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[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Our next speaker is a terrific complement to Professor Pacini.

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She is, um, Professor Carolyn Langton, emerita research fellow at Saint John's College, Oxford.

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She has published very widely on Game of Thrones, including Winter is Coming, All Men Must Die, both with Bloomsbury Publisher.

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She's also published a book on memory and medievalism in George R.R. Martin.

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She researches widely in medievalism and medieval literature, and that part of that a lot of her research has been on Old Norse myth,

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which was another hugely influential strand of influence in 20th century fantasy.

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And I'm sure she'll bring that up in her talk, which she is beginning on myth and legend.

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Thank you very much. And I will stop panicking now that I couldn't find my my slides here.

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So, uh, in this ten minutes or so, what I want to address is a number of questions about myths and legends and their relationship to fantasy.

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And as you can see from this opening slide, I'm going to sit very squarely on the fence here.

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Can we call myths and legends fantastic?

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Yes, I think obviously we can. And if we think back to what Stuart said earlier about definitions.

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Fantasy. A fantastic world is a world in which impossible things happen, and myths and legends are full of impossible things.

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Um. In myths, and I'll talk mostly about myths for the moment.

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We have a world of the gods very often, which is quite different, quite separate from the worlds in which humans exist.

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And if you like, that's a kind of early version of immersion fantasy.

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And uh, particularly, I'd say here, North Smith, where the gods and the giants are busy getting on with fighting each other,

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stealing off each other, and so on without bothering all that much with humans in legends and the Old Norse heroic, well, it's slightly different.

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The gods do sometimes contend with humans.

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In Greek myth, the gods are always popping up, interfering, watching the the war and for Troy from a distance, an intervening turning up.

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Suddenly there's great Athena um,

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coming in that she talking to people so we can see ways in which the worlds of myth intersect with the worlds of humans.

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And we can also see ways in which, um, they imagine a different space.

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We don't exactly have a portal fantasy model here, but we do have an intrusion fantasy.

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Um, so we have different spaces in math.

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And we also, as we'll see in the moment, have different time schemes.

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Um, but I also want to point here a little bit to the idea of world building that the mythological and the heroic,

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but particularly the mythological, builds a different kind of world, the world in which things, different things become possible.

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And, um, here I'm, I think I just want to mention one quite influential modern fantasy trilogy that takes place in a world of not the Greek gods,

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but of the gods in general. And that's, um, N.K. Jamison's 100,000 Kingdoms.

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I don't have it. How many people have read that? I know so many.

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Um. Well, I was quite intrigued by this, and I started reading it, though I thought 100,000 Kingdoms.

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Actually, that's probably a bit too many kingdoms there.

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And, um, mostly we did with that Three Kingdoms, which is.

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Yeah, you can go bigger than that if you talk to our Martin.

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But 100,000.

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Uh, um, and there's a very early scene in this where the protagonist has come from the more humble place where she lives into this grand palace.

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It's the world of the gods. She's she is one of them herself.

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But she's been kind of alienated and and this is something that then kind of broke the world building fantasy for me.

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Um, she ventures into a bathroom. Now, obviously, in the world of the gods, people have to use bathrooms.

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Um, but this is a bathroom with stools.

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And so there's the kind of classic high school kind of thing where a girl is inside a cubicle doing whatever it was she was doing,

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and some of these talking at the wash basins outside and gives a crucial piece of information away.

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And at this point, my faith in this new world was completely shattered.

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It took a long time to rebuild. So, um, does Olympus have bathrooms?

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Might be a question that we might well come back to at some point.

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Um, and it's also, I think, useful to think about different time schemes here as well.

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We've heard about how time moved differently had the numenoreans had longer lives.

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And what's very typical in myth, but particularly in legends and folk tales,

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is that when you go to that different place, if you go to the undersea kingdom of the Dragon King,

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for example, in Japanese myth, or if you're ocean in Irish legend, you go away with a lovely woman to a different place to have adventures.

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And you think only three days or three years or three months have passed, but it turns out to be 300 years, and when you come back, everyone is dead.

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So all of these elements about world mythology are ones which might encourage us to say,

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yes, it is fantasy, but I think we also have to think of the the kind of no side of this,

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the original audiences for which these myths and legends were created didn't hear

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them within a binary of truth and fiction or of realism versus the fantastical,

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which is what we've been talking about so far today. Um, but rather they saw myths as explanatory.

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Why? Does the sun exist?

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Why? This is the sun move through the sky. Why do metals produce condensation when they come from a cold place into a hot place?

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Why are there men and women, for example? So many myths are designed as an explanation.

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And an explanation which doesn't say this is the real, true scientific explanation, but rather something that talking with certainty say, was poetic.

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Um, or the legend might be part of a distant history when men did walk with gods, and when, um,

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the barrier between the everyday and the divine was enchanted in the way that Adam was talking about earlier,

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where these beings are moving amongst us.

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Or they may be symbolic, understood to as a way of talking about philosophical or abstract truths, which again, are, um, quite distinct from that.

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Is it true? Is it fictional?

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Um, nevertheless, all of these concepts, whether it's explanatory or part of ancient history or whether it's symbolism or all,

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quite useful when we think about the ways in which fantasy is shaped today.

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Myth and legend is, however, a quarry for contemporary and historical fantasy writing.

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And, um, you might think of the many, many new writings or rewriting of Greek myth, particularly taking the point of view of women.

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So, for example, Madeline Miller, who I think really take this off in some ways with Song of Achilles and then her extraordinary novel Sersi.

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Um, but we also have Pat Barker's The Silence of the girls, um, telling of events from the Trojan War, and followed that by another two novels.

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So let's of the girls, though, although, um, it has a strong belief that the gods exist.

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It doesn't, as I recall, have have a kind of magic happening in the world as we find the Miller Sersi, where people, men can be turned into pigs.

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This is what curses magic can do. We don't have.

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We have kind of a sliding scale of fantasy in novels of this kind.

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Um, Kate Harp Fields recent novel, The Valkyrie, talks about Valkyries.

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You wouldn't be surprised to learn. And that, along with Genevieve, Connor checks the witch's heart.

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Two novels based on women in Old Norse myth and legend both make ample use of what we would call the impossible.

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So it helps, I think, if we think of.

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Fantasy is capacious, and we've already seen Stuart's remarkable list of all the subgenres of fantasy.

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Fantasy is a broad church. It can contain many things, and it's fuzzy.

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It intersects with other genres as well as being a thing in itself.

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So we can see how with books like this, fantasy is intersecting with the historical novel, for example, or at the other end,

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a kind of mythological retelling, depending on how far you have a sense of making it new, going back to the archetype as opposed to.

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Um, just doing a new version of the story is already familiar in the ways that BP so usefully pointed out to us in Tolkiens treatment of Atlantis.

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So classical math, as we can see from this, has been on the roll recently.

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And no, Smith has to I think even more recently, though perhaps that's more the case in visual genres or young adult fiction than in novels,

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though, um, these two are sort of case in point. Um, I've mentioned the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms already and its sequels,

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and this is a fantasy world in which the protagonist is defined with all the kinds of can people be killed or not be killed?

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Um, that suspends the fundamental rule of human life, if you like.

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But in fact, in some ways, what we have in 100,000 Kingdoms is just a family drama that could take place in the human world,

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um, with or without bathroom stalls. It might even have improved it a bit, so I don't know.

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Um, and then we also have examples like Studio Ghibli.

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I've been on the Studio Ghibli cake recently, and so I rewatched Spirited Away, um,

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a story which is rooted in Japanese myth and folk tale, but which is kind of new in itself.

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Um, Princess Mononoke, which does take a story from, um,

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Japanese legend and make it into a world which is and is not part of, uh, what we might see as a historical Japan.

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Myth and legend also allows us to think in terms of archetypes.

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Again, refer quite a lot about this already. Um, so we got the hero, the princess, the dragon monster, the evil counsellor, the best friend.

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All of these are quite familiar to us, I think, as staples of fantasy.

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And along with the rise and fall and rise again of the heroes of the external supernatural threat.

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It might be the dragon, it might be the angry God, it might be some other kind of monster.

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Um, but we also get from myth, I think, the possibility of the long view.

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I hear that the myth doesn't have to take place, or fantasy doesn't take place normally across five days.

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No, it happens across aeons. And that kind of possibility of expansion and writing more and more into your world is an important one.

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And so, um, finally, I guess, um, to sum up, myths and legends are both a precursor in some ways,

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but also an enormously generative source for fantasy.

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They provide models for world building with or without bathrooms.

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Um, they inspire these epic chronological scales that we find in in so many fantasy writers.

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They generate archetypes and storylines and, um, will recognise many of those as the, um, the summer school wears on.

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Um, Fantasy Feeds two. And this is my final and quite important plot point, not just on the distant past, not on the original texts themselves.

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Original that they may be, but it also feeds on its own early history.

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Fantasy writers don't just read myths and legends, they read other people's fantasy.

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And so there's a kind of feedback loop going on there.

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Um, with that, I will stop.