[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Hello. I'm the Caroline Harrington, uh,
an emeritus professor of medieval European literature here at the University of Oxford and also an emeritus research fellow at Saint John's College.
I think fantasy is quite a hard thing to define, but what it probably means to me personally is a definition that we had this morning.
It's a world in which impossible things can happen, and that might be magical things,
or it might be the suspension of a particular set of natural laws, or it might just be some strange powers that somebody has.
But it's a world within which when that thing happens, you know, are we not in the normal world?
I think we have to always point to Tolkien here and from Tolkien as a kind of filter for his forerunners.
So a filter through which nobody reads William Morris today.
But people think about Morris because Tolkien liked Morris.
Um, the same is probably too true of George MacDonald, except his children's stories.
So it's Tolkien. And then I think going forward from Tolkien, you get this branching into all kinds of different subgenres.
And so after Tolkien and Lewis, to some extent, we have the, the kind of work of someone like George Martin or we have China, marvel's urban fantasy,
or we have the kind of Angela Carter feminist fairy tales, um, we have aspires very thoughtful meditation on fairy tale in, um, possession.
So I think that's a kind of spectres from the fairy tale and fantasy world that comes in some ways out of medieval romance,
and Tolkien is certainly a kind of passage through that,
but also these darker kinds of fantasy which are linked both to dystopia and come out of of that kind of
early 20th century Orwellian thinking about how much worse that the state of the world could become.
And before that, I think chronicle in the medieval period where what happens,
what's related is a series of terrible events, deaths, the fates of kings, and so on.
I have recently been reading Samantha Shannon's, Um, The Priory, The Orange Tree, which I very much enjoyed.
I've been writing a book about dragons, and this has both eastern and Western dragons in it, so that was quite exciting.
But something I found myself returning to again and again is Sylvia Townsend Warner's Tales of Elphin, which are wonderfully funny.
Also, in some ways they have a satirical edge to them.
They tell us a lot about human nature, even though they're about fairies,
and they're absolutely steeped in fairy law and the ways in which Warner writes in the 1970s and 80s,
these tales, which are kind of timeless and their implications.
It means I keep it on my phone so I can always read this in an emergency, and if I have nothing else on me to read.
I think originally and by originally, I think perhaps we mean the 19th century here when we have people like Morris,
we have our theory and literature, and we have the speculative stuff that people like George MacDonald were writing.
That was, in a way, an attempt to keep fantasy adult in the face of fairies, for example,
becoming the stuff of children's stories because they were little and pretty and cute and rather like little girls.
Ideal Victorian little girl, sort of unthreatening. And so fairy tales and stories about fairies became the province of children.
And I think this has to do with ideas about disenchantment,
that grownups couldn't believe in fairies anymore and couldn't believe in this sort of hidden, unseen world.
And then somehow, in the 20s, we have, perhaps in the wake of the the First World War, a recurrence of the idea that there may be other possibilities.
Again, this may be the kind of utopia, dystopia distinction, and suddenly fantasy becomes something that adults.
Are reading again. They're being invited to read by people who are writing in in that particular genre.
So I think now the target audience is no longer children.
It's young adults shading into adults and sometimes very adult indeed.
In some ways that quite a lot of very contemporary fantasy.
You might think of romance, you might think of some of the very cool material is definitely not for the kind of 12 to 14 year old market.
So I think it's it's gone through a phase where it was discussed for children,
but is definitively broken out of that, certainly since the Second World War.
That's a difficult question to answer. I think, um, in some ways, there's something about the classic status of The Hobbit and The Hobbit,
only, I think achieved that in retrospect after the Lord of the rings became so big.
And you can see there's a very different tone in The Hobbit that Tolkien is writing for children.
Writing, writing down, in a sense. Um, so I think it doesn't have to do with authorial intention.
Particularly, the author is imagining a world in which he's explaining sometimes things that children and adults don't mind that,
particularly if there's not too much of it. Um,
so I think fantasy is a genre in which kinds of storytelling can migrate backwards
and forwards between children writing for children and writing for adults.
And sometimes. Yeah, Harry Potter, I think, would be a case in point that JK Rowling was writing for children.
And perhaps it's primarily children who still read for a living.
But they're adults who keep returning to it, and sometimes that's a kind of nostalgia for their own childhood.
So I think it's it's hard to generalise,
but different stories within the genre appeal to different kinds of audiences at different times in their lives.
I think I would like to say something about Arthurian fantasy, maybe because Gabriel talked very interestingly about Once and Future King,
and suggested that in some ways, the playfulness with which it was writing was in contrast to some other Arthurian stories.
And he mentioned Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, and said that they were more historical and less fantastical.
And in some ways, I think it's true that there's a stronger sense of of historical place and a lot of research in Mists of Babylon, for example.
But there's also quite a lot more the fantastic and the magical and the mystical in particular in, um, The Mists of Babylon.
So I think it's more fantasy adjacent than people maybe thought of at the time.
In 1982, I thought it was a feminist retelling of the story of King Arthur.
And I think now looking at that again, we might see that it have more in common with fantasy,
particularly as a kind of rather startling bit in the middle where it suddenly starts talking about Atlantis and you think,
oh, okay, that's a real generic shift here.
So I think I would I would want to respond to that in the sense that we might think of books as being of a certain type when they're first published,
and we see the reviews, and then when we come back to them after a number of years, we think, oh, well,
maybe, as I said earlier, fantasy is a huge category and it's capacious.
You can get a lot of things into it and its boundaries are fuzzy.
And I think that's something that's going to be important for us to remember.