Katherine Rundell on Imagining a Fantasy World Into Being

I loved fantasy as a child, and I love it now as a writer - for the freedom it gives to wholly unleash your imagination, both in the reading and the writing. Fantasy has always seemed to me one of the most exciting ways to wield metaphor: because, in writing about griffins and dragons and flying coats, you might offer children (who have such allegiance with the fantastic, in every sense) a way to fathom their own world. 

In the ice-cold, windswept tail-end of 2016, I had the idea of a girl with a coat that allowed her to fly – but only when the wind blew. Slowly, over the years – and with many deletings - I imagined a world that would be big enough to contain her: an enchanted cluster of islands called the Archipelago, in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean, hidden from us by magic. It’s the last magical remaining: the place where all the creatures of myth still live and thrive. 

If you found your way to the Archipelago – it’s possible, though difficult - you would meet all the mythic creatures you’re very familiar with – dragons, unicorns, centaurs and mermaids. But you would also meet creatures you’re less familiar with – creatures who are found in the illustrated margins of twelfth century Persian manuscripts, or in eighteenth century Welsh myths. There’s a jaculus dragon, for instance, which features in Pliny the Elder’s 77AD Natural History, which is often called the first encyclopaedia: in among entirely serious accounts of birds and hedgehogs, there is the jaculus, a tiny tree dragon, which, he writes, ‘darts from the branches of trees’ at people’s faces and ankles ‘for these fly through the air just as though they were hurled from an engine.’ In my imagined world, the jaculus speaks like a haughty professor, and is small enough to perch on the top joint of your thumb.

I loved researching these creatures. For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where I work on Renaissance literature. While writing this book, I spent about a hundred hours in the library: reading, for instance, about the al-miraj, which is a horned hare of dazzling beauty. Their ears are long and pink on the inside and their horns pure gold. They are said to seek out the valiant, the wise and the good. And there’s the kludde, a ravening dog with ears of flames, and karkadann, which resemble unicorns, if unicorns had vicious souls and canine teeth and skin which hangs off their bones. There are kankos – miniature foxlike creatures with two tails. They are lucky, and so the nest of a kanko mustn’t be disturbed; but, in the Archipelago, they have been known to nest in inconvenient places – in shoes, hats, pockets, and, once, in the beard of a gentleman on the day of his wedding. 

There is darkness, though, in the islands: as the book opens, the creatures are beginning to falter and die. And so into the story comes a boy from the UK, Christopher, with an Archipelagian girl, Mal. She has a flying coat, a baby griffin clutched to her chest, and a murderer in pursuit. Together, they voyage across the land and sea, seeking the reason for the tide of fear that is spreading through the world.  

Writing fantasy has been a huge joy, but an unwieldy one. I wonder if it might be the freest kind of fiction: anything at all is possible. But some constraints are necessary, for a sense of robust reality, so you must establish your own rules, and then never break them. I used the word processing software Scrivener for the first draft – at one point I had nearly a hundred folders in a single document: one for each creature, one for each island. You come to know the world you’ve created deeply: you need to know far more than you can include in a book. When writing about the real world, you can say: imagine Paris. But writing a new world, you have to know every new food, every new ocean and new scent and new music. 

So writing fantasy becomes an act of not just invention, but selection: what needs to be laid out in full, what can be gestured at and left to the imagination. It’s a discipline that is entirely its own. The fantasy books I treasure most – Philip Pullman, Ursula K Le Guin, Alan Garner – never condescend to the reader. They give you enough detail to feel utterly immersed in their world, while leaving space for their readers to give vent to the power of their own imaginations.  

The thing I love most about fantasy, though, is it is such a powerful way to tell children the things you believe - or perhaps hope - to be true, and urgently want them to know. Impossible Creatures is about a very old question: if you could see the whole sweep of humanity laid out before you, in all its glory and sorrow and cruelty and splendour, what would you say: yes, or no? I wanted to write an adventure story that was also about courage and love, and the problem of power, and what it means to say yes to the world in all its great chaos and miraculous beauty.  

Katherine Rundell Introduces Impossible Creatures