If you’re a complete newcomer to manga, the range of titles on offer may at first appear daunting. From mind-warping psycho-thrillers like Perfect Blue to politicized police-procedurals like Patlabor, manga films are as wild and wide-ranging as the armies of Japanese artists making them can imagine. Some of the best films the medium has to offer are famous in the West, others shamefully obscure, but in my view at least one of them should be on everyone’s DVD shelf. The uber-manga movie is Katsuhiro Otomo’s mind-blowing, joyously violent SF actioner Akira. It’s a film full of psycho bikers, rollercoaster action and grand-scale duels between adolescents with a real sense of teen angst and rage. Set in Neo-Tokyo, a towering, hyper-violent mega-city beneath which a god sleeps, the animation in Akira is breathtaking and the visual designs are awesome, with incredible attention to detail. Then there is Ghost in the Shell, the film that partly inspired The Matrix. Although it shares Akira’s setting of a futuristic mega-city (Hong Kong this time), Ghost in the Shell is as different from the former film as Star Wars is from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mamoru Oshi’s film is an ice-cold cyberpunk meditation, in which first-class manga action supports a philosophy tract on human identity – from the point of view of a (sort of) nude woman cyborg. Ghost in the Shell, perhaps even more than Akira, is a visual and imaginative tour de force – a genre-bending fusion of police procedural, SF actioner and art movie. If you’re a fan of Philip K Dick or the Wachowskis you’re sure to love it.

Also playing a part in inspiring The Matrix was The Ninja Scroll, one of the archetypal manga movies, full of fantastical fights and weird and wonderful monsters. Refreshingly for a manga film, Ninja Scroll is set in the past, in 17th century Japan, where a man and woman samurai fight an array of monstrous meanies, including a rock-hard giant and a skin-shedding snake girl. Although violent, Ninja Scroll is equally memorable for its emerging love story, which is both affecting and sad. The climactic battle scene on a burning ship is particularly visceral and inventive – as good as anything that Hollywood has ever produced. While Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll effectively tackle the genres of SF, fantasy, adventure, detective yarn and historical fiction, Perfect Blue sees manga take on horror. In present-day Tokyo someone or something is going around carving people up. Perfect Blue is not for the faint-hearted – there are a couple of real gross-out moments – but the central heroine’s plight is absorbing. With its phantom pop-singers and scary fanboys, Perfect Blue is also slick, smart and ultra-stylish. Despite all of its obvious qualities, however, it’s easy to see why films like Perfect Blue seem to have given rise to one of the common misconceptions about manga: that it’s all about sex and violence. The reality is very different.

For a start, in Japanese manga does not mean ‘cartoon’, it means ‘comic’ (the Japanese word for ‘cartoon’ is ‘anime’). Japanese anime has also been around for much longer than you might think – the first-known cartoons date back to 1917, although the industry as we know it today really kicked off for the first time in the 1960s. While some manga titles are definitely extremely violent, the genre has also produced much tamer fare – one of the all-time best-loved Japanese cartoons is an epic-length TV adaptation of Johanna Spyri’s Heidi! The other criticism commonly made of anime is that, even once you get past all the sex and violence, the films are simply absurd and incoherent. Whilst on the face of it many manga films have something of a fuzzy grip on story logic, this is largely because many viewers in the West simply don’t see the context in which they’re released in Japan. Many manga cartoons are spin-offs of some kind – comic book adaptations, maybe, or re-vamps of an earlier cartoon. When Akira was released in Japan, for example, most of its audience would have known the comic, which may be why it doesn’t explain everything for newcomers. Other big name anime directors create overarching universes where they set all their stories, sometimes reworking plots and characters from different angles. The main point I’d make is, how can you judge something if you’ve never tried it? If your interest is even slightly piqued, why not rent a manga movie? You may hate it but, just on the off-chance that you enjoy it, there’s literally a whole universe of films waiting to be discovered after you’ve watched Akira or Ghost in the Shell: Patlabor, Fist of the North Star, Wolf’s Rain, Amon Saga, Kai Doh Maru, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Psychic Wars, Vampire Hunter D, Street Fighter, Redhawk, X the Movie, Tokyo Revelation, Shadow Skill, Ghost Sweeper Mikami -  and that’s just for starters…

May Day has been a traditional day of festivities throughout the centuries. The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the festival of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, and the Walpurgis Night celebrations of the Germanic countries. In Britain, traditional May Day rites and celebrations include morris dancing, crowning a May Queen and anything involving a Maypole. Much of this derives from traditional Anglo-Saxon customs associated with Thrimilch (literally ‘the month of three milkings’) – the Old English term for the month of May. In the years since then, May Day has become most associated with towns and villages celebrating springtime fertility and revelry with village fetes and community gatherings, although the particular traditions tend to vary from region to region. Whitstable in Kent, for example, hosts annual Jack in the Green pageants, in which a procession of morris dancers parade through the town on the May Day bank holiday. Padstow in Cornwall, meanwhile,  holds its annual ‘Obby-Oss’ (Hobby Horse) day of festivities. This is believed to be one of the oldest fertility rites in the UK, during which the whole town is decorated with springtime greenery, and every year thousands of onlookers attend. Revellers dance with the Oss through the streets of the town and even through the private gardens of the citizens, accompanied by accordion players and followers dressed in white with red or blue sashes who sing the traditional ‘May Day’ song. The university cities of Oxford, Durham and Edinburgh annually see students take to the streets in their hundreds in the early hours of May morning to see the sunrise and enjoy festivities including folk music, dancing, madrigal singing and a barbecue breakfast (although as students, let’s face it, they don’t need much of an excuse to party!).

Edinburgh is also the setting for an ancient Fire Festival that is held on the evening of May eve and into the early hours of May Day on the city’s Calton Hill. An older Edinburgh tradition has it that young women who climb Arthur’s Seat and wash their faces in the morning dew will have lifelong beauty. Celebrated on 1 May – and thus linked inextricably with May Day – Beltane is a spring-time festival of optimism. Fertility ritual again was important, in part perhaps connecting with the waxing power of the sun, symbolized by the lighting of fires through which livestock were driven, and around which the people danced in a sunwise direction. In Ireland, where the festival survived in its original form for longer than in most places, bonfires were lit to safeguard against disease and Druids used to make them with great incantations, amid solemn ceremony. The fires would mark a time of purification and transition, ringing in the season in the hope of a good harvest later in the year, and were accompanied with ritual acts to protect the people from any harm by Otherworldly spirits. Like the festival of Samhain, opposite Beltane on 31 October, Beltane was also a time when the Otherworld was seen as particularly close at hand. Beltane was equally popular in the Scottish Highlands, where young people met on the moors, lit a bonfire and made an oatmeal cake toasted at the embers. The cake was cut and one of the pieces marked with charcoal. Drawing the pieces blindfolded, whoever got the marked piece would have to leap over the flames three times. Another common aspect of the festival, practiced far beyond the shores of Britain and Ireland in the New World of North America, was the hanging of May Boughs on the doors and windows of houses and the making of May Bushes in farmyards, which usually consisted either of a branch of rowan/mountain ash or more commonly hawthorn.

With such rich traditions, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of the pagan rites of spring continue to be celebrated to this day, despite the rise of Christianity and the later secularisation of society. The lighting of a community Beltane fire from which each hearth fire is then relit is still observed today throughout the Gaelic diaspora. May Day and Beltane-based festivals are widely held by many Neopagans. Wiccans celebrate a variation of Beltane as a Sabbat, one of the eight solar holidays which make up their Wheel of the Year. Such festivities are also by no means limited to Neopagans or the Celtic fringe. On May Day, Romanians celebrate the “arminden”, the beginning of summer, symbolically tied with the protection of crops and farm animals. In Finland May Day is known as Vappu, when carnival-style street festivals are held throughout the country, while in Hawaii, it is called Lei Day, and is normally set aside as a day to celebrate island culture in general and native Hawaiian culture in particular. All of this shows that perhaps the beginning of spring and the festivals associated with it are no longer restricted to having a particular religious significance but have grown far beyond that. Now May Day is just a good excuse to throw a great party and be thankful that, for a few months at least, the days will be longer, brighter and warmer. If that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is!

In her saga of the wizard Sparrowhawk, Le Guin depicts a vast archipelago supplemented by a satisfyingly competent map. Not that this matters; the seas the hero sails are far wider than that of solid reality, as he goes off the map and into the realms of death itself. Le Guin was born into a family of academics and it is therefore not surprising that ethnography forms the basis of her fiction. Her societies, although sketched briefly, seem solid, and are enhanced by her deep understanding of the human condition. A similarly scholarly bedrock underpins Middle Earth. J R R Tolkien was a philologist (a sort of combination of historian and linguist) and his is a fantasy world built from artful language. The world of which Middle Earth is part has an entirely mythological origin, created by God in the manner of the Old Testament, and re-shaped many times. Whilst its creation may be fantastical, this ‘Arda’ is above all true to itself – and that’s the crucial part. This reflexive truthfulness is the most important characteristic in a convincing fantasy world – not how scheming its royal courts are – and a great many fantasies fall down here. Fantasy worlds that merely appropriate historical settings or, increasingly, refitted historical settings that have become genre standards, without the author seeking some form of inner journey, are plasticky and unconvincing.

That’s not to say that an author has to go to the extreme lengths of Tolkien to make his or her world feel convincing by inventing entire languages, thousands of years of history and enough maps to fill an atlas. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is the supreme example of this. It has no secondary world; its geography is entirely of the soul. It is fantasy in the purest sense and one that, brilliantly, impinges upon plain old Earth. If anything, worldbuilding becomes even more important in fantasy that does not intend to transcend our own world and time. The further from the mythological and closer to the mundane we get, the more we at least need to have the illusion that a real place is operating in the background, otherwise the whole edifice of story crumbles away. Harry Potter’s world, imagined by J K Rowling, lies undiscovered parallel to our own in a most unlikely fashion, but it is so intricately detailed that it just feels right. The fact is that the everyday and the mythical are not mutually exclusive – Alan Garner, for example, incorporates both to magnificent effect. His books are set in the actual landscapes of his native Cheshire, England. He will not even change the course of a road for mere narrative convenience; the result is that his stories remain convincing even when heaving with witches, dwarves and goblins.  Michael Swanwick does the reverse, injecting industrial technologies into fairyland in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter with equal success.

The secret, again, is style. Garner’s books are masterfully spare in their use of language, Swanwick’s brilliantly descriptive. So Le Guin had it right, it appears. Some of the most common foul-ups which plague fantasy novels, meanwhile, include the following: maps that make no sense or are just plain lazy (ever had that feeling that the fantasy world of [insert name here] looks an awful lot like Western Europe?); urban fantasies depicting ‘hidden worlds’ so full of supernatural inhabitants that it is hard to believe that they continue to remain hidden; languages full of made up words that just look and sound wrong; characters not adapted in any way to fantasy that could have stepped right out of the pages of a novel from virtually any other genre; worlds full of intelligent species with no real reason to be there other than the fact that the author was (a) inspired by Tolkien, or (b) inspired by that D&D game that was inspired by Tolkien; and so on and so on. On the other hand, what makes the very best fantasy worlds can perhaps be boiled down to internal truthfulness, stylistic accomplishment and a certain, almost academic, rigour. That’s not to say that you need to be an educated intellectual to write a good fantasy novel – far from it. Here, we’re talking about rigour in whatever field – be it geography, mythology, linguistics, industry – interests the author. Whether we’re sketching latter day Valhallas or trying to create a complete Low Fantasy world from the ground up, good fantasy is true, beautiful and rigorous. But then, surely the same applies to all good fiction, right?

Belief in angels among people in general seems to be persistent – often regardless of whether the subject is themselves religious or not. The latest polls suggest that as many as three-quarters of Americans believe that angels exist (a far greater percentage than those who believe in astrology, ESP, ghosts, witchcraft, clairvoyance, Bigfoot and almost any other known supernatural phenomenon). A far smaller (though still significant) number say they have had some sort of an experience of an angel, whether visual (the ‘light at the end of a tunnel’ commonly seen by those who have had near-death experiences is often said to be caused by the presence of a ‘radiant being’ or angel); auditory, to convey a warning; a sense of being touched, pushed, or lifted, typically to avert a dangerous situation; or by smell, usually a pleasant fragrance such as vanilla. Of course, angelic ‘visitations’ are nothing new – they have been recorded virtually since the dawn of human history. The New Testament includes many interactions and conversations between angels and humans. As recently as the 20th century, visionaries and mystics have reported interactions with, and indeed dictations from, angels. For instance, the bed-ridden Italian writer and mystic Maria Valtorta wrote The Book of Azariah based on ‘dictations’ that she directly attributed to her guardian angel Azariah.

As to the origins of angels, explanations are both varied and numerous across the globe. Early Christians inherited Jewish understandings of angels, which in turn may have been inherited partly from the Egyptians. The Bible uses the term Elohim to refer to beings traditionally interpreted as angels or, literally translated, ‘messengers from God’. According to Kabalah, there are four worlds and our world is the last world: the world of action (Assiyah). Angels exist in the worlds above as a ‘task’ of God and, after an angel has completed its task, it ceases to exist. In this sense, famous angels and their tasks included the following: Michael, angel of justice and general of the heavenly host; Raphael, God’s healing force;  Samael, the angel of death; Metatron, God’s heavenly scribe; and Lucifer Morning Star, God’s first living creation, most beautiful, betrayer of the hosts of heaven. The ancient Persian religious tradition of Zoroastrianism, which viewed the world as a battleground between forces of good and forces of evil, between light and darkness, conceived angels as the antithesis of demons. The Bahá’í Faith, meanwhile, describes angels as people who have consumed, with the fire of the love of God, all human traits and limitations, and have clothed themselves with angelic attributes and thereby become endowed with the attributes of the spiritual.

An even more intriguing theory is contained in the teachings of Theosophy, where angels or devas are regarded as living either in the atmospheres of the planets of the solar system (Planetary Angels) or inside the Sun (Solar Angels). Presumably other planetary systems and stars have their own angels and they help to guide the operation of the processes of nature such as the process of evolution and the growth of plants; their appearance is reputedly like coloured flames about the size of a human being. It is believed by Theosophists that devas can be observed when the third eye is activated. Some (but not most) devas originally incarnated as human beings. It is believed by Theosophists that nature spirits, elementals (gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders), and fairies can be also be observed when the third eye is activated. It is maintained by Theosophists that these less evolutionarily developed beings have never been previously incarnated as humans; they are regarded as being on a separate line of spiritual evolution called the ‘deva evolution’; eventually, as their souls advance as they reincarnate, it is believed they will incarnate as devas. It is asserted by Theosophists that all such beings possess bodies that are composed of etheric matter, a type of matter finer and more pure that is composed of smaller particles than ordinary physical plane matter.

It is in the worlds of fiction, however, that we find some of the most original and compelling depictions of angels. In Angelology, Daniella Trussoni imagines them as ageless beings who have adapted to the real world and live in secret communities, pursuing their own inscrutable agendas over the centuries of their existence. In His Dark Materials angels play a central role on both sides of a ‘war in heaven’ that spills over into countless other worlds and dimensions. Sharon Shinn’s Samaria series is a near-perfect fusion of faith and science fiction, featuring as it does a futuristic planet whose settlers may or may not have been carried there in the hands of God, rescued from the war that tore apart their home world, and who continues to communicate with them via the caste of ‘angels’ that live among them. The award-winning novel Skellig tells of a boy who stumbles into the old, ramshackle garage of his new home and finds something magical: a strange being – part owl, part angel – who needs his help if it is to survive. Angel Road is a mesmeric anthology of linked short stories about angels by Steven Savile. Savile depicts them as an essential part of human history, appearing in various time periods and in many forms. He does as well as any author at capturing the essence of these inspiring yet inscrutable beings, whom we show no sign of losing interest in at the dawning of a new millenium.

My first exposure to the weird and wonderful world of Blaylock was reading the delightful Land of Dreams back in the eighties, although in my view the novel hasn’t dated a bit in all the time since. Just looking at the cover alone, even today, gives me a shiver, with its depiction of a gigantic shoe, tortoise and skull washed up on an otherwise normal beach. The book tells the story of the coming of the Solstice, an event that occurs just once every twelve years, and how it brings with it a sinister carnival that brings a sense of terror and wonder to a small coastal town. Three curious adventurers discover the gateway to the mysterious Land of Dreams – a place where you may not always get what you want but you definitely get what you deserve, whether you like it or not! Land of Dreams is by turns beautiful, threatening, and exhilarating – a book for lovers of language, life and dreams, by an author who understands all three. Blaylock’s novel hit me like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky and no sooner had I finished it than I went looking for more books by him. What follows is just a selection of what I found.

The Rainy Season is a very different book from Land of Dreams, almost devoid of the latter novel’s largely humorous tone. It tells of a young man, Phil, deeply shaken by the sudden death of his wife and the eerie sensations he gets as he roams around the big, old house he inherits from his mother. He’s sure that he’s seen people snooping around his property, by the old well that, in the Californian rainy season, always seems ready to overflow. How much, though, is real and how much is in his head? That’s the question. When Phil’s sensitive young niece Betsy comes to live with him she begins to sense the powerful emotions of the past, to hear the voices of the dead, and to see the uncanny powers that are closing in around the house. The Rainy Season is not only a brilliant contemporary ghost story, it is also a superb blend of psychological insight and unearthly phenomena. The book blurs the lines between the past and the present, the living and the dead, fantasy and reality. The Rainy Season also forms part of a loose trilogy of present-day Californian ghost stories, along with Night Relics and Winter Tides, the latter of which won the World Fantasy Award.

The Paper Grail is also part of another trilogy of books which each put a modern spin on Christian themes, without being overtly or self-consciously religious. In it, Howard Barton comes to Mendocino on the remote northern coast of California in search of a folded scrap of paper rumoured to bear a sketch by the legendary Japanese artist Hokusai. Unfortunately for him, there are plenty of others in search of this Paper Grail, including Mrs Lamey, who waters her garden with blood, among other strange and noxious substances; the enigmatic Mr Jimmers whose garden shed conceals a bizarre invention designed to raise the dead; and Uncle Roy, founder of The Museum of Modern Mysteries and builder of haunted houses. In Mendocino, nothing is what it first appears but everything is connected, and Howard will have to work out whose side he’s on, as he is led into a vicious battle between mysterious underground societies. The Last Coin shares The Paper Grail‘s Christian inspiration by positing that the coins earned by Judas in return for betraying Jesus still exist – and still hold an elusive power over all who claim them. Lastly there is All the Bells on Earth, which is just a very strange book about Christmas, full of family tensions, festive decorations, strange gifts and demonic presences.

Probably Blaylock’s most famous series of books, however, is the Narbondo series, which all share the character of the villainous Ignacio Narbondo and the trappings of steampunk. This is also the series to which Blaylock has made the most recent contribution in the form of The Aylesford Skull, which was published just last month. This book, which I’m delighted to say shows that Blaylock is back to his very best, tells of Professor Langdon St. Ives. A brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer, he is at home in Aylesford with his family when, not far away, a steam launch is taken by pirates, the crew murdered, and a grave is possibly robbed of the titular skull, which has all sorts of useful properties. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of St. Ives. When Narbondo kidnaps his son Eddie, St. Ives races into London in pursuit. The Aylesford Skull shows off Blaylock’s trademark pacy style, neverending imagination and narrative verve in a way that will surely suck you in even if you have never read one of his books before (bear in mind that this is the seventh instalment in the series). The menacing, though never cartoonish, figure of the hunchbacked Dr Narbondo, in particular, stays in the mind long after you’ve read the final page of the novel – the mark, surely, of a skilled writer. Oh, and if I sound slightly jealous of Blaylock’s writing skills – that’s because I am!

There are so many other fine works by Blaylock – including the whimsical fantasy of the Balumnia trilogy (inspired, according to the author, by Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit) and the terrific short stories Thirteen Phantasms and Paper Dragons (each of which also won the World Fantasy Award). Rather than hearing more from me, though, if you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard so far about the world of James P Blaylock, I’d hugely recommend that you seek out his books for yourself. I’m normally wary of giving guarantees but Blaylock’s oeuvre is so fascinating and diverse that I for one am convinced there must be something for almost everyone in his writings. Give him a go and see!

Below, what I’ve tried to do is split up the fantasy genre, classify its sub-genres and provide some of the best examples of each. Part of the difficulty with doing this is that, of course, many books (and authors) can be filed under multiple genres, but I hope what I’ve done makes some sort of sense nevertheless. So, without further ado, this is it, my almost all-encompassing fantasy family tree:

‘Pure’ Fantasy

This is my own umbrella term for a number of related fantasy sub-genres, including High, Epic, Arthurian and Heroic fantasy, as well as Sword & Sorcery. Epic fantasy is, in a nutshell, any book or set of books where a bunch of people try to save the world, sometimes several times over. Notable for its intricate plots, Epic fantasy is also distinguished by having large casts of characters, a threat to the world and an earth-shattering war of some kind. It is also usually set exclusively in a secondary world (i.e. not our own world and time) and the over-arching plot is more important than the plots of individual novels. At its very best, Epic fantasy creates vivid worlds of heroism and sacrifice. At its worst, its primary characteristic is enormously thick books, where ideas run out long before the pages. The greatest initial influence on Epic fantasy was of course J R R Tolkien and the Professor’s hand can also be glimpsed clearly in the formation of the related sub-genre of High fantasy. Featuring similarly labyrinthine plots and lengthy lists of characters, High fantasy is distinguished from Epic fantasy mainly by the absence of shades of grey: heroes are typically whiter than white while villains are nothing more than ciphers. Absence of moral ambiguity is made up for by complex historical, cultural and magical detail – a High fantasy novel almost always features a glossary, appendix, index or some combination of all three.

The flipside of Epic and High fantasy is Heroic fantasy, a sub-genre which does what it says on the tin in focusing on heroes. Here we’re not just talking about heroes in the sense of the main protagonists in novels, we’re talking about larger-than-life characters with magic swords, world-changing destinies and, often, some sort of distinguishing physical characteristic – think Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone, Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian or David Gemmell’s Druss the Legend. Heroic fantasy is heavily influenced by folklore and mythology, which itself featured ‘hero’ characters like King Arthur, Finn MacCool and Gilgamesh, and for this reason does not need to be set wholly in a secondary world, like Epic or High fantasy. Characters like Elric and Conan belong equally in the Sword & Sorcery genre, which in many ways was the precursor to Tolkienesque fantasy, born in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s, like Weird Tales. S&S is a different beast to Epic or High fantasy, often being set in some antediluvian epoch of Earth rather than a secondary world. Its heroes, consequently, are often wily, amoral types trying to get by – think Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for example. Last of the traditional fantasy sub-genres which bucks the trend of Epic and High fantasy is the rather new concept of ‘Low’ fantasy. Low fantasy’s heroes tend to be more flawed, more tired and more grubby than their High fantasy counterparts – they have had hard lives and often have dark secrets as a consequence (or they’re just plain not nice people). The crux is this – in High fantasy books by J R R Tolkien and Robert Jordan, heroes have adventures; in Low fantasy books by George R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie, characters endure hardship, disease, torture, rain, rough sex and sewers. It’s like the difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones really!

Horror-influenced Fantasy

This is the category in which I’ve placed such sub-genres as Dark fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Urban fantasy and Weird Fiction. Some may question the classification of such fields within the wider area of fantasy at all, but the fantastical link is definitely there, however faint. A product of the 1980s and authors such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman, Dark fantasy could in a sense be regarded more as an evolution of horror than of fantasy. What it shares with mainstream fantasy, however, is the nature of the peril – magic. Where Dark fantasy differs is in the effect – magic here is evil, pure and simple; it invariably destroys the minds of those it encounters and is not regarded as an accepted part of the fabric of life. In this it shares kinship with the sub-genre of Weird Fiction, however, ultimately Dark fantasy tends to deal with the evil in human minds, and not that which lurks outside. In the Weird Fiction of HP Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Clark Ashton Smith and others, however, man is an insignificance, for ranged against him are ancient and uncaring powers. This outer terror of the cosmic threat posed by unimaginably powerful beings is the antithesis of Dark fantasy, which fears the darkness within the soul of humankind.

On a slightly lighter note, we have the closely related sub-genres of Urban and Contemporary fantasy. These might seem like different names for what is essentially the same thing, but the fractures become evident on a closer inspection. Urban fantasy is unswervingly city-based. At one extreme it touches the vampire-filled world of Harry Dresden, at the other the intellectualism of Perdido Street Station, but either way, the city itself is a key character. In many ways a sub-sub-genre within Urban fantasy, Paranormal Romance dilutes the peril of the undead with romantic, vampiric anti-heroes. Dominated by female writers like Charlaine Harris and Laurell K Hamilton, there are four main parts to a Paranormal Romance: a hidden world, so bursting with supernatural types it’s a surprise it is hidden; a dynamic, sexual heroine; a mostly urban setting; and shoes. A different creature altogether is Contemporary fantasy – unlike Dark fantasy in that its magic has good and bad sides, it is far less interested in the gooey stuff than Paranormal Romance and more interested in country than Urban fantasy’s town. Contemporary fantasy draws on folklore, where secret worlds intersect with our own. A great deal of children’s fantasy comes under this umbrella – think Harry Potter – but adult writers are like Robert Holdstock and Charles de Lint have equally made it their own.

SF-influenced Fantasy

The most startling example of the intersection between science-fiction and fantasy is the dynamic genre of Steampunk. In Steampunk, the grandeur of Victoriana blends with modern technology. Futuristic innovations and anachronistic technology in vintage settings like nineteenth century London or the Wild West are the hallmarks of the sub-genre. Other typical trappings of Steampunk include faster-than-sound airships, brass robots, wooden computers, ornate submarines, baroque time machines and a wide variety of extraordinary devices that are too numerous to mention. Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term Steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of Cyberpunk. The genre’s origins can, however, be traced back even earlier, to the scientific romances that first inspired science-fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the works of H G Wells, Jules Verne and Mary Shelley. Modern standard bearers of steampunk include some highly respected authors whose work has passed into the mainstream, including Philip Pullman, China Mieville and Tim Powers. Even more intriguingly, while most of the original steampunk novels had a historical setting, later works have often placed steampunk elements in a fantasy world with little relation to any specific historical era.

Science fantasy is a sub-genre which, in contrast to Steampunk, may seem less familiar and less identifiable to many fantasy fans. Here, what I’m referring to is fantasy that uses overt or implied science-fictional tropes, often in conjunction with the deep time of Weird Fiction and the brassy landscapes of Sword & Sorcery. This sub-genre is occupied by authors such as Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe and M John Harrison, whose stories are set so far in the future that the world’s civilizations are torpid, its inhabitants are exotic, and the technology they possess, and barely understand, appears magical. Often, a sense of grave and all-encompassing melancholy pervades the landscape. Many would dispute the categorization of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels as Science fantasy rather than pure SF but this is definitely an arguable distinction. This sub-genre is also exemplified by Pern, an SF world in fantasy dress. (The more perceptive among you will also have noticed that my own novel White Planet, also sits firmly in this particular category!).

There are many more sub-genres within fantasy which I could mention: Animal fantasy, as distinguished by the novels of Richard Adams and William Horwood; Arthurian fantasy, as written by T H White and Marion Zimmer Bradley; Comic fantasy, in the form of Terry Pratchett’s books; and many many more. Ultimately, however, the question that may be asked is: do any of these classifications really matter? I personally tend to look just for a good book and am not too concerned by what specific sub-genre of fantasy it falls into. What the above shows, however, is the sheer range and variety within the fantasy genre – there is quite literally something for everyone out there. That’s why the central purpose of this blog has always been celebrating worlds of fantasy, folklore, myth and legend from every era and every corner of the world, and that’s what I plan to do for the next one hundred posts!

The Druids – known in Wales as Derwydd (translation: ‘knower of oak’), the term I prefer to use – were the priests of a religion that was practised in Gaul and ancient Britain until the Roman conquest of these countries in the 1st centuries BC and AD. Several hundred years before the coming of the Romans, Celts from Europe had conquered Gaul and large parts of Britain and it was these Celtic people, along with the ancient Britons among whom they lived, who practised the Old Faith. The Derwydd were the most powerful individuals in Celtic tribes and were not only priests but also teachers of the young and judges of the law. As judges they even settled disputes between different tribes – not merely those between members of the same tribe – which suggests that their authority extended beyond tribal boundaries. Boys chosen to be Derwydd studied for many years and the Archdruid – again I prefer the Welsh term Penderwydd – was the head of their priestly organization, elected for life and having authority over all Derwydd, no matter to which tribe they belonged. The Derwydd held their ceremonies out of doors and many of these rites were connected with the worship of trees, particularly the oak. Oak groves were sacred places, for whatever grew on these trees was regarded as a gift from heaven. This was especially true of mistletoe, the cutting of which was a sacred rite for the Derwydd, performed with a golden knife and usually accompanied by the sacrifice of two white bulls. Other trees with important properties included the rowan (protection from evil), the willow (associated with sorrow and enchantment), the laurel (protection from illness), the hawthorn (love and fertility), the ash (the tree of rebirth) and the yew (the tree of the dead).

The twin functions of divination and assuring the future were the most popular of the Derwydd’s activities, and generally included some form of sacrifice. Much is often made of the Celts’ propensity for sacrifice, which in Roman texts is distorted into wholesale massacres: Julius Caesar claimed that the Gauls would build a huge wicker model of a man, fill it with victims and then set the structure alight (unwittingly inspiring the classic British Hammer horror film The Wicker Man in the process). Whilst it is certainly likely that people were sacrificed, it is debatable whether this was done in either the numbers or level of cruelty that is claimed by the Romans. What is often overlooked is the fact that the Derwydd were teachers as well as priests, and possessed a remarkable degree of wisdom and knowledge for their time. The ancient script known as ogham, for example, was developed by Irish and Pictish wise men for writing on monuments of wood and stone. In its simplest form, ogham consists of four sets of strokes, each containing five letters composed of from one to five strokes, thus giving 20 letters. This is an impressive degree of sophistication for what was otherwise regarded as essentially an early barbarian culture.

Although at first the Roman soldiers were terrified by the Derwydd, who stood before their armies with long beards and white robes, cursing the invaders in a foreign tongue, their power was soon broken in Britain. Even the sacred groves where it was thought that human sacrifices were sometimes made were almost all cut down, although a few of the Derwydd remained in Ireland for two or three centuries longer. The old faith died out officially in the 2nd or 3rd century AD but it was never really forgotten. Indeed, part of the reason why Christianity was so easily assimilated in the British Isles was because of the central role played by wood in both religions – the Christian cross and the pagan oak. Even the tall columns in many churches were partly inspired by the towering trees that stood in sacred oak groves, to give the impression that these buildings had a similar function – an effect that was no doubt enhanced by the prevalence of non-Christian ‘Green Man’ images in many churches.

There have been signs since the early part of the last century that, slowly but surely, the wisdom of the trees has been rediscovered (if it was ever really lost). In the 20th century the dress and some of the customs of the Derwydd were revived at the annual Welsh festival of literature and music, known as the Eisteddfod. In our more enlightened era Druidism is officially recognised as a religion and  those who follow it are, largely, left to do so unmolested. Despite many modern affectations, modern Druidism incorporates most of the key aspects of the ancient nature-based religion of the original inhabitants of western Europe. All over Britain many of the temples of the old faith – stone circles, oak groves, mounds, cairns, tors, tarns, dolmens and cromlechs – still stand and are even put to their original uses at times. In this sense therefore, it can almost be said that the old faith in its truest sense is very much alive and kicking and is likely to be around for a long time to come.

SPOILERS – BEWARE!

First, let me say a word about the aforementioned Amazon reviews of the book. This is a slight generalization but, for the most part, I found that a lot of the five-star reviews seemed to be praising either the series as a whole, or Brandon Sanderson’s (admittedly laudable) work in tying together the loose threads left by Robert Jordan after his death into a coherent narrative. The one-star reviews, meanwhile, were almost entirely made up of people protesting about the publisher’s decision to delay until spring the release of the e-book version of the novel. Neither of these seem to me to be a particularly valid way to rate AMOL. True, I myself would probably give the WOT series as a whole a better rating than the final book on its own and true, I’m as annoyed as anyone by the commercially motivated decision not to release the print and e-book simultaneously. However, it’s also my view that if you’re going to review a piece of work you should concentrate on the novel in front of you, ignoring what has gone before it as well as any other extraneous issues – so that’s what I’m going to do. I always try to be as positive as I can so I’ll start by looking at what I liked about AMOL.

I definitely liked the first third of the book much more than the final two thirds because, at that early stage, it really seemed to be shaping up to be a humdinger of a finale, as well as delivering on all the promise of the volumes that had gone before. The prologue expertly mixed frenetic action scenes involving relatively minor characters with more slow-moving developments in the meta-plot. Having some characters fight for their lives while others talked and considered weighty matters provided a pleasing contrast. When the major players started to take centre stage we were then treated to some nice character moments – the whole sequence involving the argument between Rand and Egwene at the Field of Merrilor, followed up by the reappearance of Moiraine and ending with the relief of Lan on the Malkier battlefront particularly stands out. The battle scenes, at least early on, were breathtaking – a real sign of Brandon Sanderson playing to his strengths, as well as finally delivering on all of the decades of buildup to the Last Battle. While we’ve seen some terrific action scenes before in the WOT, there is definitely an added edge to the ones in AMOL, given that we know that this is the last book, where no one is guaranteed to survive. After a few pleasingly brutal flourishes that might have impressed even George R R Martin, you are genuinely concerned every single time one of your favourite characters enters the fray – which is, I suppose, exactly how it should be when it comes to a book which is essentially about war. Oh yes, and if you’re a fan of Mat, this is definitely his book. He gets virtually all the best lines as well as stealing almost every scene that he’s in, in much the same way that Tyrion Lannister does in A Song of Ice and Fire.

So far so good, but even the positives that I’ve outlined above carry some hints about the weaknesses of AMOL. Let’s go back to the prologue, where the minor character Talmanes really gets to shine for the first time in the entire series. He fights heroically (killing no less than two Myrddraal on his own!) but then does virtually nothing in the rest of the novel. Had he been killed off at the end of the prologue that would have made more sense and been more fitting. Unfortunately, this is by no means an isolated example. Take Moiraine: yes, her comeback is memorable but after that first scene with Rand, what does she really add to the story? She’s a virtual passenger at Shayol Ghul. Thom Merrilin is one of my favourite characters in the WOT but, given his negligible impact on AMOL I really don’t know why he was included in this book at all. Another of my favourite characters, Padan Fain, makes such an insultingly brief appearance at the end of AMOL that I wonder why he was kept alive beyond The Shadow Rising – I mean, what did he meaningfully contribute to the series after that book? Slayer, meanwhile, was also kept long past his sell-by date. Whilst his Wolf Dream battles with Perrin were undoubtedly one of the highlights of Towers of Midnight, here they just feel like a tired re-tread and the conclusion of their personal feud feels hugely anti-climactic. Proof, if any were needed, that when it comes to the WOT, more is very often less.

Apart from Fain and Slayer, the other villains in AMOL were equally disappointing. Demandred, supposedly one of the greatest tacticians who ever lived, couldn’t work out that Rand – the Dragon Reborn, fated to battle the Dark One and all that – is in Shayol Ghul, erm, fighting the Dark One!?! As far as Moridin/Ishamael is concerned, it turns out that he wasn’t really bothered about serving the Dark One and destroying the Dragon after all, he just wanted to cash in his chips – a very dubious motivation, which wasn’t sign-posted at all in the previous thirteen books. As for Moghedien being caught and collared by the Seanchan, hang on – wasn’t that exactly what happened to Elaida in an earlier volume!?! The Dark One himself should have been much more scary and memorable, not just a disembodied voice philosophising endlessly with Rand in a cave. In fact one of the best potential villains was Tuon, a thoroughly unlikable character whose ‘romance’ with Mat is totally unbelievable. Not exploiting her full potential for villainy by getting her to betray her fragile allegiance to the side of Light was, I feel, a missed opportunity.

Then we come to the ‘heroes’ who died: Egwene, Suian, Gareth Bryne, Gawyn, Davram Bashere and Rhuarc. All of these deaths in AMOL have one thing in common – they were so clumsily handled that I felt absolutely nothing (other than a mild sense of irritation at the ineptitude of the writer). I really did come to this book ready to weep like a baby, especially following all of Sanderson’s tweets and hints that this is exactly what might happen to readers, but in the event I was barely moved. In particular, the fate of Rand himself felt like a massive let-down. Throughout the WOT, you feel that the series is leading up to his eventual death. Whilst his survival at the end of AMOL is not a problem in and of itself, his entire role in the book is very questionable. After the ‘last debate’ scene, he virtually disappears from the action and instead has a jolly-old philosophical discussion with the Dark One for six hundred pages while his allies are fighting and dying around him. At the end of the book not only does Rand survive, he has the god-like ability to light his pipe with a thought and is pondering which one of the three women who are after him he will end up with! Maybe I’m old-fashioned but I’ve always been uncomfortable with this particular love quadrangle and, even leaving this aside, there seems to be very little that is heroic about Rand’s actions in AMOL. To me, Rand’s survival is also one of several fairly heavy hints that AMOL is by no means an end to the WOT saga.

A lot of people have commented on the lack of resolution to the finale of the WOT. Once the Last Battle is over, AMOL ends rather abruptly. On one level, this might simply be viewed as Sanderson wanting to get things over and done with, presumably tired after having spent the majority of the last five years finishing off the work of another author while having a number of his own projects underway (The Stormlight Archive for example). However, a careful reading reveals that AMOL does a lot to set up the world of the WOT post-Tarmon Gai’don. After the defeat of the Shadow, having taken relatively minor losses, the Seanchan are perfectly placed to conquer – if, that is, they choose to ignore that pesky Dragon’s peace that they signed up to (not a huge barrier, one might think). How will the Aiel adapt to their role as upholders of the Dragon’s peace and, perhaps more pertinently, how will the other nations react to them doing so? Will the Borderlands unite under one banner – that of Lan and Malkier – following their horrendous losses during the Last Battle? Will the White and Black Towers be reconciled?  Will the Two Rivers secede from Andor? Despite the deaths I mentioned above, most of the main players are still alive, mostly quite young, and occupy central roles in the world – Rand, Mat, Perrin, Nynaeve, Lan, Thom, Moiraine, Loial, Elayne, Aviendha, Min, Galad etc. Significantly, there is no Harry Potter-style ‘twenty years later’ chapter, showing things neatly wrapped up for all of the remaining characters. To me, all of this points pretty heavily to the fact that the publishers are far from done with milking this particular cash-cow and that further WOT-universe novels are planned. Needless to say, I for one won’t be buying!

So what went wrong? Inevitably – and this is no one’s fault – the death of James Rigney/Robert Jordan hangs heavily over this last book (even more so than it did over The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight). To me, this very much feels like Sanderson’s conclusion to the WOT saga rather than Jordan’s. It has not been lost on most people that many of the best scenes/sub-plots in AMOL involve minor characters like Talmanes and, especially, the Asha’man Androl, all of whom were either introduced or given important roles for the first time by Sanderson rather than Jordan. The last two thirds of the book are basically non-stop fighting – another signature of Sanderson’s style. Whilst he is very good at action scenes, the trouble with Sanderson in this respect is that he doesn’t seem to know that you can have too much of a good thing. I personally felt physically (rather than emotionally) drained after reading AMOL because of the relentless battle scenes – at times I felt like I’d been pounded by the One Power myself! Not only did the endless fighting just get boring after a while, it seemed to leave no room for smaller, character-driven scenes. A lot of the deeper themes in the series which Jordan originally introduced – what power does to people, the inevitability of fate, past lives, the dual nature of life and the cosmos – were totally lost in AMOL. Also, annoyingly, Sanderson seemed to either ignore or pay lip service to the many omens, prophecies, visions and viewings peppered throughout the preceding thirteen books. The resolution of these mysteries was one of the things that I was most looking forward to in AMOL but I still am none the wiser about, for example, who exactly ‘The Broken Wolf’ referred to in the Dark prophecy at the end of TOM was. Again, it may be that matters like this will be addressed in the inevitable WOT spin-off series but this seems lazy to say the least.

I’m aware that much of what I’ve said above is quite negative but, like a lot of people, I came to AMOL with expectations that were (perhaps unfairly) sky-high. My investment of time in the WOT over the years has been so great that (to paraphrase Tolkien) Jordan/Sanderson had incurred some pretty substantial narrative debts that I was really expecting to be paid off – with interest! I also came to AMOL with the experience of having read a number of truly great conclusions to some of my other favourite fantasy sagas – The Return of the King, The Deathly Hallows, To Green Angel Tower, Fool’s Fate etc – and was expecting nothing less from the WOT. In the end, although I was in many ways disappointed with what I got, it’s worth saying that I did still feel a definite sense of loss – as if I knew that there was an old friend whom I was never going to see again, at least not in the same way (gulp). Hang on, I think those tears may come after all…

A belief in the holiness and energy of sacred places is fundamental to the Voudon religion, as is the pursuit of peace, prosperity and happiness. But there is also undeniably a darker side to Voudon. Bokors are Voodoo priests for hire who are said to ‘serve the loa with both hands’, meaning that they can both practice the black arts and benevolent magic. Their darker arts include the creation of zombies and the creation of ‘ouangas’, talismans that house evil spirits. Bokors are featured in many Haitian tales and are often associated with the creation of zombies by the use of a deadening brew or potion, usually containing non-fatal poisons. This potion makes the drinker appear to be dead and thus they are often buried. Days later, the bokor will return for the ‘corpse’ and force it to do his bidding, for example manual labour, in a manner akin to mind control. The person is, however, fully alive but in a detached state, whereby he cannot control what he says or does; at this point, when the person has been ‘reanimated’ from the grave, or at least is moving about working for the bokor, they can be termed ‘zombies’. However, some zombie legends dispense with this more rational explanation, and have the bokor raise zombies from dead bodies whose souls have departed.

To offset the villainy of bokors, Voudon also has more benevolent priests known as houngan, who are healers and root workers. They work with the Loa, often in an attempt to undo the harm which has been wrought by malevolent bokors. One of the interesting things about the spirits who make up this pantheon is the fact that they often seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to certain Catholic saints. This is perhaps a legacy of the spread of Christianity in parts of the world in which Voudon later took route but, if you ask a houngan, he is likely to tell you that it is simply proof that ultimately all religions lead to the same sacred goal. Damballa, for instance, is associated with Moses and is often pictured dressed in white robes and wielding a staff. He is the father of the other Loa, and the most powerful and important member of this pantheon. He also appears as a huge green-and-black snake sometimes and in either form, man or serpent, he is known for having voracious sexual appetites. Walking the world in mortal form he has married many women, and sleeps with all of them every Thursday. As you might expect, festivals and rites held in Damballa’s honour are therefore sensual, lively and energetic.

Of the other Loa, the most famous is probably ‘ol’ uncle skeleton’ himself, Baron Samedi. Outfitted with sunglasses, a stylish white shirt and an undertaker’s swallowtail coat, wearing silver jewellery and a top hat, the Baron loves to entertain children and frighten the living daylights out of adults. Of all the Loa, only Baron Samedi never disguises himself. He is always Saturday’s lord, always dressed for a party, always ready to live unlife to the fullest. His entourage, the ghede – the dead, who are ghosts, zombies and revered ancestors – usually trail along in his wake. Baron Samedi is often complemented by Papa Legba, keeper of the spirit gate and watcher of the crossroads. No one enters the mythic realms without Legba’s permission and he is associated with the Catholic saints Peter, Lazarus and Anthony, as well as the colour red. Wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and attended by his dog, Legba can speak and understand any mortal language.

The rival of Papa Legba and darkest of all the Loa is Papa Shango, god of initiation, justice and royalty. He is the lord of thunder and the priest-king of the Loa. Dressed in red and white he mercilessly hunts liars and thieves with a stone axe made by his friend and colleague Ogoun. Unlike many gods in other religions, Shango sees no problem with inserting himself into the great events of the mortal world – he’s been a vigilante, a prizefighter and a revolutionary. The Loa are each individual beings with their own personal likes and dislikes, distinct sacred rhythms, songs, dances, ritual symbols, and special modes of service. Whilst to westerners the Loa may seem quaint it is a very different matter in Haiti, New Orleans, West Africa and any number of other places where these spirits crowd the sultry night and are to be respected and feared. Take care to pay the Loa their due if you are ever in any of these spots – if you don’t, you may find yourself turned into a zombie by the spell of a bokor!

Tolkien’s Elves are derived in some part from an entirely novel solution to an old mythological problem. There was no doubt that a belief in Elves was widespread in European antiquity, however the words used about them seemed curiously contradictory. The Icelander Snorri Sturluson seemed aware of both ‘Light Elves’ (liosalfar) and ‘Dark Elves’ (dokkalfar), but he also recognised ‘Swart Elves’ (svartalfar), though the place they lived, Svartalfheim, was also the home of the Dwarves. Meanwhile Old English uses words like ‘Wood Elf’ (wuduaelf) and ‘Water Elf’ (woeteraelf). How are all these fragments to be reconciled? Are ‘Swart Elves’ the same as ‘Dark Elves’, and both perhaps the same as Dwarves? Tolkien, however, distinguishes the two species from each other perfectly clearly: the Dwarves are associated with mining, smith craft and a world underground, the Elves with beauty, allure, dancing and the woodland. The various types of Elf, meanwhile, are not separated merely by colour but by history. The ‘Light Elves’ are those who have seen the light of the Two Trees which preceded the sun and the moon, in Aman, or Valinor, the Undying Land in the West. The ‘Dark Elves’ are those who refused the journey and remained in Middle Earth, to which many of the Light Elves eventually returned, as exiles or as outcasts. The Dark Elves who remained in the woods of Beleriand are also, of course, naturally described as Wood Elves. Whilst it would only be natural, as time went by and memory became blurred, for men to be unsure whether such a character was once an Elf or a Dwarf, a main aim in Tolkien’s creations was always to ‘save the evidence’ i.e. to rescue his ancient sources from hasty modern accusations of vagueness or folly. Saving the evidence, moreover, generated story, which was a rather handy side effect!

The first of Tolkien’s published works in which the Elves are glimpsed is The Hobbit, although he had, as we now know, been creating an Elvish mythology for more than 20 years before then (in the string of tales which were to become The Silmarillion). In his 1937 novel, though, Tolkien used Elves sparingly, mentioning them only with reference to Elrond in chapter 3 (‘one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories before the beginning of History’) and then in the long paragraph discussing the Wood Elves, High Elves, Light Elves, Deep Elves and Sea Elves in chapter 8. It is the Wood Elves who play the most prominent part in The Hobbit, of course, and Tolkien drew his immediate inspiration for them from a single passage in the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo. This contains a famous section in which Orfeo, wandering alone and crazy in the wilderness after his wife has been abducted by the King of Faerie, sees the fairies riding by to hunt, their horns blowing and their hounds barking. Similarly, the first sign Thorin and company have of the Elves in chapter 8 of The Hobbit is when they become aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound of dogs baying far off. The basic idea is the same in both places: that of a mighty king pursuing his kingly activities in a world forever out of reach of strangers and trespassers in his domain. This is a common device in Tolkien’s fiction – he often took fragments of ancient literature, expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further meaning, and made them into a coherent and consistent narrative (usually enhancing them with ideas both from his own mythology and from traditional fairy tale).

We encounter Wood Elves of a quite different sort in the Lothlorien chapter of Lord of the Rings. As with the realm of the Mirkwood Elves, the ‘magic’ of Lorien has many roots, but there is one thing about it which is highly traditional, while also in a way a strong re-interpretation and rationalization of tradition. There are many references to Elves in Old English and Old Norse, as well as modern English (belief in them seems to have lasted longer than is the case with any of the other non-human races of early native mythology), but one story which remains strongly consistent is that of the mortal going into Elfland – best known, perhaps, from the ballads of Thomas the Rhymer. The mortal enters, spends what seems to be a night, or three nights, in music and dancing. But when he comes out and returns home he is a stranger, everyone he once knew is dead and there is only a dim memory of the man lost underhill. Elvish time, it seems, flows far slower than human time. Similarly, the Fellowship ‘remained some days in Lothlorien, as far as they could tell or remember’. But when they come out Sam looks up at the moon and concludes that it is: ‘as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country’. Frodo agrees with him, and suggests that in Lothlorien they had entered a world beyond time. Legolas the Elf, however, offers a deeper explanation. For the Elves, he says: ‘the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow… The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream’.

The interlude in Lothlorien brings to light another trait of Tolkien’s Elves – many if not most of them envisage defeat as a long-term prospect. Galadriel says ‘Through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, saying ‘I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless victories’. Although he later questions his own adjective ‘fruitless’, he still repeats that the victory long ago in which Sauron was overthrown but not destroyed ‘did not achieve its end’. In this he is perhaps justified, for if the entire, long history of Middle Earth shows us anything it is that good is attained only at vast expense, while evil recuperates almost at will. It is made abundantly clear that even the destruction of the One Ring and the final overthrow of Sauron will conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’. The Ring’s destruction, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring (and Gandalf’s and Elrond’s) will all lose their power, so that Lothlorien ‘fades’ and the Elves ‘dwindle’, to be replaced by modernity and the dominion of men. By ‘dwindle’ Galadriel may mean that the Elves will physically shrink in size (perhaps to become the tiny creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and popular imagination). Or they may ‘dwindle’ in number – or something else altogether may happen to them.

Tolkien would have been well aware of the Rollright Stones, the stone circle not too far from his study on the border of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, and of the legend attached to them (he mentions them allusively in Farmer Giles of Ham). Once upon a time there was an old king, who was challenged by a witch to take seven strides over the hill and look down into the valley beyond. He did, but found his view blocked by a barrow and the witch’s curse was then activated, turning him and his men into stones. Perhaps the same sort of thing happens to the Elves. The last we see of Galadriel and her company (other than the final scene en route to the Grey Havens) is her, Celeborn, Elrond and Gandalf talking after the hobbits are asleep. But then again, do we actually seem them and are they talking?: ‘If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen and heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands’. The next day the folk of Lorien leave, ‘Quickly fading into the stones and the shadows’. Fading, or turning? A possible conclusion for the Elves is that they do not all leave Middle Earth. Instead, like the old king of Rollright, they are absorbed into the landscape, becoming the ‘grey figures, carved in stone’, which dot the English and Scottish folk-tradition (the Old Man of Coniston, the Grey Man of the Merric etc). It would not be an unsuitable, or an entirely sad ending. But it is the marker of an ultimate loss and defeat.

Of course, there is one sense in which the Elves are not gone at all, and that is their continued afterlife in the fantasy genre. Almost every author who has written epic or high fantasy since Tolkien’s day has made use of the ‘Elf’ archetype as conceived by him. They are not always called Elves but, whether it is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Lios Alfar, Tad Williams’ Sithi, Raymond E Feist’s Eledhel, Michael Moorcock’s Melniboneans or Katherine Kerr’s Elycion Lacar, their origins in Tolkien’s fiction are unmistakable and undeniable. They have even made it into outer space courtesy of Games Workshop’s Eldar in the Warhammer 40K role-playing universe! Although Tolkien did expressly intend to ‘leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama’ to continue bringing his world and his creations to life, I can’t help feeling that he would not have entirely approved of all of the ‘Elvish’ types that appeared in the many fantasy novels that came after the Rings. They were for him a noble but ultimately doomed race, recalling the fate of Elves in poetry, literature, myth and heroic romance. Thus in Middle Earth the Elves only dwindled as men grew more powerful and  numerous, and these People of the Stars ultimately passed away forever to that place beyond the reach of mortals, save in ancient tale and perhaps in dream.