The Moment I Learned To Love Fantasy

... and love myself a little bit too.

What’s the point of fantasy?

And why do I love it so much?

What do I hope to share with others through fantasy fiction? And why does this medium, this genre specifically, help me do it? 

It’s difficult to answer these questions without a certain amount of self-reflection. The love of a thing is innately bound up in the life and heart of the one who loves. 

In other words, to explain why I love this genre and believe in its value and efficacy, I need to explain a bit about myself and how I came to it. 

And for those of you who are new here at Falden’s Forge, your presence gives me all the excuse I need to explain what I’m about, what I’m doing here, and why I think you should stick around.

For a Long Time, I Didn’t Get It

I mentioned in one of my first posts that I came to the fantasy genre (and the pursuit of fiction writing) by a different road than most. It honestly wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I would have called myself a fan of the genre.

Looking back, perhaps I should have.

I read a lot of adventure books as a kid. I played Ocarina of Time and loved every second of it. The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars loomed large in the imaginations of my friends and me whenever we decided to beat each other with wiffle-ball bats. 

Pictured: me and Jimmy killing time in his backyard while we waited for his dad to come back with the pizza.

And yet, I saw how much certain friends loved fantasy and… I didn’t share their enthusiasm. I read Harry Potter, found it fun, and then put it down, unchanged as a person (whereas some of my peers made it their whole personality¹). I read some Terry Pratchett before I was old enough to get the satire or a lot of the jokes.

I even read my way through all fourteen books of The Wheel of Time as a teenager, finishing the penultimate book just as the last one was due to release. 

But I’ll be honest. There was a part of me that had internalized that “nerd” stigma, slightly embarrassed to enjoy stories that involve something as farcical as dragons or the discount-elf-species-of-the-week. It’s like I was always thinking in the back of my mind: “You’ll outgrow this, surely?”

The Past As Gateway Drug

I studied medieval history at university. That love of medieval Europe (and the ancient Mediterranean) was another early love of mine. I remember going to a library event about knights & castles when I wasn’t even old enough to read, and I still have the book that my mom bought that day because I wanted to look at the pictures. 

Like a “dinosaur kid” who never outgrew the phase and ended up in paleontology, I never quite outgrew my love for the medieval and spent my undergraduate days reading things like The Táin Bó Cúailnge, the biographies of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, and the chansons de geste. My projects included poring over monastic annals and archeological scans. When I needed an English credit, I took classes that allowed me to read Homer and Dante, only taking in “new and modern” literature (like Milton’s Paradise Lost) when absolutely necessary. 

I’m the kind of guy who has a good time reading contrasting analyses about the fiscal situations of King Richard the Lionheart and his brother, King John, to best determine who was most responsible for the collapse of Angevin continental hegemony around the turn of the thirteenth century.²

Why yes, I am fun at parties, why do you ask? 

For a long time, I simply categorized my interest in fantasy as an expression of this deep love for the ancient. I loved The Legend of Zelda because I loved the sense of adventure, running around the world with a horse, shield, and sword. I loved the Lord of the Rings movies because of the battles and castles.³

Sitting among literal stacks of books about pictorial representations of kingship, or the hyper-religious milieu of the 6th century Middle East, or the failure of Norman family structures to catch on among the Gaelic nobility … it all seemed like the maturation of my childhood imagination; a way for me to use my imagination in a way that was acceptable—that is, acceptable to me.

It took me way too long to realize that the reasons I love the past are the same reasons I love the fantastical. “Look at these tomes! Whoever did the worldbuilding on these old cultures was really talented!”

When I Finally Got It

Fast forward to my last semester.

It was a beautiful spring. My last bits of coursework were light and unstressful. My thesis was already done, credited, and beginning to open doors for me into higher academia.⁴

But every single one of my friends was deep in the muck of comprehensive exams, practicums⁵, or their own thesis work. 

I had time to kill, and everyone else was busy. On a lark, I decided to see if the university library had a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. 

I’d seen the movies plenty of times, and I’d read The Hobbit as a kid, but as a young man I’d tried at least twice to make my way through Lord of the Rings.

But I just kept bouncing off of it. I frankly just could not get a grasp on it as a teenager. It was like trying to climb a sheer cliff with my bare hands. 

But when I opened up the book again that spring, it all just clicked.

Intellectually, I had the hooks and pulleys that could haul me up that cliff. I could see the heritage of the Anglo-Saxons in the Rohirrim, I could spot the shadows of Roland in the death of Boromir, I could hear the rhyme between ancient Irish myths and those of Númenor. All those hours I’d spent reading Beowulf and the Gesta Francorum suddenly made this story about elves and magic rings more nuanced, more flavorful, and just more fun. 

Philosophically, the work I’d done on medieval philosophy and theology helped me see the depth of Tolkien’s underpinning worldview in ways I hadn’t understood before. 

Emotionally, I’d grown to a place where dedication in small things like gardening and friendship seemed to me as heroic as the slaying of a great, black wyrm; it helped me love Samwise Gamgee more than I thought I could love any fictional character. As a twelve-year-old I couldn’t have understood the tragedy of Boromir, the melancholy of the Elves, or the allure of Saruman’s “wisdom.”

Hell, at twelve, I couldn’t even persevere through the descriptions of the landscapes.

But once I’d grown up and come to love (and sorely, achingly miss) the forests of New England, I could then mourn with Treebeard the scarring of Fangorn.

Once I’d seen the Grand Tetons and the Rockies as an adult, Tolkien’s prose began to sing. 

I don’t think Tolkien ever went to Wyoming, but the Misty Mountains are the Grand Tetons and I’ll take that to the grave. The “Alps?” Never heard of him. (image by jkinsocal, used under CC license, via Wikimedia).

It felt like Middle Earth was made for the particular desires of my own heart. It felt a home I’d never been to, but could recall from a half-remembered dream.

I’m not saying I have some enlightened insight into Tolkien’s work. I’m not saying I understand it inherently better than anyone else—though I’ll occasionally share any insight I think worthwhile.

I am saying that I needed that background in medieval studies and liberal arts more broadly to help show me just how valuable myth-making could be for the human person. 

Everything Clicked

Reading Tolkien that year was like a nova going off in my head. Looking back, it’s like I had blinders on.

I’ve always been in love with fantasy, I just didn’t know it. Or at least, I didn’t admit it to myself. 

Once it clicked, though, I knew I would never quite be the same. The things that I had always been a bit embarrassed about—for no reason and entirely inside my own self-castigating psyche—now seemed like keys to a more fulfilling life. 

Seeing the depth of Tolkien’s work in light of the centuries of mythos and heuristics that came before it suddenly helped me make peace with a part of myself that I didn’t even know needed fixing. 

It wasn’t just that I had a boyish fascination with swordplay or a weird obsession with defensive stonework. It was that through these facets of setting and a love of the past as “a different world,” I had always been grasping at some deeper, hidden reality: a world that somehow feels more real than our own. 

I won’t get spiritual here, but I’ve always had an innate belief that this world is not all there is, that we are not made for just this passing life, that there are deeper forces and higher truths than we can fully grasp with our reason alone. 

I believe that’s an essential piece of art.

Visual art, music, and literature are all striving to articulate some truth or reveal some aspect of beauty that we cannot simply communicate without that art. 

I don’t have enough time here to go into all the things I hope to communicate through my own fantasy fiction—indeed, if I could communicate all those things here, I wouldn’t need that fiction. But at this point it should come as no surprise that I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Tolkien’s own four-fold purpose of what he called “fairy-stories”: fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation.

It draws us into a fantasy world, built using human reason, and then leverages aspects of both realism to surrealism to recover our dulled sense of our own world. It gives us eyes to see things we otherwise might not. By helping us escape the mundanity of this world into one which more readily shows aspects of higher realities, much like powerful art or music, it provides us with consolation in our hearts to persevere and keep working towards the highest goods of love, hope, sacrifice, and selflessness. 

The fantasy genre (and myth-making more broadly), has the power to show us the deeper beauty that permeates human life, even when we ourselves are blind to it. 

And we are so, so often blind to it.

Once we’ve seen that beauty, it’s hard to forget, and it’s hard to walk away. 

Final Thoughts

I know Tolkien’s thoughts on this subject aren’t everyone’s favorite. Tolkien was famously curmudgeonly⁶, and (at least privately) turned his nose up at many beloved spec-fic works, like Dune and The Chronicles of Narnia.

I certainly don’t believe all fantasy needs to try revealing “higher truths” and “consolation of heart.” 

However, I do think fantasy is at its strongest when it does. Fantasy can do a lot of things: tell an entertaining story, explore cautionary tales, further a political narrative, on and on and on…. 

For the most part, though, other genres can do those things. And it’s true, other genres show us beauty and consolation and elevate our souls and spirits. 

In time, though, I’ll keep exploring what I mean here. I think there’s something innate within fantasy, as distinct from science fiction or any other artform, that lends itself to this sort of “high escapism”; which gives us something we can carry out of those other worlds and back to our daily lives in order to live a more fulfilling existence while we still walk in this world. 

I’ll have more essays on this, without a doubt [UPDATE: Now I do, here, and below]. For now though, I’ll leave it here. 

Thanks, as always, for reading. 

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1. “We get it, you like reading and you get good grades. Now please take off that blue-and-silver scarf. It’s the middle of the summer and look ridiculous.”

2. Of course, even this question is a bit hilarious to me, since its a fundamentally Anglo-centric premise, framing the collapse of the patchwork Angevin ‘empire’ as something purely within the control of strong English kings as opposed to being the result of—oh I don’t know—two decades of sustained and inexorable effort on the part of … (Britannic eyes avert thy gaze) … the French!

3. There are no good medieval or ancient battles on the silver screen. Only ones that are less bad. Oliver Stone’s 2004 film, Alexander, does pretty well with the battles but I found it a woefully ponderous and boring narrative.

4. Doors I ultimately didn’t walk through…

5. or ‘practici’ ? Whatever.

6. Like I said, I felt like he was writing to me specifically.