Hint: The Answer Is Swords
Feb. 23rd, 2022 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingHigh Fantasy and Heroic Romance
https://www.hbook.com/story/high-fantasy-and-heroic-romance
What makes fantasy so memorable? Unfortunately, art is not always susceptible to logical analysis, or at least not to the same patterns of logic that apply in other areas. Instead of provable answers, we have possibilities, hints, and suggestions. The most obvious answers are the least accurate. Fantasy can be considered an escape from complex reality to a more simplistic world, the yearning for a past that never existed, or a vehicle for regression. Attractive as these answers may be, fantasy offers no such escapes from life. It can refresh and delight, certainly; give us a new vision; make us weep or laugh. None of these possibilities constitutes escape, or denial of something most of us begin to suspect at a rather early age: that being alive in the world is a hard piece of business.
This is from a speech given by Lloyd Alexander (the author of The Black Cauldron) at the New England Round Table of Children's Librarians in October 1969 and published as an essay in 1971. I learned about it from Wikipedia while trying to remember who painted the covers of the old Conan paperbacks (it was Frank Frazetta btw, look at him go). Anyway, according to Wikipedia, this is one of the first recorded uses of the expression "high fantasy." Interesting.
https://www.hbook.com/story/high-fantasy-and-heroic-romance
What makes fantasy so memorable? Unfortunately, art is not always susceptible to logical analysis, or at least not to the same patterns of logic that apply in other areas. Instead of provable answers, we have possibilities, hints, and suggestions. The most obvious answers are the least accurate. Fantasy can be considered an escape from complex reality to a more simplistic world, the yearning for a past that never existed, or a vehicle for regression. Attractive as these answers may be, fantasy offers no such escapes from life. It can refresh and delight, certainly; give us a new vision; make us weep or laugh. None of these possibilities constitutes escape, or denial of something most of us begin to suspect at a rather early age: that being alive in the world is a hard piece of business.
This is from a speech given by Lloyd Alexander (the author of The Black Cauldron) at the New England Round Table of Children's Librarians in October 1969 and published as an essay in 1971. I learned about it from Wikipedia while trying to remember who painted the covers of the old Conan paperbacks (it was Frank Frazetta btw, look at him go). Anyway, according to Wikipedia, this is one of the first recorded uses of the expression "high fantasy." Interesting.
