Julia Saunders 7/15/23 Julia Saunders 7/15/23

Top Ten Fantasy Royals

In this week where Oxford (along with the rest of the UK and the Commonwealth) celebrates the extraordinary long reign of Elizabeth II, I thought it would be fun to pick out the top ten royals to appear in fantasy. Now I should start with a caveat: I’m not going to include fairy stories as we would be awash in Prince Charmings and Wicked Queens. Instead I’m going to think of the perennials who feature outside fairyland. Let’s go in reverse order:

10

Coming in at 10 is the king who rocked our world most recently - and changed perceptions in Hollywood as to who should star in fantasy films. I’m talking about T’Challa, of course, aka the Black Panther. The character had existed in the Marvel comic series since 1966, dreamt up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but didn’t really hit worldwide fame until the 2018 film starring the much-missed Chadwick Boseman. I admit I wasn’t a huge fan of the plot as it seemed a little too close to Lion King and Hamlet in structure, but the real pleasure and originality rested in other aspects of the film. I loved the evocation of an independent African kingdom - Wakanda - with some seriously kick-ass women and an amazing design. Boseman was gentle and brave - great qualities for a king - though I also have a huge soft spot for Shuri (Letitia Wright) his genius younger sister, allowed on this list as she is a princess of Wakanda. However, most of all I (and the millions who went to see it) adored the fact that finally a film dominated by an excellent black cast had blasted its way to the top of the box office and changed society as a result. That’s the power of fantasy right there: allowing us to imagine the world in new ways!

9

Royalty can also be found in outer space. At 9 on the list is Duke Leto Atreides. I did debate with my husband if he was allowed in but we decided that this was equivalent of a royal title as he clearly rules planets as well as his House. After all, the British royal princes are dukes so there is a precedent of royal duchies. He appeared first in Frank Herbert’s Dune series and also on screen in adaptations of the story. Oscar Isaac is the most recent actor to take on the role in 2021. He is a caring family man, tries to be a good and just leader and ultimately sacrifices all to protect those he loves. He is also a tragic figure, in the mould of the Ancient Greek heroes, as signalled by his name and House iconography. He is a modern Priam, father and King of Troy, so we will let him stand for all the heroes of that Greek tradition that could have also been on this list.

8

Moving back to the more familiar royal title of princess, I am staying in space. My first most remarkable cinema experience was seeing Star Wars in 1977 - now called Star Wars IV - A New Hope. It might be hard for those born into a digital age to imagine the experience of seeing these massive starships sailing overhead and onto the screen. Don’t tell me they were little models and clever lighting. For me, they were the first time that I’d seen live action manage to transport the audience somewhere else and believe it real for the duration of the film. The story telling was excellent in so many ways, with good use of humour to undercut getting too self-important. Here we come to Number 8 - Princess Leia. From the original posters, you would think that she would be the sexy damsel in the tower to be saved by the brave Prince Skywalker. Yet what does she do when she first meets her rescuers? She tells them that they are short and complains about the lack of planning in the rescue. From the outset she is a political mover and shaker of the trio, knowing the politics that Luke doesn't understand and Han Solo despises. She is the serious adult leader, not a pretty piece of arm candy - though it was a dip in the series when she was used just like that as what looks like a sex slave to Jabba the Hutt in the third film. Ok, teenage boys might have enjoyed the fantasy, but to us teen girls it was a let down at the time. At least she gets to strangle the bad guy and go back to her white robes. RIP Carrie Fisher - you were a trailblazer!

7

From princesses I'm turning to princes. Please allow room on this list for the baddest bad guy of them all. No, not Voldemort or Sauron, but Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness. I'm talking here about his fictional appearances as opposed to religious. You could argue that he appears first in Marlowe’s Faust (1604), but there he is the tempter Mephistopheles, rather than the scene-stealing main character. The most famous incarnation of this idea is Milton’s Satan from back in 1667. He is the archetype or brooding antihero:

Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

The antiheroes of Marvel and DC, even a hero like Batman, have taken a page out of this book. His infernal energy threatens to destabilise the conventional religious messages of Paradise Lost, tempting us to root for the bad guy just a little. That's why William Blake in the early 19th century said:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

Others have borrowed this energy for their own fallen angels. He glimmers in Frankenstein's creature, the gentleman vampires of Bram Stoker and successors, even Darth Vader as Anakin Skywalker owes much to the fallen angel story arc. Most recently he's appeared in a more comedic take on the concept such as in Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens and the TV series Lucifer (2016 to 2021) starring Tom Ellis, which is based on the DC comic character.

6

Coming in at Number 6 is a royal from another tradition: Japan. Another of the world’s oldest systems of monarchy, it is not surprising to find princes and princesses cropping up in Japanese culture. I’ve picked on an unconventional royal for this one: Princess Mononoke, a film from the animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli and made in 1997. San is not conventional lady: she was raised by wolves and represents the forest fighting back. She is a warrior and force to be reckoned with. Her journey is that of a hater of humankind to finding love for one among them, the Prince Ashitaka. They eventually fight together to break a curse and bring healing to their communities. She is even less conventional than Mulan, having more in spirit to do with Mowgli (the original Jungle Book version, not the Disney one) able to unleash the forces of the wild. It is as well to remember that not all fantasy royals live in castles!

5

It would not be fair to let this list be dominated by movie versions of royals so I thought I would bring in a Dutch classic by Paul Biegel, The King of the Copper Mountain (1964). It is a lovely children’s storybook with connected tales told by different animal characters who are trying to keep the eponymous king alive while his doctor goes in search of a cure for his heart condition. Why is it worthy of a place on the list? The King offers a different kind of leadership: loving, patient, welcoming to creatures as diverse as bees and a dragon. It really is extremely charming and highly recommended if you are looking for a non-militaristic king to share with your children! It reminds me also of the little gem of an animation The King’s Beard (2002) written by Tony Collingwood, where - as the title suggest - the monarch’s facial hair is the problem for the quester to solve! Unconventional and fun, it had my children singing the title song for years. Let’s remember that not all fantasy kings and queens have to be sword-fighting heroes; there are other kinds of courage and bravery.

4

We are remaining in unconventional territory for our fourth pick: The Princess Bride, S Morgenstern’s (or William Goldman’s!) 1973 novel, as well as the film 1987 adapted by William Goldman. I suspect many of us can quote lines from this cult film but what about the princess herself? Buttercup is the heart of the story and not at all royal. She is only a Princess Bride because Prince Humperdinck wants to marry her and she only agrees because she believes her true love is dead. In some ways she is the archetypal princess - beautiful and needs a lot of saving - but that is the point. The story takes the archetypes and then has ridiculous fun with them, spoofing the thing it loves which is a fairytale romance. And, of course, the story itself is a story within a story. The reading of it is hilarious as the commentator realises he has remembered only the good parts and left out all the commentary and politics. So Buttercup doesn’t become a royal - she rides off into the sunset with Westley (we hope - even here the happy ending is undercut), but she is a wonderful fantasy almost-princess!

3

Now we arrive at the top three. The list would be instantly rejected if it did not find a place for King Arthur, the most enduring of fantasy kings. From the early medieval versions of this mythic king, via Malory, the Victorians such as Tennyson, to T H White’s Once and Future King, and even the bromance version in the BBC Merlin, Arthur keeps coming back. If you want a discussion of the Arthur legend, do listen to Mythmakers Season 2 May 30th where Dr Gabriel Shenck and I discuss the literary appearances of Arthur. https://oxfordcentreforfantasy.org/mythmakers Do you have a favourite? Arthur himself is usually the royal hub around which other stories revolve, but I did enjoy his appearance in Merlin because you saw the friendship grow with the young Merlin, full of banter and adventure. The young Arthur (Wart in TH White) is also very relatable, taking his training from an eccentric wizard who is growing backwards like Benjamin Button. This is no schoolroom experience but being transformed into birds and fish to understand the world around him. He represents an ideal of chivalry in a time that never really existed but is alive and well in fantasy worlds. Fantasy monarchs wouldn’t be the same without him!

2

I debated with myself about first and second place and decided in the end to rank them by what I once thought was the epitome of kingship and what I now think might be best. As a child I loved the idea of going into a world where (of course) I would be a king or a queen. Enter Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie. Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always a King or Queen of Narnia! They are given their titles by the son of the Emperor over the Seas, Aslan, so he is the supreme king in CS Lewis’ world. And what a king he is! A mane and fur to stroke, a roar that echoes across the land, a breath that can undo evil spells. To be with him is ‘like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten’ according to Lucy. Now I might wonder why one of the very competent beasts couldn’t have sat on the thrones at Cair Paravel, but the fantasy felt right to the eight-year-old who would play dressing-up princesses. I imagine Lewis was reflecting on the privilege we have as ‘sons of Adam and daughters of Eve’, made in God’s image, but still it is a powerful make-believe and one that is hard to beat. And like any good fantasy, it includes it own end. You come back through the wardrobe from your time as kings and queens to resume ordinary life, but you must keep the Narnian experience alive in your heart so you act with the values you learned there.

1

https://screenrant.com/reddit-best-lord-of-the-rings-characters/

Who gets to be Number 1? No surprises when the Oxford Centre for Fantasy is dedicated to Tolkien that we pick one of his kings and queens. He is not unblinkered about the corruption that monarchical power can bring - the Ringwraiths were once lords and kings - but he does give us one perfect king: Aragorn. He is the Renaissance ideal of a monarch: learned, cultured, able to fight, fair and just. I think, though, that for me he makes this spot because he has a sense of humour and doesn’t grow to big for his boots. He names his house Telcontar which means Strider in Quenya, the name by which he was known, somewhat slightingly, in the north. These qualities were well brought out by Viggo Mortensen in his portrayal of this hero king in Peter Jackson’s trilogy. Viggo made up his own tunes and sang them to Tolkien’s words in honour of the character - something those who have the extended edition will remember. But perhaps above all, Aragorn shows the quality of friendship, or fellowship. In the appendices we read that it is Merry and Pippin who lie beside him on his deathbed on little beds of their own. He remembered the little folk even to the end of his glorious days. Maybe that is the ultimate fantasy? That there would be such a perfect leader. Knowing real life characters are more likely to be flawed, I think we should probably stick with democracy and constitutional monarchies like Elizabeth II rather than hope to find Aragorns to rule us all!

Congratulations to Elizabeth II on 70 years of dutiful service.

Julia Saunders 3/2/22 Julia Saunders 3/2/22

Fellowship of the Read!

We are just underway with our LotR Readathon. Over the next 63 days different readers are stepping up to be Gandalf for the day. You can follow along on Facebook or Instagram and comment. If you don’t have a social media account, you can see the posts under our news tab. And if you missed a day, you can still go back and comment on earlier posts.

It is very fitting to have a story filled with courage and the heroism of small people at this grim time in world history. Tolkien’s wisdom shines out, particularly in Chapter Two tomorrow.

Prologue - Let us know if you skip this when you re-read, or do you love reading about the habits of hobbits?

Julia Saunders 10/22/21 Julia Saunders 10/22/21

Lion’s Share

Continuing our voyage through the works of one of the lesser known Inklings, we come to the intriguing novel The Place of the Lion, published by Charles Williams in 1931. The concept is arresting: Platonic ideals - the lion, the snake, the butterfly, all of whom represent different aspects of the original conceptions of fierceness or beauty and so on - they are breaking through a rift into our world. They pull into themselves the shadow forms in our world, or possess people so they can move unseen among us. It is partly a horror story, partly a derring-do mission to close the rift, the attempt led by Anthony Durrant. Overall I find it a fascinating experiment in making Greek philosophy the main driver of a plot. The image of the lion stalking through the English landscape, making less robust fellows go mad with terror, is extremely powerful, as is the arrival of the snake in a drawing room. Nagini is nothing to Plato’s snake.

Grevel Lindop, Charles Williams’ biographer, calls it a partially successful novel - and it is admittedly uneven. The female characters are poorly drawn (poor old Damaris the intellectual is rather punished for her absorption in research) and the characters don’t quite emerge from their spiritual shocker roles. Contemporaries, however, felt the power of the reading experience and even enjoyed the characters. T S Eliot wrote to Williams that ‘I am incapacitated from making any purely literary judgement of [Williams two novel]’ and found some scenes in Lion ‘marvellously successful’. We perhaps sense that he was aware of the faults but still found it a memorable and inspiring read. C S Lewis was another admirer, going as far as to say ‘it is to me one of the major literary events of my life’. He praises the layered effect of the fantasy, pleasing first as a pure story, then as philosophical and theological stimulus, then characters and finally ‘substantial edification’. This admiration led Lewis to invite Williams to the newly formed Inklings, to which the London-based writer came as an occasional participant, that was until the war when he was evacuated to Oxford and could attend more regularly.

What resonance has this work had within the fantasy genre? There has been a suggestion that the very powerful lion of this extraordinary work was an inspiration for C.S. Lewis’ Aslan. Lewis, in a letter towards the end of his life thought Aslan came from a different source: the Bible.

"Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He [Christ] would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) the lion is supposed to be the king of beasts; (b) Christ is called "The Lion of Judah" in the Bible; (c) I'd been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the work."

But as he also said earlier that The Place of the Lion was a major literary event for him, perhaps reading Williams’ novel fed into his dreams? The resemblance is only in the power, though, because Williams’ lion is very far from one who would sacrifice himself for Edmund or give rides to Lucy and Susan. He is FIERCE, he is of the essence of that Platonic concept. Williams is, thus, in many ways a successor to Lewis Carroll who used Wonderland to teach mathematical concepts and logic puzzles, more of a truer inheritor than either Oxford man Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.

What inspiration can this strange novel have for us now as creatives? Most fertile I think is the idea of taking a philosophical or theological idea and using it as the underpinning for a novel. Jostein Gardner touch on this in his 1991 novel Sophie’s World, though the aim here is to teach the history of fantasy through fiction. Sometimes it seems the same old tropes are recycled in fantasy - dark lords, beautiful elves, horrible goblins, avaricious dragons; one way of finding a really unique and original voice might be to start with a philosophic ‘what if?’ Williams chose Plato, but what about picking our favourite philosopher and running with one of the concepts? Pascal’s wager or Spinoza’s deterministic universe, or…insert your favourite idea here. It doesn’t have to be one you personally believe, just as long as it produces a good story.

Enjoy!

Julia Golding

Julia Saunders 8/26/21 Julia Saunders 8/26/21

War in Heaven

It is not surprising that Charles Williams, the most unusual of the Inklings, produced the most unusual novels of the group. While he has not attained the level of fame found by his friends, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, he is worth a read for any fantasy writer not only because of his connection with them, but in his own right as an extraordinary thinker.

I’m spending the summer reading his novels - and a strange journey it is too. Beginning with War in Heaven, his 1930 novel, published by Victor Gollancz in 1930 (before the other Inklings ventured into print as novelists), a voyage through his novels takes in many genres, all the time haunted by an awareness of a man who is not quite of this world, deep in the esoteric wisdom of a follower of secret societies and an idiosyncratic version of Christianity. This book though in many ways is his most straightforward so is a good place for a reader to start.

War in Heaven was written in London and the capital is one of the two centres for the novel, the other a rural parish in which the grail has come to rest, the spare chalice in the local church. This premise becomes the launch pad for a murder mystery that soon forgets the murder to concentrate on the fate of the relic. As a publisher himself, Williams had a shrewd idea of the market for popular speculative fiction, and this is the closest he was to come to writing a hit in a recognisable genre. Grevel Lindop, Williams’ biographer, characterises it as ‘a good tale, gripping at once with an unforgettable opening sentence’. Now of course you’ll want to know what that sentence is so here it is!

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no one in the room but the corpse.

You could teach a seminar on that sentence alone - the contrast between the urgent noise and the stillness, the impact of the punch in the sentence as you reach the final word. It is a showy opening - shock and awe - but it suits this action-packed metaphysical thriller which speeds on from there like a steam train passing through the local stations to reach its terminus. It is with reason that I’ve seen him compared to Dan Brown, though I found myself thinking of Indiana Jones and John Buchan.

And what about the storyline? The grail (or Graal for Williams) has been located in a country parish by the monstrous antiquarian Sir Giles Tumulty, a villain splendid in his unpleasantness. The bad guys are after it, the good are trying to protect it. So far so simple. What makes this an extraordinary read is the metaphysical debates that go alongside this dichotomy of good and evil (the Miltonic title is no accident). Each character responds to the grail in a way that reveals their spiritual status. The Archdeacon, unknowingly the custodian of this cup, is less enamoured of the artefact than anyone else in the book. For him, it is the meaning, the worship, the truth behind it that is important, not the grail itself. He sums it up in the saying that you can find scattered across Williams’ work: ‘Neither is this Thou….Yet this also is Thou.’ He maintains this attitude despite the power wielded by those who believe in the grail as a vessel that can be put to evil. This is no sham but as in Indiana Jones a religious artefact has true power. Hollywood made the consequences fall on the bad but in this novel one of our heroes is turned to dust as a result of evil spells - though I will not spoil the plot by revealing who that is!

Williams’ stance that it is what you put into the vessel that matters is also found in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle - his creation and revelation stories. Narnia for Uncle Andrew is a nightmare, for the children and the good hearted cabby, a paradise. Jadis, present at the song of creation, adds her discordant note and will rule temporarily to turn it into the land of perpetual winter. Narnia is what each makes of it. Once through the stable door in The Last Battle, the Dwarfs can’t see the feast before them, and believe themselves to still be in the stable. We make our own heaven and hell, just as in Williams’ novel we make our own grail, an instrument for good or evil. And isn’t this kind of evil much more fascinating because it is inside us all?

The parallels to Tolkien are also there, with the grail acting like the Ring, consuming some, warping others, resisted by the few. In fact, the Archdeacon does what even Frodo can’t quite manage at the end: he is content to let the grail go. It is not an icon he has to worship or hold onto as his ally the Duke of North Ridings would like to do; he sees himself as a temporary holder who should give it up when a greater cause, such as saving a life, comes along. It is a daring choice for a writer to have one of your questers saying that actually the thing they are after is no so very special. The Archdeacon has a whiff of Tom Bombadil about him in this respect!

What did I carry away from this fantasy? My conclusion was that temptation is a rich theme to explore as the character’s relationship to power lifts the lid on what lies at the core of their being. Tolkien does this well with the Gondorian trio Boromir, Denethor, and Faramir: the good man tempted, the cynical man crumbling, the true heart able to refuse the temptation. The grail has this role in the Arthurian cycle. Faramir in this reading is the Galahad, Boromir the Lancelot, and Denethor the failing older generation of knights who don’t hold true to the principles of the Round Table. Likewise in War in Heaven the knights protecting the grail - a churchman, a lord, and a publisher - each show their mettle in different ways.

Another valuable insight was the nature of battle. The biggest fight here happens not in a punch-up but in a prayer battle as the Archdeacon and his allies hold into the grail as the evil ones try to enchant it out of their hands. I was reminded of the scene Tolkien was to write a decade or so later of Aragorn wresting the palantir to his will and away from Sauron. As in The Lord of the Rings, the biggest struggles are in the mind and the battlefields are in some ways sideshows to the real fight as good and evil confront each other in the long war of attrition.

The book has many weaknesses. For example, Williams has little space for women in this novel, the role of the chief female character (Barbara) is to run mad. His later novels have a wider range of female characters (though not without problems) which we’ll come to later. But this masculine adventure of Catholic dukes, Anglican priests, bookish publishers is of its time where the male and female worlds were more rigidly conceived. There is also an oddness in the way people talk and interact, and an unevenness in the writing where he spins off into ideas, usually through debates between his heroes, without taking this audience with him. However, it will remain with me long after many other novels fade into each other as it is just so different. I read to meet other minds in their books; Charles Williams is certainly one of the most fascinating I’ve met yet.

Julia Saunders 8/2/21 Julia Saunders 8/2/21

The Arthurian Inkling

One of the exciting aspects of setting up the Oxford Centre for Fantasy is finding out more about Tolkien’s fellow Inklings - that’s in addition to the already famous C.S. Lewis. Fans of the Inklings have always been aware of the other men who gathered for the meetings, thanks to the biographies of the group, but these less famous writers have inevitably been overshadowed by the literary lions. When looked at in their own right, they are very interesting big cats too.

And if you want to find out more, do consider coming to our first in person course in Oxford, Easter with the Inklings. You can find the details here.

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64801886

First on the list is Charles Williams, poet, novelist and theologian - a peculiar yet fascinating man whose posthumous reputation was not well handled so he disappeared from view rather quickly. Thanks to Greville Lindop’s comprehensive biography, Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, he is revealed as a member of even more esoteric groups than the Inklings, which fed his fantasy imagination as much if not more than his Inkling fellowships. He was interested in the magic and the occult and belonged to the secret society of the Rosicrusians (or Rosy Cross) in London. Members took part in ceremonies which had strict levels of seniority as they were initiated into higher levels of the mystery, completely unlike the ad hoc gatherings of the Inklings, open to friends to drop by and read what they wish.

If you are looking to place Williams in a poetic tradition, he follows in the footsteps of the nineteenth century poets of the Arthurian cycle, such as Tennyson and William Morris, but his imagery holds the complex layers of reference and meaning that you find in his poetic contemporaries, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound. William Blake and his prophetic books also comes to mind with their complexity and idiosyncratic use of familiar symbols and Biblical characters.

We’ll look at his novels in another post but what to read of his poetry? His most enduring collections are his Arthurian cycle Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. There is a recent edition (2016) in the Inklings Heritage Series with an introduction by Sørina Higgins. First thing to notice is these aren’t the traditional retellings of the stories of the Round Table as Tolkien or Lewis might have done. For Williams, the Arthurian cycle is mapped onto his theological history of the Church with characters such as the Pope in Byzantium joining the more familiar figures in an Arthurian tale. It is easier to understand why this amalgam is created if you’ve first read The Descent of the Dove, Williams’ account of the rise of Christianity, but perhaps it is misguided to try to make sense of it in this straight-forward way. It’s not really about mapping onto theological history; it is more a description of a spiritual quest and the vital importance of love, using the Arthurian story as the prism through which this light is shone. His theology includes sexual love as being one of the ways you experience divine love so there is a vital place in his world for female characters. One way of describing the experience of reading his poetry is like standing in a Rosicrucian ceremony and hearing a liturgy you don’t quite understand but feel is filled with meaning if you were just initiated in a higher level. Higgins suggests it takes three readings to get below the surface beauties and, indeed, these are more difficult poems than anything you’ll find in The Lord of the Rings. You’ll be puzzled and perplexed, as well as on occasion enchanted.

Looking at these poems from the perspective of fantasy creatives, what can we learn? The practice of mythopoeia - myth making - is given a third expression here after Middle-earth and Narnia. Tolkien imagined himself writing a prehistory of Britain; Williams also takes on the Matter of Britain but uses the existing materials of Arthur for his own reimagining. It’s as though an Old Testament prophet in the shape of Taliessin the bard has wandered into an Arthurian world and begun to sing of all the traditional story elements of Grail, Camelot, Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere and Merlin into new forms and new meanings.

For fantasy world builders, his world takes the approach of mapping places onto the human body. Logres, Arthur’s Britain, is the head. This is an idea has historical precedents. Renaissance cities, such as Zamość in Poland, were designed to correspond to the human body, the head being the leadership in the city council, the belly being the market and so on. Symbolical architecture or geography is a fertile place for the imagination to play.

And finally, a note on the imagery. There are flashes of brilliance, such as the description in ‘The Departure of Dindrane’ of the riders: ‘two centaur shapes, cloaked to the haunches;/everywhere centaurs round her on the road’ - catching unforgettably the effect of long cloaks draped on the mounts’ backs. Favourite of all is this recurring image of the sky which uses a post-Copernican scientific explanation of why we see stars but yet makes it feel appropriate to the Medieval world:

Done was the day; the antipodean sun
cast earth’s coned shadow into space;
it exposed the summer stars’.

Julia Saunders 7/30/21 Julia Saunders 7/30/21

Full steam ahead to Oxford - the friendliest city

It’s official. Thomas and friends (another fantasy great!) has declared Oxford to be the friendliest UK city after a poll of 3000 people to mark International Friendship Day today. Those of us who live here would agree. In a very pleasing ceremony, the city mayor was joined by Sir Topham Hatt to unveil a sign twinning Oxford with Thomas the Tank engine’s home of the Island of Sodor. This sounds like an episode of our favourite children’s programme about steam trains but it actually took place this morning.

If you are planning to come and visit us, the good news is that the rail links to Oxford are less prone to derailments, sulky trains, and incidents with flocks of animals than Thomas’ home.

So if the legacy of Oxford as home of so many fantasy writers, such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, and Philip Pullman, hadn’t already persuaded you, this has to be the final piece of track to bring you here, surely?

You can read more about this fun summer story here.

And while we are thinking about steam trains, aren’t they a great way to get into a fantasy story? From Prince Caspian to Harry Potter, from The Polar Express to The Railway Children, they have been casting a spell over us for many years. We grew up with the charming animation Ivor the Engine who helped keep baby dragons warm in his stove. Perhaps it is the clouds of steam and the personality of the engine that is conducive to fantasy? Or the sense that it is really the closest thing to a mechanical dragon? What do you think?

Julia Saunders 7/6/21 Julia Saunders 7/6/21

Novel-in-a-Year?

Last night saw the first meeting of the eleven would-be novelists and their tutors as we set out on our twelve month adventure together. We spent some time in advance deciding who was whom in the company. I was voted Gandalf despite my lack of beard (though I do have a similar hat somewhere), MG Harris (a fellow tutor) Bilbo, a new member nabbed Thorin on the grounds he had the sword, and that left a lot of baggsie-ing over Fili and Kili (I wonder why?).

The serious but fun part involved of this first session was working out what kind of writer we all are. I devised a quiz to winkle out the truth which involved such habits as the way you make your shopping list, which hobbit you thought you were most like, or what mental landscape you have, ranging from the Secret Garden to Mr Darcy’s Pemberley. If you want to write a novel in a year (whilst also doing the day job) my advice is to go with the grain of your nature. A super-meticulous planner will find it difficult to suddenly cast off the habits of a lifetime and become spontaneous; and it’s no good giving a free spirit a massive planning task before they start writing.

But we also discussed how you could be, say, spontaneous in everyday life, but a planner for your writing. It is working out who you really are that puts you on the right path.

This little band has now set off. Most of them (9 of the students) came to it through the Online Fantasy Course and are using it as a way to put what they learned there into a complete novel. If you’ve always wanted to do this yourself, or know someone who would love this, why not sign up for the next departure. The online fantasy course starts in October (places are already going), and the next novel-in-a-year in January 2022.

Julia Saunders 6/10/21 Julia Saunders 6/10/21

Travelling in Narnia

The very first guest on our online course was the writer, Katherine Langrish. She had been invited to take us on a tour of fairyland with her knowledge of fairy and folk tales, but it turned out she was about to publish a book on Narnia, to which she is also an expert guide. In From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with My Nine Year-Old Self, she goes back to the series that ignited her storytelling fire and explores how it struck her then, and now what she thinks of it in her maturity.

As with all the books of the Inklings, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien included, they are period pieces from the mid-20th century, reflecting attitudes that were mainstream in their day in a still predominantly Christian culture, though of course Tolkien was from a Roman Catholic background rather than the established Anglican church which put him in a minority group in England. Tolkien’s myth-making has fared better in modern criticism because he encoded his views in a way that allowed a multiplicity of interpretations that has largely kept pace with the times. Ironically, it was Lewis himself who summed up this technique well in a letter to Father Peter Milward:

My view wd be that a good myth (i.e. a story out of which ever varying meanings grow for different readers and in different ages) is a higher thing than allegory (into which one meaning has been put). Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: into a myth he puts what he does not yet know and cd not come to know in any other way. (22 September 1956)

Lewis chose to show his hand in the Narnia series, linking Aslan’s story to the death and resurrection of Jesus, steering Narnia towards allegory, though perhaps a better description is a ‘reimagining’ of the central Christian belief for a world of talking animals. This has drawn fire from those like Philip Pullman who find this ‘a colossal impertinence’, which is an odd phrase to choose as Aslan’s continued popularity in the Christian world suggests no offence taken by those who take the crucifixion most seriously. But Lewis has had plenty of defenders from a Christian background so what makes Katherine’s book so valuable is she is finding great value in the series from the position of someone who has slowly given up believing in God - a journey that will be familiar to many people who might’ve started life in a church-going family but found they didn’t carry the beliefs into their adult life. As she movingly says, ‘I stand with Puddleglum, I’ll try to live as like a Narnia as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.’

What a refreshing attitude! Maybe we can agree that it diminishes the potential of literature to have to check writers against an approved checklist of currently acceptable beliefs, and not allow them to evolve to have the varying meanings to different readers, as Lewis argues in the quote. Narnia as Katherine describes it is not just for those who have a Christian faith; it doesn’t mean there is a secret agenda to convert if you as a librarian or teacher or parent suggest a child read it; in any case, as she writes, children let these kind of things pass over their heads and concentrate on the adventure. Having come to peace with this personal journey, Katherine is able to find so much to admire, appreciate, and yes, criticise in Narnia, but she is still able to travel there. She understands the spell it cast over her then and now.

That’s the controversial part of Lewis, but it gives the wrong impression of Katherine’s book to say it is spending all its time arguing this. The pleasure of reading it is to get back in touch with the child you were when you first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, those long afternoons imagining another world, the instinct to try every wardrobe and closet door just in case. Particularly impressive is her reading of The Horse and His Boy, the Narnia story that barely connects to our world so is often the least favourite. I cheered her description of stallionsplaining between Bree and Hwin. Lewis has been criticised for what now seem sexist remarks (and there’s the problem of poor old Susan) but Katherine also finds the balancing examples where he puts the female weight on the side of the scales.

There is a growing sub-genre of books about the experience of reading, for example, The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot (Rebecca Mead), The Child that Books Built (Francis Spufford), or the extraordinary Girl with Dove: A Life Built By Books (Sally Bayley) - all highly recommended. It is fascinating to watch people unpick these threads of what makes them and From Spare Oom is a sparkling addition to the set. If you’ve become suspicious of Narnia after reading the comments by its detractors, feeling you might not be welcome if you come from outside Lewis’ Christian culture, try this book, then go to the series. Hopefully, you too will be happy to be a Puddleglum in Lewis’ fictive world.

Julia Golding

Julia Saunders 5/26/21 Julia Saunders 5/26/21

An Expected Party!

Last night we celebrated the end of a really wonderful six weeks with our first cohort of students for the online fantasy course. We did this by hearing from them about their work and what they’ve been inspired to do over the time spent with us. I’m pleased to report that 100% enjoyed the course (elf or above), and over three-quarters rated it as ‘wizard!’ (other options, in descending pleasure were, elf, human, orc and troll!). Over the month and a half, a spirit of fellowship has bloomed, honouring the writer who brought us all together, and many are continuing to meet as modern Inklings in a special group in our online forum.

We had to do some work, of course, as we still had editing, advice on the industry, and the issue of how to pitch your material to cover. This however led to a hilarious game of ‘Guess the Logline’. Have a go at a couple and see if you get them:

In a dark and distant future, a bounty hunter tracks down and eliminates humanoid replicants, causing him to re-examine his own humanity.

Pretty easy to guess, no? That Breakout Room captured the point of a longline which is to encapsulate in one sentence the key feature of a piece. Much shorter than an elevator pitch, it goes to the heart and the best ones include a twist.

But what about this:

A burdened heir sets off to seek advice for managing his problematic, but precious, heirloom, and gathers an unlikely crew.

II requested Room 5 not to make it too obvious, but we got there. I’ll put the answers* at the bottom just in case you didn’t guess.

However, the heart of the evening was spent discussing with Jasmine Richards the serious issues facing publishing at the moment, particularly in the wake of the new awareness of a lack of diversity in storytelling. Our participants happened to come from a range of backgrounds, languages and cultures (much to be celebrated) but if you look at publishing as a whole, it is clear that diversity has only very recently been a concern. With Jasmine, we discussed how and if you tell another’s story, when this is a minority or oppressed one, at this point in history. We also looked at how to handle physical descriptions of characters to tilt away from a white bias. Some of the very practical advice is avoid food (coffee colours, chocolate) for skin tone and find a new way. Pick other features, such as hairstyle or another subtle signal without labouring the point that describes your character.

It’s been an honour to journey with these writers and tutors. Some students are already returning for the next level course, a Novel-in-a-Year, which starts in July. If you already have an idea for a novel and just need the guidance and motivation to write, why not check this out and join us? This end with an optional extension for an in-person week at Merton College (Tolkien’s old college) in August 2022.

If you want to be on the same six-week course as described above, it is returning in October. Details are found here. The same team of tutors are returning so all we need now is the next fellowship to form of writers eager to get inspiration from Oxford fantasy writers.

*Blade Runner/The Fellowship of the Ring

Julia Saunders 5/19/21 Julia Saunders 5/19/21

A Unique Start for Tolkien and Lewis

As we are approaching the end of our six-week course, we are thinking about how to come up with striking beginnings and endings. So it was timely that our special guest expert was Joseph Loconte, documentary maker and academic, author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and the Great War. Schoolboys in 1911 had no idea what lay just around the corner. We saw an exclusive extract of Joe’s documentary which reminded us of the poignancy of the schoolboy club Tolkien formed heading straight for the trenches. Few of his friends survived. This was the horrendous start to adult life for his generation that also formed the central drama of the film Tolkien (2019), which brought the influence of war on his fiction vividly to life with black riders mingled with war landscapes. Yet it was another film that I thought of: the Oscar-winning 1917, a fascinating film not only for its technique of making the experience a breathless continuous shot, but also brought home in another way the tragedy of the friendships that bloomed so briefly under impossible circumstances. There’s a lot a writer can learn from 1917 about surprising beginnings, endings and how to treat a familiar subject in a unique way.

With Joe, we discussed how Tolkien and Lewis both had a different take on heroism than their contemporaries writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Both were veterans of the trenches yet they managed to maintain their belief of the goodness of the individual facing the overwhelming odds of battle - faith in the struggle itself - whilst being highly critical of those who sought power. Joe reminded us that there is a lot still to find out about the influence of the Second World War in particular and its influence on the writing of The Lord of the Rings.

As creative writers, though, we were free to speculate so we discussed Frodo as a kind of shell-shocked soldier, and what difference it would have made to the book if it had been written during the Vietnam War. Endings in Tolkien aren’t ‘happy ever after to the end of his days’ - though that is what Bilbo would like to write. Characters return changed and struggle to fit back in, just as many war veterans found after 1918 and 1945. Perhaps that is one of the marks of great fantasy writing that the ending wears the scars of the journey the characters have been on.

Hopefully, the participants on this course are leaving changed but not scarred! We certainly have those who wish it could go on for longer - which I take as a positive sign. Friendships are beginning to spark and we hope to keep everyone in touch via our Mighty Networks site where we’ve been putting the course material and other writing prompts and inspirations. I’m learning as much as I’m tutoring!

The next online course kicks off on 5th October 2021 and enrolment is now open. If you want to find to more, email us via the contact form and we’ll send out the details.

Julia Saunders 5/12/21 Julia Saunders 5/12/21

Happy Inklings Day!

I do like it when serendipity means you book the world expert on the Inklings to speak to your writing group on the anniversary of the first meeting with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (11th May 1926) - so happy Inklings Day, everyone, for yesterday!

With this to live up to, in our fourth workshop, led by MG Harris and myself (Julia Golding), we looked at the tricky issue of how to get dialogue right. Literary dialogue is a compromise with real speech and often expected to do more than one job, including establishing character, developing plot, and evoking atmosphere. We confessed that experienced writers are just as in need of a reminder of the good ways to write dialogue and the importance of editing. As with Tolkien and his love of hobbit talk, we sometimes indulge our favourite characters to the detriment of our story.

There were three writing challenges to undertake but the most stimulating part of the evening was spending time with Professor Diana Pavlac Glyer, author of Bandersnatch, a book about C.S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings.

The Inklings met together twice a week for 17 years in Oxford, including the war years. One of the weekly meetings was a more chatty affair in a pub like the Eagle and Child, but the Thursday evenings, usually in C.S. Lewis’ rooms in Magdalen College, were for sharing their work in progress. How many of have wished we could be the fly on the wall to hear The Screwtape Letters or The Lord of the Rings being read aloud for the first time? Something clearly brought them together for the group to last that long. Friendship certainly, but it was not just a group of friends meeting for a drink. They sat and listened to each other - a sacrifice of time that must have mounted during their busy professional lives and extra war work. Out of this routine came two of the biggest fantasy worlds of all time (Narnia and Middle-earth), as well as the interesting contributions of other Inklings, such as Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. Even C.S. Lewis’s brother, Warnie, got the author bug and produced his own well-regarded histories of seventeenth century France.

There are many lessons to be drawn from that group for us today as we try to follow in their footsteps as fantasy writers. The breadth of what they discussed is impressive with more cross-fertilisation than anyone can trace. How, for example, did Charles Williams’ poetry about King Arthur and his scintillating images of ‘the region of the summer stars’ chime with Tolkien’s elves singing to their skies? They doubtless encouraged each other that it was fit and right to find consolation in a dark period in history in such things.

One thing I’ve drawn from the discussion yesterday is that writing dialogue is equally about the listener and not just the speaker. The actions that encourage or shut down speech are an important ingredient. Through decades of study, Diana has drawn many other lessons about the successes and the failures of the Inklings group and generously shared them with us. It was a shame we couldn’t all be sitting together in an Oxford college to discuss them together, but perhaps next year some of you will come to tread in the Inklings’ footsteps in person?

In 2022 we are organising three courses at Merton (Tolkien’s college) and Magdalen (Lewis’ college) to allow you to do just that, aimed at both those interested in the Inklings, as well as those who would like to spend a week on a creative course. Please see the events page for more details about venues and dates and register your interest via the contact form to be first in the booking queue.

If you’d like to join the next online course this autumn (six-weeks, once a week seminar plus individual tutorials), please register your interest on the contact form and we’ll add you to the list.

Julia Saunders 5/5/21 Julia Saunders 5/5/21

To plot or not to plot?

On the next stop of our online fantasy course, our tutors, MG Harris and Rowena Roberts, took us through the essentials to think about when plotting a novel and dreaming up characters. Are you a plotter or a pantser? (A pantser is someone who goes by the seat of the pants). Rowena took us on some very helpful journeys, guiding us to find out what are the questions to ask when you sit down with one of your characters? I found most revealing about myself her exercise on what do the objects in your room reveal about your and how can you apply that to characters? I’m still pondering quite what my self-designed dragon cushion means to me—a project that was started fifteen years ago and finished in the first lockdown.

There was lots more on the technical side, ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics, on to the Hero's Journey, Save the Cat and Robert McKee's Story and more recent subversions and criticisms of these same structures. Even though I’m an experienced writer in a number of formats, I found the summary MG gave us extremely helpful. I’m not overly fond of meticulous planning (I’m probably a pantser) but even for a creative like me it was useful to have an overview of the standard models, and tips how to break the mould. We also had a go of collectively planning a novel set in Oxford—quite a challenge in the time allowed but great fun to find out how everyone’s minds worked.

Talk of the hero’s journey, of course, circles back to Tolkien, who is the inspiration for so many of us. Bilbo, along with Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker, is often used as the archetypal image of the hero’s journey. In very short form (and anyone who has done a creative writing course before will be familiar with this concept), the hero is comfortable in his everyday world, but answers a call to adventure. He steps out from this familiar place to the unfamiliar, meets a mentor and allies, faces challenges, experiences the dark night of the soul, fights the monster and is transformed so returns changed. It can be a description of external events but is also very often matched by an inner journey. It is a very popular—and dominant—structure. It has been around as long as we’ve had stories but in recent times it was described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, after he analysed many world myths. His work was used as the basis for the classic creative writing guide, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, and now underpins much that is expected of fantasy works, particularly in screenwriting. However, Inkling fans will know that similar discussions, less prescriptive, were happening between Tolkien, Lewis and Hugo Dyson on the famous walk around Magdalen College in 1931 when Lewis decided to commit to believing in Christianity. This is remembered as a vital step in his faith journey, of course, but it was also one for Lewis as a fiction writer. He was convinced by Tolkien’s argument that he could get something from myth that he could not get from abstract argument and thus the serious business of writing fantasy began! When you are a sub-creator (Tolkien’s phrase), you are telling your truths through your myths, many of which give hints of the True Myth, which in Tolkien’s terms was the story of Christ. The hero’s journey in that context is one of giving up your life for others, something that is also seen in Harry Potter and Star Wars—not to mention Avengers and a host of super hero narratives.

Lewis later wrote after acknowledging his debt to Tolkien when thinking about myths:

My view wd be that a good myth (i.e. a story out of which ever varying meanings grow for different readers and in different ages) is a higher thing that an allegory (into which one meaning has been put). Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: into a myth he puts what he does not yet know and cd not come to know in any other way.

Perhaps that is the secret behind a truly successful fantasy series that lifts it above the cultural background of the writer: they’ve created something whose meanings will keep on evolving for the reader. I find that inspiring and liberating as a writer because the meanings my readers draw are not bound by the limits of my experience but only by the endless horizons of their imaginations.

If you like the sound of this online course, do drop us a note in the contact form to register interest and I’ll let you know when sign up opens for the next one. We also plan in-person courses for 2022, more details can be found in the ‘events’ tab.

Julia Golding, Course Director

Julia Saunders 4/29/21 Julia Saunders 4/29/21

World Building

In the second workshop in our online fantasy writer’s course, tutors James Nicol and Lucy Strange took us through the wonderful world of…well…world-building. First we paid homage to that greatest of world builders - Slartibartfast from Douglas Adams’ brilliant The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His idea of copying the fjords from the old Norway for the new Africa has lessons for any would-be fantasy mapmaker. Who knew?

This week, as we all got to know each other a little better, the chatroom started buzzing with ideas. One which I’m still thinking about is the question ‘Could you write a character like Gandalf into a modern-day fantasy series?’ As Tolkien fans we might be expected to leap to the wizard’s defence (not that he needs us) but it is an interesting theme. Has our society and the fantasy we imagine become crueller and more jaded? Would an editor put the comment box next to a character like that, suggesting more flaws to suit a contemporary taste? (I suspect yes). Do we distrust characters who are mentors and seem solidly ‘good’? Possibly the world of children’s fiction allows this still (stand up, Dumbledore), but you’d struggle to find someone like him in A Game of Thrones, The Witcher, or The First Law Trilogy, though Bayaz in the last seems to channel a little of Gandalf at times. My opinion as an author and literary scholar is that, in literature, there are fashions in characters as with hemlines and trouser legs. There is a hunger for goodness that doesn’t go away even if we think being cynical is clever, so it might be time soon for that to re-emerge in fantasy. Let’s see what happens…

(I’ll leave you to decide if goodness is the flare or the drainpipe trouser in this comparison!)

The discussion on world building roved far and wide, looking at the danger of too much ‘gingerbread’, seeking the telling details, thinking of what is ordinary and extraordinary in your world. I’m still adding to my list of things I need to know about the world I’m inventing (and the reader won’t probably ever find out). So far the list includes internal plumbing, who you call when it breaks, and how do you call someone? Think about it: the answer reveals so much about levels of comfort, skills, the economy—and all from just thinking about the smallest room in the house (and is it the smallest or a Roman bench latrine for multiple users?).

Next week we go on to look at the essential toolkit for writers: characters and plot.

If you like the sound of this and you’d like to sign up for our next online course, please contact us below so we can add you to the list.

Julia Saunders 4/21/21 Julia Saunders 4/21/21

A Fairytale Beginning

Our first course in the Oxford Centre for Fantasy got underway last night with a truly fairytale beginning - in the literal sense because we spent much of the session thinking about the roots of fantasy in fairy and folk tales, thanks to our special guest, Katherine Langrish (Seven Miles of Steel Thistles). It was also ‘fairytale’ in the metaphorical sense as we had twenty-five participants from many countries around the world, who all managed to get there on time (especially well done, New Zealand!) with surprisingly few technical hitches. We take this as a sign at the Good Fairy did her job wishing us well at the Christening.

Picture us leaving the washing up in the sink, picking up our packs and going through the garden and over the wall on the start of our adventure.

But before we got under way, we did a warm-up exercise looking for the magic we hoped to find in the next six weeks. The responses were touching and creative - a real range which shows the group is going to be very stimulating as we compare notes and ideas. Remarks ranged from

The magic I hope to find is the passion I felt as a child when I wrote fantasy stories and the only thing I wanted in the world was to be a writer

The magic I'm hoping to discover is a circle of fantasy writer friends who support & encourage each other in being wild, being themselves & letting their inner world shine

All the way to the searingly honest

Truly, I want to be more than I am, more than I would be otherwise.

That is what we aspire to deliver to all the participants, from first time writer to experienced author.

Setting out, we began where this started with Tolkien’s Oxford and the inspiration it gave him - and can give us. We took a tour of his history with the city and the friendships he made here.

After that, we spent time with Katherine thinking about the difference between fairy and folk tales, the ways in which they differ from novels, how we can use the plots, characters and tropes in our own writing, ending with a detailed look at three excellent modern novels from Robin McKinley, Jane Yolen and Neil Gaiman, all retelling Sleeping Beauty in very different ways. The evening concluded with a chance to write a reimagining of our own.

If you want to join us on another journey for the next online course - or one in-person in 2022 - you can register your interest now through the contact page.

Julia Saunders 4/16/21 Julia Saunders 4/16/21

The Journey begins…

It all begins with an idea.

Online fantasy writers course sets off on our adventure

Spring has come to Oxford and our first course is about to start. Five tutors and over twenty students from around the world will be spending the next six weeks together exploring creative writing with a fantasy focus. This is the official beginning of what so many of you have helped create - the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, dedicated to our most famous fantasy writer from the city, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. We will be using Oxford for our inspiration as we know this place has a special fantasy magic. It shaped the works of writers from this city, mostly notably in addition to Professor Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles William, Owen Barfield (the other three of the big four Inklings), as well as William Morris, Lewis Carroll, not to mention more recent ones such as Philip Pullman, Diana Harkness and P.D. James (Children of Men) - even crime writers can turn fantastical when in Oxford! We will be following in their footsteps and seeing where that leads.

Where will we end up?

It is likely the doorways we go through will lead to many strange and wonderful lands. Oxford is not short of inspiring thresholds. Here is one of my favourites.
This is All Souls, probably the strangest of Oxford colleges with arcane practices and a name that would suit many a fantasy novel. This is proof, if you needed it, that the oddest of fantasies are very often to be found in our reality. Margaret Atwood claims she has never had to make up any of her stranger ideas in her speculative fiction as they have always happened somewhere at some time in history. You can easily believe that in my city.
I took this photo last week. Oxford has been strangely quiet during lockdown and the cityscapes even more uncanny than usual.

The first week on the online course, after a brief tour of the city of the Inklings, we will be looking at fairy and folk tales with special guest, Katherine Langrish, author of Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: Reflections on Fairy Tales. We’ll be thinking about these tales as the perennial source of magic rings, ogres, wicked stepmothers, fearsome wolves, special swords and impossible tasks. The tasks set the students won’t be impossible (we hope) but should be enough to start those inklings of inspiration coming.

I’ll report back how we get on.

If you like the sound of a virtual course (or from 2022 in-person at Tolkien and Lewis’s old colleges) in Oxford, message us through the contact form and we’ll tell you how you can join in.

Top Five Fantasy Holiday Reads

1. Beach

2. Mountains

3. Wilderness

4. Sea voyage

5. City break