on Jews and Fantasy Literature
Three years ago, the Jewish Review of Books published my essay on the work of fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay. I discussed Kay’s early wrestling with the anxious influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, the intriguing ways Kay’s Jewish identity is both revealed and hidden in his novels, and the mode of historical fantasy he … Continue reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s All the Seas of the World
JOAN AIKEN'S THE WHISPERING MOUNTAIN British fantasy’s ruminations on the exile and restoration of the Jews reach a whimsical, latter-day conclusion in Joan Aiken’s children’s novel The Whispering Mountain (1968). Set in a fantastical nineteenth-century Wales, the book is a prequel to Aiken’s series that takes place in an alternate-history Britain in which the Hanovers … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 4
At least one major Victorian fantasy writer, George MacDonald, was at times quite warm toward the Jews, and a landmark of British literary philosemitism, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Nevertheless, among the writers of late Victorian fantastic fiction, negative stereotypes of Jews outweigh positive representations, a trend that continued into the twentieth-century. … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 3: From Late Victorian Fantasy to Tolkien
In my last post I talked about Almamen, the protagonist of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1838 historical romance Leila, or the Seige of Granada. A fiery Jewish nationalist born in the wrong era, Almamen is a gifted political strategist, driven and charismatic. One suspects that there a bit of Benjamin Disraeli in Almamen. The future prime minister … Continue reading Disraeli’s Jewish Fantasy Novel (British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 2)
Tolkien’s dwarves, as has often been pointed out, are based on the Jews. While the band that shows up at the home of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit has roots in northern European sources such as the Poetic Edda, Tolkien also gives Thorin Oakenshield and company a story of exile and a powerful yearning to … Continue reading British Fantasy and the Jewish Question, pt. 1
investigations and fantasies 