which would be recognisable to a medieval Briton, and the ideals are a distillation of
those which have come down to the twentieth century as the Arthurian tradition—the
dream of Camelot. And although most of the main characters are from the upper classes
—kings and queens, princes and princesses, wizards, knights and ladies—there is
always the chance that the orphan will prove himself worthy (in which case, he, too, will
join the elite at the end of the tale). In addition to these rather concrete materials,
medieval romance also provides high fantasy with something more abstract, its style.
What separates the good from the bad in high fantasy has less to do with the material
on which the writer draws than it does on how he or she tells the story. Ursula Le Guin
argues that the ‘style is, of course the book... If you remove the style, all you have left is
a synopsis of the plot’ (1982:84). Style is especially important in high fantasy, Le Guin
continues, because to ‘create what Tolkien calls a “secondary universe” is to make a new
world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act
of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice. And every word
counts’ (1982:85). The elevated and sometimes formal style of the medieval romance is
certainly appropriate to the actions being described. As Dainis Bisenieks comments,
‘There is no pretending, as in some modern novels, that inconsequence is the rule of life;
the tales of Faerie are of those who walk with destiny and must be careful what they are
about’ (1974: 617). Chronologically more recent than myth and epic, medieval romance
may be the most observable ancestor of and influence on high fantasy.
It was, in fact, the interest of the English romantics in the medieval which led directly
to the writing of high fantasy. Whereas myth, epic, legend, romance, and folktale contain
most of the elements which are found in modern high fantasy, they are traditional
narrative forms from ages in which the distinctions between the mimetic and the fantastic
were less formalised than they are now. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
scientific method, with its emphasis on rationalism and experimentation, began to take
hold; and the literary world, like the scientific and technological worlds, attempted to
ban the fantastic as unsuitable for modern, educated tastes. The prose which grew
during that period—history, biography, newspaper reporting, and the essay—reflected
the interest of the times in things factual.
The romantics, rejecting or bypassing the rational orientation of the previous
centuries, looked to the medieval and beyond for their inspiration, bringing back to
popularity the vast resources of the fantastic in the Celtic and Scandinavian literatures
as well as reinvigorating classical pieces such as The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Reawakened interest in pre-Renaissance literatures, along with the popularity of gothic
fiction and a century of tales imported from the Middle East, the Far East and South
America, contributed to the conditions in which high fantasy could be created. In
addition, other intentionally fantastic literature was appearing in Britain in the latter
half of the nineteenth century. John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, Lewis
Carroll’s Alice books, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Charles Kingsley’s The
Water-Babies and George MacDonald’s numerous books, among other works, while not
high fantasies themselves, certainly helped set the stage for the creation of that form.
That creation began with William Morris.
Morris, well-known for his interest in all aspects of the medieval and especially his
literary inclinations toward the Arthurian materials and his interest in the Icelandic
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