Mythopoeic Fantasy and Rehabilitation: A Note
By Dale Nelson
Multiple types of fantasy exist: sword and sorcery (Conan the Barbarian &c.), Gothic-style fantasy (Peake’s Gormenghast books, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi), dark fantasy (Dracula, M. R. James’s ghost stories, etc.), weird tales (Lovecraft and his ilk), comic fantasy (de Camp & Pratt, Pratchett, &c.), urban fantasy, and more. Not all fantasy is mythopoeic fantasy; mythopoeic fantasy is rare in the midst of these other varieties.
Mythopoeic fantasy may be characterized as fantasy that evokes a strong element of rehabilitation, and that does so not, or not only, to indulge nostalgia for a past that never was, but for retrieval of wisdom. Rehabilitation means that the work takes up some long-existing imaginative elements and imparts to them a new vigor and capacity to captivate readers, and also means that the work offers wisdom that is needed in the author’s day.
The Inklings excelled at mythopoeic fantasy as just identified.
Charles Williams rehabilitated Neoplatonic universals – probably regarded as antiquarian curiosities in his day – in The Place of the Lion. He dusted off the legend of the Holy Graal in War in Heaven, and also the figure of Prester John. The shape of the necromancer took on a modern imaginative plausibility in Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve. In each of these books, there were literary “properties” brought out from a dark store-room of the imagination. The novels were entertainments, yet they also conveyed wisdom lacking in most modern fiction. Beauty and justice are real, not matters of personal taste or just social construction (Place of the Lion). The symbolism of the Graal relates to mankind’s deep need to be present at sacramental intersections of time and eternity (War in Heaven). Williams suggests the important contrast between the proper and possibly glorious role of art (Drayton’s painting) and the false way of techniques that demean the soul of master and follower (Simon and his magic).
J. R. R. Tolkien most obviously rehabilitated the Elves, especially in his romances but also in his lecture and essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” In the essay, Tolkien dismissed a false tradition of diminutive flower-dwelling fairies and revived the formidable, beautiful, but perilous beings encountered in works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.* Tolkien reimagined the heroic quest to save a kingdom – or many kingdoms – in danger. He brought forth the familiar magical object – a jewel, a sword, a cloak of invisibility, a ring – restored to its original fascination or granted a greater degree thereof than ever before. Indeed, though some readers, perhaps accustomed to computer games, complain about the copious “walking bits” of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien rehabilitated the green earth itself for many readers. He is an important contributor to an ethic of non-possessiveness towards nature, of stewardship rather than selfish domination.
C. S. Lewis is another exemplary rehabilitator. To take up just the final volume, That Hideous Strength, of his magnificent cosmic trilogy: Lewis rehabilitates Merlin and the Pendragon from the Arthurian world; he works with the Gothic tradition in his rendering of the N. I. C. E.; he revives and transforms the Tower of Babel; he refreshes the mode of the apocalyptic – by which I’m thinking not so much of the Bible’s apocalypses but, say, the pseudepigraphal book of 1 Enoch. There is much wisdom in his contrast between true companionship and the false fellowship of the “inner ring”; Lewis invites modern readers to reconsider their “progressive” notions of marriage; he contrasts academic careerism with the wisdom of real learning, and journalism co-opted by officialdom with language expressing, and shaped by, the soul when it is healthy.
To head off criticism that the “wisdom” of which I’ve written is something vague, I’ve just set out some specific examples of weighty and worthy matters in the works of the Inklings. By wisdom in their works, though, I mean even more than those matters that I’ve reduced to words. Each work not only conveys wisdom that may be suggested by precepts, but elicits from readers a new or refreshed disposition of attention to the real wherever it is manifest.
Before the Inklings, George MacDonald (especially) and William Morris were exponents of mythopoeic fantasy.
Among MacDonald’s rehabilitations was that of the Lilith-figure, the angelic mate who had been Adam’s first wife but spurned her holy privilege and became a vampiric demon. Early on, the romance that bears her name invites not only Mr. Vane but the reader to wake up to the mystery of one’s own being. As it continues, the tale calls into question inadequate notions of the good, and it depicts evil in a responsible way, not as sensational matter for amusement of dull appetites.
Morris reimagined the literary form of the medieval prose romance. He seems to have aspired to become the modern Caxton – Caxton being the early printer who published Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, probably the greatest book of them all of the cycle of King Arthur and the Round Table knights. However, for Morris the piety of the Middle Ages had become a matter of aesthetics not of living faith. His imagination was this-worldly. He called upon his audience to reconsider the right relationship of work and society. Whether or not the variety of socialism he expounded in lectures is convincing and feasible, he invites readers to think again about such basic human concerns and to question our present arrangements. He wanted a revival, adapted to modern conditions, of the way of the medieval craftsman, for the sake of justice and happiness.
After the Inklings, Ursula Le Guin wrote mythopoeic fantasy in her first three Earthsea books, namely A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. She rehabilitated the Oriental figure of the master sage, and the powerful but beneficent Chinese dragon. The Northern dragon lies coiled on a heap of golden treasure, but the dragon of Earthsea flies high in the clouds. While the Inklings were Christians, Le Guin was interested in Eastern thought, evoking for all readers an ideal of the humble soul – though not of the redeemed creature, body, soul, and spirit.
Richard Adams wrote Watership Down consciously as an epic, the story of the dangerous flight of a people (here, rabbits) to a new home. The tale is imbued with wise depictions of false leadership and true. A few years later came a very different book, The Girl in a Swing, a new evocation of the ancient and terrible goddess of sexual love. It was a wise depiction not only of the transformative ardors of romantic love but of the danger of Eros becoming a demon. (C. S. Lewis explains this in a chapter of The Four Loves; that chapter was written before Adams’s novel but it might be the best brief presentation of its meaning.) It is a work of mythopoeic fantasy though set, like Williams’s novels, in the author’s time. It has not a happy ending.
Along with “The Great Return” and “N,” Arthur Machen’s short novel The Terror, I believe, deserves recognition as a mythopoeic fantasy. It doesn’t work like the stories I’ve discussed here; nearly all of it is told as a journalistic wartime mystery. Yet a few sentences at the end retrospectively reveal it as conforming to the characteristics set out above. My essay in the 2024 Darkly Bright critical edition invites readers to consider for themselves the case for the novel as mythopoeic.
*The Green Knight is not an Elf. We learn at the poem’s end that he is a man who was enchanted by Morgan le Fay. But he looks like someone from Faerie (Fit I, Stanza 11).
© 2024 Dale Nelson
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