Episode 120: Transcript
Episode: 120: Who Owns Epic Fantasy?
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about speculative fiction and science and futurism that always packs a lot of trail mix when we go on our epic quests through the gray lands. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a whole bunch of recent books, including a young adult space fantasy trilogy that ends with Promises Stronger Than Darkness, which comes out in April.
Annalee: [00:00:25] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. I currently have a book out now about archeology called Four Lost Cities, and I have a forthcoming novel. It's coming in January that's called The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:40] It's so awesome.
[00:00:41] Okay, so today we're gonna talk about Lord of the Rings and the whole genre of epic fantasy, which it arguably spawned. There's been some controversy lately among people who think that elves and other fantasy peoples should only look like white Europeans. So, we thought it would be a good moment to kind of talk about what is epic fantasy? How did it come out of Lord of the Rings, and who owns epic fantasy storytelling? And later in the show we'll be talking to Tolkien scholar, Helen Young, about how we should view Tolkien's work. And by the way, you know, just a heads up, there's gonna be some discussion of sexual assault and sexual violence in this episode so if you wanna avoid those topics, you might wanna stop listening now.
[00:01:26] Also on our audio extra next week, we'll be talking about our hopes for Doctor Who now that everything is changing once again. So please don't miss that.
[00:01:36] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and it's funded by you, our listeners, via Patreon? That's right. It's amazing if you become a patron, you are helping to make this podcast happen. You are keeping us funded and supplied, and you're giving us oats for our horses, and you're giving us fresh armor and swords and everything, and with every single episode, you get audio extras, or we're starting to call them mini episodes because they're, they're basically like extra episodes of the podcast every other week.
Annalee: [00:02:10] It's like a mini candy bar, which is, when you think about it, almost even better than a full candy bar.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:15] Yeah, some of the mini episodes we've been doing, I think are some of our best stuff lately. And you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time, and it's like basically where I'm spending all my time now that I'm kind of not on Twitter anymore.
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[00:02:44] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]
Annalee: [00:03:13] So I know that Lord of the Rings is technically an epic fantasy, but what actually does epic fantasy mean? Is there some kind of hard and fast definition or even like a mushy definition?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:25] There is definitely not a hard and fast definition of epic fantasy. There is a slow and kind of, yeah, mushy definition.
Annalee: [00:03:33] Slimy, bubbling.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:36] There’s a kind of inchoate sense of epic fantasy. It’s one of those terms that people throw around all the time and nobody pretty much can agree on what it actually signifies. I've come across things where people are basically like, well, you know it when you see it, but here's one answer that comes from Robin Hobb speaking on a panel at Emerald City Comicon in 2015.
Robin Hobb: [00:04:00] Epic Fantasy in a sense, is a story of something that is world changing, but the author determines the size of that world.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:10] And you know, another good definition in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, editor John Klute says, quote, “Any fantasy tale written to a large scale which deals with the founding or definitive and lasting defense of a land may fairly be called epic fantasy.”
[00:04:27] So it's sort of the fate of nations and so on and so forth. But right after that, Klute says that, well, a bunch of stuff that's really sword and sorcery or heroic fantasy where it's just like a dude having adventures and the fate of nations isn't really involved, that stuff often gets miscategorized as epic fantasy. So it's kind of like nobody really knows what is epic fantasy?
[00:04:48] There's also a great NK Jemisin essay about what we mean when we say epic fantasy, which we'll link to in the show notes.
Annalee: [00:04:51] So where does Lord of the Rings come into this? Is this like the first epic fantasy or something?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:57] It's kind of the first major epic fantasy, according to some people, but it's also kind of not. There's a great kind of rundown of the history of epic fantasy by friend of the show, Adam Whitehead, which we’ll also link to in the show notes. And he says, Tolkien did not create the genre of epic fantasy, but he did come to define it for most people, and most people, when they think of epic fantasy, they think of Tolkien as the great kind of master, the originator.
[00:05:25] Lord of the Rings became synonymous with epic fantasy and a lot of the big works of epic fantasy that we think of were explicitly imitating Tolkien or drawing from Tolkien, and many of them follow its format very closely. There's a plucky hero, there's an epic quest, the fate of nations are at stake, and there's some kind of shadowy villain who is up to no good, who often is like explicitly capital E, evil. People talk about it basically being like there was Lord of the Rings, it became really popular in the late sixties, early seventies. And then finally there's this moment in 1977 where the genre really takes off where Lester Del Rey founds Del Rey books and he publishes two books that became huge hits that kind of build on the legacy of Tolkien. One of them is The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, which you know, is a very explicit like, it’s an homage to Tolkien, almost. And then you have Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson. And I remember when I was a young aspiring science fiction and fantasy author, people told me that Lord Foul’s Bane was the first book that really showed what epic fantasy was capable of and how it could go beyond and transcend Tolkien’s influence.
[00:06:40] So Annalee, what's your experience with that book?
Annalee: [00:06:44] Yeah. It's funny that you say that because I remember very clearly the first time I was exposed to the book, Lord Foul’s Bane and it was. I was a kid, I had read Lord of the Rings and I'd read the Narnia books and I'd read a lot of Ursula LeGuin, like The Wizard of Earth Sea.
[00:07:05] So I kind of had in my head what fantasy was. And then I got into high school and I joined a group of much older kids, like seniors who were playing D&D together. And because we were playing D&D and the Dungeon Master said to me, well, if you're gonna, you know, play with us and you know, do our version of d and d, you have to read Lord Foul’s Bane. And that's like kind of gonna explain to you like the mood. And the novel starts with a guy who has been, it's a secondary world kind of thing. And there's a guy who's been disabled in our world because he has leprosy, and one of the side effects of his disability is that he's impotent. So he comes to this new world and he's sort of born afresh in a new body and he doesn't have leprosy anymore. And the first thing he does is like test drive his dick by raping a woman. And I remember, it's not that I hadn't been exposed to sex and violence before, but it was a very, it was both cruel and offhand. I remember reading it and thinking. Wow. Like there's just, he just rapes this woman and that's just supposed to be normal and how it goes.
[00:08:22] And I continued to play D&D with this group and I continued to use the female characters that I had always played, and I was very fond of being a female half elf. And my DM immediately put me into a situation where I was… my character, my female character, was expected to get something from a bureaucrat by having sex with him. And the bureaucrat immediately started saying to my character, like, “Oh, what are you going to give me for that? Are you gonna like, give me a good time?” And basically this was a game where these high schoolers, high school guys, I was the only girl in the group, they had all been exposed to this idea that fantasy should be realistic and gritty and that Lord Foul’s Bane was kind of an example of what it meant to bring realism into fantasy.
[00:09:22] And I quit the group. I didn't wanna play. I was like, fuck that. If my character's gonna have to deal with being harassed and raped, that just wasn't the game I wanted to play. I wanted to have hijinks and heists and yeah, I wanna have a sword fight or two, but that was just not my vision of a fantasy. So it was very clear to me that there was a strong connection between these guys having read this book and their notion of what fantasy was being really different from what had come before.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:56] Yeah. And so of course, Lord Foul’s Bane is important in one other way, in that Thomas Covenant, the hero, is not just some random dude who stumbles into an epic destiny the way that Frodo in Lord of the Rings arguably is. Instead, Thomas Covenant is the fated savior. He's chosen by prophecy to save the realm from Lord Foul.
[00:10:20] The Lord of the Rings books do have Aragorn who is destined to be king, but their actual protagonist is just some dude whose cousin Bilbo stole a magic ring and it ended up in his possession. Now, I'd argue that a crucial ingredient of a lot of the epic fantasies that follow Lord of the Rings is that they have a chosen one, like Thomas Covenant, like in The Wheel of Time, there's the Dragon, for example. And you could also argue that even as Lord of the Rings is exerting all this influence on epic fantasy. There's also Dune. Dune is a super influential epic fantasy, even though it's also dressed up in science fiction and Dune features a messiah, Paul Atreides, who obviously we talked about in our previous episode about how it's complicated, but he is kind of the, the prophecied savior of the Fremen.
[00:11:08] So, you know, after Lord Foul’s Bane, I feel like the notion of the protagonist being a regular guy who's just caught up in a mess is kind of less popular going forward.
Annalee: [00:11:19] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think some of these shifts come about because, you know, Joseph Campbell's idea of the Hero's Journey becomes a hugely popular idea in the mid 20th century and that really shifts a lot of the ways that fantasy writers, and even just sort of literary writers, are thinking about how to create a protagonist or what it means to have this kind of story. And you know, that's a big shift. And it's also, you know, it ties in really nicely with Christian ideas that the hero is often chosen by a god and that there's just one guy who's chosen. It's a very monotheistic kind of like, there's just the one guy. It's not like there's a chosen group or like different people represent different gods or whatever.
[00:12:14] So I think that's also really. important for Western epics. You know, it kind of fits into the stories that were told in the West through the Bible and other really important early religious epics like that.
[00:12:25] So I guess this brings me to the point of the episode, which is when we ask who owns epic fantasy or who owns Lord of the Rings, what are we really asking?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:37] Yeah. So, for me, one of the things that really distinguishes epic fantasy as a genre, beginning with Lord of the Rings, is that there's a honking big giant map at the start of the book.
[00:12:48] Obviously there are books with maps at the start that aren't epic fantasy, but it's hard to think of anymajor epic fantasies that don't have the honking big map. And with any kind of map, the question becomes, what's included on the map, what's not included on the map and what's centered on the map?
[00:13:07] And to put it mildly, the maps in these books often tend to be very centered on whatever is the secondary world's version of Western Europe. Even when you get to things like Game of Thrones or the Kushiel’s Legacy series, Europe is the center, it's the origin point. It's where our adventurers start with from. It's often where all of the major adventures take place.
Annalee: [00:13:26] Yeah, that is so true. I really think that the map is key to how we understand an epic fantasy, and that by reading the map, whether it's an actual physical map at the front of the book, which as you said, very, very common. Or just putting the map together based on the adventures that characters are having.
[00:13:48] And a huge part of epic fantasy has always been the travelogue, the adventure, visiting another land, journeys that take really enormous spans of time. And this goes back really far. I mean, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of my favorite fantasies from the middle ages, there's like this section, it's kind of hilarious because the story is really focused in on this one little moment, but there's this one paragraph where the poet is like, and then he went all over the place into all these different lands and the knight was like traveling around and like trying to find stuff and Gawain went here and there and then he gets, you know, and it only takes a short time. But the fantasy epic takes that one paragraph of Gawain going here and there and visiting the hills and visiting all this other stuff and just explodes it out till that becomes the entire story.
[00:14:41] And you know, it's funny because. Maps can show us both how a story is unconsciously Eurocentric, like literally putting Europe at the center of the map. But it also can, those maps can be used to kind of tweak that idea and, and remind us that in fact, Europe or Western civilization are not always the center of the map.
[00:15:07] And I was thinking of this in the context of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which is such an interesting take on the epic fantasy. And in the story, there are two different maps not physical maps, but there's England where the story is taking place and partly in France as well. And then there's also the Ways, capital W, which are roads built by the fairies that you can reach by going into a mirror. And different characters use these Ways to get from one place to another in the real world more quickly. It's almost like a wormhole, but inside that world, within the mirror, in the world of the Ways, there's an entire other map of basically the England or the fairy version of England that is kind of falling apart and forgotten, but it's still there and it feels like that's a very conscious attempt on Susanna Clark's part, the author, to remind us that the map of Europe is just the latest version of a map that is very ancient and that there's roads that go back really far and whole other civilizations that have existed in this same place and had other maps of reality and other ways of getting around. And so, especially because the book is dealing with imperialism, it feels like a bit of a nod to the idea that, England thinks of itself as the center of things. It thinks of its map as the truth, but actually there's lots of other ways that people can go.
[00:16:46] So what do you think has happened to Epic fantasy in the 21st century? .
Charlie Jane: [00:16:50] Yeah, so I did some research on this and it seems like there was this huge boom in epic fantasy in the 1990s with the rise of things like The Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones, and we had the rise of grim dark fantasy with not only George R.R. Martin, but authors like Joe Abercrombie. But you know, I feel like it's slowed down maybe a little bit. I'm hard pressed to think of like epic fantasy authors who've achieved blockbuster status since the mid-2000s. That's when you have people like Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson coming along, although I guess Patrick Rothfuss doesn't consider himself an epic fantasy author.
[00:17:26] I feel like part of what happened in the last 20 years or so is that fantasy has kind of broadened out beyond that kind of Tolkien model and that epic fantasy model into a lot of stuff that owes less of a debt to Tolkien.
Annalee: [00:17:42] I mean, I guess one question is whether epic fantasy has become more inclusive of marginalized voices in the past 20 years or so. I mean, it really felt like when NK Jemison’s series that starts with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came along, that it was a real breath of fresh air for epic fantasy, and that was around 2010.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:02] Yeah, and there definitely have been some more, you know, you've got Ken Liu writing his silk punk novels about the Dandelion Dynasty. There's definitely more epic fantasies that kind of center, non-European characters, non-European settings. But I feel like what really seems to have happened… First of all, the last few years in particular, have seen this huge flowering of anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist fantasies that, you know, I would categorize as being epic fantasy.
[00:18:31] And we talked about those on our episode last month about decolonizing fantasy when we interviewed Naseem Jamnia Including like CL Clark’s, The Unbroken, RF Kuang’s Babel, a bunch of other recent books that are really important. But you know, when I looked into this question, what I found was a bit more surprising. It's more that there have been other types of fantasy that have kind of eaten into the market of epic fantasy, including young adult fantasy and urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and a bunch of others.
Annalee: [00:19:00] So tell me more about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:02] If you search on the internet, you'll find tons of like hand-wringing essays about like how young adult fantasy is eating into the market for epic fantasy, or how urban fantasy and paranormal romance are cannibalizing the market for epic fantasy.
[00:19:15] And it definitely seems like, especially among younger readers. Other types of fantasies became more popular at a certain point in the 21st century. And the good news is that both YA fantasy and urban fantasy are including a lot more perspectives that were largely being ignored in the epic fantasy boom, you have like a ton of BIPOC authors and queer authors, and younger women authors writing different types of fantasy novels. And I think that what's happened is that these other types of fantasy, including especially urban fantasy and YA fantasy, have kind of cross pollinated with Tolkien’s legacy and other types of epic fantasy from the 20th century to create some new types of writing.
[00:20:00] But at the same time, you still have this kind of backlash going on that… You know, there’s always gonna be a backlash. that we kind of talked about at the start of the episode, where there are people who insist epic fantasies that include powerful BIPOC people and women and queers are unrealistic or somehow historically inaccurate.
[00:20:18] And these are the same people who will be yelling online about Star Wars, including Black characters and more powerful women and superhero comics and so on and so forth. It's all part of that one backlash, I think.
Annalee: [00:20:31] And mermaids can't be Black and stuff like that, you know,
[00:20:35] It makes me think again about what we talked about with Lord Foul’s Bane, because the thing about that book that I think was embraced by, well, these dudes in my D&D grou, but also all of the millions of people who bought those books, is the idea that that was somehow realistic, that rape is just a fact of life and not including it in a fantasy made that fantasy just like too absurd and too silly, and like that you just couldn't have a representation of a medieval style civilization without rape happening all the time. It's just normal.
[00:21:18] And the same people I think, who are eager to embrace the kind of sexual violence that you see in, say, Game of Thrones or any number of other of the kind of new epic fantasies that do kind of foreground violence and especially sexual violence, these are the same people who say it's unrealistic to have representations of Black people in the middle Ages, or it's unrealistic to have elves that are Black or dwarves that are Black, or magicians who are Asian. And the fact is that we know from medieval history that there were a ton of people of color in Europe during the 12th and 13th century and the 14th century, which are kind of the eras that we call back to in epic fantasy. There were people who traveled from all different parts of the world to hang out in London. There were people from London who traveled to lots of other parts of the world. I don't know why I'm picking on London. There's people from Europe who were traveling all over the world and there was a lot of intermingling, there was a lot of intermarriage. There were mixed race people and that was just a fact of life.
[00:22:33] I think that when we are revisiting epic fantasy and kind of reinventing it, calling for realism is not necessarily it, that's not really what's at stake here. I think what's at stake is that people feel like there has been a European ownership over this genre and that they're losing it, and it really doesn't have much to do at all with what's real and what isn't.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:06] Yeah, and you know it's even pretty recently you find panels at fantasy conventions talking about how epic fantasy is really about Western Europe and that's really the heart of epic fantasy and it's something that we're still kinda getting away from. And that question of who gets to be elves and dwarves and stuff is super loaded because obviously those are racialized categories in Tolkien and it all is bound up with race.
[00:23:30] And in fact, you know, we're gonna take a short break and when we come back, we're gonna talk to a Tolkien scholar, Helen Young, about this. And I think she's gonna be able to shed some more light on this.
[00:23:41] [OOAC theme plays briefly.]
Charlie Jane: [00:23:45] So first of all, thanks for joining us Dr. Young.
Helen: [00:23:49] My pleasure. It's great to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:51] Yeah. Awesome. So why is Lord of the Rings, in particular, such a popular text and so emblematic of like high fantasy or epic fantasy? What, what makes it a foundational text?
Helen: [00:24:01] So I think there are a couple of reasons for this.I mean, one is that when it came out, it was so original. There was really nothing like it. And even though Tolkien was inspired by previous authors like William Morris, he knew Robert Howard's, Conan stories. Really nobody had created an entire other world to set these stories in
[00:24:27] And Tolkien did that. For most of his life, he was working on it. So it was rich and varied and complicated. And so there's a lot in there for people to like. And so it was kind of taken up in the decades after it was published, originally by publishers. It became a kind of massive hit in the 60s and early 70s and partly inspired people who had read it to wanna write similar things, but also publishers to wanna publish them.
[00:24:57] So part of it's kind of significance now is not just because of the, the books that Tolkien himself wrote and published during his lifetime, but all the things that were inspired by it, so heaps of other fantasy stories, arguably the whole fantasy genre and also, films, video games, all the other stuff. Fan fiction that’s been kind of inspired by it. So there's a snowball effect, I guess.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:27] Yeah. So I mean, just kind of jumping into like the controversy that we've been kind of talking about, and I know that you've been talking about. There's been this kind of online backlash about having Black and brown characters who are elves or dwarves in the new Lord of the Rings show.
[00:25:44] Is this basically the same thing as what's happened with Star Wars? Is there anything that's different about it because it's Lord of the Rings?
Helen: [00:25:51] I think it is pretty similar to what's happened with Star Wars, but Lord of the Rings has been taken up by racist extremists for at least 20 years.
[00:26:04] So I first stumbled across this around about the time Peter Jackson's movies came out where extremist websites, one in particular, started a whole chat forum based around these films to try and get people into their way of thinking, right? So these, these kind of voices have been working their way into Tolkien fandom for decades and I don't know if the same kind of purposeful things have been happening in Star Wars.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:35] That's a really good point. I don't, I can't really, I've never heard of like white nationalists, especially 20 years ago, when George Lucas was putting out the prequel films. I didn't hear about white supremacists saying, the Jedi are really us. I think that is an interesting difference.
[00:26:54] So another thing that's sort of drawing a parallel between the Lord of the Rings controversy and other controversies because I think that's interesting to think about. You've drawn some ire from some fans because you've talked about how Tolkien made certain of the groups in his books, like the orcs and the dwarves stand in for racial groups on Earth.
[00:27:15] And there's been a similar discussion happening with Dungeons & Dragons, which has orcs and Drow elves who are stand-ins for people of color. Why is this such a common sort of racist trope. Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings, other fantasy things and why is it so hard for people to kind of face up to what's obviously a huge problem?
Helen: [00:27:36] Okay, so Dungeons & Dragons drew a lot of their inspiration, and this is pretty well known, directly from Tolkien's world. So the kind of racial stereotypes and the racial structures that, that Tolkien built into middle Earth really come out of 19th century kind of pseudoscience of race. When Dungeons & Dragons started, and I've, I've actually got a chapter, I've written about this with a colleague coming out probably next year. When it started, it was basically people who were playing military role playing games, layering fantasy over the top of that.And so what they imported was the kind of structures of race that were there and available to them in Tolkien’s world. And so what you ended up with in that game is different species slash races as they called them that were you know, essentially different.
[00:28:32] Some of them were better than others. Some of them were inherently morally evil. All these things that really worked with a game where you've gotta have rules and numbers and ways of figuring out how the world works in really kind of clear defined categories that that don't actually work and don't exist in real life.
[00:28:53] And I think it's one of those things where you know, there's been a lot of, because Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons kind of inspired and influenced so many other people that those kind of ideas of race and that just kind of way of building a world is just kind of conventional in fantasy.
[00:29:14] And so people don't necessarily think about it clearly. They don't even necessarily consider, oh hey, that's racist, but I'm gonna put it in my world as well. In terms of why it's so difficult for people to hear. And for some folks it is. Not for everybody, you know? For some people it's like oh, that's what I was uncomfortable about . But in the kind of society that we live in, most people don't want to hear either that they're racist or that something they like is racist.
[00:29:44] And particularly in fandom where a lot of people's identity is kind of bound up in the things that they love. If you say to somebody, this thing that you really love, is actually quite racist, they don't wanna hear it because it's saying to them, well, you love a thing that's racist, maybe you are racist.
[00:30:07] And you know, I don't think that it's not okay to like problematic things. I think we've been having that conversation in fandom for a really long time.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:17] Oh my gosh. Yes.
Helen: [00:30:18] But there are ways of doing it that aren't just basically putting in your fingers in your ears and saying, no, no, you noticed the racism, it's you that's racist.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:27] Right. And obviously we all love things that are problematic and it's hard to find, anything, especially anything from the 20th century or earlier that doesn't have some problematic elements. You just have to acknowledge that these. Issues exist and that all we can do is try to make them better, but also we can celebrate the non-problematic aspects while criticizing the problematic aspects.
[00:30:51] So I mean, in Dungeons & Dragons, when they face this issue, one of the things that they've done, I think, is to say that the Drow elves are not all evil. So there are some nice Drow elves and there's some bad Drow elves. Is that really the only way to deal with this? Like if you have like the idea that certain species or certain peoples, like every single person you meet from that species or that nationality is going to be evil. There's no way that, that's not problematic. Right? There's no way to do that trope without it becoming, even if you don't map it onto racial categories on earth.
Helen: [00:31:22] I think it's problematic in the sense that it's kind of saying, okay, then. We're just gonna say that stereotypes are real.
[00:31:32] In this fantasy world that we've made up where we can do anything, we can think of, you know, stereotypes, they're real. And so, yeah, even if they're not mapped onto racial categories, I think there’s still some things you'd wanna think about really carefully there, to kind of not be reductive and shallow and morally and ethically questionable, but also to not have a world that is a little bit dull when you get down to it.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:04] Yeah, I mean, that is, the thing is it's a little bit dull after a while when everybody from a particular group is the same. It's just sort of not as interesting.
[00:32:12] So I've seen you quoting Dimitra Fimi, I hope I'm pronouncing their name correctly, talking about this sort of essential contradiction in Tolkien, which is that, on the one hand, his books are about multiculturalism. They're about people joining together from different culture to fight a common enemy, and Tolkien in real life was very anti-fascist, but at the same time, he still perpetuates racist stereotypes in his work. And you know, how do you square that contradiction? And also, is this a contradiction that because so much of epic fantasy borrowed from Tolkien, it's just embedded in fantasy as a genre overall?
Helen: [00:32:52] I mean, how to square that contradiction? I guess my approach is to say, well, Tolkien, like all of us is complex. And in his statements where he's… yeah, he's quite clearly anti-Nazi and he also says at one point in one of his letters that he's anti-apartheid. So what you can say Tolkien is is anti-extremist.
[00:33:08] And there's, there's a lot of, you know, I think we probably all know a lot of people who are like, yeah, Nazis are bad, but also struggle to recognize any kind of racism that is not Naziism.
[00:33:25] So who can kind of recognize, well, that's extremism, that's really bad, but who perhaps don't recognize the kinds of things that maybe we might be talking about with structural racism, systematic racism. Oh, well, you know, that's just a slur. It doesn't really matter. Those kinds of things. I never met Tolkien, but my kind of sense that would get to me from his writings is that perhaps that's the kind of person that Tolkien was. That he could recognize those really extreme, terrible things as terrible, but also didn't necessarily recognize other forms of prejudice, bigotry, that, that were not so obviously violent.
[00:34:08] And also, you know, that kind of community of different cultures that he brings together. And I've kind of written about this is elves, dwarves all the humans that he brings together in the Fellowship of the Ring, and the Last Alliance, always kind of places where different beings get together and fight evil. They’re all modeled on European people and culture. He really has a line around who can be good and occasionally it gets a little bit fuzzy at the edges. But n not really. So he had a concept of who you could be friends with and who you could be allies with, and mostly that was white people.
[00:34:51] So that kind of contradiction makes a little bit more sense when you think about how limited that that potential community is for him, or at least in his world.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Yeah. And actually backing up slightly, I probably should have asked you at this, at the start, but what made you decide to study Tolkien? What made you want to kind of devote so much time to him?
Helen: [00:35:15] Okay. Well, my dad read me The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings before I could read. So it always been part of my life. And I did my PhD in medieval studies and when I finished that, which was when the global financial crisis hit. There were no jobs for medieval studies people in Australia, not one.
[00:35:34] And so I was like, okay, I've gotta, I've gotta reinvent myself and my expertise, where could I kind of take this? And I did a lot of work in some different fields for a few years. And then I was lucky enough to get a three year fellowship for a project on fantasy and race. And I had thought for that project, I'm not gonna talk about Tolkien, people have done that already. But then you can't, you can't actually talk about and research race in fantasy without dealing with Tolkien. So I kind of a little bit accidentally became a Tolkien scholar and my work now, people wanna talk to me about Tolkien because people wanna talk about Tolkien. But it's not… I’m not just a Tolkien scholar.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:20] So actually talking about medieval studies. For the past several years, folks like Dorothy Kim and MedievalPOC have been getting a lot of pushback for resisting this sort of white nationalist view of the middle ages that really was invented in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's not actually based on real scholarship of the middle ages. And I guess what I'm wondering is, given that so much epic fantasy literature, does take place in sort of a mythical, imaginary version of medieval Europe. How does this skewed history feed into the fantasy stories?
Helen: [00:36:59] It absolutely does. And part of that is via Tolkien and being inspired by what Tolkien wrote. A lot of his scholarship was really coming out of late 19th century stuff. But then there are also people writing in fantasy and writing medievalist fantasy. That have kind of said, okay, no, that's not what we're doing.
[00:37:18] So I actually have a, a recent book out that I wrote with a colleague Kavita Mudan Finn on global medievalism, where we look at the kinds of medievalism that people like Samantha Shannon in The Priory of the Orange Tree. S.A. Chakraborty , I've just gone completely blank about the other people that we write about.
[00:37:42] But you know, there are people… or Tracy Deonn’s Bloodmarked came out yesterday.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:48] I know. I'm so excited.
Helen: [00:37:51] Right? That [unclear] my evenings for the rest of the week. But people are starting to say, okay, this is not the limit of what the middle ages were. And there are moves, you mentioned Dorothy Kim, she and others are doing really significant work in medieval studies to kind of say, okay, for so long we've had this idea in our culture that the middle ages just happened in Europe and it was all white people and they were really just like cut off from the rest of the world.
[00:38:21] And that is just so very much not true. And we're starting to see in the scholarship, but also in popular culture, people looking at it in other ways and writing other stories, and those are the ones that I think are more interesting and that I would really love to see made into TV shows and films and stuff.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:43] Yeah. I mean there's so much scope there to do something really interesting. You mentioned Tracy Deonn and Samantha Shannon and some other authors who are, I've read a lot of really amazing books lately, fantasy books that sort of decenter Europe, either in the present or in a mythic past or in a secondary world that's sort of a vaguely medieval secondary world, Europe is decentered.
[00:39:10] Decentering Europe, focusing on other settings is certainly one way to counteract this kind of systemic bias that we've been talking about and this kind of mythologized European middle ages that we've been talking about. Is it possible to feature Europe, medieval Europe in a fantasy narrative without kind of making it a white nationalist playground? Is it possible to have a more accurate or more nuanced perspective on, on medieval Europe and a fantasy?
Helen: [00:39:36] Yeah, look, there are definitely ways to do that. I mean, the kind of white nationalist playground is partly to do with race, but they're also really wound up about trans people, queer people what kind of roles women should fill.
[00:39:55] And that's one of the other things that we increasingly recognize in the scholarship, that, yeah, there were absolutely trans people in the middle ages. There were absolutely queer people in the middle ages and they were not universally ghrown out of society, persecuted by the church. Those things happened, but there are also people who just kinda lived their lives.
[00:40:15] And that's one of the things that really prevents white nationalists from… If you put queer people into your books, if you put people of color into your books or your films or whatever it is. Those are things that kind of prevent white nationalists from getting in there and being like, yes, this is my fantasy world.
[00:40:34] So I saw this… to do with the Dragon Age franchise, those video games. There were some white nationalists who were really into the original one and then as the franchise progressed and you started having NPCs that would at least kind of semi initiate potentially queer relationships with the player characters, they were like, oh no, this is not for us. We're not playing these anymore. Right? So you can make those kind of choices and even if being historically accurate is something that's really important to you, you can still make those choices.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:09] Wow, that's so interesting. So final question actually, given that it seems like the same battles are happening in academic medieval studies and in fantasy fandom. Can we have alliances between medievalists and fantasy writers and readers? Can we work together to root the white supremacy out of both fictional and non-fictional accounts?
Helen: [00:41:35] Yeah. Look, I literally dream of that. I'm writing a fellowship application now that's trying to get some money to be able to do some of this work. I think there are connections between fandom and academia, particularly around medieval studies although not exclusively. But also what's happening in these fields, kind of reflections of what's happening in the wider world, right?
[00:42:02] These aren’t conversations and battles that are exclusive to fandom or exclusive to medieval studies. So, yeah, I think these your fandom academia everywhere is a cultural battleground where yeah, we absolutely need to work together to say, this is not the kind of world that we wanna live in.
[00:42:24] You don't get to own fandom. You don't get to own Tolkien if you're a white nationalist. You don't get to own academia. These are not your spaces.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:32] We're not gonna turn it into a Nazi bar.
Helen: [00:42:36] Right.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:36] Yeah. That's a wonderful place to end this, to leave it off. Thank you so much. Where can people find you on the internet?
Helen: [00:42:44] I am on Twitter. I'm @heyouonline? I'm still on Twitter. I don't know how long that will last. If you Google Helen Young and medieval, I actually turn up. But I'm at, I'm at Deakin University as my institution and that will probably help you differentiate me from all the other Helen Youngs out there.
[00:43:06] [OOAC theme starts to build in the background.]
Charlie Jane: [00:43:05] Wonderful. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and hope we can chat again soon.
[00:43:13] So our epic heroic journey is completed. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. If you've just stumbled upon this podcast somehow you can find us in all the places that podcasts are found.
[00:43:25] If you like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else that you can put a review. You can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod, and if you wanna go deeper into our world and like become a citizen of the realm of OOAC Pod, you can support us on Patreon and that lets you into our Discord where we're just hanging out making new maps of new fantasy realms all the time.
[00:43:49] We're super grateful to our heroic, inspiring wizardly producer Veronica Simonetti, and also super grateful to Chris Palmer for doing our music. And so, you know, we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're on Patreon, you'll get a mini episode next week and we'll see you on Discord.
Together: [00:44:08] Bye.