ABSTRACT
The literary or compound term ‘high fantasy’ is enormously evocative and, like most evocative terms, it is pluralistic in meaning and difficult to pin down with a neat or precise definition. In her book, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature, Kathryn Hume argues that any work of literature can be placed somewhere on a continuum, one end of which is mimesis and the other fantasy. Writers and critics since J. R. R. Tolkien have, consciously or unconsciously, echoed his sentiments on the need for the author and the reader to take seriously the fantastic elements of the secondary world, Ursula Le Guin has asserted: I think ‘High Fantasy’ a beautiful phrase. The Romantics looked to the medieval and beyond for their inspiration, bringing back to popularity the vast resources of the fantastic in the Celtic and Scandinavian literatures as well as reinvigorating classical pieces such as The Iliad and The Odyssey.
