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I am presently working on a
History of Fantasy, and one thesis I'm looking to argue is that contemporary Fantasy is, amongst other things, a
mode of historical fiction:—that genre Fantasy is one of the ways the historical novel has evolved as a form, out of the fiction of Walter Scott and his nineteenth-century imitators (Scott’s own novels were sometimes actually fantastical, more usually borderline or ‘Scooby-Doo’ fantastical and more usually still purely mimetic). So we might say that
Lord of the Rings is ‘about’ medieval and Anglo-Saxon Europe as well as being about an inexistent imaginary realm with wizards and dragons and so on; that
A Song of Ice and Fire is about the Wars of the Roses,
the Campbells and MacDonalds, about nascent Early Modern European imperialism and so on.
So that's what I'm going to try to argue in this post: Fantasy is one of the ways we ‘do’ history, nowadays. Sometimes this fact is, I suppose, deplored: lecturers complaining that students' sense of the Middle Ages derives not from historical studies but from watching
Game of Thrones let's say. Then again, this is actually sometimes actively celebrated: in
this 2021 paper on pedagogy Sarah Spalding endorses using Game of Thrones to ‘game the classroom’ by way of overcoming student resistance to a topic perceived as boring (it ‘can serve as a solution to the issue of engaging majors and non-majors alike in courses where students feel as though they are “forced” to enroll’) and
a Boston University professor called Phillip Haberkern uses examples from George R R Martin’s Fantasy realm to focus his history student’s minds on actual questions of European history.
Presumably the logic here is: students are assumed to be able to differentiate between those elements in the TV show that illuminate actual medieval history—power battles between great houses, say—and ignore those elements (dragons, magic, ice-zombies) that don’t. But presumably the reason students are familiar with this TV show, and not with regular historical novels, is at least in part because
of the magic and dragons and zombies. These things are where history (dull, factual, fixed) is enlivened, enchanted, made more exciting and thrilling. Likewise, we read
A Song of Ice and Fire uncertain as to who will win the civil war in Westeros, where we study the Wars of the Roses already know how it ends. Actual history, in other words, exists under the rubric of spoilers. And today’s fandoms absolutely hate spoilers.
But of course there are problems with this. A stark way of putting it would be to say that Fantasy inevitably falsifies history. But of course it does, because Fantasy (like SF) aims not at mimesis but imaginative recreation; its relation to reality is creative, ironic, differential. But a more nuanced position would note that
all the ways we view history distort it—or, if we prefer less aggressive language, frame and contextualise it. Fantasy has the advantage of up-fronting its bias.
This is a basic point about history and the historical imagination: all the way back in 1961 (itself now, ironically, a historical period) E L Carr’s
What Is History elegantly argues that history is not simply the accumulation of facts about the past—that the selection of facts, their arrangement into narratives (of incident, of causation, of might-have-beens) is never neutral. We are all products of our own time; we read historical data through various lenses, political, cultural, personal. George R R Martin writes in reaction to Tolkien, moved in part by a sense that Tolkien misrepresents medieval history by omitting the realpolitik, the money, the material practicalities of mustering armies and negotiating treaties and so on. Tolkien might, were he willing to move the upturned glass around the Ouija-board of Fantasy fandom, object that Martin himself omits crucial aspects of the medieval worldview. That those eminently modern aspects of international politic-ing say nothing about more fundamental ways in which medieval men and women related to their world.
But yes: let’s say Fantasy as a modern genre is in some sense ‘about’ the past (and ‘science fiction’ in some sense is ‘about’ the future—either set in the future, or else about the forces in the now that are dragging us into the avenir—often technological, sometimes social). The distinction is more complex than that, for SF can sometimes be about the past. But let’s go with this for now.
For a conservative like Tolkien there’s an important sense in which the past is ‘better’ than the now. For him, modernity is a decline, and his art is amongst other things a reaction against progress, against social change, industrialisation, the deracination of culture and society—it is a nostalgia for how things used to be, and a desire to retreat into such a world: the bourgeois world of eighteenth-century provincial living in the shire, the chivalric world of medieval Europe in Gondor, the heroic world of Anglo-Saxon warrior society in Rohan. It was on these grounds that Moorcock attacked Tolkien as merely reactionary. But this view of history is not uniquely right-wing. Tolkien was conservative, yes, but William Morris was a revolutionary socialist and he too believed the past better than the present: his fantasy-utopia
News From Nowhere is notionally set in the future but substantively set in the past, an idealised small-scale rural England of Morris’s dreams.
It seems to me that both Left and Right are good at spotting the mote in the other’s eye and bad at the beam in their own. Perhaps you see modernity in terms of a fragmentation of the values of community, faith, family, those hearths in which human flourishing is best achieved, replacing traditional world of respect, honour, fidelity, gratitude and love with a homo hominis lupus wasteland of individuated profitmongering and competition and the dissolution of all values of human respect and self-respect.
But you might be a radical Leftist who believes, essentially, the same thing: that the communitarian possibilities of cooperation, productive labour, freedom, dignity and human flourishing have been replaced by Capitalist (or as people say nowadays, Neoliberal) expropriation, wage-enslavement, corporatisation, commodification, a homo hominis lupo dystopia striated by misogyny, racism, and so on. Climate change activists talk of ‘the anthropocene’. Some date the emergence of this new epoch from the industrial revolution, when human technological and mechanical developments began directly to affect the larger human environment. Alternately, the ‘Orbis Spike’ (a thesis argued by Lewis and Maslin) dates the emergence of the anthropocene not to the industrial revolution but to the first colonial settlers arriving in North America, and see the woes of today less as a feature of industrialised neoliberalism and more as a function of imperial expropriation and enslavement. Both right and left may deplore the depredations (environmental and social) of anthropocene, though one group may locate the origins of this new epoch in the industrial revolution and the saturation of new technologies, where the other might talk of the ‘Orbis Spike’ (a thesis adopted from Lewis and Maslin) and see the Anthropocene as a catastrophe of imperialism, slavery, genocide and global expropriation.
I mentioned Carr, a few paragraphs up. Here’s what he says about the myth of, and objections to, ‘progress’:
In ordinary life we are more often involved than we sometimes care to admit in the necessity of preferring the lesser evil, or of doing evil that good may come. In history the question is sometimes discussed under the rubric ‘the cost of progress’ or ‘the price of revolution.’ This is misleading. As Bacon says in the essay On Innovations, ‘the forward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation.’ The cost of conservation falls just as heavily on the under-privileged as the cost of innovation on those who are deprived of their privileges. The thesis that the good of some justifies the sufferings of others is implicit in all government, and is just as much a conservative as a radical doctrine.
What these views—left and right—have in common is a belief that something foundational has changed in the passage from the past into the present. That there is a substantive difference between the past and the present, such that the recreation of a past world entails the recuperation of the loss. It's possible to think that the change has been entirely positive, of course. Indeed, if you sat me down and grilled me, I might make argue exactly that. Neveretheless it's striking how rarely Fantasy novels (or Historical novels, for that matter) recreate their past lives as
only nasty, brutish and short. Even when a novel engages the myriad discomforts and terrors that (I’m going to use the word: brace yourselves)
actually characterised human existence for most of human history—the starvation and the cold, the terrors and the deprivations, the violence and misery—it will generally balance material deprivation with something else.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Shaman: a Novel of the Ice Age (2013) is a powerful recreation of life in prehistoric Europe. Sometimes Robinson’s tribe has enough to eat, more often they starve, sometimes becoming so thin they can feel their spines through the front of their bellies. They sometimes predate and are sometimes predated upon by animals and other humans; they wander and endure and continue. But they also have access to a shamanic dimension which casts numinous glory through their hardscrabble lives. This, the novel implies, is something that has been lost by Modernity. And the truth is Fantasy and Historical fiction is almost never as unremitting in its portrait of past hardships as Robinson is, here. Mostly the inconveniences of the past are glossed over—in Fantasy they are often replaced by magical alternatives, palantírs instead of phones, ‘healing charms’ instead of modern medicines and so on—and in many cases inconveniences are omitted altogether.
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This is the key thing: not just that the past is different to the present, but that this difference is understood as a declination. Of course there are continuities: the human body is essentially the same in the 2020s as it was in the 1020s (though it is better supported now by medical and practical prostheses); many human needs and desires, we can intuit, carry through: hunger and sex, love and community, ambition and despair—although even here, we have to accept that these are not simple universals, and that the cultural and social contexts in which we love or despair inflects the reality of those things: that courtly love is different to the experience of love filtered-through soap operas and three-minute pop songs, that accidie is not the same as clinical depression and so on. But these continuities are also construed by major differences. I'm going to identify four in particular.
One is to note that the pre-modern society was differently structured, and involved different immanent assumptions and premises, than is the modern: more strictly hierarchical, feudal, churched, informed by a warrior ethos, whose values were such things as courage, loyalty, glory. All this contrasts with the more disseminated world of bourgeois modernity, where personal loyalty has been replaced by, let's say, values of duty, honesty, reliability, hard-work and law-abiding conformism. The former might seem to us more romantic and glorious, but the latter has the advantages of civilisation, material comfort, certitude, equality.
Related to this—it is, perhaps, another way of saying the same thing—is
Henry Sumner Maine’s thesis that the move from the pre-modern to the modern is a shift from a logic of status to a logic of contract. For Maine, himself a jurist and a believer in the civilising and liberatory power of universal systems of law, this change was a good thing: in a world structured by status, the high status individual might, or might not, feel bound by their word, and had leeway to do as they wished, but the low status individuals (most of society—and certainly you and me) did not, and lived at the pleasure of sometimes capricious overlords. Maine believed that contracts, by binding both parties, levelled this inequality: actual contracts (of employment, purchase, political manifestoes and so on), but also contractual relations like money and in a broader sense a belief that communities and nations were determined by a Rousseauian
contract sociale.
But it is easy to see the ways in which this change can be seen as a net loss, especially under the aegis of imaginative freedom. Contracts, it might be thought, have burgeoned like the red weed H G Wells’s invading aliens bring from Mars, and are now choking life and dreams and possibility. Charles Dickens’s masterpiece
Bleak House (1853) is, amongst other things, a dystopia of the hypertrophy of the contractual. Terry Gilliam’s
Brazil (1984) is another, though Gilliam balances the entangling contractualism of his world with the protagonist’s dreams in which he flies free on silver wings over a green and pleasant land, in which he can break through all the pettifogging contractual restrictions of his life to enjoy adventure, slaying monsters and having sex with beautiful damsels.
There are two other ways of framing the difference between pre-modern and modern that are, if anything, more important to Fantasy than these, and—insofar as they inform the desire of genre Fantasy as such—they will play a larger part in my history of Fantasy as a mode. The first of these is the shift from a shame to a guilt culture. The second is what Weber called disenchantment, and what Charles Taylor describes as the move from an unbuffered to a buffered sensibility—to use his terms, pre-modern sensibilities were porous, open to the wonders but also the terrors of a cosmos interpenetrated by supernatural forces and beings. Modern has ‘buffered’ our apprehensions of the world, science has banished the monsters and fairies and bogies from the woods, the universe is mapped and pinned-down and explained. Alan Jacobs’s superb essay ‘
Fantasy and the Buffered Self’ (2014) uses Taylor’s thesis to explain the appeal of Fantasy: a kind of safe unbuffering, a textual space in which we can enjoy the marvellous and thrill to the dangerous that once actually interpenetrated human lives
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To say that Fantasy is a kind of historical novel—a specialised kind, predicated upon enchantment rather than mimesis, upon unbuffering and liberating the buffered, contractual limitations of modern existence—is to situate the mode in the tradition of Scott. It is also implicitly to set-up grounds of discriminating ‘good’ from weaker or feeble Fantasy writing, but we’ll come back to that. I will have much to say, in what follows, about the influence of Walter Scott.
The modern historical novel derives fundamentally from Scott, and so far as that is concerned I think Lukacs has it right, that Scott’s praxis is dialectical: he sets the romantic, feudal, thrilling but antiquated and outmoded past (Highlanders, Cavaliers, Saxons) against an inevitable, bourgeois, respectable, dull but civilised present (Hanoverians, Puritans, Normans)—in order to stage a synthesis: a coming-future in which the wrong-but-wromantic past still lives in the breast and imagination of the right-but-repulsive Edinburgh bourgeois lawyer and man of business. Lukacs doesn’t exactly say this—the last part, I mean—because he wants to identify Scott’s value in the extent to which he intuited what Marx later codified out of his Hegel: the dialectical materialist dynamic of history as such. What Lukacs likes about Scott is that he embodies this logic of history in his fiction (that is to say: he doesn't endorse Scott’s Toryism, and he is perfectly aware of the limitations of Scott's art: his melodrama, his schematic plotting and other things). And indeed, although on a formal level I agree that Scott is a dialectical writer, on the level of the content of his stories—the way the plots work themselves through, his characters—it seems to me that what emerges at the end of a Scott novel is more like a compromise than a synthesis.
My point is: in many contemporary historical novels—and especially Fantasy novels (where this is a very common trope)—Scottian dialectics gets replaced by a more linear Bildungsroman narrative. The pig-boy becomes a warrior or prince; the neglected village girl becomes a mighty sorceress; the character whose life is ordinary (like ours) quests through dangers and marvels that reveal him to be extraordinary. This can be satisfying, but also flattening, and it dilutes the historical imagination.
And that's the really important thing, I think. Fantasy as a mode of the historical imagination needs fully to engage with history: not just the superficial details of dress and materiel, but history in its larger dynamic, its shifts and alterations, and therefore its estrangement and potency.
A recent example: Canadian author
Miles Cameron’s Against All Gods (2022). This is the first volume in a sequence of Fantasy epics, set in a version of the Bronze Age Middle East. The story of this particular volume is a revenge plot that burgeons into a whole war between gods and mortals, and which brings a large number of characters, laying before the reader its worldbuilding. And the Bronze Age is a very different place to now. As Cameron says in his author’s note: ‘there is no money. This is a barter economy, and the relative value of gold, silver, grain or any other commodity varies from place to place and from transaction to transaction … There are no maps or charts. Most people cannot read; the ability to read is almost a magic power. Scribes hold that power … Book-keeping and accounting, like reading, are near-magical powers.’ Of course, Cameron’s note also slyly flatters us—for
we can read (we are in fact reading these very words!) which aligns us with the magical powers of the word. We, you and I, the book is saying, are special.
The novel itself, however, does not actualise these differences. Or to be more precise, its itinerary of difference marks only a surface patina over a core story of familiarity; and it is that familiarity—familiarity with genre conventions, familiarity with recognisable modern characters—that is the ground of its working. This novel is like many other grimdark-esque Fantasy novels. Structurally it is linear: scenes of dialogue; scenes of fighting with swords and spears and lots of grisly bloodletting; scenes of sex; occasional chunks of exposition. Since what I say might be thought merely disobliging, I should add that this is a novel, and Cameron is a writer, with a large and enthusiastic fanbase. To check
the Goodreads page for the novel is to see that people
love this kind of thing, and love this specific thing in particular.
I did not like this novel. It seemed to me extruded genre product, thin and unengaging. Some of my bounce-off reaction was the rather smug way the author paraded his ‘this isn’t your regular fantasy! It’s the Bronze Age and there’s no money and only scribes can write and I’ve done lots of research!’ and then perpetrated howler after howler: ‘His brain was spinning like a chariot wheel’—but Bronze Age people located consciousness in the chest and torso, not the brain;—a scribe has a seal with a hippogriff carved on it, even though hippogriffs were invented by Ariosto in the 16th century—the ships have heavier, later-period tackle than was the case with bronze-age skiffs (‘a mainmast amidships’ ‘Aanat went back aft to one of the main hawsers’ etc) or—
—But of course it’s daft of me to object to this: this is Bronze Age cosplay, the characters’ sensibilities (gods and mortals) are all modern—as is the case in
most Fantasy writing—and so far as the author and his fanbase are concerned, that’s a feature not a bug. The gods utter such resonant-transcendent Homeric sentiments as ‘Fucking idiots. We gave them too much power. They have no idea what they’re doing with it.’ The mortals are all: ‘Zos was lying, naked and oiled, on his sleeping pallet, and he had a good buzz on from the wine.’
A good buzz on. Hmm. The sex is depressingly unimaginative and all hetero—again, a very un-Bronze-Age notion, this.
And actually my problem is not that the novel gets this or that specific historical detail or mood wrong; it’s that it doesn’t really engage with ‘history’ at all, despite pretending to do so. Its characters’ sensibilities are modern, its gods agents in the imagined world much as its mortals are—the gods are more powerful, though ‘power’ is rendered here only in terms of the ability to overbear, with violence or words—all potestas, nothing of auctoritas. There’s nothing in these gods of the numinous, the transcendent, nothing of the strange, the awe-inspiring, transcendent or resplendent. This is not a dimension that Cameron reproduces in his imagined Bronze Age; although for ‘actual’ Bronze Age human beings, in their porosity of subjectivity, it was a crucial and wondrous and terrifying aspect of existence. The characters go about their various plot-driven actions, and the storylines are punctuated by interludes of purely somatic intensity (the violence, the fighting, the sex) that do nothing to estrange, to capture or embody the wonder and difference of the past as such.
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