When Gods are Absent from Fantasy: Religion and Spiritual Experience in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan and The Sarantine Mosaic. Published at www.academia.edu
Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Bialystok University, Department of Philology, Faculty Member.
Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian author of fantasy fiction, who started his career as an assistant editor of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, and whose debut The Fionavar Tapestry (1984-1986) is confidently set in the tradition of portal-quest fantasy1, has found his own unique formula for creating secondary words that combine fantasy and history to an unprecedented degree. While much fantasy fiction is set in quasi-medieval worlds, Kay’s interest in history, rather than myth, appears deeper and more conscious than in other works of the genre as, apart from the first trilogy, all his fictional fantasy worlds are immensely inspired by real places in real historical periods. Varied as these inspirations are2, they prove to be quite carefully researched…And yet the author firmly and consciously insists on the conventions of fantasy rather than the historical novel…
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