![Philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin: the 2004 adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, based on Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/07/TELEMMGLPICT000347443249_16940859910890_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqkT1T33EOYKhogUFuqxLkJ5xCWy5ffZoUVLnp9tp0Oug.jpeg?imwidth=680)
When it comes to fantasy fiction, the British are second to none
From J R R Tolkien to J K Rowling, you can trace a line of invention and flair that owes much to these windswept, ancient Isles
![Philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin: the 2004 adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle, based on Diana Wynne Jones’s 1986 novel](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/07/TELEMMGLPICT000347443249_16940859910890_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqkT1T33EOYKhogUFuqxLkJ5xCWy5ffZoUVLnp9tp0Oug.jpeg?imwidth=680)
In the mid-1950s, before she became known as one of the finest writers of fantasy for children in the English-speaking world, a young woman went to hear her lecturers speak. Diana Wynne Jones, then an English undergraduate at Oxford, wrote that C S Lewis was a magician of the form, able to make the “dullest topics absolutely shine”. He spoke in the largest hall in the faculty, to an audience crushed up against each other in the aisles, “even in the early morning”.
Tolkien, though, was different. He tried, with real ingenuity and tenacity, to repel his students: “You couldn’t hear him lecture. He worked at not letting you hear, because he wanted to go away and finish writing The Lord of the Rings. So he had the very smallest lecture room. First of all it was packed out, so he spoke with his back to the audience and mumbling. Unfortunately he was talking about – meditating on, really – what a plot is like and how it mutates into other plots, and this I found so fascinating that I went back the next week as did one other person. And this meant that he couldn’t stop lecturing and still get the money, which apparently in those days you could if no one turned up – it was a dreadful racket, really.”
Wynne Jones might argue that she, personally, delayed the progress of one of the bestselling books of all time: “He could have given just the one lecture and then been paid for a term if we’d all stayed away. But this other person and I attended diligently week after week, so he was forced to go on meditating about plots mutating, and what I could hear was fascinating.”
They are part of a genealogy, these three: you could trace a line of invention and flair that would take you from Lewis and Tolkien to Jones, and to Susan Cooper, to Alan Garner and J K Rowling and Philip Pullman, and onwards again. It’s not a tidy family tree, with direct heirs and neat delineations of kinship; it is closer to an ancient song passed on to a waiting chorus. I am not personally much addicted to national pride, but that is a heritage to take joy in: the tradition that moves through J M Barrie to E Nesbit’s Psammead and magic carpet, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice to Neil Gaiman’s iron-willed girl-child Coraline, from T H White to Joan Aiken to Cressida Cowell, and to Tọlá Okogwu and the new voices just emerging today. When the creators of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony sought to show Britain at its finest, they reached for its children’s books.
The British Isles – windswept, dark in winter, shot through with myth, with Neolithic stone circles and ancient woodlands – have always had an allegiance with the fantastical. Geoffrey of Monmouth laid out the prophecies of Merlin in the 12th century; Spenser conjured the Faerie Queene in the 16th century. The great writers of British modern fantasy have had more than a thousand years of storytelling to draw upon.
![Look who’s Tolkien: Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/07/TELEMMGLPICT000307637044_16940860780370_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
They are also, of course, very different, one from another. They were writing up against different times, and different anxieties (one of the best ways to identify the worries of any era is to read its children’s fiction). You can feel the impact of 1950s rationing in C S Lewis’s feasts and the appearance of Bacchus, god of wine. Wynne Jones was five when war broke out, and her sardonic wit and wryly loving voice are coupled with a scepticism about the innate wisdom of adults. Each writer brings a richness of their own: you would turn to Alan Garner for his liberating strangeness and seductive opacity, and to Philip Pullman for the bold splendour of his imagination.
But they have something in common, these masters of imagined worlds: their books are oxygenated by their refusal to condescend to children. They respect the depth and breadth of a child’s imagination, and their intelligence.
There is a colossal duty bound up with writing for children. When you read as an adult, you meet the book face-to-face; but when you read as a child, you pull the story closer, so that the book is cheek-to-cheek. When you love a story as a child, you love it hungrily. You devour it whole. It gets under your skin, into your blood, into your very cartilage and sinews, and you carry it around inside your body until you die. They are lifelong companions, those stories, long after you forget the details of plot or character – they put down roots in your soul.
So the responsibility of a children’s writer is enormous. Tolkien and Garner and Nesbit and Pullman knew that they could not offer to those who are hungry anything thin or pompous or fishy or bogus or rip-off or uncared-for. Because what is fantasy trying to do? At its best, it can provide answers to questions that are at the heart of everything. There have been, of course, plenty of lazy children’s fantasies over the decades – Sturgeon’s Law argues that “90 per cent of everything is crap” – but there are also those that lay out bold truths.
Although they are unlikely to be reading Socrates or Spinoza, children need philosophy – and fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You cannot just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That is not how the passing on of truth works. You cannot just scribble it on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your love will matter or your eagerness is worth keeping. But fantasy gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable truths: about endurance, and invention, and regret, and power. Fantasy has always seemed to me one of the most exciting ways to wield metaphor. It’s at once a form of play, and a form of feast.
![Katherine Rundell photographed at the 2022 Oxford Literary Festival](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/07/TELEMMGLPICT000290780467_16940862297980_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
I have just finished writing a fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy. It’s set in an enchanted cluster of islands, hidden away by magic in the North Atlantic Ocean, where all the creatures of myth are still alive.
I began it a long time ago, in the ice-cold winter of 2016, with the image of a girl with a flying coat, buffeted by the weather. I hold a fellowship at the University of Oxford, which gives me access to superb libraries and manuscripts; so I spent more than 100 hours amid book stacks, reading.
I built the book slowly – a document for each mythic creature; a document for each island; hundreds of pages of notes – because I had a sense that this is not something to do sketchily. The tradition demands care. I found in Pliny’s Natural History, of AD 77, his entirely serious account of the tiny jaculus dragon, which “darts from the branches of trees” – so I added a dragon to my world, small enough to perch on the top joint of a child’s thumb. And in Qazwini’s 13th-century Persian Marvels of Things Created, the golden-horned hare called the al-miraj; that, too, I stole for my story, along with many other creatures – longmas and lavellans, kluddes and karkadanns.
I have fresh admiration, now, for those who conjured fantastical worlds – it is an art that is cornucopial in the reading, painstaking in the creation. But I have discovered that I love fantasy fiction, even beyond my expectations. Because in writing about miniature dragons and flying coats and griffins, it becomes possible to offer children a way to think about and cherish their own world. And because fantasy’s insistence on human strangeness feels worth saluting.
Tolkien, perhaps, was the epitome of that: both in his work and his life. The inaudible lecturer would tease unsuspecting shopkeepers by handing them, among a handful of coins, his false teeth.
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury, £14.99) is out on Thursday