I am not the best qualified person to list examples of tropes in Quest Fantasies because I tend not to remember a lot about novels unless I really love them. So there is a marked paucity of examples here, but I hope you enjoy thinking through them in spite of my shoddy research!
Before I get to some of the fun tropes, I'd like to highlight a less obvious one brought up by W.A. Senior in his chapter on "Quest Fantasies" in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature:
The structuring characteristic of quest fantasy is the stepped journey: a series of adventures experienced by the hero and his or her companions that begins with the simplest confrontations and dangers and escalates through more threatening and perilous encounters.
That was some new terminology for me, the stepped journey, the idea of a progression from simpler to more complex, from frightening encounters to the more horrifying, all-consuming terrors of ultimate commitment to the quest.
Senior goes on the describe some tropes of Quest Fantasy and his list generated a bit of nostralgia for me. Perhaps you can relate.
The average person as the unwilling hero. Bilbo Baggins. Thomas Covenant. They were huge in my childhood and teen years.
The mage or wisdom figure. I loved not only Gandalf, but before him I loved Ogion (Ged's mentor in A Wizard of Earthsea). Did I mention Obi-Wan?
The importance of companions. The Fellowship!
The acquisition of knowledge and the discovery of self. Perhaps my favorite theme.
The crux of choice and action. I love a character who struggles and wins over their own fears, such as Ged defeating the demon which embodies his own dark side.
The rejection of passivity. This is the stuff heroes are made of.
The wonder of the secondary world and its organic, sentient nature. I think of Lothlorien and Rivendell (places I greatly desire to see) and in a different way of The Land which Thomas Covenant encounters with its healing magic and earth powers.
The deep mythic past of history and legends. Who embodied this more than Tolkien, whose legendarium has generated The Histories of Middle-Earth?
The mixture of peoples. I was enthralled with hobbits, elves (of various overlapping kindreds), dwarves, and men. Playing Dungeons & Dragons in my teenage years cemented this all the more.
The rules and limits of magic. A topic for which Brandon Sanderson has become quite well-known.
The machinations of the Dark Lord. Sauron, of course, and Lord Foul, and many others. In one strange example (I think it is Sanderson's Elantris) the Dark Lord had already won long ago.
The reality of evil. Philosophically speaking, evil has no independent existence, but is a perversion of good (as darkness is absence of light and cold is absence of heat). But in the social and political sense, yes, it is very real.
The final crescendo of battle and triumph. When the Dark Tower falls, your heart leaps.
Comments