Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances. Once our stories were set down in a way that made it hard to revisit them for different purposes, some of us turned to telling different kinds of stories, some to faking new origin stories, and then a whole generation to outright fantasies of origin—Tolkien, Lovecraft, Peake, Eddison, Dunsany, Mirrlees, Anderson etc. Since then, fantasy has been retelling and reinventing their stories for our own changing purposes, because that’s what people do, what people need to do. If they don’t do it, they tend to go a bit mad.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden and I put this theory together over dinner at Boskone, and yes, there was alcohol involved.
Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War (2007) is a book about the innumerable tiny subcultures of pre-modern France, and how wildly diverse they were until surprisingly recently. He discusses the way many of these little cultures changed their origin stories every few generations, without really being aware of it:
History in the usual sense had very little to do with it. In the Tarn, ‘the Romans’ were widely confused with ‘the English’, and in parts of the Auvergne, people talked about ‘le bon César’, not realizing that “good old Caesar” had tortured and massacred their Gallic ancestors. Other groups—the people of Sens, the marsh dwellers of Poitou and the royal house of Savoy—went further and traced their roots to Gallic tribes who had never surrendered to the Romans.
Even if this was oral tradition, the tradition was unlikely to be very old. Local tales rarely date back more than two or three generations. Town and village legends had a rough, home-made quality, quite different from the rich, erudite heritage that was later bestowed on provincial France. Most historical information supplied by modern tourist offices would be unrecognizable to natives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After a four-year expedition to Brittany, a folklorist returned to Paris in 1881 to report—no doubt to the disappointment of Romantic lovers of the misty Armorican peninsula–that not a single Breton peasant had ever heard of bards or Druids.
In 1760, James McPherson faked a long epic poem in pseudo-Celtic style. Ossian became very popular. It was much more appealing in the eighteenth century than actual Celtic poetry, because it was so much more to their taste. This seems to me related to the way it’s often easier for the work of someone in a majority group writing about a minority group to appeal to the majority, than it is for work directly coming out of the minority group. People enjoy just the right amount of strangeness, and authenticity is often too strange. Ossian provided a bridge for eighteenth century readers towards Celtic originals—though today it seems such a clear fake it’s hard to believe anyone could have believed it real. As well as McPherson in Scotland there was also Iolo Morgannwg, the Welsh antiquarian and forger, who has irrevocably muddled the entire field of scholarship. Through the nineteenth century (and even more recently) there were people in Wales busily faking not only documents but whole archaeological sites.
Were they doing this because they needed to rewrite their origin stories, but with their origin stories written down and already too fixed to alter?
Our myths, our legends, aren’t necessarily true, but they are truly necessary. They have to do with the way we interpret the world and our place in it. Origin stories, and perhaps fairy tales too, can be the story you need them to be, if you can change them.
A while ago I was involved in a discussion of Arthurian retellings, where I jokingly said that nobody updates them to the present. Nobody tells the story of General Douglas MacArthur as Arthur. Nobody says that when Cromwell left Ireland he’d killed everyone except for seven pregnant women hiding in a cave.
There are other kinds of origin stories. The stories we tell about how Paleolithic people lived are one. In the fifties, Paleolithic people lived in nuclear families with a hunting father bringing back food to a mother who cooked and looked after the children. In the sixties, they lived in larger more communal groups, with frequent festivals with art and music and sex. In the seventies, the women’s contribution via gathering started to be noticed. In the eighties, we heard about the alpha male with a harem driving out the other males. In the nineties, we heard how the other more geeky males came back while the alpha was off hunting and impregnated the females. In the last decade we started to hear what an advantage it was to the cavepeople to have gay uncles. It’s not that any of these stories are true or untrue, it’s the way we tell them. I think the same can be said for the stories of the origin of the universe. It’s not about the evidence, it’s about interpreting the evidence to make a useful story.
With the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy, it becomes harder to revise origin stories, or any stories. Once canonical versions exist, retellings are a different thing. Several things happened—one was the advent of something quite new, mimetic fiction. This caught on in a huge way in the nineteenth century, people were for the first time reading stories about relatively realistic characters set in what was supposed to be the real world, with no fantastic elements at all. There were the fakers. Later came the new mythologies.
Tolkien said:
I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate quite simply to: to England; to my country.
(Letter to Milton Waldman 1951, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien ed. Carpenter, 1981, p.144)
It has always seemed strange that after centuries where people wrote very little original fantasy there should suddenly be this explosion of it at about the same time. First, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, came new children’s fantasy—no longer retellings and revisions of old fairy tales, which now had canonical versions, but new stories. Alice in Wonderland. The Jungle Book. Five Children and It. Peter Pan. There hadn’t been a separate children’s literature, and what there had been was mostly morality tales. Then, a generation later, came the fantasists writing for adults—Lovecraft and Tolkien and Peake don’t have much in common, but they lived at the same time and they reacted to their time with a new mythology. Dunsany’s a little earlier, but a lot of what he wrote, and certainly where he started, with Pergana, also looks like a new mythology. Eddison too, and Mirlees—none of these people were influenced by each other (well, Tolkien had read Dunsany) and they were writing very different things, yet they all feel as if they were trying to achieve the same goal, trying to tell an origin story.
Fantasy, post-Tolkien, has been largely involved with retelling Tolkien, or revolting against Tolkien. That isn’t all it’s been doing, but that’s one of the things that’s been central. I think one of the things that caused the huge popularity of first Tolkien and then genre fantasy is that it provided a new origin story that people needed and liked.
Horror hasn’t got stuck with this kind of problem. Horror has kept revising the stories into the present and relevant—there’s no canon that stops it being reinvented to be useful. Those sparkly vampires are a sign of health, not sickness.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
great post Jo. Definitely a lot to think about.
Off topic, but those “sparkly vampires” strike me as something real vampires want us to believe about them. (All the better for them to prey on us).
During the English Civil War (and before, of course), a lot of the factions were using origin stories to justify their religious and political agendas. The Puritans were looking back to a “pure” English church, before the Roman Catholics came and corrupted it. The Levellers were looking back to the good old democratic days of the Saxons, before the Normans came along and imposed a king on them. The Diggers were looking back to the Garden of Eden, when the land belonged to everyone. Everyone looked to a mythical past to justify their vision of the future.
The original meaning of “revolution” was the overthrowing of a disliked present to return to a previous golden age, to turn in a circle back to the old ways. Now that we tend to see time as a linear process, carrying us into the future, perhaps we look less to our mythical pasts for our role-models of how the future should be?
A while ago I was involved in a discussion of Arthurian retellings, where I jokingly said that nobody updates them to the present.
Knight Life and sequels deal with King Arthur’s return to life in contemporary NYC. The first volume deals with his running for Mayor.
Carandol: That’s a brilliant example of the way people do this and how it’s useful.
Larry: Good gracious. Well, I was totally wrong. (Let’s not even think about why New York.)
(Let’s not even think about why New York.)
Actually I think it’s kind of fascinating the way that New York is, or has become, a mythical city in the way that few other North American cities have. That is, there exists a mythical NYC in parallel with, interwoven with, the real NYC.
This isn’t true of any other North American cities. Well, L.A. a little, I guess. And Montreal should be mythical but somehow isn’t, yet.
London is sort of mythical, but across Europe, the weight of thousands of years of history (and historical myth) chokes new myths in the same way that unchecked weeds choke gardens.
MacArthur’s “I Shall Return” was a big part of the mythology of my mom’s generation. King Arthur had nothing on him — the General KEPT his promise. :)
Check out the statues in Leyte on this youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6WioCDbC-A&feature=related
He played it up too.
“I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil — soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.”
(WWII certainly has a bunch of great military speeches … haven’t heard any really good ones since)
For those who think New York is an…interesting choice for a modern dress Arthur tale, check out the forthcoming King Maker by Maurice Broaddus:
On the streets of Indianapolis, the ancient Arthurian cycle is replaying in the lives of rival street gangs. Told through the eyes of King, as he gathers like-minded friends and warriors around him to venture into the fastness of Dred, the notorious crime lord, this is a stunning mix of myth and harsh reality. A truly remarkable novel.
Really fascinating stuff there. Real food for thought. It would never have occured to me to draw a parallel between Lord of the Rings and the ‘origin stories’ of legend.
Also, thanks for the link to the myth about Branwyn, etc., and the explanation of the 5 traditional divisions of Ireland. I’d never come accross that before. Fascinating, even if we have since decided to cut it down to 4 provinces :P
That is, there exists a mythical NYC in parallel with, interwoven with, the real NYC.
Hollywood is a bit, and so is Chicago.
And how about Hong Kong?
(Btw, captcha’s word for this comment is “The skyline”)
How about superhero comics as part of the modern origin mythos? Metropolis is NYC during the day; Gotham is NYC at night. (Marvel does Magneto/Professor X as Malcom X/Martin Luther King, a different take on the same thing).
Also note that it’s not just modern guys that do fantasies. There was a huge bunch of stuff in the Renaissance — California is named after the fantasy land of Califia; the conquistadores when they reached Tenochtitlan compared it to the fairy cities in the romances they were reading. (Don Quixote is a massive satire on the whole movement; it lasted long after the originals were forgotten.) Sometimes it’s just a matter of taste, and taste is episodic.
It’s interesting to think how much of what we think we know about the past is really the Victorian view of the past. The generations of tale-telling are still a mere two or three generations, but print makes them somewhat longer-lasting.
This seems closely related to Hobsbawm’s “invention of tradition”, which in turn is closely related to the rise of modern nationalism. The works of Tolkien, Lovecraft, et al., in effect are nations in miniature. Paracosms with diplomatic recognition.
It’s similar to the science fiction writer’s use of bad or faked history in order to establish the proper ideological and didactic background for the reader — here, Bujold’s perceptive description of SF as fantasies of political agency is very useful.
Horror doesn’t need to do that. Neither do mysteries.
Just mentioning this: Much of the earlier Gaulish population was wiped out by death, disease, starvation and slavery via Roman armies, which were rampaging there even prior to Caesar’s legions. By at least the time of Augustus, if the soldiers lived through their 30 years’ enlistment in the armies, retired leginaires received land in Gaul. High ranking Romans received huge swaths of Gaulish lands. Not to mention the long-time permanent Roman fortresses and towns, which were also established before Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaigns. So, via Roman colonialism, many French are indeed descended from Romans.
Love, C.
Foxessa: Yes, of course many French people are descended from Romans. But when you have one little town saying they’re Romans the the next town over saying they’re Gauls, there’s something else going on, because they’re all both, plus a lot of other stuff.
Jo: “But when you have one little town saying they’re Romans the the next town over saying they’re Gauls, there’s something else going on…”
Well, there is *one* village of indomitable Gauls. I’m sure I read that somewhere…
Chicago has at least two mythical cities interwoven with the real one. There’s the urban fantasy city, that gets Buckingham Fountain’s hippocampi, and the University Club’s gothic skyscraper, and the Athenian owls hidden on the roof of the library. And there’s the steampunk art deco city, with the mercantile exchange, and the mysterious blue light pyramid, and the remains of the Columbian Exposition. I don’t know that either of them would be all that friendly to King Arthur, though–they’re neither of them myths of leadership. Chicago is all about myths of structure and knowledge and progress.
I always thought the story of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had great mythic potential, and if it wasn’t for the fact that we have newspapers and books and stuff someone would have turned it into a myth. (I’m not saying anything about the actual people themselves, just the kind of stories that would have been told about them.)
So rich a seam, so little time to mine it!
One potent proto-fantasy author I think you’ve missed out is William Morris, who most notably in The Well at the World’s End attempted a very different approach. His nameless extended England stretches out without limit in all directions, getting steadily foreigner and weirder in no very specific way. Only right off the edges of every map are such familiar constants as the Pope and Babylon and Alexander, framing the nature of the tale rather than being possible components of it. Not for one moment does he allow any attempt to map his fantastic locales onto any England or Europe we could know. Rather, the geography itself is consciously that of a mediaeval romance: a bright linear tapestry which exists to serve the story, and whose extent is exactly what he requires for the purpose.
It is an origin myth because its vision does map onto a romantic history of our world. One side of it is just like Tolkien’s: a passionate espousal of the love and pride of making for its own sake, implicitly reproaching the dark satanic mill-vision of the Victorian factories, and casting it as a vile decadence from better things.
The other bit of anti-Victorian revisionism goes against the side of that age Tolkien so conspicuously buys into. In Morris’s bolshy world, salt-of-the-earth peasants like Sam ‘might not away with masterful doings, but were like to pay back a blow with a blow, and a foul word with a buffet’. No dogs invited for walks here! When the good prince comes to the oppressive bureaucratic town, his reaction is not, “Wot ye not that I come of royal blood?” but, “What, will free men endure this?”; and he gives his name angrily as ‘Man Motherson’. Here and elsewhere, Morris mythologizes the sturdy English yeoman (and sometimes the militant English maid) into a proud estate from which his age is fallen into mean servility.
The thing Morris shares with his successors is this: not only doesn’t he pretend that these things ever happened, he doesn’t even pretend that the world they happened in ever existed! That, I think, marks a new level of confidence in Art over Authority.
Even in the Well, at the very top of his form, Morris does not for my money achieve the heights of Tolkien. His glamoured tapestry is too much a conceit to rival the depths and power of a whole world re-created anew: there cannot at once be both Rome and Minas Tirith, Alexander and Lúthien Tinúviel. In a story that is not about Rome or Alexander, Middle-Earth wins.
Yet Tolkien had read Morris, and acknowledged great debt to him. For once we escape making up Authorities for them, even origin myths may have origins worth singing about!
Jo, the distinction you draw between schlocky derivative fantasy and schlocky derivative horror is interestingly fine. (That’s not euphemism, it’s me not having thought my way around the issue.) I guess you’re right to the extent that DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN, THE WOLF MAN &c aren’t canon to horror the way Tolkien is to fantasy. And with those particular works, it seems like an easy sell. But what if you declared Rice, Romero, and Lovecraft the horror canon instead? I’m even more ignorant of the history of horror than I am about the history of fantasy, so I’m willing to hear dispute.
I guess I’d also like to know what counts as “revolt against Tolkien,” and how you know. I guess you have people like China Mieville and Michael Moorcock who have publicly slagged elements of Tolkien’s work, so that’s an obvious starting point. But even Moorcock seems to have proceeded largely orthogonal to Tolkien, drawing on Leiber and on non-fantasy sources that predate Middle-Earth for his earlier stuff, and God only knows what for, say, the Second Ether books. And is it really fair to characterize, say, Ambergris or Ashamoil or Dragaera as “revolt”? (It’s more than possible that VanderMeer, Bishop, and Brust have all publicly declared their revolutionary intentions, but I’m not aware of it.) Likewise, is it fair to characterize recognizably epic settings like Westeros or the Malazan Empire as “retelling”? You could possibly make that case for Robert Jordan and David Eddings, but I’m not sure. And then there are all the flavors of fantasy that interact with this world, like most of Neil Gaiman’s work, Robert Holdstock’s work, Harry Potter…
Anyway, I’m thinking mostly of stuff I think is good, but I doubt the allegiances I’ve declared above make me a really atypical fantasy reader — there’s a reason I subscribe to the site. So I guess I’m left wondering if you haven’t slightly overstated the weight of Tolkien’s yoke. Maybe it’s more that, for fantasists, Tolkien (sometimes via D&D) is the least common denominator of your readers — there’s a set of Tolkienian tropes that every reader identifies with fantasy, and you have to make decisions about all of them. Whereas, although the same is qualitatively true for horror, maybe the set of tropes is less extensive and detailed.
Alternatively, maybe horror (like urban fantasy) is just better connected to our world, so you’re not writing a new Silmarillion in your head for each new book.
Going to have to leave this half-baked. Thanks for making me think. (About something other than my job.)
And there’s an obscure pb original from quite a few years ago wherein the Battle of Britain is being fought and King Arthur (going by Arthur King) is in the RAF.
Not to mention one I suggested in the obscure books thread Jo started, Laubenthal’s _Excalibur_ set in contemporary 1960s Mobile Alabama.
This kind of mythmaking and remaking of origin stories has an extremely long history. I work with medieval Irish literature, and one of the striking things in the written texts is the extent to which the writers used events of the past to comment on and promulgate one view of the present. (You’ll see things like origin myths where four brothers – ancestors of, say, four branches of the ruling dynasty – suddenly change in a later story to three brothers or five brothers, because one branch has fallen out of favour, or another branch has begun ruling. It’s absolutely intriguing.)
Control of the past has always been about control of the present, and controlling the narrative of the past is one of the best ways to do that.
London is sort of mythical, but across Europe, the weight of thousands of years of history (and historical myth) chokes new myths in the same way that unchecked weeds choke gardens.
And yet Rob Holdstock, Susanna Clarke, and J.K. Rowling have found ways of taking those myths (traditional or invented) and making fascinating stories out of them. Neil Gaiman has been able to make those myths, and other Old World myths, bridge the Atlantic in extraordinary ways. In the process suggesting a new kind of origin for a new land.
Native Hawaiian sovereignty folks (Hawaiian nationalists) have invented a past in which most of the pre-European Hawaiian past was a utopia of eco-friendly communes ruled by chiefs who loved their people and ruled selflessly. Then, canoes arrived from Tahiti, full of oppressive chiefs and priests, led by the priest Pa’ao (a white man!) who introduced human sacrifice and autocratic rule. The newcomers conquered all and turned Hawai’i into what it was when Westerners first arrived. Everything that the Westerners didn’t like — infanticide, human sacrifice, warring kingdoms led by dictatorial chiefs — well, that isn’t *authentically* Hawaiian. Authentically Hawaiian is BETTER than anything whites can do (and suspiciously like hippie ideals of the 1970s, when the sovereignty movement emerged).
These folks rewrite Wikipedia articles to reveal the TRUE history, which has been obscured by evil white historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists.
Three updated Arthurs from the world of comics:
Aquaman, aka Arthur Curry, is King of Atlantis. A recent storyline had him travel to Ireland and meet the Lady of the Lake, who gave him a powerful weapon (though not a sword).
Camelot 3000 was a 12-issue miniseries from the early ’80s, about King Arthur awakening from beneath Glastonbury Tor to save England (and the rest of the Earth) from an alien invasion.
Matt Wagner’s Mage is loosely Arthurian — the hero, Kevin Matchstick, called “the Pendragon”, is awakened into his power by meeting a wizard who turns out to be Merlin, and wields a magical baseball bat given to him by a woman. In the first storyline (published in the mid-’80s), he has to protect the Fisher King. But the story is also an allegorical autobiography (which becomes more obvious in the second storyline, published in the late ’90s).
I’d say the need for and fact of remaking origin stories shows up in the written down but not quite yet authoritative (cannonical) text of Shakespeare’s (or however his name is spelled) history plays .
It’s a commonplace that the plays can be presented to suit the current mood or audience or acted to suit the mood or actor. Even the texts vary to suit the then current mood (commonly by cuts as well) as again FREX some differences between the Oxford and Cambridge editions are ascribed to distance from WWI and to WWII (mostly WWII – Resolved this House will not fight …..We few……). From this it’s a short step to alt histories or secret histories (stabbed in the back is a recurring theme).
I suppose Aesopian language works well for redoing origin or identity myths and so encourages fantasies. Seems to me that Tolkien is somewhat limited by the conscious explicit Christian element – Robin Williams can play The Fisher King but Camelot and Arthur was suppressed from further change by being too closely tied to one view and period that is living memory for much of the potential paying audience – but word association will give the Washington DC of the Kennedy’s for Camelot in many and many a context.
So I suppose the conjecture is confirmed by examples – fantasy is used both for Aesopian language and to allow blurring as well as omission of details – it saves a tremendous amount of research into both what is truly period and what is acceptably period (Tiffany problem).
Another notably updated Arthur appears in Jane Lindskold’s Athanor tales, mixed in with heavy magic and secret history which revises just about everybody’s myths at once.
This is a subject that always fascinates me. I have a lot of love for Elizabeth Bear’s “Promethean Age” books; not only do they deal with Arthurian legend, they have twisty complex theories about the creation of mythology and its effects. In a really literal way, heh.
The Robin Hood legend has shifted interestingly in the last thirty years. In the early ’80s the British TV series ‘Robin of Sherwood’ added a muslim saracen to the merry men (mainly because the producers loved the character who appeared in the pilot episode as the villain’s henchman and so begged the writer Richard Carpenter to re-write him so as to become a good guy). Co-incidentally or not, the film ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’ a few years later did the same as did the BBC’s latest version of the legend. So, it seems that a new character has been attached to an old legend just as Maid Marion and Friar Tuck were attached in earlier centuries.
Elaine Thom@20: I remember hearing a BBC radio play about fifteen years ago which had King Arthur and the knights of the round table returning as RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain. I wonder if it was based on your paperback?
But when you have one little town saying they’re Romans the the next town over saying they’re Gauls, there’s something else going on, because they’re all both, plus a lot of other stuff.
Yes! And what else is that, exactly? Sometimes one thing, and something else another.
Sometimes, at least, it’s protest and separation from the ruling estabishment, as may well be the case when claiming celtic descent to the exclusion of the more recent arrivals, as one example.
Which is a parallel with Russian citizens, for instance, determinedly adhering to the Greek Church during the soviet era, Poland rallying around the Roman Church during the same era and during Solidarily, the previous confederacy around the Stars and Bars, and so on and so forth.
What was it for Yeats and Co. with the Celtic Twilight? More than one thing, surely.
Love, C.
It’s odd you mention the dissolution of cultural boundaries with labels. The Romans were many people, from many cultures. Actual Romans were people who came from the city of Rome. It’s when you apply the pancultural “Roman” where things become sticky. People like the Gauls, the Celts, and the Daci, never identified themselves as actual Roman except when addressing a Roman official; usually under duress (it does not help when the official is accompanied by a century of soldiers to back him up). As it happens I am working on an origin story of the history of civilization for my book XARAN, and culture identity is far stronger in 10,000 BC than it is during Roman times. I could create a whole anthro argument about why the Israelis and the Palestinians should stop hating each other, but it is too far into the future now for them to acknowledge the history of their real genetic origins. Or as someone once said, “the apple has fallen too far from the tree.” LOL.
Excellent article and some informative Comments.
The problem with JRR Tolkien’s ‘new mythology’ is that whole chunks of it, along with much of the ‘feel’ and ‘spirit’ of his legendarium, was lifted straight from Irish Mythology and Folklore, despite Tolkien’s many strident denials. And I say this as someone who would class himself as a ‘fan’ (though, obviously, not an uncritical one).
Tolkien, like most British people of his era, had something of a love/hate relationship with Ireland. He visited the country several times while working as an external examiner with various Irish universities, yet he never freed himself from the mixed feelings of prejudice and assumed superiority that has forever plagued Irish-British relations. On one hand he had a sort of paternal condescension for the Irish people (or at least some of them, as he darkly intoned) but this was coupled with some very odd views about the inherently evil nature of the island of Ireland – which by implication permeated some of its inhabitants.
Perhaps it was the natural outcome of the ‘Little Englander‘ in Tolkien that was unable to reconcile Ireland’s former position as a colonial possession of the United Kingdom with the independence gained through revolution in the period from 1916-1923 (and beyond). Some British people still find that galling even now. Tolkien grew up in a society permeated with anti-Irish racism and prejudice, and though he was certainly no racist he was still very much a product of his time (though more enlightened than many, I will readily admit).
Reading his letters and writings a very strong feeling of envy, jealously even, is to be found whenever he touches upon aspects of Ireland’s vast literary and mythological past, the likes of which England simply could not compare (or compete) with. Tolkien paradoxically dismissed much of English folklore while at the same desperately trying to reconstruct the myths behind it, with a ready eye to the traditions of the Germanic peoples, from Germany itself to Scandinavia and beyond. But he never found anything that satisfied or fit his grand, unified vision for a legendarium for the English people.
Yet in Ireland such a legendarium already existed, with a vast many-layered body of history, literature, poetry and folklore supporting it, woven into the very landscape of the country: every mountain, every river, every plain had its story or place in some other story. Is it any wonder that Tolkien looked westwards, rather than east or south, for inspiration and that later he greeted the obvious parallels drawn by others (especially in the Celtic nations) with such anger?
Fantasy, like any other work of art, is as much about the artist or the times he or she lives in as anything else. We get the Fantasy that we deserve? Or that we need?