERAL Tolkienesque fantasy. The most famous (or unfamous example of this would be the 1977 's "The Sword of Shannara" novel. This novel was designed to literaly be a simplified "The Lord of the Rings" with only a few details changed here and there. In fact, this is most of what people recall about this book - how blatant of a Tolkien rip-off it is. And yet, this book was a BEST-SELLER of the 70s fantasy, and it was a huge success, and everybody loved it, precisely because it did the same thing Tolkien did, and so you got to enjoy your favorite series all other again. Afterward, Terry Brooks, the author of the novel, expanded it into a complete series moving into much more original and personal directions, as he admitted himself that doing a Tolkien copy-paste was more of a publishing and editorial decision to make sure he would sell and settle himself in the literary landscape rather than an actual artistic project or personal desire. "The Sword of Shannara" got its own sequels, and became its own thing (though VERY reflective of what the 80s American fantasy was in terms of style, tone and content), but nowadays everybody remembers it for being the "Tolkien rip-off" in its first novel.

And yet being a Tolkien rip-off can sell well, and if the "Shannara" series hadn't proved it, "Dungeons and Dragons" did, since its first edition in the late 70s went as far as to just take Tolkien's inventions such as orcs, Balrogs and hobbits, and include it in its game. The same way the Shannara series then found its own tone and content, through the successive editions Dungeons and Dragons then began to build a world of its own... But it confirms what I said: it was the era of the Tolkien rip-offs.

In front of these "Tolkien followers", which were back then "Tolkien imitators", there was another movement that drove fantasy forward - and it was the "counter-Tolkien movement" so to speak. Works of fantasy that willingly chose to depart from Tolkien's formulas and archetypes and tropes, to do their own thing. Sometimes they did it out of an actual dislike of Tolkien's books: for example the "Elric Saga" was created because Moorcock hated the paternalist, moralist tone of The Lord of the Rings, and so he countered Tolkien's world with a protagonist serving the Lords of Chaos, using a soul-sucking evil sword, last remnant of an empire of cruel, decadent and demonic elves, in a tragic world doomed to endless falls and oblivions... (Though, ironically, Moorcock would end up initiating a genre of dark fantasy that Tolkien himself had explored in his unpublished texts...). Others did it not because they disliked Tolkien but wanted to prove you could do something else: for example Ursula Le Guin admired and appreciated Tolkien's works, but she was fed up with all the imitators and pastiches, and so she created her "Earthsea" world. No European setting dominated by white people, but an archepilago of islands with dark-skinned characters. No big war or political manipulations, the stories being about about the life, journeys and evolution of individual people. No sword-wielding hero or horse-riding paladin, but wizards and priestesses as the protagonists. No big prophecy about the end of the world, flashy magical sword or evil overlord ready to destroy the universe (well... almost), but rather philosophical and existential battles doubling as a fight against oneself and one's very existence...

This counter-Tolkien genre definitively peaked with the other big name of "dark fantasy" and what would annonce the "grimdark fantasy" a la Game of Thrones: Glen Cook's The Black Company.

But what about the titular "Tolkienesque renaissance" I speak of?

Well, if the "Tolkien followers" had only done bad rip-offs, it would have never lasted, ad the "counter-Tolkien" movement would have won. In fact in the 80s, it almost did! Tolkienesque fantasy was thought of as cliched and stereotyped and overdone and dead. People had enough of these blatant-rip offs, as the hype of the 60s and 70s had died out, and the 80s folks turned to other forms of fantasy - such as The Black Company (Dark Fantasy), or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Sword and Sorcery), or various parodies and humoristic fantasies, but all far from the "epic fantasy". And yet, something happened... The "Tolkien imitators" became "Tolkien followers" or rather "Tolkien reinventors", and began the "Tolkienesque renaissance".

The Tolkienesque renaissance is this group of fantasy authors, most predominant in the 90s though they began their work by the late 80s, that decided they would make the Tolkienesque fantasy live on. Not just by copying it as their predecessors did, a la Shannara, no. But by reinventing it, freshening up the old ways for a modern audience and new times. They took back all the key ingredients, and the famed archetypes and the usual tropes of the epic fantasy a la Tolkien, and they reused them without shame... But in new ways, with twists and turns, playing on the codes of the genre, while carefully avoiding the cliches and stereotypes of the time. Giving what people liked about epic fantasy, while also producing new works that felt fresh and went into opposite directions - taking lessons from the counter-Tolkien movement.

It is commonly agreed that the series that began this renaissance was David Eddings' The Belgariad, published between 1982 and 1984. Just a look at the Wikipedia article mentions this best-selling, very influential fantasy series was the "last gasp of traditional fantasy, and the founding megasaga of modern fantasy"... Now, I actually have to disagree with Wikipedia's words. I do not consider it a "last gasp of traditional fantasy" since it already began the Tolkienesque renaissance and thus a new generation of fantasy ; and the other qualificative is ridiculous since modern fantasy already began with Tolkien, and the Belgariad is not a mega-saga, but just five average-sized books. But the idea of it being a link between an older and a newer generation of fantasy books is very true.

While The Belgariad has to be put first, second comes Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, which probably is the most famous of the Tolkienesque renaissance works of the 90s and became this behemoth of fantasy literature. And to make a trilogy of iconic works, I will add another 90s success: Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn". Another iconic work of the Tolkienesque renaissance, though lesser known today than the Belgariad or The Wheel of Time - which is a shame, because Williams' work as a huge and heavy influence on a famous fantasy story of today... "A Song of Ice and Fire", which takes a LOT from "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" (I even call this trilogy the "missing link" between LotR and ASoIaF).

The thing with these Tolkienesque renaissance series is that today, to an audience that was nourished by Tolkien and D&D and Pratchett and other things of the sort, a superficial glance might make them seem like "yet other rip-offs, yet other stereotyped, yet other clichéed" fantasy series. You just have to see the reception of the first season of "The Wheel of Time" tv series - here there was a clash between two generatons of fantasy.

And what these people who take a superficial glance will miss is how inventive and fresh and interesting these series felt back then because they played with or subverted the tropes and the codes of the traditional fantasy. They all played by the usual archetypes - you have an everyman young chosen one, a magical mentor who must "die" at one point, an evil overlord in an ominous half-disembodied state, evil black-clad horsemen going after the hero, elves and dwarves and trolls... And yet, these series twisted these same ingredients they used to bring new flavors.

Let us take the Belgariad briefly, to see how the whole Tolkienesque formula was subverted. Like in Tolkien you've got an order of wizards appeared as elderly, bearded men - but here, they are definitively human beings unlike the otherwordly Istari, and their appearance is explained by them being the disciples of a god that likes to take the appearance of a bearded old man, and who by divine influence made them look like him. You've got a dangerous, all-powerful item the big bad is seeking to destroy the world - but here it is no evil, or corrupting thing. It is rather an item dangerous because of the sheer scope and range of its power, and the temptation isn't becaue it is "evil" power, but just because it is a power so massive it can break the world. You've got a missing king with a stewart/regent holding the throne for him until the lost heir returns - but when said heir returns, the stewart/regent is no evil vizir or scheming usurper, and gladly offers back the throne to its legitimate owner. Belgarath, your Gandalf-stand-in, is far from being the dignified guide and noble mentor of Tolkien, as he is a half-werewolf drunkard that hates any kind of official ceremony or garb and prefers running through the woods or rolling under a table in taverns. And while everything is designed as a Tolkienesque setting, you've got no elves or dwarves or orcs - but humans. And that's a big change compared to more traditional 80s fantasy (like D&D or the Krondor series or Shannara). You have your Nazgûl stand-ins, but they're humans. You've got your Istari, but they're humans. You've got your dwarves equivalent, but they're humans. You've got your orcs equivalents, but human too. And it is shown that it is all a human vs human combat, despite being a world of magic and gods, placing some relativism into it all. (Though the fact they decided to subvert the Tolkienesque good vs evil wordlbuilding by having humans on both sides did cause other aspects of the series to age badly but that's another topic).

I can go on and on but I think you see my point - and this same subversion can be found in the other two series I talked about.

The Wheel of Time begins with the chosen one going on a quest... But which chosen one? That's the problem - there are multiple candidates, and so we begin with a guessing game. And the Aes Sedai are clearly an answer to Tolkien's Istari - but all women instead of all men, and much more numerous and pro-active. As for "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" we have benevolent trolls that are actually more akin to Tolkien's dwarves and have some Inuit-influence, while the Tolkienesque-elves turn out to either be the big bads of the series and the evil guys ; or to be sheltered, useless side-characters that are not helping anyone and cause more problems than anything (I'm exaggerating a bit here, but you get the subversion). Spoilers - but the Galadriel equivalent literaly gets murdered during her second actual appearance, to make it very clear what kind of subversion we are into.

Because this was the game of these books - and the reason they were such huge successes. It wasn't about avoiding or setting themselves free from the tropes and code and archetypes of the genre. Rather it was about reappropiating them, reusing them, twisting them and modernizing them in order to get rid of the stale cliches and frozen stereotypes. It was all a game of imitation yes, but also of derailing - a subtle, discreet, derailing so that everybody got on board of the same type of train, but said train took different tracks to another landscape and worked on a different fuel. (If it makes sense?). It is a game of subtle twists - but unfortunately it is often this subtlety that makes these series overlooked, as people just focus too much on what is identical/similar and not much on what is different... Despite the differences being key here in this effort of renewing what was a dying style. Placing back these books in their context highlights even more how "fresh" they felt back then.

I have one specific point that illustrates this, but I'll need to write a whole post for it...

[mask131]

Self reblogging because I forgot to add a few details

The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her, from her stern and harsh personality, to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë - who also has a few elements of Baba-Yaga in her most positive incarnations. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".

[humanstarsoul]

I always love seeing Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn getting some attention, hugely underrated series! The whole subtle twist thing is what gets me when I describe MST to friends, I have to be like "It's like LotR... actually a LOT like LotR... but I swear it's far from a copy and it's REALLY good!"

About the "Tolkienesque renaissance"

The term "Tolkienesque renaissance" is of my own invention and creation, but it is a name I use to designate a very specific wave of fantasy fiction, or rather a specific phenomenon in the evolution of fantasy in the English-speaking literature.

As we all know, Tolkien's shadow cannot be escaped when doing fantasy. Tolkien's works being published began the modern fantasy genre as we know it today. D&D, the other big "influencer" of fantasy, would not have existed without Tolkien. The Peter Jackson trilogy began the fantasy renewal of the 21st century. Epic fantasy is a sub-genre explicitely designed after Tolkien's work.

And the massive influence of Tolkien over fantasy is the most felt in the second half of the 20th century, in English-speaking literature, through something I would call the "Tolkien cold-war". When you take a look at the fantasy books of the second half of the 20th century, you notice a fundamental clash and divide splitting it all in some sort of silent feud or discreet conflict. On one side, you have the "Tolkien followers" - as in, the authors who walk in Tolkien's footsteps ; on the other side, you have the "counter-Tolkien" offering what is essentially a counter-culture in a Tolkien-dominated fantasy.

We all know that Tolkien's success was huge in the early second half of the 20th century. The success of "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Hobbit" and the "Silmarillion" was especially important during the 60s and 70s - Gandalf for president and all that... People loved Tolkien's fantasy, people WANTED Tolkien's fantasy, and so publishers and others were happy to oblige. This began the "Tolkien followers" movement - but this beginning was a very unfortunate one, because it was one that relied on not just homage, imitation or pastiche... But in pure copy-cat and sometimes complete rip-off. Since people wanted some Tolkien, people were given LITERAL Tolkienesque fantasy. The most famous (or unfamous example of this would be the 1977 's "The Sword of Shannara" novel. This novel was designed to literaly be a simplified "The Lord of the Rings" with only a few details changed here and there. In fact, this is most of what people recall about this book - how blatant of a Tolkien rip-off it is. And yet, this book was a BEST-SELLER of the 70s fantasy, and it was a huge success, and everybody loved it, precisely because it did the same thing Tolkien did, and so you got to enjoy your favorite series all other again. Afterward, Terry Brooks, the author of the novel, expanded it into a complete series moving into much more original and personal directions, as he admitted himself that doing a Tolkien copy-paste was more of a publishing and editorial decision to make sure he would sell and settle himself in the literary landscape rather than an actual artistic project or personal desire. "The Sword of Shannara" got its own sequels, and became its own thing (though VERY reflective of what the 80s American fantasy was in terms of style, tone and content), but nowadays everybody remembers it for being the "Tolkien rip-off" in its first novel.

And yet being a Tolkien rip-off can sell well, and if the "Shannara" series hadn't proved it, "Dungeons and Dragons" did, since its first edition in the late 70s went as far as to just take Tolkien's inventions such as orcs, Balrogs and hobbits, and include it in its game. The same way the Shannara series then found its own tone and content, through the successive editions Dungeons and Dragons then began to build a world of its own... But it confirms what I said: it was the era of the Tolkien rip-offs.

In front of these "Tolkien followers", which were back then "Tolkien imitators", there was another movement that drove fantasy forward - and it was the "counter-Tolkien movement" so to speak. Works of fantasy that willingly chose to depart from Tolkien's formulas and archetypes and tropes, to do their own thing. Sometimes they did it out of an actual dislike of Tolkien's books: for example the "Elric Saga" was created because Moorcock hated the paternalist, moralist tone of The Lord of the Rings, and so he countered Tolkien's world with a protagonist serving the Lords of Chaos, using a soul-sucking evil sword, last remnant of an empire of cruel, decadent and demonic elves, in a tragic world doomed to endless falls and oblivions... (Though, ironically, Moorcock would end up initiating a genre of dark fantasy that Tolkien himself had explored in his unpublished texts...). Others did it not because they disliked Tolkien but wanted to prove you could do something else: for example Ursula Le Guin admired and appreciated Tolkien's works, but she was fed up with all the imitators and pastiches, and so she created her "Earthsea" world. No European setting dominated by white people, but an archepilago of islands with dark-skinned characters. No big war or political manipulations, the stories being about about the life, journeys and evolution of individual people. No sword-wielding hero or horse-riding paladin, but wizards and priestesses as the protagonists. No big prophecy about the end of the world, flashy magical sword or evil overlord ready to destroy the universe (well... almost), but rather philosophical and existential battles doubling as a fight against oneself and one's very existence...

This counter-Tolkien genre definitively peaked with the other big name of "dark fantasy" and what would annonce the "grimdark fantasy" a la Game of Thrones: Glen Cook's The Black Company.

But what about the titular "Tolkienesque renaissance" I speak of?

Well, if the "Tolkien followers" had only done bad rip-offs, it would have never lasted, ad the "counter-Tolkien" movement would have won. In fact in the 80s, it almost did! Tolkienesque fantasy was thought of as cliched and stereotyped and overdone and dead. People had enough of these blatant-rip offs, as the hype of the 60s and 70s had died out, and the 80s folks turned to other forms of fantasy - such as The Black Company (Dark Fantasy), or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (Sword and Sorcery), or various parodies and humoristic fantasies, but all far from the "epic fantasy". And yet, something happened... The "Tolkien imitators" became "Tolkien followers" or rather "Tolkien reinventors", and began the "Tolkienesque renaissance".

The Tolkienesque renaissance is this group of fantasy authors, most predominant in the 90s though they began their work by the late 80s, that decided they would make the Tolkienesque fantasy live on. Not just by copying it as their predecessors did, a la Shannara, no. But by reinventing it, freshening up the old ways for a modern audience and new times. They took back all the key ingredients, and the famed archetypes and the usual tropes of the epic fantasy a la Tolkien, and they reused them without shame... But in new ways, with twists and turns, playing on the codes of the genre, while carefully avoiding the cliches and stereotypes of the time. Giving what people liked about epic fantasy, while also producing new works that felt fresh and went into opposite directions - taking lessons from the counter-Tolkien movement.

It is commonly agreed that the series that began this renaissance was David Eddings' The Belgariad, published between 1982 and 1984. Just a look at the Wikipedia article mentions this best-selling, very influential fantasy series was the "last gasp of traditional fantasy, and the founding megasaga of modern fantasy"... Now, I actually have to disagree with Wikipedia's words. I do not consider it a "last gasp of traditional fantasy" since it already began the Tolkienesque renaissance and thus a new generation of fantasy ; and the other qualificative is ridiculous since modern fantasy already began with Tolkien, and the Belgariad is not a mega-saga, but just five average-sized books. But the idea of it being a link between an older and a newer generation of fantasy books is very true.

While The Belgariad has to be put first, second comes Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, which probably is the most famous of the Tolkienesque renaissance works of the 90s and became this behemoth of fantasy literature. And to make a trilogy of iconic works, I will add another 90s success: Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn". Another iconic work of the Tolkienesque renaissance, though lesser known today than the Belgariad or The Wheel of Time - which is a shame, because Williams' work as a huge and heavy influence on a famous fantasy story of today... "A Song of Ice and Fire", which takes a LOT from "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" (I even call this trilogy the "missing link" between LotR and ASoIaF).

The thing with these Tolkienesque renaissance series is that today, to an audience that was nourished by Tolkien and D&D and Pratchett and other things of the sort, a superficial glance might make them seem like "yet other rip-offs, yet other stereotyped, yet other clichéed" fantasy series. You just have to see the reception of the first season of "The Wheel of Time" tv series - here there was a clash between two generatons of fantasy.

And what these people who take a superficial glance will miss is how inventive and fresh and interesting these series felt back then because they played with or subverted the tropes and the codes of the traditional fantasy. They all played by the usual archetypes - you have an everyman young chosen one, a magical mentor who must "die" at one point, an evil overlord in an ominous half-disembodied state, evil black-clad horsemen going after the hero, elves and dwarves and trolls... And yet, these series twisted these same ingredients they used to bring new flavors.

Let us take the Belgariad briefly, to see how the whole Tolkienesque formula was subverted. Like in Tolkien you've got an order of wizards appeared as elderly, bearded men - but here, they are definitively human beings unlike the otherwordly Istari, and their appearance is explained by them being the disciples of a god that likes to take the appearance of a bearded old man, and who by divine influence made them look like him. You've got a dangerous, all-powerful item the big bad is seeking to destroy the world - but here it is no evil, or corrupting thing. It is rather an item dangerous because of the sheer scope and range of its power, and the temptation isn't becaue it is "evil" power, but just because it is a power so massive it can break the world. You've got a missing king with a stewart/regent holding the throne for him until the lost heir returns - but when said heir returns, the stewart/regent is no evil vizir or scheming usurper, and gladly offers back the throne to its legitimate owner. Belgarath, your Gandalf-stand-in, is far from being the dignified guide and noble mentor of Tolkien, as he is a half-werewolf drunkard that hates any kind of official ceremony or garb and prefers running through the woods or rolling under a table in taverns. And while everything is designed as a Tolkienesque setting, you've got no elves or dwarves or orcs - but humans. And that's a big change compared to more traditional 80s fantasy (like D&D or the Krondor series or Shannara). You have your Nazgûl stand-ins, but they're humans. You've got your Istari, but they're humans. You've got your dwarves equivalent, but they're humans. You've got your orcs equivalents, but human too. And it is shown that it is all a human vs human combat, despite being a world of magic and gods, placing some relativism into it all. (Though the fact they decided to subvert the Tolkienesque good vs evil wordlbuilding by having humans on both sides did cause other aspects of the series to age badly but that's another topic).

I can go on and on but I think you see my point - and this same subversion can be found in the other two series I talked about.

The Wheel of Time begins with the chosen one going on a quest... But which chosen one? That's the problem - there are multiple candidates, and so we begin with a guessing game. And the Aes Sedai are clearly an answer to Tolkien's Istari - but all women instead of all men, and much more numerous and pro-active. As for "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" we have benevolent trolls that are actually more akin to Tolkien's dwarves and have some Inuit-influence, while the Tolkienesque-elves turn out to either be the big bads of the series and the evil guys ; or to be sheltered, useless side-characters that are not helping anyone and cause more problems than anything (I'm exaggerating a bit here, but you get the subversion). Spoilers - but the Galadriel equivalent literaly gets murdered during her second actual appearance, to make it very clear what kind of subversion we are into.

Because this was the game of these books - and the reason they were such huge successes. It wasn't about avoiding or setting themselves free from the tropes and code and archetypes of the genre. Rather it was about reappropiating them, reusing them, twisting them and modernizing them in order to get rid of the stale cliches and frozen stereotypes. It was all a game of imitation yes, but also of derailing - a subtle, discreet, derailing so that everybody got on board of the same type of train, but said train took different tracks to another landscape and worked on a different fuel. (If it makes sense?). It is a game of subtle twists - but unfortunately it is often this subtlety that makes these series overlooked, as people just focus too much on what is identical/similar and not much on what is different... Despite the differences being key here in this effort of renewing what was a dying style. Placing back these books in their context highlights even more how "fresh" they felt back then.

I have one specific point that illustrates this, but I'll need to write a whole post for it...

[themousefromfantasyland]

@ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @princesssarisa

The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her, from her stern and harsh personality, to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë - who also has a few elements of Baba-Yaga in her most positive incarnations. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".