on Jews and Fantasy Literature
I've left this site fallow for a while, as I've been focusing on my poetry and divorce movies and--oh, yeah--my day job. I've got a few fantasy items in the hopper, but let me get back to things now with some were-owls. I recently finished Tad Williams’s epic fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, first … Continue reading More Were-Owls in Fantasy
Anyone who played Dungeons & Dragons during its golden age from the late 1970s into the mid-1980s will know that the most nefarious villain was not, as television’s Stranger Things now has it, Demogorgon, but another demon lord. In a widely played (or at least owned) series of adventures published during this period, players were … Continue reading The Jewish and not-so-Jewish Monsters of Classic Dungeons & Dragons
Lilith takes something of a hiatus from fiction for several decades after her appearance in Charles Williams’s Descent Into Hell. (See previous post.) There are exceptions, such as “Fruit of Knowledge,” a 1940 story by C. L. Moore first published in the pulp magazine Unknown.[1] Moore retells the biblical story of Eden and the Fall, … Continue reading Lilith Now
In my last post, I remarked on how unsettling it is to find that the societal warnings and critiques posed in fantasy guise by George MacDonald in his 1895 novel Lilith have in our own day taken on real-life forms that might make any demon proud. Charles Williams’s metaphysical horror novel Descent Into Hell (1937) … Continue reading The Lilith of Charles Williams
1. In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we learn that the White Witch is a descendant of "Adam’s first wife . . . Lilith.” The certain influence on Lewis in this suggestive genealogy was his beloved George MacDonald, whose novel Lilith first appeared in 1895 and was part of a … Continue reading The Lilith of George MacDonald
It should not be surprising that Lilith, the demoness from medieval Jewish folklore and mysticism and with earlier roots in rabbinic texts and near eastern mythology, would come into wide circulation in nineteenth century European art and literature. Her oriental ambience, occult cachet, and symbolic relevance for modernity’s anxious grappling with the nature and shifting … Continue reading Anatole France, “La Fille de Lilith” (1889)
Two Jewish fantasy novels, one set in an Eastern Europe of demons and death, the other a time travel romance in which a Tel Aviv hipster falls for a 13th-century Crusader. Read the full review at the Jewish Review of Books.
investigations and fantasies 