When Fantasy Creators Become Legends – Taylen Carver

Today is National Biographer’s Day. National Biographer’s Day is celebrated on May 16 because that was the day James Boswell first met Samuel Johnson in 1763. Their friendship eventually produced Boswell’s famous Life of Samuel Johnson, widely considered one of the greatest biographies ever written. The holiday was created to honor biographers and the art of preserving lives through storytelling — because apparently humanity has always enjoyed discovering that even legendary figures were still gloriously, stubbornly human.

Which is fair enough. Someone has to spend years digging through letters, journals, and badly organized archives so the rest of us can learn that history’s greatest figures were frequently held together by tea, stubbornness, and questionable sleep habits.

But once I started thinking about biographies, my mind wandered immediately toward fantasy creators instead. Fantasy has an unusual relationship with the people who make it. Over time, fantasy authors and actors stop feeling merely famous. They become legendary. And honestly, the genre practically encourages it. Take J. R. R. Tolkien.

Even before the biographies begin, the outline of his life already sounds suspiciously literary: orphaned young, survivor of the Somme, scholar of ancient languages, Oxford professor, creator of entire mythologies and invented tongues because apparently normal hobbies were too ordinary.

There are several biographies of Tolkien, but Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography is probably the best known. And then, of course, there was the film Tolkien, which I loved at least as much for its atmosphere as for the story itself. The movie understood something important: Tolkien’s life wasn’t merely a sequence of events. It felt like the forging of a mythology. Not because he fought dragons. Though trenches in World War I probably came close enough.

Fantasy readers seem especially drawn to biographies because they already love the machinery of history: ancient grudges, lost kingdoms, lineages, maps, timelines, forgotten languages, dramatic betrayals, and footnotes no sensible person would willingly read. A good biography scratches exactly the same itch.

And then there’s Christopher Lee.

If Tolkien feels like a legendary scholar from a vanished age, Christopher Lee feels like the mysterious wanderer who arrives in chapter three with unsettling knowledge and a sword nobody asks about. The man’s actual life sounds made up.

He witnessed the last public guillotine execution in France. Served during World War II. Had connections to intelligence work obscure enough that his interviews on the subject tended to become politely evasive. He personally knew Tolkien. Became cinema’s Dracula. And, of course, played Saruman in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and its sequels after being one of the only cast members who had actually met Tolkien himself.

Then, because reality apparently wasn’t ambitious enough, he recorded symphonic metal albums in his eighties.

There’s a famous moment during filming when Lee corrected Peter Jackson on the sound a man makes when stabbed in the back. He did so calmly, because he knew from wartime experience. Which is perhaps the most Christopher Lee anecdote imaginable.

There is at least one biography of Christopher Lee available, and he wrote two autobiographies, as well.

Fantasy fandom has a habit of turning people like this into figures larger than life, but in some cases the process barely requires embellishment. The same thing happens with creators like Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, and C. S. Lewis. Over time they stop feeling like contemporary writers and begin to esemble archetypes: the wise scholar, the philosopher, the satirist, the lore-master.

Perhaps fantasy readers are simply more willing than most audiences to believe that extraordinary people really existed. Or perhaps we spend so much time wandering imaginary worlds that we become especially sensitive to mythic echoes in the real one.

Either way, biographies in fantasy circles rarely remain simple records of facts. Eventually they become stories. And fantasy readers, unsurprisingly, love stories almost as much as they love dragons.