To Live is to Die- A Spiritual Journey

I think the roots of most fantasy has started with children. As kids, we are allowed to like dragons and fairies, look into our closet and perhaps find Narnia. But as the characters we love mature, we begin to mature as well and with that comes frightening realities. Maybe in the back of the closet there is only hangers and coats, maybe the fireflies outside are not fairies but rather, just fireflies. But does it have to end for them? No, it usually only goes to a darker, more complicated world. There is no longer just elation at the start of an adventure but the tension of a thousand emotions that they are not sure of.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman is a superb example of this. Often I remember reading the beginning of that book and thinking it needless children's literature but then the undertones come through. It's like when I was a child and though I had never been to church, there was the thought of God all around me and my family. I never quite came out and said that I thought the stories of God were just as ridiculous as Jack and the Beanstalk, but it was there. But when I grew older and I saw what it really did to people all in the name of "good", I realized that I was right to stay away. Lyra finds that out very early. There is a group of powerful people in the book that don't think that people should have daemons anymore. And the best way to cut the demon (or brainwash as in our world) is to start with the children. Learn to live without your daemon, desires or need to rebel. Cut out the bad stuff before the dust settles, so to speak.

I think that is the main reason why I really enjoyed The Golden Compass. Nothing excites and makes me feel more at home than a bit of fantasy that is out to give light to an institution that likes to give reason to doing really bad things. I intend to read the rest of the series to fully have the enjoyment of Lyra's journey.

Though I was never truly crazy about the Harry Potter novels, since I read six of them I have to admit they are a good example of this. I enjoyed the novels most when Harry was younger and the plots were a little less needlessly complicated. The Sorcerer's Stone opened to a boy who was living with his aunt and uncle who treated him more like a serf than even a slave. They worked him to the bone and even when his letter from Hogwartz came, tried everything in their power to make sure he was not able to go. Well, normal people can't foil magic so in the end Harry went off to the magic school and began the greatest journey of his life.

But journeys are wrought with pain and danger.

Harry finds out the truth about his family and in that also finds out about an item called the Sorcerer's Stone which grants eternal life. Of course, there has to be somebody after the artifact and of course our main character has to be in the middle of it. It ends up with Professor Quirrell who is a servant of Voldemort, the wizard who kileld Harry's parents and gave him the scar, trying to get the stone and is of course usurped by Harry and his two friends. As the series progresses, the task grow harder and the journey more dangerous, Harry realizing that he has to become a man and an able wizard to destroy the force about to rock the world to its very core. He learns to deal with death and heartbreak, a child still but growing faster than he would have liked.

These fantasy stories about spiritual journeys are books that you read when you are younger and don't fully understand all the extra wonder that is truly packed into them until you are older. I remember when I first began to read Anne Rice which was in about seventh or eighth grade and many of the themes horrified or confused me but now they are taken with grim acceptance. I am sure if I had read The Golden Compass or the Harry Potter stories as a child, I would not have understand the full implications of what was being presented to me until much later.

That is the joy of such novels as those. They offer more than just a fun tale- they give you more to chew on when you sit back.

The Epic Journey

This week, I have to admit, is one of my favorites. The roots for my love of literature did not come from fantasy. However, I discovered fantasy at the beginning of my junior year in high school. I still remember when my best friend recommended R.A. Salvatore’s The Dark Elf Trilogy to me and how skeptical I was to immerse myself in that world. Oh I enjoyed dragons and mythic creatures but I had never quite crossed the threshold into fantasy yet. But after that first chapter when Malice gave birth to Drizzt and Dinin murdered his brother to move higher up on the low male totem pole of drow society, I never went back.

I’ve read three of the series on the book list and those are the series I’m going to talk about as well as mix in thoughts from other books of this genre I have read.

I can’t talk about fantasy and not drone on about Drizzt Do’Urden. He was one of the main characters in the Icewind Dale Trilogy which, interestingly, was supposed to be about Wulfgar. But I am going to talk about the Dark Elf Trilogy instead because it involves more than just the classic epic adventure. It is the actual story of a character's growth and progress in a society that speaks against everything he believes in. The story begins in Menzoberranzan, a large drow city in the underdark of Faerun. There, the outcast dark elves of the world live in beautiful cities lit by fairy fire and their citadels built into the stalagmites and stalactites of the large caverns. Drizzt was born and meant to be sacrificed to their Spider Goddess but when his brother Dinin murdered his eldest brother, Drizzt was no longer a third son and was therefore allowed to continue to live.

What entails is him growing up beneath his sister Vierna, who is his wean mother, and learns through harsh whippings and beatings the place of a male in the world of his people. When he is fifteen, he enters Melee Magthere to learn how to be a true drow warrior. Now, as I am sure most people have yet to read the series, I won't continue as to what happens beyond that, for the plots begin to entangle Drizzt in deadly ways, but I will talk about his struggles. His father, Zaknafein, was never caught in the trick of the drow way of thinking and for that did not want his son to be caught either. Drizzt found out early the harsh lessons of what would become of him if he succumbed to such a fate. But as his integrity began to grow, so did his family's frustration with him and the hate they had for Zaknafein's influence over him.

Eventually his struggle leads him out of the underdark and able to befriend people of other races despite the connotations attached to his skin color. By the end of the Icewind Dale Trilogy, Drizzt is a hero all across the lands of Faerun and probably the only dark elf that people can trust. I just read the latest book, and one of the last to be written about him, and I must say that it is marvelous but even speaking about it would ruin this character's colorful world for whoever wants to engage themselves.

The issue of integrity and acceptance of difference is often a common device for truly good fantasy authors. It turns an epic journey into a real dialogue and struggle between the characters. This is true in Jennifer Roberson's novels of Tiger and Del (which come in 3 beautifully illustrated thick books). Tiger is a sword master in the desert lands who takes contracts for his services with the sword. The world he lives in is patriarchal and he is no exception to this. Del, on the other hand, is a fair skinned and fair haired woman swords mistress of the colder lands. She comes into the Punja (the desert land Tiger lives in) and needs a guide so that she can find her brother who was kidnapped. But the problem is that she's a woman in a man's world now and they see her as little more than a vessel for children. Tiger even thinks that (and has more personal reasons for taking the job from the beautiful woman).

Their struggle continues through all the novels, Tiger eventually accepting her gender and the idea that she could be as good as he is with the blade. But the struggle they have to get to that point is very interesting... and it's a big dominance battle between the two of them.

The last series I read was the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The stories, especially the first two, were very engaging. Most Arthurian tales describe Morgan Le Fay as a terrible sorceress who seduced her brother Arthur to bear a child of his for nefarious purposes. However, these books portray her differently, as a caring and devoted priestess of Avalon. She and Arthur's coupling that produced a son came from a pagan ritual in the story where the new king would consummate with a priestess of Avalon. However, after that night, Morgaine (which is her name in the book) realizes that the man she had copulated with was her half brother (because Morgaine's father was not Uther but her mother's first husband). That is a long secret they keep between themselves.

I think this series really captured me because Morgaine is really not a bad person in it. She becomes the person who both the other characters come to for solutions but then blame her for the uncertain outcome. For example, when Guinevere is unable to conceive a child, she asks Morgaine for a charm to help her fertility and the priestess warns her and says that the outcomes are often different and uncertain. The only product of that charm becomes a threesome between she, Arthur and Lancelot while both men are rather intoxicated. Everyone in the series uses her (Lancelot beds her and then throws her out as if she is trash, Guinevere thinks she is an evil harlot but asks her for favors and so forth) without thinking of the repercussions to Morgaine. I think the only one who throughout the books that stays by her side and defense is Arthur and I was never sure if he stayed simply because of the guilt of having unknowingly bedded her or if he truly cared.

The heroic journey and the epic fantasy tale are all wrought with trials and tribulations that we all share. The difference between our world and theirs is that in Faerun, the Punja or ancient Avalon, everyone can be a hero... or a villain. Some time ago I remember in an interview with R.A. Salvatore, he speculated why fantasy is so popular. In fantasy, everyone can make a difference. Everyone can be a hero.