1. The medieval period
English fantasy could be said to have its beginning in the Anglo‐Saxon epic poem Beowulf, the best‐known early work in English literature, generally dated in the 8th century. The eponymous hero (his name means Bear) fights and kills the monster Grendel, and then follows Grendel's avenging mother to her underwater lair, killing her too with the aid of a giant's sword, whose blade melts in the heat of her blood. As a king, 50 years later, Beowulf fights a dragon who, enraged by the theft of a golden goblet from his treasure hoard, has emerged to devastate the country. The dragon is killed, and Beowulf dies. J. R. R. Tolkien had this episode in mind when he described the death of the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit.
Marvellous stories have always held a strong appeal, as shown by the long‐enduring popularity of the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of tales compiled from many different sources, probably in the late 13th century, and frequently drawn upon by preachers to hold listeners' attention. In the opening pages of the great 14th‐century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight we are shown young King Arthur celebrating the New Year with his court, but restless until he has been told the expected story ‘of some perilous incident, of some great wonder’. Medieval writers often showed the natural and the supernatural side by side. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) presents a mythic history of the kings of Britain, which begins when Brutus, great‐grandson of Aeneas, collects up survivors of the Trojan War and brings them to England, then uninhabited, ‘except for a few giants’. Not only does Geoffrey write of giants and ogres, but also dragons and a sea‐monster who swallows up the wicked King Morvidus, and of Merlin, who first became well known in England through this work. Here Merlin is shown as a seer and a prophet, as well as a deus ex machina, capable of transferring the stones brought from Africa by giants, from Naas in Ireland to Stonehenge. He also brings about the begetting of King Arthur when he transforms Uther, who desires Igerna [Igraine], into the likeness of Igerna's husband. Geoffrey dealt more fully with Merlin in his poem Vita Merlini (c.1150).
Sir Thomas Malory assembled his Le Morte d'Arthur (printed by Caxton in 1485) from 13th‐century French prose romances which he augmented with English material. Repeatedly insisting that the account is historical, he also introduces magic. The sword Excalibur is delivered to Arthur by an arm clad in white samite, and the same arm appears out of the lake to receive it before he dies. There are spells and magic potions, and enchantresses among whom is Morgan le Fay, half‐sister of Arthur. Merlin is a less dominant figure and disappears after the opening sections of the book. We see him besotted with ‘one of the damosels of the Lady of the Lake that hight Nenivel’. Rashly he initiates her into the mysteries of necromancy, and ‘ever passing weary of him’, she imprisons him under a rock.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most brilliant of all medieval poems, a story of how Sir Gawain's honour and chastity are tempted with the aid of magic, blends chivalric romance with elements from old tales of Beheading Games, and also with an apparent vestige of some nature myth. A huge green man on a green horse rides into the castle hall at Camelot where Arthur's court is feasting, and offers his axe to anyone who will meet him in single combat. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and strikes off the green man's head. The following New Year's Day, as agreed, the giant awaits him at his Green Chapel for the second part of the contest.
The Protestant Roger Ascham (1515/16–68), tutor to Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, referred to tales of chivalry and courtly love with great disgust in The Scholemaster (1570) as belonging to the papist decadence of the past when ‘fewe bookes were read in our tong, savyng certaine bookes of Chevalrie … as one, for example, Morte Arthur’. Even to Chaucer (c.1343–1400), who began The Canterbury Tales about 1387, much the same time as the Gawain poet was writing, they seemed in a past mode. The Wife of Bath talks about fairies as bygones, belonging to King Arthur's day, ‘But now can no man see none elves mo’. Though there is enchantment in The Canterbury Tales, such as in the incomplete Squire's Tale in which a king of Arabia sends magic gifts to the king of Tartary and his daughter, Chaucer's own interrupted tale of Sir Thopas, who breathlessly gallops around, encountering the Fairy Queen and a three‐headed giant, but accomplishing nothing, is a parody of a metrical romance, and the impatient host shouts ‘No more of this, for goddes dignitee’, as Chaucer catalogues ‘romances of prys’ such as Horn Childe, Sir Bevis [of Hampton] and Sir Guy [of Warwick]. These were popular verse romances of the fairly recent past. In all three, deeds of knightly valour mingle with accounts of invincible swords, magic rings, dragons, and giants. The story of Huon of Bordeaux, a French romance of the same period, done into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1534, did not have the same popularity, but is important because in it Oberon, king of the fairies (son of Julius Caesar and Morgan le Fay), makes his first English appearance, a 3‐foot being of ‘aungelyke visage’. It was one of the romances contemptuously dismissed by Thomas Nashe in The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589) as ‘worne out impressions of fayned no where acts’.
2. The banishment of the fairies
Arthurian legend virtually disappears from English literature after the medieval period and was used very little by writers until the 19th century. Though there is an element of it in The Faerie Queene (1590–6), Spenser was primarily influenced by Italian epic poetry. There are no native English fairies in it; the enchanters are allegorical figures, Archimago representing Hypocrisy, and Duessa—the daughter of Deceit and Shame—representing Falsehood. The queen herself is of course Elizabeth, and the fact that Spenser addresses her as ‘The greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond’ is some indication of Elizabethan preoccupation with fairies. They appeared in poems, in plays, in masques, in practical jokes—as in the one played on Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and on the credulous clerk, Dapper, in Jonson's The Alchemist (1610) by the two tricksters who tell him he is going to meet the Queen of the Fairies. Though Jonson regarded his contemporaries' obsession with magic as a national mania, his position as a writer of court masques obliged him to use it in such works as The Satyr (also known as The Masque of the Fairies), presented at Althorpe in 1603 to amuse James I's queen, and Oberon, the Fairy Prince, given at Whitehall in 1611. Milton's Comus, written for a performance at Ludlow in 1634, is the richest of all the masques in terms of poetry, and a most unexpected work for a Puritan. Comus himself is an imaginary pagan god with magic powers, who waylays travellers and with his potion changes their faces ‘into some brutish form’. In ‘L'Allegro’ Milton names more traditional fairies, including Faery Mab.
Mercutio's description of Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet was to be built upon by Drayton and Herrick and subsequent poets, who presented her as the queen of fairies and the wife of Oberon, whereas originally queen meant no more than woman. But the most influential fairy play of all was A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this Shakespeare created a new species of fairy, and in doing so he brought about the destruction of the fairies of English folklore. Presumably because the play was to celebrate a marriage, he softened their image. Before that the folk view was that they were malevolent spirits, associated with witchcraft. Puck or pouke was a term applied to a class of demons; the naïve little devil who visits London in Jonson's The Devil is an Ass (1616) is called Pug—another variant of the name. Shakespeare conflated Puck with Robin Goodfellow, a hobgoblin, an earthy spirit who did household tasks in return for a saucer of milk, but also played impish tricks, such as leading travellers astray, as are described in The Mad Prankes and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow. The first known printing of this prose story with verse interpolations is in 1626, though there is evidence that it had appeared at least 40 years earlier. Robin Goodfellow here is the son of Oberon, who bestows magic gifts on him, such as the ability to change his shape ‘for to vex both foole and knave’. He is described as ‘famozed in every old wives chronicle for his mad merrye prankes’, like Shakespeare's Puck, but in capacity for magic he falls far short of the latter.
Nor was he an inhabitant of fairyland, nor a minuscule being. The fairy of English folklore seems to have been the size of a small man, and it was Shakespeare's depiction of fairies as diminutive and picturesque, with pretty garden names, employed in hanging pearls in cowslips' ears and gathering bats' wings to make elfin coats, that captured the literary imagination. Poets such as Michael Drayton (1563–1631), Robert Herrick (1591–1674), Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–72) constructed elaborate conceits about fairy revels and banquets, embellished with details of microscopic clothes and food. Drayton's Nimphidia (1627) is a mock‐heroic poem describing the efforts of Pigwiggen, a fairy knight, to seduce Queen Mab, and the battle that then ensues between him and Oberon, but it is the descriptions of the fairy palace, costume, chariots, and armour that are the poet's chief concern. Herrick's fairy poems in Hesperides (1648) used the same sort of detail. All this was of course for a limited readership. The poor man's Pigwiggen was Tom Thumb, a legendary character included—along with elves and hobgoblins and such—by Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) as an object of popular superstition. His history was set down by ‘R.J.’, probably Richard Johnson (1573–?1659) in The History of Tom Thumbe, the Little. Though it may well have appeared earlier, the earliest known copy is dated 1621. Merlin (here described as ‘a conjurer, an inchanter, a charmer [who] consorts with Elves and Fayries’) promises a childless elderly couple a thumb‐sized child. The child is delivered by the ‘midnights Midwife, the Queene of Fayries’ and ‘in less than foure minutes [grows] to be a little man’. In episodes later bowdlerized he is eaten by his mother's cow, and snatched up by a raven and a giant; his godmother the fairy queen bestows magical gifts on him, and he becomes a valued member of King Arthur's court.
Little Tom Thumb was a fairy tale singled out for particular execration by Puritan preachers, who regarded all works of imagination as lies and therefore damnably wicked—an attitude that persisted longer in America than it did in England. John Bunyan in Sighs from Hell: or The Groans of a Damned Soul (1658) lamented his youthful addiction to romances which drove him away from more profitable reading: ‘Thought I … give me a Ballad, a News book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton …’ George on Horseback is St George, one of Richard Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom, a long romance published in two parts in 1596 and 1597, in which St George is instructed in magic arts by an enchantress who steals him in infancy. Like the tale of Bevis, The Seven Champions (albeit drastically shortened) remained popular reading for centuries, and The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) owes much to both of them. Not many in the 17th century spoke up for such stories. The convivial Richard Corbet (1582–1635), Bishop of Oxford and then of Norwich, and fiercely opposed to Puritanism, was one notable exception. His poem, ‘Farewell, Rewards and Fairies’, quoted by Kipling's Puck, lamented that Puritans had banished fairies, and ‘now, alas, they all are dead; Or gone beyond the seas’.
Fairies did not flourish in the utilitarian and sceptical 18th century. So far as children were concerned, the old romantic tales of magic were held to belong to the ignorant and credulous, and conscientious parents wished their young to be well‐informed, rational beings. That arbiter of correct behaviour, Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) in one of his letters to his (natural) son, then aged 8, was contemptuous about the old‐style romances, ‘stuft with enchantments, magicians, giants’. And when Sarah Fielding introduced a d'Aulnoy‐style fairy story into The Governess (1749) it was with warnings that ‘Giants, Magic, Fairies, and all sorts of supernatural Assistances in a Story’ should only be used to point a moral. A few d'Aulnoy stories were translated in 1699, and more in 1707 and 1716, and a translation of Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé appeared in 1729, but for the most part fairies seemed a forgotten species, so that in 1744 when a mother, Jane Johnson, was writing a story for her small children, she used ‘pretty little angels’ in their place to dole out treats to the good characters. (The manuscript of this story, the earliest known juvenile fairy tale, is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.)
Oriental magic took over in such 18th‐century English fantasy writing as there was. A ‘Grub‐street’ English version of Galland's translation of The Arabian Nights was being published in London from about 1704 and made far more impact on the literary imagination than the French fairy tales. Writers began to produce tales set in exotic eastern locations, with enchantments, genii, and magical objects such as rings and talismans. William Beckford's Vathek (1786), written in French when the author was only 21, is the most extravagant of these. The Caliph Vathek, whose mother is a sorceress, lured on by lust for even greater power and magnificence than he already possesses, becomes a servant of the Devil. Despite the author's hedonism and seeming pleasure in cruelty, there is an ostensible moral: the worthlessness of riches and the fearful end of tyrants. Indeed a concluding moral reflection was a feature of the oriental tale, though some writers laboured the point more than others as, for instance, James Ridley in Tales of the Genii (1764), a book read by the young Charles Dickens, who was terrified by the diminutive old hag in ‘The History of the Merchant Abudah’. Few oriental tales were designed for children. Horace Walpole's ‘The Dice‐Box’, one of his Hieroglyphic Tales written between 1766 and 1772, is a rare exception, written for the small niece of a friend. The heroine of this brief and crudely comic extravaganza, wholly without a moral, is the 9‐year‐old Pissimissi from Damascus, who travels in a pistachio‐nut stuffed with toys and sugarplums and drawn by an elephant and a ladybird.
3. the return of the fairies
By the end of the century there was a marked change; from the 1780s the supernatural became fashionable. Reynolds's painting of Shakespeare's Puck as an impish, satyr‐like child (1789) was much admired. It had been commissioned by Alderman John Boydell for his Shakespeare gallery, to which leading artists of the time contributed, including Fuseli, whose Midsummer Night's Dream paintings show an erotic dreamworld into which he introduced such folklore beings as night‐hags and changelings, while Puck appears as a huge elemental figure in his painting of the fairy Cobweb (1785–6). Blake, though he stood outside all fashion, also used folklore fairies in an illustration for Milton's ‘L'Allegro’ in 1816. Walter Scott was a literary pioneer. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1801–2) includes an essay ‘The Fairies of Popular Superstition’, and among the ballads is the legend of Thomas the Rhymer, who followed the Queen of Elfland to her country and never came back. (Keats uses the same theme of a mortal ensnared by an elfin woman in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (1819), and Mrs Craik and Andrew Lang both built stories on it.) Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market (1862), more dark and sinister than any of these, describes goblins trying to seduce two sisters with forbidden fruit. Scott's first important original work, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), is based on a Border legend about a goblin, and The Lady of the Lake (1810) includes a fairy ballad, ‘Alice Brand’. In his novel The Monastery (1820), set in Elizabethan times, there is a sylph, the White Lady of Avenelf, who acts as deus ex machina. He also started a revival of interest in Arthurian legend; there are many extracts from Malory in footnotes to Marmion (1808). Scott was responsible for encouraging James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, in a literary career. Hogg's ‘Kilmeny’, the 13th tale in The Queen's Wake (1813), where a girl walks into ‘A land of love and a land of light, Withouten sun, or moon, or night’ which she cannot bear to leave, is one of the most haunting poems about fairy enchantment.
Important work was also done by the Irishman Thomas Crofton Croker, whose Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland (1825–8) Scott knew, and by Thomas Keightley, another Irishman, whose Fairy Mythology (1828) covers an astonishing range of European legends, and includes a section on English fairies, a subject that had received little attention before. Material from it was frequently used by subsequent writers, including Archibald Maclaren, who drew on Scott's Border Minstrelsy as well for his The Fairy Family: Ballads and Metrical Tales of the Fairy Faith of Europe (1857).
The Grimm brothers' Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen were translated by Edgar Taylor under the title German Popular Stories (1823), with illustrations by George Cruikshank (which Ruskin remembered copying when he was a boy), and translations of Hans Christian Andersen appeared in 1846. They were enthusiastically received. Early Victorians, seeking an escape from the ugliness of industrial society, turned to chivalric ideals and fairy mythology, which seemed to belong to a lost innocent world. Tennyson's ‘Morte d'Arthur’ was published in 1842, to be gradually followed over many years by the other 11 poems which make up Idylls of the King. Unexpected artists responded to the fashion for fairy pictures; Landseer painted Titania with Bottom, and J. M. W. Turner Queen Mab's Cave. John Anster Fitzgerald (the most obsessive fairy painter of all), Daniel Maclise, Joseph Noël Paton, and Richard Dadd were among those who depicted fairy worlds with minute realism and sometimes erotic detail, often on huge canvases. C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) counted 165 fairies in Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (A Midsummer Night's Dream was a favourite subject), but there are over 200 in Richard Doyle's watercolour The Fairy Tree. In Fairyland (1870), with 36 of his illustrations for which the Irish poet William Allingham wrote the verse, was the most lavish fairy picture book of the period.
The theatre of the time was an important influence on many artists, notably on Doyle and Fitzgerald. Stage productions were spectacular, using elaborate stage machinery and lighting, and there was a memorable production by Charles Kean of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1856, and one of The Tempest the following year where Ariel sailed on a dolphin's back and rode on a bat, and Prospero's freed spirits flew through the air. Pantomimes were particularly rich in fairies; Richard Henry Horne in Memoirs of a London Doll (1846) gives a chapter to one performed at Drury Lane, with a long description of the transformation scene and its frost fairies.
Literary fantasy, especially where children were concerned, was more purposeful. The first full‐length juvenile fairy story was Francis Paget's The Hope of the Katzekops (1844), a vivacious comedy which becomes serious in the final pages. The prince who is the Katzekopf hope is reformed by fairy means, as Scrooge is by the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future in Dickens's The Christmas Carol (1843), and variations on this theme played a large part in Victorian fantasy. It could involve savagely unpleasant punishment, as in Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874), or in Lucy Lane Clifford's ‘The New Mother’ (1882), where two naughty children are abandoned by their mother and her place is taken by one with glass eyes and a wooden tail. Other improving fairy tales ranged from simplistic stories, such as those by Mary Louisa Molesworth, about children who are cured of faults by encounters with magic, to the complex symbolism of George MacDonald. Nearly all his fantasies, for both adults and children, describe a quest for spirituality, but the meaning is left for readers to infer—MacDonald always denied that he wrote allegory. In Phantastes (1858) the hero's name, Anodos, Greek for ‘a spiritual ascent’, is a clue to what follows.
Both this and Lilith (1895), his last work, describe strange encounters, often full of sexual imagery, as the central characters wander in a dream world. Neither was popular in MacDonald's lifetime, the Athenaeum saying of the first that it read as if the author had supped ‘too plentifully on German romance, negative philosophy, and Shelley's “Alastor”’. His greatest work lies in the simpler fantasies for children. Charles Kingsley's The Water‐Babies (1863), though didactic on many fronts, imparting lessons in moral improvement and natural history as well as asides on topics dear to the author, was also highly original, written with an infectious verve that carries the reader through the book's chaotic organization.
Lewis Carroll's Alice books of 1865 and 1871 have often been cited as a watershed in the history of children's books; F. J. Harvey Darton referred to the first as a spiritual volcano. It is a mark of their originality that not only do they have no moral, but they owe nothing to any fantasy that preceded them, establishing their own species of nonsense which, once Carroll had shown the way, was palely imitated by many other authors. His attempt at conventional fairies in Sylvie and Bruno (1889–93) is best forgotten.
Victorian writers for children tended to draw on German and French sources rather than on native tradition. Frances Browne and John Ruskin both wrote stories which owe much to the Grimms. Hans Christian Andersen's bitter‐sweet melancholy was often imitated; Oscar Wilde's ‘The Happy Prince’ (described by John Goldthwaite as ‘quasi‐religious bathos’) is the best‐known of these pastiches. George MacDonald was influenced by German romantic writers such as Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann, and echoes of the latter can be found in Mary De Morgan. The background of Perrault fairy stories was used in burlesque accounts of court life such as in Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring (1855) and in Andrew Lang's chronicles of Pantouflia, beginning with Prince Prigio (1889), a hero whose ancestors included Cinderella, the Marquis de Carabas, and the Sleeping Princess. Juliana Horatia Ewing's Lob Lie‐by‐the‐Fire (1873) is one of the few stories to draw on English folklore. There are some English tales in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (1889–1910), but Joseph Jacobs was the first to give them serious attention, in two volumes of 1890 and 1893. Neil Philip in The Penguin Book of English Folktales (1992) summarizes the work done by English collectors.
The Scots and Irish had always shown far more interest than the English in their folklore and native tales. For his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), William Butler Yeats drew on material from many collectors of the past such as Croker and Patrick Kennedy, and expressed particular admiration for ‘the pathos and tenderness’ of Lady (Jane Francesca) Wilde's Ancient Legends of Ireland (1887). He also included fairy poems by William Allingham, and more robust material from William Carleton, author of Tales of Ireland (1834). Yeats was unusual among literary fantasists in that he actually claimed to believe in the superstitions he described. But he was a born syncretist, equally interested in Irish tales and oriental magic, and did not mind how incompatible his ideas were if they appealed to the imagination and helped inspire creative work. Lord Dunsany, though associated with the Irish Revival, drew little on Celtic tradition, more on invented mythology of his own, in his mistily romantic fairy tales. Padraic Colum, the only Irish Revival writer who was peasant‐born and country‐bred, used an Irish background and traditional tales in his children's books, and wove several legends into a single narrative in The King of Ireland's Son (1916).
4. the 20th‐century revival
The turn of the century saw another English eruption of enthusiasm for fairies, perhaps prompted by reaction against liberal progressive late Victorian culture. On 27 December 1904 an audience of adults at a London theatre responded to Peter Pan's appeal by enthusiastically assenting that yes, they did believe in fairies. Barrie had been much impressed by Seymour Hicks's Bluebell in Fairyland (1901), and determined to write a children's play of his own. Peter Pan is an amalgam of magic, nostalgia, and his own complex psychological problems, but Barrie wrote other plays using more traditional elements. In Dear Brutus (1917) an elfin host, Lob, sends his guests into an enchanted wood to seek the second chance all of them desire; Mary Rose (1920) draws on the Scottish legend where a mortal can vanish for a lifetime and reappear no older, and not knowing what has passed. Peter Pan is still an annual Christmas event in London; its rival in popularity, Where the Rainbow Ends (1911) by Clifford Mills and ‘John Ramsey’ (Reginald Owen) with music by Roger Quilter, a heady mixture of jingoism and magic, with St George as presiding genius, did not long survive World War II. The Peter Pan chapters of The Little White Bird (1902), where Barrie represents London's Kensington Gardens as inhabited by fairies who emerge after lock‐up time, were reissued as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and illustrated by Arthur Rackham, the most distinguished fantasy artist of his generation.
In her children's books E. Nesbit avoided sentimentality, combining her fantasy with humour, and magic is mostly used to show how not to use it. The Story of the Amulet (1906) is probably the first children's book with time travel, later to become very popular. It was used by Alison Uttley in A Traveller in Time (1939) and Philippa Pearce in Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), one of the best examples of the genre. The magic worked by Kipling's Puck in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910) summons up the past for two children. Puck here is the Robin Goodfellow of tradition, as ancient as the land itself. Walter de la Mare, though he wrote of fairies in his verse and used them more obliquely in his short stories, stands apart from any literary movement. The Three Mulla‐Mulgars (1910) is an account of a spiritual quest, and perhaps this is at the root of his writing, which so often has death as its theme. Eleanor Farjeon was an admirer of de la Mare, but her whimsically fanciful tales fall far short of his.
In general, fairies before World War II were of the gauzy, winged little buzzfly sort that Kipling's Puck had derided. Appetite for them seemed insatiable; they appeared in verse, illustrations, comic strips, advertisements; ‘Practically every author begins his or her career by writing a fairy tale’, stated a 1934 guide. By the 1940s the preoccupation had dwindled, though there are late instances. The title story in Naomi Mitchison's Five Men and a Swan (1957), is about a West Highland trawler skipper who chances on a swan maiden, while the stories in Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Cat's Cradle Book (1960) and Kingdoms of Elfin (1977) build ingeniously on fairy literature of the past.
The most compelling and elaborately constructed fantasy world must be that of J. R. R. Tolkien, who had been brooding over the landscape, people, history, and legends of Middle‐Earth, and formulating its language, for over 20 years before he wrote The Hobbit (1937), to which The Lord of the Rings, taking nearly 20 more years to complete, was started as a sequel. (It is perhaps not surprising that he disliked his friend C. S. Lewis's very different Narnia fantasies (1950–6), written at great speed, using—not a coherent mythology, but any elements that caught the author's fancy.) Other writers have since tried their hand at creating imaginary worlds; Peter Carey's The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) is one of the more inventive. T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1938) is a witty story about the boyhood of Arthur, later adapted to form the first part of The Once and Future King (1958); its touches of satire raise it above the level of ordinary comic fantasy.
Alan Garner began a new style of fantasy for children (albeit with echoes of Tolkien) with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and its successors, weaving myth with characters from the past and the present. The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973), though far more complex and sophisticated, develop the same theme. Richard Adams's Watership Down (1972), where rabbits set out on an epic journey to found a new colony, became something of a cult, and there were many imitations. Mary Norton's five books about the Borrowers (1953–82), three Lilliputian people, the last of their kind, is a more poignant treatment of the same sort of quest for safety and permanence. Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) created new adult interest in fairy tales by reworking traditional stories and infusing them with dark and often erotic comedy. A. S. Byatt built Possession (1990) round the character of a Victorian poetess obsessed with the legend of the French snake‐fairy, Mélusine; the novel includes accomplished pastiches of fairy tales of the period.
Bibliography
- Darton, F. J. Harvey, Children's Books in England (1960; 3rd edn., 1982).
- Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot (1981).
- Goldthwaite, John, The Natural History of Make‐Believe (1996).
- Latham, Minor White, The Elizabethan Fairies (1930).
- Martineau, Jane (ed.), Victorian Fairy Painting (1997).
