…And I’ll be in Narnia before ye.

 

You often hear the terms “High Fantasy” and “Low Fantasy” bandied around as the two major divisions within the fantasy genre. As discussed, dividing the corpus of literature can be a snobbish business, even in (1) a genre that is itself persecuted.

 

The most generally accepted definition of High Fantasy is that it represents fantasy set entirely within an invented world, whereas Low Fantasy is set, wholly or partly, within the “real” world. You can also find rather looser definitions that would claim that High Fantasy involves very outré manifestations of magic: wizards, elves and dragons; and Low Fantasy is less grandiose and more subtle in its use of the fantastic. (2)

 

The problem is that when you start to bandy about terms such as “high” and “low” you are making a judgment call, creating a two-category system (3). The implication is that “High” fantasy is superior to “Low” fantasy.

 

There are a number of problems with this concept.

 

Firstly, I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous speech concerning genre tyranny, and the artificial border between fantasy and mainstream, oft crossed and only patrolled by those with a vested interest. The argument over what is a “fantasy world”, when any fictional world must be, by default, applies here. However, more than that…

 

High Fantasy is, even beyond snubbing poor Low Fantasy, an elitist beast. For example, is Conan High Fantasy? The mighty Cimmerian strides through an entirely made-up world, after all. By that criterion (which seems to be the most widely accepted criterion for High Fantasy) then he should stand alongside Gandalf and Aslan as a prime candidate. But what is this? Conan, when he clears his head of mead and staggers to the negotiating table, finds himself relegated to something called Sword and Sorcery. Which isn’t High Fantasy, apparently, despite qualifying on every count. The key, and rather dubious, distinction is apparently that Conan’s tales are focused on individual-level heroics, whereas true High Fantasy works, most often exemplified by Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books (4) , are concerned with sweeping world-scale heroics.

 

Hmm, frankly. Very, very dodgy piece of spin. Leaving aside the question of whether focusing on world events at the expense of any detailed character development is a good thing, for it is arguable that Tolkien and Lewis do come up short in the characterisation department on occasion, where on earth do you draw the line? What about, for example, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, which follows Howard more than Tolkien in its structure and content, and is arguably about individual-scale heroics, but also takes in world-scale, and indeed multiverse-scale, heroics of great breadth and grandeur, with entire worlds ground beneath the feet of the plotline. Is this High Fantasy? I think most people would answer that it was. And yet, if Elric, then Conan. Conan, after all, saves the world from an evil god or two. It doesn’t seem right to slight the poor hulking brute just because he does it with his own two hands, rather than with armies. Surely it's less of a drain on the taxpayer that way.

 

And there is always the lurking suspicion that Conan gets shuffled out of the High Fantasy deck not because of anything in his plots, style or content, but because he comes from a background of shabby pulp magazines written by odd Americans whereas Tolkien and Lewis were respectable Oxbridge professors who wrote novels.

 

Finally, and case-clinchingly, let us look at that main criterion again, that High Fantasy means a complete fantasy world, and Low Fantasy takes off from the “real” world, and then let us look at the two poster children for the High Fantasy clique. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe starts off in wartime England, and the series sporadically skips between real and fantastic worlds. So much for that. Tolkien, meanwhile, is drawing upon dark-age myth cycles to give us what would appear to be an earlier, mythical age of our own world. Look at the introductory piece on Hobbits, and the reader is squarely placed in the same world as they – they are few now, and seldom seen, but they are, in his mythos, still around in our time. We are the inheritors of Middle Earth, and Middle Earth is the precursor to our Later Earth. It’s worthwhile noting that Howard had exactly the same schtick running with Conan, which was mock-(pre?)historical. Casting around, it’s easy to see many, many other places where the supposed border between High and Low is perforated. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Wolfe’s recent Wizard Knight, both high fantasy, save for the awkward fact that the protagonist comes from “our” world. And beyond that, don’t even start on the alternate histories? A genre in itself, but where do you draw the line? So many fantasy series are themselves based on history, with a fantastic element added in, whether it is as pointedly made as the Napoleonic wars of Novak’s Temeraire or the echoes of the Wars of the Roses in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. With all this, how on earth would one categories Mary Gentle’s astonishing Ash. If you’re equal to that task, how about her White Crow sequence, which segue in and out of history and fantasy in a dance that is entirely to their own tune. What about Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword? What about Ford’s Dragon Waiting? What about, for heaven’s sake, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s  Intrepid Enchanter, which by the rules is Low-High-Fantastical-Alternate-Historical-Comedy (5) ? What about… but you get the idea.

 

High and Low roads? Frankly, they both arrive at the same destination, and neither one of us will get there before the other.

  

(1)   Or especially in,

(2)   A third division would be that High Fantasy is for hippies, and Low Fantasy is for the Dutch.

(3)   From somewhere, and I cannot for the life of me track down my source, I recall a quote saying something like all two-category systems are wrong, including that one.

(4)   Exemplified because these works are generally held to be the founding fathers of the genre. Conan, of course, was a few decades earlier.

(5)   Polonius as fantasy fiction reviewer