Varieties of modern fantasy

 Fantasy has become a well developed genre, with lots of sub-genres, from romantic ("romantasy") to grim-and-dark to "cozy" to humorous.  Today I want to talk about several recent excellent fantasy books as examples of the variety the field has embraced.

Okay, at the simplest, fantasy is a story with magic, usually (not always) set in an imagined past, often vaguely medieval.  JRR Tolkien essentially invented the modern genre with The Lord of the Rings, and in the 1950s critics didn't know what to make of it, although they liked it a lot.  "Super science fiction."  "Fairy tales for grownups."

Tolkien-style fantasy has dominated for 75 years. It has a fairly well developed world in which the story takes place, generally with wizards, magical creatures like hobbits or elves or dragons, often a map.  The material culture is pre-modern, swords instead of guns, horses instead of cars, hand-made instead of factory-made goods, wood fires instead of electric and gas.  George RR Martin has this kind of setting for his on-going series beginning with A Game of Thrones.  My main fantasy series, "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," falls more or less into this category (though I highly doubt anyone would compare Yurt to Martin's Westeros.)

One can vary this with fairy-tale fantasy, sort of the same but vaguer on setting, often including such New World items as chocolate and potatoes in a semi-European setting (even Tolkien included potatoes and tobacco), generally more lighthearted (certainly more so than Martin), and frequently involving princesses.  Some authors retell classic tales like "Beauty and the Beast" or "Snow White" this way.

Alternately one can have a medieval setting that is pretty close to the real Middle Ages, although with magic. My husband and I did this with our Count Scar.

  

 

One can also set fantasy in something like the modern world.  The book The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow, starts off in something sort of like modern England but then ranges back over the centuries to the Bronze Age or before, with efforts to remake history in pursuit of justice.  It's been getting a lot of attention for its unexpected plot twists and strong characters.

This book just came out last year, as did Snake Eater by T. Kingfisher.  This one is set in something close to the American Southwest, and it is very evocative of the creatures and myths of the desert and the native Americans.  Its magic isn't time-travel but the idea of desert gods attached to native creatures (a roadrunner is crucial, definitely not the cartoon version).  Again, excellent characters.

A third recent book I've very much enjoyed (though it's nothing like my own fantasy) is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. This one is a few years older. It's set in something like modern Britain, except that a lot of children are born as magical creatures, and there's a highly questionable bureaucracy that is supposed to supervise them. Humor, very realistic children, and a touch of gay romance, lots to enjoy.

You will notice that fantasy is very rarely a quest to overcome the Dark Lord these days. Ever since Diana Wynne Jones published Dark Lord of Derkholme, a hilarious adventure where people from our world pay to take quests through the "portal" to a fantastic land and "slay the dark lord," we haven't seen it much.  But there are lots and lots of alternate plot lines. Fantasy, when done right, raises real human concerns in a setting like and unlike ours. And I haven't even talked about sex-with-magical-creatures.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026  

Dialogue in historical fiction

When one is writing historical fiction (or fantasy, because let's face it, most fantasy is some version of historical fiction for the setting, with the addition of magic), a question is how to handle dialogue.

Should one's characters sound sort of medieval? (or to be more accurate, like Shakespeare).  Do you want them to say things like, "Zounds, thou hast e'en be-causèd me to besmircheth mine trew."  Okay, let's hope that no one would actually have a character deliver this line.  But the temptation is often strong to have dialogue reminiscent of the costumed performers at a Renaissance Faire.

Here it's important to realize that real medieval people (or medieval-style people in fantasy) were not wearing costumes.  They were just wearing clothes.  In the same way, they weren't speaking archaic English.  They were speaking their ordinary language.

The challenge is to give the characters dialogue that will allow the reader to have enough suspension-of-disbelief to imagine (without really thinking about it) that the characters are speaking an English translation of what they are actually saying.  (It's fiction, so with luck the readers are already prepared to suspend belief.)

I write fantasy set in an alternate version of medieval France in the Count Scar series, co-authored with Robert A. Bouchard, but you won't catch us having our characters say, "Franche contesse, Diex te puist consellier!  Iceste chose ne vuel plus respitier."  This is real twelfth-century Old French (it's from the epic Raoul de Cambrai), and it means, "Noble countess, may God guide you!  I do not wish to delay to do this any longer."  I sense our readers would abandon us if we started slapping Old French into our stories.

 

But does this mean that characters should just talk like twenty-first century people?  No, that doesn't work either.  I try especially to avoid idiomatic expressions that are based on things foreign to medieval people.  For example, baseball has added a lot to our turns of phrase.  "He really struck out on that."  "He couldn't get to first base with her."  "I try to be fair, I just call the balls and strikes as I see them."  But even though modern baseball has medieval roots, as I've discussed previously, medieval people would not have used such expressions.

Football and basketball phrases don't work either.  "He shoots, he scores!"  "They're just going to run out the clock."  "He's trying to defend from his own five-yard line."  "They're trying a Hail Mary pass."  And of course the latter only works if you've got Christianity in your fantasy world.

Then there are expressions that go back to nineteenth-century clipper ships.  "He's a loose cannon."  "He's three sheets to the wind."  "All hands on deck!"  Well, maybe you could use them if your fantasy has something like a "Pirates of the Caribbean" setting.  But not pseudo-medieval.

In the same way, there are hordes of informal phrases that would just strike a jarring note.  "The joke made her crack up."  "This is one hot mess."  "Hey, don't freak out."  "Give me a break!"  Many are catch-phrases that got their start in popular movies or TV ads.  "The good, the bad, and the ugly."  "Shake and bake."  "Where's the beef?"  "Houston, we have a problem."  "Rinse and repeat."  "A few French fries short of a happy meal."  "That chick is toast!"

I try to make people speak sort-of formally but not archaically.  If you want to use catch-phrases, make some up!  If you have dragon-riders in your fantasy, surely that experience would have generated sayings or expressions.  Same thing for the people on intergalactic space ships in science fiction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval social history (and its modern descendants), see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback!

Galoran and Melchior

I've got a new book!  It's a paperback, titled Galoran and Melchior, and I cowrote it with my husband, Robert Bouchard.  Here's the link on Amazon.

It's a big fat omnibus edition containing two complete novels, Count Scar and its sequel, Heretic Wind (which I blogged about earlier).  Even though the books are officially fantasy, they are very close to real historical fiction, in that the setting, the religion (against which the heretics rebel), the weapons, the castles, the food and the like are all very close to real medieval society and culture.

The people, however, are not based on real historical figures.  Instead we have given them the kind of outlook and reaction to situations real medieval people would have had.  The two heroes, as you probably figured out all by yourself, are named Galoran and Melchior.  Here's the book's description.

* Galoran is a scarred warrior and younger son, his years of captaining the Emperor's armies over, and now it seems without future prospects.
* Melchior is a priest and magic-worker in the Order of the Three Kings, an order dedicated to redeeming magic from the heresy of the so-called Perfected.
When Galoran unexpectedly inherits the castle and county of Peyrefixade, he also acquires a spiritual advisor - Melchior. The two are not sure they can trust each other but must learn to work together as the heretics threaten the castle and the dark secrets it hides. Galoran's life is further complicated by the ruthless duke who invited him to Peyrefixade, to say nothing of his beautiful and spirited daughter.
Set in an alternate version of southern France in the Middle Ages, the story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the two main characters. The outcome turns on mystery and passion, on betrayal and uncertain alliance, as they are forced to question their very beliefs to determine where true loyalty lies.

 The heresy in the novels is essentially that of the so-called Albigensians in thirteenth-century southern France.  Similarly, the religion called the True Faith is essentially medieval Christianity.  However, neither the heresy nor the orthodoxy is given its historically accurate name, so if you don't want to mix real religion with your fantasy, you can pretend they are also fantastical.

The individual titles are available as ebooks on the major ebook platforms.  In spite of publishing a whole lot of ebooks, I myself continue to prefer a physical book, so this volume makes the novels available for those who feel the same.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

Albigensian Crusade

What we now know as the Crusades began, as I have discussed previously, with efforts in 1095 to conquer the Muslims in the Holy Land (essentially what is now Israel and Syria) and make it a Christian territory.  But the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem fell to the Turks in 1187, never to be regained.  This did not stop the desire for Crusades, just their likelihood of success.

The crusading movement quickly branched out to be wars against heretics (or even personal enemies in a few cases), rather than only against Muslims.  The first big war against heretics was the Albigensian Crusade, launched in 1209, called that because much of the fighting was near the town of Albi in southern France.

A heresy we now call Catharism had been growing and spreading for some time.  It was actually an alternate version of Christianity, a dualist religion related to Zoroastrianism and to the Manichaean heresy of late antiquity.  It seems to have reached western Europe via Bulgaria, and its adherents were sometimes called Bogomils.  The basic tenet was that the universe was divided equally between forces of light and darkness, locked in eternal conflict (and no, we're not talking here about the Star Wars' Force).  For adherents, the physical universe was the creation of the devil, not of God, and the ultimate goal was to free oneself from all hint of physicality until finally starving to death.

There is a fair amount of dualism in orthodox Christianity, but it has always held that God, not the devil, created the physical world (reread Genesis), and that when we rise again we will rise in the flesh, not as disembodied spirits.

For a long time this growing heresy was considered deplorable but nothing more.  When towns in southern France started having two bishops, one adhering to Roman Christianity and one to Cathar beliefs, Cistercian monks were sent south to preach and to try to talk the locals out of what was considered their mistaken faith.  It didn't work.  Even the count of Toulouse, the most powerful lord of southwestern France, adopted at least some tenets of Catharism.

The pope sent a legate (representative) to try to help coordinate the preaching.  His legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered in 1208, some said at the orders of the count of Toulouse.  No more Mister Niceguy!  Calling the heresy a cancer that must be cut from the body of Christendom before it spreads, the pope declared a Crusade.  The count of Toulouse's efforts to calm everything down were unsuccessful, and he was placed under anathema.  The Crusade, essentially a war of northern France against southern France, began in 1209.

It was a vicious war.  Northern forces were led by Simon de Montfort.  You should still not tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France, because these are not considered funny jokes.  When asked how they could tell who was and wasn't a heretic before burning a whole village, he was said to have quipped, "Burn them all.  The Lord will know His own."

Having (sort of) won, the northern armies settled down to hold southern lands.  They took over and enlarged a number of quite stunning castles that the heretics had held.  These are now sometimes called "citadels of vertigo" from being perched on high peaks and cliffs.  The newly established order of Dominican friars continued the efforts to try to convert people they kept hoping were just confused.  The Inquisition got underway, trying to find and deal with hidden heretics.

One of the more remarkable events, a generation after the Crusade, was the Massacre at Montségur in 1244.  A group of heretics, with their families, held out in a castle on a mountaintop for close to a year.  When the castle was finally captured (Swiss rock climbers went up the back of the mountain, so steep as to be thought inaccessible), the attackers gave any heretics who would renounce their faith two weeks to get out, not wanting to kill children and admiring the defenders' resolve.  But at the end of two weeks most were still there.  And, feeling they really had to do so, the attackers burned everybody.  You can now visit Montségur and, after paying a few euros, climb to the top.

My husband, Robert Bouchard, and I co-wrote a fantasy novel, Count Scar, set in a slightly reimagined version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade.  It is available as an ebook on Amazon and other e-tailers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Historical Fiction and the Middle Ages

I have trouble with a lot of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages.  Too often the characters are just modern people wearing medieval outfits.  And of course it is far too easy to mess up such basic tidbits of medieval social history as when the Black Death came through or when knitting was invented (clue: both were at the end of the Middle Ages).

One book (which shall remain nameless) got me very irritated when the heroine planned a romantic wedding at a nunnery (nunneries were not places to get married, being instead the opposite), when the hero had a friendly chat with the abbess, who sat on the front porch knitting (knitting was not yet invented, and abbesses did not have friendly chats outside the cloister with passing strangers), and the hero went on to disguise himself in the clothes of a dead leper (which he would have recoiled from in terror).

Real medieval people were grim, ruthless, without any religious tolerance, and thought about death a lot—and those were the good guys!  For modern readers, medieval-themed fantasy, where you don't have to worry about historical accuracy, seems to work better than accurate historical fiction.  As a bonus, it doesn't get historians like me upset.  After all, I write fantasy too! (see previous post).

The closest I have come to real historical fiction is Count Scar, which I co-wrote with my husband.  That's the cover to the print edition, done by the late, great Darrell K. Sweet.  The novel is set in a thinly-disguised version of southern France in the early thirteenth century, a time when fear of heresy was rampant.  We mix it up a little by introducing magic, which in the story is practiced by an order of monks.  This actually makes sense, as people interested in the life of the mind mostly went into the church.

In the book, we tried to strike a balance between real medieval society and characters who would appeal to the modern reader.  If you read it, hope you agree that we succeeded!  (Also if you read it, see if you can guess which of us wrote which character.)

Like my Royal Wizard of Yurt series, the book is out of print but is available used, and also as an ebook from iTunes, Kobo, B&N - Nook, and of course Amazon. amazon.com/author/cdalebrittain
For more information about my novels, go to www.Daimbert.com

© C. Dale Brittain 2014