Fantasy, as the exhibition at the British Library in London points out, is both a means of escape and a way of viewing our own world through new eyes. Fantasy: Realms of Imagination spans from the oldest religious mythologies such as the Epic of Gilgamesh up to the works of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and on TV, series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, and role-playing games – all of which feature in this exhibition.
Is this a show for geeks or nerds? It won’t appeal to people who only read detective fiction, or rom-coms, or kitchen-sink realism. But for anyone who loves the Harry Potter books and films, or the works of JRR Tolkien, or who grew up on the novels of William Morris or Lord Dunsany, this exhibition is a treat. It takes seriously what the more boring and strait-laced among us would scoff at as childish whimsy – because, of course, it’s nothing of the kind. As Tolkien wrote in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories”: “Fairy-stories offer… Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.” That applies to all the fantasy featured here.
There are four main themes in the exhibition: Fairy and Folk Tales, Epics and Quests, Weird and Uncanny, and Worlds and Portals. Oral folk traditions about enchantments, trans-formations, wishes and the supernatural, collected in the 17th to 19th centuries by writers from Charles Perrault to the Brothers Grimm, lie behind much modern fantasy, with today’s authors often re-working fairytales. Christina Rossetti, the deeply religious Victorian writer of several hymns, wrote the intriguing Goblin Market, which has been interpreted as a Christian allegory, or more recently as a feminist or lesbian allegory; the exhibition displays an edition illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Some 50 years earlier, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley used fairy-fantasy for political and social purposes in Queen Mab, in which the queen of fairyland shows visions of a utopian future.
One of the most powerful exponents of myth in modern fantasy is Alan Garner, whose recent novel Treacle Walker was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize; here there is part of his original draft manuscript for The Owl Service, based on a tale from the 12th-13th-century Welsh collection of myths, the Mabinogion – alongside a dinner plate which inspired his writing the haunting lines, “She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. You must not complain, then, if she goes hunting.”
Epics and Quests are stories featuring heroism, conflict and adventure, ranging from the Epic of Gilgamesh 4,000 years ago to the 10th-11th-century Beowulf, to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the sword and sorcery novels of Fritz Leiber and many others. What is often called the Matter of Britain – stories of King Arthur, Merlin and the Quest for the Grail – have been endlessly revisited. The TV series Game of Thrones, based on George RR Martin’s novels, shows how popular this strand of heroic fantasy still is.
The Weird and Uncanny section includes Susanna Clarke’s intriguing 2020 novel Piranesi, inspired by the famous Carceri etchings of the 18th-century architect and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose impossible prisons anticipated by two centuries MC Escher’s complex paradoxical designs. Clarke’s own drawings of how the rooms in the house of her novel interact are displayed next to a large-scale edition from 1761 of Piranesi’s work. Nearby are Mervyn Peake’s notebooks for his magnificent Gormenghast trilogy, with his own illustrations to his draft text.
In many fantasy novels we slip from our world into other worlds through portals; these could be, the exhibition says, “a physical doorway, a timeslip, death and rebirth or something even more vague and mysterious”. Classic examples include the wardrobe in CS Lewis’s Narnia novels, the rabbit hole and the mirror in Lewis Carroll’s two Alice adventures, timeslip stories like Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, where Tom meets a girl from Victorian times, and, coming to the present day, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, whose young heroine finds a passage into a sinister version of her own reality; Gaiman is one of the advisers to the exhibition and is taking part in several quickly-sold-out events. Portals or gateways in children’s books, the exhibition tells us, have in recent years often acted as metaphors, with thresholds representing stages of growing up.
As well as entertainment, fantasy can have a serious purpose. “From the moment Alice goes down the rabbit hole,” we’re told, “the nonsensical rules of the world beyond this portal demonstrate the way that fantasy can invert and critique reality.” We can see the same in much earlier highly respected works such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), about an ideal island state where food and hospitals are free and all religions are tolerated, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a fantastical satire on British society. Unexpectedly there is also a contribution from the Brontë siblings; when they were young, they wrote stories about a fantasy world in minuscule handwriting in tiny books.
For me, the exhibition was also a personal reminiscence. Years ago I was deeply involved in the science fiction (SF) and fantasy world, editing Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, for four years, chairing the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction for three years, editing a couple of anthologies and counting many of the British and some of the US writers on display here as friends. I was delighted to see hand-written pages of a novel by my dear friend, the late Diana Wynne Jones, who was writing about schools of magic when JK Rowling was still a schoolgirl herself. Fantasy can also be self-reflective; her novel The Dark Lord of Derkholm, which satirises portal fantasy, and her playful The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a parody tourist guidebook, poke gentle fun at the fantasy genre by subverting its common tropes and motifs.
It’s not all books. There are medi-eval-style costumes worn by the Gelfling puppets in the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal, and a costume from the stage musical Wicked. There’s Gandalf’s staff from the film of Lord of the Rings, complete with a pouch for his pipe; and there’s the sword Needle carried by Arya Stark in Game of Thrones.
There’s also a respectful nod to fantasy fans. Fandom has been a significant part of SF and fantasy for decades, with conventions for hundreds, often thousands of attendees – run by fans for fans. Some write fan fiction, often bringing together characters by different authors; others become published authors themselves. Some get together for live-action role playing (LARPing), designing their own elaborate costumes to act out fictional scenarios. For those who prefer tabletop gaming, there’s a complex display of figures from Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Maybe these are the geeks and nerds I mentioned earlier – but gamers and other fans I’ve known over the years aren’t the spotty-faced adolescents that critics might expect; they’re teachers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, academics – people whose imaginations have been fired, whose lives have been enriched, by their immersion into the realms of fantasy.
Fantasy: Realms of Imagination is at the British Library in London until 25 February 2024
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