Notes

1. INTRODUCTION

1. See, for instance, Michael Moorcock, Wizardry and Wild Romance (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), ch. 2; Colin N. Manlove, “The Elusiveness of Fantasy,” The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 63; Robert J. Branham, “Principles of Imaginary Milieu: Argument and Idea in Fantasy Fiction,” Extrapolation 21, no. 4 (1980): 328.

2. According to Schlobin, fantastic settings “take on powers and attributes that are normally assigned to characters”; see his “The Locus Amoenus and the Fantasy Quest,” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1984): 29; quoted in Roger C. Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ Footprints Ankle-Deep in Stone’: The Irrelevancy of Setting in the Fantastic,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 2 (2000): 156. Mathews explains how fantasy geography and setting “function almost as characters and symbols,” and Clute describes how a “land” “is not a protagonist but has an analogous role”; see Richard Mathews, Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39, and John Clute, “Land,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, eds. John Clute and John Grant (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999). Both Mendlesohn and Rosebury observe how Tolkien’s landscape is “a participant in the adventure,” even the novel’s “hero”; see Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 35, and Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 34. Mendlesohn makes similar points about C. S. Lewis’s Narnia (a “character in and of itself”), and in Bram Stoker’s Dracula “the landscape becomes a character […] with moods and emotions of its own” (Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 34, 129).

3. John Clute, “Notes on the Geography of Bad Art in Fantasy,” Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2011), 111–12.

4. Don D. Elgin, The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985).

5. Ibid., 180.

6. Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer, “The Secondary Worlds of High Fantasy,” The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

7. Many of these studies are presented in more detail in chapter 2.

8. The most thorough of such Tolkien studies is Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans, Ents, Elves, and Eriador (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). For a truly excellent reading of a natural environment, see Verlyn Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees: Eco-Conflict in Middle-earth,” J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, eds. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000).

9. Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ Footprints’,” 154.

10. “With the setting in focus,” compare matrifocal, “based or centred on the mother”; see “matrifocal, adj.,” OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press). Schlobin uses Bachelard’s term topoanalysis for a focus on setting (Schlobin, “‘Rituals’ Footprints’,” 155, citing Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas [1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1994], 8). Bachelard’s term is closely tied to psychoanalysis, however, and thus implies an almost exclusive focus on the relation between place and personal subject.

11. It should perhaps also be mentioned that however interesting a diachronic examination may be, such an examination is—regrettably—beyond the scope of this book.

12. For a wide range of opinions on how to define or describe ecocriticism, see the position papers on the topic at the website of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE): Michael P. Branch and Sean O’Grady, eds., Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice, ASLE, 1994, http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/defining/.

13. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).

14. Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii–xix.

15. Scott Slovic, “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine,” The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000).

16. Ibid., 160.

17. J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998); Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

18. Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 38–40.

19. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xiii. Not all critics agree that the debate over definitions is laid to rest, however; see, for instance, A.-P. Canavan, “Calling a Sword a Sword,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (May 2012): 1; and Marek Oziewicz, One Earth, One People: The Mythopoeic Fantasy Series of Ursula K. Le Guin, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle and Orson Scott Card (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), ch. 1.

20. Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984), 21. Note that Hume uses the word fantasy for what is here called the fantastic. Other critics who use the fantastic in a similar sense include W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 8, and Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 3 ff., esp. 11–12; and it is this broad definition that is referred to as “a general term for all forms of human expression that are not realistic” by Gary Westfahl, “Fantastic,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Rabkin’s definition, although related to the one just given, is stricter: to him, “the fantastic” is a “diametric reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world”; see Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 28–29. Also note that Todorov sees the fantastic completely differently, defining it as a hesitation about whether occurrences have a natural or supernatural explanation; see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33. Todorov’s term, while of interest when discussing a certain body of work, has no bearing on the discussions in this book.

21. Wolfe refers to this as perhaps “the most frequently cited defining characteristic of fantasy” and notes that the term is problematic in its imprecision (Wolfe, Critical Terms, 57; see also 38). For examples of scholars who have used impossible in their definitions, see Irwin, Game, 9; Attebery, Strategies, 14; Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 2; Colin N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 10, and John Clute, “Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 338.

22. Shippey, while accepting “known to be impossible” as a rule of thumb for identifying fantasy and its precursors, problematizes the concept, noting that views on what is impossible change over time and from person to person. He concedes, however, that regardless of cultural context, “the unseen or the non-material always remains in a separate category from the everyday”; see Tom Shippey, introduction to The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories, ed. Tom Shippey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), x.

23. Even a hybrid such as science fantasy may exist, although it could be argued that adding something impossible to science fiction would turn it into fantasy. See Ursula K. Le Guin, “Changing Kingdoms: A Talk for the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, March 17–21, 1993,” Trajectories of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fourteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Michael A. Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997) for a discussion of this topic.

24. Irwin describes how “writer and reader knowingly enter upon a conspiracy of intellectual subversiveness” to “make nonfact appear as fact” (Irwin, Game, 9). Whether dream stories can be thought of as fantasy generally depends on whether the dream is taken seriously or whether it is used, as Tolkien suggests, as a device to discount the fantastic: J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” The Tolkien Reader (1947; orig. lecture 1938; New York: Ballantine, 1966), 13–14.

25. Obviously, individual readers could happen to believe fiction to be true; if they believe a fantasy work to be true, however, they do so despite the way it is presented, not because of it.

26. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37. He emphasizes that he is discussing the instilling of belief, not “willing suspension of disbelief,” which he believes to be something more passive; cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 7:2 (1815; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 397–98 [ch. 14].

27. Irwin, Game, 9. Tolkien also stresses the rationality of the fantasy world, going as far as to say that “[t]he keener and the clearer the reason, the better fantasy it will make” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 54); and Elgin mentions how the reality of a “parallel world” is “drawn from its own internal consistency” (Elgin, Comedy, 180).

28. Attebery, Strategies, 12–14. He draws on cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson’s use of fuzzy sets and prototypes to discuss categorization; see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 122–24. It is worth noting that in order to make Lakoff and Johnson’s categories work as literary genres, Attebery adapts them by combining the fuzzy-sets idea with prototypes, by adding a spatial dimension to the fuzzy-set metaphor, and by suggesting that genres can have (a number of) individual works as prototypes. For an overview of Lakoff’s view of categories, see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2.

29. Attebery, Strategies, 14–16; cf. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 57.

30. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 26 ff., 19–20, 23.

31. Ibid., 28–29.

32. Ibid., 30.

33. For example: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand (1986) portrays the Trojan War from Cassandra’s point of view; Neil Gaiman offers the Queen’s perspective of Snow White in “Snow, Glass, Apples” (1995); in Robert Holdstock’s Celtica (2001), a young Merlin joins Jason and the Argo for the Celtic tribes’ invasion of the Balkans; in Caliban’s Hour (1994), by Tad Williams, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is revisited; and Lisa Goldstein has Doctor John Dee help Rabbi Judah Loew fashion a golem in The Alchemist’s Door (2002).

34. Examples of these respective dragon varieties can be found in, for instance, Erik Granström’s Svavelvinter (Brimstone Winter; 2004), Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (2007), Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (1976), Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993), and the Dragonlance Chronicles (1984–85), by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

35. Many writers appear to have misunderstood the Cauldron of Story and have tried to use someone else’s—frequently Tolkien’s—recipe, only adding the literary equivalent of a sprig of parsley, generally with scant success.

36. The categories are thoroughly presented and discussed in Mendlesohn, Rhetorics.

37. Ibid., 2.

38. Ibid., 182; see also earlier discussions of liminal fantasy in Farah Mendlesohn, “Toward a Taxonomy of Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 13, no. 2 (2002); Farah Mendlesohn, “Conjunctions 39 and Liminal Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 15, no. 3 (2005). The outline here only hints at the complexities of liminal fantasy, given that this category has no bearing on the discussions in this book, but interested readers are encouraged to refer to Mendlesohn’s book for a more exhaustive description.

39. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xv–xvii; for a discussion of texts that exist simultaneously in several categories, see ch. 5 of Mendlesohn’s work.

40. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 114. It could even be argued that the episodes narrated by Yagharek, the stranger who has journeyed to the city on a mission of his own, are brief instances of a portal–quest voice.

41. John Clute and John Grant, eds., The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), contains some forty types of fantasy, labeled according to, e.g., setting, plot structure, origin of source material, handling of source material, portrayal of magic, type of protagonist, age of (intended) reader, and story themes.

42. See, e.g., John Clute, “Taproot Texts,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 921; Attebery, Fantasy Tradition, 5–9; Wolfe, Critical Terms, xviii; John-Henri Holmberg, Fantasy: Fantasylitteraturens historia, motiv och författare [The history, motifs, and authors of fantasy literature] ([Viken, Sweden]: Replik, 1995), 14; and Mathews, Fantasy, 2–3. Although he does not call attention to this fact, the earliest “modern fantasy” work Manlove discusses is George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858); see Manlove, Modern Fantasy.

43. In-depth discussions of some of the genre’s historical development can be found in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and detailed accounts of the evolution of fantasy literature can be found in, e.g., Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), and Attebery, Fantasy Tradition. For briefer overviews, see, e.g., Shippey, introduction to Fantasy Stories, and Mathews, Fantasy, 5–20.

44. Elgin, Comedy, 31.

45. Gary K. Wolfe, “Evaporating Genres,” Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 24, 30. He acknowledges the existence of previous fantasy literature, though, in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (1923–54 and later revivals) and Unknown (1939–43), digests such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949–current), and the books of individual writers.

46. Wolfe, “Evaporating,” 24.

47. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37 et passim.

48. Wolfe, Critical Terms, 115.

49. Brian Stableford, “The Discovery of Secondary Worlds: Notes on the Aesthetics & Methodology of Heterocosmic Creativity,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (August 2004): 6.

50. As employed by philosophers such as David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology, eds. Eileen John and Dominic McIver Lopes (1978; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); and in applications to literature, see, e.g., Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2 ff.; Nancy H. Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 8–9.

51. For a more in-depth discussion of how the actual world relates to its fictional counterpart(s), see Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 2.

52. Zahorski and Boyer, “Secondary Worlds,” 58–63.

53. Ibid., “Secondary Worlds,” 56. The authors make clear that high and low are not to be taken as evaluative terms. Alternative terms, e.g. indigenous fantasy (Attebery, Strategies, 129), have been suggested but are not as frequently employed.

54. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 128.

55. Traill, Possible Worlds, ch. 1.

56. Ibid., 8, citing Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Its Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 6.

57. Clute, “Land.”

2. MAPS

1. Elizabeth M. Ingram, “Maps as Readers’ Aids: Maps and Plans in Geneva Bibles,” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 44.

2. Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, eds. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 261–62.

3. See, e.g., Padrón, “Mapping,” 265–66.

4. In a piece from 1981, Walker claims that the interest in fantasy maps engendered by the Middle-earth maps has meant that “a map has become almost de rigeur [sic] in new and reprinted fantasy” (R. C. Walker, “The Cartography of Fantasy,” Mythlore 7, no. 4 [1981]: 37). A quarter of a century later, Padrón expresses the same opinion: the influence of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis has made maps “standard fixtures of the genre” (Padrón, “Mapping,” 272). Kaveney concurs that “[i]n imitation [of Tolkien], almost all modern genre fantasies come equipped with a map, to the extent that maps are only much noticed when absent” (Roz Kaveney, “Maps,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 624.)

5. Kaveney, “Maps,” 624.

6. J. B. Post, An Atlas of Fantasy (1973; New York: Ballantine, 1979).

7. Diane Duane, “Cartography for Other Worlds: A Short Look at a Neglected Subject,” SFWA Bulletin 11, no. 5 (1976).

8. Lee N. Falconer, A Gazet[t]eer of the Hyborian World of Conan, Including Also the World of Kull, and an Ethnogeographical Dictionary of Principal Peoples of the Era, with Reference to the Starmont Map of the Hyborian World (West Linn, OR: Starmont House, 1977), vii–xiii.

9. Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (New York: Firebird-Penguin, 2006), [x].

10. Frank W. Day, “The Role and Purpose of the Map in Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature” (M.A. thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1979), 3.

11. Clare Ranson, “Cartography in Children’s Literature,” Sustaining the Vision: Selected Papers from the Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship (Worcester, UK: International Association of School Librarianship, 1996), 166.

12. Ranson, “Cartography,” 165.

13. Walker, “Cartography,” 37.

14. Such as the additional maps that have been created for The Lord of the Rings; see Karen Wynn Fonstad, “Writing ‘TO’ the Map,” Tolkien Studies 3 (2006).

15. Peter Hunt, “Landscapes and Journeys, Metaphors and Maps: The Distinctive Feature of English Fantasy,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1987): 11.

16. Ibid., 11.

17. Ibid., 13.

18. Myles Balfe, “Incredible Geographies? Orientalism and Genre Fantasy,” Social and Cultural Geography 5, no. 1 (2004): 82–83.

19. Pierre Jourde, Géographies imaginaires de quelques inventeurs de mondes au XXe siècle: Gracq, Borges, Michaux, Tolkien [Imaginary geographies by some twentieth century inventors of worlds: Gracq, Borges, Michaux, Tolkien] (Paris: José Corti, 1991), 113–32.

20. Ibid., 126–27.

21. Ibid., 131.

22. See, e.g., Jourde, Géographies imaginaires, 125, in which the gulf of Lhûn’s shape is simplified to look more like a ship—which better fits the author’s argument. Jourde also makes too much of the linguistic similarity between Lhûn/Lune and “la lune” (128–29).

23. Deirdre F. Baker, “What We Found on Our Journey through Fantasy Land,” Children’s Literature in Education 37 (2006): 239.

24. Ibid., 240.

25. Ibid., 242.

26. Padrón, “Mapping,” 276, 279.

27. See, for instance, Padrón, “Mapping,” 272–74. Calling Sauron an evil wizard and referring to the “folksy names” of the Shire (275) also detract from the force of his argument by suggesting that he is either not completely familiar with the text or prone to oversimplification.

28. Padrón, “Mapping,” 286.

29. Nicholas Tam, “Here Be Cartographers: Reading the Fantasy Map,” Nick’s Café Canadien (blog), April 18, 2011, http://www.nicholastam.ca/2011/04/18/here-be-cartographers-reading-the-fantasy-map/.

30. International Cartographic Association, “ICA Mission,” last modified March 18, 2012, http://icaci.org/mission.

31. Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 16.

32. Ibid., 15.

33. Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 100 ff.

34. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (London: Routledge, 1993), 199n43, 126.

35. Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 36–38.

36. Padrón, “Mapping,” 260–65.

37. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.

38. Ibid., 404–5.

39. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again (1937; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 19. Thror’s Map is discussed further later in the text.

40. Genette, Paratexts, 2.

41. Niels Windfeld Lund, “Doceo + Mentum—A Ground for a New Discipline,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Document Academy, Berkeley, CA, August 13–15, 2003, http://thedocumentacademy.org/resources/2003/papers/lund.paper.html; see also Niels Windfeld Lund, “Building a Discipline, Creating a Profession: An Essay on the Childhood of ‘Dokvit’,” A Document (Re)turn: Contributions from a Research Field in Transition, eds. Roswitha Skare et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), 23; and Niels Windfeld Lund, “Documentation in a Complementary Perspective,” Aware and Responsible: Papers of the Nordic-International Colloquium on Social and Cultural Awareness and Responsibility in Library, Information, and Documentation Studies (SCARLID), ed. W. Boyd Rayward (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 100.

42. Orson Scott Card, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1990), 28–32.

43. Day, “Role and Purpose,” 11. The quotation comes from a comment on the questionnaire sent by Day to Anderson. In the questionnaire itself, Anderson’s answer to whether he felt the map should be created after the story is written was “Not At All,” the questionnaire’s strongest possible negative choice (12).

44. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, April 25, 1954, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 177; see also Tolkien to Rayner Unwin, April 11, 1953, 168.

45. A contributing explanation to the unexpected rarity of maps is the popularity of “paranormal romance,” which I had underestimated. When the sampling frame was being set up, such works were classified as fantasy. (For more on this, see appendix A.) This hybrid genre is placed halfway between dark fantasy and romance by Mendlesohn and James, featuring romantic involvement between humans and fantasy creatures. They also note how it developed into its own publishing category during the 2000s; see Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 198, 254. For a more thorough discussion on paranormal romance, see also Lee Tobin-McClain, “Paranormal Romance: Secrets of the Female Fantastic,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 11, no. 2 (2001). While in many respects (predominantly low) fantasy, paranormal romance does not borrow fantasy’s predilection for maps, thus biasing the sample toward fewer maps. Removing the thirteen books that, after the study was completed, were found to have been reclassified as “romances” has only a marginal effect, however. The sample would contain 36 percent books with maps, corresponding to between 29 and 43 percent of all fantasy books.

46. Not only are the maps of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Warrior (1967; orig. short stories publ. 1935–36); Conan the Swordsman (1978), by L. Sprague De Camp, Lin Carter, and Björn Nyberg; and Conan of Venarium (2003), by Harry Turtledove, drawn in three distinct styles, they contain different amounts of information. In addition, the pictorial elements of the two most recent maps (a galley on the Swordsman map and sea dragon on the Venarium map) bring different associations to the fictional world portrayed.

47. For instance, in his review of Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War (2004), Clute refers to “the absence of any maps, in a fantasy novel with lots of names and campaigns and dynastic shifts from one armed house to another” as a “dislocation effect”; see John Clute, Canary Fever: Reviews (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2009), 108.

48. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 1. For an interesting commentary on the Hobbit maps, see Tam, “Here Be Cartographers.”

49. P. D. A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: The British Library, 1991), 19.

50. Based on diagrams in David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” The History of Cartography, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 298. The same conclusion is drawn by Asa Simon Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2006), 28. Of Raisz’s fifteen examples of medieval charts from Europe and the Arab world, eight had east at the top, four north, and three south; see Erwin Raisz, “Timecharts of Historical Cartography,” Imago Mundi 2 (1937): 11.

51. Ann Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 77.

52. John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 10.

53. Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 42. Of course, once the world was accepted to be spherical, the ocean—while surrounding the landmasses—ceased to be a border between known and unknown space. Still, the tradition of drawing the known world within an edge of ocean seemed to persist. According to J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy’s map was uncommon in that most of its edges consist of land; see J. Lennart Berggren et al., Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Ptolemy’s text orig. second century A.D.; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22.

54. John Clute, “Water Margins,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 997.

55. Ibid.

56. See Terry Brooks, Magic Kingdom for Sale/Sold! (1986; London: Futura, 1987), 93.

57. The map in Gardner’s book clearly derives from the map published in Baum’s Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), but with the cardinal points facing the traditional way (west to the left and east to the right) and with considerably more detail. A box on the map in Gardner acknowledges the debt to the original map. For a brief but illuminating discussion of the Oz maps, see Michael O’Neal Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 186–89.

58. Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic (Reading, UK: Corgi, 1985), 11n.

59. I am grateful to Kim Selling, who first brought to my attention the scarcity of southern-hemisphere settings in fantasy.

60. See, for instance, Wood, Power, and Black, Maps and Politics.

61. In the actual world, the projection used is called Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area Projection according to Kirkpatrick, who adds that projection details were included on all the maps in the book but that the publisher removed them (Russell Kirkpatrick, email message to author, April 10, 2009).

62. Arthur Robinson et al., Elements of Cartography, 5th ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1984), 159; quoted in Wood, Power, 97.

63. Wood, Power, 101.

64. I use topography in a broader sense, to include terrain, vegetation, and hydrographical features.

65. Jones, Tough Guide, [x–xi].

66. Ibid., [xi].

67. See ibid., [xi].

68. See Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 1.

69. Thrower, Maps & Civilization, 113. Wood cites Thrower and several other scholars on the subject, claiming that despite the “glib assurance” in most of their statements, little is known of the history of mapmaking (Wood, Power, 145).

70. The bird’s-eye view gives the impression of seeing at an angle to the horizon—Lynam suggests about 70 degrees—as opposed to a view straight ahead (e.g., a profile view), where the impression is of levelness with the horizon, or a plan view (e.g., contours, street plan, hachures), where the observer looks straight down from above. See Edward Lynam, The Mapmaker’s Art: Essays on the History of Maps (London: Batchworth Press, 1953), 55.

71. Lynam, Mapmaker’s Art, 39. According to Lynam, map engraving began in Italy around 1474, and “by 1590 the draughtsmen of manuscript maps were imitating [the line engravers’] style, symbols, script and decoration in every detail.”

72. Ibid., 38 (referring to a 1335 map); Harvey, Medieval Maps, 23, ill. 16 (describing the seventh century Isidore world map). Another typical example is the Cotton world map (see Harvey, Medieval Maps, 26).

73. A feature on which, according to Lynam, “all representation of relief right down to 1850 has been founded” (Lynam, Mapmaker’s Art, 38).

74. Ibid., 41.

75. Ibid.

76. Thrower, Maps & Civilization, 113.

77. Ibid., 101, 104–5, 114, 134; Wood, Power, 153–54, and Wilford, Mapmakers, 127.

78. Eduard Imhof, Cartographic Relief Presentation (1965; Redlands: ESRI, 2007), 13. Imhof finds an isolated case of shaded relief in a 1667 map by Hans Conrad Gyger but notes that the map was kept as a military secret and had no effect on contemporary mapmaking (7).

79. See Wood, Power, 98–99.

80. Wood, Power, ch. 6, esp. 155–78. In a similar vein, Steve Lundin suggests that pre-Enlightenment hill signs are easier to draw and thus more prevalent (comment at the Thirty-first International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, 2010).

81. Kim Selling, “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism’: The Image of the Middle Ages in Popular Fantasy,” Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the War of the Worlds Centennial, Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. David Ketterer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 212.

82. Selling, “‘Fantastic Neomedievalism’,” 211; she cites Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 63.

83. Zahorski and Boyer, “Secondary Worlds,” 61; Eco, Faith, 62.

84. Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, 132.

85. Legends are not much older than thematic maps (Wood, Power, 79), which have been around since the late seventeenth century (Wilford, Mapmakers, 313). Map projections are often associated with Mercator (sixteenth century) even though Ptolemy (second century), possibly building on earlier sources, had already worked with projections; see O. A. W. Dilke, “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,” The History of Cartography, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 179.

86. See Berggren et al., Ptolemy’s Geography, 58.

87. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; London: Penguin, 2000), 21–22.

88. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 4.

89. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

90. For further information about the various map editions, see the “Note on the Maps” in Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (before the maps at the back of each volume) and the chapter on the maps in Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (London: HarperCollins, 2005), esp. lv–lvi, lxvii.

91. Wood, Power, 22 ff. In a later chapter (ch. 5), Wood develops his analysis.

92. References to The Lord of the Rings are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used: FR—The Fellowship of the Ring, TT—The Two Towers, RK—The Return of the King, Appx—appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference. See Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1993).

93. In many editions misspelled with an “a” instead of an “o”: “Bindbale Wood”; see Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lvii.

94. Tolkien to H. Cotton Minchin (draft), April 1956, 247.

95. Private correspondence quoted in Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lvi.

96. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 71 ff.; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978; Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 1980), 147 ff.; and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983; London: Routledge, 2002), 87 ff.

97. Wood, Power, 24.

98. About general reference map themes and map discourse, see Wood, Power, 113.

99. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 2.

100. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 101.

101. Shippey, Road, 103, and Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lvi–lxi. (The names may seem exotic to non-English readers, of course.)

102. See, e.g., J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 59, and Black, Maps and Politics, 136–38.

103. See Alan M. MacEachren, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 315–17, and Wood, Power, 112, 125–30.

104. Wood, Power, 112, 126.

105. Ibid., 112, 127; see generally 125–30.

106. All maps have historical perspectives, see Wood, Power, 113; his analysis is broadened in MacEachren, How Maps Work, 312–17.

107. See Lynam, Mapmaker’s Art, 39.

108. Harvey, Medieval Maps, 82, ill. 64.

109. David Turnbull and Helen Watson, Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3, 5, and Black, Maps and Politics, 11. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Wood, Power, ch. 5.

110. Tolkien to Allen & Unwin, October 9, 1953, 171.

111. See, for instance, Harley’s discussion on the centering of world maps (New Nature, 66) and Black’s account of map Eurocentrism (Maps and Politics, 37–39).

112. Knowing the origin of the names, one finds them less belittling (see Shippey, Road, 103, and Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lvii–lviii), but the impression remains.

113. Harley, New Nature, 67. See also ch. 3 of the same book: “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.”

114. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings,” in Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, 775.

115. Robinson and Petchenik, Nature of Maps, 61 ff.

116. Christopher Tolkien discusses this mistake in The Return of the Shadow; see J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The Return of the Shadow, vol. 1 (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 387n10; see also Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lx. From the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, it is clear from the text that the Yale is an area: “[the road] bent left and went down into the lowlands of the Yale” (FR, I, iii, 75).

117. “Note on the Maps” found at the end of each volume in Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1993). See also Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lv.

118. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), 22, 54.

119. See the first sentence in note 127.

120. See Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37, and Shippey, Road, 101.

121. Shippey, Road, 100–101.

122. For their respective roots, see Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, lxiii, 769–70, 774–75.

123. For further discussion about this ambivalence, see the thought-provoking piece by Verlyn Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees,” and in particular part II in Dickerson and Evans, Ents. See also the discussion about Lothlórien in chapter 3 of this book. The meeting between nature and culture will be explored further in chapter 4.

124. Jourde, Géographies imaginaires, 126–28.

125. Black, Maps and Politics, 101–2.

126. Padrón, “Mapping,” 275.

127. Both Elrond and Treebeard mention how there were forests reaching from the Misty Mountains to the Blue Mountains; according to Elrond, the Old Forest is a remnant of that ancient woodland, and Treebeard explains how Fangorn Forest is but the easternmost part of the great forests (FR, II, ii, 258; TT, III, iv, 457). For further discussion on Tom Bombadil and Treebeard as the oldest beings, see David Elton Gay, “Tolkien and the Kalevala: Some Thoughts on the Finnish Origins of Tom Bombadil and Treebeard,” Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), and Matthew R. Bardowell, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Ethic and Its Finnish Analogues,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 20, no. 1 (2009).

128. Padrón, “Mapping,” 275.

129. More if the appendices are taken into account; they trace not only the remaining members of the Fellowship but also their families. See also chapter 5, note 11.

130. The hero’s journey seen from a Campbellian perspective will be discussed further in chapter 3.

131. For Fangorn, see note 127. Lothlórien’s relation to time and history is discussed in chapter 3; also in, e.g., Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), ch. 4; and Stefan Ekman, “Echoes of Pearl in Arda’s Landscape,” Tolkien Studies 6 (2009).

132. Attebery, Strategies, 15.

133. The significance of the Fangorn and Lothlórien juxtaposition, and the disappearance of magic foreboded by it, is similarly evident in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies, the first of which opens with Treebeard’s words, but spoken by Galadriel/Cate Blanchett; see Peter Jackson, dir., The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, 2001).

3. BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES

1. John Clute, “Thresholds,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 945.

2. John Clute, “Borderlands,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 128.

3. Clute, “Thresholds,” 945; John Clute, “Crosshatch,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 237.

4. Clute, “Borderlands,” 128; Clute, “Crosshatch,” 237.

5. Clute, “Thresholds,” 945.

6. John Clute, “Land,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 558.

7. Roz Kaveney, “Maps,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 624; David Langford, “Talents,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 919–20.

8. “threshold, n.,” 2a, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

9. Clute, “Thresholds,” 945.

10. See Clute, “Taproot Texts.”

11. J. R. R. Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major (1967; London: HarperCollins, 2005), 38, cf. 46.

12. Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2001), 2 et passim.

13. Neil Gaiman, introduction to The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany (London: Gollancz-Orion, 2001), xii.

14. “Mundanity, n.,” 3, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

15. Clute, “Crosshatch,” 237.

16. References to Steven Brust, Taltos. The Book of Taltos (1988; New York: Ace, 2002), and Steven Brust, The Paths of the Dead (New York: Tor, 2002), are given parenthetically in the text.

17. So far, that is. The Vlad Taltos series is scheduled to be nineteen books in total, but as of August 2012 only thirteen had been published.

18. The Khaavren Romances are written as a pastiche (or, as Brust calls it, a “blatant rip-off”) of Alexandre Dumas’s d’Artagnan Romances. The first novel is thus called The Phoenix Guards (1990), the second Five Hundred Years After (1994), and the third The Viscount of Adrilankha. The last novel is published in three volumes: The Paths of the Dead (2002), The Lord of Castle Black (2003), and Sethra Lavode (2004). See Steven Brust, “Books by Steven Brust,” The Dream Café, last modified October 25, 2006, http://dreamcafe.com/books.html.

19. See Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Robert M. Durling, vol. 1 (1320?; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), xiv, xvi.

20. “[T]he descent into Avernus is easy […] but to retrace your steps and return to the upper air, that is the task and the toil.” Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI (c. 19 B.C.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): bk. 6 (my translation).

21. References to Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Stardust: Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie (1997–98; New York: DC Comics, 1998), are given parenthetically in the text. Quotations come from the illustrated edition. Page references within square brackets are to the text-only edition: Neil Gaiman, Stardust (New York: Avon, 1999). As there are textual differences between the two editions, discrepancies may exist between the quotations given here and the corresponding text in the text-only edition.

22. See Genette, Paratexts, 1–2.

23. Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, 131.

24. In 1838: Queen Victoria was on the throne; furthermore “Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken a photograph of the moon” and “Mr. Morse had just announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires” (7 [5]). The Morse code was presented in 1838. Queen Victoria had ascended the throne in June 1837 and Oliver Twist ran until April 1839. Since the Market is on May Day, it must be in 1838. (This does not fit with Draper’s photograph of the moon, however, which was taken in 1840 in the actual world.)

25. Among the most notable examples are the tales of Oisín/Ossian, who believes himself to spend three years in the Land of the Young but returns to find that three centuries have passed; and Thomas the Rhymer, who returns after a time in Elfland to find that seven years have gone by. Fantasy examples range from adaptations of folktale themes or entire stories to more imaginative uses. Examples of the former include the fairy hill in which one night corresponds to a century on the outside in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, the Faerie land of the “nether forest” where time stands still in some regions (in part two of Bertil Mårtensson’s series Maktens vägar: Vägen tillbaka [The Roads of Power: The Road Back; 1980]), and Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer (1990). More imaginatively, Jeffrey Ford creates a Faerie (“Twilmish”) time scale predicated on the duration of the sand castle a Twilmish inhabits (“The Annals of Eelin-Ok” 2004).

26. David Langford, “Time in Faerie,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 948.

27. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World, vol. 1 (London: British Library, 1997), 16. The thirteenth century Hereford world map provides numerous examples of such monsters; see, e.g., Harvey, Medieval Maps, especially the detail of Africa (33). For a more thorough discussion, see Mittman, Maps and Monsters, ch. 3.

28. Erin C. Blake, “Where Be ‘Here Be Dragons’?” MapHist, April 1999, http://www.maphist.nl/extra/herebedragons.html.

29. Which, it should be noted, is changed to “anyone” in the text-only edition.

30. “Dionysus,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2010); Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (c. 8 A.D.; London: Penguin, 1955), 94 [bk. 4].

31. “thyrsus,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2010).

32. Together with the man in the silk top hat, Charmed stands behind Dunstan during his first meeting with the fairy girl who is to become Tristran’s mother (23), and once she regains her freedom from Madame Semele, he watches from the shadows (203). The hairy little man also watches when Yvaine gives the Power of Stormhold to Tristran (206). Finally, Charmed can be seen in the illustrations on pages 7 and 9 among the people arriving at Wall for the Market without being mentioned in the text. He obviously manages to keep out of sight, however. When Tristran asks around for him at the Market, no one admits to having seen him (204 [316]).

33. John Clute, “Thinning,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 942.

34. Clute, “Thinning,” 942.

35. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 3.

36. Vess explains that he had free rein when painting this particular picture, since very little had been written about the book or the characters yet. It is therefore rife with people from history and fiction: the Victorian fairy painter Richard Dadd, Ludwig van Beethoven, Merlin and Nimue, Hayao Miyazaki’s anime characters Kiki and Totoro, Prince Valiant, and many others, including Neil Gaiman and Vess himself. He adds that for the appearance of the goblin market sellers, he was inspired by Lawrence Housman’s illustrations for Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market (Charles Vess, email message to author, February 15, 2006).

37. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 37.

38. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (1600; New York: Norton, 2008), 5.1.7–8. Gaiman and Vess have used this line to connect imagination and Faerie before. In their “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare’s play is performed in front of Auberon, Titania, and a nightmarish fairy court. The imaginations proclaimed by the text are revealed as truths by Vess’s accompanying illustrations; see Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in The Sandman: Dream Country (New York: DC Comics, 1995), 82.

39. References to Garth Nix, Sabriel (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Garth Nix, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Garth Nix, Abhorsen (New York: Eos-HarperCollins, 2003); and Garth Nix, “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case,” in Across the Wall: A Tale of the Abhorsen and Other Stories (New York: Eos-HarperCollins, 2005), are given parenthetically in the text.

40. The name suggests that the country mirrors the Old Kingdom; Fr. ancien “old” and terre “land, domain.” A number of names suggest a Francophone origin, for instance the Ancelstierran mist-covered capital Corvere; Fr. couvert “covered, overcast.”

41. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1922; Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1993), 594.

42. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 1, 3.

43. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; London: Fontana-HarperCollins, 1993), 30, 36–38.

44. See Attebery, Strategies, 87–88.

45. Campbell, Hero, 217. What Campbell refers to as worlds may, in my terminology, equally well be domains.

46. Campbell, Hero, 217.

47. Ibid., 77–78.

48. Ibid., 78.

49. Ibid., 217.

50. John Clute, Scores: Reviews 1993–2003 (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2003), 127.

51. John Clute, “Polder,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 772.

52. Ibid., 773.

53. Ibid.

54. References to Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used in the references: FR—The Fellowship of the Ring, TT—The Two Towers, RK—The Return of the King, Appx—appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference.

55. Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 197.

56. See, e.g., Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 9–10.

57. Shippey, Author, 198.

58. Ibid.

59. Shippey, Author, 199. See also Shippey, Road, 218.

60. Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees,” 155.

61. Flieger, Question of Time, 110; cf. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchison, September 25, 1954, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 197.

62. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

63. John Clute, “Time Abyss,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 947. According to Clute, “The Lord of the Rings […]—once the immense backstory contained in The Silmarillion […] and other texts is understood—seems to hover at the very lip of […] a profound T[ime] A[byss].”

64. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 68.

65. The following paragraphs are based on my discussion of Lothlórien’s time in Ekman, “Echoes of Pearl,” 67–68.

66. Flieger, Question of Time, 107–8.

67. Paul H. Kocher, Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 98–99.

68. Flieger, Question of Time, ch. 4.

69. J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The Treason of Isengard, vol. 2 (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 367–69.

70. Flieger, Question of Time, 107; cf. Tolkien and Tolkien, Treason, 369.

71. Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, 718.

72. Flieger, Question of Time, 100.

73. References to Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984; London: Voyager-HarperCollins, 1995); Robert Holdstock, Lavondyss (1988; New York: Avon, 1991); Robert Holdstock, The Hollowing (1993; New York: ROC-Penguin, 1995); Robert Holdstock, Gate of Ivory (London: Voyager-HarperCollins, 1998) (originally published as Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn); and Robert Holdstock, Avilion (2009; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2010), are given parenthetically in the text. The novella “The Bone Forest” (1991), a prequel to the events in Mythago Wood, is left out of the discussion as it does not add much to the analysis.

74. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 156.

75. Marek Oziewicz, “Profusion Sublime and the Fantastic: Mythago Wood,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock: Critical Essays on the Fiction, eds. Donald E. Morse and Kálmán Matolcsy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 81. He refers to Mythago Wood only, but the description is equally true for the other three novels.

76. Clute, Scores, 179. Original publication is given as the Washington Post, October 1997.

77. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 154.

78. W. A. Senior, “The Embodiment of Abstraction in the Mythago Novels,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock, 14.

79. For a more comprehensive discussion of mythotopes, see Stefan Ekman, “Exploring the Habitats of Myths: The Spatiotemporal Structure of Ryhope Wood,” in The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock. The discussion about mythotopes here draws on this text.

80. Clute, Scores, 178.

81. Mendlesohn even goes so far as to claim that Steven is not important to the story of the forest, that he is part of an imported narrative rather than a tale native to the forest. Although her argument is rather persuasive, I would suggest that all narratives in the forest are, in some respect, drawn from outsiders, even when they are only part-outsiders, as in the case of Jack and Yssobel in Avilion (also see the episode with the World War I infantryman [Mythago Wood 263–77]). See Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 156.

82. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Advances in Semiotics) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 80.

83. Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19.

84. Doob, Idea of the Labyrinth, 18.

85. Eco, Semiotics, 81.

86. Ibid. However, Aarseth questions whether Eco’s net is a labyrinth at all; see Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 6.

87. Eco, Semiotics, 81.

88. Paul Kincaid, review of Avilion, by Robert Holdstock, SF Site, 2010, http://www.sfsite.com/01b/al312.htm.

89. Clute, Scores, 178.

90. Paul Kincaid, “Of Time and the River: Time in the Fiction of Robert Holdstock,” Vector 260 (Summer 2009): 9.

91. References to Terry Pratchett, Pyramids (1989; London: Corgi, 1990), are given parenthetically in the text.

92. Andrew M. Butler, Terry Pratchett (Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2001), 33.

93. It should be noted that with the introduction of the History Monks, especially in Thief of Time (1994) and Night Watch (2002), the nature of time in the Discworld universe developed in quite a different direction from Pyramids.

94. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

95. David Langford, introduction to Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, 2nd ed., eds. Andrew M. Butler et al., (2001; Baltimore: Old Earth Books, 2004), 11.

96. Clute, “Polder,” 772.

97. Richard Mathews actually claims that time travel—explicit or implicit—is as important to fantasy as space travel is to science fiction; see Mathews, Fantasy, 26.

98. Suvin appears to use this term to refer to high fantasy found near the center of Attebery’s fuzzy set, but he muddies the terminological water somewhat by referring to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, where Clute, in fact, sees little use for the term and suggests that it is a marketing euphemism for Sword and Sorcery; see John Clute, “Heroic Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It is possible that Suvin sees no difference between the (portal or) quest-driven fantasy of Tolkien and the immersive fantasy of, for instance, Michael Moorcock or Fritz Leiber.

99. Darko Suvin, “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion,” Extrapolation 41, no. 3 (2000): 226–27.

100. Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy, 81.

101. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 10. Note that the definition as it stands on p. 1 erroneously uses only “the supernatural.” The error is corrected in Colin. N. Manlove, “On the Nature of Fantasy,” in The Aesthetics of Fantasy Literature and Art, ed. Roger C. Schlobin (1975; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 16.

102. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, 3; cf. Manlove, “On the Nature,” 19.

103. Manlove, “On the Nature,” 29.

104. W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 9. Some writers have introduced “meta-rules” for how the internal rules are allowed to change; see, for instance, Lyndon Hardy’s Master of the Sixth Magic (1984), a sequel whose plot focuses mainly on how the rules for magic of the previous novel can be changed.

105. Doležel, Heterocosmica, 128–29.

106. Ibid., 131.

4. NATURE AND CULTURE

1. For instance, Christopher Manes, “Nature and Silence,” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1992; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), vx; Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967), The Ecocriticism Reader, 14; Lynn White, Jr., “Continuing the Conversation,” Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes toward Nature and Technology, ed. Ian G. Barbour (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973), 62; Frederick Turner, “Cultivating the American Garden” (1991), The Ecocriticism Reader, 41 (referring to Lévi-Strauss); Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 58, and René Dubos, “A Theology of the Earth” (1969), Western Man and Environmental Ethics, 44–45.

2. Attebery, Fantasy Tradition, 186.

3. Andrew Brennan, Thinking about Nature: An Investigation of Nature, Value and Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 88. See also the discussion in Turner, “American Garden,” 40–54.

4. Kate Soper, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1.

5. “nature, n.,” esp. 14b, 9c, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

6. “nature, n.,” 11a, OED Online.

7. Soper, What Is Nature?, 15. Such a distinction also agrees with what Andersson defines as the basic concept of nature (for a nature-centered environmental ethics), that nature “has not been anthropogenically affected”; see Petra Andersson, Humanity and Nature: Towards a Consistent Holistic Environmental Ethics (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2007), 71.

8. Brennan, Thinking about Nature, 88. He admits to the circularity of the definition.

9. Keekok Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 82–83.

10. David Kaplan and Robert A. Manners, Culture Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 3.

11. Alfred Louis Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1952), 149, n4a.

12. Peter Worsley, “Classic Conceptions of Culture,” Culture and Global Change, eds. Tracey Skelton and Tim Allen (London: Routledge, 1999), 13.

13. Daniel G. Bates, Cultural Anthropology (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), 5.

14. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Viking, 1990), 9–42, 55. Keekok Lee discusses McKibben’s position in terms of Lee’s seven senses of “nature”; see Lee, The Natural and the Artefactual, 86. For an overview of the so-called end-of-nature thesis and its treatment by supporters of a nature-centered environmental ethics, see Andersson, Humanity and Nature, 74–79.

15. White, “Historical Roots,” 3–4; Turner, “American Garden,” 40.

16. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (44 B.C.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 313 [2.152].

17. See, e.g., Turner, “American Garden,” 48. Reflections on this subject derived from hands-on experience can be found in Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Grove Press, 1991).

18. Andersson clarifies the distinction between nature (which I refer to as wild nature) and wilderness: the former is “all (biotic) entities and processes that are unaffected by human beings” while the latter is “natural landscapes”; see Andersson, Humanity and Nature, 81.

19. Verlyn Flieger similarly defines nature tamed as “nature cultivated according to human standards”; see Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees,” 154.

20. For a comprehensive discussion of this conundrum, see Andersson, Humanity and Nature, ch. 5.

21. White, “Historical Roots”; White, “Continuing”; Manes, “Nature”; Dubos, “Theology.” For an alternative view, see, e.g., Lewis W. Moncrief, “The Cultural Basis of Our Environmental Crisis” (1970), Western Man and Environmental Ethics.

22. Gen 1:28 (KJV).

23. Manes, “Nature,” 21; Michael T. Ghiselin, “Poetic Biology: A Defense and Manifesto,” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (1976): 497. Cf. Aristotle, History of Animals, 8.1.

24. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 18.

25. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), 19, 124.

26. John Clute, “Urban Fantasy,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 975–76.

27. John Clute, “City,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 204.

28. References to Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used in the references: FR—The Fellowship of the Ring, TT—The Two Towers, RK—The Return of the King, Appx—appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference.

29. See Gimli’s comments on this: FR, II, iv, 307.

30. Tolkien to Rayner Unwin, January 22, 1954, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 173. Interestingly enough, after some hesitation, Tolkien decided that the title of the second volume, The Two Towers, could not refer to either of those towers but must “if there is any real reference in it to Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol.” Tolkien’s original design for the jacket of this volume, however, shows Orthanc and Minas Morgul (see note in Letters 444).

31. Kocher, Master of Middle-earth, 125. He refers to TT, IV, v, 663.

32. Presumably, this is the same substance that the Númenoreans used for the Stone of Erech, which has also remained unchanged, smooth and black, over the millennia (RK, V, ii, 771–72).

33. Flieger, “Taking,” 152.

34. Ibid., 155.

35. Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 66–67.

36. The discussion in this section is based on Charles de Lint’s Newford novels and short fiction published until 2006.

37. Charles de Lint, Moonlight and Vines (New York: Tor, 1999), blurb; Charles de Lint, “Charles de Lint: Frequently Asked Questions,” SF Site, http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/faq01.htm. Accessed December 28, 2011.

38. Charles de Lint, From a Whisper to a Scream (1992; New York: Orb–Tom Doherty, 2003), 125.

39. Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl (2002; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2004), 244.

40. Charles de Lint, Forests of the Heart (2000; London: Gollancz-Orion, 2002). Further references to Forests are given parenthetically in the text.

41. Charles de Lint, Widdershins (New York: Tor, 2006), 77. Further references to Widdershins are given parenthetically in the text.

42. The Otherworld (also called dreamlands) provides a setting for numerous stories. The following de Lint novels deal with journeys to the Otherworld in one way or another: The Dreaming Place (1990), Trader (1997), Onion Girl (2002), Forests of the Heart, Spirits in the Wires (2003), Widdershins, and, to some extent, Medicine Road (2004). The dreamland city of Mabon created by Sophie in her dreams but visitable by others in theirs (in, e.g., “Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery” [1992]) is similar to the Otherworld created by the author Cat Midhir’s dreams in de Lint’s early novel Yarrow (1986).

43. Charles de Lint, “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow,” Dreams Underfoot (1990; New York: Tor, 1994). Further references to “Ghosts” are given parenthetically in the text.

44. Charles de Lint, “The Stone Drum” (1989), Dreams Underfoot, 57–59; see also Charles de Lint, “Winter Was Hard” (1991), Dreams Underfoot, 160–61. Further references to “Winter” are given parenthetically in the text.

45. See, e.g., Charles de Lint, Spirits in the Wires (New York: Tor, 2003), esp. 413–16. Further references to Spirits are given parenthetically in the text.

46. Charles de Lint, Trader (1997; New York: Orb–Tom Doherty, 2005), 44; Charles de Lint, “Tallulah” (1991), Dreams Underfoot, 444–45; Charles de Lint, “Pal o’ Mine,” The Ivory and the Horn (1993; New York: Tor, 1995), 222. Further references to Trader are given parenthetically in the text.

47. Charles de Lint, “But for the Grace Go I” (1991), Dreams Underfoot, 326.

48. For instance, Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons (1986) and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996). For further discussion on invisibility and homelessness in these two works, see Stefan Ekman, “Down, Out and Invisible in London and Seattle,” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 94 (2005).

49. Charles de Lint, “The Invisibles” (1997), Moonlight and Vines, 217.

50. Charles de Lint, “Waifs and Strays” (1993), The Ivory and the Horn, 34. Further references to “Waifs” are given parenthetically in the text.

51. Charles de Lint, “The Forest Is Crying” (1994), The Ivory and the Horn, 53. Further references to “Forest” are given parenthetically in the text. The quotation is from Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).

52. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 261.

53. Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying (1998; London: Pan, 1999), 85. Further references to Someplace are given parenthetically in the text.

54. According to, e.g., “The Buffalo Man” and Spirits in the Wires. The earlier stories “The Stone Drum” and “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow,” on the other hand, place their house a few blocks to the north, on McKennitt Street. See Charles de Lint, “The Buffalo Man,” Tapping the Dream Tree (1999; New York: Tor, 2002), 104, and de Lint, Spirits, 151; and cf. de Lint, “Stone Drum,” 45, and de Lint, “Ghosts,” 197. Further references to “Buffalo Man” are given parenthetically in the text.

55. Charles de Lint, “Pixel Pixies” (1999), Tapping the Dream Tree, 276.

56. Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream (New York: Tor, 1994), 32 et passim. Further references to Memory are given parenthetically in the text.

57. Charles de Lint, The Blue Girl (2004; New York: Firebird-Penguin, 2006), 251. Further references to Blue Girl are given parenthetically in the text.

58. Charles de Lint, “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines,” Moonlight and Vines, 117. Further references to “Held Safe” are given parenthetically in the text.

59. Charles de Lint, “In This Soul of a Woman” (1994), Moonlight and Vines, 51.

60. Charles de Lint, The Dreaming Place (1990; New York: Firebird-Penguin, 2002), 23. Further references to Dreaming Place are given parenthetically in the text.

61. Charles de Lint, “That Explains Poland” (1988), Dreams Underfoot, 108. Further references to “That Explains” are given parenthetically in the text.

62. Charles de Lint, “The Sacred Fire” (1989), Dreams Underfoot, 139.

63. The story of the tree that grows on stories is told mainly in “The Conjure Man” (1992) but is also referred to in “A Tempest in Her Eyes” (1994) and Onion Girl.

64. In this respect, Kellygnow is similar to Tamson House, which acts as a genius loci, for instance by magically keeping a severely wounded man alive. See Charles de Lint, Moonheart (1990; London: Pan, 1991), esp. 20–22, 24, 256.

65. References to China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (2000; New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 2001); China Miéville, The Scar (New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 2002); China Miéville, Iron Council (2004; New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 2005); and China Miéville, “Jack,” Looking for Jake: Stories (New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 2005), are given parenthetically in the text.

66. Joan Gordon, “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3 (2003): 362.

67. Joan Gordon, “Hybridity, Heterotopia, and Mateship in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3 (2003): 456, and Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xx. Even the later Bas-Lag novels have been considered to blur the genre boundaries; see, for instance, the review of Iron Council by Andrew Hedgecock, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 94 (2005): 123. Miéville also claims that he writes fiction located at the intersection of science fiction and fantasy; see Gordon, “Reveling in Genre,” 359, and China Miéville, “Messing with Fantasy,” Locus (March 2002): 5. Jeff VanderMeer refers to Perdido Street Station as the “flash point” for “the New Weird,” fiction in which the setting “may combine elements of both science fiction and fantasy”; see Jeff VanderMeer, “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’,” The New Weird, eds. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008), xi, xvi. For further discussion on genre-blurring and the New Weird, see also Darja Malcolm-Clarke, “Tracking Phantoms,” The New Weird, 341, and Jukka Halme, “Blurring the Lines,” The New Weird, 355.

68. Rich Paul Cooper, “Building Worlds: Dialectical Materialism as Method in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009): 220–21.

69. Christopher Palmer, “Saving the City in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag Novels,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009): 225–26.

70. Gordon, “Hybridity,” 456–63.

71. Yagharek’s prologue, epilogue, and interludes are printed in italics but are quoted in roman type here.

72. The city’s size is inferred from figures given in Perdido Street Station (146).

73. Pratchett repeatedly makes a similar point about the river through Ankh-Morpork, which is, owing to silt and refuse, almost viscous enough to walk on.

74. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 64. The constructs are so greatly feared that they are eventually wiped out in a conflict called the Construct Wars (Iron 87–88).

75. Gordon, “Hybridity,” 461.

76. References to Patricia A. McKillip, Ombria in Shadow (New York: Ace Books, 2002), are given parenthetically in the text.

77. For a discussion on loyalty in Ombria in Shadow, see Christine Mains, “For Love or for Money: The Concept of Loyalty in the Works of Patricia McKillip,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 3 (2006).

78. Christine Mains, “Bridging World and Story: Patricia McKillip’s Reluctant Heroes,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 1 (2005): 43.

79. John Clute, “Edifice,” The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 309–10.

80. Clute, “Water Margins,” 997.

81. Mains, “Bridging,” 44.

82. Meeker suggests that we limit our choices by establishing “artificial polarities” such as good/evil, true/false, and pain/pleasure. Nature/culture would make another such set. See Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 32.

83. Don. D. Elgin sees the transition from hunting and gathering to farming as one of the roots to our ecological crisis. The other two roots are Western religion and the ideas that came out of the French and Industrial Revolutions; see Elgin, Comedy, 4–9. It should be noted that, for instance, Breivik and (more recently) Hilbert find that the Old Testament advocates humanity’s stewardship—rather than ownership—of the world; see Gunnar Breivik, “Religion, livsform og natur [Religion, way of life, and nature],” Økologi, økofilosofi[Ecology, Ecophilosophy], eds. Paul Hofseth and Arne Vinje (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1975), and Betsy S. Hilbert, “Beyond ‘Thou Shalt Not’: An Ecocritic Reads Deuteronomy,” Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

84. The latter position has been forcefully argued, e.g., by Patrick Curry, “Nature Post-nature,” New Formations 64 (2008): 53–54.

85. In their anthology of critical texts aimed at developing the field of ecocriticism, Armbruster and Wallace go so far as to claim that “understanding nature and culture as interwoven rather than as separate sides of a dualistic construct” is one of ecocriticism’s “central conceptual challenges”; see Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 4.

86. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” The Tolkien Reader, 57.

87. The evil landscape in Tolkien is discussed in detail in chapter 5.

5. REALMS AND RULERS

1. Moorcock, Wizardry, 64.

2. References to Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, are given parenthetically in the text. The following abbreviations are used in the references: FR—The Fellowship of the Ring, TT—The Two Towers, RK—The Return of the King, Appx—appendices to The Lord of the Rings. Book and chapter are given in Roman numerals before the page reference.

3. A handful of Dark Ladies can be found in the genre, such as the White Witch in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), but the overwhelming majority of these personifications of evil are male, so I therefore refer to a Dark Lord as he.

4. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 68. Clute briefly notes that tragic fantasy exists but is uncommon; see Clute, “Fantasy,” 339.

5. The model is presented by Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and described in somewhat more detail in his Guest Scholar Speech at the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (Fort Lauderdale, 1999; later published in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts); see Clute, “Fantasy,” 338–39, and John Clute, “Grail, Groundhog, Godgame: Or, Doing Fantasy,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10, no. 4 (2000). Clute’s model is effectively used by Farah Mendlesohn in her fantasy taxonomy; see Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xv et passim. The quotation is from a review of Mendlesohn’s book; see Clute, Canary Fever, 369, originally published as “Drawn and Quartered” in Strange Horizons, June 2008.

6. Attebery, Fantasy Tradition, 12–13.

7. Ibid., 13–14. Elsewhere, Attebery observes that The Lord of the Rings conforms to Propp’s morphology; see Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy, 15.

8. V[ladímir] Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 63–64.

9. Clute, “Fantasy,” 338–39.

10. John Clute, “Healing,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 458.

11. Don D. Elgin notes that even Aragorn’s line will fail, however, and that Sam and his children are the future of Middle-earth; see Elgin, Comedy, 50. Elgin’s point suggests a telling comparison between the two characters: it is possible to argue that whereas Aragorn is the monarch who ascends the throne, marries, and heals the land, Sam heals the land, marries, and becomes a successful, democratic representative of his people (he is elected Mayor seven times; see Appx B 1071–72). Rather than the pro-monarchy tract it has often been accused of being, Tolkien’s text leaves it to the reader to decide who is the “proper” ruler.

12. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 3.

13. Jones, Tough Guide, 108.

14. The association between Aragorn’s ascending the throne and the introduction of nature in Minas Tirith (discussed in chapter 4) is a result of his policy (such as allowing the elves to plant trees in the City) and Gandalf’s help in finding the scion of the dead Tree; there is no direct link.

15. Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore. The Earthsea Quartet (1973; London: Puffin-Penguin, 1993).

16. Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, trans. Ralph Manheim (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 31–32. Original: “Die Kindliche Kaiserin galt zwar—wie ihr Titel ja schon sagt—als die Herrscherin über all die unzähligen Länder des grenzenlosen phantásischen Reiches, aber sie war in Wirklichkeit viel mehr als eine Herrscherin, oder besser gesagt, sie war etwas ganz anderes. […] Sie war nur da, aber sie war auf eine besondere Art da: Sie war der Mittelpunkt allen Lebens in Phantásien.” Michael Ende, Die unendliche Geschichte (Stuttgart: K. Thienemanns Verlag, 1979), 33–34.

17. Patricia A. McKillip, The Riddlemaster of Hed (1976; New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 1978), 85.

18. Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (1988; London: Corgi, 1989), 127.

19. Ibid., 90–92.

20. Ibid., 92.

21. In the Discworld novels, the legitimate heir often does not ascend the throne. See, e.g., Pyramids (discussed in chapter 3), in which Teppic renounces the throne in favor of his (maybe) half-sister; and Guards! Guards! (1989) and Men at Arms (1993), in which Carrot has all the signs marking him an heir to the throne but these signs are quite emphatically ignored, and he remains an officer of the Ankh-Morpork Watch. Carrot’s superior in the Watch is even explicitly against the idea of kings in, e.g., Feet of Clay (1996).

22. Brooks, Magic Kingdom.

23. Tad Williams, The War of the Flowers (New York: Daw Books, 2003).

24. William’s Oberon and Titania recall the fairy rulers in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who are also directly linked to the land. Cf. Titania’s description of how their quarrel has caused a large number of ills to befall the land and its people: Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.81–117.

25. References to Tim Powers, Last Call (1992; New York: Avon-HarperCollins, 1993), are given parenthetically in the text.

26. Fiona Kelleghan and Tim Powers, “Interview with Tim Powers,” Science Fiction Studies 25, no. 1 (1998): 7. The second book, Expiration Date (1996), focuses on ghosts and people who ingest them, and the two sets of protagonists are brought together in Earthquake Weather (1997), when another bid is made for the kingship. The books are also referred to as the Fault Lines series.

27. Gary K. Wolfe, Soundings: Reviews, 1992–1996 (Harold Wood, UK: Beccon Publications, 2005), 23. From a review originally published in Locus #374, March 1992.

28. For a discussion on Weston’s influence on and a Fisher King reading of The Waste Land, see Marianne Thormählen, The Waste Land: A Fragmentary Wholeness (Lund: Gleerup-LiberLäromedel, 1978), 68–74.

29. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. The Waste Land and Other Poems, ed. Helen Vendler (1922; New York: Signet–New American Library, 1998), l. 189, 191–92. Further references to the poem are given parenthetically in the text.

30. Thormählen points out that the “king my brother’s wreck” “could be a modified excerpt from Isis’ mournful chants” (71). Since, in Last Call’s mythical domain, Osiris and the Fisher King are linked to the same figure, that reading would still agree with the Fisher King reading the novel calls for.

31. Tim Powers, Earthquake Weather (New York: Orb–Tom Doherty, 1997), 194.

32. Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920; New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1957), 118–19.

33. Urban T. Holmes, Jr., and M. Amelia Klenke, Chrétien, Troyes, and the Grail (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 103; Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485; Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 646 (bk. 17, ch. 5).

34. Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzival (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 145, 205–6. It is worth noting that Groos, citing an article by Brunel, claims that the leg wound of Chrétien’s Fisher King is, in fact, a wound to the genitals: “‘parmi les hanches ambedeus’ […] has a widespread meaning of ‘genitalia’” (145n3); see also C. Brunel, “Les Hanches du Roi Pêcheur (Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval 3513),” Romania 81 (1960).

35. Weston discusses the connection between Tammuz and Adonis and suggests a connection to the Fisher King figure (Weston, From Ritual, ch. 4). James Frazer also observes the Tammuz-Adonis link and includes further discussion on, e.g., Attis and Osiris; see Frazer, The Golden Bough, esp. chs. 29–42.

36. Weston, From Ritual, 114.

37. Barber persuasively argues that there is no “reflex effect” causing the desolation of the Fisher King figure’s realm—in the earliest Grail stories, the wasteland is simply the result of the ruler’s inability to lead his men into battle; see Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend (London: Penguin, 2005), 205. “[Weston] emphasizes the Waste Land, which […] is a minor theme in all but the very late romances,” Barber claims, “and even in these romances it becomes important only because the writer was anxious to tie up the loose ends left by his predecessors” (Barber, Holy Grail, 249).

38. Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland (Woodbridge: Boydell Press / Wilton: Collins Press, 1999), 170.

39. In “Cath Maige Tuired” (The Battle of Maige Tuired), James MacKillop claims that this and similar Irish and Welsh tales are believed to be antecedents to the maimed Fisher King by some Arthurian commentators; see James MacKillop, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 253.

40. MacKillop, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, 253.

41. References to Lisa Goldstein, Tourists (1989; New York: Orb–Tom Doherty, 1994), are given parenthetically in the text.

42. Wolfe, Soundings, 209. From a review of Goldstein’s short-story collection Travellers in Magic, originally published in Locus #406, November 1994.

43. “palimpsest, n. and adj.,” 2a–b, OED Online, December 2011 (Oxford University Press).

44. See, e.g., Bob Brier and Hoyt Hobbs, Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 24–26; Charles W. Hedrick, History and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 109; and “palimpsest,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2010).

45. Hedrick, History and Silence, 93.

46. Five categories of palimpsests relevant to the field of archaeology are discussed by Geoff Bailey, “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 203–10. An architectural palimpsest is described as “the partial erasing and constant overworking of sites and buildings over time. This can involve building over, within, above or alongside the previous or existing structure” in Tom Porter, Archispeak: An Illustrated Guide to Architectural Terms (London: Spon Press–Taylor & Francis, 2004), 135; see also Robert Cowan, The Dictionary of Urbanism (Tisbury, UK: Streetwise Press, 2005), 279.

47. A brief but well-reasoned overview of the subject, which may serve as a starting point for such an exploration, is provided by Roz Kaveney, “Dark Lord,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 250.

48. Examples of the former include the evil god Torak in David (and Leigh) Eddings’s Belgariad sequence (1982–84); the wrathful and destructive Rakoth Maugrim in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry (1985–86); and the power-hungry Morgoth in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (1977). Examples of the latter include Voldemort in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997–2007); Darken Rahl in Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule (1995); and the Warlock Lord in Terry Brooks’s Shannara books (1977–present).

49. Including the White Witch/Jadis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew (1955), who is mortal but from a different world and with powers far beyond those of normal people; Arawn in the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander (1964–68), who is a supernatural character but not divine; and the Storm King in Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series (1988–93), who is an undead lord of the immortal Sithi.

50. And therefore easily parodied. Examples include Diana Wynne Jones’s The Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), in which “Dark Lord” is just a role thrust upon a wizard to provide a suitable opponent for tourists from another world, and Mary Gentle’s Grunts (1992), in which the Dark Lord returns in a female body and announces that rather than conquer the world by military means, she will win by election. In “Another End of the Empire” (2009), Tim Pratt portrays a Dark Lord who decides to educate the children prophesied to overthrow him and finds himself adopting them and reforming his realm in the process.

51. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 50.

52. Texts that predate the emergence of generic fantasy, but that include the fantastic, and are of heightened significance to the genre. See Clute, “Taproot Texts,” 921–22.

53. Michael Alexander, ed., Beowulf (London: Penguin, 1995), l. 1357; cf. Beowulf: A Verse Translation, trans. Michael Alexander (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973).

54. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Paradise Lost: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Scott Elledge (1674; New York: Norton, 1993), 50 (bk. 2, lines 624–26).

55. Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Robert Browning’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. James F. Loucks (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), st. 10:2–3. Further references to this poem are given parenthetically in the text.

56. Tom Shippey, introduction to The Wood beyond the World, by William Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), ix; see also Shippey, Road, 184. In the latter work, Shippey also mentions that “Childe Rowland” is a story in Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales from 1890 (346). This story takes Rowland to Elfland, however, rather than to any evil landscape. Edgar’s line comes at the end of King Lear 3.4.

57. Astrid Lindgren, Mio, My Son, trans. Marianne Turner (1954, English trans. 1956; London: Puffin-Penguin, 1988), 88, 103. It is interesting to notice the many similarities—even on a fairly detailed level—between Lindgren’s book and The Lord of the Rings, especially since the original Swedish edition of Mio, My Son was published in the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring: a small boy and his steadfast friend, the gardener’s son, venture to the Dark Land to defeat a Dark Lord in his dark tower. For aid, they receive magical bread that sustains them, cloaks that hide them, and a special blade; and they avoid the black soldiers by entering the Dark Land through mountain tunnels.

58. Milton, Paradise Lost, 10 (bk. 1, l. 63).

59. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), bk. 10; Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, bk. 6.

60. Glen Cook, The Black Company (New York: Tor, 1984), 240. The two following books of the series also introduce a male Dark Lord.

61. Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 190.

62. For a more thorough discussion on authorities in portal–quest fantasies, see Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 12–16 et passim.

63. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 183 [ch. 11].

64. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 151 [ch. 18].

65. J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-earth, vol. 4 (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 11, 26–27, 58–59.

66. Randel Helms, Tolkien’s World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 98.

67. This is also the position of Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 186.

68. John Garth, “‘As under a Green Sea’: Visions of War in the Dead Marshes,” Tolkien 2005: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, ed. Sarah Wells, vol. 1 (Birmingham: The Tolkien Society, 2005), I:18–19. He mainly treats the Dead Marshes and Dagorlad in connection with Tolkien’s experiences at the Somme, however, referring to an interview from 1968. The same interview (Keith Brace, “In the Footsteps of the Hobbits,” Birmingham Post, May 25, 1968) is cited in Hammond and Scull, Reader’s Companion, 455, in connection to Dagorlad.

69. J. R. R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien, The War of the Ring, vol. 3 (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 105.

70. Dickerson and Evans call it “one of the lengthiest and most gruesome passages describing environmental degradation in modern literature” (186). They also argue persuasively that both Isengard and the Shire under Saruman offer more potent images because they strike closer to home for the reader (Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 193, 204).

71. Swinfen, In Defence of Fantasy, 85.

72. For further discussion on the felling of trees in The Lord of the Rings, see Flieger, “Taking the Part of Trees,” as well as Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 195–96, 211–13.

73. Helms, Tolkien’s World, 79; see also 81.

74. Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 190; cf. RK, VI, ii, 897; iii, 916.

75. For a similar discussion, see Dickerson and Evans, Ents, 191.

76. References to Stephen R. Donaldson, The Power That Preserves (1977; New York: Del Rey–Ballantine, 1980), are given parenthetically in the text.

77. W. A. Senior, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy Tradition (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 87–88.

78. Senior, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles, ch. 3. For his discussion of the rings, see esp. 85–97. A similar comparison can be found in the discussion on evil in Donaldson’s Chronicles in Christine Barkley, Stephen R. Donaldson and the Modern Epic Vision: A Critical Study of the “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” Novels (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), ch. 5.

79. Senior, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles, 79–80.

80. Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane (1977; Glasgow: Fontana-Collins, 1978), 38–41.

81. Barkley, Stephen R. Donaldson, 148–49.

82. Senior, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles, 67.

83. Ibid., 79.

84. References to Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World (New York: Tor–Tom Doherty, 1990), are given parenthetically in the text.

85. Dante, Inferno, xiii.

86. Ibid., xiii, 11. 31 ff.

87. Other parallels to nuclear weapons in Jordan’s Wheel of Time series are discussed in the blog The Thirteenth Depository (Linda [pseud.], “The Age of Legends,” The Thirteenth Depository: A Wheel of Time Blog, March 26, 2002, http://13depository.blogspot.com/2009/02/age-of-legends.html).

88. At least Gandalf implies that Sauron is behind the storm (FR, II, iii, 281), a point also noted in Senior, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles, 88.

89. Tolkien’s anti-industrialism is brought out even more plainly in Peter Jackson’s movies, where the servants of Sauron are portrayed as engineers. A typical example would be when Jackson’s ents flood Isengard by tearing down Saruman’s dam rather than (as in Tolkien’s text) damming the river themselves—destroying technology that harnesses nature rather than building such a harness themselves.

90. Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters, 127.

91. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, 3.

92. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 260.

APPENDIX A: METHOD FOR THE MAP SURVEY

1. In the construction of this study, I am much indebted to the careful description of methodology provided by Helena Francke, (Re)creations of Scholarly Journals: Document and Information Architecture in Open Access Journals (Borås, Sweden: Valfrid, 2008), ch. 5.

2. Attebery, Strategies, 12–14. See also chapter 1.

3. International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions: Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), http://www.ifla.org/files/cataloguing/frbr/frbr.pdf.

4. Baker, “What We Found,” 239.

5. For the nonrepresentativeness of convenience samples, see Chava Frankfort-Nachmias and David Nachmias, Research Methods in the Social Sciences (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 184.

6. November 7, 2007. SF-Bokhandeln has stores in Sweden’s three largest cities as well as a web store at http://www.sfbok.se.

7. See Clute, “Taproot Texts,” 921–22.

8. G. H. Jowett, “The Relationship between the Binomial and F Distributions,” The Statistician 13, no. 1 (1963), and Mikael Elenius, “Några metoder att bestämma konfidensintervall för en binomialproportion: en litteratur-och simuleringsstudie [Some methods to determine confidence intervals for a binomial proportion: A literature review and simulation study]” (C-essay [bachelor’s thesis], University of Gothenburg, 2004), 7; cf. Francke, (Re)creations, 186–87.