This is a huge, beautifully designed exhibition. It’s encyclopedic in scope, endlessly fascinating, full of visual and imaginative pleasures. It makes you realise how widespread the impulse to Fantasy has been throughout the history of literature, and is in today’s culture, having undergone explosive growth in the last 50 years. In that period Fantasy has broken beyond books into graphic novels, TV and movies, into board and card games, in what we used to call video games and innumerable online games, plus a host of live action events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters.

The exhibition pulls together examples of Fantasy in all these media, namechecks scores and scores of authors, and builds up a dizzying sense of the multiple, limitless worlds of Fantasy. It features over 100 exhibits, including historical manuscripts, rare printed books and original manuscripts, drafts of iconic novels, scripts and maps, illustrations, clips from Fantasy TV shows and movies, film props and costumes, and much, much, much more.

‘The Battle of Helm’s Deep’, watercolour illustration by Alan Lee for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by J.R.R. Tolkien, published by Harper Collins (1992) © Alan Lee

Structure

The curators must have had a lot of fun figuring out how to structure the exhibition. It’s divided into four main sections, but the sub-themes or genre within each topic, the themes and ideas the exhibition addresses, keep overflowing these containers, so there are sub-sections within each theme, so that it looks something like this:

1. Fairy and Folk Tales
   • Faerie worlds
   • The dark enchanted forest
   • Endings
2. Epics and Quests
   • Into battle
   • Journeying and seeking
3. Weird and Uncanny
   • Architects of the strange
   • Gods and monsters
   • Peculiar affinities
4. Portals and Worlds
   • Gateways and thresholds
   • Forging realms
   • Worlds of fandom

I’ll be candid and say I struggled to contain the overflow of ideas raised by the show within this structure, so I loosely use the big four themes/rooms to structure this review but also go off at tangents sparked by individual exhibits or wall labels.

Here’s one of Piranesi’s Carceri pictures from the mid-18th century. As well as an artist, Piranesi was an architect and archaeologist who studied the layered history of Rome. The Carceri etchings depict vast, imaginary prisons filled with stairs, shadows and machines. In the second edition the images seem to have been edited to make some of their geometries physically impossible, further shifting them into the realm of the fantastical.

‘Carceri Etchings’ by Giovanni Battista Piranesi,(1750 to 1761) © British Library Board

1. Fairy and Folk Tales

‘An ancient mappe of Fairyland newly discovered and set forth’ by Bernard Sleigh (1918) © British Library Board

Fairie

Fairie is the archaic word denoting the place where fairies live, a world of fairy folk such as witches and warlocks, goblins, elves, sprites and trolls. Stories features themes of transformation, magic spells, bewitchment. he exhibition includes the 12 ‘Coloured fairy books’ by Andrew Lang, published between 1899 and 1910 which bring together myths, legends, romances, histories, epics and fables from around the world, an encyclopedia of Fantasy as it was defined in the Edwardian era.

Origins

Fantastical elements are present in the earliest literature, gods and monsters appearing in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and in the even earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, written nearly 4,000 years ago.

These are all represented by venerable old editions of these classics, the Iliad by a 14th century handwritten manuscript which is covered in notes and glosses. The great epic of our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons, Beowulf, describes a hero battling superhuman monsters. Although the possessor of superhuman strength, the poignancy of the poem comes from the fact that in his final battle he is mortally wounded and dies.

‘Beowulf’ in the Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, f.193 r © British Library Board. Photo by the author

Stories about heroes battling gods and monsters obviously helped humanity categorise, makes sense of and manage what were, until living memory, the terrors of being alive.

Multicultural

The exhibition makes a bold effort to cast its net beyond the Anglophone tradition and so has displays about Europeans Franz Kafka and Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as about the Arabian Nights and the adventures of Sinbad, a version of the Chinese Monkey legend and the African Ananci stories – both in their original forms and as reimagined by modern writers and comic book authors.

‘Sinbadnama, the Story of Sinbad’ in an anonymous Persian version © British Library Board

Pilgrimage

The idea of pilgrimage was invented as early as the 3rd century AD, but the idea of a hero going a journey in which he faces death and learns wisdom is not only much older but appears in all human cultures. The moral seems to be universal: to learn wisdom you must leave home.

King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table

The huge, complex and rich series of legends surrounding the court of King Arthur and his knights circles around the idea of the holy quest. In England its most famous spin-off is the medieval poem ‘Gawayne and the Green Knight’ where the hero has to undergo trials of strength and fidelity which he, in the event, fails.

Original illustrated manuscript of ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Photo by the author

There’s a typically handsome illustration of Sir Thomas Malory’s Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur by the fabulous Aubrey Beardsley. It’s worth pointing out that, although from another era, dealing with a completely different subject, the huge series of tales about king Arthur, like Beowulf end in failure as Lancelot’s infidelity breaks up the Round Table and Arthur is fatally wounded in the Last Battle. These are flawed heroes.

And then, subverting the earnest seriousness of Gawayne or the Welsh version of the stories in The Mabinogion, is a nearby of a display about Monty Python’s movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975), complete with killer rabbit and the Knights Who Say Ni. To be precise, it’s a notebook showing Michael Palin’s very early drafts for the movie screenplay.

Epic then folk then fairy

Epic came first, stories about gods and heroes, in Europe epitomised by the primal monumentality of Homer. The primary epic of Homer was copied and civilised in the great Aeneid of Virgil but it’s instructive to see how Virgil softens the hardness of the all-male Iliad, introducing the love story of Dido and Aeneas, and lending his story a strong sense of magic, specifically in Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in search of wisdom.

Folk stories are the popular versions of the literature of the elite. They are found in the ancient world and appear throughout the Middle Ages, when they were often Christianised as legends about saints and martyrs. The exhibition includes an edition of the most famous collection of European folk stories, by the Brothers Grimm.

‘Children’s and Household Tales’ by the Grimm Brothers (1819) © British Library Board

Fairy tales come a lot later and are the sanitised cousins of the folk tale, cleaned up and given a happy ending suitable for children, with an improving moral thrown in. The exhibition includes classic collections of fairy stories, including ones by Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen (rare early editions of both on display here).

Gothic In the late 18th century there was a fashion for Gothic works such as ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794) and Mary Shelley’s great masterpiece, ‘Frankenstein’, both represented here by old editions and informative labels. Critics always say that narratives like this combine elements of fantasy, horror, crime and even science fiction. What they’re really proving is that those sub-genres had not yet been divided up and crystallised.

Specialist genres The explosion of genres came at the end of 19th century when cheaper printing and publishing technology encouraged a proliferation of specialist magazines and journals which could afford to cater to niche tastes and so encouraged the creation of literary genres and sub-genres. Science fiction, detective stories, horror and fantasy were just some of the sub-genres which began to find shape and definition at the turn of the twentieth century.

Two books provide evidence for my thesis: The Story of the Glittering Plain is a fantasy novel by William Morris published in 1891 and, according to Wikipedia, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature. The second is George MacDonald’s novel Lilith, published in 1895 and widely seen as one of the first modern Fantasy novels. My point being that both were published in the decade which, I’m suggesting, saw the emergence of so many specialist genres and movements.

The emergence of Fantasy

Yoking together examples of Fantasy which stretch all the way back to the Iliad, via Beowulf, Paradise Lost, Gulliver’s Travels and Frankenstein into the 20th century prompts a thought: in those older works, classics of European and English literature, the Fantasy element is embedded in a larger worldview, often in a religious theology. The Iliad depicts the gods of Olympus as most ancient Greeks actually believed them to be, beliefs which continued to be held across the ancient world well into the Christina era.

Similarly, Paradise Lost is explicitly a work of Christian propaganda, its stated aim being to justify the ways of God to men i.e. defend orthodox Christian belief. In their ways two other classic works, Thomas More’s Utopia and Gulliver’s Travels, are heavily embedded in serious Christian debates about the ideal state and human morality, about the value of learning and education. The element of Fantasy is subordinate to what you could call the serious or adult aim of the work.

‘Utopia’ by Thomas More © The British Library Board

Now we can begin to see that the modern concept of Fantasy emerges and becomes clearer when it steps free of these ideological frameworks. Fantasy emerges as the fantastical elements in those previous works but shorn of their serious ideological context. It is set free. It becomes more playful because unrestricted by ‘serious’ aims, by those ‘adult’ agendas. As the 20th century progressed Fantasy was set free and has gone on to have stranger and more complex adventures.

My impression is that countless fantastical elements and works existed previously, but it was in the mid-twentieth century that Fantasy fiction was crystallised by J.R.R. Tolkien’s magisterial Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955) and has continued to grow in popularity ever since.

My impression is that the genre has undergone explosive growth since the 1990s; it was turbocharged by the advent of the internet which has allowed all kinds of fan fiction to proliferate. Alongside this has gone the huge growth in fantasy video games, many of which have led the technical, graphic and operation development of online games, to become a vast market spanning the world. And spreading from Japan, the spread of manga comics and, alongside the growing respectability of graphic novels.

The purposes of Fantasy

Arguably, Fantasy helps its consumers navigate profound difficulties we face in life.

Small

When we’re small this is panic-fear of the unpredictable giants known as grown-ups, who tell us strange fantastical stories and about whom we ourselves make up all kinds of stories. In childhood we live among networks of stories, our imaginations are formed by countless stories, many or most unfettered by the constraints of ‘reality’.

Teenagers

When we are troubled, alienated teenagers, it is simultaneously reassuring, thrilling and/or terrifying to think that there are other worlds than this one, ones where life is more exciting and dramatic and where, maybe, we or our representatives in the story can perform heroic actions. I’m thinking of the four ordinary schoolchildren who go through the back of a wardrobe and into Narnia where they play a pivotal role in the future of an entire world.

(The exhibition includes notes C.S. Lewis made for his Narnia books, plus the original map of Narnia he drew before handing it over to the series’ illustrator Pauline Baynes to bring to life.)

Grown-up

When we ourselves are grown up, the simplest function of Fantasy is to take us away from our boring mundane lives but it also has the power to take us back into the intense emotional worlds of childhood and youth. It can be an escape into pure fantasy, or an escape back to our earlier, simpler selves.

Video games

This wish to be elsewhere doing elsewise is maybe most obvious in the final sections of the exhibition about videogames like Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls, plus a playable mini-game by Failbetter Games designed especially for the exhibition, based on the Fallen London universe.

LARP

And in the very last section which describes the real-life world of conventions and events where fans can dress up as their favourite Fantasy characters. Apparently, this is referred to as Live Action Role Play or LARP. Right at the end there’s a stand of life-size costumes and a video of fans at a convention explaining their motivation for dressing up as elves and fairies and orcs.

Just some of the scores of thousands of costumes Fantasy fans make for themselves or hire and wear at numerous Fantasy fan events and conventions. Photo by the author

I was very struck by these vox pops of young people dressed up for a LARP event somewhere because they all said basically the same thing: which is that dressing up like this gave them a sense of identity, attending these events gave them a great sense of belonging, putting on Fantasy costumes helped them accept who they are and how they feel. And to be able to do it in a safe space among thousands of like-minded fans gave them a tremendous feeling of being accepted.

As a satirically-minded young man I would have laughed at all this, until I had children of my own and had to support them through their troubled teenage years, had to help my daughter in particular to ‘find her tribe’ – so now I am much more accepting of this kind of thing. In fact I found these artless happy vox pops rather moving and ended my visit to the exhibition feeling unaccountably emotional.

The importance of play

Psychologists know that ‘play’ is absolutely vital for the development and ongoing health of human beings. From this point of view Fantasy can be seen not as an escape from the ‘real world’ but an escape into a much more intense version of the world we inhabit. It represents all the slight irritations and small emotions of everyday life (the bus is late, my boss is nagging me) transformed back into the enormous primal emotions we experienced as children.

Is Fantasy childish?

I think the answer is a straight Yes, as long as we use at least two positive definitions of childhood: 1) as a time in our lives when we were subject to simpler, more intense emotions derived from simpler, more primal situations, and 2) when we were free to play – to dress up and be whoever we wanted to.

Board games

I’ve mentioned video games but there were also lots of examples of board games. The most famous might be Dungeons and Dragons, ‘a fantasy tabletop role-playing game originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and first published in 1974’. There’s a display of original boxes and cards.

There’s also a display of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s ‘Fighting Fantasy’ interactive gamebooks. And Martin Wallace’s board game A Study in Emerald based on Neil Gaiman’s story of the same name.

There’s one devoted to Magic: The Gathering a tabletop and digital collectible card game in which players use cards to take on the role of Planeswalkers, powerful wizards who can cast spells and summon spirits.

And there’s a nifty display case of Warhammer models, ‘a tabletop miniature wargame with a medieval fantasy theme created by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley, and first published by the Games Workshop company in 1983’. My son went through an intense Warhammer phase and we not only bought the models but really got into painting them properly, attending a painting course at one of the many Warhammer shops.

Display of Warhammer models. Photo by the author

2. Epics and Quests

The ‘Epics and Quests’ section introduces us to iconic heroes and villains ranging from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Xena Warrior Princess, and explores how ancient tales have helped to shape modern Fantasy epics. On display is a version of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic story.

It’s also a rare opportunity to see items related to The Lord of the Rings, including J.R.R Tolkien’s notes for the 1955 to 1956 BBC Radio adaption of the book. There’s a funny story about Tove Jansson the beloved author of the Moomin books. In 1960 she was thrilled to be commissioned to make illustrations for a Finnish version of The Hobbit. However, a note tells us, Tolkien didn’t like her illustrations that much and took particular exception to her depiction of Gollum as a giant troll, significantly taller than the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Her misinterpretation of the character led Tolkien to insert the word ‘small’ into descriptions of Gollum in subsequent editions.

‘Bilbo: En Hobbit’s Aventyr’, front cover designed by Tove Jansson (1962) © Tove Jansson Estate

This section also includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s drafts and drawings for her Earthsea novels, on display in the UK for the first time, a site of pilgrimage for Le Guin’s many fans.

Some of Ursula K. Le Guin’s notebooks showing her working out the world of her classic trilogy ‘Earthsea’. Photo by the author

Sword and sorcery

There are, these days, a bewildering variety of sub-genres and categories of Fantasy. ‘Sword and Sorcery’ is the phrase used to describe the kind of Fantasy which features sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent adventures. The genre is said to originate in the early-1930s in the works of Robert E. Howard but the actual term ‘sword and sorcery’ was only coined in 1961, by Fritz Leiber in a Fantasy fanzine.

I was intrigued to read the carefulness of the definition which is that S&S takes place in a world before any technology, dominated by muscle-bound heroes fighting evil powers, witches and dragons etc but that, crucially, these are purely personal adventures and battles which don’t affect the world they take place in – a contrast with a lot of other Fantasy stories in which the fate of the alternative world is often at stake.

I associate them with the Conan the Barbarian, the character invented by Howard and embodied in the terrible 1982 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (which was remade in 2011). The genre is characterised by a very distinctive iconography of an absurdly muscle-bound hunk wearing armour and wielding an immense sword, generally being adored by a scantily clad busty beauty sitting or kneeling in a posture of adoration. Different strokes for different folks.

3. Weird and Uncanny

This section focuses on iconic monsters, sinister landscapes filled with eerie edifices and the darkness at the heart of Fantasy.

Visitors are presented with the roots Fantasy in works like the Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein or the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. We learn how Piranesi’s atmospheric Carceri etchings, a kind of hallucinatory vision of a decaying 18th century city, inspired the design of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. There’s a displayaboutf G.K. Chesterton’s nightmarish thriller The Man Who Was Thursday and much more.

There’s also section on classic anti-heroes, starting with the (initially) charismatic figure of Satan from Paradise Lost through to the lead characters in Mervyn Peake’s classic series, Gormenghast.

4. Portals and Worlds

Having encountered monsters and weird creatures, visitors move on to explore the imagined worlds these creatures inhabit in the ‘Portals and Worlds’ section. It’s a distinctive characteristic of Fantasy that its texts involve imagining and describing entire worlds i.e. world-building. The ability to create ‘strange new worlds’ gives Fantasy writes almost unlimited scope to create wonder and amazement, at one end of the spectrum, or worlds of darkness and horror. Or to create cities, in particular, which satirise the cities we live in now, strange mashups of recognisable features.

Fantasy maps

And if you’re creating new worlds, then chances are you need a map. The curators could have gone to town on the theme of Fantasy maps along, given that so many Fantasy stories involve journeys. In the event there’s Branwell Brontë’s map of the Glass Town Federation, C.S. Lewis’s own draft map of Narnia, and a bigger, more finished map of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Installation view of the fold-out ‘Discworld Mapp’ devised by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs (1995) Photo by the author

Talking of Pratchett, it is, of course, possible to satirise this genre, to pastiche and caricature and play it for laughs. If Monty Python mock the Grail quest theme, Diana Wynne Jones did something similar in her Derkholm series.

Portal Fantasy

The concept of the portal or doorway to another world plays a very large part in Fantasy, as in Science Fiction. Think of all those mysterious doorways into another time and space: maybe the wardrobe in the Narnia stories is the most classic portal, although platform nine and three-quarters at King’s Cross is possibly the most famous secret doorway of our times. On a moment’s reflection you realise that both the Alice in Wonderland books contain portals which the heroine passes through, falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland or passing through the Looking Glass in its sequel.

Authors

Huge range of authors, ancient and modern. I’ve mentioned Homer, but classics of English literature include:

• Gulliver’s Travels (1726) demonstrates a completely different aspect of Fantasy, namely the Journey to Fantastic Lands
• Paradise Lost (1667) because Milton’s version of Satan is an archetype of the charismatic baddie, archetype of the Dark Lord who appears in so many Fantasy and Horror stories

‘Paradise Lost’ illustrated by Gustav Doré (1888) photograph © British Library Board

Other classic authors include:

• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliff (1794)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley for his early poem, Queen Mab (1813), which uses fairy tale elements as allegory to convey Shelley’s radical political views
• The Bronte sisters for the Fantasy world Gondal they invented and wrote stories about in the 1830s
• Edgar Allen Poe for his stories of mystery and the imagination (1839)
• Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
• Christina Rossetti for Goblin Market (1862) which combines elements of fairy tale, children’s story and Fantasy
• William Morris for his Fantasy novel The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891)
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman for her short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892)

1900s

• Frank Baum for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
• J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan (1904) and his adventures among pirates and faeries in Neverland
• G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
• E. Nesbit for The Magic City (1910)
• Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett aka Lord Dunsany, for his 1905 book, The Gods of Pegāna and his 1924 fantasy novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter
• H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ by Edgar Allen Poe illustrated by Harry Clarke © British Library Board

Modern i.e. post-war authors include:

• Jorge Luis Borges for the fantastical stories in Labyrinths (1940s)
• Mervyn Peake for his Gormenghast books (1946 to 1959)
• C.S. Lewis for the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ (1950 to 1956)
• J.R.R. Tolkien for The Hobbit (1937) and Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955)
• Philippa Pearce for Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958)
• T.H. White for the Once and Future King series (1958)
• Mikhail Bulgakov for The Master and Margarita (1967)

Notebooks of text and sketches by Mervyn Peake for his ‘Gormenghast’ novels

Contemporary authors include:

1960s

• Alan Garner, for children’s books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), Elidor (1965) and The Owl Service (1967)
• Susan Cooper for The Dark is Rising series (1965 to 1977)
• Ursula K. Le Guin for her Earthsea novels (1968 to 2001)

1970s

• Angela Carter for rewriting traditional fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979)
• M. John Harrison for his Viriconium stories (1971 to 1984)

1980s

• Terry Pratchett for his series of comic Fantasy Discworld series (1983 to 2015)
• Robert Holdstock for Mythago Wood (1984)
• John Crowley, Little, Big (1981) and his Ægypt series (1987 onwards)
• Neil Gaiman, especially for The Sandman comic book (1989 to 1996)

1990s

• Robin Hobb for her ‘Realm of the Elderling’ novels (1995 onwards)
• George R.R. Martin’s epic sequence A Song of Fire and Ice (1996 to the present)
• J.K. Rowling for the cultural phenomenon which is the seven Harry Potter books (1997 to 2007) and movies and stage plays
• Diana Wynne Jones for her Derkholm series (1998 to 2000)

2000s

• China Miéville particularly for Perdido Street Station (2000)
• Patricia A. McKillip for Ombria in Shadow (2002)
• Susanna Clarke for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

2010s

• Nnedi Okorafor for her Nsibidi Scripts series (2011 to 2022)
• Monstress, an ongoing epic fantasy comics series written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda, since November 2015
• Naomi Novik for Uprooted (2015)
• Aliette de Bodard for her Dominion of the Fallen series (2015 onwards)
• Seanan McGuire for his Wayward Children series (2015 to the present)
• Jeannette Ng for her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun
• The Deep (2019) by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes

2020s

• N.K. Jemisin for her novel The City We Became (2020)

The exhibition is being staged by a library so most of these authors are represented by editions of their books – often old and precious early editions – but also by quite a few displays of notebooks and manuscripts. These include manuscripts and notebooks by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S, Lewis, the Bronte sisters, Michael Palin, Ursula K. Le Guin, original sketches and outlines for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, notes for his Fantasy epic Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, and more.

Costumes

There are the costumes worn by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in the Royal Opera House’s 1968 ballet production of The Sleeping Beauty which is, of course, based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale. And costumes from the 2003 musical ‘Wicked’ and the 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

Costume for Kira in ‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982) © Brian and Wendy Froud

But the best prop is probably the very staff used by actor Ian McKellen playing Gandalf in the three-movie epic version of Lord of the Rings. I know it’s valuable and all, but I think the Library missed a trick by displaying it in a glass case: it should have been free-standing and they should have encouraged children to touch it and pose with it. It might have got a bit knocked about but imagine the magic it would have brought into thousands of children’s lives!

Installation view of Gandalf’s staff, pipe and concept art from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ by Alan Lee. Photo © Justine Trickett

Transformation and metamorphosis

Generally heroes of Fantasy remain themselves but are transported to otherworlds like Narnia or the worlds visited by protagonists of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. They rarely themselves change shape or person. Slightly odd is the inclusion by the curators of Franz Kafka’s famous short story The Metamorphosis, represented here in a version illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason.

Movies and TV

The exhibition includes excerpts from Fantasy TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2001), Xena the Warrior Princess (1995 to 2001), Twin Peaks (1990 to 1991), the Netflix series The Witcher (started 2019 and still ongoing).

And from Fantasy movies such as The Dark Crystal (1982), the Studio Ghibli film Princess Mononoke (1997), Lord of The Rings (2001 to 2003), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and more.

I was surprised at the space the curators gave to The Wizard of Oz and to learn quite what a cultural phenomenon it was in its time. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum was published in 1900. It was, apparently, ‘the first Fantasy series with continuity provided by the imagined world rather than by the characters’. Baum wrote no fewer than 14 books set in Oz, but at the same time cashed in on the books’ popularity by writing a stage musical and a comic strip. He concocted an elaborate touring spectacle involving dozens of actors, a full orchestra, a slideshow and moving picture clips.

A movie version was made in 1910, silent and in black and white and running for just 13 minutes. Most of us are more familiar with the 1939 version starring a young Judy Garland, directed by Victor Fleming.

In the past 124 years there have been scores of spin-offs, but the most successful of recent times is probably Gregory Maguire’s 1995 reworking of the story in ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West’, which was adapted into a popular Broadway musical in 2003.

Exhibition design

The design of the exhibition allows visitors to journey through different Fantasy landscapes, from a dark enchanted forest, through epic mountains and a sinister fallen city to sunrise on a new world.

Installation view of the ‘Fairy and Folk Tales’ section of ‘Fantasy: Realms of the Imagination’ at the British Library. Photo © Justine Trickett

Anniversaries

Interestingly, a little fleet of Fantasy anniversaries are coming up. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Colour of Magic, the first novel in Terry Pratchett’s immensely successful comedy fantasy Discworld series. It also marked the 50th anniversary of Susan Cooper’s best-selling novel, The Dark is Rising. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons.

Events

These anniversaries, the achievements of numerous Fantasy authors, as well as themes and topics (Queer Fantasy, Black Fantasy) are explored in a comprehensive series of events:

• Calendar of British Library Fantasy events

Reading list

On one level the entire exhibition is like an animated reading list. When you emerge from the exhibition into the British Library shop the temptation is to buy every book in sight – Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, Melville, Garner, and scores of others – take them home in a suitcase, lock yourself in your bedroom and not come out for a year. Why not? It’s not as if the so-called ‘real world’ is anything to celebrate right now.

Related links

• Fantasy: Realms of Imagination continues at the British Library until 25 February 2024

Related reviews

• Aeneid reviews
• Beowulf reviews
• Paradise Lost reviews
• The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
• Moomin reviews

More British Library reviews

• British Library reviews