LINDSAY ELLIS: Wizards, dragons, magic, ancient prophesies, important quests, daring feats of bravery and chivalry.

Hey, wait.

Wait.

Wait!

Where are you going?

What, are we too cool to talk about fantasy?

It's no longer low art for children, D & D campaigns, and bad "Lord of the Rings" rip-offs.

It's now the stuff of prestige, of Oscar-winning trilogies and the adaptational basis for the most popular show on television.

But even if you watch "Game of Thrones," that doesn't necessarily translate into new fans of the literary genre.

To quote "Washington Post" critic Michael Dirda, "Many readers simply can't stomach fantasy.

They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty feud barbarians with battle-axes, seeking the bejeweled coronet of obeisance.

But the best fantasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance."

In other words, the genre is a lens to explore what we as a society find important to our pasts, our presents, and our future.

[groovy music] Fantasy and science fiction often fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction.

And as a result, they are often grouped together in marketing, and especially in bookstores.

But if, as we examined earlier in the series, science fiction is more of a forward-looking genre propelled by the possibilities of technology and the things that worry us about that, fantasy is more backward-looking, by which I mean it is more inspired by history.

Most of the seminal classics of the genre, like J.R.R.

Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and T. H. White's "The Once and Future King," are based off of oral traditions, tropes and stories rooted in Anglo-Nordic culture, with Tolkien looking backwards at everything from Norse mythology and linguistics to create an entire world that feels both familiar and fantastical, and T. H. White taking the great tradition of Arthurian legends and translating them into something more immediate and modern, and also very tired of fascism and communism.

Both examples are re-interpretation of myth.

But they celebrate those myths more than challenge them.

So let's take a quick look at different types of fantasy.

When most people hear fantasy, they think of epic fantasy, also known as high fantasy.

High fantasy occurs in a completely fabricated world that can be inspired by history and legend, but that has its own consistent rules and physical laws that are separate from the real world.

"A Song of Ice and Fire" is the big juggernaut of the sub-genre right now, especially if it ever gets finished.

Although, fans of the book, please stop harassing this man.

He's busy.

Then you have your sword-and-sorcery types, your Conans the Barbarian, set in exotic, quasi-mythological locations, which can be #problematic in their depiction of exoticized, coded versions of non-European peoples.

But this is a six-minute video, and we only have so much time to get into it.

And then there's "Lord of the Rings," the classic, the big boy.

Tolkien felt like England didn't really have a mythology.

So he decided to write one, in effect laying the blueprint for the entire genre.

There are plenty of high fantasies that aren't inspired by European history and folklore.

But their popularity is a lot more recent.

N. K. Jemisin's "Dream Blood" series and "Inheritance" trilogies, as well as Tomi Adeyemi's "Children of Blood and Bone," are recent, less European examples.

Then there's low or portal fantasy, in which characters from the real world are affected by crossover with a fantasy world.

Think of your "Chronicles of Narnia," your "Wizards of Oz," your "Alices in Wonderlands."

[screams] Hello.

LINDSAY ELLIS: Portal fantasy has a very strong tradition in children's fantasy and tends to focus on using this crossover as a very important teaching moment.

Then there's urban fantasy.

Think "The Dresden Files" or the Sookie Stackhouse series, books that take place in our world, but with a fantastical twist.

Maybe there's a secret magic society you didn't know about.

Or maybe it's basically our world, but hey, there's vampires and werewolves in it, and the werewolves are testifying in front of Congress.

But what function does fantasy serve as a genre?

What is its draw?

As stated in the essay, "Why We Need Dragons," by academic Daniel Baker, "Tolkien set the great majority of the genre on a seductive path, a path to the status quo.

The status quo is maintained because the reader feels no need to change, as evil has been vicariously defeated by the text's hero and the need for social change effaced by nostalgic recollect.

The impulse behind it becomes not so much a desire to create a better world, but to escape into a pre-industrial landscape."

[screams] Real history is complex.

It makes for a bad, or at least unsatisfying, narrative.

Fantasy, at its worst, simplifies and echoes the past instead of confronting it, because it makes for an easier pill to swallow.

It takes what it wants, like a barbarian horde, leaving anything complex behind.

It can even be argued that written history is a form of fantasy itself.

It was, after all, written by the victors.

But that is not to say that there's anything immoral about the way fantasy often contextualizes cultures and histories-- well, not always anything immoral.

"Fantasy," writes professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose, "is not antagonistic to social reality."

We can look to the past to find commonality, to find threads of what makes us human, to discover where we've been so we don't get lost moving forward.

And the fantasy genre can be a fascinating study of all the ways we can reframe, ideal, deconstruct, and explore our histories and our cultures.

The amazing thing about fantasy is that it can really be anything you make of it.

You want a magical, flat world riding on the back of a giant turtle with wizards and dragons and wars and a deeply satirical, comedic take on real-world issues?

Have some "Discworld" by Terry Pratchett.

Are you tired of white medievalism in your fantasy?

Well, have some Ursula K. Le Guin and everything by N. K. Jemisin.

Again, to quote "Washington Post" critic Michael Dirda, "In most instances, fantasy ultimately returns us to our now re-enchanted world, reminding us that it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do truly matters."

So what's your favorite fantasy novel?

What novels do interesting things with the way they use magic to interpret history and culture?

"The Great American Read" is a new series on PBS about why we love to read, leading up to a nationwide vote on America's favorite novel.

Who decides America's favorite novel, you ask?

Well, that would be you.

So head to pbs.org/greatamericanread to vote on your favorite book.

Check the link in the description for more details.

[groovy music] [electronic music]