Blogs by Frank P Ryan
Returning to my epic fantasy
6/17/2015 10:38:52 AM
One reviewer accused me of being influenced by Tolkein throughout my first fantasy novel, The Snowmelt River
Okay - I was certainly influenced by Tolkein. I loved his work, which I only read in my forties. I was also accused of being influenced by Lewis, whose work I have never particularly liked and most certainly would not have influenced me. Tolkein was the master who influenced a lot of us but I have never written about elves or orcs or very much about magicians - and there is only one dwarf in my series, Qwenqwo Cuatzel, who wasn't taken from Tolkein but from Irish legend of the Fir Bolg, which means "the little people", who were said to inhabit Ireland before the Celts and about whom there is plenty of Irish legend. Was I influenced by Irish legend? Yes, far more than by any other source. I grew up surrounded by it, breathing the very air of Celtic magic from childhood, thanks to my storyteller father. The magic mountain, Slievenamon (in English, the mountain of women), was visible from every vantage in the quaint ancient town of Clonmel, where I spent my childhood. The great river, Suir, which joined the Nore and the Barrow as three sisters in the estuary of Waterford, flowed by my front door. Was I influenced by all that? Of course I was.
If anybody accused me of being influenced by Tolkein or Lewis in the second book of my fantasy, The Tower of Bones, I'd frankly be surprised. If they accused me of the same influence in Books 3 and 4, The Sword of Feimhin and The Return of the Arinn, which is the last of the series, I'd fall down in astonishment.
In Book 4 the Tyrant of the Wastelands, who is subjecting the strange genius girl, Penny Postlethwaite, to a series of psychological and mental seductions, admits that he, as a master of dark magic, is confronting her world - a world he interprets as one that venerates machines - to a final conflict of dreadful magic against the worst our war leaders can throw at him. And boy do they!
When, as I hope, some of you will read these last two books, you are at liberty to come back to me and tell me if these were influenced by Tolkein, or Lewis, or anybody else at all other than my own peculiar subconscious derived from my own life and creativity.
What fun we shall have on the journey!
All best wishes,
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