Hello and welcome to this episode of the Oxford Fantasy Literature podcast.
I'm Catherine Ollie, a junior research fellow in mediaeval studies here in Oxford,
and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about the role played by faith in
fantasy literature and a warning here for spoilers for the following fantasy novels.
James Islington Harness Trilogy and Tasha series Realm of Ash.
My interest in this topic was sparked by a passage I read in James Islington the light of all that falls.
The concluding novel in his laconic trilogy, The Central Conflict of his trilogy, revolves around a group of near immortals called the venerate,
most of whom believe that they have been recruited by L. the great benevolent creator deity of
Ellington's fantasy world to save that world from the corresponding evil deity or demon Shyamala.
They believe that L has been trapped inside his creation by the machinations of Shamila,
who has set the world upon a predestined course from which only the Venerate can free it,
thereby liberating Al from the bounds of time in which he is encased and returning free will to the world.
In pursuit of this goal, the Venerate have committed great acts of good as well as great acts of evil.
But as their evil deeds begin to accumulate, some of them start to doubt that the entity that speaks to them and drives them on this mission is,
in fact the benevolent L and begin to fear it is instead Shambhala deceiving them into thinking they are freeing Al whilst really encouraging them to
widen a breach between worlds which will allow the evil of the spirit world beyond called the dark lands to flood the Earth with pain and suffering.
And Islington takes a long time to confirm for the reader which of these two opposing views is the true one,
leaving a sliver of doubt as to whether it is L or Shameless, whom the vendor which has been serving until quite far through the trilogy.
In the course of his adventures, one of the book's main protagonist, Davian, meets a man called Ray Less,
who has been exiled by the venerate for preaching against their belief in L and Damian is somewhat
taken aback by the strength of Ray Letts conviction that the venerate are wrong about L.
Something that Davion himself, though he considers the venerate his enemy, has not fully accepted or has not fully thought through that himself,
and there follows a very interesting discussion between them as Riley sets out his rationale for objecting
to the aims of the venerate and their desire to free out as they see it from the constraints of the world.
And so they think restore free will. And he lays out his beliefs for Davion in the following words on pages three to five to three to six.
Quote a world where all possibilities are promised is by necessity.
A world in which God cannot take part. Cannot choose to accept the world in any way if he exerts his will.
Even a fraction. He is, by definition, changing how things could have been.
He is removing possible outcomes. They either venerate a trying to convince everyone that our creator wished to create a world in
which he could not take part could not help guide or save in which he was functionally irrelevant,
and he goes on again a few lines later. The L I believe in is not just the creator of this world, but inextricably tied to it.
If he were to withdraw from it, it would cease to be as we know it.
It would become a place where all the things we value, all things that have beauty and life and meaning are simply not possible.
End quote.
Relaxed, passionate defence of a God who would not quote abandon us to ourselves page three to seven but would rather intervene to help and guide,
struck me as a rare occurrence in fantasy literature in that it is a depiction and I find it a convincing one of faith.
Very rarely in my reading of fantasy have I come across such a thing.
And let me clarify at this point that when I say faith here, I mean an expression of a personal and profoundly held belief.
In contrast to simply the structures and dogma of an organised religious system, their religion certainly does not have to be a feature of fantasy.
Writing in Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are good examples of books in which religion plays hardly any role.
It has come to have a growing presence,
and most fantasy works these days have some kind of imagined religious belief system or systems to flesh out their cultural world or multiple worlds.
It's quite unusual, however, for these belief systems to have more than what I would call a fairly superficial impact
on the characters motivations and actions in a culture of scepticism and relativism.
Most writers depict religion from an omniscient, impersonal perspective in their work,
viewing it as a cultural, particularly tourism, rather than an objective reality,
rather like a sort of fictional anthropologist probing fantasy religions for
understanding about their doctrines and rituals rather than seeking enlightenment.
The interiority of religious belief or faith as a personal experience is rarely given much thought,
and instead belief is often either two dimensional telling, rather than showing as by frequent allusions and invocations to the relevant fantasy gods.
Or else it is insincere, with religion used as a front for other motivations, usually political or power orientated.
And I would argue, in fact, that the fundamentally secular outlook of many fantasy characters in particular main characters in fantasy
literature is one of the features that that jars most strongly against their mediaevalist setting,
which harks back to a world shot through with faith and religion.
A world in which that kind of divide between the religious and the secular had very little meaning.
Why someone believes in a certain faith is very rarely explored in fantasy writing in a Song of Ice and Fire, for example,
we're never given any real insight into why Melisandre believes so completely in Rollo,
even in the chapter written from her point of view in a Dance with Dragons.
We must simply accept that she does for unspecified reasons.
So while her behaviour is shaped by her beliefs, it's superficial in the sense that her beliefs rest upon for us a shallow foundation,
and we cannot see how her faith is individually and personally inflected and how that feeds into her actions.
Similarly, in David has Moon Tide quartette, which for a series that is all about religious warfare,
contains strikingly few characters who hold a genuine belief in the religions that hat creates.
All of which are closely based on real world examples. There's no interior explanation for or exploration of Ramita and Cashel runs of Mali faith.
It's simply a product of her upbringing in LA, where she was born.
And while her faith is occasionally challenged throughout the series by each of her husband's, for example,
both of whom are religiously ambivalent or atheist, Ramita simply brushes these disagreements aside.
They do not provoke her or, by extension, the author to reflect on her personal experience of her faith.
So I was particularly struck by Islington, sudden sidestep into what you might call fantasy theology,
where we get a sense of exactly why Ray Left believes in our the way that he does.
And though it may initially seem to be a minor scene, I actually think Ray last words are key to understanding the laconic trilogy as a whole.
The narrative arc of Tale come at the most prominent member of the Venerate
throughout the series is a journey towards the most pivotal moment in his life,
the moment which sowed a seed of doubt in him, causing him to question the direction of, as it turns out, the false L.
And indeed that scene, which sets out how out on the road that he walks over the course of the books constitutes the very final scene of the trilogy,
emphasising that the most important struggle in the books has not been the
protagonist fight against shaman life than those of the Venerate still loyal to him,
but has been the interior struggle of Tao Kama himself, a struggle that is spiritual rather than actual.
And in a series that has doubt as such a central theme relaxed exposition of faith in spite of personal suffering,
in spite of doubts that he too has experienced emerges as a kind of interpretative key to the whole trilogy.
Elevating it, I think from a highly traditional fantasy narrative of Good vs. evil into something that's a bit more nuanced about
the symbiotic relationship between faith and doubt and the world changing consequences of profound personal belief.
And I'd like to turn briefly before finishing to another novel, which likewise locates power in the person of the Believer and in their faith itself,
rather than seeing it as invested solely in the deity being venerated,
Tasha Suri's realm of Ash contains a scene in which the heroine Arwa confronts a nightmare.
This is a kind of demonic creature intent upon provoking massacre in a pilgrim camp.
And while the nightmare infects the camp with a sort of preternatural fear,
the residents of the home for widows in which the nightmare has been hiding are spared
because they have unwittingly been offering the nightmare prayers and tokens of worship.
Worship had power, so he writes Page three, five, eight, and when this knowledge,
Arwa is able to save the camp in a similar attack by another nightmare later in the novel is
likewise fended off by an act of collective prayer on the part of the travelling pilgrims until,
as Suri describes it. Quote The fear remained, but it was quiet, so very quiet,
all but thought again of a tide against the shore of the way a river of voices could wear and nightmares bone smooth given time.
And that's from Page three eight two, as in Islington, to work.
Story highlights here the power of faith, rather than just the power of the gods, which is actually something quite different.
She highlights the power of faith to affect real world change,
and she's quite particular about faith rather than ritual being the wellspring emphasising that the pilgrims all quote had different prayers,
their letter names and mantras and songs jumbled together in a great cacophony of noise.
Page three eight one to two.
So once again, as with Islington, the light of all that falls, these small scenes prove pivotal to the novel's main narrative arc,
which concerns finding a remedy for the curse, which lies over the Ambon empire because it's in these acts of prayer and worship.
The hour ultimately finds what she calls quote a slow way through the dark page four and four, which offers a remedy for the empire's ills.
That does not entail further exploitation of its people, but relies instead upon their faith.
Both Islington and Surrey find and explore the larger power inherent in seemingly small personal acts of faith,
and it's obvious doubt demonstrating that it is possible to treat faith seriously in fantasy while maintaining a fully imaginary world,
i.e. without needing to make their work an allegory of any real world religious belief.
And thereby they bring, in my opinion, an extra and much needed dimension to the fictional worlds that they create.
Thank you so much for listening.