The fiction of fantasy

Reading a few books doesn't make anyone a master on any topic, let alone several topics at once. Imagine that for all your life you weren't allowed to read more than a few books, together covering everything you would ever know about history, language, literature, religion, mythology, economy, science, warfare, sociology, and so on. You would, frankly, know next to nothing.

Yet partaking in epic fantasy, such as reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, fits this scenario: the reading of a few books describing another world, with those few books being everything we come to know about that world. But after reading those books, far from realizing our ignorance, we instead believe we got the real story. We believe we understand the different races of peoples, and the way magic works, and the only meaningful interpretation of that world's history. How incredulous we are!

If epic fantasy were anything like real life—and yes, I realize the irony of this sentence—the conclusion of every book and series would leave us more befuddled after than before. That Sauron fellow, we might say after finishing The Return of the King, he got a viciously lopsided treatment by the author. Even Hitler had some good points. I wonder what Sauron's real story is? Or: So all dwarves like to live in caves? Yeah, right. The author is too racist to bother fleshing out a people beyond a few stereotypes.

Yes, I know I'm taking seriously a genre of fiction—and one that's especially detached from reality. Relax, Craig, I hear you say. It's just a story. Maybe so. But I wonder if the biggest lure of epic fantasy is the comfort of believing in a world that makes sense, of believing in a world that our puny brains can get a handle on. If so then that's the fiction of fantasy. Reality can't be understood by one person, especially not by only reading a few books on it—never mind how numerous the appendices.