For the Love of Fantasy
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Fiction’s greatest fantasy creatures[/caption]
Infographic Credit: Victoria Russell
As children, the world around us was always more than what met the eye. The living room floor was made up of hot molten lava, unforgiving and destructing. The only safe haven was the old sofa that had transformed in our minds from throw pillows and couch cushions to unrelenting mountains. Our survival depended on jumping from sofa to sofa making sure we never touched the fiery floor, and our moms never seemed to understand what we were doing besides ruining the couch springs. Even when I was a child, I had convinced myself there was a Great White shark lurking at the shadowy and cold deep end of my grandma’s pool. It was our lively and almost dangerous imaginations that brought us new experiences, lands, and worlds. But for some reason, the lava cooled in the living room, the mountains turned back into sofas, and sharks no longer lived in my grandma’s pools. Our created fantasy lands that were once filled with trolls who lived under bridges, knights ready for battle, and friendly aliens slowly diminished to nothing more than fond memories of playing pretend.
Now instead of creating our own fantasy lands, the once imaginative children turn to books, more specifically, fantasy books. Fantasy fiction creates and explores lands that our childlike minds could have hardly fathomed. These carefully constructed worlds are read by millions and adored from the young, innocent child to the old, grumpy grandpa. My question is what makes fantasy fiction so popular? What makes a book like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sell more than 8.3 million copies in the US during the first twenty-four hours? I believe it is the call to our own youthful imaginations that makes fantasy fiction so popular. These magical lands remind us of the worlds that we once created and explored. People long to again experience different worlds that we once believed to be so real, like lava floors and deep sea creatures in pools. However, for those of us who made the sad step in growing up can no longer believe our own imaginations, so we turn to the various fantasy lands created by J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis’ imaginations. Their books allow us to relive the child-like wonder and awe of new worlds.
There are very few rules as to what makes a novel fantasy fiction. As long as there is a consistency in the world you have created, almost anything can be a fantasy novel. While most novels follow mythological and folkloric themes, the author is not bound to any restrictions. Essentially, fantasy follows the rules created by the author and the magic of their pen, which is similar to a child’s imagination. There are no rules to playing pretend, and that is the beauty of it. No matter what crazy worlds you come up with, it works because it is yours.
Fantasy fiction and their lands have been popularized because we identify with J.K. Rowling’s house elves, Tolkien’s hobbits, and C.S. Lewis’ talking animals because, some time or another, as children, we created stories like these. Fantasy lands and fantasy fiction allow us to relive our childhood again, activating our imaginations to the point where we hope and almost believe that our letters from Hogwarts are coming and there is a place called Narnia.
So for the children that never really grew up, thank you for your imagination and for helping me to experience being a child again.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/22cnd-potter.html?_r=0
