The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman Read online

  Praise for The Mythological Dimensions of NEIL GAIMAN… “The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman is a must-have for anybody interested in the history and development of fantasy. Its fifteen intelligent, scholarly, and very readable essays examine Gaiman’s work in light of the literary, mythic, and pop-cultural influences that have shaped him as a writer as well as his own on-going influence on the field of fantastic literature.”

  —Delia Sherman, author of The Freedom Maze

  “A marvelously erudite and impressive compendium of insightful glosses to and upon mythmaker Neil Gaiman’s splendid work.”

  —Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, author of The Keltiad fantasy series and Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison “It is a brilliant conceit to view Gaiman’s work through such filters as Tolkien, Beowulf, and even Doctor Who. Through these divergent lenses, we gain a deeper understanding of his contribution to storytelling, myth, and the creation of worlds. It would be easy to simply touch upon influences; Dimensions goes deeper, as each chapter fills in a grand world view that gives us context to the man and his words. A tremendous insight into one of our best modern writers.”

  —Sam Balcomb, Rainfall Films, Director/Producer “The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman fills a key gap in the study of this prolific fantasist by exploring how Gaiman both recasts myth from many cultural traditions and creates his own new set of myths for the twenty-first century. The editors have compiled a broad array of incisive and entertaining essays spanning Gaiman’s varied career and touchstone works such as The Sandman graphic novel series, his seminal novels American Godsand Anansi Boys, his award-winning books for young adults such as The Graveyard Book and Coraline, his short fiction, and even his scripts for classic SF/fantasy films and television series such as Beowulf, Babylon 5, and Doctor Who. This volume situates Gaiman’s myth-making in the tradition of other writers from George MacDonald to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and examines how Gaiman finds his own voice and constructs his own unique mythic universes. This will be an important collection for all scholars, students, and fans of Gaiman and contemporary fantasy literature.”

  —David D. Oberhelman, Professor, Oklahoma State University Library; member of the Council of Stewards for the Mythopoeic Society

  Mythological Dimensions

  of

  NEIL GAIMAN Mythological Dimensions

  of

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Edited by Anthony Burdge Jessica Burke Kristine Larsen

  The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman

  Copyright© Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, Kristine Larsen April 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer.

  Printed in USA. First printing 2012, Kitsune Books. Second printing 2013, CreateSpace.

  Cover art by Catherine Sparsidis Disclaimers:

  The opinions expressed in individual essays are solely those of the authors and not necessarily those of the editors or the publisher.

  Dedication

  We dedicate this volume in loving memory of our friend & mentor

  Alexei Kondratiev

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments • 11

  Foreword by Matthew Dow Smith • 12

  Preface by Lynnette Porter • 15

  Title Abbreviation Conventions • 20

  The Authors and the Critics: Gaiman, Tolkien & Beowulf • 21 Jason Fisher The Problem with Bod: Examining the Evolution of Neil Gaiman’s Response to C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle in “The Problem of Susan” and The Graveyard Book • 35

  Chelsey Kendig

  Ravens, Librarians and Beautiful Ladies: Bakhtinian Dialogueism in the Gothic Mythology of Neil Gaiman and George McDonald • 49 Melody Green

  What Ever Happened to the Time Lord? Mythology and Fandom in Neil Gaiman’s Contributions to Unfolding Texts • 64

  Matthew Hills

  So Long and Thanks for all the Dents! A Guide for the Hitchhiker through the Worlds of Douglas Adams and Neil Gaiman • 81 Anthony S. Burdge

  Consorting with the Gods: Exploring Gaiman’s Pan-Pantheon • 94 Harley J. Sims

  Gaiman: The Teller of Tales and the Fairy Tale Tradition • 109 Leslie Drury

  The Best Things Come in Threes: The Triple Goddess in the Works of Neil Gaiman • 125

  Tony Keen

  Women’s Magic: Witches and the Works of Neil Gaiman • 141 Jessica Burke

  Fables and Reflections: Doubles, Duality and Mirrors in the Fiction of Neil Gaiman • 173

  Samuel Brooker

  Through a Telescope Backwards: Tripping the Light Fantastic in the Gaiman Universe • 186

  Kristine Larsen

  The Eternal Carnival of the Myth: Or How to Kill Myths and Live Happy • 199

  Camillo A. Formigatti

  “It Starts with Doors” Blurred Boundaries and Portals in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman • 208

  Tanya Carinae Pell Jones

  The End of the World as We Know It: Neil Gaiman and the Future of Mythology • 223

  Lynn Gelfand

  The Playful Palimpsest of Gaiman’s Sequential Storytelling • 239 Colin B. Harvey

  Contributors • 253

  Bibliography • 258

  Index • 279

  Acknowledgements 11

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Anthony, Jessica, and Kristine would like to thank our Editors at Kitsune Books, Anne Petty and Lynn Holschuh, for having faith in us to produce another collection that continues the publisher’s “Mythological Dimensions” series.

  The editors are indebted to Brie Alsbury, for her keen eye and for taking the time to review the manuscript.

  Anthony is appreciative for the help of Shield Bonnichsen, creator and webmaster of The Neil Gaiman Visual Bibliography. His assistance in providing scans of everything Neil Gaiman wrote about Douglas Adams, for magazines, was a tremendous boost in research material. Shield’s website is a must stop for all things Neil Gaiman.

  Anthony and Jessica would like to thank their dear friend Catherine Sparsidis, cover art illustrator. Cat is a long-time friend and artist for The North East Tolkien Society. Her art has graced numerous covers and pages of society journals, has been featured in the society calendar, and on various incarnations of the society website. We are devotees of her creative vision which serves to open portals between worlds.

  Lastly, and most importantly, the editors would like to thank Neil Gaiman. This collection is, of course, dedicated to his work, but the editors are indebted to Mr. Gaiman for spreading the word of our Call for Papers on his blog and in Twitter posts. It is his support for and interaction with his fan community that is admirable, and so very much appreciated.

  Now for that pint of Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar…

  FOREWORD

  The Muse in the Black Leather Jacket: A Kind of Introduction

  Matthew Dow Smith It’s nearly impossible to talk about author, screenwriter, comic book writer, poet, and occasional songwriter Neil Gaiman without touching on the subject of myths and legends in one way or another. Whether it’s the modern mythology of superheroes, the gods and monsters of ancient myths, or the folklore of cultures past and present, there is almost always a mythological component to Gaiman’s work, in any medium.

  Then there’s the fact that Neil Gaiman has become a bit of a myth in his own right, a legendary figure in Fantasy circles, with an everexpanding group of devoted fans who follow him from project to project, medium to medium, praising his work on their blogs and message boards, recommending his books to friends and strangers
alike. And when Gaiman makes public appearances—always in his trademark black leather jacket, black jeans, and black t-shirt—his fans present him with dolls and sculptures inspired by his stories, or paintings they’ve done of characters from his books, and speak of how being exposed to his work changed their lives.

  Many of these same fans have gone on to write stories of their own, some even becoming quite famous themselves; and it is no overstatement to say that few living authors have ever inspired so many others to write. His name is almost universally cited as a major influence by writers in the Urban Fantasy field, not to mention the wider Fantasy genre, the Science Fiction genre, and more than a few Mystery writers, as well.

  If not a god among other, far more mortal Fantasy writers, Neil Gaiman has at the very least become a kind of modern muse, lighting a spark of creativity in a surprisingly wide portion of his audience.

  Like many people, I first came across the name Neil Gaiman on the cover of a comic book—in my case, DC Comic’s The Sandman #8. This was early in his career, before the novels, before the television shows and movies, but even then, the signature Gaiman elements were in place. In the issue, we see the figure of Death re-envisioned as a young-looking woman who claims the newly dead with love and respect instead of gloom and menace. No black cloak, no scythe, just a Goth girl with pale skin, heavy eye makeup, and an ankh necklace. And instead of a slow build-up to a fight between spandex-clad superheroes, we are presented with a 22-page conversation between Death and her brother Dream that touches on the human condition and what it means to be alive.

  This was a new kind of mythology, built on classic themes and ideas, even characters, but filtered through the modern world in a way that made the drab, sometimes confusing reality around us seem a little more magical, if you only knew where to look. In its own way, it fulfilled the reverse function of traditional mythology. Instead of explaining how the world came to be, it showed us what the world would be like if all those myths were true. It would be a world much like our own, but somehow better, more interesting, more magical.

  That first dip into Gaiman’s blend of the mundane and the magical was only the beginning. As The Sandmanseries continued, Gaiman worked an ever increasing pantheon of gods and monsters into the narrative— creatures from Greek myths stood side by side with Norse gods like Thor and Odin, and even forgotten characters from the more recent mythology of the DC comic book universe found their way into the story, playing their own small part in a narrative that grew into an unabashed celebration of stories and myths on a grand scale I had never seen before.

  Gaiman carried this same almost promiscuous exuberance for mythologies well known and obscure with him as he moved from comics to television, then to books, and later into movies: sometimes placing ancient gods in modern settings, as in novels like American Gods and Anansi Boys; sometimes re-presenting our oldest stories in exciting and accessible new ways, as in his script with Roger Avary for the film, Beowulf; and even occasionally creating mythologies of his own, steeped in the folklore and fairy tales of our past, as in his novels Coraline and The Graveyard Book. You will find discussions of the mythological aspects to all these in the essays collected here in this book, along with examinations of Gaiman’s work as it relates to authors such as Tolkien, Lewis, and Lovecraft, as well as myths and fairy tales in general.

  I can’t pretend to be capable of producing the kinds of insights present in these essays, but even now, nearly twenty years after that first encounter with Neil Gaiman’s work in the pages of The Sandman, I find myself in awe of the staggering depth and breadth of his mythological knowledge and his ability to weave that knowledge into new, entertaining forms. It may not be a unique gift—I’m thinking here of Gaiman’s longtime friends, Kim Newman and Alan Moore, both of whom have tapped into modern and ancient mythologies to one degree or another in their work—but I would argue only Gaiman has cast so wide a net. One need only look at the penultimate Sandman storyline, The Wake, to see just how many cultures’ folklores Gaiman can appropriate at the same time. Even the shared universes of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton novels and Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, chock full as they are with characters from a wide array of pulp novels, movies, and comic books, seem almost limited in scope when compared with the eclectic pantheon of Gaiman’s American Gods.

  The question of which author can fit the greatest number of pantheons—whether characters from fiction or the gods and monsters of our ancient myths—into a single story aside, Neil Gaiman has clearly captured the imagination of a generation of fantasy readers, including the authors featured in this book. Did their first exposure to Gaiman’s work change their life? I wouldn’t dare speak for them, but I will speak for myself…

  By the time I had finished reading that issue of The Sandman all those years ago, my life really did change. I had decided to write and draw my own comic books.

  The muse in the black leather jacket had ignited another spark.

  —Matthew Dow Smith Delmar, NY 2012 PREFACE

  Magic and Dreams and Good Madness

  Lynnette Porter For New Year 2001, Neil Gaiman wished “magic and dreams and good madness” for his legions of readers. A little more than a decade later, his hope for us all in 2012 is that we “make mistakes….Make glorious, amazing mistakes”—because that means we are making something new: “you’re Doing Something.”1 The decade-separated wishes might seem incongruous, but then Gaiman’s work has never been limited to one culture, time period, franchise, story world, or medium. Why should the content of his New Year’s messages be any different?

  Yet Gaiman’s New Year’s wishes and plethora of published works all revolve around the very essence of what makes us human: the realm of the mind. Gaiman encourages us to think and to expand our range of experiences. Both dreams and mistakes determine who we are and how we respond to the glories and challenges of life. For all that he writes about death (or Death), Gaiman and his art are “amazing” and life affirming. Perhaps that is one reason why he has won so many awards—16 alone (including the Newberry Medal and Hugo Award) for The Graveyard Book and dozens more for Coraline, American Gods, and The Sandman series.

  He creates realistic modern characters: thinking, feeling beings who are called to respond in marvelous ways that they could never have predicted. They touch us because they are lively and force us to interact with them, whether they reside in worlds far way in an interplanetary future or a fictionalized terran past, whether they are human, hybrid, or immortal. Gaiman understands the modern mind and forces us to contemplate our lives and society. Instead of providing mere escapist entertainment, he holds up a mirror so we can discover ourselves.

  Modern man Gaiman also is a wizard who conjures new tales made from myth and folklore, not only from his own culture but myriad others around the world and throughout history. He dissects familiar fables and intriguingly re-combines their elements into new tales.

  Gaiman, like me and, I suspect, most people who read this book, is a fan of classic stories first discovered in childhood that continue to influence us as adults. He pays homage to the stories others have developed over the years but is still true to his style when asked to play in someone else’s cinematic or literary backyard. In 2011, for example, Gaiman not only wrote one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who episodes, “The Doctor’s Wife,” but he added a new layer to the series’ mythology that is compatible with the franchise’s nearly 50-year history of episodes. Similarly, Gaiman’s most recent pastiche of Sherlock Holmes (“The Case of Death and Honey”) and his 2004 story “A Study in Emerald” bookend the life of the venerable detective and allow us to consider Holmes, and his scientific methods, in a different way. Even if Gaiman had not revisited several of my favorite authors and fandoms, I would find his insights into the characters and myths that shape our culture fascinating, both from a fan and an educator’s perspective. Similarly, the following essayists offer us new ways to consider Gaiman’s works.

  For e
xample, Jason Fisher’s “The Authors and Critics: Gaiman, Tolkien, and Beowulf,” compares Gaiman’s and Roger Avary’s script for the 2007 film Beowulf with Tolkien’s interpretation of the epic poem. As a humanities teacher, I have used Beowulf the movie to introduce students to the title character and the art of adaptation. My students also study the poem and Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” both discussed in Fisher’s chapter. They then look at the ways that the Gaiman/ Avary script presents images found in the poem but that also are seen in another adaptation—Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. Just as Tolkien’s descriptions of the Rohirrim reflect Beowulf ’s influence, so does the 2007 film resonate not only with the original epic, but Tolkien’s stories and their adaptations, as well as Gaiman’s understanding of the historic text and mythology in general. After reading Fisher’s chapter, I will include it as a text when my students next study Beowulf and adaptation. In this way, this volume’s essayists analyzing Gaiman’s themes and methods, authors and adaptors of myth (like Tolkien and Gaiman), and I (along with, other educators) form a continuing cycle of passing on ancient stories and adapting them for the next generation.

  New interpretations of mythic characters and themes are a cultural necessity, something that Gaiman well understands. As Colin B. Harvey notes in the final chapter (“The Playful Palimpsest of Gaiman’s Sequential Storytelling”), Gaiman excels in the “continuance and transformation of myth,” which, as Lynn Gelfand reminds us in her chapter (“The End of the World as We Know It”), “must fit the changing social, economic, and technological requirements of a society.” Gaiman continues a myth by transforming mythic beings so they can live in our world, or we in theirs, but he also meets those technological requirements of making myth accessible. He tells stories through a variety of media—printed comic books, graphic novels, stories, children’s books, novels, and poems as well as television, film, and even song.