high fantasy n.

Once an author sets his own high standard it is difficult not to compare his succeeding work with it. And compared to the high fantasy of ‘The High King’ or the picaresque romance of ‘The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian,’ Lloyd Alexander’s latest book seems like a packaged deal. It is a mock medieval adventure complete with a crotchety wizard, a naïve and good-hearted hero, a spirited heroine, a trusty, phrase-making friend, and a pair of unscrupulous villians.

High fantasy consists of fairy tales and myth-based tales: fairy tales, those ancient and new stories which take place in the mysterious other world of faërie, such as Beowulf or J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit; myth tales, stories whose setting is the realm in which gods and men have commerce, as in the Welsh Mabinogion or in Lloyd Alexander’s The Foundling and Other Tales of Prydain. This is not to say that ghost stories, fables, folk tales, or satirical farces are not fantasy. To the extent that they take place in an unreal world or conjure up people or happenings which, according to realistic norms, are impossible, they are indeed fantasy. But they are not high fantasy. A number of traits combine to produce a work of high fantasy. High fantasy has an other-world setting, whether this be Middle Earth or Brocéliande, or whether it be the sacred grove of Ashtaroth or the cottage of the Fates. The characters in high fantasy include a generous number of imposing figures who, with their magical or supernatural powers, inspire wonder or fear or often both: Elfin kings, wizards, unicorns, and demigods. High fantasy deals with recognizably archetypal themes and motifs such as the initiation into manhood, death and rebirth, and most frequently with the courage an individual needs to undertake the fateful quest. And, finally, as befits the settings, characters, and themes of high fantasy, the style is elevated, often figurative as it must be to evoke the imaginary worlds it deals with.

We might note that games which are limited to the acquisition of power are of the ‘sword & sorcery’ variety; those games which also include nobler objectives are, at least, moving toward High Fantasy.

High fantasy, fantasy set in a fully imagined Secondary World, according to Boyer and Zahorski, as opposed to Low Fantasy which concerns supernatural intrusions into the ‘real’ world.

High Fantasy is a subset of fantasy. It invariably involves a quest. It usually pits Good against Evil in one form or another, and Good always wins.

Until Sojourn, we've seen very little high fantasy with realistic art (if, considering the subject matter, you'll pardon the term realistic). And certainly not on a regular monthly schedule, with high storytelling values. The storyline is largely successful as well, if a little familiar in places. There is an evil lord of darkness whose armies have taken over all the known kingdoms. Set against him is a very small, but growing band of rebels, on a quest to recover long-hidden magical artifacts they have been told will help them defeat him.

Of course that has to include all the talking animal stories, fairy tales, and takeoffs (Captain Underpants, for example) as well as straight forward [sic] high fantasy.

Elysian Fiction (<www.sfroundup.com/elysian>) is devoted to fantasy, often quite traditional high fantasy, mostly featuring newer writers, though the quality is somewhat uneven.

Nobody predicted that I would jump sideways into fantasy. Not high fantasy, of course, like stories with kings and princes and what have you, but into a sort of modern epic fantasy.