‘Realms of the Imagination’ Review: The Worlds of Fantasy
An exhibition at The British Library takes visitors on a journey through fantasy literature, a testament to humanity's persistent attempts to understand this world by imagining others.
Hallo, readers!
The year has been one long book revision day so far, but I did escape to London to see the Fantasy exhibition at The British Library (until Feb 25; links at the end).
Fantasy is an ancient, multi-pronged genre, bristling with wand-waving witches, yawning with portals to topsy-turvy worlds. Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination explores the theme through an extraordinary array of some 120 exhibits: medieval epics, modern authors’ handwritten drafts and typescripts, maps of imagined worlds, posters, theatre costumes, movie shorts and props, and audio interviews with creators and fans.
Four thematic sections unwind through the galleries’ winding corridors and cavernous halls. The first, devoted to “Faerie Worlds”, introduces readers to magical world-building and the beings who inhabit fairy and folk tales.
There’s a draft page handwritten in red ink from Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967), a YA novel centered on the preternatural powers of a dinner service. The sheet appears alongside the plate that inspired the book – a chilling, thrilling encounter for anyone who read Garner young enough to never look at a dinner plate with a patterned rim the same way again.
Quests are a persistent fantasy theme. “Epics and Quests” includes medieval treasures: a heavily-annotated, fourteenth-century manuscript copy of Homer’s The Iliad; a turn of the eleventh-century manuscript of Beowulf, the Old English monster-hunting epic first penned between the mid-seventh and late-tenth centuries.
The Beowulf manuscript is part of the Cotton collection, the founding British Museum manuscript collection heavily damaged by fire in 1731. The charred, jagged-edged pages mounted on modern paper frames betray the epic life it led in England.
It lurched from Cotton House (which fell into ruin), to Essex House (which was deemed a fire risk), to Ashburnham House (where it and other peripatetic Cotton manuscripts finally experienced fire).
A safer trajectory (one imagines) brought Ursula K. Le Guin’s notebook for A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a coming-of-age quest, from the University of Oregon Libraries to London. This is one of several choice loans that expand the show beyond The British Library’s considerable literary manuscript holdings.
Tolkienalia on display ranges from Gandalf’s staff and pipe from Peter Jackson’s turn of the millennium Lord of the Rings movies to the 1962 Swedish translation of The Hobbit, illustrated by Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson. Jansson’s renditions of Bilbo Baggins and Gollum recall the unmistakable style of her Moominvalley books about a family of what can only be called Arctic hippopotamuses who live in a supernatural forest.
Jansson’s hulking, lurking Gollum, who towers over Bilbo Baggins, displeased some of Tolkien’s fans, “which apparently prompted Tolkien to add the word ‘small’ to descriptions of the character in later editions.”
I love Jansson’s drawing of Gollum rising from a pool to confront Bilbo. Gollum looks more like Beaker from The Muppet Show here than a terrible threat - a flummoxed gremlin wearing a greenery tiara faces a tiny humanoid brandishing a sword:
World-building is a defining characteristic of fantasy. The “Weird and the Uncanny” section invites visitors into tense, often terrifying versions of the “real” world – doppelganger universes so subtly out of alignment that it can be hard to tell where fantasy ends and reality begins.
An extract from Guillermo del Toro and Doug Jones’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in which a child in Franco’s Spain in 1944 finds monsters and ordeals underground, plays on a screen. Reality itself is sometimes as sinister and horrific as a fantasy novel, as China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2000) show us.
Works of fantasy appear in many of the world’s literatures. In the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West (present in the exhibition in an eighteenth-century volume), the task of bringing Buddhist scriptures from India to China falls to a monk accompanied by monsters: a monkey king, “a pig-spirit and a sand-demon” – all the better for battling monsters en route.
Tokyo-based Studio Ghibli’s anime movie Princess Mononoke (1997) sews together the ancient/mythological fabric of fantasy and the techno/futuristic ribbons of science fiction, as forest spirits inspired by Shinto beliefs battle resource-consuming humans.
The boundary between reality and fantasy often seems porous. Find the right door or wardrobe on the right day, and it becomes a portal into a world where the universe plays by different rules: where rabbits go to tea parties. The all-star manuscripts come thick and fast in the “Portals and Worlds” section: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and a map of Narnia.
Two of the exhibition’s co-curators, Tanya Kirk (Lead Curator of Printed Heritage Collections 1601-1900 at The British Library) and Matthew Sangster (Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow, and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic) have also edited a sumptuous 250-page book to accompany the show. Twenty essays by a varied array of authors including Maria Dahvana Headley and China Miéville, introduced by the co-curators and prefaced by Neil Gaiman, take the reader through the history, themes, and subgenres of fantasy from antiquity to the present. Rachel Foss (Head of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts), Susan Reed (Lead Curator, Germanic Collections) and Sophie Gosling (Adult Learning Manager) completed the curatorial team.
Fantasy places audiences on an imaginative tightrope: between the mundane and the magical, the real and the impossible. It tips us back and forth between commentary on the present, and the vertiginous physics of the imagination. In doing so, the genre refracts into view timeless characteristics of human experience: fear of the uncanny, thankless trudging towards almost unattainable goods against near-impossible odds, but also wonder, excitement, and laughter.
Links
You can book tickets for the show via See Tickets. You can also just show up. The last day of the show seems to be Feb 25.
The rich and deep catalogue is available in-person or mail order (along with other merchandise) from The British Library. If you have a BL library card, there’s a discount of (I think) 5GBP on the catalogue.
Substantive, and opening many things. Thank you. Unfortunately too late to make it to London.