1 00:00:03,650 --> 00:00:09,890 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Uh, well, I'm Caroline Harrington, and along with Stuart, we've been responsible for. 2 00:00:11,570 --> 00:00:17,030 Conceptualising this event. But it has to be said, most of the hard work has been done by other people, 3 00:00:17,030 --> 00:00:22,610 including our assistants over here and Kate Forbes, who you will have met on the front desk. 4 00:00:23,150 --> 00:00:26,370 So we're absolutely delighted to see you all here. 5 00:00:26,390 --> 00:00:33,560 We wonder what kind of dropout rate we might find, but it looks if everybody who signed up to come has actually turned up, 6 00:00:33,560 --> 00:00:38,750 which is a great delight and perhaps even unprecedented. 7 00:00:39,800 --> 00:00:45,200 So welcome to the first Bloomsbury Publishing Oxford Summer School of Fantasy. 8 00:00:45,620 --> 00:00:55,850 And we very much hope this is going to be an opportunity to explore, to discuss, to anticipate and to imagine fantasy of very many kinds. 9 00:00:57,640 --> 00:00:59,799 A few details to start off with. 10 00:00:59,800 --> 00:01:07,450 We have to thank Bloomsbury, of course, and we'll be thanking them lavishly during the course of the next couple of days. 11 00:01:07,860 --> 00:01:13,870 Um, we have to thank the English faculty who have afforded a great deal of help in organising, 12 00:01:14,050 --> 00:01:19,150 and Exeter College itself, which is, of course, our hosts in this wonderful building. 13 00:01:20,410 --> 00:01:26,170 There isn't a published programme for you all to have a copy of to save paper. 14 00:01:26,530 --> 00:01:28,210 Will no one think of the trees? 15 00:01:28,240 --> 00:01:37,690 We decided, but they've all QR codes on the wall and there are programmes pasted up in different places so you can remind yourself of what's going on. 16 00:01:38,860 --> 00:01:43,810 And now a bit of housekeeping. So all of the talks will be in here. 17 00:01:44,350 --> 00:01:51,790 Um, the catering is outside. You've probably already spotted the coffee being set up for after the first session. 18 00:01:52,150 --> 00:01:59,200 We have two fire exits, one through that door which you came in, um, one through this door, which seems to have, 19 00:01:59,380 --> 00:02:05,020 um, various constraints about being able to use it to do anything other than run for your lives. 20 00:02:08,250 --> 00:02:13,920 The toilets are just outside and to the right there's toilets of various kinds. 21 00:02:14,160 --> 00:02:18,270 And I can already sense from looking at the demographic of this room, 22 00:02:18,630 --> 00:02:26,580 that there will be plenty of time for the gentlemen to make use of their facilities, and the ladies will be queuing down the hall. 23 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:34,230 But there is another gender neutral set of toilets just beyond where the catering is. 24 00:02:34,530 --> 00:02:41,550 And that's if you go past the catering and as if you're going back to the front door, that's also a possibility. 25 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:49,530 All the talks are going to be recorded and most of them are being live streamed. 26 00:02:49,830 --> 00:02:57,660 So this means that if you ask a question for the people in the hall, um, the question will all be recorded as well. 27 00:02:58,200 --> 00:03:04,169 But you can see from the setup of the camera that nobody is going to film the audience. 28 00:03:04,170 --> 00:03:14,040 The cameras are trained on the speakers and for the people who are with us online, a very special welcome to you in your different time zones. 29 00:03:14,490 --> 00:03:19,710 Um, we hope that you will be able to get as much as possible out of the experience. 30 00:03:19,980 --> 00:03:29,430 Not quite the same as being in the room with us here in Oxford, but you too have the opportunity to put questions and you can put them in the chat, 31 00:03:29,430 --> 00:03:35,670 and our chat monitors will find some questions to, um, bring up at the end. 32 00:03:37,330 --> 00:03:40,630 So we have, um. 33 00:03:42,640 --> 00:03:46,720 We have a mixture of formats here. 34 00:03:46,960 --> 00:03:50,560 We have some longer lectures with time for questions. 35 00:03:50,920 --> 00:03:54,010 Um, hopefully time to get a little bit of discussion going. 36 00:03:54,250 --> 00:04:01,150 And then we have some shorter ten minute presentations just to introduce some topics that you might not have thought about. 37 00:04:01,570 --> 00:04:06,670 And there there's going to be less time for questions. Um, but hopefully we'll get a couple in. 38 00:04:07,060 --> 00:04:15,640 And for people who are in person here, of course, there's the opportunity to grab speakers at the meal breaks and and ask them further questions. 39 00:04:17,600 --> 00:04:23,990 The organisation of our three days is quite simple its past, present and future. 40 00:04:24,350 --> 00:04:29,750 And so today we're mostly looking at the history of fantasy up into the 20th century. 41 00:04:30,140 --> 00:04:33,710 Tomorrow we'll be looking at fantasy in the present, 42 00:04:34,040 --> 00:04:38,210 and we've got a very special afternoon planned with our friends in Bloomsbury 43 00:04:38,570 --> 00:04:42,770 who are going to be talking about the state of fantasy in publishing today, 44 00:04:43,070 --> 00:04:49,280 and, of course, presenting some of their authors to talk to you about their own experiences with the genre. 45 00:04:50,740 --> 00:04:55,150 On Thursday, our final day. We're looking at the future of fantasy. 46 00:04:55,360 --> 00:05:05,410 And that means that we're going to have a different set of of, um, perhaps most speculative lectures talking about where fantasy might be going. 47 00:05:08,460 --> 00:05:17,370 Why Oxford and why fantasy? And it's important, I think, to note before I wrap up here, that Oxford. 48 00:05:18,480 --> 00:05:21,540 Has a claim to be the home of fantasy. 49 00:05:22,140 --> 00:05:26,700 It's woven into the history of Oxford, and I'm going to be talking a bit more about this tomorrow. 50 00:05:26,970 --> 00:05:30,480 It's the place, perhaps, where modern fantasy began. 51 00:05:30,750 --> 00:05:34,440 Arguably 150 years ago with Alice in Wonderland. 52 00:05:35,550 --> 00:05:43,920 And it's a place where research, study, writing and thinking about fantasy continues in the university. 53 00:05:44,610 --> 00:05:51,030 But as we'll also see, the streets of Oxford are thronged with people who are using. 54 00:05:52,040 --> 00:05:56,030 Oxford as part of the stimulus to their own imaginations, 55 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:03,760 and we'll see a little bit how far Oxford has fed into the imagining of various fantasy writers, 56 00:06:03,770 --> 00:06:07,640 even some who've never been to Oxford, who didn't study here or teach here. 57 00:06:07,910 --> 00:06:12,950 Somehow Oxford has got into the genre at a very fundamental level. 58 00:06:14,210 --> 00:06:20,930 So at this point, I think it probably remains for me to welcome you all once again, um, 59 00:06:20,930 --> 00:06:29,330 to remind you that we're all here to enjoy ourselves, to learn about fantasy, to think about fantasy and discuss our own ideas. 60 00:06:29,600 --> 00:06:33,830 And that means being respectful of other people's views as well. 61 00:06:34,070 --> 00:06:38,630 So I hope this is going to be a very friendly, very collegial atmosphere here. 62 00:06:38,960 --> 00:06:45,220 And nobody is going to get into enormous fights about whether something is fantasy or not. 63 00:06:45,230 --> 00:06:49,640 And for this kind of definition, this is not the atmosphere that we're looking for. 64 00:06:50,150 --> 00:06:53,390 And so with that, I will bid you all welcome once again. 65 00:06:53,750 --> 00:06:57,799 Um, if there are any questions, there will be a roving mic. 66 00:06:57,800 --> 00:07:02,120 I don't imagine that there are any questions, particularly at this point. 67 00:07:02,720 --> 00:07:06,140 Um, but if you do have a question, do raise your hand. 68 00:07:08,830 --> 00:07:14,440 In which case going slightly early, which is always a good thing when it comes to timekeeping. 69 00:07:14,710 --> 00:07:24,400 I'd like to welcome our first speaker, who is Professor Adam Roberts, who is going to be who doesn't have any slides so we don't have to put those up. 70 00:07:24,850 --> 00:07:30,130 Um, and who has a roving mic and we will open the floor to him. 71 00:07:31,540 --> 00:07:39,070 I'm going to speak to us, uh, about an introduction to fancy literature, long history and theory. 72 00:07:40,600 --> 00:07:45,500 Soon as I see you, just your water. Uh. Hello. 73 00:07:46,040 --> 00:07:54,830 It's lovely to see you all here. What I propose to do is, um. 74 00:07:56,020 --> 00:07:59,800 In essence, is to run through this book, which I wrote. 75 00:08:00,460 --> 00:08:06,400 Quite proud of the fact that I wrote this book. Uh, it takes a lot of time to write a book in which I urge and exhort you all to buy. 76 00:08:06,400 --> 00:08:11,200 Buy seven copies in case you lose. Six imagine if you bought six copies and then lost all six. 77 00:08:11,200 --> 00:08:15,790 That extra seventh copy could make all the difference. You don't have to buy a copy of this book. 78 00:08:16,060 --> 00:08:21,820 Really you don't? Uh, it is published by Bloomsbury, though, so that's one of the reasons why I wanted to to flourish it. 79 00:08:22,240 --> 00:08:28,320 I wrote a a history of Science fiction some years ago, and, uh, 80 00:08:28,420 --> 00:08:32,410 it was suggested to me that I write A History of fantasy as a kind of companion volume. 81 00:08:33,040 --> 00:08:36,150 And when I was asked, I thought, yes, I've been a reader of fantasy all my life. 82 00:08:36,160 --> 00:08:40,360 I grew up reading Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin. I will do that. 83 00:08:41,470 --> 00:08:44,140 Then I started actually writing it and researching it, 84 00:08:44,320 --> 00:08:51,760 and I realised that there is a lot of fantasy I haven't read that I had to read in order to write this book, 85 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:56,170 particularly through the 80s and 90s into the 21st century. 86 00:08:56,440 --> 00:09:01,210 Thousands upon thousands of volumes of fantasy. Many of them very, very large. 87 00:09:01,720 --> 00:09:07,120 A lot of them parts of enormous, you know, romance, love series that go on for 15 volumes. 88 00:09:07,120 --> 00:09:12,460 And I had to at least try to read a representative sample of all that fantasy. 89 00:09:12,970 --> 00:09:19,420 It was quite a lot. What I'm going to do is summarise the argument I'm making this book, which is, in essence, 90 00:09:19,420 --> 00:09:26,780 a kind of historical account of how we come to that place where fantasy is now such a huge phenomenon. 91 00:09:27,730 --> 00:09:35,260 And I'm going to give you a potted version of that. But I'm doing that because there are questions I think my history of fantasy is is right. 92 00:09:35,680 --> 00:09:38,080 I would say that you'd expect me to say that, 93 00:09:38,470 --> 00:09:46,959 but there are questions which I couldn't really answer as I kind of wrote it out and they still kind of puzzled me. 94 00:09:46,960 --> 00:09:50,560 So I'm really I'm going to ask you those questions and see if you can answer them for me, 95 00:09:51,010 --> 00:09:54,430 and then that will put my mind at rest, and I'll be very grateful. 96 00:09:55,430 --> 00:09:59,150 Um, so it's a kind of historicist account of fantasy. 97 00:09:59,540 --> 00:10:07,759 And to that end, uh, we can start in the 1960s and then we can run backwards. 98 00:10:07,760 --> 00:10:13,489 And then that's kind of saying tomorrow and the day after, we can roam forwards into the future of fantasy. 99 00:10:13,490 --> 00:10:18,500 But I start in the 60s because it's in the 60s. That fantasy kind of explodes. 100 00:10:18,920 --> 00:10:20,690 And that's for two reasons. 101 00:10:20,990 --> 00:10:29,870 One is Tolkien, and there's no getting around Tolkien talking about Oxford people, uh, sitting in the the pubs in Oxford with the inklings, 102 00:10:29,870 --> 00:10:36,770 talking about working through writing up his, uh, his great legendarium, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. 103 00:10:37,430 --> 00:10:44,900 Um, the interesting thing about that, I think, is the Lord of the rings is published 1954 1955, in three volumes, 104 00:10:45,290 --> 00:10:50,930 but it doesn't become a big hit until the 60s, when it's released in paperback form in America. 105 00:10:51,290 --> 00:10:57,680 And then it becomes a campus novel and a cult book, and then it becomes a bestseller and then a global bestseller. 106 00:10:58,070 --> 00:11:06,229 And it's never lost that position. It still sells enough to make the bestseller lists kind of annually all the way through it. 107 00:11:06,230 --> 00:11:13,810 Maybe it flagged a little in the 90s, but then the the Peter Jackson movies in the 2000 brought it back into popular consciousness. 108 00:11:13,820 --> 00:11:21,920 It's its enormous kind of phenomenon. So that's at the heart of the question that I'm trying to trying to answer myself, 109 00:11:21,920 --> 00:11:26,540 which I'm canvassing your opinions of the there's a kind of relatedness there. 110 00:11:27,200 --> 00:11:31,430 Why is it in the 60s that fantasy really takes off? 111 00:11:31,730 --> 00:11:37,100 Um, in the 60s, it's because partly Tolkien is is so influential. 112 00:11:37,400 --> 00:11:45,680 And then through the 70s you have, uh, uh, Terry Brooks and Steven Donaldson and many other writers who are effectively imitating Tolkien, 113 00:11:45,680 --> 00:11:51,169 producing fantasies in a Tolkien Ian style. And then as we move into the 21st century, 114 00:11:51,170 --> 00:11:58,969 you get a kind of reaction against that with what they call grimdark George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie and so on. 115 00:11:58,970 --> 00:12:04,080 That aim for, uh, I'm going to put scarecrows around the word realistic, uh, 116 00:12:04,190 --> 00:12:08,989 kind of violent, nasty, fantastical realms, but they're still writing kind of. 117 00:12:08,990 --> 00:12:15,860 In reaction to Tolkien, Michael Moorcock dismisses Tolkien as epic Winnie the Pooh and writes his own. 118 00:12:16,280 --> 00:12:22,670 And I'm quite stylish, but still quite cruel, quite violent fantasy novels. 119 00:12:23,150 --> 00:12:29,150 He's doing that in reaction to Tolkien, that the grimdark seems to me a kind of photographic negative of what Tolkien is doing, 120 00:12:29,690 --> 00:12:33,350 um, which is still marked by the influence of Tolkien. 121 00:12:33,830 --> 00:12:40,080 And now romantic is a big deal now. Uh, I read a lot of romance to see that's also often quite violent. 122 00:12:40,100 --> 00:12:48,440 I was surprised, actually, to discover it's quite Bdsm. It's quite some kind of Twilight and, um, 50 Shades of Grey, but in a fantasy realm. 123 00:12:49,070 --> 00:12:53,149 Uh, so it's the 60s. It's two things. 124 00:12:53,150 --> 00:12:59,090 One is Tolkien, just the success of Tolkien, and then people read it and they want to read more stuff like that, 125 00:12:59,090 --> 00:13:04,520 and people write extra new fantasy series to to meet that demand. 126 00:13:05,120 --> 00:13:08,690 But the other thing is the Ballantine Adult Fantasy list. 127 00:13:08,900 --> 00:13:11,960 So Ballantine, the American publisher, uh, saw this. 128 00:13:12,110 --> 00:13:16,700 The I mean, they issued the first proper paperback edition. 129 00:13:16,700 --> 00:13:23,720 They've been an unauthorised edition issue of Lord of the rings before Ballantine did it properly and paid royalties to Tolkien and sold, 130 00:13:24,080 --> 00:13:26,630 you know, shed loads of copies of his books. 131 00:13:27,050 --> 00:13:35,750 And they in 1965 issued the put out the Ballantine Adult Fantasy List, which is to begin with was a series of reprints. 132 00:13:36,200 --> 00:13:39,890 So the initial list, which came out in 65, was 19 titles. 133 00:13:40,100 --> 00:13:41,629 Eight of those titles were Tolkien. 134 00:13:41,630 --> 00:13:50,810 So The Hobbit, the three Lord of the rings books, um, the Donald Swan music that he wrote for the songs of Lord of the rings, I think Train Leaf. 135 00:13:51,140 --> 00:13:58,280 Most of them were Tolkien, but they also published, uh, The Worm, Harry Burrows Edison's Great Fantasy from the 1920s. 136 00:13:58,670 --> 00:14:04,880 Uh, they published Gorman, Garth and Titus Grown, Mervyn Peake's 1940s kind of gothic fantasy. 137 00:14:05,540 --> 00:14:08,989 Uh, and then Lynn Carter, the American writer and editor, 138 00:14:08,990 --> 00:14:18,290 came in and took over the Adult Fantasy list and published another 65 titles, most of which, again, were reprints of earlier books. 139 00:14:18,590 --> 00:14:26,690 And with those reprints in these new paperback editions, the books became big sellers, which they hadn't been before. 140 00:14:27,080 --> 00:14:29,809 So I'm roaming back from the 60s. 141 00:14:29,810 --> 00:14:40,490 So the Ballantine's list is the late 60s into the 70s, and that and Tolkien's kind of belated success really marks the arrival of fantasy as a mode. 142 00:14:42,250 --> 00:14:49,000 So some of the books we're talking about that came out and were big hits in the because they were reissued in the in the Valentine's list. 143 00:14:49,670 --> 00:14:58,870 Uh, I mentioned The Worm, a reboot, Ross Edison's fantasy, uh, strange, the rather wonderful book, um, Don Saint. 144 00:14:58,870 --> 00:15:02,800 He's the king of El Flynn's daughter, which came out in 1924. 145 00:15:03,490 --> 00:15:06,879 Um, hope mere plays a lot in the mist, which is 1926. 146 00:15:06,880 --> 00:15:13,720 So these are books that were published, you know, half a century before and, uh, finding a new audience. 147 00:15:13,840 --> 00:15:21,000 And, you know, it's kind of disseminating. One of the things I talk about in my history is the way fantasy, which starts as a, 148 00:15:21,030 --> 00:15:29,170 as a written form of art, uh, jumps into all different media in the, in the 20th 21st century. 149 00:15:29,470 --> 00:15:31,770 And that starts in the, in the 1970s. 150 00:15:31,780 --> 00:15:39,549 So the The King of Elf Lands daughter, which is a great fantasy novel, was made into a kind of prog rock album with Christopher Lee, 151 00:15:39,550 --> 00:15:47,890 of all people, singing in his deep voice and various other people in the 70s, um, and television and film and video games. 152 00:15:47,890 --> 00:15:51,350 And this is all now colonised, as it were. Bye bye fantasy, fantasy. 153 00:15:51,580 --> 00:15:59,260 A mode is everywhere. That's where it starts from. But what's interesting to me is these are books that were written in the 1920s. 154 00:16:00,340 --> 00:16:08,810 So if we if we wanted to come up with a kind of. Core canon of fantasy novels through the 20th century. 155 00:16:09,350 --> 00:16:16,220 What I think you find is they are marked in a particular way by World War One. 156 00:16:17,020 --> 00:16:19,120 So we can talk about talking. 157 00:16:19,510 --> 00:16:26,410 Talking, of course, served in World War One and rather mournfully reported that all but one of his friends was killed in the war, 158 00:16:26,800 --> 00:16:29,590 and he survived the war. Uh, came back injured. 159 00:16:30,350 --> 00:16:37,900 Uh, he started working on his legendarium in the 19 teens as the war was going on, and he starts writing it up seriously in the 1920s. 160 00:16:38,320 --> 00:16:42,120 Now we've we've got all this posthumously published Tolkien, Diana, 161 00:16:42,130 --> 00:16:45,370 The History of Middle Earth, which, if you are Tolkien not, is absolutely wonderful. 162 00:16:45,370 --> 00:16:51,790 You can really, uh, kind of immerse yourself in that. But one thing, just the sheer size of it, the cliff face of books that have been issued, 163 00:16:51,790 --> 00:17:00,069 show how meticulously and thoroughly Tolkien worked and reworked over and over this material to get it into the state that he wanted it to be. 164 00:17:00,070 --> 00:17:04,120 But he was writing as someone who had fought in World War One, and he was writing, I think, 165 00:17:04,120 --> 00:17:13,270 in reaction to World War One, that the horrors of industrialised mass slaughter, that this was modern warfare. 166 00:17:13,930 --> 00:17:21,730 Uh, he writes, instead of, uh, an earlier, nobler, more chivalric time where war is, 167 00:17:22,000 --> 00:17:28,870 uh, is romantic and heroic and you're fighting evil and a very real evil. 168 00:17:29,200 --> 00:17:34,059 John Garth, in his book on Tolkien and the Great War, which is a very good book, 169 00:17:34,060 --> 00:17:39,910 and I recommend it, explores the ways that Tolkien specific experiences, uh, 170 00:17:39,910 --> 00:17:44,770 fed into the descriptions of Mordor, that Sam and Frodo have to fight their way through, 171 00:17:45,310 --> 00:17:51,790 um, the horrors of of of what Sauron is capable of, that that's what is to be defeated. 172 00:17:52,030 --> 00:18:03,890 The. Essence, I think of of what Tolkien is doing, and that what appealed to and continues to appeal to people is a re enchantment of the world. 173 00:18:04,310 --> 00:18:06,830 And in a nutshell, that's my thesis. 174 00:18:07,250 --> 00:18:16,610 So disenchantment, which is a phrase that Max Weber, the sociologist, uses to describe the conditions of modernity. 175 00:18:16,610 --> 00:18:20,150 This is where we live. He says we live in a disenchanted world. 176 00:18:20,480 --> 00:18:27,620 It used to be an enchanted world full of magic and wonder, but also terror and supernatural peril. 177 00:18:28,100 --> 00:18:35,850 But now we were secularised, and we think science describes the world accurately, and there's no room left for any of that magic. 178 00:18:35,870 --> 00:18:39,920 We have become disenchanted and in several senses of that word. 179 00:18:40,990 --> 00:18:47,720 For my history, I lean quite heavily on Charles Taylor, who is a Canadian philosopher. 180 00:18:47,740 --> 00:18:48,399 He's still alive. 181 00:18:48,400 --> 00:18:59,980 He's quite old, who wrote a book called The Secular Age, which is a very large, uh, investigation into the conditions of effectively disenchantment. 182 00:19:00,490 --> 00:19:07,810 How do we go from being a religious culture society, uh, to being a secular one? 183 00:19:08,260 --> 00:19:12,220 I mean, people are still religious. That religion hasn't gone away, Taylor says. 184 00:19:12,640 --> 00:19:16,900 But we don't really live in a religious world in the way that people did in the Middle Ages. 185 00:19:16,900 --> 00:19:20,440 Let's say we live in a secularised scientific world. 186 00:19:21,350 --> 00:19:32,210 The way that Taylor describes that is we have moved from and these are his terms from a porous sensibility to a buffered sensibility. 187 00:19:32,390 --> 00:19:37,220 It used to be that our sensibilities were porous and things kind of got inside it. 188 00:19:37,230 --> 00:19:41,630 So we lived in a world of magic and marvel, but also terror and alarm. 189 00:19:41,960 --> 00:19:46,910 You believe there were genuinely nasty things lurking in the woods that might steal your babies. 190 00:19:47,540 --> 00:19:54,170 You. You might be damned and go to [INAUDIBLE]. You you could be frightened by demons and hobgoblins and ghosts. 191 00:19:54,950 --> 00:19:59,540 Um, we have, Taylor says, buffered our sensibilities. 192 00:19:59,540 --> 00:20:05,300 And as to how that's happened and why that's happened. His nearly a thousand pages long a secular age. 193 00:20:05,540 --> 00:20:06,919 It's very worthwhile reading. 194 00:20:06,920 --> 00:20:12,379 It's fascinating to see whether you agree with his account of how that's happened, but I think it's hard to deny that that has happened. 195 00:20:12,380 --> 00:20:15,080 So now we don't have these poor sensibilities. 196 00:20:15,080 --> 00:20:23,060 We're not affrighted in the way that, uh, we're also not capable of the kind of wonder, uh, and the the the marvel and the magic. 197 00:20:23,450 --> 00:20:29,570 C.S. Lewis is very good on this, actually, in his, uh, his non-fiction works, his accounts of medieval literature. 198 00:20:30,740 --> 00:20:36,380 So we have, I suppose, gain something because we're not scared of the creatures that might look under the bed. 199 00:20:37,160 --> 00:20:42,860 But we have lost something as well. We've lost that sense of kind of marvel, of wonder. 200 00:20:43,340 --> 00:20:48,410 So the argument I make in the book, and I steal this argument from the American scholar Alan Jacobs. 201 00:20:48,770 --> 00:20:54,860 Uh, but I figure he's in America, and that's a long way away. So he's not going to, you know, be able to get at me. 202 00:20:55,370 --> 00:20:59,420 Uh, he's a he's a friend of mine, and he's a very mild mannered guy, but, uh, I do credit him. 203 00:21:00,050 --> 00:21:04,670 He says that's what fantasy provides. It provides a kind of, um, buffering of our sensibilities. 204 00:21:04,670 --> 00:21:08,510 It provides us of access, uh, a way of really enchanting the world. 205 00:21:08,510 --> 00:21:16,880 And it gives us a fictional world that is enchanted and that transcendence, that marvel at wonder is at the heart of the appeal of fantasy. 206 00:21:17,510 --> 00:21:22,220 And that's that chimes with my experience. I don't know how it is for you when you read fantasy. 207 00:21:22,230 --> 00:21:25,850 When I was reading fantasy as a as a kid, which I did obsessively over and over. 208 00:21:26,450 --> 00:21:29,870 My problem in writing the book was that I then I grew up, uh, into a man, 209 00:21:29,870 --> 00:21:34,909 and then I put away childish things and fantasy, just kept producing more and more books. 210 00:21:34,910 --> 00:21:39,350 So when I had to read them all in a great hurry to write this book, it was a bit of a cram. 211 00:21:39,350 --> 00:21:41,840 But when I was a kid, I would read Tolkien over and over again. 212 00:21:42,290 --> 00:21:48,199 I read Tolkien, Lord of the rings every year, and that was I think that was a huge part of the appeal. 213 00:21:48,200 --> 00:21:53,420 It for me was I was just living a dull, decimated suburban life. 214 00:21:53,870 --> 00:22:00,350 And Middle-Earth just seemed so wonderful. And I remember feeling as a kid a desire to go there. 215 00:22:01,460 --> 00:22:07,070 Uh, I mean, that's one of the things I find hard to, to quite fathom about grimdark, actually. 216 00:22:07,610 --> 00:22:10,870 Who would want to go to Westeros? I mean, it's a horrible place. 217 00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:14,330 It's nasty, brutish and short life there. And yet people do that. 218 00:22:14,330 --> 00:22:17,930 It's been enormously successful. Some the Fire and ice and the and the TV Game of Thrones. 219 00:22:17,930 --> 00:22:25,399 There's something going on there that desire, I mean, in a, in a pure sense, to escape into this, 220 00:22:25,400 --> 00:22:31,219 this more wonderful, more marvellous, more magical world is at the heart of what I think Tolkien was providing. 221 00:22:31,220 --> 00:22:39,250 And you can see having the experiences that he had in the First World War, that he then writes what is a war novel? 222 00:22:39,260 --> 00:22:44,780 It's about the War of the ring, but it's not a war in the way that the the Somme was the war. 223 00:22:45,560 --> 00:22:52,580 So there's a clutch of fantasy written in the 1920s in the aftermath of World War One. 224 00:22:52,580 --> 00:23:00,260 And that, I think, is it's kind of written in reaction, I think, to World War One and to modernity and the disenchantment of modernity. 225 00:23:00,260 --> 00:23:03,559 And that, I think, is in the baked into the DNA of fantasy. 226 00:23:03,560 --> 00:23:08,090 All the fantasy that gets written carries that through in a kind of historical sense. 227 00:23:08,810 --> 00:23:13,550 And that, I think, is something C.S. Lewis, he was also, uh, he fought in World War One. 228 00:23:14,090 --> 00:23:21,080 Um, and when he writes Narnia, uh, in the 19, he starts writing in the late 40s and publishes the 1950s. 229 00:23:21,440 --> 00:23:26,870 The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe is also a kind of war novel of the big battle and the last in the series. 230 00:23:26,880 --> 00:23:34,640 It's called The Last Battle. Um, and he's, you say, collecting his experiences as a soldier. 231 00:23:35,090 --> 00:23:39,950 Um, he's also writing as a, as a Christian, uh, as well as Tolkien, of course, 232 00:23:40,460 --> 00:23:49,010 working that sense of Tolkien's word for it was sub creation, where, uh, he takes this idea from Coleridge. 233 00:23:49,370 --> 00:23:52,370 God is the creator. God made the world. 234 00:23:52,820 --> 00:24:00,560 What an artist does is sort of in imitation of that divine act of creativity in a sort of ratio, inferior. 235 00:24:01,010 --> 00:24:07,129 It's still creative, but it's a sub creation kind of creating his particular kind of world. 236 00:24:07,130 --> 00:24:14,540 And it's shot through with his, his religious, um, sensibilities as well as is the case for Narnia. 237 00:24:15,320 --> 00:24:18,200 Dunsinane, uh, the king of Alfred's daughter. 238 00:24:18,770 --> 00:24:26,780 Uh, he served in the he served in not only World War one, he was also in, um, the Boer War because he was a bit older than Tolkien and Lewis. 239 00:24:27,530 --> 00:24:31,610 Um, Edison was a Civil war during a civil servant, excuse me, during the war. 240 00:24:31,940 --> 00:24:38,540 So he didn't see a lot of action on the front, um, lines, but he was kind and very marked by the war. 241 00:24:39,050 --> 00:24:42,550 Um. And there's a larger sort of literary. 242 00:24:42,550 --> 00:24:47,590 Historical. I mean, this is to be very sketchy about it because I don't want to take up too much time. 243 00:24:47,950 --> 00:24:56,440 There's a larger kind of literary historical account that places modernism and the modernist experiments of writers like Joyce, 244 00:24:56,530 --> 00:25:01,210 T.S. Eliot, um, Virginia Woolf in the aftermath of World War One. 245 00:25:01,240 --> 00:25:10,300 The fascination with experimenting and a fracturing narrative and breaking up and of poetic modes is itself seem, 246 00:25:10,870 --> 00:25:16,520 uh, there's quite a lot of criticism on this as, uh, as a reaction to what the war was doing. 247 00:25:16,540 --> 00:25:20,650 Now, my argument, I suppose, is that fantasy is also marked in that way. 248 00:25:21,460 --> 00:25:25,420 So this leads me back to my the question which I can't quite answer. 249 00:25:26,290 --> 00:25:29,870 Um, you know, Dennis, I love fantasy, I read fantasy. 250 00:25:29,890 --> 00:25:34,780 Um, I was born in 1965, so I was I was reading fantasy through the 1970s and 1980s. 251 00:25:35,290 --> 00:25:38,520 Um, reading often the same fantasy over and over again. 252 00:25:38,530 --> 00:25:43,149 That was just an accident of my chronology. I'm interested in the larger question. 253 00:25:43,150 --> 00:25:53,620 Why is there this gap between what happened in World War One and then the the writing that emerged out of that? 254 00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:59,620 Is that the argument I'm making, uh, that we call fantasy, that feeds the big contemporary, 255 00:25:59,620 --> 00:26:05,050 popular, uh, phenomenon of fantasy, why does it only take off in the late 60s? 256 00:26:05,800 --> 00:26:09,940 That that gap seems interesting to me. What was it about the 60s? 257 00:26:10,120 --> 00:26:16,180 Um, and the 70s. That meant this is the time when fantasy kind of explodes. 258 00:26:16,510 --> 00:26:20,200 So it's not it doesn't. It's there throughout the 20th century. 259 00:26:20,200 --> 00:26:31,809 And in fact, uh, I in the history, I have, uh, a section exploring the roots of modern fantasy and in part that's quite well trodden ground. 260 00:26:31,810 --> 00:26:36,940 Critics have talked about this so that both Tolkien and Lewis talk about, um, 261 00:26:36,990 --> 00:26:43,840 MacDonald's fantasies, which I think it'd be good to have a slide deck, actually. 262 00:26:43,840 --> 00:26:46,479 Then you can see what these books were. I don't know, though. 263 00:26:46,480 --> 00:26:51,969 I just if some of the lectures are just standard elective and read out a prepared script, 264 00:26:51,970 --> 00:26:56,380 you're thinking, well, just give me the paper and I'll read it in half the time. And, um. 265 00:26:57,650 --> 00:27:00,680 So Jordan, The Old Fantasticks, which is 1858. 266 00:27:00,680 --> 00:27:05,930 So right in the middle of the Victorian period, which is a story about a character called Uno. 267 00:27:05,930 --> 00:27:12,740 Dos, rather unusual name, who is in his study in a regular, um, Victorian house. 268 00:27:12,980 --> 00:27:22,220 And it turns into a fantasy kingdom, and he's able to move from our world into into this marvellous magical fantasy realm. 269 00:27:23,090 --> 00:27:28,469 Um. Foreign Mendelsohn's book Rhetorics of Fantasy. 270 00:27:28,470 --> 00:27:35,250 I don't know if anyone has come across that this is a kind of whistle stop tour of some of the kind of key critical works on fantasy. 271 00:27:35,950 --> 00:27:40,799 Uh mendelsohn's book identifies four. It's a kind of structuralist account of fantasy, in a way. 272 00:27:40,800 --> 00:27:48,630 She identifies four types of fantasy. Um, but I think what's really clever about her book is that it turns out that all four kind of the same. 273 00:27:48,990 --> 00:27:54,930 So she says there are what she calls immersive fantasies, like the Lord of the rings, which take place in their own world. 274 00:27:55,620 --> 00:28:00,180 And we can't go from our world to their world. It's just its own self-contained place. 275 00:28:00,840 --> 00:28:07,829 And they are what she calls portal fantasies. Where you starting out in our world, as the children do in The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, 276 00:28:07,830 --> 00:28:11,610 and you go through a portal of wardrobe in that book into the fantasy realm. 277 00:28:12,240 --> 00:28:15,569 It's very cleverly pitched by Lewis. 278 00:28:15,570 --> 00:28:19,620 I think that whole scene, in fact, I think one of the things. 279 00:28:20,900 --> 00:28:25,670 I'm not happy. Not so happy about in the later books in the Narnia series, 280 00:28:25,670 --> 00:28:31,640 is that Lewis feels he has to go back and kind of explain all the features of The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe. 281 00:28:31,670 --> 00:28:35,990 Why a wardrobe? Why the why is the first thing they see a lamp post? 282 00:28:36,380 --> 00:28:43,910 And I think that he does explain it all, and I think that kind of robs it of some of its amazing kind of marvel and mystery. 283 00:28:44,330 --> 00:28:47,030 And actually, there's a it's a sort of dreamlike process, isn't it? 284 00:28:47,420 --> 00:28:54,920 They go through the wardrobe and inside the wardrobe are fur coats because it's winter on the other side, 285 00:28:54,920 --> 00:29:01,040 and it's always winter, never Christmas, of course. So they put on the fur coats, and then they come out into a forest of fir trees, 286 00:29:01,460 --> 00:29:06,170 like a sort of conceptual pun, which is what happens when when one dreams, it feels. 287 00:29:06,170 --> 00:29:12,180 It kind of rings true. Uh, so portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, portal fantasies. 288 00:29:12,180 --> 00:29:16,379 And then the other two kinds of fantasies are actually just another way of saying portal fantasy. 289 00:29:16,380 --> 00:29:19,740 So, uh, one is intrusion fantasy where there is a portal, 290 00:29:19,740 --> 00:29:24,720 but instead of us going into the fantasy realm, creatures from the fantasy realm come into our world. 291 00:29:25,140 --> 00:29:28,440 And then the final section, which is the shortest section in Mendelsohn's book, 292 00:29:28,440 --> 00:29:33,720 is called liminal fantasies that take place in the kind of ambiguous borderline between our world and the fantasy world. 293 00:29:34,110 --> 00:29:43,410 But what she points out, and I think this is important, is that even in immersive fantasies, there is a kind of portal, almost always. 294 00:29:43,830 --> 00:29:48,000 So if we think of Lord of the rings or, you know, The Hobbit, we think of middle earth. 295 00:29:48,660 --> 00:29:52,770 It's its own realm. And you immerse yourself as a reader in this imagined world. 296 00:29:53,520 --> 00:30:05,160 Nonetheless, the story takes us from a kind of recognisable, cosy, uh, suburban, slightly modern world of the hobbits. 297 00:30:05,940 --> 00:30:10,319 And they have to leave the Shire and they have to move out into the perilous realm, 298 00:30:10,320 --> 00:30:15,300 into the wider world, where all that excitement and adventures and magic and marvels happen. 299 00:30:15,750 --> 00:30:18,870 And it's not literally a portal. It's not a wardrobe they have to go through. 300 00:30:18,870 --> 00:30:28,320 But there is still that trajectory. Um, so my my kind of pre-history of fantasy, if we go back, uh, 301 00:30:28,360 --> 00:30:35,230 I think it probably it's one thing I say right at the beginning is I could have written a book about, 302 00:30:35,290 --> 00:30:43,930 uh, almost everything, because we could argue that fantasy is a sort of default logic of storytelling for human beings. 303 00:30:44,200 --> 00:30:53,020 We could argue the Epic of Gilgamesh is kind of a fantasy. We could argue that Homer and Beowulf and medieval romances are all kind of fantasies. 304 00:30:53,650 --> 00:30:59,500 I don't think that's true because I, as I say, I think modern fantasy is its is as we read it now, 305 00:30:59,500 --> 00:31:07,810 as it's constructed now, is written out of that logic of, of disenchanted modernity. 306 00:31:08,230 --> 00:31:11,000 And actually it's quite a modern form fantasy. 307 00:31:11,000 --> 00:31:18,430 It feels older because it's often set in the medieval, a medieval ized world or an ancient world, but actually it's quite a contemporary. 308 00:31:19,090 --> 00:31:24,370 It's newer, I think, than science fiction. In my science fiction history, I say science fiction starts in about 1600. 309 00:31:24,370 --> 00:31:28,779 It goes back a long way. Fantasy, I think, really doesn't get going until the later 19th century. 310 00:31:28,780 --> 00:31:35,830 And there were, I say, there were three kind of roots that feed through then into 20th century fantasy. 311 00:31:36,370 --> 00:31:42,999 Uh, and one is you mentioned Alice in Wonderland, one is children's fantasy in the 19th century. 312 00:31:43,000 --> 00:31:51,610 So Lewis Carroll and and, um, the Water Babies and lots of other stories like that which are set in their own fantastical realms. 313 00:31:52,300 --> 00:31:58,840 Another is the, uh, the revival of Arthurian literature. 314 00:31:59,410 --> 00:32:04,059 So last year in literature, which was very popular in the Middle Ages, just falls out of fashion. 315 00:32:04,060 --> 00:32:10,090 No one really writes anything Arthurian for hundreds of years. It's quite an odd kind of observation about literary history. 316 00:32:10,360 --> 00:32:14,169 John Milton thought, I'll write a great epic of England, and it will be about King Arthur. 317 00:32:14,170 --> 00:32:19,700 And then John Milton thought, no, no, I won't do King Arthur. I'll do God and Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. 318 00:32:19,700 --> 00:32:28,179 And so he writes Paradise Lost. And there aren't really any the Arthurian fantasies or epics until the 19th century. 319 00:32:28,180 --> 00:32:31,030 And then for some reason in the 19th century, there's a huge glut of them. 320 00:32:31,030 --> 00:32:35,530 Suddenly everyone's writing Arthurian literature again, and that's continue through, 321 00:32:35,560 --> 00:32:38,590 that's continue to be popular through the 20th and into the 21st century. 322 00:32:38,590 --> 00:32:45,160 Those the myths and legends associated with King Arthur, which you can trace into lots of classic fantasy novels as well. 323 00:32:45,880 --> 00:32:52,420 Um, and that's, uh, Tennyson's Atlas of the King and and William Morris, uh, writing poetry, 324 00:32:52,420 --> 00:32:58,000 particularly in Arthurian mode and William Morris prose fantasies at the end of the 19th century, 325 00:32:58,330 --> 00:33:06,280 which Tolkien was very, uh, full of praise for and influenced by, uh, but it's also Faulkner's ring cycle. 326 00:33:06,370 --> 00:33:10,180 Um, and his testament is old, which, of course, is an Arthurian story. 327 00:33:10,930 --> 00:33:15,400 Um, why Arthurian literature kind of came rushing back in the 19th century. 328 00:33:15,610 --> 00:33:18,340 And it's an interesting question, which I could go on at greater length. 329 00:33:18,760 --> 00:33:24,010 The third strand, I think, is John Bunyan and The Pilgrim's Progress, and that, again, it's an argument I make. 330 00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:32,260 So Bunyan published his book much earlier, but it's in the 19th century that that book becomes an absolutely global phenomenon. 331 00:33:32,260 --> 00:33:36,040 And it's partly because it was, uh, it was widely reprinted. 332 00:33:36,040 --> 00:33:42,669 It was taken by missionaries and evangelicals all around the world because it's a religious allegory, 333 00:33:42,670 --> 00:33:46,450 and it's there to make us more godly, um, and so on. 334 00:33:46,450 --> 00:33:52,870 But it's also a fantasy, a compellingly written fantasy quest through this really vividly imagined. 335 00:33:52,870 --> 00:33:55,660 I mean, it is an allegory, and everything in it stands for something else. 336 00:33:56,110 --> 00:34:00,040 But the world comes alive as you read it, and it was so popular in the 19th century. 337 00:34:00,040 --> 00:34:06,010 It's hard to overstate how popular The Pilgrim's Progress was, and I think these things then feed into the way fantasy gets written. 338 00:34:07,040 --> 00:34:10,580 Not that Tolkien or Lewis were writing allegories. 339 00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:16,560 I don't think they were. So Tolkien in The Lord of the rings, in the preface says it's not an allegory. 340 00:34:16,580 --> 00:34:24,140 Lord of the rings I cordially dislike allegory, he says, and have done so ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. 341 00:34:25,270 --> 00:34:26,979 People think the Narnia books are allegory. 342 00:34:26,980 --> 00:34:34,150 They think The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe is an allegorical tale about the Passion of Christ and the death and resurrection of Christ. 343 00:34:34,840 --> 00:34:41,110 I don't think it is. I don't think Lewis thought it was a there's a difference there, 344 00:34:41,140 --> 00:34:45,970 which I don't want to get too kind of super fine about, but I think it's sort of important. 345 00:34:46,840 --> 00:34:59,160 Um. The Narnia books are Lewis, uh, indulging his lifelong fascination with the idea of talking animals. 346 00:35:00,030 --> 00:35:06,420 Um, he was called Jack by all his friends, even though his name is Clive Staples Lewis. 347 00:35:06,720 --> 00:35:08,070 You know why he was called Jack? 348 00:35:09,310 --> 00:35:16,900 Because his pet dog he has a boy was called Jack, and he identified really, really strongly with this dog and he wished the dog could talk. 349 00:35:17,290 --> 00:35:22,180 And he was fascinated by the idea of telling stories in a land where the animals can talk. 350 00:35:22,720 --> 00:35:28,780 Okay, so he writes lion, the witch and the wardrobe, and it's set in a fantasy land where the animals can all talk. 351 00:35:28,810 --> 00:35:30,880 Not all of them. Some of them can't, but most of them can. 352 00:35:31,940 --> 00:35:42,820 Uh, what then happens is he thinks, as a Christian, uh, in our world, Christ incarnated ism as a man because ours is a human world. 353 00:35:43,720 --> 00:35:48,070 Um, and that's that's important. If you're a Christian. That's a really important point of of belief. 354 00:35:48,520 --> 00:35:52,970 Christ was God incarnated in bodily form. 355 00:35:52,990 --> 00:35:57,430 He wasn't like a symbolic representation of Paul. He didn't represent God. 356 00:35:57,850 --> 00:36:01,450 He wasn't an allegorical version of God. He was God. 357 00:36:01,720 --> 00:36:06,459 This is incarnation. So Lewis says, well, what would it look like in a world of talking animals? 358 00:36:06,460 --> 00:36:10,290 How would Christ incarnate in such a world? But he would incarnate as a talking animal. 359 00:36:10,330 --> 00:36:16,780 We have Aslan the lion. It is that story. It's a Christian story, but it's not an allegorical retelling of that Christian story. 360 00:36:17,230 --> 00:36:24,370 And that logic of incarnation is central, I think, to both what Lewis and Tolkien are doing. 361 00:36:24,370 --> 00:36:30,760 Tolkien's emphasis, I think, is a little different. There are lots of Christian parallels in the way he writes his narrative, 362 00:36:31,570 --> 00:36:36,220 and I think that does something to to what Bunyan is doing in The Pilgrim's Progress. 363 00:36:36,640 --> 00:36:40,480 But again, it's about bodying that into an imagined world. Um. 364 00:36:41,830 --> 00:36:45,130 So I traced these kind of 19th century roots. 365 00:36:45,520 --> 00:36:49,660 But I think it is the catalyst is then the First World War. 366 00:36:50,290 --> 00:36:56,710 And then what happens after the First World War is people write in reaction to that and just wondering how much longer I have to. 367 00:36:58,580 --> 00:37:01,670 I don't want to go rambling on. I mean, I'm going to come back to my question. 368 00:37:01,790 --> 00:37:08,930 If anyone has an answer to this question, please shout it out and I will reward you, um, with, uh, gold and silver. 369 00:37:09,770 --> 00:37:14,090 But my question. So why do we think that was? I mean, I think I'm right in saying this, okay. 370 00:37:14,120 --> 00:37:19,640 I mean, you could disagree saying I misunderstood the history of fantasy across the 20th century, but I don't think so. 371 00:37:20,120 --> 00:37:24,200 I think fantasy is a kind of small scale thing for most of the century, 372 00:37:24,470 --> 00:37:29,180 and that it explodes in the late 60s and in the 70s, and then it just keeps exploding. 373 00:37:29,210 --> 00:37:36,470 There's a delta of a vast number of fantasy novels are published through the 80s and 90s, and that's just continuing its changing mode. 374 00:37:36,800 --> 00:37:41,630 It's now as popular. And I mean, video games are full of kind of the tropes of fantasy. 375 00:37:42,050 --> 00:37:45,080 Some of them very mean. Some of them are actually literally based on Tolkien. 376 00:37:45,110 --> 00:37:48,320 Many are just based in a kind of Tolkien in fantastical universe. 377 00:37:48,830 --> 00:37:51,980 Uh, the movies have been very successful in TV series. 378 00:37:52,490 --> 00:37:55,549 Um, uh, comic books and games. 379 00:37:55,550 --> 00:38:02,420 I talk quite a lot about Dungeons and Dragons and how that has kind of part of the sort of the, the flow, 380 00:38:02,450 --> 00:38:09,319 the river of the fantasy through the, uh, into the modern day fantasy has become much more global. 381 00:38:09,320 --> 00:38:13,160 So there's a much greater diversity and variety of fantastical realms. 382 00:38:13,160 --> 00:38:18,229 It's not all now based on kind of an idea of the Anglo-Saxon, the medieval, uh, 383 00:38:18,230 --> 00:38:22,670 bits of Northwest Europe, which is what Tolkien was interested in for a long time. 384 00:38:22,670 --> 00:38:30,620 That was the the default of fantasy. But now you get fantasy realms and kingdoms that are based on, um, you know, African and Indian and, 385 00:38:31,130 --> 00:38:36,530 uh, East Asian and, uh, South American, uh, traditions and cultures and heritages. 386 00:38:36,530 --> 00:38:45,830 And it's become a much more diverse, which I think is a very good thing, but it continues in popularity in a way that it wasn't before. 387 00:38:46,760 --> 00:38:50,629 So let me summarise and then we'll see if you can answer my question for me. 388 00:38:50,630 --> 00:38:56,180 And I will indeed be grateful, although possibly I may have overstepped stated when I said I would reward you with gold, 389 00:38:56,720 --> 00:39:00,530 because the only gold I've got is my wedding ring, and my wife would kill me if I gave that away. 390 00:39:01,280 --> 00:39:07,430 Uh, and I shouldn't give away a ring that would, given the topic of the summer school here today. 391 00:39:08,770 --> 00:39:15,819 So I think that there's there is a sense in which we could call Fantastica is kind of the default of human storytelling. 392 00:39:15,820 --> 00:39:21,280 We like stories about fantastical things. There is a tradition of writing which you can call realist. 393 00:39:21,670 --> 00:39:26,319 I generally fight shy of realism as a term because it means something quite specific. 394 00:39:26,320 --> 00:39:32,770 Actually. It's it refers to a particular school of novelists in the late 19th century, mostly in France. 395 00:39:33,250 --> 00:39:36,520 People like Zola, um, Tolstoy, George Eliot, 396 00:39:36,520 --> 00:39:44,770 who were aiming to the naturalism they were aiming to absolutely reproduce the the kind of qualia of lived experience, 397 00:39:45,160 --> 00:39:48,330 a sort of documentary verisimilitude was underlying their work. 398 00:39:48,340 --> 00:39:53,020 Well, when we say realist, what we really mean is books that are that don't have fantastical elements in them, 399 00:39:53,020 --> 00:39:56,500 books that are set in a kind of recognisable world, such as the one that we live in. 400 00:39:57,280 --> 00:40:01,359 That is a strand in literature that's important, but I think there are many, 401 00:40:01,360 --> 00:40:06,189 many more stories going right back to the beginning of storytelling that include elements of fantasy, 402 00:40:06,190 --> 00:40:10,840 magic and monsters and, um, and quests and treasure and so on. 403 00:40:11,710 --> 00:40:19,480 Um, but even if we if we limit it to the roots of modern fantasy, the explosion of fantasy in the, 404 00:40:19,750 --> 00:40:27,190 in the 60s and 70s and where we are now with this global fantasy culture, why is there this lag? 405 00:40:27,940 --> 00:40:31,090 Why is it that fantasies that are germinated. 406 00:40:32,040 --> 00:40:34,379 Uh, sometimes literally in World War one. 407 00:40:34,380 --> 00:40:42,780 But out of the experience of that war, written and published in the 20s and 30s, uh, and then through into the 40s and 50s and the 50s are talking. 408 00:40:42,780 --> 00:40:47,819 And, Lewis, why do they only take off in the late 60s and 70s? 409 00:40:47,820 --> 00:40:49,830 What is it about that generation? 410 00:40:50,700 --> 00:41:00,090 Uh, well, that historical moment, that means that when fantasy becomes a huge deal, because it's working in a with a kind of creative relatedness. 411 00:41:00,330 --> 00:41:03,690 The Ballantine List was republishing books published way back. 412 00:41:04,470 --> 00:41:07,920 I mean, they republished, um, some Morris's, uh. 413 00:41:09,260 --> 00:41:17,690 Romances in the 1890s, but they published a lot in the mist, which is 26, and one, the reverse, which is 24th. 414 00:41:17,690 --> 00:41:21,179 So this is a long lag. Do we know anyone? 415 00:41:21,180 --> 00:41:27,540 One idea. Go. I'm going to go on my, uh, knowledge of history as many books by Ken Follett. 416 00:41:27,810 --> 00:41:31,770 Okay. Okay. Can we have a second while we bring you a rope? 417 00:41:31,800 --> 00:41:35,250 Okay. Uh, just before you answer, let's. Right. 418 00:41:35,460 --> 00:41:42,010 Very much. Right. 419 00:41:42,360 --> 00:41:45,640 We have a roving mike. So which you now have. 420 00:41:45,660 --> 00:41:51,220 So do answer that the question for us. Go go go. 421 00:41:51,730 --> 00:41:55,350 I suppose a few thinks going off with more creative freedom. 422 00:41:55,740 --> 00:42:02,040 So an obvious example being the Beatles, um, for creative expression at that time, 423 00:42:02,040 --> 00:42:09,270 as I wonder if that's not enough to have that creativity to choose a bit more, but not being ashamed of your choices? 424 00:42:09,760 --> 00:42:17,640 Very interesting idea. I wonder if you know that they were slated to appear in a film of Lord of the rings. 425 00:42:17,910 --> 00:42:21,330 Yes, the jump and jump as well. 426 00:42:21,330 --> 00:42:29,680 Yeah, but no, it's I'm not to interrupt your your questions, but it's certainly true that the the initial kind of boom the great success, 427 00:42:29,680 --> 00:42:39,149 the popularity of Lord of the rings was kind of it correlated with the counterculture, with students and hippies, and it's Vietnam War. 428 00:42:39,150 --> 00:42:42,540 It was kind of anti-war protests, a kind of ism. 429 00:42:42,540 --> 00:42:48,030 And maybe it is because you're right. And then it feeds almost immediately through into pop music. 430 00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:56,420 When LED Zeppelin released songs that are all about escaping from Mordor and, uh, prog rock, is that more creative freedom? 431 00:42:56,430 --> 00:43:01,140 Do we think there was more creative freedom in the 60s? I think so. 432 00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:09,270 Yeah, maybe. Except that the creative freedom is the things like the Lady Chatterley trial, which was 63. 433 00:43:09,870 --> 00:43:14,340 So that then said, after that you can put sex in your novels now. 434 00:43:14,670 --> 00:43:18,480 You couldn't do that before because it was fall foul of the. 435 00:43:18,900 --> 00:43:22,710 It would be obscene and would be prosecuted for it. And now there's a lot more sex in fiction. 436 00:43:23,250 --> 00:43:27,830 That's a kind of creative freedom, I suppose, but not really in classic fantasy. 437 00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:31,230 Not until you get to romantic. Did you have another point to drop? 438 00:43:32,070 --> 00:43:37,610 My second theory was, I suppose this is the last time a change and has the ruling classes. 439 00:43:37,620 --> 00:43:43,679 The, um, the feeling that if you put your minds about to something you maybe can start to achieve. 440 00:43:43,680 --> 00:43:47,639 And if you look at the main protagonists of those, the treatment program, 441 00:43:47,640 --> 00:43:52,440 very ordinary individual to achieve great things, a lot of those maybe a bit more of a. 442 00:43:53,420 --> 00:43:56,570 Connection. But yeah. Do you think the common. Yeah. 443 00:43:57,200 --> 00:44:03,500 I mean, you can classically remember romance in the medieval sense is about. 444 00:44:04,100 --> 00:44:08,000 Kings and princes and great knights and warriors. There's quite a lot of that in Lord of the rings. 445 00:44:08,810 --> 00:44:12,530 I mean, it's sometimes hard because I work in University of London. I teach for Royal Holloway. 446 00:44:13,130 --> 00:44:18,050 Um, and it's it's it can be hard for students to get their heads around the, 447 00:44:18,410 --> 00:44:24,920 the way a class articulates itself in the Lord of the rings that Frodo and Sam Reed, 448 00:44:24,950 --> 00:44:31,880 to a lot of people today, is all their friends going off on a they're not, though photos of a master, and Sam is the servant. 449 00:44:32,270 --> 00:44:38,570 And it's modelled actually, I think on on a kind of military logic, not explicitly, but I think that's what's behind it. 450 00:44:38,600 --> 00:44:44,480 It's a father's like an officer, and Sam is like, Is Batman not Batman in that sense? 451 00:44:44,630 --> 00:44:48,140 In the traditional, the old fashioned sense? That's really interesting. So something about. 452 00:44:48,260 --> 00:44:54,730 Yeah. Well, I mean, the world is changing and it's changing more rapidly, I suppose, across that period. 453 00:44:54,740 --> 00:45:00,319 So something about the common man do we think something about creative freedom. 454 00:45:00,320 --> 00:45:02,540 They've got some more questions like here in here. 455 00:45:02,660 --> 00:45:09,319 Um, then we'll take an online question after this one if you have some sort of I mean, what gold and silver. 456 00:45:09,320 --> 00:45:12,770 And we'd have to have a go at that. 457 00:45:12,800 --> 00:45:21,340 Okay. Perspective of, um, uh, psychologist, historian and cultural historian and, uh, picturing myself simple. 458 00:45:21,350 --> 00:45:26,209 I think of two boxers, uh, playing in the 60s and 70s. 459 00:45:26,210 --> 00:45:31,550 The first one is, um, really traumatisation with the Second World War. 460 00:45:31,640 --> 00:45:42,710 This is site history and so on. Um, because that way the audiences can then connect with the, um, the First World War generation. 461 00:45:42,890 --> 00:45:52,640 Um, you like to kind of really chime in with, um, the concerns and with these narratives and then, you know, there's lots more to be said about. 462 00:45:52,640 --> 00:45:58,640 But the second one, I think we if we look at it from the point of memetics, kinetic theory, 463 00:45:59,030 --> 00:46:08,180 this is a time when, uh, um, through development of technology, um, also becomes a sort of, um, uh, meme fix. 464 00:46:08,630 --> 00:46:15,020 So it's not just one meme, it's a series of means which kind of co involve, uh, co-evolved. 465 00:46:15,410 --> 00:46:23,800 Um, I'm sorry. Um, so, um, I think what happens is that this is a time when you can actually start producing, um, 466 00:46:23,810 --> 00:46:31,640 High fidelity, these things before that, they are very much information about the oral culture we've got. 467 00:46:32,120 --> 00:46:38,630 Okay. From, um, uh, book printing onwards, there's a high chance of producing, um, high flying bees. 468 00:46:38,990 --> 00:46:49,160 But I think once, um, fancy code falls into this category of culture, um, and becomes a meme, this is what it takes off. 469 00:46:49,400 --> 00:47:01,070 Okay, that's really interesting. I certainly think there's there's a there's a hospitality in in Tolkiens writing invites you into his world, 470 00:47:01,580 --> 00:47:06,770 and it's a major part of the kind of reception the fantasy is, 471 00:47:06,770 --> 00:47:10,879 not just people sitting in in their bedrooms reading these novels, although that's part of it. 472 00:47:10,880 --> 00:47:17,630 Obviously. It's also, you know, fan engagements where you can dress up as your favourite character from from Lord of the rings. 473 00:47:17,630 --> 00:47:20,640 It is. Sharing means it's having a kind of share thing in common. 474 00:47:20,680 --> 00:47:27,050 Them basically. Yeah, but some taxable a better that that than others aren't they. 475 00:47:27,740 --> 00:47:31,370 Um, for some reason, you know, Star Wars, Harry Potter, uh, 476 00:47:31,370 --> 00:47:37,330 Lord of the rings are endlessly memed and they're everywhere with lots of other perfectly good texts and all. 477 00:47:37,340 --> 00:47:40,909 I mean, I think that's where the Queen's Earthsea books are amongst the greatest fantasy novels ever written, 478 00:47:40,910 --> 00:47:43,940 but no one means them, and they've been adapted. 479 00:47:43,940 --> 00:47:49,639 They've had various television film adaptations. They're widely read the great novels and why those books don't. 480 00:47:49,640 --> 00:47:54,680 But somehow Tolkien does. And I suppose Narnia does to a certain extent. 481 00:47:55,460 --> 00:47:58,340 That's really interesting. I mean, the generational question seems. 482 00:47:59,690 --> 00:48:07,760 A little blurred to me because it is the generation that first embraced Tolkien was a generation that grew up after the war. 483 00:48:08,750 --> 00:48:13,790 It was their parents who fought in the war. They were the first generation kind of free of war. 484 00:48:14,450 --> 00:48:16,999 Um, I mean, the Vietnam War was obviously going on. 485 00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:24,630 So they went not the war is going away, but that kind of complete saturation of a generation by the experience of war. 486 00:48:24,650 --> 00:48:27,830 I think you're quite right. I think that speaks back to the First World War. 487 00:48:27,830 --> 00:48:30,650 And then I think of it, the upheaval generation. 488 00:48:30,670 --> 00:48:38,420 I'm younger, but we we grew up in the shadow of the Second World War and the fear of a Third World war, you know, all kind of nuclear stuff. 489 00:48:38,430 --> 00:48:44,020 So for them, you know, see reading the Ring as the nuclear bomb or whatever. 490 00:48:44,030 --> 00:48:49,690 So I think it's very much the response to the poetry from the Second World War. 491 00:48:49,910 --> 00:48:54,690 Yeah. Oh, sure. No, no, no, that's really interesting. Can we have another question from the online campaign? 492 00:48:54,770 --> 00:49:00,500 See, do we have all male victims? Yeah. 493 00:49:01,700 --> 00:49:06,440 And I'll repeat the question for the benefit of the online viewers. 494 00:49:06,590 --> 00:49:10,140 Yeah. Okay. So you okay? So that can be heard. 495 00:49:10,160 --> 00:49:17,170 I won't repeat the question. This works. Um, there are quite a lot of people offering answers to this question. 496 00:49:17,180 --> 00:49:24,770 Um, and a lot of, oh, I haven't got going through all that. I can't, but yeah, I have to go kill a lot of them over that. 497 00:49:24,860 --> 00:49:34,459 Okay. So, um, one point that's brought up quite, um, repeatedly is the idea that perhaps an increase in leisure time in the 60s, um, 498 00:49:34,460 --> 00:49:40,490 due to some home technological advances, might have increased, uh, need for escapism, 499 00:49:40,970 --> 00:49:46,520 um, with the energy of everyday life sort of freed up with free time. 500 00:49:46,520 --> 00:49:54,620 That's one point. Um, someone has suggested access to, um, drugs during the 60s. 501 00:49:54,620 --> 00:49:58,910 Might have helped, um, drug. 502 00:49:59,960 --> 00:50:03,830 Um, uh, where was it? Actually? Several people suggested drugs. 503 00:50:05,800 --> 00:50:08,840 Mhm. Um, I can't imagine what it was about. 504 00:50:08,840 --> 00:50:15,620 A novel that contains kind of smoking is pipe and tumble stick around and appeal to drug culture. 505 00:50:16,990 --> 00:50:22,420 Oh, yes. Interesting. Um, someone has pointed out perhaps it's, uh, access to cheaper paperbacks. 506 00:50:22,720 --> 00:50:27,130 Um, with the cultural dominance, dominance of the U.S. and protracted conflict in Vietnam. 507 00:50:27,340 --> 00:50:31,910 A greater need for entrapment as that conflict continued, the two sided putting something to do with it. 508 00:50:31,930 --> 00:50:37,900 I think the fact that it does, it takes off in America in the first instance at that time, and the Vietnam War is the. 509 00:50:39,160 --> 00:50:44,799 Is the it's not the kind of, you know, the it's not like the Second World War. 510 00:50:44,800 --> 00:50:52,740 It's not a kind of just war. It's a a war that you that you can protest and that kind of shapes a particular identity. 511 00:50:52,750 --> 00:50:56,920 I think there is something in I mean, youth culture emerges after World War two. 512 00:50:56,920 --> 00:51:00,069 There isn't because young people for the first time have disposable income. 513 00:51:00,070 --> 00:51:06,280 That's why pop music comes about. Then, um, I mean, the history of pop music is, again, very interesting. 514 00:51:06,280 --> 00:51:17,260 It's kind of intertwined, the fantasy in strange ways. But the, um, the initial invention of the what was in the day, in my day, vinyl records, uh, 515 00:51:17,380 --> 00:51:24,760 the companies that produced them assumed that they would be used for dictation, so people would dictate and then their secretaries would write up. 516 00:51:24,790 --> 00:51:30,700 So that's why the record companies all have names like Parlophone over His Master's Voice, 517 00:51:31,360 --> 00:51:34,969 um, that we would record on to records as a, as dictation devices. 518 00:51:34,970 --> 00:51:39,730 They had no idea the people would want to buy pre-recorded music and listen to it. 519 00:51:39,730 --> 00:51:44,800 But of course they did. And he knew in huge numbers in the 60s, that's the that's the Beatles coming to to fame. 520 00:51:45,340 --> 00:51:47,850 And that's because for the first time, there was, uh, 521 00:51:47,920 --> 00:51:54,010 a group of generation that had leisure time and disposable income in a way that hadn't been true before. 522 00:51:54,340 --> 00:51:56,890 Um, fantasy, I suppose, has something to do with that. It's the. 523 00:51:56,980 --> 00:52:03,940 Yeah, these are all good answers, but I'm sorry I'm not giving out my gold ring because it's it's not making me invisible. 524 00:52:03,940 --> 00:52:09,490 No questions over here. So we try to if you want to pick one of that cluster that there at the back. 525 00:52:10,540 --> 00:52:15,460 And uh, another move in the 60s was environmentalism. 526 00:52:15,880 --> 00:52:22,660 So spring in the early 60s. And I wondered if you see a connection between that and, and the group in fantasy, like I find early fantasy, 527 00:52:22,660 --> 00:52:26,830 especially the Lord of the rings, so concerned with the moral value of the natural world. 528 00:52:26,830 --> 00:52:29,830 And. Yeah, that's that's a really good point. 529 00:52:29,830 --> 00:52:34,180 I mean, again, it's a question as to why it was in the 60s that environmentalism, 530 00:52:34,330 --> 00:52:39,580 they used to call it ecology, and now we call it environmentalism and green ideas. 531 00:52:39,970 --> 00:52:44,590 It changed with the publication. Uh, well, that was in the 60s. 532 00:52:45,520 --> 00:52:54,490 That 65 gene was published. But. That's right. And he that he sent kind of a dedicated team to dry land ecologists, which is such a great dedication. 533 00:52:55,030 --> 00:53:01,179 I generally dedicate my novels to, you know, my wife or my kids or something, but, um, but yeah, it's an idea, isn't it, 534 00:53:01,180 --> 00:53:09,040 that that kind of again, it's not that people have been concerned about the natural world, uh, for a long time, but it becomes a real concern. 535 00:53:09,310 --> 00:53:14,830 I suppose that's reactive. I suppose that's the sense that industrialisation is accelerating and that the world is more polluted than it was. 536 00:53:15,310 --> 00:53:24,010 And it's racial. Carson's Silent Spring, and certainly it seems to me well, it seems to me Lord of the rings is really quite, 537 00:53:25,060 --> 00:53:30,310 uh, quite keenly engaged with a valorisation of the natural world. 538 00:53:30,670 --> 00:53:35,860 It's one of the ways that you can see the different emphasis, um, in the movie adaptations. 539 00:53:36,040 --> 00:53:42,940 It's not just that Peter Jackson cuts out Tom Bombadil, although he does tragically, it's that those movies, 540 00:53:43,420 --> 00:53:48,549 the emphasis is much more on the on the fighting, on war, and in the there is fighting. 541 00:53:48,550 --> 00:53:52,900 There are battles in the novel, but the novel is kind of more interested in, like trees, 542 00:53:53,110 --> 00:53:58,330 let's say, uh, that seems more important to Tolkien than than war, in a way. 543 00:53:59,050 --> 00:54:02,710 Uh, and he loves his trees and walking trees, so. 544 00:54:03,730 --> 00:54:06,970 That's. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't connect with the drugs, though. 545 00:54:07,240 --> 00:54:10,360 You're not saying people became okay? 546 00:54:10,900 --> 00:54:17,860 That's true. Okay. Herbal things. One more question from that corner, and then, um, we may have to wrap up. 547 00:54:19,890 --> 00:54:22,920 Yeah, I spoke to Mike from the religious angle a little bit. 548 00:54:23,040 --> 00:54:29,120 I think, um, at that time, 60s and 70s, you were kind of seeing a wave of securitisation projects, 549 00:54:29,260 --> 00:54:32,730 and I think Judge Sentence was kind of falling off a cliff at that time. 550 00:54:33,360 --> 00:54:39,149 So for young people, there's, you know, heritage and the kind of distrust of traditional structures, 551 00:54:39,150 --> 00:54:47,100 but they also want transcendence, that kind of spiritual leaders see fantasy, a kind of a way to get that transcendence. 552 00:54:47,100 --> 00:54:51,570 And I think it's big, not quite all things that are fundamentally religious work. 553 00:54:52,260 --> 00:54:58,260 And I think even people who couldn't stand policies that might be attracted by the end of the human sense. 554 00:54:58,910 --> 00:55:03,210 Well, yeah, he said he said that in a letter to a Jesuit priest. 555 00:55:03,420 --> 00:55:07,650 And the priest had written, a friend who happened to be a Jesuit priest had written to Tolkien saying, 556 00:55:08,160 --> 00:55:12,209 I'm just puzzled as to why are there no churches or temples in Middle-Earth? 557 00:55:12,210 --> 00:55:16,230 Why does nobody pray or go to worship? And it's true in the middle earth. 558 00:55:16,680 --> 00:55:25,440 That's he. The world is really detailed in its world building and the social structures and the landscapes and the languages, 559 00:55:25,440 --> 00:55:30,560 and everything is carefully mapped out. But there are no temples of our churches. 560 00:55:30,570 --> 00:55:34,220 No one seems to have a religious life. And that's strange is rare. 561 00:55:34,230 --> 00:55:37,350 Most fantasies written in imitation of Tolkien include. 562 00:55:37,350 --> 00:55:39,870 That is because that's part of human life. 563 00:55:40,530 --> 00:55:47,010 And Tolkien said, no, I deliberately left all that out because the work is fundamentally Catholic and religious in conception. 564 00:55:47,400 --> 00:55:51,150 If I put the religion into the work as well, that would just kind of confuse matters. 565 00:55:51,150 --> 00:55:55,650 That would tangle things up. It's the work itself is is kind of religious, but it is. 566 00:55:56,430 --> 00:56:02,549 I think it is. Yeah, I think it in fact, I'd say something kind of more than just that. 567 00:56:02,550 --> 00:56:11,910 I think that is right. I think part of the appeal of fantasy is it it gives in a kind of ecumenical sense of that kind of transcendence, 568 00:56:11,910 --> 00:56:18,569 that enchantment, that wonder, um, without needing to be specifically religious. 569 00:56:18,570 --> 00:56:29,559 But I also think that. One of the three lines that I trace in the book has to do with, uh, Varner, uh, who also wrote a series of great text, 570 00:56:29,560 --> 00:56:36,210 great operas about, uh, about a magic ring, and it has a dragon in it and a dwarf and all sorts of things going on. 571 00:56:36,220 --> 00:56:40,640 It's the ring of the navel on the totems which I cross, which people said, oh, you were influenced by Wagner went. 572 00:56:40,660 --> 00:56:45,640 You said, no, no, my ring. Both rings were round. And there the resemblance ends, is what he put it. 573 00:56:46,150 --> 00:56:56,260 But it clearly is kind of influential. But I think it's also a very potted history of the reception of Gardner is he was he was. 574 00:56:56,260 --> 00:56:59,260 I mean, he's still a very towering figure in music. 575 00:56:59,740 --> 00:57:07,210 Um, but he was he was in almost through the late 19th century, uh, and through the first half of the 20th century. 576 00:57:07,630 --> 00:57:17,709 He was a towering kind of artistic figure, and he kind of isn't so much after World War two because he's so German, 577 00:57:17,710 --> 00:57:22,240 because his myths are so kind of tied to German. 578 00:57:22,240 --> 00:57:28,000 This, uh, in a, in a way that is polluted by the Nazis. 579 00:57:28,000 --> 00:57:33,670 The Nazis very fond of father, uh, his two attended, uh, performances of The ring, the neighbourhood and so on. 580 00:57:33,670 --> 00:57:40,000 German heroism and, uh, the German folk. That's okay, I think. 581 00:57:40,120 --> 00:57:43,419 I mean, I make this argument and I'm a little bit less secure in this, I think. 582 00:57:43,420 --> 00:57:54,100 But I still will make the argument that Tolkien provides some of the satisfactions of Wagner without being tied to a specific national. 583 00:57:55,000 --> 00:57:58,270 Ethos or culture. So it's not nationalist. 584 00:57:58,600 --> 00:58:01,749 It is kind of about England, isn't it? Lord of the rings. 585 00:58:01,750 --> 00:58:04,390 And he says it's he's providing a mythology for England and so on. 586 00:58:04,720 --> 00:58:10,460 But in a, in a kind of non-denominational way, it means you don't have to, you know, 587 00:58:10,540 --> 00:58:19,720 have any particular affection for English nationalism, uh, to connect with all those, uh, elements in, in Lord of the rings. 588 00:58:20,680 --> 00:58:24,459 But yeah, it was I'm straying from the point, which is a kind of chronological point, isn't it? 589 00:58:24,460 --> 00:58:25,470 Which is? I think you're right. 590 00:58:25,480 --> 00:58:33,370 There's a there is an increase in secularisation through the 60s and 70s and this maybe that's this is a kind of it's tied up with that. 591 00:58:34,150 --> 00:58:38,330 Right I think. But my rambling on, I'm sorry to wrap it up. 592 00:58:38,350 --> 00:58:47,259 Um, do you see Adam outside later for your gold and silver or, uh, or other fine reward for your answers? 593 00:58:47,260 --> 00:58:50,320 If we got a definitive answer here. We could all go home. 594 00:58:50,600 --> 00:58:54,220 Yes. Maybe it's the case that we then have to. 595 00:58:54,400 --> 00:58:56,560 But let's thank Adam once again. Thank you.