High fantasy born of myth and folklore, of the dark and the trees and the winter’s  cold, the flint blade’s edge and the secrets that are spoken only in dreams… 

Assassin, executioner, shapeshifter, and dutiful son of the undying Queen of the land called only the Forest, Mairran is haunted by the voice of an Immortal long   lost, who runs with him as a wolf in his dreams. More used to being the instrument of death than an arbiter of justice, he is dispatched by his mother to find the killer of an earl whose life was offered in an unsanctioned sacrifice to the  Forest. 

In an earlier age, the outlaw Lannesk swears an oath to follow the Grey Hunter and the Wild King, ancient guardians of the Forest, in a war against the invading dragon-kin and their sorcerer-priests, who seek to wake the great dragon long ago  bound in sleep beneath the Lake. Past and present tangle around troubled assassin  and mute outlaw, as a conspiracy of fell magic threatens the land and its people.

Evocative of a darker, grimmer McKillip, The Wolf and the Wild King is a brooding, lyrical new work from a master of epic fantasy.

The Wolf and the Wild King is available now. 

High Fantasy and The Wolf and the Wild King

by K. V. Johansen

I was talking to Tom Lloyd, trying to find a way of describing The Wolf and the Wild King, and growling about how, though epic fantasy is what I’m known for, “epic” didn’t fit this particular book. It wasn’t “sword and sorcery,” either. An assassin who is by turns human and wolf and raven, two outlaws on the run, a feral shapeshifting fox, dragons, an invading army led by sorcerer-priests whose magic is strengthened by human sacrifice, and yet also a quest for the unknown, the swordtheyn travelling with only the faithful retainer for companion, powers moving unseen, stirring in dreams, the wilderness brooding over all …

“High fantasy,” Tom said. 

“Yeah!” I said. “That sounds right.” And then, “But what exactly is meant by ‘high fantasy,’ anyway?”

Lloyd Alexander wrote an essay “High Fantasy and Heroic Romance,” published in Horn Book (the venerable American children’s literature journal) in 1971. Although the essay is mostly a defence of fantasy, and, like Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” and Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, is useful reading for anyone interested in the history of fantasy or needing to marshal arguments for just why fantasy is a vital, valuable, and necessary part of literature, it also suggests a definition of what high fantasy might be. Alexander writes, “heroic romance … is a form of high fantasy,” and says of it, “If anyone can be credited with inventing the heroic romance as we know it today — that is, in the form of a novel using epic, saga, and chanson de geste as some of its raw materials, it must be William Morris …” Thus “high fantasy,” for Alexander, encompasses more than “heroic romance,” the latter being only one form of it. Wikipedia, in its entry for “high fantasy” (accessed 9 Oct. 2024), actually uses “high fantasy” as a synonym for “epic fantasy.” The equation of “epic” and “high” in that definition seems to show that both are being used very broadly, to mean what Tolkien meant by secondary world fantasy — fantasy set in an imagined world, not our own; Alexander is using “high fantasy” in the same way, when he writes of “heroic romance” as a subgenre of that.

W.P. Ker, on the other hand, in his seminal work Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1896; 2nd Edn. 1908; all quotations are from the Project Gutenberg e-text) took Epic and Romance (the capital R of the latter serves to distinguish it from the modern genre romance meaning a love-story) as the two significant modes of medieval secular narrative. Epic, as Ker discusses it, is “a term freely applied to the old school of Germanic narrative poetry,” such as Beowulf, the Hildebrandslied, and the Nibelungenlied, and also the Icelandic sagas and Old French works such as the Chanson de Roland. Epic, for Ker, “implies some weight and solidity.” Romance, on the other hand, succeeded Epic; it is the chivalric romance that came into fashion in the twelfth century, and it carries “some notion of mystery and fantasy.” The character of Beowulf he offers as the type of one, and Gawain or Lancelot of the other. “No kind of adventure is so common or better told in the earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds,” Ker writes of Epic, attempting to find a single typical example of incident which can stand for the entirety of a genre. For Romance, in contrast, he gives “a knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances; a fight on foot with swords, … then, perhaps, recognition—the two knights belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest.” 

“Mystery and fantasy” — the knight riding alone through the forest versus the defence of the narrow place or the hall against high odds — this is the distinction that I felt was useful in thinking about why in my mind there is a definite difference between epic fantasy and high fantasy. Both, now, are usually secondary world fantasy; there is no reason they have to be, though “historical fantasy” would be the more accurate description and the more likely to be used in the case of such a story being set in what is recognizably a variant of our own world. Both epic and high will nearly always contain the fantastic or the mythic; magic in some form, the presence and actions of gods or other immortal beings, are usual, although magic may play a much smaller role in epic, or, very rarely, could even be completely lacking. Epic fantasy may be tragic, as much early medieval Epic was. Some threads of The Last Road are that. The modern epic fantasy does not necessarily have to be heroic in its mood — though if, as in some grimdark, it does not contain the heroic, it sets that absence in deliberate contrast to the heroic mode, an anti-heroic mirror-opposite of itself. There is at least an expectation of heroism, which can be subverted, as in Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns. The realism of presentation in contemporary epic fantasy may (but definitely need not) extend to the presentation of magic, of the non-human, the supernatural, though that is not a defining characteristic. The setting of an epic fantasy may be a single land but is likely to encompass a larger stage; politics, the conflicts of peoples and nations, religion as opposed to myth, are common elements — Gods of the Caravan Road, Ryan’s Covenant of Steel, Mike Brook’s God-King Chronicles, are recent examples, and this is probably the most common shape of secondary world fantasy these days. However, although the presence of an underlying magic and mystery not formalized and defined, of myth — of the numinous, perhaps only half-seen or half-remembered — may be found in modern epic fantasy, it is not a defining characteristic of epic, and may be completely absent. There, I suggest, is the most crucial difference. High fantasy demands it. 

Gawain going out from castle and community alone to his encounter with ancient mystery and magic in the wilderness, to make discovery of himself, is Romance, while Beowulf, with his comitatus, his loyal retainers, his sworn ship-companions at his side, travelling into a community, into the hall for its rescue and restoration, and onwards to his own kingship and tragic, heroic end in his land’s defence against the dragon, is Epic, in Ker’s argument. The term high fantasy, now that it seems to have fallen out of general use, with epic fantasy being applied to nearly all secondary world fantasy regardless of how well it suits, could be reclaimed for secondary world fantasy that, in its story and its tone, its sensibilities, is more akin to the medieval Romance of the twelfth century and later than to Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and the sagas. Not that every or indeed any novel needs to fit into a labelled box — far from it. The Lord of the Rings is most definitely at home with both Ker’s Epic and his Romance. However, it can be useful, when someone wants to know what sort of fantasy a thing is (because that’s what they’re in the mood to read today, or that’s what the friend for whom they’re trying to buy a gift enjoys), to be able to say, this one is high fantasy, and thus give someone an idea of where it falls on the spectrum of fantasy. Cherryh’s Fortress series is high fantasy, though one might also call it epic. Nearly all of McKillip’s fantasy, on the other hand, could be taken as the modern epitome of Ker’s Romance; she is the author who first comes to mind when thinking of an example of the sort of story to which this definition of high fantasy applies. Epic can be high and high can be epic, but one does not have to be the other. (Sword and sorcery, of course, is also secondary world fantasy, and usually focused on a few characters rather than the larger field, but it has a different flavour from what I would call high fantasy; its mysteries are there be solved, its magic exists to hinder or help the protagonist; action, rather than character, drives it.) High fantasy is shaped by a sense of the mysterious, by wonders, by magic and things unseen and unknown, perhaps unknowable, and more often than not driven by a focus on characters acting on their own within that world, rather than on characters driven by events that sweep over them like a rising flood and carry them into the heart of nation- or world-changing conflict — high fantasy is the quest rather than the campaign, but the quest exists for the journey, whether actual or inward, rather than its resolution. 

If the story in The Wolf and the Wild King were Lannesk’s alone, then I would have called it epic fantasy. His thread has more of an epic mood; outlaw and mute musician, he is drawn into events that change his land forever; he travels towards what seems like it may be a bleak, grim ending: defeat, a war lost, a land and culture overrun; it is a story of warbands and battles, the defence of a fortified settlement against invaders and fell sorcery. Mairran’s story, though, is different. Close-focused on the hero’s travels and adventures, but not a sword and sorcery quest with some object to be achieved, Mairran’s story fits better into Ker’s definition of Romance. There is the focus on the hero, a quest for some elusive thing that he is not even fully aware he is seeking; magic, mystery, the unknown and possibly unknowable — and there are monsters, of whom Mairran, in some people’s estimation, is one. Although all that can belong just as well to epic fantasy, Mairran’s story, at least in this first half of the duology, is not that of a land, or a war, but of a person. His mother’s assassin, executioner, and priest of sacrifice, he is at the centre of all that happens; he drives it by his own actions and choices; he is the thing that may, if he emerges alive, be most changed — though in that changing, he may effect change in his world. When that is combined with the fantastic element, the possibility of wonders, high fantasy, if taken to mean what Ker means by Romance, offers the best quick and easy way to tell a reader what sort of fantasy they are getting in The Wolf and the Wild King. There is no system of magic laid out, though magic is present in all the life of the Forest, sometimes accepted, sometimes feared, always acknowledged to exist, and the gods, the Mothers, Bright and Dark, Above and Below, are a distant thing, existing as acknowledged and respected powers but playing no part in the action. What is woven through the lives and minds of the characters and the world they inhabit, in both Lannesk’s story and in Mairran’s, is the fantastic and the mysterious. In Lannesk’s time, the non-human faylings and even the Immortals of the Forest may join in the ritual dancing that marks the changes of season; you may encounter them wandering in the woods, or while fleeing for your life; the ancient tracks of the Forest may change and shift and take you where you did not know you needed to be; legends may fight at your side. In Mairran’s day, the faylings and the Immortals may be gone, though they live on in memory, but the magic inherent in the land remains, there in the corner of your eye or breathing over your shoulder. A feral girl in the Forest is also a fox; Mairran is a wolf and a raven; a prince’s body can carry the scars of the ghost that speaks in his dreams. Immortals long thought gone may walk among the trees or ride the paths of the sky beneath the stars with a train of ghosts, and resurrect a new life from the bones of the dead. Comrades long separated by death may be reborn to try yet again to bring final defeat to an ancient enemy. Woven through all is the numinous presence of the Forest itself, a power revered by some and feared by others, uncodified, unexplained, but binding all the land together. Heroes, inhuman and immortal beings, a smaller stage, ancient mystery — most of all, the fantastic and the mysterious — this is the mode that we should revive the name of high fantasy to describe, and that’s where The Wolf and the Wild King, for all that it is also a story of invasion, siege, and battle, sits most comfortably.

The Wolf and the Wild King is available now. 

K.V. Johansen is the author of the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, beginning with the Sunburst-shortlisted Blackdog, as well as a number of books for children and teens and two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature. She has an M.A. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish. As Kris Jamison, she is the author of the novel Love/Rock/Compost. Her website can be found at www.kvj.ca and she is on Bluesky as @kvjohansen. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada.