ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with the epic quest, retracing its origins to the search for the Holy Grail. In following the quest from the Medieval chivalric romance to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, particular emphasis is placed on close reading and the language of quest. Landscape and cartography feature largely here and, in discussing C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mervyn Peake’s first volume of the Gormenghast trilogy, Titus Groan, and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, this chapter pays especially detailed attention to the role of scale and horizontal and vertical trajectories in the construction of fantasy topography. Quests can be internal or intellectual as well as physical and the search for self-, scientific and social knowledge is also explored in relation to The Water-Babies and George MacDonald’s Phantastes, before considering the role of death and the shadow, beginning with Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Shadow. The chapter concludes with a consideration of two of the key ingredients typically encountered through questing: totemic objects, with particular reference to the horcruxes in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and the depiction of monsters, especially dragons, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
