Earlier this evening, I caught the second episode of BBC4’s ‘Worlds Of Fantasy‘. I have to say, it’s a fascinating, almost moving, documentary series charting the past and present of fantasy fiction from a sober, critical point of view. In a way, I’m just a relieved to have found a programme willing to seriously analyse the careers of, say, Philip Pullman and Tolkien, without feeling the need to treat their most popular works as un-adult or kids-fare. I guess it’s an honest approach I find almost irresistible.

One of the major themes of this second episode was looking at how reality, and real-life experience, often so tightly under-pins the unreal landscape of the genre. A regularly stated, serious criticism of fantasy literature (or, indeed, any kind of fantasy media) is that it’s merely a vehicle for the reader’s own desire for escapism. Taken at face value, that may be the case, but so much of what I’ve read is multi-layered, at once foreign and enticing, yet echoing deeply-seeded, utterly human feeling.

A great example explained in the documentary is how Frodo’s journey across the corpse-infested, stinking swamps on his way to evil Mordor reflects horribly on Tolkien’s own sad experiences in World War I, during which he served on the front-line through out the infamous Battle of the Somme, where more than one million people were killed or wounded in just four months of bloody, muddy combat. Some people might have documented those memories in the form of an autobiography, but, as one critic explains it, fantasy writers tend to explore their own lives in an indirect, side-ways fashion. I think capturing these feelings in such a way, removing them from a specific time, context or place, creates a resonance or feeling that echoes forever, in a way that we’re no longer viewing the situation as something in the past, but instead, as a relevant, timeless human emotion.