It’s been over a year since I’ve had the time to write for this blog. A lot’s happened since my last post. I’ve directed two plays and finished my final year of college, ThereisBear! have performed their fourth production and my career goals have shifted from medieval studies at Oxford to English language teaching in Korea.
We’ve got stuff to talk about.
The above sentence does not actually make sense. But it is glorious.
Or, one man’s quest for the least compelling title ever.
Fantasy has arrived. It’s gone mainstream.
It’s made a remarkable transition in the past decade. When I began reading fantasy as a young teenager, the genre was unpopular; strange and marginal. It certainly wasn’t cool. The young adult section of my local (read, an hour’s bumpy bus ride away) library was dominated by realism. Shelves packed with gritty dramas. Runaways, drug and alcohol abuse, bullies and broken homes. Characters that moved to new places- new schools- who, through adversity, discovered the transcendent power of friendship were much in evidence. The stories were always set in a recognisable, realistic Earth, often situated in specific geographies.
Yes, there were fantasy books aimed at my demographic. But in the rainy world of Letterkenny Library, that small selection was recognisably other. Alternate. They were not the standard and were offered, it seemed, only to fulfil the library’s holistic mission statement. The same applied in Letterkenny’s two bookstores, though at least there, fantasy books were grouped by genre, rather than recommended reading age, so that I stumbled across several inappropriately educational and, no doubt, formative scenes as a kid.
Hello!
How different it is now though. The fantasy sections in libraries and bookstores are huge, walk-in areas stretching multiple floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Fantasy is everywhere too. Since the popular and financial successes of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and the Harry Potter books and movies, fantasy has exploded onto the world stage and established itself on the public consciousness in the way that science fiction, its chrome-plated cousin, managed in the late seventies and eighties.
Fantasy stories, old and new, have become part of popular literary discourse in a way that they have never managed in the history of the genre. Older ‘classics’ of the genre such as A Game of Thrones, Wizards’ First Rule (adapted as Legend of the Seeker), His Dark Materials and Where the Wild Things Are, brought to the public’s attention through screen adaptations, are enjoying their newfound life in the sunshine, while new movies and series such as Twilight, Eragon, Snow White and the Huntsman and, I will argue, The Hunger Games, enter the mainstream directly, skipping the apprenticeship older series once served in obscurity.
My inclusion of The Hunger Games in the above list might cause consternation. It raises a question of definition. According to the Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ‘the major theorists in the field […] all agree that fantasy is about the construction of the impossible, whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely, but is grounded in the scientifically possible’. Most ‘theorists in the field’, then, would agree that The Hunger Games, set in an Orwellian, explicitly American future, is science fiction. However, the incredibly developed technology, ‘indistinguishable from magic’ as the overused quote has it, the epic sweep of the narrative, the familiar themes of friendship, loyalty and hope in the face of impossible odds, not to mention distinctly un-futuristic motifs such as Katniss’ bow, the hunter in the woods, the blood and the rose and so forth, highlight The Hunger Games’ tonal relationship with fantasy. The movie’s marketing reinforces this notion: it was aimed at Twilight fans, not Trekkies.
This is what they aim at Trekkies
The themes I mention in from The Hunger Games are not so different to those I encountered in the young adult section of the library all those years ago. Protagonists find themselves not fitting in, encountering new places and people, discovering the power of friendship and battling to overcome impossible odds.
Of course with parameters that bland, almost any book could fit the template.
But the question remains why fantasy has always appealed to me where these books rarely do. I always slightly disliked familiar settings and the more I actually knew about the place they were set, the more I actively hated them. Books set in contemporary Ireland were the worst. There was so often a soullessness about them and the characters seemed constrained, dull and unexciting to boot. Ironically, I never really believed realistic settings.
And there, I think, lies fantasy’s appeal. The genre’s roots are in fairy-tales, legends and medieval adventure-stories. They abound with the supernatural: ghosts and monsters, witches and fairies; things we are raised with from childhood. Fantasy goes for the gut, for the archetypal, and so can bypass intellectual objections or preconceived notions. It can bring us back to when we knew there were things that went bump in the night. The worst fantasy never fills in these archetypes. It deals in stereotype, mistaking form for content. But the best fantasy makes them at once specific and universal; recognisable but with a power to shock that comes directly from their familiarity.
And, to come to my point, it has gone global. The prominence of Twilight, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones in meme culture alone is a testament to the genre’s presence in people’s minds. This ubiquity is a new development, one unprecedented in the history of the genre. Not only is fantasy popular all across the globe, but the same fantasy is popular. Thanks to Peter Jackson’s movies, the same Middle-Earth has been experienced by millions of people. Most of you reading this have seen Diagon Alley and Hogwarts in your mind’s eye and on screen. The globalisation of fantasy has created shared imaginative worlds.
When you read Catcher in the Rye, you are experiencing Salinger’s New York, yes. But to it you bring all sorts of cultural hang-ups and personal notions of what New York is, was or may be. If you’ve read, say, The Great Gatsby or seen Friends or a movie set in the city, it’s going to influence your reconstruction of Holden Caulfield’s world. Salinger’s New York is a heterogeneous morass of images and notions that will exist differently and independently in the mind of each person reading Catcher because each of those people already believes they know what a New York is.
Not so Winterfell, I argue, or Minas Tirith, or Ankh-Morpork. We approach these locations with no prior experience, in the knowledge that they do not actually exist. We do not equate them to any real-world locale and so do not bring specific biases to bear in our experience of the worlds. To us, Middle-Earth or Westeros exists outside of our reality, on some plane between our minds and those of Tolkien or George R. R. Martin, not as an actual location in our world.
These worlds are imaginative spaces that are now shared by millions of people and accessed every day. Such a thing has never before existed in the history of literature. The fantastic mode, that step towards the impossible, the magical, is a liberating form. It creates fresh platforms on which to investigate and interrogate ideas while simultaneously drawing on the most primal narratives and forms we know. Its ability to create new worlds and unite millions of people in an imaginative space outside of the constraints of reality makes it an exciting, active cultural force.
Fantasy has arrived and I think it’s here to stay.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m applying for a master’s in English at the end of the year in England. These programmes are pretty expensive. I’m looking at Oxford, which costs c. £6000 for tuition, plus a £2000 college fee and a recommended budget of £13,000 for living expenses for a year. About £21,000 in total. Expensive, but pretty standard for Britain. We can’t all be Sweden, I suppose.
These hockey players are very excited about free education
A lot of grants and funding opportunities in Britain are only available to UK or Commonwealth students. Even the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) awards will only cover fees for EU students. That’s a £13,000 difference depending on where you’re from. So, I decided to look into British citizenship. My father, uncle and aunts are all Scottish after all. But that’s where I ran into a snag. If your mother is British, then you’re automatically a British citizen. If, however, you’re claiming British citizenship through your father and you were born after a certain year, British law goes by the law of your mother’s country. And in my case, that’s the gloriously forward-thinking, socially emancipated, progressive Republic of Ireland.
and Ireland’s lovely
It was perfectly possible, I learned, to claim citizenship from one’s father. I, however, am not eligible because, under Irish law, I am illegitimate. That’s right. In this, the twenty-first century, in a first-world, EU member-state, I am deprived of rights other citizens enjoy because I, like Jon Snow here, am a bastard.
I know that feel, bro
I was born before my parents married, and they have since separated. That fact, over which, I remind you, I had no control, means a difference of £13,000 if I am lucky enough to win funding. It means I am limited in the types of funding I can seek and it makes it all the more likely that I’ll have to go into debt to pay for my education. All because my parents got a little frisky a little early.
Eire herself facepalms
I’m amazed that my bastardy (a really fun word, incidentally) is having such a quantifiable effect on my life. I know the constitution was composed in 1933 but I assumed that 80-odd years of statehood would have curbed De Valera’s more excessive church-appeasing pseudo-medieval sycophancy.
lol, nope
So there’s not really much I can do. I’m in good company, though. The bastard as a historical and literary figure is an old archetype. They range from the aforementioned Jon Snow of A Song of Ice and Fire to Edmund in King Lear. William the Conqueror was William the Bastard before he got motivated and Confucius, Da Vinci and Thomas Paine all seemed to get by despite their less than immaculate conceptions. It’s telling though, that the most recent figure on lists of ‘bastards what done good for themselves’ is Eva Perón, who died in 1952. It really doesn’t seem to figure in recent history and barring a sudden time jump to 1259, it wasn’t something I ever thought I’d have to worry about.
1259 was not a good year for bastards
The ‘bastard speech’ in King Lear reads a little differently now. ‘Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?’ The question stands.
What, in sooth, is up with this shit?
Now Gods, stand up for bastards. Someone’s going to have to.
A digression.
Our word otter comes from the Old English word otor, derived from a proto-Indo-European word that was something like *udros, meaning ‘water-creature’.
From *udros, we get words like the Latin name for otter, lutra, and the Old Irish odoirne*. We also get the Greek word hydra, which means this
and these
are actually close relations.
The Old Norse form, Ótr, has an interesting story attached. Ótr is a character in Norse mythology, a shape-shifting dwarf who spends his days in the body of an otter, gorging himself on fish.
One day, the god Loki passes by and, seeing the otter in the river, kills it, skins it and continues on his merry way wearing its pelt.
and looking FABULOUS!
Unfortunately for Loki, Ótr’s father is a king, Hreidmar, and he demands a hefty wergild or ransom for the death of his son. Loki is forced to fill Ótr’s skin, first with yellow gold, then with red. When he has done this, however, there is still a whisker protruding and Loki is forced to cover it using the magic ring he’s stolen from the dwarf Andvari.
This episode, the ‘Otter’s Ransom’, kicks off the Völsunga Saga, which was the basis for Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung and Tolkien’s epic poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and was a major influence on The Lord of the Rings.
Now that’s all interesting I’m sure but what’s it got to do with this blog?
Well, everything really.
This word, otter, can be traced right back to the earliest stages of our language. Every one of the three billion native speakers of Indo-European languages currently living and speaking on the planet today almost certainly know some version of it and might even recognise its forms in sister languages. The Ótr story places it at the heart of one of the most enduring myths in Western culture.
This is the background for just one word of the three hundred-odd in this post but most, if not all of them have an equally interesting and illustrious history. It’s an example of what Euan Ferguson called ‘the glorious interconnectedness of all things’. That makes it the perfect title for a blog like this.
Also, otters are cute as fuck.
I mean seriously
*I don’t know what happened to odoirne but modern Irish uses madra uisce, lit. ‘water-dog’, which is also lovely.
Alloh!
My plan is to use yon blog for some good ol’ fashioned booknerding, with a healthy amount of otter appreciation thrown in for good measure. I’ll try and keep things on a relatively literary bent but, of course, given my short attention span, there’s no guarantee that- OHMYGODSQUIRREL!
Obvious joke is obvious
The humour is unlikely to improve.
Over the summer, I’ll be working on the Irish national tour of Patrick Galvin’s play, The Last Burning (more info forthcoming) as well as preparing an application for a master’s degree in English for the end of the year. This’ll probably involve preparing a 4000-word article on a subject of my choice. I’ll be keeping you updated on that stuff and posting anything interesting that happens along the way.
So, first post more or less concluded, I’ll promise some more interesting fare for next time and leave you in the capable paws of a sea otter who’s said too much.
GASP! Indiscretion!
Indeed. Goodboo to you all.
WordOtter 