The Grammar of Magic is a deeply personal project. It draws on on my own reading experiences. I wrote it because I would have loved to read this kind book myself, but I simply never found anything quite like it. At the heart of the “Grammar” are six varieties of magic.
There are three reasons why I wrote this book:
- I wanted to give an accessible first overview of how these kinds of magic work in stories and what role they play in them.
- I wanted to find out which cultural-historical, mythological, and philosophical ideas have shaped each kind of magic.
- I wanted to open a path into the worlds of magic for new fantasy readers, and offer a guide to those who already know and love fantasy.
Above all I wanted to spark curiosity. To me, it has always been part of what it means to be a human being.
This book might be of interest to you if you love not only the stories but magic itself. It invites you to explore its many forms in a new way: entertaining, thematically organized, interpreted, and set in a historical context.
Once you’ve read through the “Grammar”, you’ll have a thorough overview of how a wide range of authors use these six kinds of magic in their stories and which books they appear in. You’ll also get a sense of why these forms of magic don’t just live on within the stories themselves, but can also matter for understanding what it means to be human.
You’re warmly invited to join me on this magical journey.
Whether you rode with the Aes Sedai through Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, puzzled over the true names in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, or dreamed of bonding with a dragon like Eragon did: “Grammar of Magic” brings you back into these worlds, this time from beyond the curtain. I take a closer look at the magic systems imagined by writers like Robert Jordan, Patrick Rothfuss, Ursula K. Le Guin, and George R. R. Martin and show which aspects of magic keep surfacing behind such different worlds.