Hi everyone. This is another of my little micro-essays, put out into the wild. Not sure how many more I’ll do. This is really just me pontificating with the hope of stoking some discussion. There is also an audio version, if you’d rather listen to that.
ON NATURE AND FANTASY
For me personally, nature has always been deeply and closely entwined with fantasy stories. However, if I think about the origin of this connection in my head, I find myself coming back almost entirely to Tolkien. So much of Tolkien has been mimicked–consciously or unconsciously–that it is a little surprising to me that his connection with nature has not echoed more strongly through subsequent fantasy works.
Tolkien himself was a person of the outdoors. A walker of hills. A lover of trees. A man who was contented rambling up and down slopes, and through wild places. This shows strongly in his work. The people in his world experience a journey through the landscape as a journey through nature. In contrast, in most other epic fantasy that I have read, a journey through landscape tends to be more akin to a journey through scenery. Moreover, in Middle-Earth, nature manifests itself, quite literally. Radagast is a Maia of nature, if a rather bumbling and harmless one. That’s a little odd, when you think about it. Prior to Tolkien, most druidic characters in fantastical works (or at least in British fantastical works) tended to more heavily lean towards the bloody grove of oaks, as described by Roman writers. Tom Bombadill is probably, maybe, some form of manifestation of the land, whilst Goldberry is very certainly a manifestation of the waters and riffles wild. In Beorn’s garden there are preternaturally large honeybees, and clever animals that seem to hint at a deeper natural magic than mere skin-changing. And as for the Elves, they do not perform magic, in as much as they see it. Rather they understand the laws of nature, and their understanding is so deep that it appears to be magic from a Hobbit’s perspective. To riff: any sufficiently advanced, erm, comprehension of nature (let us say), is indistinguishable from magic it seems. And, of course Tolkien gave literal voice to the trees themselves. Haruum haroom.
Tolkien clearly loved nature. I wonder if perhaps that sort of love is simply too hard to fake, or more to the point: a writer who does not sufficiently love nature is unlikely to dwell on how the magic, the story and the fantasy might perhaps grow out of the nature of the world. Nature, for Tolkien, was, I suspect, the fabric of the imagined world. Other things might be stitched and embroidered across that fabric. Languages, for instance. Migrations. Wars. History. But the natural remains beneath, underlying it all. It is also perhaps worth noting that Tolkien was working in a tradition that goes back a while. William Morris, I think, was working in the same tradition, and it runs right back to Anglo-Saxon poets who so carefully observed the natural world. The sparrow that flies briefly through the fire-lit hall. The eagles and wolves and ravens that gather when there is fighting. In modern works, wolves and ravens might scour the aftermath of a battlefield, yes, but eagles? In our modern minds we don’t typically think of eagles as scavengers of the dead, but they are scavengers, and certainly did so after a battle. The Norse associated eagles with Odin, and sometimes left the dead, tortured or dying cut with marks of the ‘blood eagle’ as an offering. No. No. Not that ridiculous nonsense about pulling someone’s lungs out of their ribs, as evidenced by no source whatsoever, and invented by an over-imaginative historian. As best the evidence indicates, the tradition was to carve an eagle shape into flesh as a mark. It was seemingly a way to leave a body for the scavengers. Was it a tribute to Odin? Or a way to dishonour the flesh? We don’t know. But it strikes me that to be dishonoured by eagles is very much not in the vein of modern thinking.
For herein is the point I think I am getting at. To write about anything, a person needs to know that thing.
Surviving in the natural world requires both observing, and observance.
I will return to this.
I suppose that the whole relationship of nature and fantasy is interesting to me, because it seems to have been left so fallow, post-Tolkien. Even writers who I think are (or were, when they were alive) sympathetic to nature, have not often entwined nature itself into their stories in the way that Tolkien did. Ursula Le Guin certainly loved nature, and it shows in her work: but even in a story like Always Coming Home, her focus is anthropological. It is not a story about the relationship of humans and nature, not exactly. It is a story about the relationships among humans, within nature. Likewise, The Word for World is Forest is much more of a first contact story, rather than an ecological one. Ray Bradbury loved the life and the joy and the thrum of the natural world. Just read the opening of Dandelion Wine if you don’t believe me. But his focus was always more psychological. He told tales about what it is to be an experiencing mind. Nature itself, if it has a presence, tends to be numinous in his works. Either joyously so, or darkly. I can think of a few others who struck out on nature’s weedy trails, though I think they still veered away from fully embossing nature itself very deeply into their work. Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood is very certainly steeped in a natural landscape, and so too Alan Garner’s Thursbitch. But in both instances, it is the mythopoetic aspects of the landscape that come to the fore. The natural, a bit less so. I have not read Terry Windling’s Woodwife, though it is on my stack. I gather, it steps closer to being a story about the intersection of the human and the natural than anything else I’ve mentioned so far. Though, ironically, the book was written as an exercise in being inspired by a piece of Brian Froud artwork, rather than by nature more directly.
Froud himself is certainly inspired by nature, so I suppose it still counts, if rather tangled way.
Of course, fantasy does not have to encompass nature as a theme, any less than any fiction more generally requires it. Fantasy can, and should be more than that. Gormengast, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Perdido Street Station, The Book of the New Sun, His Dark Materials, and A Song of Ice and Fire are—to my mind at least—all thoroughly uninterested in nature, but they are excellent fantasies, all the same.
So, fantasy does not need nature.
But does nature need fantasy?
In our age of conservation crisis, I think I would have expected to see more in the way of fantasy analogies for environmental collapse. And yet, even those seem to be rather absent. Climate change science fiction does exist, true enough. Perhaps ecosystem-wide collapse is too grim a topic for the more escapist sister of science fiction? Too ever-present? Too impossible to conquer? Perhaps our current relationship with nature does not make for a readable fantasy story? The solution of the plot wouldn’t’t be to conceal, find or destroy some old object of power, or to unravel a mystery, or to meet armies upon the field of battle. It would be to consume less, and use less, and walk more lightly upon the earth. It is to reconcile ourselves with the limitations of being alive. Le Guin would have had the skill and mind to turn that into a wonderful story. I can’t think of many other authors who might. Perhaps, within the more usual paths of the fantasy story, it would not make for such an exciting read? Perhaps. It does also strike me that both Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke explore these themes, and those films are neither tedious nor overwhelmingly despairing. Something like The Lorax, but written for adults, does not seem such a strange notion to me. Yet, I do not think it is a topic often visited.
Nature is changeful, so I think I shall be too, if only a little.
I want to come back to nature and fantasy more generally.
It would be wrong to say that nature is utterly omitted in modern fantasy. It is certainly represented, but often in the form either of nature spirits that can be quite unnatural in their ways and manners, or in the shape of fairies. The relationship of fairies and fantasy could take up a whole essay of its own, if not a book. I will mostly leave fairies aside, except to say that they often seem to suffer from the same problem as other nature spirits in fantasy: they frequently do not seem like they would be at home in nature. To pick an example that is neither fairy nor spirit exactly, the Rivers of London seem far more human than river. That feels forgivable, when a story is set in a place that has been occupied by humans for so long that the rivers might very well become a little confused, and start to think of themselves as ‘not-rivers’. The pattern, however, seems quite common throughout current fantasy more generally. And often enough, it is extrapolated so that nature becomes a sort of mere faction. The representatives of nature are reduced to being the green cards in the deck.
The human relationship with nature has changed drastically in the last hundred or so years. I’m thinking mostly from an post-industrialised point-of-view, but whereas nature used to be (at least in part) threatening, this is no longer the case for most of us, most of the time. Nature has been subjugated, and our relationship with it has changed. Tolkien was standing on something of a cusp in this regard. His wolves are premodern wolves: terrifying and predatory, clever, evil and bloody. His eagles, are more modern in the way they are constructed. It is striking that it would be strange now to find a fantasy novel in which wolves are wholly villainous. In both A Song of Ice and Fire and The Assassin’s Apprentice series, the wolf is a companion, not a ravening beast.
We no longer fear the wolf. The wolf is not at the door. It is probably in a zoo somewhere, a bit sad. It is rare, fleeting, absent. Off in some distant land. We now dream of befriending the wolf, not killing it on sight.
So, I wonder if an actuality, nature has been diminished and pushed to arm’s length in fantasy, very much as it has been in Western culture more broadly. The trend is at its most extreme, I think, in LitRPG, where the very idea of a natural world is dispensed with entirely. You can go on an adventure through the world, but without ever once being soiled by the touch of real dirt. The natural world has been reduced to an illusion, drapery of muslin, a paper moon, a mass of blue-hued pixels that are off-limits for player characters. You can walk towards the mountains, but you will never reach them. The mountains are a rainbow, pretty to look at but hard to touch.
Before I wind down my thoughts, I wanted to light on one last little twist. For many of us, the urban landscape is now our environment. The city is the natural habitat in which we live. There certainly are authors—I would count Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint among them—who draw spirits and manifestations out of the living ecosystems of towns, suburbs and cities, rather than out of the ecosystems of woods and waters wild. Their stories do sometimes dwell on relationships between humans and their natural environment: but that natural environment is human-made. It is the street, the house, the kitchen, the backyard, the alleyway and that pub with the unpleasant beer-smelling carpet.
I have no doubt that there are excellent examples of fantasy writers working deeply with nature, and I am simply unaware of them. I’m not nearly as widely read as I’d like to be. Time is finite. That said, I’d be happy to be provided with suggestions if you have any.
Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I haven’t watched Princess Mononoke in a very long time. Perhaps a rewatch then.
tldnr: Past fantasy, especially Tolkien’s fantasy, seemingly had a much strong connection to nature than much of the current stuff does. I miss that a bit. Not much more to add. Just a bit of navel-gazing.