notes on Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy

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all quotations from Jamie Williamson, The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

For example, on the simple level of original publication context, a cursory look at the canon reveals an immediate rift. As I have noted, Morris, Dunsany, Cabell, Eddison, and Tolkien emerged in the world of “literary” book publishing. By contrast, Lovecraft, Smith, Howard, Pratt and de Camp, Leiber, and Vance emerged in the ephemeral world of popular publishing—pulp and early genre-book publishing. The literary writers, with the exception of Dunsany, wrote primarily book-length narratives, while long works by the popular authors, with the exception of Pratt, rarely reached the length of the shortest of Morris’s romances. When the literary writers published in periodicals, it was in Harper’s rather than Weird Tales; when the popular writers published books, they were published by Arkham House rather than Houghton Mifflin Co. The work by the literary writers on the whole stands apart from other contemporary forms of fiction, whether literary or popular; the tropes and conventions of science fiction, horror, and adventure fiction actively inform the work of the popular writers. The prose styles of the popular writers (excepting Smith) tended to be unadorned and contemporary; the literary writers often developed carefully nuanced, archaized, poetic styles.^[35] (13)

(we might also take this as a cue to think about the class character of pregenre “literary” fantasy vs. pregenre “popular” fantasy.)

Needless to say, none of these works represent the passing on of living, received traditions: [Kenneth] Morris was not a bard who derived his narrative matter from a living bardic tradition, [T.H.] White was not a medieval troubadour passing on his variation on what he had heard or read in handwritten manuscripts of King Arthur, and so on. All these authors were engaging creatively the written remains of narrative traditions long dead—remains that were processed by antiquarians and scholars after having been largely forgotten for centuries,^[61] transformed into mediated texts and translations, and then read in the form of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century book by the authors. What the modern authors “knew” of the living contexts that bred the works that inspired them were the reconstructions (including mediated texts) of linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Again, the modern fantasy versions of these tales are predicated precisely on distance from the living contexts in which the matters originated. (29-30)

I (likely obviously) agree with the fundamental point here, but there’s a really striking elision from the body of his argument here, relegated to note 61:

By way of contrast, it is striking to note the virtually complete lack of fantasy interpretations of (suitable, it would seem) narrative material from the Bible, which does occupy a central place in the living, received traditions of European and Euro-American Christianity. This is not to say that the texts that compose the Bible are not, in fact, more ancient than most of those noted previously or that the world that bred the texts is not as or more remote. But it is to say that, since the introduction of Christianity, the Bible has had a continuous, unbroken presence in Western culture, its stories forming part of a living, received tradition, and there is attached to it a webwork of established exegesis that does not encourage the kind of creative reshaping we see in the work of White and Morris.^[62] But at least as significant as the hostility of certain orthodoxies to this kind of thing is the simple fact that the Bible—though it may be chronologically distant from the modern world, though the world from which it emerged may be culturally distant from the European and European-rooted cultures for which it became a sacred book—has been a constant presence for centuries up to nearly two millennia and a stable, known quantity that never had to be “recovered.” A stable, known quantity, I would suggest, is not what the modern imagination geared to “romance, or faery literature” most readily turns to for subject matter. (30)

there is, of course, as Williamson notes, obviously influence from Christianity on fantasy:

I am being deliberately narrow here and restricting myself to works that explicitly engage biblical material—that is, retell a story from the Bible. In a broader sense, of course, one can see obvious biblical influences: the imprint of the Old Testament can be discerned on the shape of Tolkien’s “Quenta Silmarillion,” the influence of the King James Bible on Lord Dunsany’s prose is readily apparent, and so on. (208n63)

but a) I think he’s correct to distinguish between the strong influence of Christianity on Tolkien’s work (e.g.) and the kind of retelling we find in The Coming of Cuculain or the work of Evangeline Walton and b) I can’t think of a single “Bible retelling” marketed as fantasy from the last...since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, essentially. that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t any, but I think I’m sufficiently conscious of the field that we can take it as an indication that they’re still very rare.

the chronological structure of Williamson’s reading of 18th-c antiquarianism is bizarre because he starts his consideration of the growth of popular antiquarianism with Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, on which he spends several pages, suggests that this was part of “[t]he new enthusiasm for the idea of indigenous narrative traditions as a basis for poetry” (62) and only after another two paragraphs does he belatedly turn to Ossian, from which this explosion of interest in oral narrative and poetic traditions originated.

this would be weird enough in and of itself, but this is how he links his (quite limited frankly) discussion of Percy and his cultural context with his (weirdly even more limited) discussion of Macpherson:

All this together still yields little in the way of narrative, again primarily due to lack of texts to serve as models. However, the desire for “Gothic” [i.e., ancient northern/northwestern European] antiquities, and the idea of a link between contemporary oral and ancient narrative traditions, merged during the 1760s in a sensational literary phenomenon of crucial signficance here [i.e.,Ossian]. (62)

OSSIAN IS THE ORIGIN OF THAT IDEA MY DUDE. ONE OF MACPHERSON’S CENTRAL CLAIMS, THE CLAIM THAT GOT JOHNSON ET AL. UP IN RACIST ARMS, WAS PRECISELY THAT THERE WAS A LINK BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY ORAL AND ANCIENT NARRATIVE TRADITIONS.

to present Ossian as simply “a sensational literary phenomenon” is simply bizarre in this context: the Fragments of Ancient Poetry (transparently the model for Percy’s title!) predates the Reliques by five years; Fingal predates it by four years and Temora by two. especially in the political context Williamson correctly if only somewhat vaguely indicates — the rise of early nationalism, manifest in these cases in a “patriotic” search for indigenous literary origins to set alongside classical models — it’s honestly kind of revisionist to ignore the fact that Macpherson was working in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising, during a period of broad institutional efforts to suppress Gaelic culture. that’s why it mattered to him, and that’s part of why people got so mad about it! PERCY WAS RESPONDING TO MACPHERSON. you can’t separate Ossian as a “literary phenomenon” out from “genuine” antiquarianism in the 1760s!!!!! there’s a reason Percy’s introductory essay pointedly claims that “the scene of the finest Scottish ballads is laid in the south of Scotland”!!!

sorry, even after writing that out I’m still feeling unhinged about this. what kind of English chauvinism is it to position Percy who, again, named his book after Macpherson’s first collection, ahead of Macpherson as the inciting incident for the rise of popular antiquities in the 1760s!!!!!!!!!

it’s also honestly kind of unhinged to say this —

But it is precisely the “inauthenticity” of Ossian—an inauthentic text weaving in transformed material from authentic tradition—which makes him important in the present context. In order to make his hoax credible, his matter, style, and presentation had to accord with eighteenth-century notions of what such poetry would be like [I want to do an annotated edition of this section where I add a Gillies citation here and then have a long argumentative footnote about Macpherson]. For matter, actual Gaelic tradition furnished him with “Homeric” warrior heroes, and the sometimes martial, sometimes sentimental narrative frames accorded with such characters. The lofty, diffuse, elegiac style also suited eighteenth-century preconceptions. The appended essays spoke to the presumed context of the poems’ composition.

In all three of these areas, MacPherson was doing very close to what many—both Morrises, Cabell, Tolkien—of the pregenre literary fantasy writers were doing. Tolkien built his initial fictional indigenous English mythology out of chosen bits of Germanic and Celtic (and other) tradition and a great deal of his own invention. The content and style of that “mythology” was deliberately intended to evoke an impression of the authentically traditional. The essays—whether independent pieces on language or the appendices affixed to LOTR—further underscore the intended effect of “authenticity.”

The major difference is that Tolkien did not actually attempt to deceive his readers: the air of authenticity is clearly part of the fiction. One suspects that Tolkien had more scruples than MacPherson, but it must also be remembered that in the 1760s there was no solid comparative basis for evaluating MacPherson’s claims [except perhaps among, you know, Gaelic-speakers[, which, combined with a broad predisposition to believe the claims, rendered the fraud less immediately obvious. Even if he had been an unscrupulous man, Tolkien would not have been able to pull a similar hoax off.

But beyond MacPherson’s extratextual claims, there is not a great deal of difference between what he was doing and what the pregenre literary writers were doing. In a context where ancient Gaelic narrative traditions were largely inaccessible, MacPherson in effect made a tradition up. While, with the qualified exception of Tolkien and to some degree Kenneth Morris, there was not an issue of actual inaccessible tradition to contend with come the twentieth century, the “making up” part is virtually identical. (63-64)

— and then still only spend about a page and a half total talking about Ossian in your history of pregenre fantasy! what!

The Greece of Shelley, as the passage from Alastor suggests, is turned to the Romantic East rather than the sober, staid, instructional classics of Pope. This is also true of the Greece of Shelley’s younger contemporary John Keats. In the early sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1817), Homer’s works are deipicted as a “demesne” in the imaginative “realms of gold,” and the reader’s “travels” into that work are travels of discovery: the invocation of a dehistoricized Cortez suggests the penetration and opening up of an exotic territory, unknown and remote from the present world, to which its “pure serene” implicitly stands in contrast. The “realms of gold” are as dehistoricized as Cortez; there is not even the kind of appeal to classical practice that Shelley makes for Prometheus Unbound. This is not the Homer or Greece of antiquarians or classical scholars, however much it may have depended on their work: as with Shelley, at its center is a peculiarly modern, imaginative perspective on antiquity, far closer to the “imaginary worlds” of fantasy than the classical milieu associated with the Enlightenment. (79)

this I think matches my intuition that the influence on classicism on fantasy is a smaller factor than Orientalism and Ossianism — classicism as offshoot of Orientalism. (but also the invocation of Cortez here! It’s All Connected.)

I do feel like Williamson’s argument is undercut by bracketing the influence of other European languages in his Romanticism chapter to two and a half pages on German at the very end, part of which is really about Sarah Coleridge’s Phantasmion. he’s barely talked about contes de fée or French Orientalism (especially weird considering how important Galland was to the development of fantasy), and to spend so little time on the Germans is pretty wild! I think there’ll be more in the next chapter (tracing the impact of the Grimms on Victorian fantasy), but…still.

and this is related — because it’s all connected — to his understatement or underpresentation of the importance of Ossian, which was hugely influential on continental European Romanticism, especially Germans. there’s also, you know, a direct through-line from Ossian to the Grimms, by way of Herder.

More pertinent in the present context, however, is Longfellow’s earlier The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Rather than “elevating” historical subjects, or turning the rustic parlor of a New England village inn into a crossroads of international storytelling, here Longfellow turned to American Indian oral traditions—no doubt recognizing that, if there was narrative matter indigenous to the North American continent roughly corollary to the Arthurian, Greek, or Norse myths and legends, it would emerge from the traditions of the American Indians. Perhaps spurred by his contemporary James Russell Lowell’s brief “A Chippewa Legend” (1843), Longfellow turned to Henry Schoolcraft’s collection of (mainly) Chippewa legends, Algic Researches (1837), for narrative matter.

There are some issues attendant on Longfellow’s poetic use of American Indian traditions that should be mentioned. These are directly related to broader cultural and historical factors, a detailed discussion of which would be out of place here. Suffice to say, a history of “context” circling around land appropriation and attempted cultural eradication [just say genocide my dude] rather than genuine engagement did not facilitate understanding on the part of the rapidly expanding dominant Anglo-American culture. A mechanical understanding of Native languages and an assumption that verbal texture and sophisticated conception of narrative were qualities uniquely relegated to “civilized” literary endeavor led to a blindness to those qualities and elicited judgments even more acute than those attending Beowulf or Volsunga Saga. The rather bald prose of Algic Researches no doubt reflects these issues.

Hiawatha was affected by all this in some odd ways. For exaple, though Longfellow’s subject and the better part of the substance of his poem is founded on the stories connected to the Chippewa culture hero Manabozho in Schoolcraft, Longfellow somehow received the mistaken impression that the Iroquois Hiawatha was the same character. In fact, the mythic Manabozho has no relation at all to Hiawatha, the historical/legendary founder of the Five Nations Confederacy; the Chippewa are entirely distinct from the Iroquois as a cultural/linguistic entity. (Imagine, for example, a poetic version of the tales of the Norse gods in which Odin is renamed Charlemagne.) But to much of Longfellow’s readership—and Hiawatha proved quite popular—he was transforming “puerile” (to use Scott’s term) material into literary art.

Hiawatha is as thoroughly a fantasy as Thalaba the Destroyer and no more “Chippewa” than Lalla Rookh is “Oriental”; in fact, the exotic attraction of the subject must be seen as emanating from the same imaginative space as the Oriental. Longfellow’s verse form resulted from his reading of the 1851 German traslation of Lönnrot’s The Kalevala [sic], and narrative matter derived from the Finnish work is patched into the mainly Chippewa content. “Hiawatha,” his Manabozho, emobdies little of the trickster of Chippewa tradition and is instead made over into the peculiarly European “Noble Savage,” admirable as a simple Child of Nature but belonging to a time now gone.

Hiawatha sold well, if not as well as some of Longfellow’s other poems mentioned here, and all told, of the poets of the period, he probably sold second only to Tennyson. While the degree of influence attributable to Hiawatha in the present context is limited, it was nonetheless a widely read part of the fabric of the Victorian era poetry informing the sensibility underlying the literary canon of the BAFS. Like Tennyson’s and [Samuel] Ferguson’s works, Hiawatha, if in a more convoluted fashion, fed on a patriotic feeling, elevating “national” traditions into a refined work of art; like Tennyson’s Idylls and Swinburne’s Tristram, it is large, like a monument. (100-101)

this section really highlights the biggest critical gap in Williamson’s argument, namely its relative inattention to the politics of the pregenre texts and traditions he’s tracing. to some extent that’s an unfair criticism, since what he’s trying to do is offer a broad strokes revisionist literary history of the fantasy genre, but I feel like it’s not too much to ask for some slightly more involved consideration of the ideological impact of some of the different elements that have contributed to the genre (Orientalism, Celticism, here an Indigenism in a sense not unlike Mexican indigenismo). he clearly regards them as problematic, but he seems to take this as given, rather than digging more deeply into their relationship to the structure of the genre.

it’s like this (at best) every time Williamson talks about Orientalism/etc. — like he doesn’t need to bother actually reading the politics because We All Know. but clearly we don’t, or else he wouldn’t read Longfellow’s politics this way, as if it were just a wacky settler fantasy. and, more to the point, if his central contention about the elided history of the fantasy genre is to have any force, the politics of these texts are, surely, actually really important!

as a much less substantial issue, Williamson also keeps weirdly falling back on either definitely known or probable (in his estimation) direct influence from the early pregenre texts he’s looking at on post-Morris writers, but this just undercuts his whole argument. it doesn’t really matter whether any particular given text in these larger non-fantasy genre formations (romance, ballad, Oriental tale, …) can be shown to have directly influenced later writers — what matters is that some texts in these formations did, meaning that later writers (Dunsany, Howard, Tolkien, etc.) and, following the BAFS, the fantasy genre writ large, still bear the ideological imprints of these older formations in ways that prior historiography has largely occluded precisely by focusing on direct influence and a narrow set of retrojected genre markers.

this is — sorry, I’m never getting past this — again related to his weirdly passing discussion of Ossian: it’s certainly true that Macpherson’s direct influence on anglophone writers after about 1800 was pretty minimal, but his indirect influence is huge, and it’s worth spending more time with it in order to be able to adequately account for that indirect influence as it shaped later fantasy through, especially, German Romanticism and 19th-century folklore collecting in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland — especially John Francis Campbell, who he explicitly mentions! — that brought “Celtic folklore” into popular consciousness.

I obviously really appreciate the revisionist literary history! but at times it feels more like a really detailed Wikipedia article than a critical study.

But after these poems of Morris, Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, and Ferguson, the type of romance narrative associated with the BAFS migrates almost exclusively to prose. There is not a clear-cut reason for this, but some speculation is possible. In the move from invention to adaptation, a certain static quality emerges. Ideologically, one can see in this material a retreat from the revolutionary intentions of many of the Romantics the desire to combat the forces of Enlightenment rationalism and growing utilitarianism and the notion that the poetic imagination could form the foundation of a rejuvenated humanity. Instead, we begin to find a tendency to nostalgic lament: the poet becomes the “idle singer of an empty day” ([Morris, The Earthly Paradise,] 1:1).

This ideological retreat bleeds clearly into the thematic substance of many of these poemsl. When, at the closing of “The Passing of the King,” Tennyson’s Arthur declares to Bedivere, “The old order changeth, yielding place to the new” (Tennyson 251), the transition is from an order characterized by dedication to the ideals of the Round Table to an “order” marked by infighting, betrayal, self-motivation, and chaos. The gradual erosion of Camelot and what it symbolizes is the consolidating substance of the Idylls as a whole, a dark apocalyptic current lending a collective power to the poems. Yet Tennyson’s diagnosis of the fall of Camelot reveals simply a breach of conventional Victorian morality and propriety: it is the queen’s sin of adultery that precipitates the fall into chaos and therefore the queen who stands primarily responsible for Arthur’s failure. A few lines later, Arthur asks Bedivere, “[W]hat comfort is in me?” (251), a shrug of defeat suggesting that the glory of Camelot is now part of a past that has no bearing ont he present. […]

[…] The predominant mood is one of rather powerless nostalgia.

The thematic substance running through these poems does not really encourage further development. And then there is the bulk: how many book-length or multivolume elgies to lost ages can be produced before there are enough? (104-105)

see, this is, like…fine? not wrong? but it’s not actually really an ideological analysis of the shift from verse to prose, not least because the question it raises is, did this “rather powerless nostalgia” cease to be a dominant mode of fantasy(ish) writing in prose? surely not — in which case its explanatory power in accounting for this shift falls apart.

(I suspect the actual answer is the rise of cheap popular printing; Williamson’s argument is heavily focused on the literary strand of pregenre fantasy (Morris / Dunsany / Eddison / Tolkien) and not on the popular strand (Howard / Lovecraft / Moore / Vance / etc.), and I think it’s resulting in a certain privileging of the ideological over the material.)

actually, I take it back: Williamson straight-up does not do enough (or, really, anything) to address the Orientalism of the “quasi-Oriental” fantasy or “Oriental tale”. I do think he’s (partly) taking it as given that people will recognize the issues there, but given the strong influence of the Oriental tale on the development of the fantasy genre the lack of explicit engagement with the ideological issues it brings with it is…not good!

ultimately, the closest thing to any kind of critique in the whole book thus far, beyond the methodological criticism of mainstream understandings of the history of fantasy as a back-projection of a category that didn’t exist before ~the ’70s, has been that lukewarm criticism of Longfellow.

Oddly, [James] Stephens has not been accorded any particular attention from the standpoint of the post-1960s genre beyond passing reference to his most well-known work, The Crock of Gold (1912). David Pringle’s entry on Stephens in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia [of Fantasy] runs to a bare eight lines and does little save list book titles. However, as I have said, he does stand as a significant early twentieth-century progenitor of “Celtic Fantasy” and the first writer to produce literary adaptations of traditional Red Branch and Fenian tales as prose fiction. (139, bolding added)

lmao. sure, buddy.

The setting [of Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories] is China, but despite the presence of mandarins and emperors, familiar allusions to Chinese place-names, and students undergoing rigorous examinations in pursuit of lucrative administrative positions, there is even less “China” here than there is “Spain” in [Plunkett/Dunsany’s] Don Rodriguez. The prose points to Burton and Meredith; the actual narrative content, from the intricate, novella-length “The Transmutation of Ling” to the short pure-minded fool story “The Probation of Sen Heng,” draws liberally on motifs common to popular tales and romances throughout the European world. Hilaire Belloc wrote that Bramah employed the “Chinese idiom” (Bramah 6); it would be more accurate to say he employed an English idiom used to evoke the English idea of the Chinese. The profusion of money-hungry hucksters and disingenuous governing functionaries, the absurdly enforced etiquette, and the oftentimes impenetrably Kafkaesque bureaucratic apparatus suggest that the barbed irony of its author was, at any rate, more specifically directed at England. (147)

with the caveat that I’ve read neither Bramah nor Plunkett/Dunsany (yet), this just seems like a…woefully inadequate analysis of the use of the “Oriental” setting for Kai Lung (or, indeed, of Spain in Don Rodriguez). first of all, I’m pretty sure all of the things he identifies as “more specifically directed at England” are very much stereotypes of China. second of all, even if that weren’t the case, and even if the Kai Lung stories are “meant” to be read as a satire of English-British society, the fact remains that they are set in “China” and so must be — at the absolute minimum — read in conversation with Orientalist representations of the ~mysterious east~.

more to the point: it’s not as if Bramah couldn’t have, had he chosen to, written stories set in England satirizing certain byzantine qualities of English society. he chose to use China instead, transforming it into just a reflection of the Occident. that’s part of Orientalism! read Said!

The core thematic focus of [The] Worm [Ouroboros] is heroic action, though his treatment of the great war between Demonland and Witchland, and of the quest of Lord Juss to rescue Goldry Bluzco from an enchanted captivity, recalls the romantic epic rather than adventure fiction. (148)

he has not spoken about adventure fiction in the entire book thus far! there are only two references to it in the introduction, both passing, as part of lists of genres related to fantasy!

I’m losing my mind about this a bit. I’m in the chapter on the “popular” strand in 20th-c fantasy and he continues to say things like

Even those tales [of Lovecraft’s] most akin to Dunsany’s early work carry a heavier tone, a strong undercurrent of alienation, and a more marked tendency to the grotesque and the bizarre—all characteristic elements of Lovecraft’s non-Dunsanian literary heritage. (170, bolding added)

and name-drops a few people/bodies of literature (Poe, Hawthorne, Machen, French Romanticism) but he hasn’t talked at all about this body of texts that’s vitally important for understanding the popular strand. no Mérimée or Gautier, no meaningful discussion of Poe (of all the people to leave out!) or Machen, not a single mention in the whole book of Irvine, one endnote reference to Bierce.

if you’re going to handle the popular strand this badly, just don’t do it at all! you’re clearly only interested in the literary strand, anyway!

his handling of Howard’s background is slightly better, in that it spends a few paragraphs on Haggard and Burroughs, but why wasn’t this a chapter in its own right, alongside the Victorian precursors to the “literary” strand?

What Howard drew from these earlier narratives could as well have come from Bulfinch’s or Guerber’s as from Homer’s or Snorri Sturlusson’s works themselves. The modern conception of “barbarian,” so crucial to the depiction of Conan, is strikingly absent not only in heroic epics from Gilgamesh to Ramayana [sic] to Tain bo Cualnge [sic!!!] but [also] in the works of Tolkien, Eddison, and Morris. (176)

this is so fucking stupid, because if you think about the political and cultural context for two seconds you will realize that the significance of the figure of the “barbarian” for texts about “Bran Mak Morn” the “Pict” and “Conan” the “Cimmerian” (identified as a distant antecedent of Gaels) is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial discourse and a stagist or evolutionary model of history that positioned Celts, Indians, ancient Sumerians, etc. as “barbarians,” meaning that to engage with these bodies of literatures was inherently or inevitably to be writing about barbarians. by the same token, we might reverse this and say the reason Howard’s characters have names like “Conan” and “Bran” is precisely in order to emphasize that they are barbarians.

The Tolkien influence, combined with that of T.H. White, is evident in American writer Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles [sic] (1964-68). Here it is the shadow of LOTR rather than The Hobbit, however: a very Tolkienian good-versus-evil struggle underscores the series, and the culminating volume seems directly patterned on LOTR. Despite Alexander’s use of a Welsh-derived nomenclature, there is little Welsh in the thematic and narrative substance of Prydain: it is not really a “Celtic Fantasy.” (193, bolding added)

????????

I wish people regarded thematic and narrative substance directly derived from Celtic-language literatures as a necessary prerequisite for something being “Celtic fantasy”. also, granted, it’s been a while since I read any of Prydain except The Book of Three, but this seems...not accurate.

more to the point, this claim feels like it’s resting on the same kind of vibes-based assessments of a work’s Celticity that are in common use for determining whether or not something is “Celtic”, just with priority assigned to a different set of vibes — essentially what Williamson is saying is that the Chronicles of Prydain makes use of “Celtic” signifiers but doesn’t feel “Celtic” in spite of that (and so “is not really a ‘Celtic Fantasy’”).

on the one hand The Evolution of Modern Fantasy is an excellent and illuminating intervention into fantasy historiography that challenges the easy identification of work before the mid-1960s as “fantasy” as such and reintegrates “pregenre” texts into their actual literary contexts.

on the other hand, Williamson does absolutely nothing with this revisionist history. there’s never any sense of why it matters, beyond a simple factual correctness, unless you’re already invested in challenging the back-projection of fantasy and the way it conceals influences on the history of the genre. in particular, there’s no engagement with questions of Orientalism, settler colonialism, or other ideological elements that had substantial impacts on the development of the genre in ways that often go unreckoned-with and which have been largely pushed out of sight by the canonization of a narrow body of particular texts as The precursors of fantasy. also it’s got a bunch of glaring omissions and some factual errors, and it inflicted the spelling “Tain bo Cualgne” on me multiple times. what is this, Middle Irish?

a messy, messy book! good and provocative, but provocative in spite of its apparent commitment not to provoke if it can avoid saying…anything.

but if you’re interested in fantasy and want to somewhat better understand the trajectory of the genre — albeit with a much heavier focus on the “literary” trand represented by Morris, Dunsany, Eddison, and Tolkien, than on the “popular” strand that has ultimately dominated the genre’s aesthetics — it’s worth a read.

that said, as both a literary fantasy and popular fantasy (albeit not most “epic” fantasy) enjoyer what I think is striking reading Williamson’s conclusion is the way not only Morris/Eddison/Dunsany but also even Howard/Smith/de Camp/Vance/etc. have vanished for the mainstream understanding of the genre. if the BAFS fantasy canon looked mainly back to about 1900 (plus Morris), it seems like at this point things look back only to about (generously tbh) 1970, plus Tolkien.

which on one level makes sense, since the fantasy genre only really started to coalesce around 1965, but also means almost the entire BAFS canon, Tolkien excluded, is gone from popular consciousness of “fantasy.” which is wild! even Vance, who wrote what I think it’s fair to say is probably the second most influential fantasy of all time — I make this claim on the basis that D&D’s magic system, most of its aesthetic, and much of its implicit world-building (if not necessarily Gygax’s original world-building for Greyhawk) come from Vance, with some Tolkien layered on top — isn’t reliably in print (I can’t get the Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus from the specfic bookstore here, for example).

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