Building Fantasy Worlds from Page to Screen

Following the gap left after the end of the Game of Thrones phenomenon, fantasy has witnessed the rapid appearance of multimillion-dollar productions headlining almost every major streaming platform as well as literary best-sellers. Fantasy works rely heavily on the world in which the story takes place as argued by Wolf ( 2012 , 2018a), and although it is true that the notion of worldbuilding is, of course, inherent to all fiction, it seems to take on a more pivotal role in this genre. This is more evident in what Wolf ( 2012 ) calls ‘secondary worlds’, which often do not conform to the rules of the non-fictional world. This chapter defines worlds in a more nuanced manner than it has been done in the past and, through corpus techniques, it identifies specific constituents of the fantasy world of Robert Jordan&s;s novel The Eye of the World (1990) and its TV adaptation, The Wheel of Time (Judkins, 2021). In doing so, this chapter addresses the concept of ‘world as entity’ by pointing at the linguistic resources that build up such an entity, since understanding worlds in this way can account for how they work in fantasy as opposed to other genres.