by Mariano Martín Rodríguez
High fantasy is today one of the most widely popular genres of fiction. Its essential feature is the creation, for fictional purposes, of an integral secondary world fully distinct from the phenomenal or primary world in which we live. This creation is “integral,” that is, it is entirely the fruit of imagination, of fantasy. Consequently, although it may be inspired by our global mythic, folkloric and literary heritage, its secondary worlds are the result of a complete invention and, therefore, have their own ontological order and their own laws, which may or may not coincide with the natural laws of our material universe. Unlike other genres such as fairy tales, the creation of these internal laws of the secondary world in high fantasy is based on the intrinsic modern preference for verisimilitude in fiction. Accordingly, it is founded on a rational and scientific conception of the universe, derived from the methods, practices and discourses of contemporary Humanities. The scientific study of languages, literatures, history, myths and rites is what inspires the shape of the invented secondary worlds of high fantasy. These worlds usually look ancient and legendary, as well as pagan, because they imply a mythopoetic development congenial with the mythic tenets of paganism, rather than with the theological stance of most monotheistic religions. Tolkien fully understood this deeply pagan nature of high fantasy. This is why he eschewed both theology and its fictional expression, allegory, when conceiving and practicing his subcreations, as Robert E. Howard, Ursula K. Le Guin and other canonical writers of high fantasy also did.
But when and how exactly did high fantasy originate? We refer, of course, to its concept and practice, not to its name, which appeared relatively late. Scholars often put the origin of science fiction well before the invention of the label of science fiction proper. This is usually estimated to coincide with the mutation of mentality caused by the rapid acceleration of technological progress as a result of the industrial revolution since the first third of the 19th century. Similarly, high fantasy predates its labeling as such. Although its development was limited before the period around 1900, when exotic and sometimes invented landscapes were favored in literature and the arts, its birth took place much earlier. It was at a site and time almost as specific as that famous Geneva evening of the summer of 1816 in which Mary Shelley presented to her friends the story that would give rise to her pioneering science-fiction novel titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
In the summer of 1825, two students of Theology at the German University of Tübingen named Ludwig Amandus Bauer and Eduard Mörike started a close intellectual friendship, nourished by common readings and cultural concerns. This friendship lasted their whole lives, as their letters attest. Bauer would eventually become famous in his country for a universal history in six volumes intended for a wide readership. Mörike was soon to begin a successful literary career, both in prose and in verse, which earned him great renown and a solid place among the German Romantic narrators and poets. Several of his poems even inspired composers of the musical genre called Lied, such as Hugo Wolff’s opus 46, his musical version of Mörike’s “Gesang Weylas” or ‘Weyla’s Song.’ Weyla’s voice evokes a sacred island called Orplid, but few concrete details about it are offered in this very short poem of just eight lines, which does not even tell who the eponymous person might be. It would seem that Mörike assumed that both Orplid and Weyla must had been familiar to his readers and listeners. However, the first line, which reads in the original “Du bist Orplid, mein Land” (‘you are Orplid, my country’), suggests that this is rather a personal world, and indeed so it is. Scholars who set out to elucidate the mystery of this famous little poem soon found out that Orplid was, in fact, an invention, and that neither Weyla nor Orplid had ever existed in this material world of ours. They also learnt that both featured in other longer and more detailed works by Mörike, and also by his friend Bauer. Reading those works, as well as both friends’ correspondence, shows how significant Orplid was for them. This significance was not limited to their individual lives, though: it also marked the birth of high fantasy.
In a letter from Bauer to Mörike dated in June 27, 1826, the former asked the latter on which day in the summer of 1825 they have begun discussing Orplid, Mörike’s invented land. Bauer only remembered that it must have been a few days after July 25, when together they projected and mapped the island that Mörike had called Orplid, as the first sketch of a country and a civilization that they would jointly create, or rather subcreate, if we prefer to use Tolkien’s term for the kind of literary creation consisting of envisioning fully imaginary secondary worlds for fictional purposes. Bauer’s question about the exact date of ‘Orplid’s birth’ (‘Orplids Geburt,’ as he put it) was prompted by his wish to celebrate it every year. Mörike did not remember the exact date or did not want to tell him, perhaps because he did not give it as much importance as Bauer, who might had felt that Orplid’s birth was a cultural milestone, not just a biographical one. In the same letter, however, Bauer told Mörike of a play that he had planned to write to be set on the island of Orplid, featuring as its main character a certain king Maluff, whose name is as invented as that of the island itself. In 1828 Bauer finally published a long romantic drama entitled Der heimliche Maluff (The Secretive Maluff). Shortly afterwards he wrote Orplid’s letzte Tage (The Last Days of Orplid), but he did not see it published, since he died before it appeared in 1847. By then Eduard Mörike had already published Der letzte König von Orplid (The Last King of Orplid), a shadow play included as an independent work in his novel Maler Nolten (Nolten the Painter, 1832). Mörike would later return to Orplid in his enigmatic heroic-comic narrative poem “Märchen vom sichern Mann” (The Tale of the Man of Certainty), which he published together with “Gesang Weylas” in a volume of Gedichte (Poems, 1838). However, as that story of the ‘ever certain man’ takes place in an afterlife combining Christian features, such as the devil, as well as other elements from the mythology of Orplid in a rather vague way, the poem does not contribute much to the knowledge of Orplid as a whole. Only the above-mentioned plays allow us to describe Orplid as the first full example of a high fantasy venue, as well as of a saga.
This statement might surprise those who believe that high fantasy is, above all, a cultural product originating in the Anglophone world that writers in other languages would imitate rather than develop in an original way. This idea could be sustained, if at all, for the period after the launch by Lin Carter in 1969 of the marketing label of (high) fantasy through his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. However, a multilingual and comparative look at Western literatures reveals that this label is comparatively recent. It was fully unknown to the greatest modern classics of high fantasy such as Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, whose high fantasy works were labelled as such by critics and booksellers long after they had been written. Similarly, quite a few writers from continental Europe and Latin America independently produced similar fictions to those by Howard and Tolkien both in their time and long before them. If everyone seems satisfied with the later, maybe anachronistic, labelling as fantasy of Howard’s Hyborian stories and of Tolkien’s Middle-earth novels, there is no reason why we should not also label retrospectively as high fantasy the non-Anglophone works preceding them and presenting the same essential literary features. This is especially the case of Bauer and Mörike’s Orplid, a subcreation not unlike those of Howard and Tolkien, as we shall now see.
Der heimliche Maluff narrates the complicated and at times confusing intrigues of Maluff—the king of one of Orplid’s nations, the so-called schmetten (a further invented name)—against Ulmon, the ruler of a city also called Orplid. This city, located in the center of a lake, is the seat of the most powerful kingdom in the whole island, as well as the location of its main temple, where the different gods of Orplid are worshipped by its whole population. Orplid is located somewhere in the South Seas, between Australia and South America. The racial and ethnic background of its inhabitants is not mentioned. We can know only for certain that they are not to be counted among any known populations from our primary world, Polynesian or otherwise. The idea of their existence far from any contact with any foreigners could have been inspired, however, by Rapa Nui islanders from before their contact with European explorers, since all in Orplid believed they are the only human beings in the world.
In addition to these two kingdoms in conflict, there existed in Orplid a republic of free fishermen and a tribe of plundering nomads, the hynnus. Maluff had tried to enter the city of Orplid and seize it by surprise, but had been prevented from doing so by the supernatural rising of the cliffs that surrounded it, which turned Orplid into an inexpugnable fortress thanks to its supernaturally heightened natural walls. However, after having managed to spread discontent among the inhabitants of the island against the government of Ulmon, Maluff ends up defeating and killing the rival king in a pitched battle, after which the victor abdicates his acquired throne to his son and heir Quiddro. That turns out to be the reason why he had secretly undertaken his shrewd political maneuvering, while everybody believed that his motives were related instead to his unquenchable thirst for power.
A thousand years later, according to Bauer’s Orplid’s letzte Tage, the tables have turned. Another king of the Ulmon dynasty of Orplid has defeated the schmetten and imprisoned their king, but his imperialist ambition has not yet been satisfied. After learning that the sea has brought to the island some pieces of driftwood inscribed with characters unknown in Orplid, he decides to assemble a great expedition to explore and conquer the territories now believed to exist beyond the island’s shores. Wam-a-Sur, one of the priests of Orplid’s supreme sun god Sur ascends the mountain seat of this deity to tell him about Ulmon’s plans. Sur then informs him that he will not tolerate Ulmon’s colonial plans. Instead, Orplid will be wholly destroyed by a huge storm. As a punishment, only King Ulmon himself will survive for a thousand years. According to Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid, towards the end of that period, long after the fall of Orplid’s civilization by divine decree, a ship arrives on the island carrying lower and middle class unarmed Europeans, thus showing that their intent is not militaristic. After they settle among the empty ruins of the city of Orplid, they learn of the survival of Ulmon, who walks the island like a lonely ghost with the fairy called Thereile, his unrequited lover, at his heels. Ulmon, who only wants to find eternal rest, flees from Thereile and finally disappears into the waters of a lake. Orplid perishes for good together with him. We can only hazard a guess at how the knowledge about the ancient history of Orplid was acquired. Later European settlers and scholars might have found and deciphered its documents, since Orplid’s kingdoms seemed to be highly literate. In fact, they had far more in common with ancient pagan cultures from Europe and Asia than with contemporary Oceanian islanders. Orplid even resembled one of the Hyborian nations in Howard’s Conan stories…
However, Mörike’s Orplid drama cannot be considered a fully-fledged example of high fantasy. Customs and characters from the primary world coexist there with the legendary King Ulmon and with beings taken from European folklore such as fairies and giants. The importance in the work of these latter beings suggests that Mörike’s Orplid was still indebted to the Kunstmärchen or literary fairy tale genre, preventing him from advancing along the path of scientific plausibility that, on the other hand, Ludwig Bauer followed in his two Orplid dramas. Both of them entirely lack fairy-tale features. Even the intervention of Orplid’s gods as characters in Orplid’s letzte Tage does not preclude that plausibility, since they are an integral and constitutive part of that secondary world, unlike those beings from European folklore featuring, somewhat incongruously, in Der letzte König von Orplid, although Mörike himself felt that an explanation was warranted. Before reproducing the text of his drama in his novel Maler Nolten, an embedded explanatory foreword states that the subordinate world of elves, fairies and elves was not excluded (die untergeordnete Welt von Elfen, Feen und Kobolden war nicht ausgeschlossen) from Orplid. These beings are not mentioned at all, however, by Bauer in his own foreword to Der heimliche Maluff, where he told his prospective readers a similar story about the invention of Orplid, but with significant differences from Mörike’s later report with regard to his literary and personal approach. While Möricke would suggest that Orplid was a sort of poetic pastime and he even downgraded its originality by pointing to Homeric deities as forerunners to his own invented ones, Bauer emphasized everything that made the island and its civilization a consistent and credible fictional new (sub)creation. Moreover, he rendered it all the more believable by sistematically establishing its geography, politics, religion and history.
In any case, the explanations offered by both authors about Orplid demonstrate that they had first devised it as a complete fictional world even before writing any specific works set there, in a way similar to how Tolkien had conceived his Middle-earth, with its geography, myths, languages, customs, civilizations, geopolitics, chronology and history before using all that pre-existing material in The Lord of the Rings. Unlike Tolkien, however, Bauer did not tell the myths of the island, but only described its pantheon. This was then a great innovation. Well before Lord Dunsany concocted the myths of The Gods of Pegāna (1905), Bauer implied that Orplid had its own system of gods by mentioning in the foreword to Der heimliche Maluff their names, all of them invented, as well as describing their function in the mythical cosmos of Orplid and some of the rites practiced by its inhabitants to honor them. Bauer also put on the stage the gods themselves in Orplid’s letzte Tage, where their intervention may recall how beings endowed with divine or semi-divine powers shape the fate of humans in the Tolkienian universe of Arda and Middle-earth. All of this was revolutionary, since these gods were imagined for purely fictional purposes, unlike William Blake’s private and mostly symbolic pantheon.
Bauer was also a pioneer when it comes to conceiving the mundane dimension of Orplid. His foreword to his first Orplid drama fully informed about its geography and related geopolitics, of its landscape and how it had defined the position of each polity (a republic of fishermen, the royal city and seat of the centrally located and hegemonic kingdom of Orplid, the rival kingdom whose sovereign is Maluff, etc.), as well as their military, cultural and political relationships. In this way, Bauer strived to give the impression of a global historical reality of which the staged conspiracies and fights are simply an episode. All this contributes to providing Orplid with a plausibility familiar to contemporary readers. This even extends to Bauer’s hypothesis about the real existence of Orplid, as if the positive knowledge of the island had somehow come to Mörike and this had shared some of its documentary evidence with his friend and Bauer had just presented it to the readers of his first drama.
Bauer also tells there about Mörike having drawn a map of Orplid, a map that is unfortunately now lost. Fantastic cartography was not new, since it already appeared, for example, in the famous Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, where the author also invented the names, manners and institutions of his fantastic isles. However, Mörike and Bauer’s Orplid is not an island like those visited by Gulliver and other imaginary voyagers, whose fictional travelogues Tolkien excluded from high fantasy in his 1957 speech on fairy-stories, because “such report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them.” In this regard, while Mörike’s Der letzte König von Orplid is still linked to the well-established genre of the ‘imaginary voyage,’ Bauer’s two dramas began a new genre, due to the wholeness and full independence of their secondary world from any intrusion of the primary one, including by contemporary travelers such as Gulliver. He actually specified in his foreword that Orplid existed as a civilization vor Zeiten, that is, formerly or once, literally “before time,” thus fictionally transporting us to a bygone age. This is similar, among others, to Howard’s Hyborian civilization, since it is located on Earth though in a distant time; crucially this is a closed time, as Mörike also claimed about Orplid when he applied to it the adjective abgeschlossen in the original text. Following the destruction of Orplid’s civilization with its inhabitants, nothing survived but the unfortunate King Ulmon, and only for a limited, though lengthy period of a thousand years. After Ulmon’s disappearance, Orplid fully becomes a legendary land. Its ruins remain mute until they are revealed by Mörike’s and Bauer’s mythopoetic imagination as a thing of a past that could only be explored through fiction.
Orplid was conceived as such, without any other discernible purpose and it has thus the whole set of features that we are used to recognize in high fantasy for the very first time. Atlantis has made many believe in the possibility of ancient, bygone imaginary civilizations, but Plato did not separate his secondary fictional world of Atlantis from the past of the primary world: Atlanteans had allegedly fought the very real Athenians and had been defeated by them, while both nations worshipped the known Greek gods, instead of any invented ones as the Orplid nations had. Furthermore, the inhabitants of the island imagined by Mörike and Bauer did not even know that there were human societies other than their own and, after they had come to suspect that others could exist, they were simply wiped off by their gods. Therefore, Bauer at least underlined in clear terms that Orplid was not, and could not be, related to our positive, primary world, unlike the secondary worlds of both the imaginary voyage popular during the Ancient Regime and later portal fantasies such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. If we add to that the extensive use by Mörike, and especially Bauer, of the scientific method and discourses of contemporary Humanities in order to confer materiality and rational plausibility to their creation, we can have now a clear picture of how those genial friends invented high fantasy when they started discussing Orplid a bright summer day exactly two hundred years ago.
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