never attempts this marriage of mise-en-scène with emotion, virtue, or character (with the exception of the martyrdom of Aslan, which presents a scene redolent with grief and horror, surrounded by cold and dark). Later writers, as Attebery points out, use landscape to fill the gaps of actual experience, “to rehistoricize fantastic assertions by placing them within an approximation of the most accessible milieu in which such statements could have been made” (Strategies 132). Vital to this substitution is the intense concentration on landscape, the insistence on a level of detail that is almost distorting. Brian Stableford wrote, “Descriptive prose can be like a pre-Raphaelite painting, attempting to specify the colour, position and texture of every object which the hypothetical observer would see” (The Way to Write 28). The metaphor can be extended into landscape painting as a whole, in which the “natural” is actually a clever contrivance that encodes specific messages about what the Land should be. The more I consider it, the more obvious this link to Pre-Raphaelite painting seems. Dalí once cited the Pre-Raphaelites for “their precise rendering of detail and the equal focus accorded each element of reality. The technique rendered their paintings awkward in some ways, since sharp-focused clarity of each part works against the illusion of perspective” (Mathews 39). Similarly, the “microscopic natural detail [which] appears at the expense of space, atmosphere or any feeling of light and shade … seems to belong to a world of dreams and enchantments”—as Allen Staley conjures Millais’s Ferdinand Lured by Ariel he also conjures the elaborate but curiously thin stage sets of so many quest fantasies (15). On the subject of the same picture, Staley quotes the 1851 Art Journal: “The emphasis of the picture is its botany, which is made out with a microscopic elaboration, insomuch as to seem to have been painted from a collection of grasses, since we recognise up to twenty varieties” (176). Exactly. As we shall see later, the insistence on a monosemic understanding of the world in so many quest fantasies works against the illusion of reality that this detail strives so hard to conjure.
What there is surprisingly little of in the work of both Lewis and Tolkien, is the action adventure rhetoric that one associates with modern heroic fantasy. A rare moment is on page 337, at the start of “The Choices of Master Samwise”.
Sam did not wait to wonder what was to be done, or whether he was brave, or loyal, or filled with rage. He sprang forward with a yell, and seized his master’s sword in his left hand. Then he charged. No onslaught more fierce was ever seen in the savage world of beasts, where some desperate small creature armed with little teeth, alone, will spring upon a tower of horn and hide that stands above its fallen mate. (The Two Towers)
The language appears to have leaked in from the sword and sorcery genre that increasingly influences the quest narrative as the century proceeds. We can see it in the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber’s Grey Mouser stories. Both of these, like most sword and sorcery novels, are better considered when we turn to immersive fantasy,23 but because in the post-Tolkien era sword and sorcery comes to influence the writers of quest fantasy—particularly Terry Brooks—the comparison of language is worth noting.
Howard’s Conan is interesting because Howard focuses the reader’s attention upon the action. Whereas in Tolkien, the emphasis drives the reader through the action, Howard is interested in the action itself. To take just one example, from “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933): “Steel flashed and the throng surged wildly back out of the way. In their flight they knocked over the single candle and the den was plunged in darkness, broken by the crash of upset benches, drum of flying feet, shouts, oaths of people tumbling over one another, and a single, strident yell of agony that cut the din like a knife” (16–17). Take note of the hyperbole in the adjectives, “flashed,” “surged,” and “strident.” Although we do see hyperbole in Tolkien, it is rare. For Howard, the action itself is the point; the finding of the object sought after, or the completion of a task is almost irrelevant. Accompanying this style of writing is the sense that action is about what is felt. It is important that Conan reacts by instinct, and that when Murilo, Conan’s employer, is frightened, we feel “his blood congeal in his veins.” We are reading here to feel these emotions, to thrill with the hero, to fear with the onlooker.
Fritz Leiber aims for a similar impression, although writing with greater delicacy. While his descriptions of swordplay match those by Tolkien of landscape, his attention is on the beauty—and hence internal morality—of the action: “The Mouser made a very small parry in carte so that the thrust of the bravo from the east went past his left side by only a hair’s breadth. He instantly riposted. His adversary, desperately springing back, parried in turn in carte. Hardly slowing, the tip of the Mouser’s long, slim sword dropped under that parry with the delicacy of a princess curtseying and then leaped forward and a little upward” (“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” 9). Infusing the text is the sense that little can be done without emotion. Although more sparing with his adjectives than later imitators, Leiber allows Fafhrd to respond “gruffly, at the same time frantically” (151). Attention to action and emotion is much more specific, is much more a focus for the reader’s attention than what we usually see in the portal and quest narratives. I do not consider it a coincidence that it is Sam for whom Tolkien writes these moments. He is the character most of the world and most physically engaged with it. Lewis is even coyer than Tolkien. Even when he presents action, there is no shift to the action adventure style with its emphasis on wild emotions and forceful movements. Instead, action is simply “a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare” (122).
But what are the consequences in all of this vis-à-vis the position of the reader? Lewis, the writer of an acknowledged portal fantasy, keeps the reader almost continually on the outside of the action. His double distancing of feelings and of action remind the reader that these events happened some time ago. If we are in danger of forgetting it, Lewis breaks the spell by reminding us of the differences between Narnia and our world, a technique that may be one of the distinctions between the true portal fantasy and the classic quest fantasy. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), a recent full portal fantasy, uses a similar technique, creating dissonance quite deliberately by overlaying the fantasy world on the familiar diagram of the London Underground system. We are never fully in the other world. In contrast Tolkien uses a range of tones to create the effect of embedded realities and to convince us that we are in a fully real otherworld, in which there is no door to elsewhere. When Sam breaks the fantasy with his pragmatism, we are thrown back a step into the Shire, not into our own world, a Shire built by history and narrative. When the rolling rhetoric of Elrond, or Aragorn, or Gandalf becomes too much, one or another will launch into a story that both deepens the tale and—by its use of the oral narrative—pulls us to the fireside with the other listeners. Crucially, while we are capable of moving between the parties, we only ever know as much as we have been told. The degree to which this process is compelling is dependent in part on the extent to which both speakers seal the internal narratives from challenge by a continual reminder that the senior narrators are worthy of trust.
The Modern Era: Brooks and Donaldson to the 1990s
The two writers who most thoroughly articulated the pattern for quest and portal fantasies for the post-Tolkien era are Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson. The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), are contemporaries. With the exception of Lord of the Rings, most fantasies prior to 1977 were short to mid-length books. After Brooks and Donaldson, the portal and quest genre would begin to sprawl. This is not a coincidence. Although very different writers, each homed in on certain aspects of Tolkien’s technique in such a way as to emphasize reader positioning, and to ensure the length of the book. What Tolkien does, by creating both world and landscape as character, may be impossible to do in a short book (although, as we shall see when we consider immersion and liminal fantasies, there are other ways in which these elements can be constructed). Brooks and Donaldson each attempt the same thing, although with quite different effects and degrees of success.
Prior to 1977, the fantasy genre was popularly represented by two types: the stylists (Beagle, Anderson, Harrison,
