A Rich Fantasy Life

            I was introduced to the world of fantasy at a very young age. My dad was really into reading the Xanth series by Piers Anthony and had almost all of them in paper back. My older sister quickly got hooked to the fantastical worlds offered by Anthony and Tolkien and began to educate us younger siblings. As we move away from the sub genres of horror and more towards fantasy, I feel as though I have a much better understanding of this genre and will be able to offer better insight.

            I can’t remember how old I was when I first read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings books but I know I was pretty young and I struggled through them. I also have a very vivid memory of watching the old animated version of The Hobbit, we would get the vhs tape at the library and it was always a hit when my mom would bring it home. Needless to say I am very familiar with the heroes journey and also the classic archetypes of the fantasy genre. As I got into highschool and the new feature film versions of The Lord of the Rings came out I was once again compelled to read the books, and with my older sisters help a deeper understanding was achieved. I was no longer occupied with a fascination for the characters and there struggles, now I was interested in their motives and also the symbolism Tolkien was employing. Wait a minute this isn’t about destroying a ring, this is about temptation and greed and maybe our struggles here in the real world.

            I love fantasy’s amazing ability to remove our problems from the real world and put it into a made up world to give us a new understanding of what is really going on. We touched on this with the witch story and I think it is an idea that easily translates to many genres of literature.