This article could not have been written without the faithful and meaningful contributions of Sarah Palma.

Let us begin by saying this; you’ll never find any commentary on income tax code in The Lord of the Rings. Likewise, you won’t learn much about the debate surrounding climate change in Game of Thrones.

Nonetheless, we feel strongly that the fantasy genre; however underutilized by the academic literary canon, has a lot to tell us about culture and political life. Fantasy can impart upon us what might be called a “useful approach” to our imagined future.

Just to cement the futility of looking for specific political messages in these fantastical works, we turn to the authors themselves… In the introduction to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien had this to say about the meaning of his works:

“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 its 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.”

Clearly, Tolkien was thoroughly suspicious of directly applying static meaning to any particular aspect of his work. In this way, we cannot neatly say that the Shire was clearly meant to be a Distributist paradise or that the Haradrim are a clear reference to the Bedouins who fought with T.E. Lawrence.

This is a sentiment that is echoed by R.R. Martin (perhaps less elegantly) in an interview with Collider:

“I agree with Tolkien, in the sense that you really don’t want to inject any sort of allegory and satire or contemporary political issues into your medieval fantasy. But, nonetheless, there are certain universal themes. There are certain things that I’m trying to say about politics, governance, the use of power, kings, and all of that stuff.”

Granted, not all fantasy is free of allegory. C.S. Lewis was one fantasy author who rigorously integrated allegory and commentary into his work. However, we would argue that Lewis’ style of writing lacks the “applicability” that Martin’s and Tolkien’s work do.

Alright so, what fruit does applied fantasy bear out? What is this “useful approach” we allude to? The useful approach of fantasy demands that we forge an creative politic. Consider Tolkien’s musings on what makes a creative fantasy:

“Creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under sun; on a recognition of fact, but not slavery to it.”

Fact, as useful as it is, lacks vision- it lacks imagination. This is true in fiction and political life. Often, for better or for worse, it is not “fact” that moves people to action. Consider, for example, the mass hysteria that descended during the Cold War. Think about the fears baked into the radical whig ideology that gripped America’s founding fathers. More recently, look at the success of the alt-right. Richard Spencer has made a name for himself championing the myth that “America belongs to white men.”Clearly, we have a lot of room for imagination in American political culture- even before the so called age of post-truth politics.

Spencer’s myth is easy enough to disprove, but that doesn’t make it any less popular. He’s crafted a vision. Vision cannot always be fought with fact. It needs to be combated with vision.

We can do better. We can build a political imagination built on something besides fear and exclusion. The fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and R.R. Martin gives us the tools to recognize fact, but realize that the facts themselves are not ends.

In his 1958 work, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes: “The daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” As much as the immediate world needs to be recognized, it’s clear that the “real world” is not what humans operate in, ideologically. Moreover, those day-dreamed worlds, however infinite, are not the same between us.

Bachelard posits that our experience (as lived through drawers, basements, and attics) eludes to deeper- almost primordial- descriptors. Going beyond Bachelard- it seems so often that our political lives depend on such descriptors too. So often our political rhetoric frames policy in terms of the house, the family, the small business, the rule of law. What do these things really mean? What phantoms do these descriptors shelter?

This is not a new sentiment, at the turn of the 20th century, surrealists sought to use a radical new form of art to create new forms of consciousness. The surrealists hoped that new descriptors would arise to form a new kind of rhetoric for the politics of liberation. Andre Breton wrote, in the Surrealist Manifesto, that:

“The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit.”

Surrealism was about the fragility of reality, especially political reality. Max Ernst’s Ubu Imperator, for example, depicts a mighty tower seemingly as stable as a child’s top.

Realism or not, our day dreams and our fantasies are still there.

Our day dreams shape our political lives. Millennials are apparently “Ready to Talk About” the end of Capitalism, writes Bloomberg Magazine. A Harvard University poll conducted in 2016 showed support for Free Market Capitalism is declining amongst youth. This phenomena was once thought impossible in our post-Fukyiama society. On the other hand, hate crimes are on the rise; indicating, I think, increased interest in the sort of race-reality narratives peddled by the alt-right. Opposing imaginations are at war.

Perhaps, St. Thomas More’s Utopia is a good example of what we are getting at. Utopia, first published in 1516, is a sort of work of fantastical politics. Utopia, was almost a certainly a response to old world politics. More’s narrator spends the first half of the book speaking about then-contemporary politics. However, the second half of the book is almost completely divorced from critique and discussion. Instead, it dares to imagine. It imagines a society with no private property. It imagines mobile landmarks that might be moved about in case of an emergency. It imagines a society wherein male and female priests may marry. It imagines that a profane substance such as gold might be used as chamber pots and to fetter prisoners.

These day dreams have no basis in fact. These imaginings were impossible in More’s day. Many of them are still impossible.

Because of its imagination, Utopia remains one of the most profound and influential political manifestos of all time. Proving that fantasies, day dreams and fiction are playgrounds in which we can practice speculative politics.

The useful approach that applied fantasy gives us opens us up to new perceptions. It opens us up to new possibilities. It “cleans our windows” as Tolkien would say. In our stagnating political culture, we think it is an approach that is sorely needed.

UPDATE: The Road Goes Ever On…

Originally, I mean to end the article. However, I must take this opportunity to be nauseatingly longwinded, as is usually my custom.

Up to this point, what am I really calling for? For renewed imagination alone? No- to do so would be little more radical than adopting the pathos of 1990s children’s television. And, as I stated above, imaginative politics can be as regressive as they are progressive.

Likewise, those who are best known to enjoy fantasy are not always inclined to engage in speculative politics. In fact, especially in a post-gamergate era, Nerds can seem downright reactionary. Too often, connoisseurs of fantasy find themselves bemoaning new fiction that they find “too feminist” or “too SJW.” I mean, I don’t have any hard data, but the examples are numerous. You can also just put in “SJWs are ruining XYZ” into Youtube and you’ll see plenty of people seeking to defend fantasy books, films and games from “left wing politics.”

I think the trouble with these folks is that they seek to defend the textual make up of particular works of fantasy without engaging in the core mechanism of fantasy itself- transcendence. The anti-SJW crowd, I think, is afraid that their interests are being threatened. They’re afraid that the fantasy will be taken away from them. In that sense, they live in the fantasy, they never leave. They revel in a cosmetic image of a fictional work. Which is a shame because all fiction, especially fantasy, is built to be transcended.

In terms of Tolkien, especially, he makes it very clear that fantasy is about descent and ascent. In his essay on Fairy stories, he writes:

“Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”

For Tolkien, Fantasy is almost apocalyptic in its capability to reveal. He hopes that the grace, dignity and justice that’s revealed to us in Fantasy is carried on to the real world. I find that to be my own experience as well, I can really only come to grips with the grace of a fictional work when I leave it. Only when I set a game, film or book aside can I come to terms with it in relation to the real world. And only then can I see how that Fantastical work live in reality- that a new world of justice and human dignity might be conjured and made manifest by the will of imagination alone. How can we carry what warms our hearts about those stories into our waking lives?



After Fantasy, our relation to the world is disrupted. As Bachelard says in praise of miniatures: “‘Here too, was an entire world.’ Why should a metaphysician not confront this world? It would permit him to renew, at little cost, his experience of “an opening onto the world,” of “entrance into the world.” Too often the world designated by philosophy is merely non-I.” Reality, dreams, fiction, fact, macro and micro all teem with perspectives and potentialities. As we as we emerge from the fantasy we find that the old binary relations we live in begin to collapse. Just as the surrealists said, Fantasy reveals the fragility of reality.

The Utopias of Marx and St. Thomas More are fantasies. Just like daydreams about Hobbits and Magic rings are still just dreams. But when we wake up, we’re changed all the same.

“When you sleep, no one is homeless. When you sleep, you can’t feel the hunger. No one is lonely in a dream… Tell me, where will you wake up?”