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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Hello. I'm the Caroline Harrington, uh,

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an emeritus professor of medieval European literature here at the University of Oxford and also an emeritus research fellow at Saint John's College.

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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.

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It's a world in which impossible things can happen, and that might be magical things,

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or it might be the suspension of a particular set of natural laws, or it might just be some strange powers that somebody has.

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But it's a world within which when that thing happens, you know, are we not in the normal world?

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I think we have to always point to Tolkien here and from Tolkien as a kind of filter for his forerunners.

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So a filter through which nobody reads William Morris today.

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But people think about Morris because Tolkien liked Morris.

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Um, the same is probably too true of George MacDonald, except his children's stories.

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So it's Tolkien. And then I think going forward from Tolkien, you get this branching into all kinds of different subgenres.

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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,

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or we have the kind of Angela Carter feminist fairy tales, um, we have aspires very thoughtful meditation on fairy tale in, um, possession.

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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,

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and Tolkien is certainly a kind of passage through that,

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but also these darker kinds of fantasy which are linked both to dystopia and come out of of that kind of

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early 20th century Orwellian thinking about how much worse that the state of the world could become.

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And before that, I think chronicle in the medieval period where what happens,

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what's related is a series of terrible events, deaths, the fates of kings, and so on.

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I have recently been reading Samantha Shannon's, Um, The Priory, The Orange Tree, which I very much enjoyed.

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I've been writing a book about dragons, and this has both eastern and Western dragons in it, so that was quite exciting.

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But something I found myself returning to again and again is Sylvia Townsend Warner's Tales of Elphin, which are wonderfully funny.

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Also, in some ways they have a satirical edge to them.

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They tell us a lot about human nature, even though they're about fairies,

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and they're absolutely steeped in fairy law and the ways in which Warner writes in the 1970s and 80s,

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these tales, which are kind of timeless and their implications.

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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.

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I think originally and by originally, I think perhaps we mean the 19th century here when we have people like Morris,

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we have our theory and literature, and we have the speculative stuff that people like George MacDonald were writing.

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That was, in a way, an attempt to keep fantasy adult in the face of fairies, for example,

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becoming the stuff of children's stories because they were little and pretty and cute and rather like little girls.

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Ideal Victorian little girl, sort of unthreatening. And so fairy tales and stories about fairies became the province of children.

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And I think this has to do with ideas about disenchantment,

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that grownups couldn't believe in fairies anymore and couldn't believe in this sort of hidden, unseen world.

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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.

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Again, this may be the kind of utopia, dystopia distinction, and suddenly fantasy becomes something that adults.

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Are reading again. They're being invited to read by people who are writing in in that particular genre.

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So I think now the target audience is no longer children.

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It's young adults shading into adults and sometimes very adult indeed.

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In some ways that quite a lot of very contemporary fantasy.

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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.

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So I think it's it's gone through a phase where it was discussed for children,

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but is definitively broken out of that, certainly since the Second World War.

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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,

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only, I think achieved that in retrospect after the Lord of the rings became so big.

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And you can see there's a very different tone in The Hobbit that Tolkien is writing for children.

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Writing, writing down, in a sense. Um, so I think it doesn't have to do with authorial intention.

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Particularly, the author is imagining a world in which he's explaining sometimes things that children and adults don't mind that,

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particularly if there's not too much of it. Um,

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so I think fantasy is a genre in which kinds of storytelling can migrate backwards

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and forwards between children writing for children and writing for adults.

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And sometimes. Yeah, Harry Potter, I think, would be a case in point that JK Rowling was writing for children.

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And perhaps it's primarily children who still read for a living.

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But they're adults who keep returning to it, and sometimes that's a kind of nostalgia for their own childhood.

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So I think it's it's hard to generalise,

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but different stories within the genre appeal to different kinds of audiences at different times in their lives.

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I think I would like to say something about Arthurian fantasy, maybe because Gabriel talked very interestingly about Once and Future King,

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and suggested that in some ways, the playfulness with which it was writing was in contrast to some other Arthurian stories.

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And he mentioned Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, and said that they were more historical and less fantastical.

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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.

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But there's also quite a lot more the fantastic and the magical and the mystical in particular in, um, The Mists of Babylon.

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So I think it's more fantasy adjacent than people maybe thought of at the time.

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In 1982, I thought it was a feminist retelling of the story of King Arthur.

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And I think now looking at that again, we might see that it have more in common with fantasy,

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particularly as a kind of rather startling bit in the middle where it suddenly starts talking about Atlantis and you think,

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oh, okay, that's a real generic shift here.

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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,

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and we see the reviews, and then when we come back to them after a number of years, we think, oh, well,

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maybe, as I said earlier, fantasy is a huge category and it's capacious.

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You can get a lot of things into it and its boundaries are fuzzy.

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And I think that's something that's going to be important for us to remember.