Very interesting question.

I think point 6 is part of it. And I see the advent of science/age of reason as a turning point. It’s hard to have magic in a scientific society, at least without spending lots of time explaining how it works.
If you add firearms (16-17th century) into the equation, it changes how useful magic is. Why go to the trouble of using magic when you can blow someone away from 1500 metres with a sniper rifle, or bombard them from thousands of kilometres away?

And of course there’s the time of myth and legends in Europe from post-Roman to late Medieval times that makes it an “easy” time period to set a fantasy story in. Then again that is in some way a Victorian romanticised ideal of the middle ages, but that’s arguably where modern fantasy started.

You forgot:

0. It’s all Tennyson’s fault.

-1. It’s all James Macpherson’s fault.

-2. It’s all Spenser’s fault.

-3. It’s all Mallory’s fault.

-4. It’s all Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fault.

The aesthetics is a massive strain of English Literature, I mean, from the get-go, and while the early Arthuriana was temporally set in the Dark Ages it was representing that period in Medieval terms — knights, kings, etc. — (re)constructing an ersatz past (for reasons 3 and 4 in part, perhaps? Also because temporal displacement is a stratagem for maintaining (in)credibility — reason 6.) Any pre-Modern aesthetic can be wired into that, really — Celtic, Viking, Roman or even Tudor/Plantaganet. And often is, it seems.

There’s a pastoral appeal, but the flipside of the Gothic (original Gothic, I mean, the aesthetic of gargoyles, the grotesque) also has to be considered, no? And between them, created in the clash of idyll and inferno, you have the baroque, the byzantine. The aesthetics of pseudo-medieval fantasy is itself a rich discourse of those aesthetics, loaded with the symbolic capacity for wonder, horror and intrigue. And in a heroic narrative grammar, power, capital and sex are all mushed up, so reasons 5 and 8 surely come into play here too.

Anyways, taken in reverse order, each of those writers, it seems to me, taps into and reinforces the power of that deeper aesthetics. It all seems fairly logical as an ongoing industry of mythopoeic manufacturing, with pretty much all those reasons valid aspects.

Reason 7 isn’t unfair either. The creation of Ballantyne’s Adult Fantasy line in the 1970s creates the category around Tolkien and the other works in that Romantic tradition. And the aesthetics is cemented with Terry Brooks and so on, a genre with a closed definition that only starts to open up as the default label for non-generic strange fiction changes from sf to fantasy.

It is White and Western?

I think a lot of reasons have been highlighted without realising it. If it’s not medieval it gets branded as something else eg sci-fi or urban fantasy and the fact there’s steampunk as well leaves little wriggle room. Part of the problem is that medieval actually defines the term “fantasy”.

More simplistically is the fact that “medieval” as most of us regard it means anything before guns and after the stone-age, which is actually the majority of civilised history. There is a lot of scope to pick from, just there.

The romantic in me still likes to think it’s linked to legend though. Most fantasy books try to emulate the spirit of mythology and since mythology is intrinsically set in the era of swords, be it Greek gods or King arthur, that’s what we go for now. In a thousand years authors may be trying to emulate Marvel/DC comics?

Then there’s the cynic in me that simply says “That’s what Tolkien did and that’s what sells”.

Correction, I didn’t *really* mean post-industrial – just industrial. Post pre-industrial, perhaps, or something.

And I didn’t even have an Ardbeg, sheesh.

E.

9 – Dude, swords are cool! (I guess that’s 8 rephrased…)

10 – No lawyers. A lot of heroic fantasy is set in less civilized times so that the hero can solve things in ways that would not be allowed today unless one were the president of a large western nation. This is why cowboy fiction has remained popular. Back in the old west, a man is able to do what a man’s gotta do without being subject to crippling litigation.

Often, that’s what a lot of romanticism breaks down to – dreaming back to simpler times when problems could be solved through direct action, when heroes and villains were clearly defined, and good triumphed because it was destined to. In that regard, fantasy is very conservative. I don’t mind it in books. It’s when its used in political campaigns that it annoys me.

It’s also what I’m trying to muddy up in my own writing.

I think there’s one called “Elf Defense.” I’m afraid I haven’t read it.

I think Hal and E.M. have tapped a pretty rich vein from which a lot of the ore that goes into the alloy of fantasy has been mined, but there’s more than that. The “medieval” period is also violent, stratified, conceived as somewhat lawless, and full of uprising, crusades, and banditry, which makes for a setting that can be exciting, escapist, and at the same time safe. It lends itself not just to pastoral description, but assorted grotesqueries and flamboyances as well. You can have grit and high fashion, magical woods and forbidding fortresses, and swordplay swordplay swordplay! Certainly other periods have some of these elements, but in the cultural memory they lack the fusion of the bucolic and the dastardly, the hardscrabble and the regal, and the concomitant stratification with chaos that, many think, is what characterized the era

There is also the counter-ethic that a reader can pleasurably wallow in of the mean old feudal system and all of its problems that contrast with our relatively safe, privileged democratic systems. We can read about the excesses of monarchs and opposition to them (or the anointment of a better king) , we can observe brutality and honor in “purer” forms. . . there are an array of contrasts that can be created aesthetically that play on the reader’s suppositions through the deployment of genre traditions. It is also an easy milieu to set up for Anglophone readers, and the reader can often fill in a lot of blanks easily as they read on. We receive a lot of these protocols in the standard education we received in literature, and they are easily deployed.

I think Moorcock also gives us a lot to think about in his WIZARDRY AND WILD ROMANCE, and Hal touches on a few of the elements that Moorcock discusses there.

I think Eric’s nod to Don Quixote is a cogent point in terms of how much the yearning is a response to Classicism and the industrial era. Actually, the Rationalist aesthetics in literature is born with Cervantes, one might argue, in a response to chivalric Romances like Amadis de Gaul (1508). The later Romantics are counter-revolutionaries, idealising the pre-industrial era, for sure, but the pastoral is there in Virgil’s Eclogues, if not earlier. Either way, in the 1100s you have Jean Bodel talking about the Matter of Rome, the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain. All of which is knightly, courtly.

The soft-focus may not even be on the far past at first — like the dime novels that created the Western genre were being written (almost?) during the frontier era itself in the grands scheme of things. The rapt audience wasn’t distanced by decades but by space — being “back East” — and… cultural trappings, the milieu itself. Wild West or wild woods, I see a common yearning in the gunslinger and the knight, something that predates the reaction against those dark satanic mills because it predates the mills.

You *do* have the Arcadian idyll — even *more* a part of Classicism than Romanticism — but I think the import of the Enlightenment / Industrial Revolution may be over-stated, that the notion that it’s *essentially* a panic in the face of mechanistic Modernity is… part of a grand self-serving metanarrative of Rationalism which is *itself* ironically Romantic. Like, it’s a great way to undermine the counter-revolutionaries, positing their aesthetics as *dependent* on your own.

There is an artistic tradition antedating Tolkien which is heavily invested in medieval settings, sagas and symbols: the Gothic novelists, the Pre-Raphaelites, fantasists like George MacDonald, etc. If you include the Renaissance, which many modern fantasies borrow from, along with the medieval, it is about a thousand years of history that is being drawn upon for inspiration, which is an impressive span. But modern writers often treat it as more static and uniform in its technologies and social structures than was actually the case. The influence of fairy tales, which Tobias mentions, probably has a lot to do with that, as they seem to occupy a timeless period that conflates the characteristics of numerous different historical periods within that thousand year range, while adding large dollops of magic to the mix. Childhood exposure to those tales created an audience highly receptive to the modern medievaloid fantasy.

Re the Gothic spilling into epic fantasy: When I say “original,” maybe I could have put that better. I mean the Gothic of medieval cathedrals, that pre-Renaissance aesthetic that’s largely visual, architectural — grey stone and gargoyles, castles and keeps. I’d say epic fantasy is full of that. Hell, goblins and orcs are, visually, gargoyles in flesh, just missing the wings. I’m thinking less of a taxonomy of Romantic literature — into straight Romance and distinctly darker (weird, uncanny) Gothic Romance — more of the aesthetics of the grotesque and the sublime that go hand-in-hand with the pastoral. *Without* that, actually, do you still have the pseudo-medieval at all? Pure pastoral fantasy, it seems to me, tends to slip towards the Arcadia of (Neo-)Classical art.

I guess I’m arguing, in an inchoate way, that there’s a self-mythologising going on in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages, something akin to the way Classical Greece defined itself in the present with its legends of Antiquity. The rose-tinted lenses were mostly pointed on the Classical period, with Petrarch setting everything since, up to his own 14th century as “the Dark Ages.” Against that you might view Geoffrey of Monmouth and his ilk as *progressive*, casting the High Middle Ages as a replacement to Classical Greece, with the Early Middle Ages as a sort of European Antiquity, the heroic age of Arthur & Charlemagne. In other words, rather than nostalgia for a lost past, those chivalric romances were establishing heroic/mythic foundations for their current culture as legitimate in and of itself. Parzival as a new Perseus, so to speak.

Why would the specifics of that mythos persist? Why *wouldn’t* it persist? It’s Western Europe’s equivalent of Homer.

Far too many intelligent points to respond to here, as comments spread like mutated mushroom after a nitrate rich rain.

I would posit there is another element, not touched much on so far. The psychological dimensions of these stories, with their roots in both European fairy tales and Greek and Roman mythos – especially those of the Mysteries and the work/re-work of dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

There are interwoven in this tradition both foundation myths and deeper aspects of the human psyche – ideas which we respond in certain ways as children, and then later as adults, looking back at the darker elements in these same stories.

Taking away the modern’s yearning for past agrarian glories, it is over simplification to say its the pull of the dark in the dark ages, or the ability for writers and fabulists to add colour to terra incognita. It is true that the fuzziness of historical knowledge often of these periods (which were not so uniformly dark as is frequently assumed) can lead to easily imagined heroics, and later even political satire in the hands novelists like Rabelais and Swift.

But I’m less sure this explains the relative, and I do stress, relative, homogeny of so much our fantasy landscape. This is why I think that the influences of popular media, from games, to toys, to movies, and more, have contributed. Less in terms of all of the above, but in the original sense of Mark’s question as I see it: one of surface aesthetics, not necessarily the deeper and more classical meaning behind the exploration of these themes and ancient questions.

I think that part of it is about believability (is that a word?). There is a certain amount of suspension of belief that has to occur when reading fantasy but it also has to be beleivable in the regular sense. The historical setting seems easiest to achieve this in, it is an era we are familiar but because it is so different from today (the most standout reason being the lack of technology) the unreal is easier to believe. It creates a balance that may be harder to achieve using a more modern setting, and using a setting that appears futuristic creates the danger that you’ll automatically be classified as SF regardless of anything else.

Of course this is from a reading perspective, but what is read is written right?

I don’t know that I actually agree with the above, it was just my first thought, I have no problems with believability, I do afterall still read children’s books and enjoy old sci fi.

I remember that my first books as a child, the ones that had been read to me and also the ones that I had started reading myself were fairytales. I include also the Greek and other ancient world legends which in my opinion could be a form of fantasy. For those contemporaries of Homer and Herodotus, who had to deal with the “realities” of gods and goddesses, might have not been fantasy. Interesting question though and now that I think about it, the reason why I turned to fantasy were The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh and The Aeneid among others. All in prose form and simplified, mind you, since as a 4 year old I would have been bored by the verses.

“But that’s not the cause I think of todays glut of shields and maidens, dragons and stupid orcs – not even Tolkien is the guilty party. I’d personally blame Robert E. Howard before even the dean, along with a few others.”

You’re probably going to have to explain this a bit more, since I honestly don’t see why Howard should be any more to blame than Tolkien.

In any case, I don’t think either are to blame for the current archetype, so much as their imitators fail to understand exactly what made their fiction so compelling are to blame – and thus, the legions of imitator’s imitators have a gigantic game of Chinese Whispers, the original genius lost in the process.

How many epic fantasy stories have all the battles, feudal trappings, grand landscapes, lost civilizations, orcs, elves, “halflings,” trolls and knights of The Lord of the Rings, but fail to have anything comparable to Tolkien’s themes of loss, of magic fading from the world, of nobility, of the common soldier shouldering incredible trials alongside the famed leaders and kings? How many Sword-and-Sorcery stories have all the buxom maidens, horrific monsters, dastardly sorcerers and muscular heroes of Conan, but fail to match Howard’s themes of man’s futility in the face of a vast and uncaring cosmos, the bleakness of existence quenched only by the immediacy of love, war and hate, the philosophical conflict between barbarism and civilization, the corrupt decadent hypocrisy of civilization being not that much more morally superior to the harsh violent brutality of the wild?

Neither Tolkien nor Howard can, nor should, be blamed for the glut of dime-a-dozen cookie-cutter fantasy epics cluttering the shelves: the blame falls squarely on the writers of those books for failing to understand the true value of the original authors they lifelessly ape, and on the droves of fantasy fans who buy them in such numbers to justify their continued existence.

In any case, I would hesitate to blame Conan purely because so many of the stories happen outside a feudal Medieval milieu: plenty happen in the equivalent of the ancient Middle East, darkest Africa, even a few in Colonial America. Only a few of the tales take place in a decidedly Medieval setting, and even then, there’s usually something to offset it substantially.