Exile

The exile hero has been cut from his country, his order, his name. Aragorn for the long years before Gondor, Elric without Melniboné to come back to, the rangers and runaways and stripped knights who populate the genre's middle distance — the archetype works because exile sharpens identity. Stripped of the world that made him, he has to decide what of himself he still owns.

The appeal is the ache and the freedom in equal measure. Expect old loyalties that won't quite die, glimpses of a homeland written with real love, the moral question of what return would cost, and the deep satisfaction of a hero who carries his country in his head when he can't walk in it. He moves through other people's worlds with a foreigner's eye, and what he sees is sharper for it. This is the archetype for readers who want their fantasy with a homesick king walking the long road back.

• Identity stripped to essentials
• Old loyalties that won't die
• Foreigner's eye on the page
• Homecoming as moral question