![]() ![]() Essentially, if Aragorn had killed Sauron in hand-to-hand combat, that would have been Heroic Fantasy, and if Gondor had beaten Mordor by having more allies, better strategy, innovative tactics and a better-trained army, that would have been Low Fantasy. Victory will also be complete and with few loose ends or sour notes this is shared with Heroic Fantasy, but Low Fantasy tends to favor more ambiguous and incomplete endings. It is also not achieved through wide-ranging strategy, logistics and political and military conflicts, which is generally the case in Low Fantasy. Methods: Victory is not achieved through force of arms, the main feature distinguishing High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy.This is in contrast to Low Fantasy, which tends to favor human-versus-human conflicts, and Heroic Fantasy, which favors pitting the heroes against successions of mostly unconnected human and bestial foes. Their victory would be, in no ambiguous terms, a terrible thing for everybody else. Great evil: An enemy which is near enough Evil incarnate or fundamentally abhorrent, whose machinations and plots serve as the main push of the conflict.Even in cases where moral ambiguity or flexibility exists, there's still a fairly clear divide between good and evil - generally speaking, antiheroes and -villains still tend to fall mainly one one side or the other - as opposed to the Grey-and-Gray Morality more common in Low Fantasy. Morality: The good guys are purely good and the bad guys are evil, with fairly minimal overlap.This is what distinguishes High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy. Power politics, wars, the birth and death of nations, gods walking the earth, and the real threat of The End of the World as We Know It. Scale: Epic scale in terms of geographic and historical impact.While this isn't a strictly a crucial element - you can and do get High Fantasy works with subdued or minimal magic and Low Fantasy works with quite a lot of it - High Fantasy is distinguished by typically portraying its fantastical elements in a more positive and glamorous light, quite unlike the bestial monsters, shifty sorcerers and Power at a Price style of magic found in Low and Heroic Fantasy. Magic: Magic, wizards and fantastical elements (dragons, spells, etc) are often to the fore in High Fantasy, and tend to play major roles in stories, worldbuilding and conflicts.Nevertheless it often resembles medieval Europe, and is often peopled by People of Hair Color. Mythopoeia is often put into play to define the very metaphysics of the world. It may have a nominal connection with present day Earth, such as being our remote past or future (Tolkien specified that Middle-earth is our Earth), but this plays no role in the plot. Many core elements of this type of high fantasy can be found in seminal literature from the 19th and early 20th century, but it was Tolkien that codified the genre, although he called The Lord of the Rings "heroic romance". Tolkien scholar Thomas Shippey talks about this in a chapter of his book J.R.R. And it's still not essential to stick so closely to the model, but many of today's fantasy writers still use many or most of the above elements, perhaps feeling that you don't mess with what works. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros or The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock. Heroic Fantasy, with some works kind of in the middle, like E.R. Also, there's sometimes a very fine line between what is defined as High Fantasy vs. Some more modern works usually classed as High Fantasy, like Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist and Ursula K. Lovecraft in his Dreamland cycle have such a storyline. William Morris ' Well at the World's End doesn't have this, nor do the dreamers' tales of Lord Dunsany, or his The King of Elfland's Daughter, which are very High Fantasy indeed. In former times, High Fantasy did not follow this formula. They will have to brave a long quest for the MacGuffin through strange, dangerous lands inhabited by monsters and peculiar and hostile peoples in order to save the world. The free lands have only one hope, a small band of lost heirs, princes, and simple village folk gathered together by a mysterious wandering grey-bearded wizard. The setting of the stereotypical High (or "epic") Fantasy, a collection of tropes, often boiled down from The Lord of the Rings (and Tolkien's Legendarium in general) which has been the foundation for many a series of doorstoppers.īasically, the Dark Lord, thought defeated millennia past, has returned to his Dark Tower in the Dark Land, gathering around him Dark Forces. ![]()
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