I love fantasy books. I love the sense of adventure and possibility that I feel from reading a good fantasy story. I love how the best ones transport me to worlds untainted and unpolluted by modernity, rich in their own history and culture. I especially love it when these worlds are populated with characters who I feel could be my friends, their stories told in such a way that I almost feel I know them better than I know myself.
Every literary genre is defined by the primary emotions they are supposed to evoke in the reader. Thus, romance is all about the emotions associated with love and longing, horror is all about the emotions associated with fear and dread, mystery is all about the emotions associated with discovery and making sense of the world, etc.
Fantasy and science fiction are the two major divisions of the speculative fiction genre. The way I like to think of them is like two sides of the same coin. Both are defined by the sense of wonder they evoke, but where science fiction tends to be oriented toward the future, fantasy is oriented toward the past.
To me, this is the biggest thing that distinguishes fantasy from science fiction: the deep, almost nostalgic yearning for a long-forgotten past. This goes much deeper than superficial aesthetic details, such as the idea that if your story has trees, it must be fantasy, but if it has rivets it must be science fiction. Trees hearken back to a world before the modern era, when we lived much closer to the rhythms of nature. Rivets, on the other hand, hearken to a world utterly reshaped by human technology and engineering.
But if this is the case—if fantasy is all about a nostalgic yearning for a lost, pre-modern age—why does so much fantasy take place in a world that is not our own? Yes, if you read the lore for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Robert E. Howard’s Hyborean age, you eventually learn that these worlds are supposed to be far ancient versions of Earth—but no one thinks or cares about that when they’re reading the stories. And these days, most fantasy worlds don’t even try to pretend that they have a connection with Earth. So how can they possibly channel that sense of nostalgic yearning?
Through archetypes.
“Type” is another word for symbol, and “arch-” is a prefix meaning the chief or principle thing. Thus, an “archetype” is the chief or principal symbol of a thing, such that every real-world example of that thing is a manifestation of its archetype.
It’s kind of like the inverse of a stereotype. When we stereotype someone, we mentally categorize them based on superficial characteristics like race, gender, age, etc, purposefully ignoring the things that make them different from other people. We start broad and go narrow. Archetypes, on the other hand, start narrow and go broad. The archetype of a hero slaying a dragon can be taken to represent anything from confronting childhood trauma to overcoming a deep-seated addiction—or something completely different.
The dragon starts off small, hatching from an egg, but if it is not slain when it is young and non-threatening, it grows into something huge and fearsome and almost impossible to slay. It also guards a horde of treasure, which can only be won by slaying it. Does that remind you of anything in your own life? If the story is told well enough, it should, because of how it points to certain universal truths. A problem that isn’t solved when it is small will often grow until it is almost impossible to solve. The greatest reward can often only be gained by doing the most difficult thing.
The best fantasy books use archetypes to evoke that sense of wonder that defines the genre—and because these archetypes are so timeless, they often evoke a sense of familiarity and nostalgia. In the best books, they also imbue the surface-level story with deep layers of meaning, making it a rewarding experience to come back and reread it again.
I love stories that are full of meaning. But in order to be truly meaningful, a book shouldn’t set out with a specific message in mind. Rather, the best books use well-constructed archetypes to resonate with the ideas that the author wants to explore—and often, the readers will draw conclusions that the author never consciously intended. To me, this is the hallmark of the best kind of fantasy book—and of archetypes done well.
