Introduccion to the Special Issue: Fantasy Goes to hell. (2024)

As with many good things, the idea for this special issue started with coffee and conversation. It was in Albuquerque at the first in-person Southwest Popular and American Culture Association conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, so perhaps thoughts of mortality--and morality--were on our minds. (Certainly the concept that we had all been through something uniquely challenging, to say the very least, was a significant subtext to our interactions.) Aside from these more recent social and cultural circ*mstances, the late 2010s and early 2020s have been rich in texts that wrestle with the concept of life after death, from comedies such as The Good Place to video games such as Wraith--The Oblivion: Afterlife. Out of this conversation came a proposal for a Mythopoeic Society online seminar, "Fantasy Goes to Hell," focused on portrayals of Hell (and the afterlife more generally) in fantasy texts across multiple media, and an associated special issue of Mythlore.

Artistic depictions of hell reflect the social concerns of their times more than they do actual theology, and always have. The mystery play cycles of medieval Europe, for example, fed the development of popular theology around the non-biblical Harrowing of Hell tradition in a world deeply concerned with war, famine, disease, and sectarian conflict. Contemporary hells often betray the concerns of late-stage capitalism: a fear of being tied up in bureaucratic red tape for eternity and of earthly inequality perpetuated after life. As Turner puts it, "The pull of the Pit on the creative mind has been extraordinary. Poets and artists have always taken an immoderate interest in Hell" (3). Peeling back the layers of our modern Western consensus hell, we find the imprint of Milton, Goethe, Dante, Virgil, Bosch, Durer, stained glass windows and gargoyles, mystery plays and books of hours, all reflecting the concerns of their times but now preserved like fossils.

The many fascinating papers presented at the seminar in August 2023 reflected this wealth of texts and influences to choose from; of these, we have selected a representative sample of material exploring sources in television, comics, film, theatre, and literature that offer a tapestry of analyses of texts from antiquity to the present day.

The issue opens with Perry Neil Harrison, who uses the monstrous figure of Ungoliant in Tolkien's work to interrogate Tolkien's own view of evil, suggesting that Ungoliant complicates what seems to be a purely Augustinian conception of evil--that is, evil as corrupted good--to suggest a more Lovecraftian approach in which the unknowable is automatically labeled as evil, existing beyond human understanding. Lovecraft will crop up again in a later essay, being an author highly relevant to our theme. Richard Angelo Bergen also views one of the Inklings through the work of other authors; in this instance, approaching Lewis's view of Hell in The Great Divorce via Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton's Paradise Lost. He argues that while Blake's Romantic view portrays a Hell of "perpetual cosmic change," Lewis's in turn is insubstantial, a static, small place empty of larger meaning because of the absence of a divine presence. The way individuals misunderstand their hellish state, Bergen suggests, represents a type of "substance abuse" because they reduce "spiritual reality" to psychological metaphors.

Continuing with Lewis, his A Grief Observed is the fulcrum of Brian O. Murdoch's analysis of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the futility of the denial of death as a literary theme in world poetry from antiquity to contemporary times. Giovanni Carmine Costabile also uses the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to explore and explicate Tolkien's tale of Beren and Luthien. He demonstrates how Tolkien melds elements of the variants of the original classical tale with medieval retellings such as Sir Orfeo, as well as with Middle English artistic and poetic representations of Christ's Harrowing of Hell. Tolkien ultimately derives his happy ending from these sources and, in a greater sense, from his characteristic blending of pagan and Christian influences.

Contemporary retellings of classical texts are also the focus of Jarrod DePrado's article. He examines Burt Shevelove and Stephen Sondheim's modern adaptation of Aristophanes's The Frogs and Anais Michell's Hadestown musicals--one a comedy and the other a tragedy--and the ways in which both adaptations use these katabatic myths of descent and return to offer cogent contemporary political and cultural commentary.

Moving away from antiquity and into theology, Camilo Peralta addresses the question of life after death, particularly the idea of concepts such as heaven and hell existing outside of conventional time. He explores this thought through the works of Russell Kirk, a Catholic historian who wrote both fiction and nonfiction that frequently focused on the afterlife, and applies Kirk's idea of the afterlife's "timeless moments" to both the Inkling Charles Williams and American author Stephen King, and liminal yet specific and physical locations in their work (such as the Overlook Hotel in King's The Shining and the underworlds of Williams's Descent Into Hell and All Hallows' Eve) that represent opportunities for both living and dead to change their circ*mstances.

Anna Caterino parses the cosmic forces at work in another contemporary work, the television series Supernatural, through the character of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), who is sent to hell at the end of the series' third season. Caterino examines how Dean experiences both actual hell and a hell in his own mind, deconstructing his initial character and "carving a new animal," in the words of one of his torturers. Additionally, this narrative and character arc provides an insight not only into the series' and character's interaction with masculinity and queerness but also with post-9/11 sociopolitics.

Kristine Larsen analyzes the space horror film genre, particularly media that use the imagery of the black hole to ask deeper metaphysical questions about the nature of the afterlife. To this end, she focuses on Disney's The Black Hole (1979), cult classic Event Horizon (1997), and the "Impossible Planet/The Satan's Pit" arc of the rebooted Doctor Who (2006). These examples conceptualize black holes as "fantastical gateways" with the ability to eternally trap humans into some kind of timeless hell (to echo the Russell Kirk concept in Peralta's paper), and yet also offer audiences the opportunity to question what it is we don't know. Closing out this section of the journal is Zachery Rutledge's comparison of Dante's Inferno and Alan Moore's comic book series Providence and the ways in which both deal with the concept of sin in an historical and cultural context and as a response to Virgil and other classical texts (Dante) or Lovecraft's cosmic horror (Moore). Despite the centuries-long gap between these texts, Rutledge argues that they share a similar goal in the ways they categorize and seek to understand the nature of sin.

The authors and creators discussed here follow in the steps of Dante, Milton, and countless others, engaging in one of the most human activities possible: exploring the human intertwinement of morality and mortality and telling speculative stories about the Great Beyond. But in the end, these stories are really about what we fear and desire in this one earthly life that we know for a fact we have.

The first of our Notes in this issue is also in keeping with the conference theme; Lee Oser addresses the composition history of C.S. Lewis's peculiarly horrific unfinished work "The Dark Tower." In our other Notes, G. Connor Salter reviews the career of Willam Goldman and his relevance to studies of the mythopoeic, and Matthew Thompson-Handell provides background that helps to pin down some disputed details of the newspaper reports on Tolkien's lecture "On Fairy-stories."

My saddest duty as editor is to prepare "In Memoriam" notes for people who have been important to Mythlore and the Mythopoeic Society. In the Notes section in this issue are memorials to Dick Plotz, founder of the American Tolkien Society, and Peter J. Schakel, Lewis scholar, Mythopoeic Award winner, and longtime Mythlore editorial board member.

And of course in this issue we include a generous number of reviews of recent works on the Inklings and their circles, other fantasy writers, and some of the raw materials of mythopoeic fantasy: mythology, folklore, and Tarot. As always, I apologize to your already-groaning bookshelves for whatever you are moved to add to them.

Our next special issue will be Spring 2025, when we hope to include many of the outstanding papers presented at our February 2024 Online Midwinter Seminar, "Something Mighty Queer."

If you would like to keep up with news relating to Mythlore, please follow us on Facebook, where we post advance notice of papers accepted for upcoming issues, lists of items available for review, and so forth. In addition to the members of the Mythlore Editorial Advisory Board, the Mythopoeic Society Council of Stewards, and our ever-dependable referees, I'd also like to express my continuing gratitude to Phillip Fitzsimmons, University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Southwestern Oklahoma State University Libraries and our Administrator for Mythlore and Mythopoeic Society Archives, who directs the team adding content to dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/, and to his assistant Ben Dressler. My thanks also to David L. Emerson for moral support, eagle-eyed proofreading and quote-checking, and keeping the editor optimally caffeinated. As well I would like to gratefully acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Sarah Gail Croft, who as Mythlore's official Editorial Assistant edits works cited lists to match MLA9 style, proofreads, and assists with the preparation of the Mythlore Index Plus, among other tasks.

WORKS CITED

Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. Harcourt Brace, 1993.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

ERIN GIANNINI, PhD is an independent scholar. She served as an editor and contributor at PopMatters, and has written numerous articles about topics from corporate culture in genre television to production-level shifts and their effects on television texts. She is also the author of Supernatural; A History of Television's Unearthly Road Trip (Rowman & Littlefield 2021), and The Good Place [TV Milestones], and co-editor of Bloomsbury's book series B-TV: Television Under the Critical Radar.

JANET BRENNAN CROFT is Associate University Librarian at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of War in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien and has also written on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Orphan Black, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and other authors, TV shows, and movies, and is editor or co-editor of many collections of literary essays, most recently Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction with Jason Fisher. She edits the refereed scholarly journal Mythlore and is assistant editor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+.