Katherine Rundell’s Fantastic Four

Katherine Rundell grew up reading about mythical creatures—Minotaurs and trolls, dragons and unicorns—in books by writers like J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Edith Nesbit, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philip Pullman. With the publication of “Impossible Creatures” (2024), the first book in her new children’s fantasy series, Rundell stakes her claim among these literary giants. Rundell, whose next book, “The Poisoned King,” comes out this fall, recently sent us her thoughts on four works set in remarkably fantastical worlds. Her comments have been edited.

Le Morte d’Arthur

by Thomas Malory

Malory’s prose telling of the Arthurian legend is a thing of spectacular sweep, thrill, and sadness. Across its fantastical chapters stalk the wizard Merlin; Arthur’s half sister, Morgan le Fay, with her black magic; and Arthur himself, wielding Excalibur. The book ends with a battle in which Arthur and his illegitimate son, Mordred, who has unlawfully seized the throne, mortally wound each other; its pages are covered in blood and glory.

By far the most quoted lines are these: “What? seyde Sir Launcelot, is he a theff and a knyght? And a ravyssher of women? He doth shame unto the Order of Knyghthode, and contrary unto his oth. Hit is pyté that he lyvyth!” The identity of Thomas Malory is disputed, but the most likely candidate is Malory of Newbold Revel. This would mean that the author of one of the finest stories in English was himself a rapist and a robber, a cruel thug who, just two decades before completing the manuscript, lay in wait with a gang to attempt to murder the Duke of Buckingham. Many have tried to square away the problem, but it seems unmovably true: a man may write a text that minutely investigates the nature of goodness, and act basely.

Orlando Furioso

by Ludovico Ariosto

Ariosto opens his epic poem with the declaration that he will tell of “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” It is not false advertising: it’s a story that is comical, tragical-historical, polemological, ironical, and cosmological. The tale, begun in 1500, is of Charlemagne’s liegeman Orlando, who has gone mad, furioso, for love. Orlando’s friend Astolfo travels to the moon to find Orlando’s lost wits. There, he finds everything ever lost on Earth—ladies’ charms, princes’ favors, peoples’ minds—stored in bottles. The poem is part love quest, part account of Italy’s battles; in places profoundly serious, in places satiric. Amid it all, Ariosto invented the hippogriff:

No empty fiction wrought by magic lore,
But natural was the steed the wizard pressed;
For him a filly to griffin bore;
Hight hippogryph. In wings and beak and crest,
Formed like his sire, as in the feet before;
But like the mare, his dam, in all the rest.
Such on Riphaean hills, though rarely found,
Are bred, beyond the frozen ocean’s bound.

Created through the union of a mare and a griffin, the hippogriff is part horse, part eagle, and, Ariosto announces, capable of flying to the moon.

The Earthsea Cycle

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Earthsea” is proof that you can write an ethically and philosophically serious book about magic and dragons, and entrance teen-agers with it. It is a fearsomely beautiful thing, the world Le Guin built, one in which violently maimed girls may transform into dragons, and your shadow pursues you across oceans. The series follows Ged, first to the School of Magic, on the Island of Roke, then through a dark labyrinth and into death itself.

Le Guin has strong claim to have been the first to fully imagine a wizarding school; she wrote, of J. K. Rowling, “When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school . . . she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.” Le Guin was a true original, and she showed what is possible. One of my characters in “Impossible Creatures” is named Irian Guinne, in her honor.

The Chronicles of Narnia

by C. S. Lewis

In a 1956 essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis wrote that he loved the fairy tale for “its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas.’ ” Narnia is in many ways a fairy tale, a landscape that you must fill in on your own. Lewis offers none of the painstaking rigor of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Father Christmas coexists with fauns; Narnia has undergone a hundred years of snow but still has plentiful supplies of honey, tea, and oranges. But this never worried me as a child, because I was too busy glorying.

Narnia taught me about the yearning that a book can conjure, for food and places and a specific texture of feeling. Lewis’s vision of perfection is so bodily; Narnia introduces you to the glory of boundless and unimaginable love and, with the Beavers, to “a great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll.” The books are an invitation to delight. When I came to write fantasy for children, I wanted to cultivate a feeling inspired by Lewis—joy awaits you throughout your life, and the time to begin is now.