Interview | From Myth to Fantasy: Where Folklore Ends & Imagination Begins

In this special feature for Whispers of Ilire, I sit down with renowned literary scholar Professor Kristen Poole to explore the ancient roots and modern reinventions of myth, folklore, and fantasy. Together, we ask: is fantasy today’s new mythology?

For centuries, myths and folk beliefs were more than stories; they were frameworks for meaning. They shaped how societies understood the cosmos, the divine, and the mysteries of life. Today, those same themes echo through the fantasy novels we read for wonder, escape, and beauty.

But are these invented stories really so far from the sacred myths of the past? Are authors like Philip Pullman preserving something ancient? Reshaping it? Or creating an entirely new symbolic system for our modern age?

In this conversation, Professor Poole (an expert in 17th-century literature, religion, and science) guides us through the blurred boundaries between belief and invention. We discuss:

• The difference (and overlap) between myth and fantasy

• How early modern readers perceived magic, faeries, and the Otherworld

• The lasting influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost on Pullman’s His Dark Materials

• Whether fantasy still holds symbolic power in a post-religious world

• And the role of stories in helping us name our fears, hopes, and questions

Kristen Poole is a professor at the University of Delaware, where she holds an endowed chair in English Literature. She specialises in the English Renaissance and the intersections of literature, theology, and science, with degrees from Harvard and visiting fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. She is the author of several academic works and currently serves as General Editor for Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World.

Her most recent book, Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, takes readers on a fascinating journey through Renaissance allegory, early modern science, alchemy, and Milton’s theology—all the threads woven into Pullman’s worlds.

Learn more about Kristen’s book here >