[Editor's Note: The conversation below is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Randy Hoyt: In the very first issue of this magazine, I proposed a working definition of myth that encompasses more than just traditional mythology, including fantasy and science fiction. What do you think that all three of these have in common?

Amy H. Sturgis: All three are involved in the project of answering the question of what it means to be human: the nature of humanity; the nature of humanity’s relationship to the earth, the cosmos, the infinite; and other questions like these. The very first storytellers, through their mythological stories, parables, and other tales, were trying to come to some sense of the world and to figure out their place in it. I see mythology as a “mother figure” out of which the other two have grown. I would group all these under the umbrella “speculative fiction,” along with much of horror. I would also emphasize that some of the sub-genres of science fiction like utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and weird fiction or Gothic fiction fit under this heading. I think all of these forms of speculative fiction originate from the same impulse that was first shown through mythology.

RH: I like that term, “speculative fiction.” Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?

AHS: I think the easiest way to describe it is to consider what does not fit in speculative fiction. On the one hand, you have the kind of fiction that describes the world as we can see it or taste it or feel it, a world that is already familiar to readers: “mundane fiction.” These stories take place in the time and place in which the readers live or one with which they are familiar from history. For example, when reading Jane Austen, readers don’t have to be told how gravity works in order to understand her story because it’s taking place in a world that they already recognize. Speculative fiction is the opposite of that. These stories use imaginative tools in order to answer the important questions about the human experience, attempting to explain everything from what happens when we die to what makes thunderstorms occur to how the earth and its inhabitants came into being in the first place.

RRH: In what ways would you say that fantasy and science fiction differ in their approach to these questions?

AHS: I think the impulse to draw a line between these two types of speculative fiction is something with which the critics are more concerned than the practitioners, those telling the stories. Some of my favorite authors move fairly easily between the two: Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Orson Scott Card, for example. But as a critic, the distinction that is helpful for me — inspired by some of the work that scholar James Gunn has done — involves describing science fiction as the fiction of change and fantasy as the fiction of difference. In a work of science fiction, it’s our world, our universe; we recognize its natural laws as identifiable and familiar to us; but there’s a change. Artificial intelligence might exist, or we might have interstellar travel or time travel. It’s our world with a change added to it, a “what-if.” That change requires plausibility, if not probability: the change could really happen. Fantasy, on the other hand, is more about overall differences. When you are in Middle-earth or in Narnia, there’s a different set of rules in effect there. Even in the wainscot fantasies like Harry Potter, with the wizarding world that butts up against our own, things are still different in that secondary universe. This is what Tolkien wrote about in “On Fairy-stories,” a believable world of fantasy with its own internal dynamic and its own laws that hold true for that world. I think this angle — change vs. difference — helps me to move any given work in one direction or another, but I think there’s an argument to be made that some works incorporate both, some blur the lines, and other are just not easily pigeon-holed in either one.

I think it’s interesting to see whether science fiction or fantasy gains an ascendancy over the other one at different times. In the 1950s, for example, there was a sense of wonder and excitement about the future and technological progress — “We’re going to go to the moon!” and “Think of all the things we’re going to accomplish!” At that time, there was a greater interest in science fiction than in fantasy, particularly with science fiction becoming popular in young-adult fiction thanks to the juveniles of Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and others. Contrast that with today, when the national polls say that young people don’t think their life is going to get better, that they don’t think the world their children will inherit will be as good as the world their parents lived in, when there’s a general societal concern about what the future holds. Today, you see the trend moving sharply from fantasy and away from science fiction. I’m not saying there’s a definite causation, but there is definitely a correlation between the way we view the past and the future and which of the two genres speaks to us. At a given time one seems more popular than the other in part because of the way we feel about the state of our affairs today.

RH: When would you say that modern science fiction as a genre began?

AHS: I think that all speculative fiction has a very long past. In terms of the greater tradition out of which science fiction emerged, you would have to go all the way back to something like the Epic of Gilgamesh or Plato’s Republic to find the seeds. As scholars again, more than as fans or practitioners, we pinpoint when certain movements began or shifted. Scholars differ about the beginning of modern science fiction as we know it, but I think the best case can be made for Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. Elements of science fiction can be found in earlier works, but Shelley really combines all of the necessary ingredients for what we consider modern science fiction. The next important figure would probably be Edgar Allan Poe. The genre really came into its own with people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells writing at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Science fiction has of course gone through many different stages, waves, or movements since. The thing I like most about the history of science fiction is how closely it is connected to the question of what it means to be human. The science part of science fiction keeps expanding. It starts out as biology and chemistry, then takes in physics, then takes in linguistics and anthropology and sociology. As more disciplines get brought in under the science part of science fiction, we get new insights into what it means to be human. I think at some level, we always answer the question “What is human?” with something like “Whatever is like me.” That is just our frame of reference. But as science fiction has expanded its lens by incorporating the tools of different sciences, the notion of “what’s like me” gets bigger and bigger. So the answer starts out to include only well-educated, land-owning white men and then evolves to include people of both genders and all races. But then, what traits must a computer or an artificial intelligence possess in order for us to think of it as something like a human? What about different biological creatures, like a primate on our planet or a different life form on another planet? What of clones? What is necessary for us to consider any life human enough to be treated as human? Some of the most innovative questions about the very nature of how we understand the universe have come from writers using science fiction to get at these questions in a different way.

RH: For people who want to get started with science fiction, what classic works would you recommend?

AHS: Mary Shelley is a good starting place. Frankenstein (1818) is a work of absolute genius, but I really love her less-known but equally-brilliant book The Last Man (1826); I try to foist that on people whenever I can. You can’t wrong with anything by H.G. Wells; his work stands up incredibly well. I would particularly recommend The Time Machine (1895).  I’m also a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, who is as much a science-fiction author as a weird-fiction or horror author; The Color Out of Space (1927) would be a good one to read first. I would also include three books that were instrumental in my own adolescence: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966). These classic works give a sense of the possibilities and the breadth of science fiction.

RH: You teach classes on the history of science fiction at Belmont University. What do you cover in those classes?

AHS: There are three classes in particular, and each of them has a bit of a different perspective. The one I’ve taught most is called “The History of the Future”; it essentially looks at one hundred years of history through science fiction. We look at science-fiction texts and ask how the works reflect the concerns of the authors about their own time period. It’s a history course, but the premise is that the science-fiction authors — no matter how remote the worlds they describe, how furry the aliens, or how chartreuse the ray-gun beams — are actually talking about their own time and place and reacting to it in some way. Joe Haldeman’s classic work The Forever War (1974), for example, is set in the distant future at a time of interstellar travel. It is a story about people sent away from home to fight on the front lines. Because of the way time works with space travel, they return from the war to encounter a place that is literally a different world than the one they left, and these soldiers must suffer through the difficulty of finding their place in this alien world. But Haldeman is writing about his experience in Vietnam as a soldier, serving in the U.S. Armed Forces and then returning home to a less-than-recognizable United States. Students can learn much more from that rich text about the experiences of the Vietnam Era than they can get from reading a history textbook.

Another class I teach is called “Worlds Gone Wrong,” a class specifically on the dystopian tradition. We start with E.M. Forrester’s The Machine Stops (1909) and look at different dystopian works from the last hundred years to see the different warnings that authors have given. These descriptions of worst-case scenarios tell us about the concerns of the time periods in which they were written: totalitarian governments, moral decline, rampant consumerism, and other concerns. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), for example, discusses drug abuse and gangs and the disintegration of the cities; we look at how that book relates to the early ’90s but also to our concerns today. A lot of the students are really interested to find out that environmental concerns — something they associate with today’s mainstream media — show up quite early in dystopian works.

The third class in which I use science fiction is about the frontier and US Exceptionalism. We look at the idea that started back in the late nineteenth century with Frederick Jackson Turner called the “frontier thesis,” which suggests that the United States is unique among all other nations because it had the experience of the frontier. We bring that idea forward to consider what the frontier means in different eras in the United States’ history. Is the United States really unique? If not, why did we come up with this idea? If so, how do we look at it in a twenty-first century context? It is not strictly a science-fiction class, but we do look at works like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and David Brin’s The Postman (1985), as well as the science-fiction television series Firefly (2002), to think about the frontier in different ways.

RH: What about more recent science fiction? Is there an anthology or some other resource that would expose people to work going on today?

AHS: There is a great anthology series called The Road To Science-Fiction (1979-1998) edited by James Gunn. It contains six volumes, with each volume addressing a different time period. The last several volumes include contemporary stories from around the world. The series as a whole is an excellent introduction for anyone interested in the history of science fiction.

I have also found podcasts to be a great resource for recent stories. There are a number of great podcasts in speculative fiction, such as Escape Pod and SciFiDimensions. I am personally involved with a podcast run by Tony C. Smith called StarShipSofa, which spotlights new science fiction stories published in the last year or two. Tony has persuaded some tremendous authors — authors who are in a good position to shape the genre in the twenty-first century — to donate their stories. I am very fortunate to do dramatic readings of these works for the podcast. I’ve narrated stories by the likes of Jeff Carlson, Vonda McIntyre, and Paul di Filippo, among others. Last year and this year, the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) allowed StarShipSofa to run dramatic readings of all of the stories they shortlisted for their Best Short Fiction award — the highest science-fiction honor for short stories in Great Britain. (In February, I was honored to do the dramatic reading of M. Rickert’s 2009 BSFA-nominated story.) StarShipSofa will also be putting up has also just put up dramatic readings of all seven nominees for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

RH: Not only do you do dramatic readings, but you also write and read fact articles on the history of science fiction. I have really enjoyed listening to those and getting some historical context on the genre. I found your articles on Francis Stevens, the Arkham House Sampler, and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in particular to be quite fascinating.

AHS: Thank you so much! I greatly appreciate it. The other main goal of StarShipSofa, besides spotlighting new authors, is to try to rescue some the forgotten pioneers of science fiction. I hope my fact articles contribute to that end. It gives me great joy to be a part of the podcast and to shine the spotlight on authors and works I think are too important to be forgotten.

I have included links to all the books and podcast episodes Amy recommended during the interview below. You can learn more about Amy’s work by visiting her web site, amyhsturgis.com. She is currently working on what sounds like an exciting new book, The Gothic Imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and J.K. Rowling, for publication with Zossima Press in 2010.

[Editor's Note: The conversation above is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Recommendations

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
• Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826.
• Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. 1895.
• Lovecraft, H.P. The Color Out of Space. 1927.
• Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. 1950.
• Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965.
• Heinlein, Robert. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress . 1966.
• Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. 1974.
• Forrester, E.M. The Machine Stops. 1909.
• Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. 1993.
• Brin, David. The Postman. 1985.
• Firefly. Directed by Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, and Vern Gillum. 2002.

• Gunn, James. The Road To Science-Fiction. Six volumes:
  • Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Wells. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 2: From Wells to Heinlein. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 4: From Here to Forever. 1997. Scarecrow Press: 2003.
  • Volume 5: The British Way. White Wolf Publishing: 1998.
  • Volume 6: Around The World. White Wolf Publishing: 1999.

• Dramatic readings of the finalists for the British Science Fiction Associations award for best Short Fiction from the past two years are available at StarShipSofa.
  • 2007 Shortlist (Winners Announced March 22, 2008)
    • Whates, Ian. “Gift Of Joy.” Narrated by Alex Foster.
    • Brenchley, Chaz. “Terminal.”
    • Chiang, Ted. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” Narrated by JJ Campanella.
    • MacLeod, Ken. “Lighting Out.”
    • Reynolds, Alastair. “Sledge-Maker’s Daughter.” Narrated by Diane Severson.
  • 2008 Shortlist (Winners To Be Announced April 11, 2009)
    • Rickert, Mary. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment:One Daughter’s Personal Account.” Narrated by Amy H. Sturgis.
    • Chiang, Ted. “Exhalation.” Narrated by Ray Sizemore.
    • McAuley, Paul. “Little Lost Robot.” Narrated by Matthew Wayne Selznick.

• StarShipSofa will be adding added on April 2 dramatic readings of the finalists for this year’s Nebula Award for best short story. (Winners To Be Announced April 25, 2009)
  • Allen, Mike. “The Button Bin.”
  • Ford, Jeffrey. “The Dreaming Wind.”
  • Hoffman, Nina Kiriki. “Trophy Wives.”
  • Johnson, Kij. “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.”
  • Jones, Gwyneth. “The Tomb Wife.”
  • Kelly, James Patrick. “Don’t Stop.”
  • Nestvold, Ruth. “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide.”

Randy Hoyt: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

Ted Nasmith: My older sister gave me a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring when I was 14. It hit me really strongly, as it does so many people. I just loved it right from the start. It was set in the distant, romantic past, amid traditional English-style landscapes, and it was all very nostalgic, fairy-tale and storybook material. It really grabbed me. I was an art student at the time, and I started to draw pictures inspired by the book fairly quickly. That was a big turn for me: I had been drawing spaceships, cars, and all kinds of more mechanical stuff. Tolkien was a big new element in my artistic imagination.

RH: How did you get started publishing your Tolkien illustrations?

TN: The first Tolkien calendar came out in 1973. It contained Tolkien’s own artwork, but then calendars with other artists’ work quickly followed, which greatly impressed me, since it demonstrated that The Lord of the Rings had struck a resounding chord of artistic inspiration with others, too. I had already accumulated my own paintings and drawings through high school and into the ’70s. The calendars in theory provided a way for me to get my stuff in front of the publishers; it proved to be a process that required persistence, but that eventually bore fruit. My work started appearing in the calendars in the late ’80s, fifteen years after I first sought its publication.

RH: When did you first encounter The Silmarillion?

TN: I read The Silmarillion as soon as it came out in 1977. It was not nearly as enjoyable as The Lord of the Rings, but it was more of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. More images came to me through these ‘new’ legends. I deliberately included something of Beren and Lúthien or one of the other major stories for the calendars, in order to integrate more of Tolkien’s legendarium into my growing body of paintings.

RH: I imagine many people seeing those calendars would have been familiar with The Lord of the Rings but possibly not The Silmarillion. What did you hope your art communicated to those who did not know the story you were illustrating? Obviously you lose some elements like dialogue, and you are limited to a single, frozen moment: but what extra elements can artwork use that make it more powerful?

TN: Hopefully they convey the sense of enchantment, the otherworldliness and remoteness, or simply the romance and nostalgia, or the poignancy and sadness — all those things and more you can convey using color, mood, shadow, etc. Someone looking at these illustrations who is unfamiliar with The Silmarillion can definitely see there’s something going on. Even if you know the story depicted, a work of illustration can still speak to you at a deeper level. Images are powerful. Tolkien dealt with archetypal material, the stuff of dreams, and through visual images that material can tap into the human subconscious in ways that augment prose.

As I would start drawing a scene based on the written description, I would notice visual associations that I didn’t really intend or appreciate originally. These associations emphasize the sub-text or the background ideas a bit more, filling them out and amplifying them. They definitely seem to complement the written part of it. I’d often think, “This really has a life of its own, a separate validity to it.” Sometimes a person will get a strong reaction to a work of art and they will say, “That’s what I saw in my head. How did you know?” That’s an amazing compliment to an artist. If you received a comment like that once in a blue moon, it would be enough to make you feel like you were achieving a level of success, but I actually get comments like that fairly constantly in letters from fans; it’s really, really flattering.

RH: You mention images coming to you. Many authors, Tolkien included, describe their stories as something that they discover more than something they invent. Do you find that to be the case with your paintings?

TN: Yeah, I definitely understand why they would say things like that. There have been times where something just sort of came through me in a way. I didn’t overly deliberate on it: I just got out of the way and let it come onto the page. So yeah, I really relate to that kind of creative description of what happens. It is a bit of magic, for sure.

RH: Do you have a favorite piece of all the ones that you have done?

TN: That’s a question I get often. I could probably narrow it down to ten or fifteen or something. There are so many individually that are successful, for one reason or another.

RH: My personal favorite is The Kinslaying at Alqualondë from the 2004 illustrated version of The Silmarillion. Would you include that one in the list?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. 2004. View larger image »

TN: Yeah, that came to mind. There are a couple of things I wanted to show there. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to show a glimpse of the lost city of Alqualondë and the wonderful culture of the Teleri. The ships are described as the Teleri’s greatest work (Tolkien 86). I imagine they would have been so beautiful that no artist could truly have captured this accurately — but it’s my job and fascination as an artist to approximate it as best I can. I couldn’t imagine them any other way than each having its own character, for instance. Compositionally, the curving wharf portrays a more feminine and dynamic setting. The battle taking place was difficult; scenes with many figures interacting are not my strong suit. But you just get down and you work on it much more to make sure that it’s up to the standard level of the other parts. I used to work mainly as an architectural renderer, so I have a facility for architecture; it was interesting to try to envision Elven architecture of the First Age. What would that be? Certainly it would be exotic, all carved, elegant and otherworldly.

Then there’s the problem of lighting; the scene is under starlight with no sun and moon. The text mentions lamps on the quays and piers (Tolkien 77), so that gives you something. I played a bit with the color of the water to make it almost luminous. When you try to do as realistic art as I do, you get caught sometimes thinking you have to do it according to all the laws of physics. But this is fantasy. I have learned to take liberties to convey more than just the hard facts and the surface of things, and not to worry about someone saying, “Hey, that isn’t real.” None of it is ‘real’, although it is famously realistic to a high degree, and thus presents tantalizing dilemmas.

RH: I saw on your web site an earlier image you did of this scene, which you called a “sketch.” I thought that sketch was excellent. What’s the relationship between that sketch and the image from the book?

The Kinslaying at Alqualondë. Sketch. Source »

TN: That first color sketch was based on a thumbnail drawing of a raw impression of the wharfs, ships, and the battle. Christopher Tolkien worked with me in choosing illustrations, and I was encouraged that he expressed great praise for this initial rough image. I tried to preserve what was good about the sketch but make it more sophisticated.

RH: The scene in the sketch felt like it took place at night, but in the final illustration it really feels like it took place before the sun and the moon, before day and night existed. I often forget that the sun and moon hadn’t appeared yet, and I often picture these scenes as if they were in daylight. This illustration really drives that home.

TN: I’m glad. It’s difficult. That’s often the way you draw a scene, with that daylight impression. It may make for a nice picture, but isn’t accurately illustrating it. I used to wonder why there weren’t more great illustrations of the Fellowship traveling through the countryside as they came south to Moria, but it’s because they traveled mostly at night! The Peter Jackson movies showed the Fellowship against these wonderful landscape shots — but in the daytime. The Tolkien illustrator is often left with a serious limitation. Take Bilbo and Gollum and the riddle game: it’s pitch black except for Gollum’s eyes — not too great for an illustrator! You’ve got to take a little license on some of these things.

RH: A big theme I see in Tolkien is the interaction of beauty and sorrow, which this illustration captures really well: the beauty of the ships on the left and the sorrow of the battle here on the right.

TN: Right. That was an important part of it for sure. Somehow you’ve got to underscore this terrible kinslaying scene, the violence and obscenity of it. Paradoxically, the beautiful is that much more tragic because of the incongruity of something terrible and violent juxtaposed with it.

RH: What new projects are you working on and what new artwork should we expect to see from you in the near future?

TN: I provided all the artwork for the 2009 Tolkien Calendar, featuring landscape images from the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth from The Silmarillion. I’m also doing various commissions, mostly new Tolkien paintings; projects done recently or upcoming. Last year, I did the scene with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin meeting Gildor and the Elves in the Woody End. I always loved that scene, right from the first time I started imagining and creating the illustrations. I never found a chance to illustrate it earlier, though; I never felt I was in the right moment or something. Yet it was an immediate hit, and I was commissioned to do another version of that same piece because the first one sold quite quickly at the exhibition!

Elves in the Woody End. 2006. View larger image »

I’ve also been fortunate enough to get involved with George R.R. Martin, another amazing fantasy author. I’ve done a lot of new work in ‘Westeros,’ his imaginary universe, for an upcoming big-format reference book on his fantasy novels [see examples]. I’ve also recently accepted an offer for the 2010 Tolkien Calendar, which will feature landscapes of the Third Ages.

You can learn more about Ted’s work by visiting his web site, tednasmith.com. The 2009 Tolkien Calendar featuring Ted’s paintings of landscapes of the First Age of Middle-earth is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.com and other booksellers.

References

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, editor. Ted Nasmith, illustrator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Randy Hoyt: Why did you think The Lord of the Rings has been so popular?

Verlyn Flieger: I think it’s been so popular because it is an extraordinarily good book: a remarkable achievement in terms of fantasy. I wouldn’t call it unique because I don’t think many things are unique; but I think it is almost sui generis in its complexity, in its craftmanship, and in the power of the story. I just think it’s a really good book.

RH: When did you first encounter the works of Tolkien? What impact did they have on you?

VF: I first read The Lord of the Rings in the winter of 1956/1957. It was a very new book at that time. Not very many people had read it. One of my co-workers at the time was from England, and her brother had sent her the first English edition. We all passed it around and read it. Even then, I recognized that Tolkien was drawing on a vast body of mythological material: there was Beowulfian material, Arthurian material, Celtic material — all of which he had reconfigured into his own secondary world.

RH: And the published Silmarillion?

VF: I first read that in 1977, when it came out. I guess we were all sort of waiting for it to appear.

RH: You now teach courses in Tolkien at the University of Maryland. Did you play a role in getting these courses into the curriculum there?

VF: Single-handed.

RH: Why would you say that Tolkien deserves courses in the curriculum alongside such greats as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton?

VF: Why not? They were writing about the human condition, as they saw it in their own time. Certainly Chaucer and Shakespeare were writing about the human condition, though I’m not sure Milton was. Tolkien is writing about the same thing.

RH: What do you cover in these courses?

VF: I teach Tolkien in a number of different ways. I teach an Honors Seminar in Tolkien as “Author of Century” (to borrow from the title of Tom Shippey’s book on Tolkien). There we cover the two big essays, “On Fairy-stories” and “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and then we read, right the way through, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings — more or less in order of the chronology of Tolkien’s secondary world — in order to get an overview of Tolkien’s whole corpus of major fiction, to get some notion of the continuity and the discontinuities among them.

I started out, however, back when I myself was in graduate school, teaching a course in fantasy, which was really just an excuse to get The Lord of the Rings into the curriculum. I very soon realized that it overbalanced the course, that it was too big for everything else. Another faculty member and I pulled out Tolkien and introduced another course called “Tolkien, Myth, and Medieval Tradition,” which consisted of the Beowulf essay, Beowulf, some aspects of the Arthurian story, and then The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. With some modifications, I’ve been teaching that course ever since.

This fall, I’m teaching what I think is going to be a very exciting course called “Tolkien On War.” Our whole campus has devoted the fall semester to courses on war, new courses on war or existing courses adapted to war. I thought that to cover Tolkien, an author in whom you have a secondary mythology, a children’s book, and a fantasy that all focus on war, would be an interesting angle from which to look at it.

RH: Do you find that students taking your courses expect it to be easy because it is about a “fantasy” book and not about “real literature”?

VF: Not any more. They did to start with, yes, but they don’t now.

RH: I guess word gets around.

VF: I think so, yes.

RH: A lot of professional academics, critics, and journalists have been surprised by the popularity of The Lord of the Rings.

VF: I think most of those who are surprised — or who express surprise — either haven’t read it or find it not to be to their taste. If it’s not to their taste, that’s fine: then they shouldn’t read it.

RH: Some go even further, showing disdain towards Tolkien and horror at its success. What do you think drives that disdain?

VF: Snobbery.

RH: Did you encounter any of this disdain or snobbery as you were working to get Tolkien into the curriculum?

VF: Oh yeah, I still do. I got teased horribly when the movies came out. I was known for some time as “the fantasy lady.” My colleagues — not all of them but many of them — do not take the material I teach seriously. And that’s OK. My students do, and it’s my students that I’m really concerned about.

RH: You said that in your Tolkien as “Author of the Century” seminar you cover two of Tolkien’s essays, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-stories.” Why would you say these two essays are important? What impact did they have on myth scholarship and fantasy literature?

VF: The essay “Beowulf: Monsters and the Critics” was originally a lecture given to the British Academy on Beowulf. It changed the direction of Beowulf scholarship. Up until that time, scholars had acknowledged the poem’s importance, but had only studied it for philology, for social customs, for all kinds of things — never as a work of art. Tolkien said, “Hey guys. This is a poem. Why don’t we look at it as if it were a poem and see what we can get out of it in terms of its art?” That really did open up a whole new avenue in the way of looking at the poem. There are Beowulf scholars who disagree with him, but since that lecture nobody has been able to ignore what he said. You go to the library and look at any anthology of Beowulf criticism, and Tolkien’s essay will be there.

The essay “On Fairy-stories” also was originally given as a lecture, this one as the Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This essay is not as well-known in general scholarly circles, but I think it is Tolkien’s most important essay. It reveals more about his art and his own feelings about his art than any other essay. It looks at philology, it looks at where mythology comes from and its importance, it looks at fantasy and fairy story. He really pulls together a lot of strands.

RH: How does this essay about his art relate chronologically to his own works of fiction?

VF: He had been working on “The Silmarillion” since 1917, when he came back from World War I. Sometime in the early 1930s, he began work on The Hobbit, which started as a story for his children and then turned into something a little more formal. That was published in September 1937 and was a great success. The publisher said, “People are going to want more. Can you write a sequel?” After several false starts, he did begin a sequel which was very clearly imitative of The Hobbit in its tone. As early as December 1937 he was thinking about what he called “the new hobbit” but which became over time The Lord of the Rings. So he started in let’s say 1938/1939 and he finished it in ten or eleven years, and then he had trouble getting it published. In the meantime, in a sense à propos his publication of The Hobbit, he was giving the Andrew Lang lecture in March 1939. He began to codify a lot of what he had been working toward instinctively in The Hobbit and realized that he had made some mistakes in it: there were lapses in tone, places where it didn’t hang together. His thoughts on these mistakes found their way into the lecture, particularly in the section on fantasy, and in turn affected The Lord of the Rings. So the chronology goes The Hobbit, “On Fairy-stories,” and then The Lord of the Rings.

RH: You have edited a new edition of the “On Fairy-stories” essay that came out this summer.

VF: Yes, with Doug Anderson. The book is called Tolkien On Fairy-stories.

RH: What is in this new edition, beyond just the essay itself?

VF: A huge amount of previously unpublished material. Doug and I were given access to all the manuscripts pertaining to “On Fairy-stories” and to all of the draft materials. It was first the lecture, then it was greatly expanded and turned into a published essay, and then Tolkien further edited and tweaked the published essay. Doug and I were able to trace the way that certain ideas began, developed, grew, moved into this or that category. You can see the growth of his thought. It’s a fascinating thing to read.

RH: What would you say has been Tolkien’s impact on fantasy literature as a whole?

VF: Huge. Enormous. And not altogether positive. He casts a very long shadow. It’s very difficult to get out from under Tolkien. I published Pig Tale in 2002, a fantasy novel that I had been working on for quite some time. It was a struggle to get away from Tolkien and to write something that I thought could really be just my own. It was hard to do. I’d be typing along, and I’d think, “Uh-oh. I know where that comes from!” And then I had to back up. Most of the fantasy that has come after The Lord of the Rings has either imitated it or reacted strongly against — which is also in a sense a form of imitation.

You can learn more about Verlyn’s work by visiting her web site, mythus.com. The book Tolkien On Fairy-stories that she edited with Douglas A. Anderson is available from HarperCollins at Amazon.co.uk and other booksellers. Mythlore 103/104, the current issue of the scholarly journal of the Mythopoeic Society, contains a review of this book; this review is available online at the society’s web site.

References

• Flieger, Verlyn and Douglas A. Anderson. Tolkien On Fairy-stories. HarperCollins: 2008.

Randy Hoyt: Tell us about the approach you take to Harry Potter on The Hog’s Head web site and podcast.

Travis Prinzi: Let me step back and mention first James Thomas, a thirty-year literature scholar at Pepperdine University. He argues that the Harry Potter series is better literature than both The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. Now that’s a big statement, a huge statement. I reference that to say that there are people who take literature seriously taking Harry Potter seriously.

At the web site, we’re taking the series seriously as literature. We try to look at it from as many different perspectives as possible. We have a few different contributors: Johnny does a tremendous job looking at the Christian elements in Harry Potter, Dave comes at it as a literature scholar who has a good handle on postmodernism, Matthew nicely blends a serious approach to the series with related pop culture issues, and I bring my theological and literary training to it. My wife has appeared on a podcast, talking about it from a psychological point of view. And the commenters bring a lot of great perspectives as well. We’re trying to open up conversation about the series in as many realms as possible.

RH: Not everyone will be familiar with looking at Harry Potter in this way, thinking instead that it’s just a fun adventure story with no purpose but a brief mindless escape. What are some of the similarities Harry Potter has with great literature? What are some of the great mythic themes it explores?

TP: In an interview, J.K. Rowling made the statement that J.R.R. Tolkien — someone you definitely want to discuss when talking about myth and fantasy — said all the most important stories are about death (source: Spanish original; automated English translation). The most likely candidate for what she was quoting is from a letter in which Tolkien wrote:

[The Lord of the Rings] is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going: it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man. (Letter #203)

That’s one of the most universal human themes right there. The earliest stories explore the theme of death. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving story there is, is about death. Death and the human desire to transcend death is fundamental to all mythology.

Regarding whether or not it is escapist, I would mention what Tolkien describes a “real escape” as leaving something that is less permanent to go into a fairy tale to learn about things that are more permanent (“On Fairy-Stories” 69-70).

RH: You mention fairy tales, which you discuss quite extensively in your forthcoming book, Harry Potter & Imagination. What more can you tell us about the book?

TP: It begins with a defense of the fairy tale. The first two chapters of my book deal with what a fairy tale is and how it works. Why does it matter? What does it provide for the reader? We’re not just a bunch of fringe kook people who are overly obsessed with wizards. There is a reason that people love these stories.

From there I go to one of Rowling’s main themes: fear. The third chapter of my book is all about fear, which has a lot to do with death. Rowling gets really frustrated with people who don’t want kids to experience and resolve fear in a novel, a controlled environment. She writes scary moments into her books and a lot of people say, “Too scary for children,” but she’s looking to give children an opportunity to see their fears on the page and work through them along with Harry.

One of the biggest conflicts I think in the individual characters in the whole story is what do you do with fear. Let’s not pretend it’s not there and let’s not say that it is something that we shouldn’t feel. What do you do with it? You’ve got Voldemort, who is afraid of death and runs from it. That leads to evil and to dehumanization. I think she defines evil as dehumanization in the series, very much in the way that C.S. Lewis did in his Chronicles of Narnia. The talking beasts could end up losing their ability to talk — just as George MacDonald wrote in The Princess and Curdie where Curdie was given the magical ability to see whether or not a person was becoming more and more a beast. Rowling is playing with that same idea with Voldemort. The right response to fear is courage and self-sacrificial love. Those are the next two chapters in my book: courage and self-sacrificial love.

RH: These stories are officially classified as children’s literature. What would you say to someone who doesn’t have time for “children’s literature”?

TP: The categorization is unfortunate. The series has been popular among both children and adults. A recent poll has shown that J.K. Rowling has already become one of the authors best loved by British adults (source). Tolkien opened up his essay “On Fairy-Stories” by describing himself as a wanderer filled with wonder in the land of fairy (27). I think that we are all in a rush to grow up into these enlightened rational beings and we lose our wonder.  Even if we only get that far — as far as being filled with wonder — that’s worth doing. G.K. Chesterton says that the fairy tale teaches us that the world is wild (“Ethics of Elfland”), something most of us do not realize on a daily basis. Most of us spend our days in a mundane reality and never experience any wonder in them. The fairy tale brings us to that place of wonder.

RH: In what ways do you think that reading and meditating on the Harry Potter stories as adults can improve our lives or push us to fulfill our human potential?

TP: Rowling uses an alchemical framework as the basis for her story. Alchemy is something that has been incredibly misunderstood: it wasn’t fake chemistry, it wasn’t pseudo-science. It was a spiritual experience, it was a different point of view. What happens externally, outside the body, has some sort of relationship to what’s happening internally and vice versa. The alchemical process, the purification of the base, happens in the metals and also spiritually within the person. She’s not the only one to make alchemy the basis of a story: Shakespeare did it, C.S. Lewis did it in the Ransom trilogy, a lot of great writers do this. The idea is that we are transformed along with Harry as we experience his figurative and spiritual alchemical process. We learn to go through the dark periods of life, like Order of the Phoenix, then we learn about the purification stage, and then we learn how to become the hero. We’re not just watching Harry have his adventure: the adventure of getting through the story is supposed to transform the reader. I’d recommend that anyone who’s interested in this check out John Granger’s work in Unlocking Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Lectures.

RH: Do children pick up on these deeper themes, or are these themes too complicated for them?

TP: I really think they pick up on these things and learn them. We have a problem in the United States of underestimating children and their capacity for understanding. You see children loving Harry Potter, immersed in it: the adults scoffing at these children could learn a lot from them.

Travis mentioned G.K. Chesterton in this interview, and he will be sharing in an article for the next issue more on what G.K. Chesterton wrote about what fairy tales are and why they are important to us.

References

• “Interview with J.K. Rowling.” El País. 08 February 2008. (Full text available online: Spanish original; automated English translation.)
• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien On Fairy-Stories. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. HarperCollins: 2008.
• “Enid Blyton beats Roald Dahl and JK Rowling to be voted Britain’s best-loved author.” Telegraph. 19 August 2008. (link)
• Chesterton, G.K. “The Ethics of Elfland.” Orthodoxy. 1908.

Image from Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows cover