In Fantasy Novels, Should Metaphors Only Be Things That Exist Within the Fantasy World?
The work of J.R.R. Tolkien asks an obscure question, but I think it opens up a fascinating discussion.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, the third book in J.R.R. Tolkien’s landmark The Lord of the Rings fantasy series, the wizard Gandalf attends Bilbo’s birthday party and magically creates fireworks in the shapes of creatures, including a dragon, which passes through the sky “like an express train.”
And toward the end of Tolkien’s “prequel” book, The Hobbit, the half-bear half-man being known as Beorn roars like “drums and guns.”
Hold on! Are these the right metaphors? Middle Earth, where these books are set, is a pre-industrial society. They didn’t have trains and guns, did they?
Meanwhile, in The Power That Preserves, the third book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant fantasy series (and some of my favorite books of all time), an evil horde attacks the ancient castle of Revelstone with a massive catapult that hurls an evil black concoction at the keep — an amount of liquid “as large as a Stonedowner’s home.”
This metaphor makes more sense. After all, a “Stonedowner” is a kind of craftsman who resides in the world of Revelstone, and since they work with stone, their houses would be very large indeed.
What makes an acceptable metaphor in a fantasy novel anyway? And what kind of other references are okay? If a book exists in a medieval setting, can the author ever mention technology, even in passing?
Sure, it’s an obscure question, but I think it opens up a fascinating discussion. What kind of references are okay in any given novel? Must everything cited exist in the world of that novel?
Like almost everything in fiction, it all depends.
Good stories all have an internal logic and consistency (even if that internal logic might be illogical and inconsistent for the purposes of the story).
When it comes to metaphors and references, the most important question is: who is the story’s narrator? And — to a lesser degree — who is he or she telling the story to?
Novels are stories, and all stories are told from a particular “point of view” — although that point of view might be omniscient, like God, knowing everything there is to know about the story, even what every character is thinking or feeling at any given time. This point of view is technically called “third person omniscient.”
The perspective of most stories, especially more modern ones, is much more limited.
In stories told in “first person” — where “I” am telling a story that happened to “me” — the reader only knows the thoughts and feelings of the narrator (and in the case of an “unreliable narrator,” even that information may be inaccurate or incomplete). What the other characters are thinking or feeling is entirely speculation on the part of that “first person” narrator.
But these days, even most “third person” novels are usually fairly limited: the narrator often only knows the thoughts and feelings of one character at a time — though that perspective often shifts from chapter to chapter or section to section.
All novels also have a specific audience. Sometimes it’s just “any human who wants to experience this story.” But sometimes the audience is more specific, and the story is written in the form of a letter or other communication to a specific person or people — like how Dracula by Bram Stoker is written as a series of letters and diary entries, and how The Martian is written as a series of log entries by the astronaut main character.
A novel’s narrator and its perceived audience combine to determine what references make sense in a fantasy novel.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, the perspective is a bit confusing. The books are written in a somewhat limited third person, but the conceit is that the events contained therein actually happened in some pre-historical age, and they were written down by the protagonists of the books — Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam — in the form of memoirs. But they were written in an ancient language which was “translated” by the author, J.R.R. Tolkien, for a modern audience.
In other words, in the world of these novels, the references to “trains” and “guns” in these ancient stories were added by translator-Tolkien to make things make a bit more sense for us, the reader.
Meanwhile, in The Power That Preserves, we witness that attack on Revelstone from the point of view of a secondary character, Lord Morham, who is a resident of the land in which the castle exists. Since we’re seeing things from his point of view, it makes sense that he sees that massive amount of the ugly black concoction in a way that he understands.
If we had witnessed the attack from the point of view of the book’s main protagonist, Thomas Covenant, he’s from the “real” world, transported to the world of Lord Morham by magic. As such, he might have seen that black liquid hurling at Revelstone like, well, an express train.
Every successful story, fantasy or not, has a similar internal consistency and logic.
This seems like a good time to mention something called the “objective correlative,” which is a term popularized by the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot to describe the idea that great authors don’t merely “tell” the reader what a character is feeling and experiencing. No, they literally show the reader by writing the character’s surroundings — his or her entire world! — in a way that is consistent with the character’s emotions and characteristics. In doing so, they make the reader feel the same emotion.
If a character is depressed, his or her entire world might be described as flat and colorless. The metaphors, therefore, might be dark and gloomy.
In The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin, the second book in another classic fantasy series, The Earthsea Cycle, we open on images of silence and darkness — “One high horn shrilled and ceased” and “great webs and blackness” — as a frightened young girl, Tenar, is taken from her parents and declared to be the reincarnation of a high priestess, doomed to spend her life serving a cruel religion overseeing an ancient complex of tombs and dictating specific methods of torture for those brought for punishment.
But by the end of the novel, after the wizard Ged gets Tenar to realize the folly of her dark service and helps engineer her freedom, she is surrounded by sounds and images of openness — even if it’s a bittersweet kind of freedom:
A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had [before becoming a priestess]. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free…. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
In other words, the entire plot of the novel — and virtually every metaphor in the book — illustrates the emotional state of the main character. And the description of the novel is used to provoke a similar emotional reaction in the reader.
There aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules in writing fiction, but this might be one: the point of description is never just to describe something the way we, the author, see it. No, the point is to describe it in a way that’s consistent with the narrator, character, and audience — and that creates an emotional response inside the reader.
That’s why we writers do everything — even create the different metaphors in our fantasy novels.
Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.