Fantasy is very much in vogue at the moment, with high-profile television series and exhibitions, such as ‘Fantasy: Realms of Imagination’ at the British Library, which I visited earlier this month with my (adult) daughter. I’m not sure if anyone has yet denounced the exhibition as reactionary or pro-fascist, which used to be the attitude to fantasy in some quarters. This would be very silly for reasons that I will enlarge upon below, but quite possible given the attitudes displayed recently to the ‘Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author’ exhibition funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and currently on display at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. I must admit, I haven’t popped over to Rome for a look, but here rely on press reports to write about it.
Thror’s Map from The Hobbit on display at ‘Fantasy: Realms of Imagination’ at the British Library
Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author
On 3 November 2023, Jamie Mackay asked, in the Guardian, ‘How did The Lord of the Rings become a secret weapon in Italy’s culture wars?’ and then preceded to explain:
When The Lord of the Rings first hit Italian shelves in the 1970s, the academic Elémire Zolla wrote a short introduction in which he interpreted the book as an allegory about “pure” ethnic groups defending themselves against contamination from foreign invaders. Fascist sympathisers in the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) quickly jumped on the provocation. Inspired by Zolla’s words, they saw in Tolkien’s world a space where they could explore their ideology in socially acceptable terms, free from the taboos of the past. [Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia] Meloni, an MSI youth wing member, developed her political consciousness in that environment. As a teenager she even attended a “Hobbit Camp”, a summer retreat organised by the MSI in which participants dressed up in cosplay outfits, sang along to folk ballads and discussed how Tolkienian mythologies could help the post-fascist right find credibility in a new era.
Obviously, we’re talking about a fringe movement here. But it’s worth recognising that, with a little imagination, the sagas of Middle-earth do fit pretty neatly into the logic of contemporary rightwing populism. The Lord of the Rings follows the logic of a zero-sum game, rooted in Catholic metaphysics. There are “good” hobbits and elves who fight off “evil” orcs. There’s little space for nuance. While most of us probably read the “good” characters in apolitical terms, it doesn’t take much effort to bend that definition to nationalist purposes. In her book, Meloni does just that. One moment she tells us her favourite character is the peace-loving everyman Samwise Gamgee, “just a hobbit”. A few pages later she’s implicitly likening Italy to the lost kingdom of Númenor and citing the character Faramir’s call to arms in The Two Towers. Ultimately, she seems to view Tolkien’s work as a didactic anti-globalisation fable, a hyper-conservative epic that advocates a full-blown war against the modern world in the name of traditional values.
It’s tempting to disregard culture wars as superficial, campaign tactics: polarising arguments that politicians use to galvanise passions in the run-up to elections, and nothing more. Meloni’s actions remind us there’s a serious side too. Over the summer, in a move right out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook, the Italian government took the dramatic step of awarding itself direct power to appoint the management of Rome’s Experimental Cinematography Centre, one of Italy’s most important film schools. MP Igor Iezzi justified the decision on the basis of a need to “modernise” the institution, adding that the left must make an effort to “remove its claws from culture”. Interestingly, the government seems to have no such qualms with the apparently growing number of far-right publishers that are reprinting books by fascist authors such as Giovanni Gentile and Julius Evola for a new generation of readers (many of these publishers, by the way, are using The Lord of the Rings to draw in new audiences).
There is some useful context here as to the interest of Tolkien to Italian neo-fascists but the article might have pointed out more firmly that LOTR, written largely during the Second World War, doesn’t really support this construction and Sam, in particular, is particularly unsuited as a fascist role model. In contrast, Jason Horowitz’s report on the opening night of the exhibition in the New York Times, which feels obliged to point out somewhat unnecessarily that ‘most people know Tolkien’s books as bedtime stories or fantasy epics’, can’t help pandering to East Coast snootiness:
On the opening night of Rome’s most talked-about new exhibition this week, top government ministers in sharp suits hobnobbed with Roman socialites in fur coats, and eccentric art lovers rubbed shoulders with hard-right youth group members.
They all contemplated a drawing of a glam-rock Gandalf in a form-fitting wizard’s cloak, acrylic armies of orcs and other works of fan art displayed in gilded frames. On one wall, they studied a family tree of elves, men and dwarves; on another, a glossary explaining the protagonists of Middle-earth [sic](“Hobbits are a unique and distinct people known as Halflings.”) They stepped over an interactive map on the floor featuring Frodo and his companions coasting on a floating green saucer.
Some were enthusiastic, others bewildered. But if there was any question why Italy’s Culture Ministry had staged a major retrospective dedicated to the life, academic career, and literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author of “The Lord of the Rings,” at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, a marquee space usually dedicated to modernist masters, and why everyone seemingly just had to be there, one superfan held the answer.
“I found the exhibition very beautiful,” Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, said after her personal tour of “Tolkien: Man, Professor, Author.” “As a person who knows the issue pretty well, I found many things I didn’t know.”
The article carries on in similar vein (illustrated with a lovely picture of an LOTR pinball machine) before concluding:
More than that, on Wednesday night, it appeared to be required viewing. At the end of the night, the country’s powerful economy minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti, received a personal tour from Mr. Sangiuliano, who, after Mr. Giorgetti stopped to play pinball, insisted they take a picture in front of a backlit drawing of archers.
“I’m always working with awfully real things, like money,” Mr. Giorgetti said as he left. “This is a dive into fantasy.”
But in Ms. Meloni’s Italy, the exhibit was also very real.
As the last of the ministers left, and the right-wing youth saluted one another with ancient Roman forearm handshakes, Cristiana Collu, the museum director, nervously asked a colleague how the evening went. He assured her it went fine.
Asked by a reporter what exhibit previously occupied the space, the museum worker paused.
“Picasso,” he said.
The message as to what counts as high culture and what doesn’t is made so clear that the article achieved the difficult feat of making me sympathetic to those celebrating the exhibition. The horror of Meloni’s Italy lies in the government attitudes to immigrants and LGBTQI+ people, not in running an exhibition on Tolkien, who is a major writer whatever the NYT might think.
Having said that, I must admit that there is something slightly comical about attempts by various sections of the right to harness Tolkien to their cause. For example, look at Daniel Hannan’s article, ‘What I learned about The Hobbit from reading it to my children’, published by conservativehome.com on 10 December 2014:
When the editor of ConservativeHome phones me, he often begins by wryly declaiming some line or other from Tolkien. If I can, I reply with the next line, and so on. He tends to get the better of our exchanges: his knowledge of the text is encyclopaedic.
Nor is our editor unusual among Tories. I watched the opening nights of all three Lord of the Rings films with Chris Heaton-Harris, the wittiest MP on Twitter, and Theresa Villiers, the patriotic Cabinet Minister, both at that time MEPs. The Northern Ireland Secretary, in particular, can recite the most abstruse details from the corpus, down to the family trees of the minor characters.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. Tolkien’s novels are, in the most literal sense, conservative, bathed in an almost overpowering sense of loss. A lot of Leftist intellectuals find them uncomfortable, and so mock them. Philip Pullman dismisses them as “infantile”. Richard Eyre calls Middle Earth “the kingdom of kitsch”. There are also Leftist Tolkienians, of course, but even some of these are uneasy about the fact that Númenóreansare fair-skinned and assailed by dark foes from the East and South. (In fact, anyone who doubts Tolkien’s anti-racist credentials should read his magisterial reply when the Nazis asked if he was Jewish.)
This reminds me how once playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the 1980s, a conservative-minded dungeon master tried to tell me that a ranger wouldn’t cooperate with a thief because a thief was obviously immoral. Well, The Hobbit is a story about a burglar, who not only steals from the dragon but also steals the Arkenstone of Thrain from Thorin and gives it to a besieging army of elves and men in the hope of averting war. Difficult to think of anything less conservative and I can assure you that someone behaving in this way today would instantaneously be branded ‘anti-British’ by the current government (and also, no doubt, by the leader of the opposition). In the summing up at the story’s end, Tolkien reminds us how Bilbo has lost more than his spoons (to the Sackville-Bagginses, who would both have been on the local Conservative party committee):
… he had lost his reputation. It is true for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer’ – except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.
In other words, as the Daily Mail or the Murdoch press would say, Bilbo was dangerously ‘woke’ and not remotely Conservative (at least, in terms of current membership). Would he have voted to send the ‘elves’ back home? I think not. Yet, Conservatives tried to tell us that Brexit meant the hour of the shire-folk had come. For example, Charles Moore’s article, ‘The Lord of the Rings is our Brexit guide – people need a home to come back to’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2017), rather grandiosely claims:
I now, belatedly, see The Lord of the Rings as a key Brexit text, though it was written before the European Community had even been invented. I have never noticed it lying around in the corridors of power, but it supplies an ingredient so far entirely missing in Mr Hammond’s view of the world, and not yet fully articulated in that of Mrs May. It is a grand, romantic statement about how the ordinary people of a small country can win.
It really isn’t. I sometimes think we should focus more when teaching English Literature on explaining the basic plot and narrative detail of works. The people of the Shire don’t win. In fact, they allow themselves to be taken over by a bunch of thugs and crooks led by a silver-tongued ex-wizard (and who says Tolkien didn’t write social realism). They are only saved by the younger (and queer and woke) Tookish elements who have been gadding about abroad and giving up sovereignty to form international alliances. The novel ends with its working-class hero, Sam, who overcame his own temptations in the dark places, bequeathing the future to his baby daughter.
My point is that the right have no claim to Tolkien and it is idiotic of cultural snobs to give cover to conservatives and fascists by turning their nose up at the world of hobbits, elves and fantasy. This brings us back nicely to the fantasy exhibition currently at the BL.
Fantasy: Realms of Imagination
This exhibition runs until 25 February 2024 and you can book tickets here. It is accompanied by a beautiful book, Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide World of Fantasy edited by Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster. Alongside the exhibits, which I’ll discuss below, the exhibition (and the book cover, frontispiece and section divides) feature a stunning original illustration by Sveta Dorosheva, who you can read an interview with (and see the picture) here.
I’m not going to review the exhibition formally because others have done that to various extents – see here, here and here. I just want to report how happy I felt to be able to walk around and look at a a series of beautiful exhibits, ranging from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘little book’, ‘The Search after Happiness’, to a page from Ursula K. Le Guin’s manuscript for A Wizard of Earthsea, and on to the manuscript of Dianna Wynne Jones’s (very funny and lovely) The Dark Lord of Derkholm; from the first edition of Hope Mirrlees’s Lud in the Mist, to those of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings, and Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories; from screen clips of Princess Mononoke, Pan’s Labyrinth, Tara being chased by the Gentlemen in ‘Hush’ from season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena awakening Gabrielle from enchanted sleep with a kiss in Xena: Warrior Princess; from Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s epic comic series, Monstress, to the video game Skyrim and on to a display of Magic the Gathering cards. All of these things belong together and they are all wonderful things. If you wanted to show a Martian the best of our culture, this exhibition would be one of the places to go.
I’m not going to say it’s a legitimisation of fantasy because while once fantasy was looked down upon, that has been very much a residual attitude for most of this century at least. The ongoing success of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow (whose co-director, Matthew Sangster was the external curator of the exhibition and co-editor of the accompanying book), is important in this respect and it really has helped transform the landscape in universities (as well as being a useful source of potential external examiners for those of us who have supervised fantasy PhDs at other institutions). Therefore, instead of a sense of arrival, the exhibition, with its stunning presentation of a new diverse post-canon, made me feel that fantasy has come of age. Along with its twin partner in crime, Science Fiction (which has itself enjoyed a year of winning most of the major literary book awards), Fantasy has rightfully come to take its place in the 2020s at what used to be the pinnacle of culture: in the place occupied a century ago by Modernism in its various forms.
I left the BL with a copy of Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town centring on Charlotte and set in Haworth and the childhood Brontë worlds of Angria and Gondal, which I loved despite being team Emily (who is beautifully represented in her necessarily more minor role in the book). I had already acquired the Realms of Imagination book by mail order so that I could begin reading in advance of my trip to London. This is a very good book indeed; a thing of great beauty in its own right. It has four sections corresponding to the four sections of the exhibition: ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’, ‘Epics and Quests’, ‘Weird and Uncanny’ and ‘Portals and Worlds’. The chapters include longer, more wide-ranging chapters, typically at the beginning of the section, such as Terri Windling’s ‘Folk Tales, Fairy Lore, and the Remaking of Traditions’, which starts with a lovely ‘old story told in the West Country’, and shorter more specific chapters, such as Rachel Foss’s ‘A “Perilous Realm”: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”’. Tolkien, represented in the exhibition by a first edition of The Hobbit open to Thror’s map on the inside cover (also reproduced in Realms of Fantasy on p. 92 and incorrectly identified there as his map of Middle-earth), is the most-mentioned writer in the volume and accordingly has the biggest entry in the index. This isn’t surprising, the rise in the status of fantasy is tied to the rise in status of Tolkien and the scholarly apparatus that has developed around his work. His only real rival in this respect is Le Guin, but in many ways her work may be seen as complementing his while breaking crucial new ground. As Brian Attebury notes in ‘The Wizards and Dragons of Earthsea: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Fantasy Quest’, while Le Guin has no villainous Dark Lord, she stays closer to Tolkien’s model than many of his overt imitators by having her heroes renounce power in the manner of Gandalf, Aragon, Galadriel and Samwise the Great in Lord of the Rings. Aside from the manuscript pages of A Wizard of Earthsea on display in the exhibition, there were also some of Le Guin’s sketches of scenes from the work in progress, including of the moment in The Tombs of Atuan – my favourite of the original three novels (which I actually first read in class at school in the 1970s) – when Arha sees the light of Ged’s staff (reproduced on p.143 of the book). As lead curator, Tanya Kirk, mentioned in the online book launch of Realms of Imagination, there has already been a huge, positive, public response to the display, for the first time in the UK, of these papers from the University of Oregon. In her superb chapter, ‘The Everyday Book’, Sofia Samatar comments that Le Guin especially stands out among fantasy writers by proving that the modern genre could be flexible when she returned to the world of Earthsea with the innovative, feminist Tehanu (1990), a book which completely blew me away when I read it soon after its publication. So, one great takeaway from the exhibition and book is that it is time to read Le Guin again.
There’s much, much more I could say about the book (for example, Laurie Penny’s chapter, ‘The Room of Requirement’, is pitch-perfect and absolutely had to be in here). Moreover, similarly to how Neil Gaiman describes his experience of reading the book in the Preface, I too noted down the titles of dozens and books and essays to follow up on and later pretend that I knew about all along. Actually, Gaiman doesn’t say that last bit; that’s just me playing the cynical old academic. Joking aside, I already have plans to reference some arguments gleaned from the chapters mentioned above, and Rob Maslen’s excellent ‘Quest Fantasy: The Adventure of Reading’, in a chapter I am writing for the 1920s volume of this series, which will include some discussion of Mirrlees and other great fantasy writers mentioned in this book, such as Lord Dunsany and the inimitable Naomi Mitchison, as well as works which people don’t also equate with fantasy but which partake in the fantastical, such as another of my all-time favourite novels, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. For the gun has been fired on the coming political fight over fantasy and its role in the culture of our times. This book and exhibition are statements. Other moves are afoot, such as Adam Roberts’s forthcoming history of fantasy, currently in the last stages of writing. Portals are opening, wheels of time are revolving, rings of power are being forged, and even fools may dream of a world transformed.
Prospective Cultures 