fantasy as that fantasy ‘set in a secondary world...as opposed to Low Fantasy which
contains supernatural intrusions into the “real” world’ (1986:52).
J.R.R.Tolkien was one the first critics to articulate the importance of the secondary
world; in ‘On fairy-stories’ (1947), he delineated the concept and stressed the importance
of its cohesiveness.
What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He
makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he 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. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the
little abortive Secondary World from outside.
Tolkien 1966b: 37Tolkien realised the importance of the reality and cohesiveness of the secondary world
not from writing The Hobbit, which is, along with The Lord of the Rings, certainly an
excellent example of the secondary world taken seriously, but from his study of ancient
epic, especially Beowulf.
In ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ (1936), published a year before The Hobbit,
Tolkien defended the reality of the monsters against those who would see them only as
symbolic or metaphoric constructs. The Beowulf poet, Tolkien argues, ‘esteemed
dragons...as a poet, not as a sober geologist’ (1966a: 11). ‘A dragon is no idle fancy’, he
continues (15), and ‘the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are
essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty
tone and high seriousness’ (19). Tolkien the academic scholar knew that before Beowulf
could be taken seriously as a poem the monsters had to be taken seriously as monsters,
monsters which actually existed within the world created by the artist; Tolkien the high
fantasy writer knew that before a work of high fantasy could be taken seriously the author
had to create a world that was real, a world of logical internal cohesiveness, within the
pages of the story.
Writers and critics since Tolkien have, consciously or unconsciously, echoed his
sentiments on the need for the author and the reader to take seriously the fantastic
elements of the secondary world. Ursula Le Guin has asserted:
I think ‘High Fantasy’ a beautiful phrase. It summarises, for me, what I value most
in an imaginative work: the fact that the author takes absolutely seriously the
world and the people which he has created, as seriously as Homer took the Trojan
War, and Odysseus; that he plays the game with all his skill, and all his art, and all
his heart. When he does that, the fantasy game becomes one of the High Games
men play.
Cameron 1971:137And it is not coincidence that Le Guin, like Tolkien, draws upon ancient epic for
analogues by which to explain high fantasy.
HIGH FANTASY 301