Thoughts on the medieval setting common to fantasy

Cafe Society
1

One of the things I appreciate about urban fantasy is the modern setting. It’s nice not to have horses and castles and fire and arrows (though I could do with a bit less kinky sex, too, authors!) all the time.

Why do so many fantasies revert to that romantic, Tolkein-esque setting of kings and knights and magical swords?

I’ve wondered in the past if maybe fantasies are often trying to draw in female readers and medieval settings are popular in romances. But I dunno. I guess that fantasy probably has more women reading it than does sf, but Tolkein and his literary heirs really don’t seem to be trying to appeal to the feminine. And based on the fanship, I’d say they tend to draw more male readers than female, but that’s more a guess than anything.

Besides, I don’t think authors are necessarily that driven to figure out what the readers want. If we assume for the sake of conversation that the authors are trying to place their stories in a setting that makes the most sense for the stories, what about the fire and pony settings make them better suited for fantasy?

I’m coming up with two reasons.

  1. Better contrast with technology. If you have a society were you don’t carry a Bic, someone with a fire-lighting magic is then remarkable and not explained away by science. When you want it to be ambiguous, you set it in the “real” world.

  2. More conflict. Not only do we accept that people in a medieval-ish setting might be more likely to be set upon by bandits and more likely to get involved in sword fights and more likely to die of a scratch, but putting things in the “real” modern world gives less for the magic to do. Is telepathy all that great when you can pick up your Blackberry? Are magical weapons impressive when there are nuclear ones?

What do you think? Are these plausible ideas and/or do you have others?

2

I agree and this is why I loved Final Fantasy VII so much (and 8 to a lesser extent) but have no interest in the earlier ones or any fantasy game involving elves, dwarves, and all that other stuff. I like the weird mix of cyberpunk and late 19th-century-European-style aesthetic of FFVII and FFVIII.

3

I’d say it’s a sort of inertia. Modern fantasy grew out of fairy tales and epic poetry. So the people who made up the stories about King Arthur put the stories in what was a modern context for them. So King Arthur was a knight in shining armor because that was what knights at the time wore, never mind that Arthur would have had to have existed back in the Dark ages rather than the late Medieval period. We know every King of England since the Angles and Saxons migrated to England, and King Arthur wasn’t any of them.

But the stories about King Arthur and Jack and the Beanstalk got frozen in time. They were first told when Europe was medieval, but they stayed medieval. And so when Tolkien wanted to create a new mythology, he did so by recreating the style of the medieval and dark age stories he liked, and that meant setting his stories in a pseudo-medieval setting.

4

I like the medieval settings in fantasy for the same reason I like historical fiction – escapism. I should be able to escape in a modern setting, but it’s not the same – too much familiarity, maybe.

I’ve enjoyed some fantasy in modern settings (Gaiman, Vandermeer, Stross, Powers, Christopher Moore) but not nearly as much as the other.

It’s not the romance that appeals to me. A little romance is okay (very little) but I don’t like romance as the focus.

5

Because they sell.

Major publishers are only interested in fantasies set in either Medieval settings or in modern urban settings. If you are a well-known author, you can try other settings, but even that is iffy as far as sales are concerned.

The reading public is very conservative in their tastes. They want things that they know they’ll like. This is a function of the price of books: as the cost of an art form increases, audiences become increasingly less willing to try things that are outside their comfort zone (you can see the same trend in movies and Broadway shows).

If you try to write a fantasy in a setting other than these two, you’re not likely to get it published. In my own case, I wrote a fantasy set in the 1930s and another set in the Medieval setting. No agent had any interest in the 1930s one, but several have wanted to see more of the one set in a medieval world. There may be other factors, but I have to think the fact that the medieval one didn’t deviate as much from what people are used to was the reason they were more interested in it – it would be an easier sell.

6

I tend to agree with point #1. If you have a setting without modern science in your way, it is so much easier to explain things with “a wizard did it” to move stories along.

7

Well, I think it’s because

  1. it’s much more satisfying to the average male’s reptilian brain to imagine yourself beating someone (or, an evil monster) to death with your muscles and a sword than it is to imagine yourself gunning down a monster, or targeting the monster with a laser-guided missle [although computer games do a better job of simulating the latter, which I suspect is why gunning down monsters is relatively more common on computers than in books].

  2. escapism works better when the scene is simpler than the current day. Escapists prefer temporarily inhabiting the days when a man could hack a monster apart and not have to worry about having a current monster killing license, or spending all day filling out paperwork, or dealing with the tax implications of taking the monster’s gold.

Finally, it’s also partly a matter of definition. A tale of two friends adventuring through an imaginary sword-wielding country would probably be considered fantasy, even if there was no magic involved. Wheras a tale of two friends adventuring through an imaginary 1813 sea campaign would be considered ‘historical fiction’ or something.

8

Knights.

Knights had swords.

And armor.

They make a period of history that should be looked down upon as a low point in humanity way too awesome.

9

Generic fantasy kingdoms are one of my pet peeves. I’ll put up with them if the story is good, but I get really excited when I read a story with an imaginative, well-drawn world.

10

I think the #1 reason is the one Lemus866 mentioned. Modern fantasy has at least some of its roots in European fairy tales (along with medieval folklore like King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc.), which grew out of medieval Europe and so of course has a medieval European-ish setting and accoutrements.

Looks to me like it’s the publishers who are the conservative ones, not the readers. I really think there are readers (and moviegoers) out there who want something new that they haven’t seen before—more of them than there are of publishers and producers who are willing to take a risk on something that isn’t tried-and-true.

Maybe people just don’t like the 30s. It was a Depressing time.

There are lots of classic (and not-so-classic) fantasies set in worlds other than the cliched “castles and horses and fire and arrows and knights in shining armor” medieval European ones (or modern urban settings). (Harry Potter, for one huge modern example.)

11

The generic European middle ages fantasy is comfortable to some people because they are pretty familiar with how that sort of setting generally works. Magic will work, if there are unicorns then they’ll be attracted to virgins, if there are dragons they’ll breathe fire, etc., etc.

Get ahold of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. This isn’t a novel, it’s a list of fantasy tropes, with the common mistakes that many writers make. For instance, Jones notes that most writers treat horses as machines, not animals with their own quirks and needs.

12

Yeah, I think inertia is the biggest reason why that’s the case now. The early “inventors” of the fantasy genre (especially Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) were drawing on fairy tales and medieval Romances to create their works. Practically every author since has been working in the shadows of said authors, and so it goes.

In fact, one could argue that the pseudomedieval settings are practically a defining element of fantasy as a genre. Genres are really determined by their deviation from an archetype – since the archetypal “fantasy” novels are medievalish, it’s practically impossible to write a book that IS “fantasy” outside that setting unless you make the rest of the book extremely archetypal (i.e. the plot is “a dark wizard has stolen an artifact, and a young adventurer and his plucky companion must set out on a dangerous journey to recover it lest darkness befall the land; also, there’s a king and probably some talking animals involved”). Incidentally, I just realized how close I just came to describing the plot of Neverwhere, probably one of the most successful attempts at non-Medieval fantasy out there. Gaiman obviously shares my opinion. :wink:

So, if you want to write a “fantasy” novel, you pretty much have to make either the plot kinda generic or the setting kinda generic. I think most authors are happy to go the latter route in order to have more freedom with the plot.

If you want freedom on both fronts, go ahead by all means. But don’t be surprised if many people have trouble accepting your book as “fantasy,” even if you’ve still got a dragon up in there.

13

Which, as you point out, always amuses me because the way most fantasy writers write such settings nowadays basically amounts to writing about a modern town where the cars neigh, the houses have thatch roofs, and people speak in a creole of Modern and Early Modern English.

People seem to want non-medieval fantasy; I’d like to see CONVINCINGLY medieval fantasy for once. :wink:

14

William Morris was the ur-author, and he was deliberately going for a medieval-romance style.

15

“There once was a strapping young lad, who was king, though did not know it on account of having been adopted by swineherds at an early age after his true Royal parents had been killed in a palace coup, which was besides the point, as the King died of pneumonia at the ripe old age of 7.”

I like it, but I don’t think it’ll be optioned for a movie anytime soon.

16

I’ve always thought it had something to do with magic superseding advances in technology. You end up remaining in a mediaeval era, because other technology like steam and gunpowder aren’t required.

But I guess that’s not really the question being asked.

It probably comes down to the romantic idea of knights and princesses and chivalry, mixed with the brutality of close quarters combat, and the wonders of magic and fantastical creatures.

King Arthur, Robin Hood, Beowulf, and fairy tales, are just simpler yet evocative eras to play in.

17

Reason #1 is a factor, so is #2. There were some SF/F ideas from RPGs that spawned a few books, especially in the 90s; Rifts and Shadowrun. Those incorporated cyberpunk with fantasy, positing either dimensional crossover or a reawakening of magic, including magical beings. The ideas proved of limited appeal.

The kind of fantasy you’re talking about is High Fantasy, which is set in an invented world, or a fictionalized past. Low Fantasy is the real world with some supernatural trimmings. Epic, heroic stories are almost always set in a high fantasy world.

I think a major reason for this is that we know how the real world works, and epic heroes don’t fit all that well into it. In The Matrix, for example, Neo is essentially an epic hero in an SF setting. Look how hard most people started rolling their eyes when this started to become clear in the later installments. Prophecies, unexplained and unexplainable powers, and interference in the real world with what is essentially magic messes with people, to the point where even fans started to reconcile the inconsistencies between the Matrix’s Zion and what we know about the possible future of reality by positing that the “real world” is just another layer of the Matrix, and no more real than the machines’ control program.

It’s harder to gain suspension of disbelief, and the author has to do more research if things are set in the real world. Your points factor in here. Technology has partially superseded the powers of magic in most fantasy worlds. Think about how unimpressive Excalibur is when a Barrett .50 cal can halfway vaporize your anachronistic ass from a kilometer away. It’s not very believable that even the companion sheath could make the reborn Arthur “take no wound nor lose no blood” when just about everyone who has seen live modern military footage knows what kind of damage even conventional small arms can do.

Escapism is another thing. When I read fantasy, I do often want to go to a different place, where the rules of reality don’t work, or don’t work the same way. I’m into martial arts, and medieval and ancient warfare. I like reading stuff set with that kind of fighting, since the closest I’m ever likely to get to that in the real world is an SCA tournament. Firearms and explosives are game-changing things. Even with wizards around to perform minor miracles of offense and defense, tactics would change drastically.

The cultural settings are necessary for many of the trappings of high fantasy to work too. What a lot of fantasy readers like are the politics, social maneuvering, etc. of nobility, the stress between classes, the contrast between high and low status. They also like the world building, getting to know a different place, language, people. They already know this world, they want to explore a new one.

18

Barbara Tuchman has an interesting take on the High Middle Ages, which I paraphrase as, “when kid gangs ruled the world.”

19

This has always been my gut-level understanding, too. Medieval fantasy appeals to people (mostly men) who feel physically thwarted and impotent, and the characters you’re supposed to identify with get to physically avenge themselves with their own arms and stick-like weapons (swords, etc.)

Ironically, it’s the guys in cubicles in front of computer screens who will be doing more and more of modern warfare, sitting in an office in Nevada remotely directing un-manned drones on the other side of the planet.

20

The Middle Ages were so long ago most people can’t relate to them in a historic sense, either.

I’ve been working on a Steampunk adventure and the biggest obstacle I keep running into is people saying “But the Victorians didn’t have Spaceships or steam-powered robots!” It’s odd- people happily accept the idea of dragons and wizards in 13th century Europe, but apparently Victorian spacefarers- despite having a rich literary history in the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells- are just “too out there” for the modern reader.