UK/AUS/NZ

Last Friday I posted on US-based genre site the Supernatural Underground, on the topic of “High Romantic Fantasy and The Gathering Of The Lost.”

The thrust of my premise was that;

“The Gathering Of The Lost (and Wall of Night series) is the style of epic that is also known as High Fantasy, or alternately High Romantic Fantasy.

Rightly, I believe, because the chivalric epic of the High Medieval period is a major influence on this style of storytelling: for example, the Morte D’Arthur and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, as well as Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte de Graal, Parsifal, and Lohengrin. “

USA

The romance, I argued, is also “high'”, deriving from: “… notions of quest and of chivalry, of tryst and tokens, of the trumpet blast at dawn, the banners of noon day, and the twilight of the gods…where the romance is… [that]…of Lancelot and Guinevere, Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, of Tristan and Isolde…  “

In that sense, the High Fantasy version of epic could also equally well be called “High Romantic Fantasy” as opposed to the more recent “brutal realism” popularized by series such as George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (which began with A Game of Thrones), in particular.

Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy, on the other hand, belong more in the High Fantasy quadrant of the epic ‘verse—with considerable High Romance as well, i.e. in the heroic, chivalric and mythic/legendary elements of these stories.

Another way of thinking about this style of Fantasy literature is as High Romantic Adventure—a sense I tried to capture in the three quotes I included from The Gathering Of The Lost in the Supernatural Underground post.

When I was making those selections, I realised there was an intervening step in the connection between contemporary High Fantasy and the romantic epics of the medieval era.  Although touched on in epic poems such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, it came into its own in the Romantic era, with the works of writers such as Walter Scott, including novels like Ivanhoe, and poems such as Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

I believe the Emerian knights of The Gathering Of The Lost can trace their literary lineage as much to works such as Ivanhoe, as to the medieval Morte d’Arthur or The Song of Roland—the latter referenced in Browning’s poem “Childe Roland To The Dark Tower”, which is echoed in its turn by Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Fantasy series.

In the end, whether a story is epic fantasy, high fantasy, or even high romantic fantasy doesn’t really matter that much—these are all just labels and it’s the quality of the story being told that counts. But I do find the history of our literature fascinating, and the way in which a story form that was present in the medieval world (and undoubtedly before that too, although perhaps not so clearly in a written form), can link to the first novels of the Romantic era, and still find expression through contemporary literature.