Any fiction – but above all a work of fantasy – is a world made of words, ‘A world,’ as Ursula K. Le Guin has said, ‘where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation.’ There is no Middle-earth, no Dorimare that lies beyond a barrier, a veil of words; no window heaped with goblin fruit for sale. No ‘faery-lands forlorn’ exist unless the casement is the spell. The glass is language; and the glass is all there is.

For the most influential of modern fantasists, that glass was a telescope, trained on origins.

Etymon

Fairy tale and philology have been entwined since Jacob Grimm first studied both, the linguistic root-stock inextricable from Briar Rose's hedge. The sleeping beauty of the past awaits the scholar seeking it, undaunted by the thorns. Grimm's study, etymology, derives from etymon: the true name of a thing, its first form. Origin is seen as authenticity; the eldest is most true.

J. R. R. Tolkien conceived of Middle-earth as a reconstruction of a lost world. Philology, he thought, ‘could take you back even beyond the ancient texts it studied. He believed that it was possible sometimes to feel one's way back from words as they survived in later periods to concepts which had long since vanished, but which had surely existed, or else the word would not exist.’ He hung his mythology on these *-words – the asterisk marks conjecture – in the spaces between words, as if imagining his constellations from a scattering of stars.

There is a moment in an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin when she argues that: ‘Fantasy is the language of the inner self.’ Not least because of the multiple meanings of the word ‘fantasy’, psychoanalysis is a very useful theoretical approach in analysing fantasy: not just the mode of fictional narrative (and the narrower genre of the Fantastic) but also desires, drives or unconscious fears – which I will refer to as ‘phantasies’. Rosemary Jackson's Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) owes its subtitle in part to Sigmund Freud's and especially Jacques Lacan's notions of the divided self: fantasy ‘has a subversive function in attempting to depict a reversal of the subject's [self's] cultural formation’. Unities of space, time and character – and the attempt to represent them – are questioned both by fantasy and psychoanalysis. For Jackson, fantasy is ‘a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss’ (3) and the reader who associates fantasy just with Tolkien and his successors is likely to be disappointed by her literary choice of exemplars. At the same time, psychoanalysing genre fantasy risks tautology: since Freud draws upon myths such as that of Oedipus and stories such as Hoffmann's ‘The Sandman’ (1815) to formulate his theories, it is hardly surprising that the theories seem to work well with fantasy narratives which look back to such sources for inspiration. This chapter will outline part of the thought of three major figures in psychoanalysis – Freud, Lacan and Jung – in relation to analysing fantasy.

All fantasy is political, even – perhaps especially – when it thinks it is not. From the abstruse literary confection to the sharecropped franchise series, a fantasy text at the very least functions like any cultural text to reproduce dominant ideology. This essay is concerned with some of the ways in which fantasy has been theorized as being political, and with the ways in which some authors have utilized fantasy for explicitly political ends. Rosemary Jackson's Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) established the association between fantasy literature and resistance to the dominant social order, arguing that fantasy ‘characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss’. Fantastical intrusions into bourgeois reality are thus seen as the return of the repressed into the realm of representation.

Jackson characterizes this in Lacanian terms: the Symbolic (the law, the signifier, subjectivity) constrains and is disturbed by the Imaginary (delusion, the signified, the Other), exhuming ‘all that needs to remain hidden if the world is to be comfortably “known”’ (65). Fantasy opens ‘for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law [and] dominant values systems’ and thus ‘reveals reason and reality to be arbitrary, shifting constructs and thereby scrutinizes the category of the “real”’ (4, 21). For Jackson, fantasy's subversiveness lies in its disruption of the smooth surface of the bourgeois social order as constructed in the mimetic novel.

The relationship of ideas and practices

Of the different types of law taught at universities or practised in governments, commercial companies, or law firms, international law has always been the most open to moral or philosophical reflection. To engage in international law has been to involve oneself in contested ideas about legitimate government, justified forms of violence, universal rights and the direction of human progress. Ideas about the politically just and unjust are condensed in technical international law rules and institutions, giving them sharpness and actuality that has fed back as experience to the worlds of politics and thought. For example, occupation of territory, the movement of military forces or the rights of aliens are seldom discussed in fully abstract terms – without thinking of this occupation, that war, those people. Abstract legal debate and political engagement are almost always two sides of the same coin. Which is why themes such as ‘sovereignty’, ‘just war’ and the ‘right to trade and extract resources’ may be equally at home in philosophy departments, international courts, foreign ministries and political rallies. As a vocabulary and a practice, international law is deeply embedded in the creation of a global, economically and technologically driven culture. Leading ideas such as the ‘universal’ or the ‘humanitarian’ are used both to legitimise current developments and to challenge them. There are few international controversies where both sides would not regularly invoke international law in their favour.

A survey of the last fifty years in children's fantasy, if it is to be more than a roll-call of those who have distinguished themselves in terms of popularity or critical acclaim, must step back from the fashions for individual books and authors to describe developments at a more general and, as it were, tectonic level. Such a description may be couched in literary terms, of plot, character and narration; or as reflecting changes in the world at large, especially the world as experienced by children; but ideally it should acknowledge and analyse the mutual influence of these factors. Social mores have changed greatly since 1960: can the same be said of children's fantasy fiction?

In British children's fantasy of the early 1960s, there was a distinct preference for real-world settings, usually rural or suburban, inner cities being generally the preserve of realist writers. Child protagonists would typically be white and middle-class, often holidaymakers or newcomers to an area. Indeed, a stock way to begin a book was with the train bringing the protagonist (alone, or with family) to the site of the adventure, as in Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone (1965). And an adventure it generally was, in the sense of being delimited in time, and bracketed by a life marked as recognizably ordinary. The adventure would be undertaken largely without the assistance of adults from the children's own circle and would revolve around, or be precipitated by, contact with a mysterious place, object or person.

Introduction

In politics and elsewhere, whenever people have banded into some form of organisation, be it a football club, a trade union or (why not?) a state, those entities tend to look for likeminded entities to cooperate with. Trade unions form federations of unions; football clubs form national associations that, in turn, form international associations; and states form international organisations.

States may do so for a variety of reasons. Often mentioned as a central element in the literature is the idea that international organisations may be of use when states have identified common purposes. Thus, so the argument runs, if states find that they need to organise the flow of mail across borders, they set up a Universal Postal Union. If they feel monetary stability needs to be guaranteed, they set up an International Monetary Fund. If they feel the need to cooperate more generally within their region, they may establish an African Union, or an Organisation of American States. And if they wish to form an ever-closer union, they may even set up something as ambitious as the European Union. This, at any rate, is the traditional, functionalist, story: states create organisations in order to achieve common goals and perform certain specified functions. However, as will be seen, this story leaves a few gaps.

Introduction

Central to the question of how we live is how we share the earth. From conflict over territory, to passage over the high seas, to the quest for raw materials, to disputes over water and oil, to dams and development, to methods of agriculture, food security and to negotiations over climate change, the question of resources lies at the heart of many international events. The struggle for the use, control and distribution of the earth and its riches has been the impelling force behind a great deal of international legal doctrine, including much which might, at first glance seem unrelated to that issue. From the River Oder case at the Permanent Court of Justice in 1929, to the judgments of the International Court in Corfu Channel in 1949 and the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Project case in 1997, many landmark decisions of international courts and tribunals, cited for a range of legal principles involving sources, jurisdiction, nationality, etc. involve at base disputes over scarce resources.

But if the struggle for control over resources lurks under the surface of international law, international law lies in the background of how we understand and define them in the first place. The idea of background reiterates the importance, highlighted by other chapters in this volume, of an appreciation of historical context in understanding international law. In this instance, the ‘background’ is closely connected to international law’s imperial origins (Anghie 2005; Chimni 1987).

Introduction:

The relationship of international law to the practice of international diplomacy, or to global politics, is obscure and, sometimes, paradoxical. As a prelude, then, to sketching the structuring role international law performs in the present phase of globalisation, or may have played at different moments in diplomatic history (a history that, for these purposes, emphasises the formal institutions and semi-formal practices of diplomacy in inter-state relations but encompasses, also, the broader world of international political life), it is important to say something about the ways in which the relationship might be framed in general. Three questions seem pertinent. Does international law influence or found the diplomatic system, or is it largely an irrelevance or trifling preoccupation? Has international law been a force for good (or for global well-being) in diplomatic history? And is it possible to speak intelligibly of a single body of norms, or way of thinking and acting, called ‘international law’? These questions might, in turn, generate (at least) three images or ways of thinking about the field: (1) international law as virtuous and marginal, (2) international law as constitutive and responsible and (3) international law as a combination of norm and aspiration. We can imagine other images, for example international law as substance and form or as change and stability or utopia and reality (Carr 1946), and other combinations: there are, no doubt, ways in which international law is constitutive and virtuous. I have chosen these three because of their ubiquity and influence, and for what I hope are the heuristic possibilities they offer.

Virtuous/marginal

Approached for the first time – by students, by state officials, by the intelligent, non-specialist reader – international law, as a body of principles or a way of doing things, might appear virtuous yet marginal. This, too, would be the self-description of many international lawyers. From this perspective, international law is a mostly frustrated project to civilise global politics, humanise war, tame anarchy, restrain the Great Powers and ensure fairer re-distributive outcomes.

Introduction

Various human rights are widely recognised in codified and customary international law. These human rights promise all human beings protection against specific severe harms that might be inflicted on them domestically or by foreigners. Yet, international law also establishes and maintains institutional structures that greatly contribute to violations of these same human rights: central components of international law systematically obstruct the aspirations of poor populations for democratic self-government, civil rights, and minimal economic sufficiency. And central international organisations, like the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, are designed in ways that systematically contribute to the persistence of severe poverty.

We know, or certainly should know, that even today about a third of all human deaths – some 18 million annually – are due to poverty-related causes such as malnutrition, perinatal and maternal conditions, measles, diarrhoea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, or malaria (WHO 2008, 54–59, Table A1). Most of this annual death toll and the much larger poverty problem it epitomises are avoidable through minor modifications in supranational institutional arrangements that would entail only slight reductions in the incomes of the affluent. Such reforms have been blocked by the governments of the affluent countries that, advancing their own interests and those of their corporations and citizens, are designing and imposing a global institutional order that, continually and foreseeably, produces vast excesses of severe poverty and premature poverty-related deaths.

J. R. R. Tolkien said that the phrase ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ came to his unconscious mind while marking examination papers; he wrote it on a blank page in an answer book. From that short sentence, one might claim, much of the modern fantasy genre emerged. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) (henceforth LOTR) looms over all the fantasy written in English – and in many other languages – since its publication; most subsequent writers of fantasy are either imitating him or else desperately trying to escape his influence. His hold over readers has been extraordinary: as is well known, and to the annoyance of literary critics, three major surveys of public opinion in Great Britain around the turn of the millennium placed him as the ‘author of the century’ or his book as the most popular work of English fiction, beating Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice into second place. In 2004, Australians and Germans both voted LOTR their nation's favourite book. LOTR has been translated into all the world's major languages; and film director Peter Jackson's loving re-creation of Tolkien's world (2001–3) is the most profitable trilogy in cinema history, grossing nearly three billion American dollars.

The fantasy novels of C. S. Lewis – in particular his so-called ‘Space Trilogy’ (1938–46) and the seven Narnia books (1950–56) – have not had quite that impact, but have nevertheless reached a large audience, and, as Lewis's status as a Christian writer continues to grow, so that audience expands. The Narnia sequence has become one of the best loved and most enduring series of fantasies for children, currently reaching a wide cinema audience: the first three adaptations were released in 2005, 2008 and 2010, and the fourth is in planning: it is The Magician’s Nephew, based on the sixth book which Lewis published.

What is realism? When we examine the cultural conventions which have developed around the concept of realism in the Western world, we see an emerging standard which is allied ever more closely to scientific explanations of reality, widely accepted as the ‘official’ view. Such views have determined and structured, to a large extent, the modern way in which we ‘read’ reality. The many different kinds of realism are of course a way of communicating the current agreed-upon interpretation, or interpretive consensus, of a given reality in a given place and time, and as filtered by the current view of accepted science. Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion gives us a working basis from which to begin:

Paradoxically, each generation seems to define its version of realism differently, even when literature arises from an oral tradition in which the most important element is continuity and history. The Surrealists were famous for communicating realism as a vision that went beyond the outer appearance of things, more so even than the Romantics desired to communicate the inner essence of things. Ken Booth, citing the legendary story of Picasso painting a portrait of Gertrude Stein, argues that ‘Gertrude Stein is fixed in our minds as Picasso, not nature, made her.’

Fantasy for children, similar to children's literature at large, could not emerge until childhood was acknowledged as a separate and especially formative period in human life. However, while the Enlightenment primarily resulted in instructive works for young readers, Romanticism, with its interest for, on the one hand, folklore, and on the other, the child as innocent and untouched by civilization, provided rich soil for the first fantasy stories explicitly published for children, naturally children of the upper and middle classes. In handbooks of children's literature, fantasy is frequently treated together with literary fairy tales, or under the misleading label ‘modern fairy tales’.

E. T. A. Hoffmann's ‘The Nutcracker and the Mouse King’ (1816) is internationally acknowledged as the first fantasy explicitly addressed to children, since the protagonist is a little girl, the point of departure is the nursery, and many characters are toys. The child is, however, instrumental in the story, which rather involves the animated toy, the Nutcracker, and his quest for the princess in the fairy land. The connection between the Nutcracker, an enchanted prince, and the enigmatic old man in the real world is hinted at. Yet play and playfulness, associated with childhood, make this story different from Hoffmann's other fantastic stories, even though it carries many philosophical and ethical aspects far beyond a child's comprehension. Similarly, Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881), with its puppet as the central character, has always been considered a story for children, despite its narrative and moral complexity.

The structuring characteristic of quest fantasy is the stepped journey: a series of adventures experienced by the hero and his or her companions that begins with the simplest confrontations and dangers and escalates through more threatening and perilous encounters. The narrative begins as a single thread but often becomes polysemous, as individuals or small groups pursue minor quests within the overall framework. Quest fantasies conventionally start in a place of security and stability, and then a disruption from the outside world occurs. The protagonist, generally an average person with hidden abilities, receives a call to action and reluctantly embarks on the first adventure. Choice is crucial in quest fantasy, so protagonists face several cruxes where their choices determine the fate of many. After the hero and company pass the first test and receive rewards such as magic items, a respite, often characterized by feasting and music in a haven under the protection of a wisdom figure, occurs during which the members of the company receive aid and knowledge.

The quest journey continues across a massive, wild landscape of forests, rivers, mountains, valleys, small villages and occasional cities. As in the American Western, the landscape functions as a character, here endowed with animate traits as the fantasy world itself seeks to heal the rift that threatens its destruction. The menace frequently comes from a Dark Lord, a satanic figure of colossal but warped power, who wishes to enslave and denature the world and its denizens and who lives in a dead land, often in the east or north, surrounded by a range of forbidding mountains and deserts. During the quest the pattern of an organic, moral world with directive purpose emerges.

Fantasy is not so much a mansion as a row of terraced houses, such as the one that entranced us in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew with its connecting attics, each with a door that leads into another world. There are shared walls, and a certain level of consensus around the basic bricks, but the internal décor can differ wildly, and the lives lived in these terraced houses are discrete yet overheard.

Fantasy literature has proven tremendously difficult to pin down. The major theorists in the field – Tzvetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, Kathryn Hume, W. R. Irwin and Colin Manlove – all agree that fantasy is about the construction of the impossible whereas science fiction may be about the unlikely, but is grounded in the scientifically possible. But from there these critics quickly depart, each to generate definitions of fantasy which include the texts that they value and exclude most of what general readers think of as fantasy. Most of them consider primarily texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If we turn to twentieth-century fantasy, and in particular the commercially successful fantasy of the second half of the twentieth century, then, after Tolkien's classic essay, ‘On Fairy Stories’, the most valuable theoretical text for taking a definition of fantasy beyond preference and intuition is Brian Attebery's Strategies of Fantasy (1992). Building on his earlier book, The American Fantasy Tradition (1980), Attebery proposed that we view fantasy as a group of texts that share, to a greater degree or other, a cluster of common tropes which may be objects but which may also be narrative techniques.

Meaning of the ‘rule of law’

The ‘rule of law’ signifies that all persons (natural or juridical), including organs of the state, should comply with laws adopted through prescribed constitutional procedures. Its essence is the prohibition of the exercise of arbitrary power. The scope of the rule of law includes the procedural guarantees of general laws and an ‘impartial’ due process (Neumann 1985, 265–267; Sypnowich 1990, 55). It has also come to be associated with the protection of core human rights. But despite a certain common understanding, the rule of law ‘is an exceedingly elusive notion’; ‘contrasting meanings are held’ by reasonable people (Tamanaha 2004, 3). There are several reasons for this.

First, the differences can be traced to the use of a positivist as against a deliberative conception of law. The validity of a legal rule is usually traced to adherence to a prescribed procedure, most often laid down in a written constitution. But as Jürgen Habermas points out, rules based only on positive enactment may sometimes lack legitimacy for ‘the belief in legality can produce legitimacy only if we already presuppose the legitimacy of the legal order that lays down what is legal. There is no way out of this circle’ (Habermas 1987, 265). Legitimacy can be secured only if both particular laws and the legal order are justified by good arguments as opposed to drawing strength from compliance with formal processes or being the outcome of the mere exercise of power. Thus if the legal order is based on some originating violence, as it often is, the legitimacy of legal rules tends to be undermined (Derrida 1992, 6). This is of particular relevance when the relationship between colonialism and international law is explored. Habermas’ understanding of the rule of law is however a regulative ideal. The extent to which it is complied with will bestow a greater or lesser degree of legitimacy on the legal order.

On 1 July 1712, in his magazine The Spectator – which, widely available in coffeehouses, was probably the closest thing eighteenth-century England had to what we would now think of as a popular blog – Joseph Addison introduced a topic of discussion that might sound familiar to modern readers of fantasy:

Addison, of course, wasn't thinking of anything like the fantasy novel in the modern sense – his main purview was poetry and drama – but his observations were pertinent enough that a contemporary scholar, David Sandner, has argued that Addison could be regarded as ‘the first critic of the fantastic’. Addison does not quite use the terms ‘fantastic’ or ‘fantasy’, however, speaking instead of ‘the reader's imagination’ and ‘the poet's fancy’ – both terms which would increasingly, over the next century or so, move to the foreground in discussions of the fantastic imagination.