Under the spell of Tolkien: The Features of Epic Fantasy

In epic fantasy stories everything is set on a scale that we as humans can’t grasp. The world building is described to the smallest details, and the moral of the story is often an idealistic battle against evil. There’s usually a secondary world introduced, the world we live in is somewhere next to the world where the story takes place. This other world is as rich and detailed as our own. This genre requires an enormous amount of world building.

Fantasy is usually revolving around a world built by the author. In fantasy books, there is on the first or last page a map that shows what this world looks like. The reader can, while reading, go back and look at the map to see where the events take place or where the voyage goes. This is part of what creates an internal logic in a fantasy story. Fantasy stories have an internal point of view by setting everything in the world up against each other and take it away from our society. Opposite of in Science Fiction where there is an external point of view where things in our world are unnormalized as for instance a building on the moon. We know as humans that there is a moon and we understand there are no buildings on it, but we accept the idea as well as we accept the idea of a whole new world as long as it’s consistent by following its own rules. When the reader accepts the fantasy story they read, they become enchanted.

Enchantment is a state of mind where the reader will have no problem seeing the difference between the real world and the world in the book, but the audience still understands the story as a different reality. Tolkien meant that this wasn’t something to apologize for. One example of what Tolkien considered an attempt to apologize is when the writer ends the story with the main character waking up from a dream. He thought that apologizing for the fantasy elements of the story would make the enchantment fall apart. Tolkien ended an era where fantasy wouldn’t be taken seriously and seen as children’s literature or excused by the main character waking up from a strange dream. Tolkien pushed for us to let ourselves be re-enchanted. He wanted us to see more than just the material world, allow ourselves to believe in fantasy stories, to escape and thereby also recover. He wanted things to go back to before we got disenchanted by industrialism. It’s okay to escape he says, it might even be healthy, and it’s not childish because it’s good to think about alternatives to how the world is.