I used to think of myself as a huge fantasy fan, but nowadays, I have accepted that I probably read more mysteries than I do fantasy. That said, I still enjoy a good fantasy and Maria Sachiko Cecire’s book interested me, given its subtitle: The rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century.

Re-Enchanted deals with the origin and development of medieval fantasies for children (or “high fantasy” or “epic fantasy”, to use other terms). This narrows it to a subset of writers; E Nesbit’s fantasy is ignored and we start with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. In five chapters, Cecire explores:

• J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s Antimodernism
• The role of Oxford’s English faculty in the rise of children’s medievalist fantasies, looking at six writers in particular: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Philip Pullman
• The role of romantic notions of childhood in the rise of medievalist fantasies
• Race and medievalist fantasies
• How fantasy in the early twenty-first century uses medievalisms to explore the “broken promises of Anglo-American childhood for adult audiences”

The first chapter, which talked about how Tolkien and Lewis’s love of the medieval era shaped the English syllabus at Oxford was interesting. One point that Cecire brings up is the significance that these authors placed on the fictionality of medieval legends, as when Tolkien called the dragon in Beowulf “a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even today (despite the critics) you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm.” As Cecire put it, “[f]or Tolkien, old stories contain profound truths that hold relevance across time and practical ramifications that persist into modernity.”

The book does not mention this, but I thought it would have been interesting to also bring Chesterton into the discussion. We know that Chesterton’s book ‘The Everlasting Man’ was greatly influential on Lewis, and given that Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholic, I cannot help but wonder if he had any influence on their views. Chesterton’s chapter “The Ethics of Elfland” comes immediately to mind as espousing very similar sentiments, but throughout his books Orthodoxy and Heretics, I get the feeling that Chesterton treats old practices, including pagan rituals, as pointing towards a deeper truth, the way Tolkien sees them. It would have been interesting if Cecire had any research that looked at this possible connection.

Chapter 2 looked at how the Oxford English program, as set up by Tokien and Lewis (Cecire does not mention any syllabi changes so I assume it’s the same for the time period she examines) and how that influenced a few influential fantasy writers. As someone who doesn’t really follow authors, I’m not sure if the six writers mentioned are the sum total of all Oxford English-educated fantasy writers or if there are more and these were deemed representative. Still, it’s interesting to see that despite the field’s colonialist origins, these writers did try to push the boundaries in their own ways.

One thing in this chapter that confuses me was during the discourse about English’s appeal to marginalised groups such as women, the working class, and people of colour and how that works with the way Tolkien and Lewis saw the study of English. As Cecire put it, “literary canons are ultimately about demarcating and imparting what Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital: social assets that can help people navigate and advance through hierarchies of power” and hence its appeal to marginalised groups. However, Chapter 1 gave me the impression that Tolkien and Lewis’s antimodernist views weren’t extremely dominant, as exemplified by the fact that Cambridge’s English syllabus focused on modern works. So what is this literary canon and was it even clearly defined if the medieval period wasn’t “in fashion”? My question is off-tangent but I did wonder that if a canon was being debated, then how does it help to go to one or the other’s school of thought? What would be the appeal of this and would these marginalised classes be conscious of why they chose Oxford instead of Cambridge and vice-versa?

Another passage that baffled me was in Chapter 5, when Cecire used the tumblr MedievalPOC as an extended example of how people of colour were erased from the Medieval Ages. Cecrire writes that “MedievalPOC’s greatest sin in the eyes of its attackers seems to be the very fact of its existence, as part of a larger phenomenon that challenges whiteness and gender inequities of medievalist fantasy and other popular genres.” This example almost completely ignores that there are legitimate reasons to critique MedievalPOC, including her cited Queen of Sheba image which, as this reddit post on r/badhistory argues, doesn’t mean that just because an artist painted black people, it is proof that the subject was based on a real person the artist knew, especially since the Queen of Sheba was believed to be from South Arabia and people would have wanted to draw what they thought she would have looked like. To write about MedievalPOC uncritically and without mentioning how some of their “evidence” is contested and how some critiques are about the lack of context given, rather than the blog’s existence, did make me wonder if I could fully trust all the other examples given.

Now that I’ve sort of skipped over to Chapter 5, I wanted to add that her chapter on race and fantasy reminded me of this BBC article on Enid Blyton’s popularity in India, which I will just recommend in my review and then leave it aside. As someone who never had “The Moment” where I felt like fantasy didn’t love me back despite being Chinese, I can’t fully understand the exclusionary feeling. However, while reading the chapter on race, I couldn’t help but think that it was perfectly normal for people who studied English medieval works and having a certain idea of how the medieval world looked like would write a mostly-white world. And as Cecire points out, later authors do try to be inclusive in their ways, though looking at how she talked about how JK Rowling got pushback for not being racially diverse in her books and then for not writing about a race that she didn’t belong to well enough, I can also see why authors will shy away from attempting to be more inclusive for fear of getting it wrong.

I have blogged about diversity before, and I obviously love diverse stories. But I don’t think I can get angry at Tolkien and Lewis for writing what they knew and influencing other writers (whether it’s through their syllabus or because their works were so popular). Were they the product of their time? Absolutely. But acting like there’s something wrong that their works continue to enchant despite the lack of racial diversity is rather strange to me – surely their works enchant because the story enchanted us? Perhaps it’s because I just heard about the new “updating” of Roald Dahl’s works, but there was something about the argument about the fantasy “doesn’t love you back” argument that tired me. The only way I can see fantasy “not loving me back” is if I intentionally choose to read only fantasy that features people that does not look like me and I somehow cannot see a part of me reflected in the character (like a hobbit or an elf, which aren’t technically even human?). It may just be me, but I always identified more with the character traits of the characters than how they looked like. If I wanted to read about people that looked like me, I would read Legend of the Condor Heroes but then again, I’m unable to identify as a martial artist due to my lack of skill.

Anyway, I have dithered long enough so it’s time for me to end my review. Re-Enchanted was an interesting book that uncovered the origins of medievalist fantasy children’s literature and gave me a lot of food for thought. I do wish it was less academic in style because I think it would be worth it for fantasy fans to read and think about the issues raised here, but it might be a bit inaccessible for a non-determined non-academic.

Postscript: I somehow only saw all my mistakes after I hit publish, but since I am here, it occurred to me that I’m tired of people assuming that medieval times = white. China, India, and many other non-Western countries existed, and the Silk Road was active so trade was happening. This probably contributed to my general sense of unease with the term “medievalist fantasy” because medievalist fantasy could very well refer to Medieval China, Medieval Egypt, etc. Why do we assume that Medieval = Western Medieval society? I can understand Tolkien and Lewis basing their fantasy on Medieval England/Western cultures because that’s literally their field of study, but modern texts arguing for cultural diversity should at least interrogate why their field has been restricted to native-English Western/Anglo-Saxon text in their definition of the genre.