Why There Is No Jewish Narnia

Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

Needless to say, C. S. Lewis wasn’t Jewish either, though he did marry a Jewish convert to Anglican Christianity (played by Deborah Winger in the film Shadowlands). In fact, when one of her two sons from a previous marriage became increasingly observant, Lewis turned to the great Jewish historian Cecil Roth for advice on finding kosher food and shabbat hospitality for his stepson. But of course no one would suppose the author of Mere Christianity and the Chronicles of Narnia to have been Jewish himself. Tolkien had famously converted his friend and fellow Oxford don from skepticism to Christianity through a series of conversations that led Lewis to the realization that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth.”

Tolkien and Lewis’s gentility would hardly bear comment were it not for the fact that they are not isolated examples in this regard, but only the most well-known figures within an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare. I cannot think of a single major fantasy writer who is Jewish, and there are only a handful of minor ones of any note. To no other field of modern literature have Jews contributed so little.

So why don’t Jews write more fantasy literature? And a different, deeper but related question: why are there no works of modern fantasy that are profoundly Jewish in the way that, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Christian? Why no Jewish Lewises, and why no Jewish Narnias?

My interest in these questions is partly personal. Tolkien and Lewis loomed large in my childhood and, as I read them to my own children, I wonder what they ought to mean to us as Jews. But my thoughts are also stimulated by the recent publication of some apparent exceptions to the rule: from the United States, The Magicians, a fantasy novel for adults by novelist and critic Lev Grossman, and from Israel, Hagar Yanai’s Ha-mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds), the acclaimed second installation of a projected fantasy trilogy, which, when it is finished, will be the first such trilogy in Hebrew.

Asking these questions is hardly frivolous when fantasy, especially children’s fantasy, has today become a multi-billion dollar industry. In addition to the perennial popularity of Lewis and Tolkien, there is of course the publishing tsunami that is J. K. Rowling, as well as the lesser but still remarkable successes of recent fantasy authors such as Philip Pullman and Jonathan Stroud, all magnified immensely by the films based on their books. Fantasy is big business.

Indeed, one wonders why, amidst all the initiatives to solve the crisis in Jewish continuity, no one has yet proposed commissioning a Jewish fantasy series that might plumb the theological depths like Lewis or at least thrill Jewish preteens with tales of Potterish derring-do. Granted, popularity is rarely cooked to order and religious allegory sometimes backfires (a mother once wrote Lewis that her nine year old son had guiltily confessed to loving Aslan the lion more than Jesus). But still, what non-electronic phenomenon has held the attention of more children (and not a few adults) during the last ten years, than Rowling’s tales of Hogwarts? And, as Tom Shippey has shown in Tolkien: Author of the Century, the Lord of the Rings trilogy consistently tops readers’ polls of their most beloved books. Why the apparent aversion to producing such well-received books by the People of the Book?

Some readers may have already expressed surprise at my assertion that Jews do not write fantasy literature. Haven’t modern Jewish writers, from Kafka and Bruno Schulz to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick, written about ghosts, demons, magic, and metamorphoses? But the supernatural does not itself define fantasy literature, which is a more specific genre. It emerged in Victorian England, and its origins are best understood as one of a number of cultural salvage projects that occurred in an era when modern materialism and Darwinism seemed to drive religious faith from the field. Religion’s capacity for wonder found a haven in fantasy literature.

The experience of wonder, of joy and delight on the part of the reader, has long been recognized as one of the defining characteristics of the genre. This wonder is connected with a world, with a place of magic, strangeness, danger, and charm; and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: “The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It’s not Poughkeepsie.”

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience. This goes some way towards explaining the Jewish enthusiasm for science fiction over fantasy (from Asimov to Silverberg to Weinbaum there is no dearth of Jewish science fiction writers). George MacDonald’s Phantastes, thought by some to be the first fantasy novel ever written, begins with a long epigraph from Novalis in which he celebrates the redemptive counter-logic of the fairytale: “A fairytale [Märchen] is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole . . . opposed throughout to the world of rational truth.” Contrast Herzl’s dictum that “If you will it, it is no Märchen.” The impulse in the latter is that of science fiction—the proposal of what might be—and indeed Herzl’s one novel Old-New Land was a utopian fiction about the future State of Israel.

Lev Grossman’s clever new novel The Magicians would seem to bring the Jewish disenchantment with medieval fantasy into the heart of the genre. His characters (who are urban sophisticates but not identifiably Jewish) are underwhelmed by their encounter with the fantasy world, in this case a Narnia clone called “Fillory.” When presented with the predictable quest to become king of this magical land, Grossman’s protagonist, a recent college grad named Quentin, finds it unpalatable and, well, a little unrealistic:

There was hardly any central government, so what would a king actually do? The entire political economy appeared to be frozen in the feudal Middle Ages, but there were elements of Victorian-level technology as well. Who had made that beautiful Victorian carriage? What craftsmen wove the innards of the clockwork mechanisms that were so ubiquitous in Fillory? Or were these things done by magic? Either way, they must keep Fillory in its pre-industrial, agrarian state on purpose, by choice. Like the Amish.

The novel is serious, too, and its goal is to ask the question of whether fantasy and adulthood are mutually exclusive, as the process of becoming an adult means accepting the reality principle rather than “looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life,” as one character puts it. Of course, such an either/or does not do justice to fantasy literature, which, at its best, confronts loss, pain, and frustration. Grossman does not, for instance, turn his satirical sights on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which after all is a world saturated with failure and loss, and his send-up of Narnia’s divinely incarnated lion Aslan falls short of grappling seriously with Lewis’s actual theology.

Moreover, his overeducated, young, single protagonists—like Whit Stillman characters thrown into a Harry Potter novel—can offer only a thin slice of what it means to be an adult. Nevertheless, Grossman’s experiment of placing real, urban, early twenty-somethings in a Hogwarts-and-Narnia-like environment is often dazzling. What he shows is the extent to which medieval magic cannot make our human unhappiness disappear.

Aside from an aversion to medieval nostalgia, there is a further historical reason why 20th-century Jews have not written much fantasy literature, and that is, inevitably, the Holocaust. Its still agonizing historical weight must press prohibitively upon Jewish engagement with the magical and fantastical. It is not that fantasy writers must be innocent naifs. Tolkien and Lewis were deeply influenced in their portrayals of evil by what they knew of 20th-century political barbarity. As Shippey notes, Tolkien especially grapples in his novels more seriously than many supposedly more sophisticated modern literary works with the evils of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, for Jewish writers working after the Holocaust, classical fantasy must have made redemption seem too easy. Certainly, the notion of magic and wizards existing in our own world—as in, for example, the Harry Potter books—becomes all but impossible. (Or at least must raise the question of why Hogwarts, like the FDR administration, never tried to bomb the railroad tracks.)

C. S. Lewis was always clear that he did not set out to write The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as a didactic project. It began, he said, with an image in his head of an umbrella-toting faun standing in the snow. Nonetheless, when he wrote the Narnia books, Lewis drew deeply from his Christian beliefs. In this, he and the many Christian fantasy writers have an advantage over not only the few, largely assimilated Jewish fantasy writers, but even over a deeply knowledgeable and religiously committed Jewish writer who might seek to create a work of fantasy dramatizing Judaism in the way that the various Narnia books dramatize Christianity. The Jewish difficulty with fantasy is not only historical and sociological. It is theological as well, and this has to do with the degree to which Judaism has banished the magical and mythological elements necessary for fantasy.

To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition. Let us take two central examples: the magical world and the idea of evil.

Christianity has a much more vivid memory and even appreciation of the pagan worlds which preceded it than does Judaism. Neither Canaanite nor Egyptian civilizations exercise much fascination for the Jewish imagination, and certainly not as a place of enchantment or escape. In contrast, the Christian imagination found in Lewis and Tolkien often moves, like Beowulf or Sir Gawain, through an older pagan world in which spirits of place and mythical beings are still potent. Nor is this limited to fauns and elves. This anterior world can be dark and frighteningly alien, as Tolkien has Gandalf indicate in The Two Towers. “Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves,” the wizard says, “the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not.” Lewis sounds the same note in Perelandra when, far below the surface of the planet Venus, his protagonist catches an unsettling glimpse of alien creatures, and wonders if there might be “some way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”

Contrast this with the treatment of the great and symbolic monster of ancient Judaism—the sea-creature Leviathan, whose terrifying pagan majesty as the personification of the watery depths the rabbis were determined to strip away:

Raba said in the name of R. Yochanan: The Holy One will make a feast for the righteous out of the flesh of Leviathan, and what is left will be portioned out and made available as merchandise in the marketplaces of Jerusalem. (Bava Batra 75a)

To subject the primal abyss to the forces of commerce is to demythologize with a vengeance—and to do it wholesale at that.

In general, Judaism is much warier about the temptation of dualism than is Christianity, and undercuts the power and significance of any rivals to God, whether Leviathan, angel, or, especially for our purposes, devil. Fantasy literature is often based around conflict with a powerful evil force—Tolkien’s Morgoth and Sauron and Lewis’s Jadis and the White Witch are clear examples—and Christianity offers a far more developed tradition of evil as a supernatural, external, autonomous force than does Judaism, whose Satan (or Samael or Lilith or Ashmedai) are limited in their power and usually rather obedient to God’s wishes. In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes:

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference [between Christianity and Dualism] is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

This is of course the plot, in a nutshell, of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and much of Lewis’s Space Trilogy too—which, for that matter, concludes with the forces of good being led not by a Christian but by the pre-Christian Merlin. Judaism is far more skittish about acknowledging the existence of powers acting apart from God, even in rebellion—which leaves a lot less room for magic.

To be sure, all the elements necessary for classic fantasy—magic, myth, dualism, demonic forces, strange worlds, and so forth—can be found sprinkled here and there in biblical and rabbinic literature. Much of it is developed in Jewish folklore, and theoretically developed and dramatized in the kabbalistic literature, especially the Zohar, which may even draw on the medieval literature Lewis lovingly described in his scholarly work The Allegory of Love.

For the last hundred years, various anthologists have attempted, with greater or lesser ideological urgency, to collect these elements and weave them together into a usable Jewish “mythology.” Hagai Dagan’s Ha-mitologiyah ha-yehudit (The Jewish Mythology, 2003) and Howard Schwartz’s Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (2004) are only the most recent compilations that posit and seek to restore a supposedly repressed or marginalized Jewish mythic vitality, a project that runs back through Buber’s Hasidic collections and Berdichevsky’s emphasis on Judaism’s earthy, pagan side. Yet the very necessity of all these attempts to retrieve and weave together these elements suggests their marginality. While Lewis could remain within orthodox, or at least “mere” Christianity in writing his books, the Jewish writer leaves the realm of the normative in order to develop the mythologies that are the fantasy writer’s natural materials. Put another way, Tolkien and Lewis both referred to Christianity as the sole true fairytale. Jewish thinkers are far less likely to consider this praise.

The absence of fantasy writing in Israel is, if anything, even starker than in the Diaspora. The fantasy genre has always been disparaged in modern Hebrew literary culture as being a frivolous distraction from the serious political and artistic missions facing the Jewish people and its writers. Of course, Israelis are just as avid consumers of fantasy literature, film, and games as any other nation. Israelis have flocked to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, their bookstores are filled with Hebrew translations of writers from Tolkien and Rowling to Robert Jordan and Orson Scott Card, and their children play Hebrew editions of Dungeons & Dragons games. And yet none of this production is local. As one writer lamented, in an article in Ha’aretz in 2002 on the absence of Israeli fantasy literature:

Faeries do not dance underneath our swaying palm trees, there are no fire-breathing dragons in the cave of Machpelah, and Harry Potter doesn’t live in Kfar Saba. But why? Why couldn’t Harry Potter have been written in Israel? Why is local fantasy literature so weak, so that it almost seems that a book like that couldn’t be published in the state of the Jews?

As it happens, though, the author of these lines, Hagar Yanai, has recently attempted to fill this gap, along with a few other Israeli writers who have in the last few years begun to produce fantasy books—not magical realism or surrealism or postmodernism, but serious fantasy. Yanai’s Ha-livyatan mi-Bavel (The Leviathan of Babylon) was published in 2006, followed by Ha-mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds) in 2008, with a third scheduled to follow. Both of these books won Israel’s local Geffen awards for best original Hebrew fantasy or science fiction novel of the year (a prize that, significantly, has existed for only a few years). But the enthusiasm has been mainstream as well. Yanai was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize, along with more established writers such as Ariel Hirschfeld and Haim Sabato, “for the way in which [she] introduces mythological and fantastical elements from various eras and strata of Jewish tradition into a contemporary Hebrew work … Yanai has ‘resurrected’ a neglected stream in Hebrew literature.”

This is a questionable resurrection, for Yanai draws only superficially on the sort of materials that Schwartz and Dagan have lovingly anthologized—despite pulling an epigraph from the latter. Nor does her work really show the influence of authors like Tolkien, Lewis and LeGuin. If anything, the overriding ambience is that of Hollywood action films, from James Bond to The Matrix and Pirates of the Carribbean. Yanai loves spectacle, chase scenes, prison breaks, explosions and slapstick, all of which she does well. Her literary influences are drawn mainly from contemporary fantasy (Philip Pullman, Rowling, Stroud) and like these authors, Yanai’s fantasy world is essentially modern, mundane, and technocratic, with magical forces and creatures substituting our fossil fuels and silicon chips. There is little true enchantment here, just crystal balls instead of iPhones (electrically charged demons power the generators in Yanai’s Babylon).

The plot of Yanai’s trilogy-in-the-making centers on two Israeli teenagers, Ella and Yonatan, who travel via an inter-dimensional portal from Tel Aviv to a world ruled by the oppressive (and entirely unbiblical) Babylonian Empire. In this dystopian world, depression is a crime. Ella and Yonatan become separated, Ella joining a group of anti-imperial rebels led by the dashing young warrior, Hillel Ben-Shachar, while Yonatan befriends a demon with a penchant for scatological humor and falls into the clutches of the imperial priesthood. In the second book, they discover that their own parents have long been deeply embroiled in the trans-dimension machinations of Babylon, and that the fate of multiple worlds, including our own, is at stake.

Yanai’s decision to set her fantasy world in an alternative Near East is intriguing. Indeed, probably the most fantastic element in these novels is the portrayal of a Middle East throughout which two young Israelis can travel more or less freely. No matter what fearsome monsters, demonic armies, and diabolical villains they have to contend with, Yonatan and Ella clearly come out better than if they were trekking through the Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia of our own world on Israeli passports.

Yet these books are not really very interested in the various Near Eastern mythologies they draw from. Yanai does not (at least in the first two-thirds of the series) explore, say, the implications of a Middle East without monotheism, or what it might be like to live in a world in which the transmigration of souls is a known reality. Instead, Yanai’s central borrowing—the mythic battle between the great god Marduk and Leviathan’s Sumerian cousin Tiamat, embodiment of the primal abyss—is used to conduct what seems to be a rather odd polemic against our contemporary psychotherapeutic culture. Babylon is a civilization that seeks obsessively to police, banish, or destroy the powerful, dark, and unpredictable currents in the human soul, represented by Tiamat and the watery abyss. The evil priests of Babylon are described as “soul-doctors,” who use “soul-scopes” to inspect the inner recesses of their patients’ psyches, a process that leaves their patients feeling horribly violated and exposed. The population is kept docile with injections of psychotropic drugs, and those who lapse into depression are sent to therapeutic concentration camps. Finally, it emerges that the Babylonian priesthood is in cahoots with an international drug conglomerate. (Yanai seems to feel about Prozac the way that Philip Pullman feels about Christianity.)

Writing for teenagers, it is perhaps not surprising that Yanai’s heroes are heroic nonconformists. Yet their deepest struggles are expressed in the language of contemporary self-actualization. “Before I can return with you to any human realm and be who you expect me to be,” Yonatan tells the empress with whom he has fallen in love, “I have to deal with who I am.” The empress meanwhile learns that, to fulfill her own magical quest, she must discover that “the abyss is within you … you must jump into the depths within yourself.” Yanai’s former involvement in Israel’s New Age culture—she wrote for a prominent New Age magazine, spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, and edited a volume of literary erotica by women before turning to fantasy—makes itself felt here. In fact, Yanai writes particularly well when she touches the raw nerve of her teenaged characters’ erotic and sexual insecurities. But, as is often the case with such adolescent quests for personal authenticity, the overall process is less than interesting to follow. Her characters display the conventional anti-conventionality of most Disney movies, with girls looking for their princes and boys for their princesses, and everyone singing about how they need to be who they are. I would hesitate to give this book to a teenager, not because there are things in it they shouldn’t know, but because there is little in it that they don’t already.

Yanai’s Babylon trilogy, when it is complete, will sit on a very short shelf of recent Israeli fantasy books, the most interesting of which is poet and critic Shimon Adaf’s Ha-lev ha-kavur (A Mere Mortal). The novel is particularly intriguing because Adaf makes an attempt to base his lyrical and chillingly creepy tale on biblical and midrashic sources. His villain is Amraphel, the King of Shinar, whom Abraham defeated in the Book of Genesis, and who has returned to stalk a southern development town in Israel based on Adaf’s native Sderot. This attempt is disappointingly truncated, though, less an exploration of Jewish sources than, like Yanai’s Babylon, a springboard for concerns purely his own.

We will probably see more Jewish writers producing fantasy, as younger Israeli writers seek to follow global trends, and as younger American Jewish writers shed older instinctive hesitations about the genre. But we will have to wait some time, if not forever, for a genuinely Jewish fantasy work to appear. It may not be impossible, but it will take some audacity and may require more literary stimulation than any anthology of forgotten Jewish mythic materials, such as Schwartz and Dagan have given us, is likely to provide. It would require at least a Jewish education equivalent to the philological and medievalist backgrounds of the Oxford and Cambridge dons Tolkien and Lewis. Perhaps there is some Jewish Studies professor or yeshiva student even now scribbling in a notebook.

I would describe what I’ve read of Ray Bradbury’s as science fiction, rather than fantasy.

It was a loaded question. I think the "blurring" of the 2 genres you mentioned is a matter of readers/viewers/marketers doing the blurring, not the authors.

Bradbury considers himself a fantasy writer: . "I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power."

I've been a fan of both forms for 50 years and I think most of the writers would agree with Bradbury's definition. Marketers like the Sy Fy Channel have twisted definitons beyond logic. To them horror, corny science fantasy, gory slasher junk etc. all qualify as "Sci Fi" (sorry, it's been dumbed-down to Sy Fy).

As to the matter of Jewishness, I agree with you. But as I read it the author seemed to be referring to fiction from a mainly religious perspective, i.e. Lewis and Tolkien. It's an interesting question. Ellison's Jewish but he's sure as hell not very religiously-oriented.

Yes, absolutely. That is very poignant.

The 20th century is catastrophic, and you have pinpointed one of the major reasons why. You could also point to the generation of Allied fathers who came home and abandoned their kids, who became the moves and shakers of the 60s and 70s. Now their kids are pretty messed up, as well. And many of those grandkids of WWII vets are much more conservative than their parents. Perhaps the process of healing has begun. But this is a thing that can’t be turned around even in several generations.

I would suggest a further distinction the author of this piece didn’t make very clear. When he refers to to “fantasy” I believe he is referring primarily to “epic fantasy,” a very specific form of which Lord of the Rings is the classic example.

Science fiction, to the extent the term means anything, refers to attempts to extrapolate into the future the consequences of potential technology based on what we presently know of science.

Fantasy as such is a much broader grouping than either epic fantasy or science fiction and is roughly the same as “speculative fiction,” which asks the questions “what if?” with absolutely no limits.

Anything goes in fantasy as such, whereas science fiction and epic fantasy are both inherently more limited. A big problem is blurring of these categories. I have no problem with “science fiction” that violates our present scientific knowledge, for instance, as long as it is at least possible that the story is set in another universe with different laws of nature. When it is clearly set in the future of our universe, but science is just ignored, it doesn’t work for me.

Fantasy doesn’t have that problem, as it is usually clearly set in another universe where our laws of nature don’t apply.

“I don’t remember reading anything of Joel Rosenberg’s.”

His SF includes “Not For Glory” and “Hero” — about the Metzadan Mercenary Corps, military SF. His fantasies include the Paladins series and the Guardians of the Flame series (although the latter series are more fantasy parodies - like Mike Resnick’s “Stalking the . . .” books).

Jews have plenty of fantasy fiction, largely based on the Bible, Talmudic Stories, and Kabbalah. We forget just how much literature is extrapolation of biblical stories. (Heck, I would argue that 1/2 of Rabbinic exegesis is fantasy playing around with numeroulogy and non-canonical source material. There are also dozens of non-Canonical biblical books known as the Apocrypha. ) Although we have been in exile for centuries, we have a tribal lore. We have Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Deborah, Saul, and David.

European Christians use biblical allegory mixed with local history or pre-christian themes to create a sense of rootedness. This is largely necessary since Christianity is not a tribal religion for them, but a universal religion that they adopted.

As a member of the Khazar-Fiction email list, I have read quite 3 historical fantasy novels based on this. As non-Jews whose nobility accepted Judaism while still having a society and political cultural based on the the Tengri religious Khagans inherited from the Gok Turkut, Khazaria is a perfect setting for historical fantasy.One could argue that the Yehuda haLevi's Kuzari served this purpose, but stripped away from all of its fantasy elements with a straight exposition on Jewish survival and pride in the diaspora. There have been a few good (more bad) novels on this. Major publishers just don't pick it up.

Actually, I don’t read either any more. I find SciFi too nihilistic altogether and fantasy too predictable (and violent).

For what it’s worth, I am still plowing through WoT and just want to see the series concluded. I feel over-invested but close to the finish. I’d like to get closure (at low expense, naturally) A good editor would have pared the equivalent of five WoT-sized books from the series. There was too much repetitive internal monologue along the way (and books seven and eight were extensive diversions that have done damage to several characters and probably were what turned a lot of people against the series altogether), which should have been pared. Part of this was the original creeping temptation to allow readers into the series in later books by lamely recapping what had already happened. The effect was to produce repeated stereotypic descriptions and confine major characters in the narrative boxes they started in. When the narrative started to grow out of the original dimensions, the characters failed to grow as well, requiring a lot of ‘wasn’t it lucky THAT bad thing didn’t happen’.

Yeah, I’m pretty tired of it too.

Then again, it only took four books for Martin to repulse me and none of them were anywhere as long as Jordan’s.

"Tolkien was very clear that he was happy for readers to find deeper meanings in his works."

Look at what you wrote . . ."for readers to find deeper meanings in his works."

Finding some meaning in what you read, does not mean that the author put it there for you to find, it merely means that you are projecting your own beliefs on what was written.

To quote Tolkien:

"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches; but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, 'Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted It's souces are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or in its sequals". . .

". . . Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes of views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with it varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author . . ."

The only meaning beyond the storyline "resides in the freedom of the reader," not in the authors work. What was being discussed was the presence of any intentional deeper meaning, not the personal baggage of a reader.

I can’t find it but, from what I recall.

The Cardinal of NY appeared on the Jack Benny/Ed Sullivan/Red Skelton (I don’t remember who) program and just killed with the jokes.

The host quipped who writes your jokes, and the Cardinal replied, “Well like you I’ve use a bunch of Jewish Writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke & John”

Finding some meaning in what you read, does not mean that the author put it there for you to find, it merely means that you are projecting your own beliefs on what was written.

Disagree.

What you are saying goes well beyond your Tolkien quote, with which I am quite familiar.

You seem to be saying that any deeper meaning doesn't really exist, except in the imagination of the reader.

What Tolkien is saying is that different readers will find different deeper meanings, which were already there, often without the full concious intent of the author.

That is one of the main things I believe sets great art off from hackery. Great art lasts because there are layers of meaning that are continually being discovered. Not invented, but discovered.

This is not the tyranny of the author, forcing the reader to buy into his allegory, nor is it the invention of the reader, seeing what he wants to see. It is a collaboration between the two that becomes more than the sum of the parts.

IMHO, that is.

No sense in going overboard with this. We will simply disagree, but:

"You seem to be saying that any deeper meaning doesn't really exist, except in the imagination of the reader."

That is precisely what I am saying. When Tolkien says:

"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none."

I take him at his word and assume that there is no underlying hidden message. If the author is being truthful, then you are claiming that you can read his subconcious mind for meaning that he didn't even know was there.

Perhaps you should read tea-leaves for a living. :)

What he is saying-in my interpretation-is that he welcomes any reader to find deeper meanings, but he didn’t put them there.

Words only have meaning if they connect with something inside of you (the reader) therefore they are a manifestation of your own feelings, thoughts, and experiences. They are, in effect, a projection of yourself.

The author has already defined his intent and his meaning.

I do not believe that you can divine the deeper psyche of the author from a story he puts on a page, what you can see is your own reflection.

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