The Retreat of Magic
Rather than creating their own fantasy world, many authors choose to set their novels in Earth's past. In order to explain the absence of miraculous elements, authors may introduce "a retreat of magic" (sometimes called "thinning") that explains why the magic and other fantastic elements no longer appear: For example, in The Lord of the Rings, the destruction of the One Ring not only defeated Sauron, but destroyed the power of the Three Rings of the elves, resulting in their sailing into the West at the end of the story. Larry Niven details the idea in The Magic Goes Away, as an allegory for a modern-day energy crisis. A retreat can also be used as a plot device in a non-Earth setting, such as the diminishing of the Spirit-skills in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky Trilogy.
A contemporary fantasy necessarily takes place in what purports to be the real world, and not a fantasy world. It may, however, include references to such a retreat. J. K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them explains that wizards eventually decided to conceal all magic creatures and artifacts from non-magic users.
Read more about this topic: Fantasy World
Famous quotes containing the words retreat and/or magic:
“The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)