So I started this blog over eleven years ago, and as of today I'm making my 600th post. In honor of this milestone, I'd like to make a few comments about medieval social history and fantasy literature, the blog's two (related) topics.
Most fantasy these days is set in some version of a society like that of Europe in the Middle Ages. Exactly where in that thousand-year period is not always particularly clear, but hey, this is an imaginary past, with magic and wonders, set in an imaginary landscape, so we don't need to get all technical. Do we?
How did fantasy and the Middle Ages get associated? Part of it is fantasy's roots in fairy tales and folk tales, which get bawdlerized into sweet pictures of princesses in tall, pointed caps from which a veil is suspended. Some of these tales (like "Puss in Boots") were written in the early modern period, which from a modern perspective doesn't look that different from the medieval period. Some (like those of the Brothers Grimm), though written later, depict a country life not wildly different from that of half a millennium earlier. In some ways the Middle Ages persisted until the railroad and the telegraph transformed transportation and communication in the nineteenth century.
More specifically, all modern fantasy has been inspired by JRR Tolkien, who was a medievalist who specialized in medieval literature. He was able to keep much of the ethos of that literature while creating characters modern readers could identify with. Readers loved it and wanted more.
Modern industrialization has taken all the glory out of most work, and with most household objects made by strangers on the other side of the globe, we have lost connection to our own possessions. The Middle Ages (or at least an imagined version of that time) is seen as a period in which we made our own excellent objects, grew our own food, were close to the natural world, and didn't get stuck in highway traffic. Plus glory!
Medieval literature was full of glorious wars and celebrations of bravery. Right up through WW I a lot of people still believed in this, at least in Europe, though the American Civil War, with its deaths and maimings and friends turned against each other, had reduced American enthusiasm for wars with cannons and rifles. Strikingly, fantasy battles never have cannons and rifles. It's mostly swords, where if you kill someone it's an up-close-and-personal event, where you could get killed yourself just as easily.
Cannons reached the real Middle Ages in the fourteenth century, transforming warfare, as foot soldiers became valuable as cannon fodder (the enemy cannons shoot, kill the foot soldiers, and then you quick charge before they can reload). Castles also changed. But no one wants to read about this.
Instead most fantasy today is set in a society that looks a lot like Tudor-Stuart or Elizabethan England (sixteenth century), but with twelfth- and thirteenth-century weaponry. Our heroes wander through a world with few peasants (Tolkien didn't have peasants either, though the hobbits were sturdy yeomen). There are castles and kingdoms, lots of kingdoms, often just a few weeks' walk apart. In fact, medieval kingdoms were a lot larger than that, and the division of Germany into multiple little principalities was a later phenomenon.
While I'm on the topic of things that bug me about modern fantasy, every crossroads village in these stories has a tavern, serving brown stew (with meat, probably savory, but certainly brown), and full of ruffians and ne'er do wells (that is, the tavern is full of them, not the stew). In fact a medieval tavern or brew house was there for the locals, so everyone didn't have to brew their own beer, and was connected with the village bakery, which served a similar purpose. It might provide food, but it was almost certainly vegetarian.
Then there's fantasy religion. Some stories have no religion at all, which seems wildly unlikely. All societies have some version of religion. More likely, there's some organized religion that appears to be a weird mashup of the modern evangelical movement and stereotypes of the Spanish Inquisition. Priests tend to be scheming hypocrites who don't actually believe what they preach, or fanatics. Sorry, I know too much about the history of medieval religion to be able to reconcile this with what is supposed to be (fictional) events taking place in a historically-based medieval society.
But it's fantasy! Yes, I know. My main "Yurt" fantasy series is set in something that's like what the nineteenth century would have been like if there had been no Protestant Reformation, no American hemisphere to be discovered, no French Revolution, no Industrial Revolution (with magic filling the latter gap). But with religion. And magic. And no gunpowder. When one is making up a society, one can make up all sorts of things (my sister and I once made up an island society where the people were marsupials). But if you want readers to think you're inspired by the Middle Ages, change things around on purpose, not because you don't know better.
© C. Dale Brittain 2025
