High Fantasy - Genre Overview

Genre Overview

High fantasy is defined as fantasy fiction set in an alternative, entirely fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the real, or "primary" world. The secondary world is usually internally consistent but its rules differ in some way(s) from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set in the primary, or "real" world, or a rational and familiar fictional world, with the inclusion of magical elements.

Nikki Gamble distinguishes three subtypes of high fantasy:

• A setting in which the primary world does not exist (e.g. The Lord of The Rings, The Prydain Chronicles, The Inheritance Cycle, The Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Name of the Wind)
• The secondary/parallel world(s) is entered through a portal from the primary world (e.g. Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials, Xanth, The Dark Tower, and Avantasia)
• A distinct world-within-a-world as part of the primary world (e.g. Gods of Pegana, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter and The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

Where the primary world does not exist, detailed maps, geography and history of the fictional world will often be provided. The secondary world often is based on, or symbolically represents, the primary world. The Oxford of Phillip Pullman's Northern Lights is similar, a world that is "both familiar and strange". Pullman's preface to that book explains that the setting is "a universe like ours, but different in many ways".

In the case of a world-within-a-world, the secondary world co-exists with the primary world; however, the mundane inhabitants of the primary world are unaware of the secondary world.

Gamble suggests that The Lord of the Rings takes place in a setting where the primary world does not exist. This was something Tolkien often denied; rather, he suggested that Middle-earth was the primary world, but in the past. This was not always clear, however, as a few of his early letters described that while his stories take place on earth, elements of the stories as a kind of "...secondary or sub-creational reality" or "Secondary belief" in replies to letters, or "at a different stage of imagination...". In most cases he is adamant that the events ("history") occurred on primary earth, and not another planet.