 

Fantasy

antasy is an extensive, amorphous and ambiguous genre, resist-

F ant to attempts at quick definition. It can incorporate the
serious and the comic, the scary and the whimsical, the moral and
the anarchic. It can be ‘high’ – taking place in alternative worlds –
or ‘low’ – set in the world we know. Or it can combine the two.
Besides texts set in other worlds, fantasy includes stories of magic,
ghosts, talking animals and superhuman heroes, of time travel, hal-
lucinations and dreams. It overlaps with other major genres, notably
the fairy tale and the adventure story, but it intersects also with
almost any other kind of children’s book: the moral tale in the case
of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (), say, or the school
story in the case of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (–).
The various forms of fantasy are, as Brian Attebery has put it,
‘fuzzy sets, meaning that they are defined not by boundaries but by
a center’ and ‘there may be no single quality that links an entire set’.1
But as a concept, fantasy is clearly central to any understanding
of children’s literature. Some have argued that fantasy is the
very core of children’s literature, and that children’s literature did
not properly exist until the imagination had been given an entirely
free rein to entertain children in unreservedly fantastical books
like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland () or
Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets
(). Indeed, Wonderland, like Neverland, Narnia, Oz or Tom’s
Midnight Garden in Philippa Pearce’s  novel, can be regarded
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as spatial – or perhaps psychological – representations of child-

hood, places from which one is exiled as soon as one grows up. But
it has also been argued that all children’s literature is necessarily a
fantasy. In the same way that an author writing about Narnia or
Neverland is creating a fantasy world which they imagine but
cannot actually inhabit, so all adults writing about childhood are
describing a world that they can no longer directly experience.
According to this view, influentially set out by Jacqueline Rose in
The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
(), even the most realistic children’s story – an eighteenth-
century moral tale, say, or a ‘problem novel’ in the twentieth – is
actually an adult’s fantasy of what childhood is, or should be.2 And
then in another sense, it might even be claimed that, because it
relates that which has not taken place, all fiction should be under-
stood as fantasy – although most critics have preferred to limit the
genre to those texts depicting what could not (rather than did not)
happen. Colin Manlove, for instance, argues that fantasy is ‘fiction
involving the supernatural or impossible’.3 This is a workable
definition that will serve well for this chapter (although it will be
possible to consider only a small proportion of children’s fantasy
literature), but, like a number of common assumptions about
fantasy it is far from unproblematic.
For one thing, the supernatural, the impossible and the unreal
are not fixed. Is the bible to be regarded as fantasy fiction because
it includes miracles? Is The Divine Comedy a fantasy because Hell,
Purgatory and Heaven do not exist, or because Dante imagined
them in a particular way? Are books about witchcraft fantasy?
Certainly the two wicked witches in L. Frank Baum’s The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (), or the schools for spells in Jill
Murphy’s The Worst Witch () or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
series, are improbable. But in early modern Europe and America
witchcraft was regarded as a reality, so sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century books such as Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft
(), or Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World
() about the Salem witch trials, surely cannot be considered as
fantasy. In the same way, a Victorian author writing about a human
walking on the moon would be a fantasist, but a post- writer
would not. In other words, fantasy literature depicts things which
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are contrary to prevailing ideas of reality, rather than which are

incontestably supernatural or impossible. But this is only the first
of many complications. What of stories which purport to recount
dreams, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(), John Masefield’s The Box of Delights (), or perhaps
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are ()? These may be
full of impossible things, but it is not defying reality to describe even
the most unrealistic dream. Are such texts fantasy any more than,
say, the stream-of-consciousness narratives of James Joyce or
Virginia Woolf, which tried to show as realistically as possible a
character’s waking thoughts? Books about children’s imaginary
friends are curiously placed too. The eponymous heroine of Helen
Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping stories (–) imagines that she has
a witch for a friend, but it is never quite clear whether the witch is
simply a product of Lizzie’s notorious mendacity, invented to rile
her parents. Are the Lizzie Dripping books fantasy fiction, or
accounts of a teenager’s mischief, or insecurity? It is often very
unclear where fantasy and realism begin and end. Rather than being
a weakness, this ambiguity is one of the strengths of much good
fantasy writing.
What seems particularly misguided is to regard fantasy and
realism as mutually exclusive categories. It is surely not the case that
all literature can be placed somewhere on a scale with pure fantasy at
one end, and pure mimesis (the representation of reality) at the other,
so that to increase the level of fantasy is to diminish the level of reality
(or vice versa). This interpretation can make sense with texts like the
Alice books, in which the gradual disintegration of the normal life of
a genteel Victorian girl is marked by her encounters with progres-
sively curiouser and curiouser creatures and situations. But it does
not take sufficient account of fantasy novels which are just as remark-
able for their representation of reality as for their supernatural
dimension. One good example, already discussed in Chapters  and ,
is Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (), an account of a human
family and a neighbouring brood of polite, thinking, talking robins.
This is an anthropomorphic fantasy, not very dissimilar in some ways
from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows () or E. B.
White’s Stuart Little () or The Trumpet of the Swan (). But
Fabulous Histories is also determinedly – some would say dispiritingly
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– mundane. The robins do not drive motorcars like Grahame’s Toad,

nor become celebrity musicians like White’s swan. Rather, they live
in a nest, eat worms and learn to fly. The human characteristics that
they do have are prosaic: a childish impetuousness, say, which they
can be educated to overcome. This combination of fantasy and reality
was not only popular in the early history of fantasy writing. Richard
Adams published Watership Down in , and its rabbits, like
Trimmer’s robins, can think and talk, but never wear clothes, go to
market, or lose their identity cards – as Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit
or Pigling Bland have a tendency to do. Fred Inglis has succinctly
characterised this form of fantasy by noting that Adams ‘gives rabbits
consciousness, which they do not have, but keeps them as rabbits.’4
Another, rather different example of a text in which reality over-
whelms the fantasy is William Mayne’s Earthfasts (). This
begins with the emergence from the ground, in the later twentieth
century, of a boy called Nellie Jack John who had entered a cave in
search of legendary treasure in . He is befriended by the two
heroes of the book, David and Keith. The ‘explanation’ for this time
travel is that while underground, Nellie Jack John had picked up
one of the candles burning around the sleeping King Arthur and
his knights. Awakening Arthur has brought much disruption:
standing stones become marauding giants, ancient boggarts (or
house ghosts) revive, and finally, terribly, David disappears. Keith
eventually realises that he must replace the candle in order to return
Arthur to suspended animation and rescue his friends. Clearly
Earthfasts is, in some respects, a classic time-slip fantasy. But as
unlikely as it may seem from this synopsis, the novel is remarkable
more for its depiction of life in a quiet Yorkshire village, and of the
relationship between the boys, than for its fantastic elements. David
and Keith’s friendship is the central theme, Mayne subtly suggest-
ing the affection, but also dependence and jealousy, that exists
between them. Like Nellie Jack John, they are stolidly realistic in
their view of events. Indeed, Mayne uses their practicality to
demonstrate how unimportant he thinks it is to make the book’s
fantastical elements entirely credible. ‘It was not possible by ordi-
nary standards of thought, for a boy to walk for two hundred years
underground, and then come out’, David thinks. ‘Nor was it possi-
ble for two more boys to meet him and talk to him, even fight with
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him for a moment.’ But if ‘the only explanation was the impossible
one’ then there are more important things to worry about:

‘We’ve had supper and breakfast,’ said David. ‘But he hasn’t.

We’d better find him and take him some.’
‘It’s unreal,’ said Keith.
‘Unreal but actual,’ said David. ‘It was just like it was. If a
thing’s happened it’s happened.’
‘It isn’t reasonable,’ said Keith. ‘It’s an effect without a
cause.’
‘There’s plenty of them,’ said David. ‘But he’s the most
orphanist person there ever was, and nobody else knows him.
So if he exists, whether he’s a cause or an effect, we’ve still got
to do something about him.’5

Cradlefasts, a sequel published in , continued to subordinate

the fantasy to the representation of David’s emotional develop-
ment, using the time-slip mechanism to allow David to come to
terms with the death of his mother and baby sister. What one comes
to realise with Mayne’s novels is that genre can be very unimpor-
tant. His fantasy writing focuses on character far more than either
plot or the supernatural apparatus. If this is true for Mayne, it is
also true, to a greater or lesser extent, of many of the most well-
regarded authors of fantasy fiction such as Joan Aiken, Alan
Garner, Susan Cooper, Ursula Le Guin and Philip Pullman.
Mayne’s somewhat cavalier attitude to sustaining the integrity of
his fantasy settings flies in the face of J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous
dictum that the author should strive to imagine a fully-formed
‘Secondary World’ into which the reader can enter:

Inside it, what he [the author] relates is ‘true’: it accords with

the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are,
as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is
broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.6

There is no doubt that Tolkien’s strategy has worked. The

phenomenal success of The Hobbit () and The Lord of the
Rings (–), and the sincere flattery of dozens of imitative
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secondary-world fantasies, amply prove this. This is success

achieved even though some critics have found Tolkien’s writing so
pompous that it is laughable. ‘Very seldom does one encounter
emotion this fraudulent and writing this bad in any genre’, writes
John Goldthwaite.7 But this is perhaps missing the point. The
important thing is that even passages of preposterously high-flown
heroics do not break the spell that Tolkien has cast. That readers
tolerate, and even approve, such overblown writing is the proof of
Tolkien’s skill in creating the ‘truth’ of his world.
But Tolkien was surely not quite right about when and why
fantasy fails, at least not for all fantasy writing. In his extremely suc-
cessful ‘Discworld’ series (from ) Terry Pratchett deliberately
destabilises the feasibility of his creation. The world is flat and
travels through space on the backs of four elephants, who them-
selves stand on a giant turtle. Although drawing on Indian mythol-
ogy, this is a cosmology intended to be risible. Similarly, most of his
characters and places have absurd names, designed to amuse rather
than convince, and he delights in building plots by comically twist-
ing well-known stories. In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated
Rodents () a troupe of rats works a scam based on the traditional
story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and it is a rat called ‘Dangerous
Beans’ who eventually saves the town of Bad Blintz from the real
danger they uncover. Pratchett’s kind of comic, self-ironising and
referential fantasy is part of a long tradition. ‘Uncle David’s
Nonsensical Story about Giants and Fairies’ in Catherine Sinclair’s
Holiday House () is similar, with the giant Snap-’em-up
described as so tall that he ‘was obliged to climb up a ladder to comb
his own hair’, boiling his kettle on Mount Vesuvius, and making tea
in a large lake.8 Just as deliberately absurd is W. M. Thackeray’s The
Rose and the Ring (), beginning with Valoroso , King of
Paflagonia, becoming so engrossed in a letter from Prince Bulbo,
heir to the throne of Crim Tartary, that he allows his ‘eggs to get
cold, and leaves his august muffins untasted.’9 In late twentieth-
century children’s books, this whimsicality is understood as post-
modern irony. Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle () is
archly set in a land ‘where such things as seven-league boots and
cloaks of invisibility really exist’. It takes for its heroine Sophie, who
complains that she is the eldest of three children because ‘Everyone
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knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of
you set out to seek your fortunes.’10 Tolkien’s dictum applies even
less to what has been called ‘low fantasy’, in which the magic
intrudes into normal life. P. L. Travers, for example, did little to
maintain the credibility of Mary Poppins (), creating a world in
which statues and characters from books can come alive, where chil-
dren can grow and shrink, where the animals in the zoo mysteriously
find themselves free and the visitors caged, where gingerbread stars
are pasted into the sky. The magic is almost entirely random and,
annoyingly to some critics, inconsistent in scale, sometimes affecting
only the children, sometimes changing the entire world.
What all these examples suggest is that the supernatural and the
normal exist together in fantasy texts, in various proportions and
combinations, but that there is no ratio which governs their rela-
tionship. To increase one is not to diminish the other. Alison Lurie
has noted that William Mayne’s writing is often ‘in the tradition of
[Jorge Luis] Borges or [Gabriel] Garcia Marquez’, and their kind
of magic realist writing is a case in point, depicting events which are
beyond belief but also doggedly realistic.11 Science fiction operates
on a similar principle, but almost exactly the other way around. If
magic realists revel in the impossibility of the things they show,
goading readers into accepting them in spite of their better judg-
ment, science fiction writers delight in the plausibility of their fan-
tasies, daring their readers to disbelieve things which have been
made to seem almost true. Thus, Jules Verne’s stories, such as
Journey to the Centre of the Earth () or From Earth to the Moon
Direct (), are often utterly fantastical, at least in their original
nineteenth-century context, but rely for their effect on an underly-
ing viability. Preparations for the journey into the earth are metic-
ulously specified. The voyage to the moon is described in great
technical detail (remarkably similar to the actual landings of the late
twentieth century). Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea ()
was based on voyages really being undertaken by a French experi-
mental submarine – just as Richard Adams closely based Watership
Down on R. M. Lockley’s scientific study The Private Life of the
Rabbit (). These works offer an endorsement of Tolkien’s view,
that the reader’s conviction must be maintained. The critic Tzvetan
Todorov agreed, using the issue of credibility to distinguish
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between fantasy and the literature of the ‘marvellous’. In the latter,

he argued, the reader simply accepts that supernatural events are
taking place and does nothing to try to explain them. In successful
fantasy, Todorov argued, there is almost always some attempt to
understand and explain the strangeness and, right up until its con-
clusion, the reader often cannot quite decide whether the events
being described are natural or supernatural.12
In children’s fantasy writing this uncertainty is often personified
in the text by a leading character, who represents the readers and their
responses to the strangeness. In Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of
Thomas Kempe (), for example, ten-year-old James Harrison only
gradually comes to realise and accept that the mysterious occurrences
taking place in his new home are caused by a poltergeist. We readers
are also initially unsure, despite the book’s giveaway title, and we
sympathise with James as he tries to find rational explanations for the
ghost’s interventions in his life. Similarly, in secondary world fan-
tasies, even if child protagonists often display a surprising sang-froid
when they suddenly arrive in the new world, their willingness to
suspend disbelief helps to bridge the gap between misgiving and con-
viction for the reader too. In C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe (), Lucy Pevensie, then later her other siblings, act as
the reader’s representatives in Narnia, vicariously exploring and
interpreting. They conduct us through this world, mediating our
encounters with the fantastic until we become acclimatised to the
weirdness. (Lewis’s concern that readers would be mystified or
shocked by his fantasy world explains his insistence, against all
advice, that the recognisable, benign figure of Father Christmas
should feature in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.13) Tolkien
used the same strategy in The Hobbit, carefully mediating the reader’s
reactions to dwarfs, elves, goblins, a wizard and a dragon through the
responses of an equally surprised, safe and familiar pseudo-child,
Bilbo Baggins. Equally, in his two Alice books ( and ), Lewis
Carroll relied on the normality and common sense of Alice to give the
reader some kind of perspective on the bizarre creatures he had
invented. Without her, Wonderland would surely be not intriguing
and amusing, but absurd and tiresome. Her curiosity, concern or
impatience, and her struggle to make sense of what she finds, makes
what would otherwise be baffling twaddle into captivating nonsense.
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However, in some of the best fantasy fiction the protagonist

exploring the fantasy world on our behalf is not wholly to be
trusted. Alice gives a very partial impression of the people she
meets in Wonderland, mediated by her social prejudices and her
rather prim and pretentious character. Likewise, it is one of the suc-
cesses of The Hobbit that Bilbo, and through him the reader, is grad-
ually forced to reassess initial character judgments. The dwarfs, for
example, begin as jolly scamps in coloured hoods who might
have wandered in from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, released in the same year as The Hobbit. But it is Bilbo’s
gradual reassessment of their character and motives that trans-
forms them into the much grimmer, almost Wagnerian desperadoes
of the novel’s close. Those who guide the protagonists can
be untrustworthy too. The Cheshire Cat is famously unfathomable,
but Peter Pan is actually deliberately misleading as an explainer
of the customs of Neverland and the ways of the world. Trying to
persuade Wendy about the faithlessness of adults, he lies, unforgiv-
ably, about having been forgotten and replaced by his mother.14
Farah Mendlesohn has commended the work of Dianna Wynne
Jones because it ‘continually asks us to consider the reliability of
whoever is offering to guide us through the dark woods’.15 This
is disorientating for the reader – as if Gandalf, Hagrid or Mrs
Doasyouwouldbedoneby had turned out to be self-serving and
deceitful impostors.
Some fantasy novels turn all this on its head. In Mayne’s
Earthfasts, or Lively’s Ghost of Thomas Kempe, it is boys from ‘our
world’ (although still fictional of course) who have to help visitors
from the past adapt to their new surroundings. Similarly, in Philip
Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the ‘real’ world is introduced
only in the second volume, The Subtle Knife (). When Lyra, the
self-assured heroine of the first volume, enters ‘our’ Oxford she
suddenly loses all her savvy and confidence and has to be guided by
Will. The first thing that happens to her is that she is knocked down
by a car. She finds herself ‘a lost little girl in a strange world’ and is
mystified by all that she sees: ‘What could those red and green lights
mean at the corner of the road? It was all much harder to read than
the alethiometer.’16 This kind of de-familiarisation can be comic. It
is also part of a long tradition of satirical texts (the most famous of
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which is Montesquieu’s Persian Letters of ) which purport to

describe the travels of a foreigner, describing his bemusement at
customs and habits which the reader takes for granted, and thus
bringing them into question. Transferring this technique to fantasy
fiction can be just as comical and just as satirical, but it also helps to
draw attention to the arbitrariness of a distinction between fantasy
and reality. An excellent example is Howl’s Moving Castle, in which
Diana Wynne Jones takes her characters from the magical land of
Ingary to a contemporary, and rainy, Wales. Narrated from Sophie’s
Ingarrian point of view, Wales is a strange place. People wear tight
blue clothes on their legs which force them to walk ‘in a kind of tight
strut’. In the house they visit, ironically called ‘Rivendell’ after the
‘Last Homely House’ in The Hobbit, people watch ‘magic coloured
pictures moving on the front of a big, square box’ and can hardly be
distracted from what only the reader recognises as computer games.
The trip to Wales strengthens Jones’ characterisation of the wizard
Howl as an ordinary teenage boy. In Wales he is called Howell, a
common name, and he is bullied by his sister, which explains his
dread of confrontation even in Ingary where he is a powerful
wizard. But when he gives his nephews a new computer game that
is set ‘in an enchanted castle with four doors’ each opening on a
different dimension – just like his own Moving Castle in Ingary –
the reader is forced to consider that one person’s fantasy is another’s
reality, that they are relative terms, not opposites, but different ways
of looking at the same thing.17
Alan Garner’s Elidor () provides one of the best examples of
a novel in which the divide between reality and fantasy is disinte-
grating. Four children, a little like the Pevensies, enter a fantasy
world and take back with them four ‘Treasures’. If these are kept
safe, Elidor will be saved from the ‘Darkness’ that has cursed it. But
the rest of the novel is concerned with the attempts of the enemies
of Elidor to break through into the Watson children’s world to take
back the Treasures. Garner’s success is in showing how the ‘real’
and fantasy world lie on top of each other, touching at certain
points. The wasteland of Elidor maps precisely onto the derelict
Manchester of the Watson children, with its bombed-out buildings
and half-demolished slums. There are places where the two worlds
touch, explains Malebron, their guide in Elidor, especially those
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which have been ‘battered by war’ and where ‘the land around
quakes with destruction’: the slums of Manchester and the war-
torn castles of Elidor.18 In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the
touching point is more mundane: a wardrobe (although made from
a Narnian tree, as Lewis explained in his ‘prequel’, The Magician’s
Nephew). But in another way, the parallelism of the two worlds is
even more striking than in Elidor. The Pevensie children have been
evacuated from London to avoid the air-raids of World War Two,
but, as Maria Tatar has pointed out, they ‘end up fighting the war
by proxy against the armies of the White Witch’, until, as Lewis
gleefully puts it, ‘all that foul brood was stamped out’. They then
bring peace and prosperity to post-war Narnia through their wise
and benign rule.19 Five years after the end of the Second World War,
Lewis’s fantasy was celebrating a victory over tyranny and his hopes
for reconstruction. He was also showing how impossible it is to
exclude children from conflict, for the Pevensies find their own way
to fight. Fantasy, we find, is not an escape from reality but, often, a
rewriting of it.
Indeed, even if fantasy writing is, by definition, generally disen-
gaged from reality, it is often easy to discern its entanglement in the
ideological controversies of its day. This may be, of course, because
fantasy so readily invites symbolic readings. Writing during the
political crisis caused by the French Revolution in s Britain, for
instance, the radical Thomas Spence argued that ‘the stories of
enormous and tyrannical giants, dwelling in strong castles, which
have been thought fabulous, may reasonably be looked upon as dis-
guised truths, and to have been invented as just satires on great
lords’.20 Some modern critics’ exercises in contextualisation can
seem even more fanciful, notably attempts to read every detail of the
Alice books as a comment on late-Victorian politics and society.21
Yet there can be little doubt that Kingsley’s The Water-Babies
() was a response to on The Origin of Species () – an attack
on those who unthinkingly denounced Darwin’s theories.22 Equally
apparent are the political resonances of the many children’s science
fiction fantasies published during the Cold War. Robert O’Brien’s
Z for Zachariah (), set after a nuclear holocaust, and Jean Ure’s
Plague  (), about an almost equally destructive pandemic, are
clearly reflective of anxieties about an imminent apocalypse.
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But it is not much more difficult to read the classic ‘high fan-
tasies’ politically. Both Lewis’s Narniad and Tolkien’s The Hobbit
advance a particular political economy, fundamentally that devel-
oped in the later nineteenth century by proto-socialist thinkers like
John Ruskin and William Morris (themselves both authors of
fantasy fiction). By the time Tolkien and Lewis were writing, this
was a more paradoxical position, conservative in its contempt for
the values of industrialised modernity, its casual snobbishness, its
traditionalist pietism and its advocacy of autocratic leadership, but
hostile to the gross inequalities of unfettered capitalism and con-
cerned with the values of ordinary people, especially the artisan.
These contradictions run through The Hobbit. The Trolls are
mocked and derided for their plebeian names (‘Bill Huggins’),
Cockney slang (‘lumme’), vulgar appetites (beer) and supposedly
working-class attitudes (querulousness; an inability to look beyond
the present). The Goblins are characterised as a brutal industrial
proletariat making ‘no beautiful things’ but efficiently mass-
producing ‘Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs’ (some
of these, one notes, featuring on the Soviet flag). Yet Tolkien
equally attacks the rich: not only dragons’ pointless and unpro-
ductive hoarding (‘they hardly know a good bit of work from a
bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current
market value’) but also those leaders who ‘have a good head for
business’ but are ‘no good when anything serious happens’. The
men of Esgaroth depose these ‘old men and the money-counters’,
crowning the belligerent Bard as their king in place of the non-
monarchical ‘Master’. In doing so they reveal a reactionary, author-
itarian and perhaps even slightly fascistic tendency in Tolkien’s
fantasy.23 With its simultaneously anti-socialist and anti-capitalist
agenda, it might be said that Tolkien was trying to steer a middle
way between the main clashing ideologies of the late s, but it
might be noted that the politics of The Hobbit are not, in some ways,
so very far removed from the rhetoric of Nazism.
The politics of gender in The Hobbit are also extremely intrigu-
ing. It is very notable that The Hobbit contains no living female char-
acters. This might, in itself, be indicative of a desire on the author’s
part to make Middle Earth a sort of pre-Lapsarian Eden, free, like
Narnia, from the complications of sex. But it might also be part of
 ’ 

what one critic calls Tolkien’s ‘subtle contempt and hostility

towards women’.24 Yet it must be clear to any reader with an eye for
psychological detail that one of the most important characters in
The Hobbit is Bilbo’s dead mother, Belladonna Took, introduced
right at the start of the novel. It is she who has bequeathed to Bilbo
‘something not entirely hobbitlike’: a thirst for adventure. Once we
notice this, it is difficult not to conclude that Bilbo’s real quest is to
please his absent mother.25 In any case, the novel is hardly a cele-
bration of machismo. Some of the most influential characters
exhibit what might be thought of as ‘female’ characteristics:
Gandalf and Beorn are both nurturing, even maternal figures. And
ultimately Bilbo does not triumph because of any ‘manly’ accom-
plishment, but because he relinquishes any pretensions to honour
or soldierly loyalty, sacrificing his own interests rather than sticking
to a destructive desire for profit or prestige. At the novel’s close he
is congratulated for domestic virtues: ‘If more of us valued food and
cheer and song above hoarded gold,’ says Thorin Oakenshield with
the wisdom of one on his deathbed, ‘it would be a merrier world.’26
Of course it would still be a stretch to regard The Hobbit as a femi-
nist text, but Tolkien’s decision to erase the feminine does raise
some interesting questions about the role of gender in high fantasy
more generally. Low fantasy fiction written for children in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries had been written about girls as
much as boys: Carroll’s Alice, Barrie’s Wendy and Baum’s Dorothy
amongst many others. Tolkien’s decision to exile women from
Middle Earth seems like a deliberate attempt to masculinise the
genre, especially since the sorts of text that he took as a model had
included female characters in important roles, the Anglo-Saxon
epic Beowulf for example. High fantasy of the sort that Tolkien pio-
neered was cast as a masculine genre right from the start.
It has taken decades for this to change. Female protagonists may
have become more common – like Sabriel and Lirael in Garth Nix’s
‘Old Kingdom’ series (‘Abhorsen’ in the USA, –). But
what Ursula Le Guin calls ‘the intense conservatism of traditional
fantasy’ based on ‘the establishment or validation of manhood’ has
remained firmly in place. This can be seen from Le Guin’s own
work, and her reflections on it. In her early fantasy fiction, she came
to realise, she ‘was writing by the rules’, employing an essentially
  

masculinist paradigm. In the first three Earthsea novels (–),

she acknowledged, ‘the fundamental power, magic, belongs to men;
only to men; only to men who have no sexual contact with women.’27
They follow the story of a male magician Ged, and were, by any stan-
dard, extremely successful (as well as being, in some ways, politically
radical, for Ged was black). But when Le Guin came to add to the
series with Tehanu in , followed by Tales from Earthsea and The
Other Wind in , she used the opportunity to recreate her imag-
ined world from a feminist perspective. Not only did she make her
central characters female, but she ‘reinvented the past’, as Perry
Nodelman has put it, to show that magic had once been practiced by
women, that the forces of patriarchy had later combined to deny
them this power, and that Ged’s own magic derived from an ‘unau-
thorised’ female teacher.28 Le Guin sought to show how males had
appropriated magic in Earthsea, how this had caused social and spir-
itual corruption, and how the damage could be repaired by the less
aggressive behaviour of Tehanu, whose magic aims at reconciliation
rather than dominion. But of course this feminised, feminist revi-
sion provides another demonstration of the ways in which fantasy
has been adapted to suit changing social and cultural values. As Le
Guin put it, ‘even in Fairyland there is no escape from politics.’29
If it is a misapprehension that fantasy is not political, so it is also
wrong-headed to imagine that fantasy writing is always liberating
in a way that other genres are not. Fantasy does, of course, allow the
reader to enter worlds where normal laws and limits do not apply.
Harry Potter is clearly liberated by removal from his dreary and dis-
ciplined life in Privet Drive to the magical world of Hogwarts.
Readers enjoy Rowling’s books, it is often said, precisely because
they are not like humdrum life. In particular it has been suggested
that they have been popular because they offer a change from real-
istic, issue-based fiction that, some say, is imposed on unwilling
children by adults who think they know what is best. But fantasy is
seldom actually very anarchic. Hogwarts, like most schools in chil-
dren’s literature, is a very regulated world: disciplined, rule-bound
and hierarchically ordered. High fantasy too is generally very struc-
tured. It tends to abound in authority figures who impose order, the
benign but dictatorial Aslan in the Narniad being a classic example.
And most authors are careful to ensure that their protagonists (and
 ’ 

thereby their readers) always know exactly what they are doing in
the fantasy world. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it is
notable that the Pevensie children are not much disorientated by
their arrival in Narnia. This is partly because of their trusting
nature, but also because they so obviously have a purpose there. The
prophesy explained to them by Mr Beaver, but alluded to by Mr
Tumnus almost as soon as Lucy first steps into Narnia, leaves little
room to doubt the children’s trajectory:

‘Down at Cair Paravel – that’s the castle on the sea coast down
at the mouth of this river which ought to be the capital of the
whole country if all was as it should be – down at Cair Paravel
there are four thrones and it’s a saying in Narnia time out of
mind that when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve
sit in those four thrones, then it will be the end not only of the
White Witch’s reign but of her life, and that is why we had to
be so cautious as we came along, for if she knew about you four,
your lives wouldn’t be worth a shake of my whiskers!’30

This use of a prophecy that must be fulfilled is a common motif

in fantasy writing. In Edidor the Watsons are even shown a book by
Malabron which contains a picture of them, as well as the usual
prophetic verses.31 It is, perhaps, a hangover from the medieval quest
narratives which influenced much fantasy fiction. But it is also a
means by which the fantasy world can be ordered. In Russell
Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child () there is both a quest and a
prophecy. The Child, welded to his father because together they
form a clockwork toy, wants to find a home and a mother, as well as
to become ‘self-winding’. Hoban emphasises the quest element by
introducing a frog toward the beginning who pretends to read the
mice’s fortune. He is as surprised as anyone when a true spirit of
prophecy mysteriously overcomes him and he divines that ‘The
enemy you flee at the beginning awaits you at the end.’ ‘That isn’t
much to look forward to’, says the Mouse, rightly, but his Child, and
the reader, take a sense of direction from the prediction.32 Prophecy
and quest mean that readers are likely to be less bewildered by the
weird fantasy world Hoban has created. Alice’s progress along the
chessboard, culminating in her inevitable coronation as a queen,
  

imposes the same kind of order in Carroll’s Through the Looking

Glass. Some authors deliberately play with this prophesy motif. In
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones introduces a witch’s
curse in Ingary which orders the fate of the novel’s lead characters,
but turns out actually to be a photocopied homework exercise which
has somehow been carried through from ‘our’ world. A prophesised
narrative structure can be constricting. In The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe the Pevensies’ destiny is set out for them, and the only
anxiety is whether Edmund will be brought round to join his siblings
on the four thrones. In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman seems to
be reacting against the lack of free-will in Narnia. Lyra and Will (his
name is far from insignificant) are continually having to make their
own choices. It is noticeable that, unlike the Pevensies, Harry Potter,
or the return of the king in The Lord of the Rings, their coming is not
foretold, although the fate of the world hangs on it.
We get the impression that Narnia has been waiting for the
Pevensie children, as Sleeping Beauty’s palace has been waiting for
the Prince. If Narnia has not quite been in a state of suspended ani-
mation, then it has certainly been gripped by an endless winter,
with all the unnatural stasis and sterility this implies, until the chil-
dren’s arrival brings renewal. Indeed, in the majority of parallel-
world writing we find that the world revolves around the
protagonists. This is not to say that they remain stationary while the
world around them is transformed, although this does sometimes
seem to be the case, as in Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams
(), an account of the adventures in a dream-world created by
the heroine’s doodles with a magic pencil while she is confined in a
sick-bed. Rather, in books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
we get the impression that the fantasy world lacks an independent
existence, that it has only been created for the benefit of the central
characters. Carroll’s Alice books provide another example. The
Mad Hatter’s tea party might have been going on before Alice
arrives, and the tarts might have been stolen out of her sight, but we
nevertheless get the impression that Wonderland and the Looking-
Glass world exist for Alice’s benefit, and almost that the inhabitants
are on standby until Alice appears to interview them. We might call
this ‘Ptolemaic’ fantasy, the world revolving around the protagonist
as Ptolemy thought the sun, stars and planets revolved around the
 ’ 

Earth. But some fantasies are more ‘Copernican’, with the protag-
onist often disoriented, travelling through a fixed universe, as
Copernicus realised the Earth revolved around the sun.
Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe () is one such
text. The past inhabitants of a house called Green Knowe blithely
continue to live their unchanging lives, as ghosts of a sort, while the
at first mystified protagonist, Tolly, slowly learns about their
history and is occasionally able to see them and join in with their
games. Kingsley’s The Water-Babies is similar. Tom, a chimney-
sweep, is transformed – into an ‘Eft’ – which means that he can
begin a new, clean life in an aquatic world which was always there,
but hidden (though what Kingsley does not make immediately clear
is that Tom has in fact drowned, and that his existence as a Water-
Baby is his afterlife). In this kind of ‘Copernican’ fantasy, the pro-
tagonists are generally powerless and shy in the fantasy world. In
‘Ptolemaic’ fantasies, child characters become powerful and impor-
tant figures, although in their real worlds they have been weak. In
Garner’s Elidor, Roland is the youngest and feeblest of the siblings,
but ‘Here, in Elidor,’ he is told by Malebron, ‘you are stronger’, and
discovering this, he leads his siblings in their quest.33 For Roland,
as for Harry Potter, Lyra Silvertongue, Bilbo Baggins and the
Pevensies (especially Lucy), all of whom are subordinate in their
home worlds, no less than the fate of the world rests on their shoul-
ders once they enter the fantasy.
Another common assumption about fantasy writing is that it rep-
resents the antithesis of the didactic tradition in children’s litera-
ture. Many histories of children’s books make this case, arguing that
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, delight and
instruction were at war within children’s texts, fantasy eventually,
and inevitably, triumphing.34 This paradigm can be collapsed in at
least two ways. First, many early didactic texts were often couched
as fantasies. Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories () and
Dorothy Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse () are
good examples. Eighteenth-century secondary world fantasies exist
too, most famously Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (), which came to
be read by children soon after its publication. Alternative worlds are
also to be found in some very early texts that were always intended
for the young, such as The Prettiest Book for Children; Being the
  

History of the Enchanted Castle; Situated in One of the Fortunate

Isles, and Governed by Giant Instruction (). The description
provided by ‘Don Stephen Bunyano’ focuses almost entirely on the
educational opportunities that the Giant Instruction wisely pro-
vides there, but the Fortunate Isles are part of the tradition that
would lead to Charles Kingsley’s St. Brendan’s Isle in The Water-
Babies, J. M. Barrie’s Neverland or the archipelago of islands in Le
Guin’s Earthsea series.
Second, didacticism has consistently remained at the heart of chil-
dren’s fantasy writing. The ground-breaking fantasies of the s
and s certainly had not lost their determination to teach. It is
difficult to imagine a more preachy text than The Water-Babies,
which uses the medium of fantasy to attack spiritual corruption as
well as the more worldly scandal of child chimney-sweeps. Mrs
Bedonebyasyoudid represents the spirit of the Old Testament, and
Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby the New. Mother Carey and the little
girl Ellie play other parts in this theological masquerade, allowing
Tom, eventually, to find his way to Heaven by going to the Other-
end-of-Nowhere – that is to say, Hell – to save his old master, Grimes.
The novel reads rather like a medieval morality play. George
MacDonald’s novels expound similar social and spiritual teachings.
At the Back of the North Wind () combines accounts of the harsh
lives of the poor, like Nanny, a destitute crossing-sweeper, with an
allegorical representation of salvation. In The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe the didacticism is even clearer. Edmund transgresses,
giving way to greed, selfishness and spite, and is punished by the
cruelty of the White Witch and being denied a Christmas present.
This, it has been pointed out, is the sort of morality that a child can
easily understand and might wish for: no tedious moral lectures nor
long drawn-out process of repentance, but clear punishment, quick
confession, and a swift readmission to the good graces of those he has
wronged. His sins are completely forgotten by the time he takes up
his place as one of the monarchs of Narnia.35
Other fantasy novels teach more sophisticated lessons. In Anne
Barrett’s Caterpillar Hall (), for instance, a magic umbrella
allows Penelope to see the moments from other people’s childhoods
when they wanted something as badly as she wanted the umbrella.
Their frustrated desires explain why they have become the adults
 ’ 

they are – strict, sad, wistful, angry – and Penelope cannot help but
empathise. The didacticism of The Hobbit is less ostentatious but
equally central to the story. Suddenly taking a more serious turn,
the novel ends with Bilbo stealing the prized Arkenstone from his
dwarf companions, or rather appropriating it as his share of the
treasure, and passing it to the dwarfs’ enemies so that it can be used
as a bargaining chip in the brokering of a treaty. Read as a fable, the
moral is about the importance of overcoming avarice and selfish-
ness, perhaps even selfhood. This goes some way to answering the
question archly raised by the narrator at the very start of the novel:
Bilbo ‘may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well,
you will see’. He gains much from the adventure, including the ring
that would feature so prominently in the Tolkien’s further account
of Middle Earth’s history, but it is how he changes as a person that
the narrator was surely referring to. ‘You are not the hobbit that you
once were’, Gandalf tells him at the end of the novel.36 What Bilbo
has acquired is a stronger sense of his identity, the knowledge that
he can survive outside the comfort of his home, and a life of cre-
ativity and fulfilment instead of timidity and torpor. Ultimately,
The Hobbit is more a novel of personal development, or
Bildungsroman, than a straightforward fantasy quest narrative. Even
Carroll’s Alice books, often regarded as the books in which unham-
pered fantasy finally triumphed over the instructive tendency, can
be regarded as didactic in this way. There may be no religious alle-
gory, nor social realism, and it would be reductive to suggest that
Carroll had intended only to write a Bildungsroman, but Alice does
return from Wonderland wiser, and more aware of her own identity,
than she was. At the start of her adventure she is downright insen-
sitive. Meeting a mouse, the first thing that comes into Alice’s mind
as a fit subject for conversation is her cat, Dinah, ‘such a capital one
for catching mice’. She repeats the same mistake several times, but
slowly learns to be more empathetic. By the time she is being told
by the Mock Turtle about whiting (a kind of fish), she has at least
come to realise that she must watch what she says: ‘I’ve often seen
them at dinn—’, she says, checking herself just in time (leaving the
Mock Turtle to wonder where Dinn actually is).37
More obvious is Carroll’s representation of his heroine’s psy-
chological development. From the fall down the rabbit-hole, which
  

might easily be understood as a kind of birth, Alice grows steadily

in Wonderland, her adventures paralleling a child’s gradual matu-
ration. Her first encounters are with small, cute creatures – rabbits
and mice – but progressively she meets more frightening adults: the
Duchess, the Hatter, the Queen. These are not the safe, pleasant
interactions of the nursery. Nor do these new acquaintances help
Alice much, but rather challenge her. They are competitive, capri-
cious, selfish and deceitful. Increasingly, she is confronted with all
sorts of ‘adult’ concerns too: anger, fear, nostalgia, death, judgment.
These encounters shape Alice’s sense of self, which she had
wrongly thought of as set and stable. She comes to doubt herself,
and to develop – in size, but also psychologically. Indeed, the books
can be understood as a quest for identity. In Through the Looking
Glass, Alice advances until she reaches psychic fulfilment as a
queen. In Wonderland, she keeps growing and shrinking until she
finds out what her right size is. The text is dominated by questions
of identity. Having grown enormously, she loses the certainty that
she and her body are one, considering sending a letter to ‘Alice’s
Right Foot, Esq.’ – a male form of address, we note. Later, she seri-
ously wonders if she is actually Ada or Mabel. It is the Caterpillar
who confronts her most bluntly about this. ‘Who are you?’ he
quizzes. Alice cannot answer, saying that she was one thing when
she got up, but ‘I think I must have been changed several times since
then’. For the caterpillar, presumably later to metamorphose into a
moth or butterfly, such transformation is natural. For Alice it is a
source of great anxiety, manifested when the Wood Pigeon asks why
it should matter whether she is a little girl or a serpent: ‘ “It matters
a good deal to me,” said Alice hastily’.38
If Alice is gaining a sense of self, she is also learning other vital
lessons about the rules of life, and more particularly, their dismay-
ing inconstancy. The Queen’s croquet game (or the Caucus Race,
or Lobster Quadrille) is incomprehensible to Alice, apparently
without rules. But everyone else seems to understand. As is often
pointed out, this replicates the way that many aspects of the adult
world might appear to a child encountering them for the first time.
Alice longs for rules, but is constantly disappointed. She believes
she knows how tea parties should be conducted, but the Mad Hatter
shows she cannot be so sure. She is proud of knowing how judicial
 ’ 

trials work, but the Wonderland court works on principles that she
cannot fathom. Only the Cheshire Cat seems to acknowledge that
there are no rules and one can never fully make sense of what is hap-
pening. The Alice books are not didactic in a conventional sense,
but like other Bildungsromans, by dramatising some of the
difficulties of interacting with the adult world, they do offer the
reader an oblique education, and comment on, if they do not quite
help with, the construction of a stable identity.
Fantasy is extremely well suited to consideration of questions
of identity. The journey to another world, or another time, de-
contextualises the protagonists, removing them from the structures
that locate and bind them into a particular role within the family,
the school, or the larger society. They then have to discover afresh
who they are, and, usually, can return to their reality at the end of
the novel with a stronger sense of themselves. Perhaps this helps to
explain why children’s fantasy has become increasingly prevalent.
Quite apart from the many satisfactions it offers to the readers,
authors find the form eminently suitable for the transmission of
lessons on selfhood, these being regarded now as the best kind of
instruction that good children’s literature can and should teach.
Identity exchange fantasies, such as F. Anstey’s Vice Versa; or, A
Lesson to Fathers () or Mary Rogers’ Freaky Friday (),
show this clearly. In the former a haughty businessman and his
schoolboy son find themselves inhabiting one another’s bodies; in
the latter, a teenager is metamorphosed into her mother. By the end
of the novels, the characters have gained a cross-generational
empathy and a stronger sense of their own identity. The same ques-
tions of selfhood are explored more directly in Penelope Farmer’s
Charlotte Sometimes (), in which a s schoolgirl is somehow
transported back and forth between her own time and the period of
the First World War, where everybody knows her as a girl called
Clare. Unsurprisingly, Charlotte finds it increasingly difficult to
cling to her own identity. She has to discover what it is that makes
her Charlotte, and not Clare. Less schizophrenic, but no less dis-
concerting, is Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, in which the young
heroine Sophie is magically aged. She prematurely learns a great
deal about life as an old woman, but she also comes to accept that,
even as a girl, she possesses many of the characteristics that she will
  

have when old. The reader finds, from Sophie’s experience, that the
child is already the adult that he or she will become. The search for
one’s mature identity is central to Philip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials too. Children’s demons change shape, but settle into a
fixed form when they reach adulthood. The trilogy concludes when
Lyra and Will’s demons finally settle, symbolising the same realisa-
tion of identity that forms the denouement of many other children’s
fantasy novels.
The relationship between childhood and adulthood is a related
theme, often central to fantasy fiction and particularly time-slip
novels. Philippa Pearce wrote that she ‘wanted to explore that
almost unimaginable concept of adults having once been children’,
and to do so devised Tom’s Midnight Garden ().39 Its epony-
mous hero is a lonely child on the verge of adulthood who has been
sent away to live with his strict aunt and uncle. He finds that, every
night, he can visit a garden that no longer exists. There, he finds
solace in the friendship of a Victorian girl called Hattie. Only right
at the end of the novel does he discover that the old woman who
lives upstairs from his aunt and uncle is in fact Hattie, now grown
up. Tom’s Midnight Garden is an entrancing and gripping novel and
it would be quite unfair to call it a didactic text, but it was clearly
constructed to tutor its readers. Each time Tom returns to the
garden he finds Hattie at a different age. When, finally, he returns
to find that Hattie has grown up, he is devastated, but slowly he
learns to reconcile himself to the loss, or rather to accept that people
develop and change. The lesson applies directly to Tom too, for we
understand that his unhappiness was the result of an unwillingness
to accept change in his own life. As well as showing that the old were
once young, Pearce teaches young readers that they cannot hold
onto childhood forever. The book serves equally well to teach adult
readers that they cannot forever treat their sons and daughters as
children. All things change, Pearce shows, but just as Hattie,
however old, will always be Hattie, and just as the house to which
Tom has moved will always retain traces of its former inhabitants,
so identity remains secure despite external alteration.
Perry Nodelman has noted that ‘children’s literature is frequently
about coming to terms with a world one does not understand – the
world as defined and governed by grownups and not totally familiar
 ’ 

or comprehensible to children’.40 Good fantasy literature dramatises

this experience, transporting its characters into a past time or new
world where all is strange and perplexing. Perhaps this mirroring of
their own daily experience helps to explain why children relish
fantasy so much. Or perhaps it is because in a new world where
nobody knows the rules, children are not placed at a competitive dis-
advantage, and consequently feel the equal of adults in a way that
they do not in their real lives. In certain time-slip novels, when a
figure from the past is propelled into their lives, these children
become, relatively speaking, figures of knowledge and authority.
This is certainly the case in Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe or
Mayne’s Earthfasts. In other fantasies, where the children are sent
into the past, or another dimension, they are equally significant,
fêted because of their exoticism, or honoured and empowered
because, like the Pevensies in Narnia, they find themselves to be
somehow vital to the well-being of the world. This fantasy of
empowerment is central to the appeal of fantasy writing to children.
But the genre has appealed to the adults who write it surely at least
in part because it can so easily be adapted to provide lessons of all
kinds, moral, political, practical and psychological.

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

• No children’s books are pure fantasy, but combine fanciful and

realistic elements. To increase the amount of fantasy is not to
diminish the reality, nor vice versa. Fantasy has often been used
to satirise or rewrite reality.
• Most fantasy writing is not completely anarchic, but presents
carefully structured alterative realities which are usually con-
trolled by strict rules.
• Fantasy can be both empowering or disorientating for protago-
nists and readers.
• The process of self-discovery, and questions about how identity
remains fixed despite external change, are central to much good
fantasy writing.
• Fantasy has always included, and continues to include, didactic
elements.