I don’t suspect anyone would argue with the notion that one role of imaginative fiction is to provide readers with an opportunity to escape the everyday. Professors might sniff at escapist fiction, but there is good and not-so-good escapist stuff. The good stuff…

J.R.R. Tolkien famously crafted his own languages and myths. His chum C.S. Lewis cobbled together Narnia out of bits borrowed from hither, thither, and Christianity. Narnia fascinated me as a child but lost my interest long before Middle-Earth. I attribute that in part to more vividly drawn characters (with Eustace the principal exception in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Tolkien also offered a more disturbing villain and heroes without access to a (lionesque) deus ex machina.

He also offered a haunting vision of a utopia under threat. I’m not sure it’s fair to say good imaginative fiction is to required to present a vision of a world we think superior to our own. But that notion has never been far from my mind all these years I’ve been thinking about the world of Northern Arcadia.