Otherworlds Fantasy and otherworlds creation has a long history in literature and the visual arts.
This publication will be discussing the history, nature and implications of the portal quest, or portal fantasy narrative and how it has changed and evolved throughout history.
This genre is incredibly old, having existed all throughout recorded human history across many different cultures, such as the fairy tale of Urashima Taro, where a fisherman is transported to the undersea palace of the dragon king and when he returns home, he finds that 300 years have passed in the 3 months he spent in the palace. first recorded in the 7th century.
This theme of lost time is reflected in many cultures, for example, Celtic mythology has the story of Tír na nÓg “When he returns, he finds that 300 years have passed in Ireland. Oisín falls from the horse. He instantly becomes elderly, as the years catch up with him, and he quickly dies of old age.”
Otherworlds and stories about people venturing into otherworlds have existed all throughout human history, but the form the otherworld takes has changed over time.
This is partially because the otherworlds we create are reflections of the societies that created them and as these societies change so do their otherworlds.
One form that portal fantasy stories commonly take in the mythologies of ancient cultures is the journey into the afterlife, or underworld, such as the ancient Babylonian myth of Ishtar’s journey into the underworld, the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Historically these otherworlds were institutional, afterlives in religion, but more recently the idea of otherworlds have fractured and anyone can create their own otherworld.
As modern cultures grow more secular in their beliefs their otherworlds change to reflect that, creating otherworlds that are not born from a desire to imagine an afterlife, such as Lewis Carol’s Alice in wonderland (1865), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Wizard of Oz (1900)
As technology has developed, otherworlds based on ideas around this technology are being written about, the mid-twentieth century saw a rise in popularity of science fiction around the time of the moon landing, many of the otherworlds of this time were literal other worlds out in space, such as Star Trek (1966) and Forbidden Planet (1956), with the rise of the internet and video games stories about otherworlds were set in video games or virtual reality, such as The Matrix (1999), Ready Player One’s (2009), Freakazoid (1995) and Scooby doo and the cyber chase. (2001)
This does not mean that stories about the afterlife have disappeared entirely, there are contemporary examples of journeys into the afterlife, such as Over the Garden Wall being a modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno, or that in the past there were only stories about the afterlife, A True Story by the 2nd century Greek writer Lucian is a story that has the protagonist travelling between the planets in the solar system.