Episode 4.5: Beyond the Fields We Know

From the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, published in 1972. Why is a there a skeletal pterodactyl and a Jesus lizard with the dragons and pegasi? Mind your business.

Welcome back everyone! I decided to split the last installment of Something About Dragons in two because addressing both the state of the fantasy genre of the eve of the pulp explosion and the influence of modernism on fantasy settings seemed like a lot for one post. But after we cover Lud-in-the-Mist in the next installment, it will be a while before we return to anything that could be described as "high fantasy" - probably Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast, which is awaiting us twenty-plus years away in 1946. So, let's dig back into The Worm Orobouros and The King of Elfland's Daughter.

First, let’s talk about influence and genre. I mentioned the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series in the previous post. The Ballantine series was a (mostly) paperback reissue series from, unsurprisingly, Ballantine Books that started publishing in the late 60’s. That reissue part is key. The earliest books printed were the Lord of the Rings – the first official paperback publication of LOTR – and The Hobbit. A Voyage to Arcturus and The Worm Ouroboros were included in the early editions, before the Adult Fantasy Series proper began with the hiring of editor Lin Carter. Carter selected the next 65 books (and short story collections for publication), and the series essentially codified the early canon of fantasy literature.

Or brought together a bunch of largely unrelated titles for the sake of capitalizing on the Tolkien craze. Take your pick.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series – of which both The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Worm Ouroboros were reissued as part of – essentially retroactively established what was the more or less “official” canon of fantasy as a genre for the early 20th century. It was also largely the work of a single editor, Lin Carter. We’ll cover Carter more when we get to Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, published in 65 or 69, depending on which version you’re talking about, but suffice to say, his list of adult fantasies is quite idiosyncratic.

First, lots of pulp stuff is missing. Carter was a pulp writer and did a lot of Conan pastiches, but his Ballantine list shorts the pulps, in my opinion. There’s a fair amount of Clarke Ashton Smith, a collection of Lovecraft’s work, a couple of short story volumes – New Worlds for Old and Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy are pretty good – but Carter’s selections emphasizes older, novel length material. Details on the series are available here.

Even in the short story collections, Carter tends to look back to authors like Kipling or MacDonald for material. Which is completely reasonable, Kipling and Ambrose Bierce did write fantastical stuff and did heavily influence later genre writers (Burroughs filed the serial numbers off a LOT of Kipling, just for example). For the moment, despite the heavy influence of several decades of pulp sword and sorcery, the pulp strain of the genre receives way more attention about a decade later in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N to the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979). We’ll discuss that more later as well.

Some of Carter’s choices may come down to the fact that some of the best pulp stuff – Conan, Fritz Lieber, etc. – came later in the 30’s and 40’s and maybe Carter didn’t find that “classic” enough (or would have had to pay for the rights to it). To be clear, Ballantine was actively looking for material that was “similar” to Lord of the Rings to capitalize on the craze. Or at least material that could be marketed that way. And was cheap. Better yet, out-of-print. Better yet, material within the public domain or with a dubious copyright, which was the case for next week’s Lud-in-the-Mist. Something they didn’t have to pay for, basically.

But also longer, more “high-fantasy” works.

When we look at books like The Worm Ouroboros and The King of Elfland's Daughter as part of the history of fantasy literature, we have to realize that their inclusion in the first attempt at establishing the fantasy literary canon was motivated as much by publishing incentives as it was by influential status. That’s not to say they weren’t picked for their influence and importance, but that that their influence and importance was augmented and reinterpreted by their availability as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Some books, like The Worm Ouroboros and The King of Elfland's Daughter, had had outsized influence before Ballantine republished them. Dunsany was a well-known and prolific author in his day, though perhaps a bit forgotten by the late 60’s. The Oxford Inklings read both books and were obviously influenced by them. But it’s not clear that something like Lud-in-the-Mist would have been available to someone like Neil Gaiman, a very vocal fan of the book, without the Ballantine series.

These early Romances lack the truly high stakes of later high fantasy. In the case of The King of Elfland's Daughter, the resolution didn’t exactly turn out great for the residents of the Land of Erl but life goes on elsewhere. In The Worm Ouroboros, control of “Mercury” is up-for-grabs, but more in a feudal, who gets to call themselves King kind of way. Does it really matter much if the Demons or Witches win? For Lord Juss, yeah. For almost anyone else, to the extent that the population of any of the nations exist as more than “X number of warriors”, not really.

But that’s not the case in Tolkien or Lewis or Eddings or Brooks. To get from romances to “high fantasy”, one of the things you have to do is marry these adventure stories with truly epic stakes. World-changing, or potentially world-ending, stakes. We’ll talk a lot more about that as we get to Tolkien and go from the adventure tale of The Hobbit to the epic good and evil clash of The Lord of the Rings. I don’t think it ALL has to do with WWII and the atomic bomb, but I think a decent chunk of it does. We’ll get into it.

To be more succinct, the strain of modern fantasy most important in the 1920’s is the pre-“high-fantasy” Romances. Adult-themed, largely self-contained stories that focus on the individual adventure or event, but without (as much of) the world-ending stakes of later high-fantasy or the wild energy of the pulps. That will change soon.

Next, let’s talk a little about portal fantasy. Or These early high fantasy Romances we’ve covered are being written at a time when industrialization, war, international hegemony, and social hierarchies are all changing at an exceptionally rapid pace. Modernism, in literature and everywhere else, is pushing its way into the conversation whether you like it or not. Part of fantasy literature’s small-“c” conservative reputation is as a more Romantic response to these changes. Dunsany and Eddison – particularly Eddison – are consciously calling back to a pre-modern time. Dunsany's depiction depiction – in The King of Elfland's Daughter and elsewhere – emphasizes the closeness of nature, the allure of the supernatural, the pastoral aspects of the pre-Modern times. His “Elfland” draws on folk tales and epics, full of magic and peril, with more than a little similarity to The Wind in the Willows, when you get right down to it. We’ll talk more about this when we get to Tolkien, but when the land of Erl is absorbed, for lack of a better term, into Elfland, it’s not at all something everyone wanted. But it’s obvious that Dunsany himself has a sort of wistful affection for the pre-Modern Era, though his glasses aren't entirely rose-colored.

Eddison is more of a straight-forward feudal apologist. Might makes right. Great men make history. Let’s wade through oceans of blood, boys! Dudes, being Dudes, being Dudes, being Dudes!

Eddison downright fawns over the Demonlander aristocracy, who are assumed to make good decisions because they, the aristocracy, are making them. It’s not only a reflexive deference to lineage – it’s clear that folks like Lord Juss or Brandoch Daha have superhuman martial prowess – but there is no criticism of any of the characters for failing to live up to any assumed moral obligations. They’re superhuman with a sword, so they get to be in charge, and everything gets to be about them. It’s an affection for the aristocracy that, in many ways, mirrors what we talked about with Burroughs, but without the pseudo-scientific veneer of eugenics. More of a British “deference to proper authority”. Similar to, if distinct from, Tolkien’s need for the “proper” king to be in place for society to work smoothly.

But both books, for all their deference to the past, can’t escape the rapid scientific and empirical discoveries of Modernism. By 1920, there is no magic in the real world anymore – the early 1900’s is a time before quantum physics makes everything weird again – so both stories must take place somewhere else. Enter, portal fantasy. The door to a new world where the fantastic elements are contained. Contained both in the sense of holding something within them and controlling or restraining it. Magic must not be allowed to spill over into the fields we know.

This comes out of, or represents a reaction to, Modernism writ large. The fantastic no longer really exists in our world. Thus, for a story's fantastica elements to be accepted by the audience, the fantastic and supernatural elements must be located somewhere else. Somewhere else that white European dudes generally aren’t, anyway. There are no elves in Peoria. Forgotten cities, center of the earth, lost world, darkest Africa. That’s the ticket.

All these are expressions of the same issue: the fantastic must happen elsewhere because as Modernism becomes the default, the real world no longer has much place for the supernatural. Even in The King of Elfland's Daughter, where the supernatural bleeds into the “fields we know”, this intrusion is unsustainable. The Land of Erl comes to contain some of the fantastic, in the person of Orion and a lot of unicorn-hunting trolls, so the last great rune of Elfland must be used to absorb this part of our world into Elfland. Elfland and the “fields we know” must be eternally separate. It’s also strongly implied that using this powerful rune dooms Elfland at some future date.

Other examples abound just in the stories we’ve covered. A tornado takes Dorothy to Oz. Tarzan is shipwrecked in “darkest Africa”. A Voyage to Arcturus needs a homeopathically scientific starship. Even House on the Borderland transports the Recluse on a fantastic mental voyage to…somewhere. The end of the universe?

Instead of journeying out to find the fantastic and the supernatural within the real world far enough away to be exotic (e.g., the Arthurian Tales), authors now must create or transport their characters to a secondary world – or a truly remote portion of our world that their readers are unfamiliar with – through some sort of portal. In the early 20th Century, the rules of the natural world are becoming clearer by the day, at least at the day-to-day perceptual level. We’ll eventually probably rope in Einstein and discuss the Uncertainty Principle, and the fact that electrons literally don’t have a position and how that affects depictions of the fantastic later in the podcast. But, in general and with a boatload of caveats, as of the 1920’s, there no longer exists room for the fantastic in the real world in any way that readers of the time will generally accept. Because that kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.

Now, you do occasionally have things like Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle believing that fairies exist and that you can capture them on Polaroid in the interwar era. There was plenty of mysticism and whatnot too – Maskull gets started on his journey to Arcturus at a séance, after all – but generally, the rapid increase in scientific knowledge and an understandable universe minimizes the ability of the readers – and the authors, for that matter – to willingly enter a secondary world modeled primarily on our own world.

The pulps will deal with this as well, largely by putting everything far back in prehistory (e.g., Howard’s Hyborian Age) or the far future (CAS’s Zothuique). Oddly enough, it’s Lovecraft that seems to have the least problem with this. He just drops the supernatural into New England, emphasizes the cosmic strangeness, contemplates the utter insignificance of man within the larger scheme of the universe, and then moves on to giving his cat racist nicknames.

Overall, though, the fantastic largely becomes regulated to a secondary place or world that, if you’re a resident of the quote unquote “real world”, you must visit and then return.

Just as a sidenote, this meshes interestingly with Joseph Campbell’s ideas about the Hero’s Journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Hero’s Journey – whatever version of it you pick – involves a transition from the known to the unknown world. Leaving behind the place where things are understandable, consistent, and predictable, and going to the place where three-headed demon dogs might bite your head off. And transform your very soul. But the development of the secondary world as the vehicle for the fantastic story to take place within, is a relatively small step from the leave “the fields you know” and go to that crazy foreign place where weird things happen, to “leave the fields you know and be transported to a place where magic still exists.” We’ll discuss this more as we go on.

Finally, as we discuss the genre later in the 20th century, you’ll see the nature of the secondary world evolve. Early 20th century discoveries in relativity and uncertainty eventually bleed into the pop-scientific consciousness with things like the space race. Eventually, this gets you a many-worlds or multidimensional approach, which happens in adjacent media and genres like comic books as well. I’ll dive into more detail with this sometime in the future – probably when we get to Zelazny and the Chronicles of Amber.

Later, toward the end of the 20th century, we’ll cover books where you start to see the fantastic aspects of the secondary world seep back into the primary world, often under a masquerade. We’ll cover authors like Emma Bull or Laurel K. Hamilton or even Terry Brooks’ Word and Void series that adopt this dynamic. Basically, all of urban fantasy. This third phase of the secondary world stays strong through the early 21st century (until the present day, really, if you’re a Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, Patricia Briggs, etc. fan). But, that’s a ways off in the history of the fantasy genre, and we’ll leave discussion for another time.

Which I think brings us to a good place to wrap it up for now. Between this installment and the last, we examined the place of two incredibly important works in the fantasy genre: The Worm Ouroboros and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. We discussed how such “romances” were major influences on later “high fantasy”, once authors started working in higher, world-ending stakes, and how the other three strains of fantastic literature – children’s literature, the pulps, and weird fiction – are also existent at this time. The preeminence of the high-fantasy romances is almost at an end, as now we’ll start covering more and more pulp/weird fantasy for the next several episodes, including Robert E. Howard, Clarke Ashton Smith, CL Moore, and others. We also briefly covered the nature of portals and portal fantasy at this time, with the authors needing to take their fantastic stories out of the primary world to aid in the readers’ acceptance of their secondary creation. Portal fantasy will go through its own changes as our understanding of the natural world and our place in it change over the next century.

Alright, our next installment will finish our final romance/high fantasy work from this era, 1926’s Lud-in-the-Mist and introduce true pulp with Clark Ashton Smith and…a whole bunch of short stories. I’m going to work chronologically if I can but getting affordable copies of some of this stuff is hard. If you just want to read one thing, start with The Dark Eidolon. Until next time!