The Aeneid with Rabbits

The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic by Hannah Parry A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2016 Acknowledgements Sincere thanks are owed to Geoff Miles and Harry Ricketts, for their insightful supervision of this thesis. Thanks to Geoff also for his previous supervision of my MA thesis and of the 489 Research Paper which began my academic interest in tracking modern fantasy back to classical epic. He must be thoroughly sick of reading drafts of my writing by now, but has never once showed it, and has always been helpful, enthusiastic and kind. For talking to me about Tolkien, Old English and Old Norse, lending me a whole box of books, and inviting me to spend countless Wednesday evenings at their house with the Norse Reading Group, I would like to thank Christine Franzen and Robert Easting. I'd also like to thank the English department staff and postgraduates of Victoria University of Wellington, for their interest and support throughout, and for being some of the nicest people it has been my privilege to meet. Victoria University of Wellington provided financial support for this thesis through the Victoria University Doctoral Scholarship, for which I am very grateful. For access to letters, notebooks and manuscripts pertaining to Rosemary Sutcliff, Philip Pullman, and C.S. Lewis, I would like to thank the Seven Stories National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Oxford University. Finally, thanks to my parents, William and Lynette Parry, for fostering my love of books, and to my sister, Sarah Parry, for her patience, intelligence, insight, and many terrific conversations about all things literary and fantastical. 2 Abstract Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right. In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic. Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to 3 eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 7 1. “This is the Story of Odysseus”: Rosemary Sutcliff's Adaptations of Epic for Children 16 Constructing the Hero in Beowulf: Dragon Slayer 17 The Wanderings of Odysseus and the Sutcliffean Hero 23 2. “A Modern Literature Whose Only Successful Epic is about Rabbits”: Richard Adams's Watership Down 33 “This Rabbit Aeneid”: Connections between Adams and Virgil 37 Watership Down and the Foundation of a Kingdom 44 3. “A Little Fellow in a Wide World”: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit 54 “The World into which Mr Baggins Had Strayed”: Tolkien and Northern Epic 57 “Child of the Kindly West”: Bilbo as Children's Book Hero 70 4. Epic, Romance and the Matter of Britain I: T.H. White's The Once and Future King 82 Finding an Antidote to War 85 “The Joy of Life Which Belonged to his Boyhood”: Old England and the Fall 89 “The Maturest or the Saddest Phase” of Camelot: Epic and Tragedy 97 5. Epic, Romance and the Matter of Britain II: Rosemary Sutcliff, King Arthur and Historical Epic 106 The King Arthur Trilogy: Arthur as “Hero-tale” 110 Holding Back the Dark: The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset 117 5 6. An Epic Holiday: C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia 132 Narnia and the Fall: The Magician's Nephew and Paradise Lost 137 Paradise Gained: The End of Epic in Narnia 147 7. “Paradise Lost in Three Volumes for Teenagers”: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials 157 “Eve Must Fall”: His Dark Materials as a Revision of Paradise Lost 163 “The Compulsion of the Form”: The Epic Form vs Authorial Intent 175 Conclusion 189 Works Cited 197 6 Introduction At first glance, children's fantasy and the epic tradition seem to have little in common: one, after all, is a genre written to entertain children, while the other is what the Renaissance viewed as the “noblest literary form” (Tillyard 2). Yet the two are often intertwined. As Anna Smol argues, citing Allen Frantzen, the influence of romantic historians who “linked past and present in the paradigm of parent-child relationships, in which the present was the fulfillment – the adult form – of the past” has often meant that the literature of the past becomes viewed as appropriate for “those usually taken to be the simple and unlearned always in our midst – children” (93). As such, epics are frequently directly retold and repackaged as children's fantasy in the same manner as myths, folk tales and fairy tales. Besides these “straight” retellings, a number of children’s and young adult writers draw knowingly on individual epics to create new stories (Adele Geras’s Troy and Ithaka, for example, are set against the backdrop of the Trojan War but deal largely with original characters), or to retell the old ones from a different perspective (such as Clemence McLaren’s Inside the Walls of Troy, which gives the Trojan War from the first-person perspectives of Helen and Cassandra). At its most general, children’s literature and fantasy in particular seems simply to have what Lisa Scally terms a “natural epic slant” (211). Many of the features identified with epic are equally applicable to children’s fantasy: a cosmic scale, a setting in the distant past, the presence of heroic and supernatural characters, plots pivoting on wars or quests (Martin 10), and even the “persistent motif of travel, symbolic of a search for identity” (Merchant “Epic in Translation” 246). The basic compatibility of the two genres, however, can also work in reverse, and if epic can become children's literature, there is also increasingly potential for children's literature to become epic. In her 2004 thesis on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Scally proposes that Pullman has written what Franco Moretti defines as a modern epic, and goes on to consider children's literature as one of the possible locations of epic in a “pluralistic and secular age” (212). Moretti argues that the ability of the epic to function as an “encyclopaedia of a society's own culture” (cited in Scally 212) was lost with the rise of scientific empiricism, which has left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and magic unable to be taken seriously and thus epic itself only able to survive as ironic affectation. The true epic impulse for Moretti resides in magical realism, a genre discussed also by Paul Merchant as he 7 similarly charts the effect on epic of the “sense of disintegration” and loss of old certainties following World War I (“Epic in Translation” 257; 262). Scally sees children’s literature as analogous to magical realism in its ability to engage with fantastic myths and serious themes in a manner not otherwise permitted in a fragmented literary landscape, and in its potential to revitalise an “impoverished postmodern adult culture” (222). The fact that children’s fantasy has a relationship with the epic tradition does not necessarily imply that children’s literature is a part of that tradition: as critical writers on the epic genre agree without exception, the epic is notoriously difficult to define, and texts can contain features generally considered “epic” without necessarily being epics themselves (and vice- versa) (Martin 10).

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