The Golden Age

Author! Author!: Lewis Carroll

There have been quite a number of biopics of authors of fantasy over the years, some more realistic, some more romantic, and some frankly down-right fantastical. Over a few weeks I intend to review a few of them.

Dreamchild (1985), purports to tell the story of the widowed Alice Hargreaves, the erstwhile little girl on whom was based Alice in Wonderland; she is traveling to the United States on an invitation to celebrate the one hundredth birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) at Columbia University. She is accompanied by the (fictional) orphan girl Lucy, who is wooed by a down-on-his-luck journalist in an effort to gain access to and exploit the elderly Alice. As Mrs. Hargreaves travels down the rabbit-hole of 1930's America, she has dreams about encountering the characters from the stories, and has childhood recollections about her friendship with the eccentric Oxford don. Although having conflicting memories of affection and ridicule, eventually she comes to a clearer understanding and reconciliation with her past and the loving friendship of the lonely Lewis Carroll.

Coral Brown plays Alice Hargreaves, Amelia Shankley the young Alice, and Ian Holm is Lewis Carroll. Jim Henson's Creature Shop provides the Mad Hatter, March Hare, and other characters from the book. Peter Gallagher and Nicola Cowper play the journalist and the orphan companion in the tacked-on "romantic" subplot. The main interest of the movie is, however, neither that nor the hallucinatory episodes of fantasy creatures, but the memories of Alice as a little girl, and her complicated (and controversial) relationship with the man who immortalized and idealized an aspect of her character in a classic work of children's literature.

Quotes Applicable to Fantasy

The grandest philosophic myths, those Socrates tells in the Platonic dialogues, are end-myths; they consummate the dialectical argument with the high of a cosmic vision. Now, in contemporary philosophy, grandeur being out of favor, mini-myths, flairless, little thought-constructs, are placed throughout the logical argument: Martians, counter-earthlings, brains-in-a-vat and possible worlds in­habited by that one-and-only unicorn whose affliction is non-existence. Finally, there are the real myths, the ones that are not made but re-told, and these are good as preludes to philosophy: In the Metaphysics (A) Aristotle says: “Wonder is the beginning of philosophy,” “myths are composed of wonders,” and so “the myth lover (philomythos) is somehow a philosopher (philosophos).”-- Eva Brann

[Lin Carter] turns to a discussion of Amadis of Gaul, and his admiration for it. As he explains, the popularity of Amadis sprung a wealth of new romances, mostly imitators. Most of those works which followed the Amadis became so convoluted with the idea of topping the last, that they became dreary and nearly unintelligible. --"Kilsern"

Tom Gauld's Comics on Fantasy Literature

"Adventure Time" Quote Sighting

The Magician's Land is the third book in Lev Grossman's New York Times bestselling books about the young magician Quentin Coldwater's adventures in the magical land of Fillory, an alternate world reported on Earth as a series of beloved children's books. As well as references to Narnia, Middle Earth, the Harry Potter books ("Dumb-Bell-Door!"), and Alice in Wonderland, you can find this bit, where a character named Josh is trying to catch the ram-god Umber:

She was still standing there, arms crossed, glaring at it, when Josh came heaving up the top step like he was trying to get himself out of a swimming pool.

"I'm gonna sack that guy's nutcastle," he croaked.

This is surely a specific reference to this exchange in the Adventure Time Season One episode "Henchman":


Lisby: Yeeees? Duke and Duchess of Nuts' residence!
Finn: My boss is gonna sack your castle!
Lisby: Oh! Well, that's certainly bad news for us!
Duke of Nuts: Lisby! Who's at the door?
Lisby: Someone who wishes to sack the nut castle!
Duke of Nuts: Why would you want to sack my nut castle on my second son's first birthday?!

A lovely little example of the Easter eggs Grossman habitually leaves for all lovers of Fantasy.

Chapter One: Starts and Beginnings

“The single biggest problem with openings is that writers have a tendency to want to begin at the beginning. They want to start where it all happens first so they don’t leave anything out. But the truth is nothing starts at the beginning, at least not since the time of Adam and Eve. Everything starts in the middle of something else, and that’s where it ends, as well. So you might as well jump in somewhere interesting as somewhere boring, and bring the pieces of the story and its characters together as you go along. Choosing the important components of your story ahead of time – and discarding the unimportant ones - will help you do that.” — Terry Brooks

“One of the easiest ways to spot an inexperienced author is what former Wizards of the Coast editor Mark Sehestedt described as “weather report, fashion report, travel report.” This is when a book begins with a lengthy description of the roiling gray clouds traced with ominous flashes of lightning then slowly but surely moves on to what the character is wearing—exactly—and how long and what color his hair is, before finally resting into several pages of the history and customs of the realm and the difference between a flugle tree and a tizzleberry bush, so that you’re most of the way through chapter one before anyone says or does anything." --Philip Athans

Merlin Lives

Arthur: Where have you been these many years? Is it true that Morgana--

Merlin: Lies. Stories. You brought me back. Your love brought me back. Back to where you are now...in the land of dreams.

Arthur: Are you just a dream? Merlin?

Merlin: A dream to some...A nightmare to others!

***

Kay: I was dreaming.

Arthur: Of Merlin?

Kay: Yes. He spoke to me...

Arthur: I dreamed of him, too. Merlin lives. He lives in our dreams now. He speaks to us from there.

Getting My Goat

When I sat down yesterday morning to put together this post, I thought it would take ten minutes or so to gather a bundle of images from my folders, publish them, and be done. When I discovered my collection of caprine characters was a little scant, I hit the search engines to punch it up a bit, and soon found myself down the rabbit-hole. I went wandering through myth, legend, and popular culture, and soon realized I would now have to cut back on everything I had put together. Goats are some of the earliest domesticated animals and it is no surprise that they feature in many myths. There are gods who are part goat, like Khnum in Egypt or Pan in Greece, but I want to focus on what you might call full-on goats.

One of the earliest representations of King Arthur is a mosaic that shows him as a king in the otherworld, riding a goat. In Welsh writer Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium, he tells the story of the meeting of King Herla with a dwarf king mounted on a goat, to fateful consequences. It seems we are likely to be treated more images of goat-riding dwarves in the third Hobbit movie next year, with Dain and his army from the Iron Hills reportedly mounted up on a battalion of billies.