The Genre That Must Not Be Named.

While other little Australians were cutting their teeth on Snugglepot & Cuddlepie or The Magic Pudding [a book I loathed with a great loathing], I was enamoured with Peg's Fairy Book.

I don't think I ever read much of it after the first time.  It was a large book with thick cardboard covers & heavy duty pages with the most glorious full page colour illustrations. The detail was amazing, the colours delicate, the detail vivid & for a child with an acute sense of *otherness* they were completely enchanting. I just loved the fairy bride with her gown of gossamer weighted with delicate gum blossom & the goblin tailors with their dark gypsy faces.

 I think this was my mother's & at some point I inherited it.  It is very old, & more dilapidated than it was, but considered both an Australian classic & rare. Unusual too in that so many of her wee folk look more like gypsies than anything from the hollow hills.

Then one Christmas a few years later we, though I can't remember ever agreeing to share this treasure with my brothers, received a beautifully illustrated copy of some Han's Christian Anderson fairy tales.  My favourite, naturally, was Seven Swans, Seven Brothers ~ which is derived from a much older & far  darker Celtic tale.

My brother's had Noddy, Thomas the Tank Engine, Little Black Samba.  I had Pegasus & fairies, unicorns & doorways into that Other World ~ the one that always seemed to hover just beyond my sight. Much later, when I read C.S. Lewis' Surprised By Joy, I instantly recognised his sense of *other* & how that longing eventually brought him to Christ.  I knew it all to well.

As I grew up my parents subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly Press who put out a range of children's classics ~ I suspect so they always had books on hand for me @ birthdays & Christmas. They were classics & many were extraordinarily dull to my mind no matter how worthy the material, but it was here I first learnt about The Once & Future King.

Lots of children read about Camelot & Arthur, Lancelot & Guinevere without it becoming an obsession but I have a quirky mind.  It was quirky as a child & time has not helped. I liked the general stories I had in my cheap Atlantic Press copy with its thick ragged edged pages but I didn't particularly like the style so I looked for something better.  I read Le Mort d'Arthur; the Mabinogion;  Monmouth's Kings of Great Britain; & stumbled across Geoffrey Ashe's  The Quest for Arthur's Britain ~ & that book forever changed the way I looked at fantasy, the way I read fantasy, what I considered fantasy, how I understood fantasy & it is, perhaps, why neither Tolkien nor Lewis have ever been my fantasy heroes. I've read them but meh...you know.

It is, perhaps not so surprisingly, why Harry Potter has never bothered me & why I actually don't even consider the books fantasy as much as poorly written fiction. Firstly Rowling does not have a very good sense of place.  All the best fantasy books do because they are rooted in reality.  The very best children's fantacist is a man called Alan Garner.  When I finally read The Owl Service, as an adult, I was blown away. By then I had been to Wales.  I had read The Mabinogion. I knew this story & it's roots. 

There was also Susan Cooper & her, The Dark is Rising series; Diana Wynne Jones & Mary Stewart, whom I discovered early.
Later I found Guy Gavriel Kaye ~ such a lovely, lovely writer ~ & they all share one thing in common: they understand the root reality of their fantasy & that has come to bother me a good deal.  

I didn't know, as a child, that both Cooper & Jones held pagan beliefs & these beliefs permeated & percolated  throughout their work grounding it firmly in another reality. This is what gives their work such power & strength ~ & what makes them so very dangerous. They know their history ~ & so do I! It is why so many fantasy writers irritate me no end.  They get stuff wrong.  They don't know the history.  They think you can just make pretend stuff up & somehow that is fantasy when it is not. Fantasy is grounded in an old belief system & Joshua 23:7 says~ 
 Make sure you do not associate with the other people still remaining in the land. Do not even mention the names of their gods, much less swear by them or serve them or worship them...a verse I only recently discovered.

I do not read much fantasy any more. I do not read it because I know my history.  I know my archaeology. I see the dark truths undergirding much of what I once loved ~ yes even Arthur, who is pagan to the core despite later attempts to Christianise him. 

Once you have studied the history & the archaeology ~ & I have~ you can't unknow the parallels with ancient Celtic beliefs & practices. They are hardly romantic or idealistic.  Rather they are earthy, bloody & literally horrifying. Christ died to set us free from such things ~ & yet I am not sorry to have known the joy of good fantasy.  No other genre prepares the mind so well to accept the implausible or the heart to long for that which never was in this world.