First-person in High Fantasy

"You know I looked around at the faces I know, I fell in love with the people in the front row." --Hilltop Hoods, The Nosebleed Section

I love it when I have things pre-determined to blog about at the beginning of a day...it just makes it so much easier to post when the time comes.

So right! The first-person p.o.v. in high fantasy. Like I posted yesterday, Buried in the Slush Pile contends that it doesn't work very well, because so much world-building has to happen in a high fantasy narrative, and it doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense for a person to discuss how the world they live in works inside their own head (or to a reader from their own world).

She goes through some limited situations in which it does work for other types of fantasy, but none of them fit my definition of high fantasy (slightly different from hers--I need more than just a completely secondary world. I need magic, pre-modern technology, and non-human sentient races). I agree with her, but only for worlds that haven't been previously established.

If you were to read the first book that takes place in a world from a first-person point of view, it would be very difficult to grasp what's going on. But in a world that's well established, the first-person could work admirably. It would produce a very different sort of high fantasy story, and one that I might hesitate to call high fantasy at all, but in a world that is so well-known to its readers that its rules don't need to be established, the first-person might work admirably, though it would necessarily limit its audience to those already familiar with its world.

...now why you'd want to write a first-person high fantasy narrative is another question entirely. One of the things that sets high fantasy apart and makes it so wonderful is its tendency towards a diverse cast of characters, with different archetypes for different people to identify with, and you would lose that in a first person narrative.

But I don't think it's quite so unreasonable a proposition as she contends.