Mythopoeic writings have the capacity to carve out space for new visions, radical thought, and social change. Join Rivera Sun for a roundtable social change. Join Rivera Sun for a roundtable discussion on how this has impacted us as readers (or writers) in our own lives. We’ll also explore how far these writings can push the envelope before society starts pushing back. Where are the boundaries that can’t be crossed, and how can mythopoeic stories help shift those boundaries on behalf of social change? What role does perceived market demand or pushback play in how publishers either constrain or support stories that help us imagine a new world into existence?

In this presentation I explore why Tolkien singled out for particular appreciation the Brothers Grimm fairy tale ​“The Juniper Tree,” which Tatar (Annotated Grimm 209) has called ​“the most shocking of all fairy tales.” In ​“On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien described its effect on him as follows: ​“The beauty and horror of ​“The Juniper Tree” … with its exquisite and tragic beginning, the abominable cannibal stew, the gruesome bones, the gay and vengeful bird-spirit coming out of a mist that rose from the tree, has remained with me since childhood; and yet always the chief flavor of that tale lingering in the memory was not beauty or horror, but distance and a great abyss of time.… Without the stew and the bones … that vision would largely have been lost.… Such stories … open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe” (OFS 56). Tolkien is saying that his main response to ​“The Juniper Tree” was an experience of enchantment rather than horror, but that horror was a necessary element in producing this enchantment. By thinking about why Tolkien focused on the cannibalism (My Father He Ate Me) rather than the murder (My Mother She Killed Me) in this fairy tale, and investigating anthropological and psychological understandings of cannibalism, I will develop the idea that Tolkien’s appreciation of this fairy tale stemmed from his experience of enchantment tangling at its edges with horror and the uncanny. In his response to ​“The Juniper Tree,” like in much of his legendarium, Tolkien situated himself at a complex, ambiguous balance point between communion and alienation, between joy and loss.

Garcia y Robertson’s The Spiral Dance begins as a historical novel set in the time of the rebellion led by the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Westmoreland against Elizabeth I in 1569, told from the point of view of Anne, Countess of Northumberland. It is also an epic or heroic fantasy; besides Lady Anne, two of its main characters are a werewolf named Jock and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Their adventures carry them not only to the highlands of Scotland but to the realm of Faerie. The author’s theme is that one must lose all one has before one can be truly transformed — or, to put it another way, before one can discover one’s true self. It may be read as an extended meditation on the nature of reality and illusion, and the discovery of true identity. Thus it is a classic Quest tale. Like Bilbo Baggins, Anne goes ​“there and back again,” and returns changed. So have heroes from Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Sir Gawain to Luke Skywalker. But the author’s original contribution to this genre is his conception of Faerie. We are accustomed to think of the ordinary world as real, and of Faerie as the land of illusion. But in Garcia y Robertson’s fictional universe, the ordinary world is a place of illusion, where things are seldom what they seem, and Faerie is the realm of reality, where illusion is impossible, and all things are seen for what they really are. In this paper I shall explore how the author uses this conceit to pursue his theme, with references to J.R.R. Tolkien and Sir Thomas of Ercildoun. I hope to show how this master storyteller gives his readers a rollicking tale of warfare and witchcraft, which is also an extended spiritual meditation on identity, illusion, and reality.