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| - High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy fiction that is set in invented or parallel worlds. Built upon the platform of a diverse body of works in the already very popular fantasy genre, high fantasy came to fruition through the work of authors such as C.S. Lewis and, foremost, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose major fantasy works were published in the 1950s. While it is far from being the oldest fantasy subgenre, high fantasy, along with sword and sorcery, has become one of the two genres most commonly associated with the general term fantasy.
- The setting of the stereotypical High (or "epic") Fantasy, a collection of tropes, often boiled down from The Lord of the Rings, which has been the foundation for many a series of doorstoppers. Basically, the Dark Lord, thought defeated millennia past, has returned to his Dark Tower in the Dark Land, gathering around him evil hordes. The free lands have only one hope, a small band of lost heirs, princes, and simple village folk gathered together by a mysterious wandering wizard. However, it's not essential to stick so closely to the model. The core elements of High Fantasy are: Examples include:
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| abstract
| - High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy fiction that is set in invented or parallel worlds. Built upon the platform of a diverse body of works in the already very popular fantasy genre, high fantasy came to fruition through the work of authors such as C.S. Lewis and, foremost, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose major fantasy works were published in the 1950s. While it is far from being the oldest fantasy subgenre, high fantasy, along with sword and sorcery, has become one of the two genres most commonly associated with the general term fantasy.
- The setting of the stereotypical High (or "epic") Fantasy, a collection of tropes, often boiled down from The Lord of the Rings, which has been the foundation for many a series of doorstoppers. Basically, the Dark Lord, thought defeated millennia past, has returned to his Dark Tower in the Dark Land, gathering around him evil hordes. The free lands have only one hope, a small band of lost heirs, princes, and simple village folk gathered together by a mysterious wandering wizard. However, it's not essential to stick so closely to the model. Most core elements of high fantasy can be found in seminal literature from the 19th and early 20th century, but it was Tolkien that codified the genre. Often flanderized as Medieval European Fantasy, though alternatives exist. The core elements of High Fantasy are:
* Setting - A world other than ours. It may have a nominal connection with present day Earth, such as being our remote past or future, but this plays no role in the plot. Mythopoeia is often put into play to define the very metaphysics of the world. Nevertheless it often resembles medieval Europe, and is often peopled by People of Hair Color.
* Scale - Epic. Power politics, wars, the death of nations, gods walking the earth, and the real threat of The End of the World as We Know It. This is what distinguishes High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy.
* Great evil - An enemy which is near enough Evil incarnate or fundamentally abhorrent
* Methods - Victory is not achieved through force of arms, the main feature distinguishing High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy. If Aragorn had killed Sauron in hand-to-hand combat, that would have been Heroic Fantasy. In short, a Supporting Leader or the Reluctant Hero will be offered up instead of the rough-hewn barbarian of, say, Conan or Beowulf. Other common elements include:
* Artifacts of Doom
* Cool Horse
* Cool Sword
* Emerging From the Shadows
* Functional Magic
* Hobbits
* Lost heirs to kings
* Medieval Stasis
* Mordor
* Prophecies
* The Quest The boundary between High Fantasy and Low Fantasy is probably impossible to pin down, but the Deverry and Deryni series are near the borderline, and may straddle it. In both, the protagonists are involved in high-level power politics, with the fate of their nation in the balance, but Deverry has superhuman evils which the Deryni series lacks. Another borderline series would be the violent, low-magic A Song of Ice and Fire, which is on an epic scale, in a pseudo-medieval setting, with the looming menace of the Others, but lacks a Dark Lord (so far). The Discworld novels as a whole are another problematic case; they are generally considered Low Fantasy, but several of them tick all the boxes on the core elements noted above and epic-level plots (like Thief of Time) happen just as frequently as street-level ones (like The Truth). Novels which are unambiguously Low Fantasy include Eisenstein's Sorcerer's Son, about a family quarrel among wizards devoid of wider implications, Barbara Hambly's Stranger At The Wedding, where the threat is confined to a single merchant family, and Maskerade, whose villain, a normal human, has no greater ambition than to run an opera house. Not to be confused with Demythtification, which is a myth or legend reimagined as Historical Fiction. The sci-fi version of High Fantasy is Space Opera, but not vice versa. The quintessential Space Opera doesn't necessarily include a Dark Lord equivalent, but if a Space Opera does, as with Star Wars or Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, it is High Fantasy in space. Contrast Heroic Fantasy, a.k.a. Sword and Sorcery. Heroic or High Fantasy of Chinese cultural origin is known as Wuxia. For other "epic" genres, compare Sword and Sandals and Space Opera. Examples include:
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