Death: the undiscovered country. Why is it undiscovered? Because once you cross over into the Great Beyond, there’s no going back. As a result, those who are left behind in the world of the living have no way of knowing what’s coming next.

That’s the way it is in real life anyway. Things aren’t quite so straightforward in fantasy fiction, which frequently features characters dying and returning to life.

Sadly, fantasy authors are no more privy to knowledge of life after death than the rest of us, so these forays into the afterlife usually end up just telling us something about the character — a mere emotional truth, not a literal one about the nature of death.

Damn!

Still, let’s see what some of the more interesting and famous of these fantasy resurrections have to tell us, shall we?

Xena Warrior Princess (in “Fallen Angel”)

At the end of the fourth season of Xena: Warrior Princess, Xena and Gabrielle both died — victims of Caesar and the culmination of a prophecy given to Xena by the evil shaman Alti at the very start of the season.

Unlike most fantasy “deaths,” the “Fallen Angel” episode shows us exactly what happens to Xena and Gabrielle after they die: the episode is actually set in the world of heaven and hell. But Xena being Xena, she just can’t help getting involved in the eternal struggle between good and evil. I could write for pages about this wonderful episode, but suffice to say: it was a thrilling, knock-our-socks-off moment when we learn that Xena sacrifices herself, choosing to spend all of eternity in hell, not for Gabrielle (as we might expect), but for her uber-nemesis Callisto. Since Xena “created” Callisto, it makes perfect sense in retrospect.

Of course, Xena died other times over the course of the series — six times total, according to some estimates. And the last time she, um, didn’t come back to life. But it’s best not to think about that, right?

Aslan (in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)

In one of the most famous “Christ” metaphors in all of literature, the god-lion Aslan allows himself to be sacrificed by the White Witch in exchange for the life of the traitor Edmund, which belongs to the witch as a result of “deep magic from the dawn of time.”

But surprise! As a result of “deeper magic from before the dawn of time,” which says that death is reversed when someone willingly sacrifices himself for another, Aslan comes back the next morning — which is really good, because otherwise the witch was going to kill them all anyway!

I know this story has profound meaning for Christians, which I respect, but as a non-Christian, I gotta say: this storyline has always struck me as a bit of clunky metaphor and a colossal plot-cheat. Wouldn’t it have been better if the Pevensie kids had been more active players in their own story?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in “The Gift”)

In the sixth season musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy famously sings, “Hey, I’ve died twice.” But her most significant “death” may have been in the 5th season episode “The Gift,” when Buffy sacrifices her life to save her “new” sister Dawn by diving into (and closing) an inter-dimensional portal created by a god.

Later, Willow and the others perform a spell to “save” her … or do they? In the aforementioned musical episode, we finally learn why Buffy had been so depressed all season long: she was in heaven, finally at peace, and her friends ripped her back out again! Needless to say, the decision by Buffy’s friends to bring her back to life ends up having major ramifications, which — duh! — is exactly the way it should be.

Ged (in The Farthest Shore)

The Wizard Ged has it rough in Ursula le Guin’s The Earthsea Cycle series of books: first, he unleashes a shadow-being into the world that is impossible to “destroy.” And in The Farthest Shore, the third book in the series, he must cross the “wall” between life and death in order to stop an evil wizard who has opened a breach in the wall so that he may live forever.

Ged closes the breach, but it comes at a great cost: he loses his ability to do magic. Ged survives his fantastic (and very effectively written!) foray into the land of the dead, returning to the world of the living, and le Guin gives the character two endings: in one (later developed in subsequent books) he returns home, but in another, he sails off into the ocean, never to be seen again. The latter is a less optimistic, but bolder ending, implying — truthfully — that in any confrontation with Death, human beings ultimately always lose.

Thomas Covenant (in Fatal Revenant)

At the beginning of the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson, Thomas Covenant, still in the “real” world, is stabbed in the chest by one of Lord Foul’s minions — but he and Linden Avery are transported into the magical “Land” before he can actually die. When, at the end of the three-book series, the main characters returns to the “real” world, Covenant is, in fact, dead.

Or is he? Linden hears his voice in the first book of the next series, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and eventually encounters a being who looks very much like him — although looks can sometimes be deceiving. Has Thomas Covenant really come back to life? Not yet, but he does later in the second book, once again by command of the all-powerful Earthblood.

In fantasy literature, humans never seem to learn some lessons, namely, that we should leave the damn dead alone! Oh, and drinking the all-powerful Earthblood is generally a bad idea too.

Frodo (in The Two Towers and The Return of the King)

Okay, so Frodo isn’t really killed by Shelob’s poison in his trek into Mordor over the Ephel Dúath mountains — he’s merely paralyzed by her venom so she can keep him “fresh.” But Sam, of course, thinks Frodo is dead and carries The One Ring on without him, and I’m including the encounter here because it serves as a example of the function that resurrection often serves in fantasy fiction: that of metaphorical rebirth. When Frodo and Sam both emerge from this encounter, they are different people, having learned important truths about themselves and even more determined to continue forward.

Interesting fact: The Two Towers includes material from Shelob’s POV, and these passages make it very clear that the giant spider is trying to “kill” Frodo with her bite, not just “paralyze” him. It’s later we learn (when Sam overhears the guards) that the venom is not fatal. A cheat on Tolkien’s part?

Harry Potter (in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

Does Harry “die” at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, or is he merely killed, but before he “dies” is given the opportunity, by magic, to decide whether to live or die? Then again, it’s been established that Harry can’t kill Voldemort without dying himself, so it’s pretty clear that Harry has to be truly “dead” in at least some respect.

Speaking of plot cheats … I’m not trying to get into any arguments here, and I’ll grant that J.K. Rowling did, if you squint, just barely make her whole epic saga hang together in the end.

But Voldemorte accidentally made Harry a horcrux when he was a child and now can’t kill him, because he somehow also incorporated Lily’s protective charm into him? And brilliant mind and fantastic magic-user that he is, he didn’t figure any of this out (but Dumbledore did)?

Okay, that’s not strained at all. I do, however, buy the bit at the very end of Deathly Hallows, with the Elder Wand — that Harry might figure out who the wand’s true owner is and that Voldermort, in his supreme arrogance and over-confidence, would refuse to believe it, effectively condemning himself to death.

Which brings up another fantasy “resurrection”: that of Voldemort himself. He too had died previously and come back to life. In fact, plenty of fantasy villains — Voldemort, Lord Foul, Sauron — have “died” (or been vanquished) and somehow eventually reformed themselves and returned to “life.” Evil is never really “dead,” right?

But, alas, those resurrections will have to be the subject of another article!

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Two and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

Back 2006, Japan’s famous Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Ponyo) finished a movie called Tales From Earthsea, based on Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic Earthsea series of books. But legal wrangling kept it from being released in the U.S. — the U.S. film rights to the books were held by the SyFy Channel which had produced a truly horrible TV adaptation of le Guin’s work back in 2004.

Tales From Earthsea finally opens in the U.S. today, released by Disney with voice-overs by Timothy Dalton and Willem Defoe (the preview screening I attended was in Japanese with subtitles).

We could’ve missed this one. Le Guin, it seems, is doomed to see only sub-par film adaptations of her most famous work.

The movie tells the story of … well, I’m not quite sure. Truthfully, the story is so different from the books that I assumed the movie was based on a short story that Le Guin had written that I hadn’t read. But no, it’s supposedly based on the first four books in the Earthsea series.

Mostly, it’s based on Tehanu, the fourth book. And if you think that starting with the fourth book in an intricate series like this is a bad idea, you’re right.

Ultimately, my problems with the movie all boil down to awkward storytelling. Some elements from the books are jammed in that are completely unnecessary to the plot — like references to the Tombs of Atuan, Ged’s facial scar, and the mythology of the dragons (although, admittedly, this is among the coolest parts of Le Guin’s books).

Other elements aren’t set up properly — namely the whole idea of the “shadow” — and aren’t even really acknowledged until the end of the movie, leaving even viewers who’ve read the books confused. A magic sword isn’t fully explained, and the movie’s antagonist isn’t introduced until halfway through the movie.

And while the movie has a decent opening and a terrific third act, the middle section is slow-paced and meandering — ironic given all the plot from the books that they’ve left out.

I’ll confess my bias upfront and say I’ve never been a huge fan of Studio Ghibli, whose movies always seem to me to have major narrative problems (acknowledging that there could be cultural differences I’m not aware of).

But Spirited Away’s confused, disjointed narrative worked because the story was supposed to be confused and disjointed: the plot was mimicking a major theme of the story, which was all a big mind-trip.

Here it just feels like the people involved didn’t have a clear vision and ultimately let their story get away from them.

• I’ve always wanted to be like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys or Robinson Crusoe and live in a tree house. I was never quite as elaborate in my dreams as the Wilkinson Residence, but I’m not opposed to it.

• Ursula K. Le Guin has declared war on the Authors Guild for agreeing to “settle” with Google after they and their Google Book Project illegally scanned millions of books. Le Guin has resigned from the organization in a very public way. Careful, or she’ll send the dragons to burn down Google’s Mountain View California campus.

• CollegeHumor.com has some mockups of what video games would be titled if they were named after what you said most while playing them. My favorite is Grand Theft Auto, which would be renamed Shoot Those Hookers.

• George Lucas is working on a CGI feature film at Skywalker Ranch, and it’s a musical about fairies. Typing that made me a little ill. There’s no title for the piece but Kevin Munroe is directing, and his cred for animated films is TMNT (a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies)

• Nightscape is billed as a thriller/horror movie about three high schoolers discovering they have paranormal powers, but none of that is on display in this quietly creepy trailer that just went up. How is it that little kids walking around quietly can give you the shivers so easily?

• Zelda Rubenstein, the diminutive actress who played the psychic in Poltergeist has passed away at the age of 76. With more than 50 credits to her name, from voicing Atrocia Frankenstone on The Flintstone Comedy Hour, to guest spots on Caroline in the City, she was also a noted AIDS activist and little people advocate. Our condolences go out to her friends and family.

• NASA has a fancy new space suit for astronauts to wear to the moon, assuming we can ever afford to go back there. The new suit has a 150 hour life, computer telemetry links, and added flexibility.

• Supernatural is spawning a web spinoff called Ghostfacers, to premiere on TheWB.com in a run of ten three-minute webisodes. If Ghostfacers sound familiar, they appeared in season one and season three of Supernatural, largely for Dean to mock mercilessly.

• On the face of it Spartacus: Blood and Sand appeared to anemic numbers on Friday night, but it was actually record-breaking for Starz as a network. Nobody seems to have any idea what a magic number is for the show to make money at this point, but hopefully CGI blood spatters aren’t expensive, otherwise they’re screwed.

Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Q: Dude, what the hell happened to Santa and his elves between the 1964 Christmas Special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and 1974’s The Year Without a Santa Claus? They look totally different! The elves don’t even look like the same species! — Mark, Hudson River Valley, NY

A: You’ll recall that between the filming of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill was in a disfiguring car crash (which was “explained” by the Wampa attack)?

Sadly, The Oracle can finally reveal that something similar happened to Santa in 1969: a sleigh crash with a Russian satellite that was so disfiguring that it somehow even managed to move Santa’s eyes much farther apart.

Lest you feel too sorry for Santa, keep in mind that he’s also responsible for altered look of the elves. In 1972, the Rudolph elves unionized in order to ask for both heat and the option to not always be singing a happy tune. Santa immediately fired them all and hired scab-elves, two of whom, Jingle and Jangle, were featured prominently in 1974’s The Year Without a Santa Claus.

But shortly after the filming of that Christmas special, these new elves complained about the horrible, sub-freezing working conditions, and Santa fired them too, replacing them with the gang from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Since the children from Peanuts never age, and since the North Pole is excluded from international child labor treaties, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy continue to toil in Santa’s toy factory to this day.

Q: If an angel gets its wings every time a bell rings, wouldn’t heaven be overrun with angels? – MAGPIE, Toronto, Canada

A: It’s worse than you think. Every single individual “clang” of any bell results in an angel getting his or her wings — which means that a single jingle bell can produce hundreds of winged angels over the course of a minute.

Which means that, yes, heaven should be overrun with angels. Fortunately, there’s another rule that every time someone grinds their clutch, an entire legion of angels is instantly obliterated, so things have pretty much tended to even out.

Q: So is the fifth Indiana Jones movie a go … or not? — Mason, Portland, OR

A: The Oracle can reveal … that no one knows for sure except for the principles involved, and even they have been all over the place, with George Lucas generally being more enthusiastic and Steven Spielberg seeming less so.

Will the next movie feature Shia LaBeouf in the “lead” role, with Harrison Ford in a more Sean-Connery-in-The-Last-Crusade-type supporting role? That’s what Lucas suggested in 2008, right before The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opened. But a few months later, he ruled that out completely. “Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones,” he said. “Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones.”

So where do things stand? In September of this year, Ford reported that things are definitely moving forward, with everyone on board. “The story for the new Indiana Jones is in the process of taking form,” he said. “Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and myself are agreed on what the fifth adventure will concern, and George is actively at work. If the script is good, I’ll be very happy to put the costume on again.”

Will LaBeouf and Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood be part of the picture? The former definitely, the latter almost certainly. But the latest, most interesting rumor has Lucas and company holding out the prospect of a role for Sean Connery as Indie’s father — providing the 79 year-old actor is willing to take it. He previously turned down Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.

Q: I have a memory of a novel published in the 80s that included music — actual recorded music — that went along with the book. True? — Amanda, Miami, FL

A: Yes. The book was Always Coming Home, a pet project of Ursula K. Le Guin, six years in the making, about the Kesh, a post-apocalyptic culture living in future northern California. The book was less a narrative than a sweeping document of the culture — with maps, poems, recipes, stories (even more so than The Silmarillion). Cleverly, the boxed edition of the original 1985 hardcover also included a cassette tape of “Kesh” folk music and poetry (composed by musician Todd Barton, in association with Le Guin).

Boldly visionary or over-long and self-indulgent? Readers differed, but the book eventually went out-of-print. It’s been back in print since 2001, from a small press, but alas, the edition does not include the actual recorded music. However, a CD is available from the musician (with some audio clips available online).

Looking to buy a Christmas special, Always Coming Home, or any other media? Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing it through this link.

Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you’re writing from.)

Q: Does a Deck of Many Things always include the same set of things? — Mark, Key West, FL

A: A Deck of Many Things is, of course, a powerful magic item from Dungeon & Dragons — possibly a source of great benefit, but also great tragedy. For example, one card grants you a wish, and another gives you a castle. But another card causes an emnity between you and a powerful being, and still another takes your soul. You must declare in advance how many cards you’re going to draw, and then you must draw that number of cards (unless you draw the jester, in which case you can draw two more cards). If you do not, the cards will draw themselves.

In short, the Deck of Many Things is the ultimate game of Russian roulette! Better still, it requires as an intriguing prop: an actual deck of tarot or playing cards, with each face card corresponding to a card in the “deck”.

Needless to say, the Deck of Many Things has long been one of the most sought-after magic items (and one of the Oracle’s favorites!).

The Oracle can reveal that a Deck of Many Things generally has 22 cards and yes, they are usually the same cards — although there have been versions with fewer cards (a 13-card deck appeared in Greyhawk, D & D’s first game suppliment, in 1975), and more cards (a 78-card deck appeared in an issue of Dragon Magazine, September 1983 #73).

But things never stay the same in D&D. Wizards of the Coast is, even now, adding cards to these mysterious decks. They even have a web feature where you can design your deck so that it applies specifically to your class.

Q: Last week, you rated dragons, saying that Dragonslayer’s “Vermithrax Pejorative” was the greatest movie dragon of all time. You also said they did it all before CGI. But how? How did they make it look so good? — Tom, Palm Springs, CA

In addition to the models, live-action puppets were used in some of the scenes; there were 15 different models and puppets in all.

And the piece de resistance was a full-sized, 40-foot hydraulically-powered dragon, with a movable, 10-foot high latex face.

But it wasn’t just the effects themselves that were so impressive. Much attention was paid to the way the dragon was designed. The creature was 40 feet long, but unlike many movie dragons, some thought was given as to how such a creature could actually fly. The wings were appropriately large — it had a wingspan of 90 feet — and the body was appropriately stream-lined, with semi-proper weight-distribution.

Plus, the thing just looked so damn cool — exactly like a real dragon should.

Q: What exactly is oobleck? — Molly, London, UK

A: In Dr. Seuss’ 1949 children’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck (a sequel of sorts to The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins), the king grows bored with sun, rain, snow, and fog and asks his court wizards to conjure up something else. But in a classic case of not being careful what you wish for, that “something” turns out to be gobs of green sticky goo that fall from the sky, gumming up the kingdom — and blocking off the magicians’ caves, making reversal impossible.

Since oobleck is fictional, even the Oracle can’t say exactly what it is. But there are those who say it can be created with a mixure of water and cornstarch (in a ratio of between 2:1 and 3:2) and green food coloring. The result is a vicious, sticky goop that is neither liquid nor solid. It can be molded and will hold a shape – but only for a very short time.

Q: The Sci Fi Channel’s Legend of Earthsea. Worst. Fantasy. Adaptation. Ever? — Michael, Seattle, WA

A: The Oracle says, Oh, God yes! The less said about the disasterous 2004 adaptation of Ursula le Guin’s wonderful series of Earthsea novels, the better.

But interestingly, there was another adaptation two years later, Tales From Earthsea, an animated one from Japan’s Studio Ghibli (the same studio that produced Spirited Away). About the first adaptation, Le Guin was initially silent, but when the producers seemed to imply that she approved of their TV version, she wrote on her website, “I can only admire Mr [Executive Producer Robert] Halmi’s imagination, but I wish he’d left mine alone.” In articles for Slate and Locus, she wrote that she was particularly upset with their turning her dark-skinned characters white.

About the latter Japanese film, she said, “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie.”

Trailer for Gedo Senki (or Tales From Earthsea)