While talking with a friend on the way home from writers' group, I had a bit of an epiphany. It may be a thought that has been expressed by other, more intelligent and better read thinkers out there, but it was something that struck a nerve in me. It's pretty simple: High- and epic fantasy in the traditional vein is often propaganda for aristocratic suppression of the lower classes.
Papa Tolkien
It's not unusual to give the title of "Father of modern fantasy" to J.R.R. Tolkien. Like other giants in their fields (Shakespeare, Freud, Marx, and many more), anyone attempting to work in the same genre or discipline has two options: Confront, or go around. There is no ignoring Tolkien if you're writing fantasy. Part of what makes him so fundamental is his tapping into mythic motifs, re-conceptualizing them and modernizing them in such a way that the topography of fantasy has been permanently shifted because of it.
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| Probably laughing at all the imitators that he'd inspired. Source. |
His fundamental Britishness, cultivated during the tail-end of the British Empire, permeates the worldview and forms the concrete off of which his work is ultimately built. The Lord of the Rings is set up as a history of our own Earth, pulling in mythologies from sundry areas. But Tolkien, despite having been born in South Africa, considered himself "a true West Midlander, both by blood and by spirit" (Errigo 46). And that bourgeois middle-class sensibility fuels the subtext of fantasy literature.
The Chosen One
Joseph Campbell's monomythic hypothesis and rendering visible the Hero's Journey are well known, so I'm not going to recite anything significant about them, save the way the Chosen One trope has transferred from the mythic past to the fantastic present. While Frodo is the only one who can destroy the Ring (thanks to help from Samwise, we must always note), the archetype of the Chosen One spirals away from Tolkien almost immediately. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series features Richard, someone untrained in fighting, diplomacy, or magic, yet quickly proficient in all of them before the ending of the first book. Harry Potter, who--if we're to believe Snape--has no real ability and is, at best, mediocre (an impression brought more fully home by the films' treatment of his lack of application to his studies), yet manages to do what Dumbledore never could do. The Iron Fist character from Marvel Comics (and now a Netflix series) is that same idea.
The idea is really well distilled by Saladin Ahmed in this quote from his short story, "Doctor Diablo Goes Through The Motions":
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| Snarky. I like it. From Ahmed's Twitter. |
This is more pointing toward Batman, but the concept of the Chosen One is deeply embedded in our psyches. And I think that it's actually more elite bourgeois reinforcement than anything else. And it's not just because it's almost always a straight white guy who is the Chosen One. (Although that's interesting, too; at least Frodo had a height deficiency. Most dudes who are the Chosen One are utterly not unique, almost requiring magic to make them significant at all.) No, they're qualified because of who they are, not what they can do.
If you look at The Wheel of Time, Rand becomes the Dragon Reborn (and that's about all I know of the series), and he ends up having immense, save-the-day powers merely bestowed by him. Through his birthright (genetics). Through his fate. Through the handwaving of magic. This story is reassuring to the middle- and lower-classes because of the supposedly humble origins of the hero, but it's more about the way in which only those of the most unique, most privileged, most "deserving" continue to occupy the positions of power.
Subversions
Sure, there are ways around this. And there are ways of directly confronting it, like Ahmed does. I'm confident, in fact, that there's more going on here. Why else would stories about the Chosen One continue to resound and reverberate despite having heard them for millennia? I think it's because it's speaking to all levels of society--a mirror for the privileged, an "it could be me!" ubiquity for the oppressed--that we buy into it.In this way, then, fantasy is for the upper-class.
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Errigo, Angie. The Rough Guide to "The Lord of the Rings. 2003.