Mythic Fantasy

What it is

Mythic fantasy is modern, authored fiction built directly from mythology. It comes in three main forms. There is the retelling, which revisits a known myth from a new angle, often through a figure the original ignored — the witch Circe, Morgan le Fay, the monster. There is the transplant, which carries old gods and heroes into the present or into recorded history, where they must live among us. And there is mythopoeia, the making of new myth, in which an author invents a mythology with the cadence and weight of a real one.

Terri Windling and Charles de Lint coined "mythic fiction" for their own contemporary, folklore-steeped work, and it remains the label most often used for the first two forms. Tolkien's poem "Mythopoeia," written for C. S. Lewis, gave the third its name. Catherynne M. Valente later coined "mythpunk" (2006) for postmodern, subversive takes on folklore.

Origins

Every age has retold its myths; Ovid and Virgil were remixers. The modern form grew from the 19th-century rediscovery of national mythologies — the Eddas, the Kalevala, Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of The Mabinogion — and from writers who treated those sources as living fiction. William Morris recast Norse saga as English verse. Lord Dunsany invented a pantheon outright in The Gods of Pegāna (1905).

Evangeline Walton's first Mabinogion novel appeared in 1936 as The Virgin and the Swine; it sold poorly until The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series reissued it in 1970 as The Island of the Mighty, prompting Walton to complete the tetralogy. By then the form had found a children's audience: Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–68) reworked Welsh legend, and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1965–77) wove Celtic and Arthurian myth into modern England. Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword (1954) had already given adults a brutal Norse tragedy of elves, trolls and a changeling.

Evolution

J. R. R. Tolkien was the great mythopoeist. Middle-earth began as an attempt to give England a body of legend of its own, and The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1977, is that mythology in its purest form. The Mythopoeic Society (1967) and its awards, given from 1971, institutionalized his idea of fiction "in the spirit of the Inklings."

From the 1980s the genre broadened. Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984) imagined an English forest that manifests archetypal heroes from the collective unconscious. Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics and American Gods (2001) set gods loose in modern life, overlapping with Urban Fantasy. Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief (2005) made Greek myth a children's bestseller series, and Madeline Miller's Circe (2018) led a wave of retellings from mythic women's viewpoints.

Games have long been mythic. Greg Stafford's Glorantha, the world of RuneQuest, is a mythopoeic creation in which gods, cults and the "HeroQuest" into myth are part of play. D&D's Deities & Demigods (1980) statted real pantheons. FromSoftware's Elden Ring (2022) had its backstory mythology written by George R. R. Martin.

Video games have become some of the most visible mythic retellings. Sony's God of War (2005) put a Spartan warrior among the Olympians and later moved its hero to the Norse myths, and Supergiant Games' Hades (2020) made escaping the Greek underworld a repeatable run, built from the family quarrels of the gods. Both treat the myths as source material to be reinterpreted, the defining move of the genre.

How to tell it apart

• Mythic fantasy vs. Myth & Epic: myth and epic are the traditional sources, shaped over centuries by many tellers; mythic fantasy is one modern author working with them. Beowulf is myth-and-epic; John Gardner's Grendel (1971) retelling it from the monster's side is mythic fantasy.
• vs. Fairy-Tale Fantasy: mythic fantasy works with gods, heroes and cosmology; fairy-tale fantasy with folktale figures and domestic magic.
• vs. Arthurian Fantasy: Arthurian fantasy is a specialized branch with its own continuous story-world.
• vs. High / Epic Fantasy: a high fantasy may contain invented gods, but it prizes internal consistency and plot. Mythopoeic work, like The Silmarillion, prizes the voice of legend over the logic of worldbuilding.
• vs. Historical Fantasy: historical fantasy is anchored in a real period and its politics; mythic fantasy is anchored in the myth itself, and may happen in any time or none.

Where to start

• The Chronicles of Prydain — Welsh myth as a boy's coming of age.
• The Broken Sword — Norse tragedy, pitiless and beautiful.
• The Silmarillion — invented mythology at its most ambitious.
• Mythago Wood (Robert Holdstock, 1984) — myth grown in an English wood.
• Circe (Madeline Miller, 2018) — the modern retelling at its most popular.