The Lord of the Rings Is Middle Fantasy, and That’s Best Kind
Seeing as how I just named it such
What You Know
You’ve heard of high fantasy. No, it’s not when you take mushrooms and start hallucinating. That’s tripping. High fantasy is a type of fiction wherein the world in which the story takes place is completely different from our own, having a history that is somehow unconnected with Earth and most natural laws in ways that make its universe function differently.
Some examples of high fiction include the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the One Piece manga/anime, the prime Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings, and the Mythica movie franchise. Don’t pretend you know that last one!
Of course, a lot of fantasy stories take place in the universe we know, and we call that low fantasy. In this fantasy subgenre, the writer sprinkles on the fantasy elements like a sword-and-sorcery Salt Bae and attempts to marry the occult with the ordinary in ways that feel genuine and plausible. You know, like the opposite of 39-Day Fiancé or whatever it’s called.
Some examples of low fiction include the The Dresden Files novels, the Record of Ragnarok (Shuumatsu no Warukyuure) manga/anime, the Persona video games series, the Supernatural television series, and those stories you tell your friends about how you totally hard-carried that game that one time.
Screenshot or it didn’t happen, my friend.
What It Is
So, now that you’ve been “reminded” of the two most famous subgenres of fantasy — and read the title — I’m sure you can easily discern which of them is the classification that the greatest work of fantasy falls under.
Neither.
Yes, that’s correct. The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) series is neither high nor low fantasy, and the reasons for this are simple.
LOTR isn’t high fiction because Middle-earth, the setting where the vast majority of the media in the legendarium takes place, is literally Earth — and that so in its middle age. Tolkien derived the name from Midgard, the name for the realm of men in Norse mythology, and situated the main continent of the setting in the Pangaea-like Arda.
Then again, LOTR isn’t exactly low fantasy either. Consider that Arda doesn’t exactly fit any historical age of Earth, and it’s very much the mundanity intruding on the fantasy in every piece of the legendarium, not the reverse.
What It Becomes
So, if it’s not high or low, we are going to have to reconcile that the LOTR legendarium is something else, something in-between. Hence middle fantasy, a subgenre where our universe looks very different than our historiography records and at least some natural laws are unfamiliar.
No, we’re not going to call it mid fantasy. Kids these days use mid to refer to something being unattractively tepid, and that’s definitely not what we would call the majority of middle fantasy works.
Didn’t know there’s other works of middle fantasy? Fred Saberhagen’s Ardneh sequence (the Empire of the East series, the Books of Swords series, and the Lost Books of Swords series) takes place on an Earth changed into a fantastical world by a nuclear holocaust and the entities created to manage it.
Read it! You’re welcome. Matter of fact, if you like post-apocalyptic fantasy, then you’ll probably like the Shannara novels. Yes, there’s a show, too, but as there’s bound to be some YA fans out there, I have no further comments.
It’s not just pre-history and post-apocalyptic scenarios in the middle fantasy realms, either. In fact, Tolkien’s famous friend C.S. Lewis gave us The Chronicles of Narnia, tales that occur near WWII and have most of their action in a portal realm whose name I forget.
Don’t help me. It’ll come to me.
Why It Matters
Sure, we could still call all those works I just spoke about “high fantasy” and probably get away with it. I mean, that’s pretty much what we’re doing right now, and readers don’t seem to have problems finding the correct shelves hiding the books in question — if books are even still acquired on shelves these days.
There are, however, several compelling reasons why we should not go with the more common label.
Writing is about concise communication. I’m sorry, but someone had to say it. Writing is about taking something that exists in one’s head and putting it on the page where, if the work is both well done and well packaged, it gets absorbed, thusly uploading an image without the interwebs.
Not that you can’t read books on the interwebs.
The second reason — and perhaps the most important one — is that giving something an appropriate label locks in the rules to that thing, to a degree. And why do we care about rules? So that we can break them…respectfully, of course.
The third and final reason I’ll give, though there are more, is that placing works like the LOTR in a unique subgenre shows the evolution of craft. Sure, I’m naming it middle fantasy as a partial nod to Middle-earth and a partial nod to both high and low fantasy, but it’s the works that pull inspiration from Tolkien’s writings that establish the radial pattern that makes the naming useful.
World of Warcraft has orcs, something Tolkien gave us, but as Azeroth is not Earth, it’s high fantasy — and recently low pop(ulation). The Iron Druid Chronicles follows in the same urban fantasy traditions as the above-mentioned Dresden Files, but Arizona is the main location — words you don’t hear often.
But whether you like urban fantasy or want to play a game that’s like a Middle-earth version of a Civil War re-enactment, I’ve got you covered. All you have to do is tell me what type of stuff you like, and I’ll start from the middle.
