[LiuBei]

I came across a review for a Feist book that complained about the unrealistic portrayal of medieval settings in fantasy novels. Mainly that instead of disease, poor sanitation, and the brutality of medieval law, we have "strapping young lads" and "comely maidens," etc.

I have to admit that I would love to read something a little more realistic in these aspects which is how Tolkien's world seemed to be, there are reasons why authors choose to be inaccurate in this regard.

1. They are building their own worlds-the cultures are made up. They aren't totally based on their sources and authors tend to mix real-life cultures. While medieval Europe had poor sanitation and virtually no cosmetic products, medieval Arabia did.

2. The worlds rely on magic instead of science-many of the fantasy cultures are thousands of years old and yet have not advanced very far technologically. Herbal medicines are made out to be a lot more powerful than they are in real life. In fact, they are as powerful as medieval societies 'believed' them to be. With magic, advances in medicine simply aren't needed.

3. Cultures are often are based on the Renaissance era and not the Middle Ages-These are societies that have been enlightened to the advantages of trade before the discovery of gunpowder. This gives the world a Renaissance without guns type of feel. Great examples of this are Robert Jordan's work and Forgotten Realms books.

4. Authors tend to base the culture on their own-Ever read a fantasy novel where homosexuality is more accepted than it could ever be in the modern world (Terry Goodkind's lesbian BDSM queens for example).

5. Fantasy worlds are set up like heroic epics of yore-Remember Beowulf, The Oddysey, or King Arthur. Everything is genuinely romantic. They didn't pay much attention to disease and sanitation.

6. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder-While a peasant woman wouldn't look too attractive to us, she might be drop-dead gorgeous in a world where standards are much lower than ours.

The guy does have a valid complaint however. Suspension of disbelief is just fine and probably even helps us enjoy the novels much more. However, it would be nice if there were other novels that described a more realistic medieval world other than The Lord of the Rings. Any thoughts?

[Jack]

The guy does have a valid complaint however. Suspension of disbelief is just fine and probably even helps us enjoy the novels much more. However, it would be nice if there were other novels that described a more realistic medieval world other than The Lord of the Rings. Any thoughts?

You make some astute observations. The realism of medieval settings in fantasy settings is, strangely, something I've never considered; odd considering I do have at least a basic knowledge of medieval history. I suppose I always just assumed fantasy is just that - fantasy.

Regardless, I second your desire to see a more realistic medieval world in a fantasy novel, preferably something written recently. I imagine Tolkien was a bit of a stickler for medieval realism because he himself was a medievalist. Odd bunch, those medievalists. But for the most part I think they're fun.

[Jay_T]

The guy does have a valid complaint however. Suspension of disbelief is just fine and probably even helps us enjoy the novels much more. However, it would be nice if there were other novels that described a more realistic medieval world other than The Lord of the Rings. Any thoughts?


Actually IMHO (and I think most people) The Lord of the Rings doesn't present an accurate portrayal of a Medievil world at all; and because of it's standing in the genre, you see it's influence reflected in most epic fantasy.

There are novels that attempt to describe the reality of medieval times (to an extent), I like to call them the GOOD ones like George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

1. They are building their own worlds-the cultures are made up. They aren't totally based on their sources and authors tend to mix real-life cultures. While medieval Europe had poor sanitation and virtually no cosmetic products, medieval Arabia did.

A cop out, and a conveinient one.

2. The worlds rely on magic instead of science-many of the fantasy cultures are thousands of years old and yet have not advanced very far technologically. Herbal medicines are made out to be a lot more powerful than they are in real life. In fact, they are as powerful as medieval societies 'believed' them to be. With magic, advances in medicine simply aren't needed.

One of the elements that I think plagues fantasy the most right now, is the irresponsible use of magic in their storyline. Too often is it used to merely cover up a author's plot-holes, and a lack of imagination. It happens a lot; prime example - see Robert Newcomb's Gates of Dawn. If they had invented the term, Deux Ex Machina, strictly for fantasy it wouldn't go under used.

3. Cultures are often are based on the Renaissance era and not the Middle Ages-These are societies that have been enlightened to the advantages of trade before the discovery of gunpowder. This gives the world a Renaissance without guns type of feel. Great examples of this are Robert Jordan's work and Forgotten Realms books.

Look I have a lot of respect for some FR authors; but any argument using that setting as model for ideal world-building is a little bit to hard for me to fathom.

4. Authors tend to base the culture on their own-Ever read a fantasy novel where homosexuality is more accepted than it could ever be in the modern world (Terry Goodkind's lesbian BDSM queens for example).

Yes.


5. Fantasy worlds are set up like heroic epics of yore-Remember Beowulf, The Oddysey, or King Arthur. Everything is genuinely romantic. They didn't pay much attention to disease and sanitation.

This is like coming up with reasons for why there are a lack of quality elements instead of recognizing they are present IMHO. Fantasy certainly is not entirely romantic, M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, Matthew Stover, Paul di Fiippo etc, etc, etc.

[Teresa Edgerton]

But there are a good many fantasies being written by people who do know a great deal about what life was like in the medieval period, how feudal cultures work, etc. and who use that knowledge extensively in their worldbuilding. For example: Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series, Katharine Kerr's Deverry books, Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Also books by Judith Tarr, Susan Schwartz, C. J. Cherryh, Parke Godwin, Morgan Llewellyn, and several others.

They may not be as popular as books by writers like Jordan, Eddings, Goodkind, & co, but they are certainly available if you want to go look for them.

[KatG]

Watch out Madeleine, Tad Williams is going to come and hit you on the head. His standing in the firmament is essentially on the same level as Eddings and co.

I feel compelled to point out that the Medieval period also had quite a lot of international trade going on, plus invasions, explorations and kingdom mergers and the like, which promoted cross-polination. For that matter, the Roman Empire period was a mass of cultural and goods trading too.

As for showing the dirt, the chamber pots and the disease-pocked prostitutes, just because an author choses not to show such things, I don't necessarily assume they don't exist in that particular universe. And I find that authors lauded as "realistic" epic fantasy writers usually don't show these things either. They seem to get the rep for being more realistic because they kill off main characters, which, while possibly laudable, does not necessarily make a medieval-type setting more believable. As for non-epic fantasy writers, comparing them to epic fantasy writers on realistic settings hardly seems fair, especially as many of them are writing about contemporary settings. They don't show the dirt there either, or much of anything else, as we can fill in for ourselves what a clock, or a tea kettle on a stove might look like.

Settings don't have to be realistic. Or unrealistic. There's plenty of room for all sorts of settings, styles, approaches, yes? Must we monochrome everything? Must we assert the right of one approach to exist only by saying that the other approach has to now be banned? Must one person's preference for realism be forced upon the rest of us who don't care?

This topic brings to mind a conversation in the Writing Forum, in which an author complained that she had put an elk in a story and critiquers had informed her that she couldn't have an elk in her story because her story was set in a European-like, medieval-like setting, and there were no elk in Europe. As it turns out, there are plenty of elk in Europe, some of them being called reindeer, but the problem wasn't that the critiquers did not know biology. The problem was that they thought they had to police the wildlife in someone's creation. I'm for putting this witch-, er, elk-hunting madness down right now. No more fantasy police! No more fantasy police!

[Teresa Edgerton]

Tad Williams is far too good-natured a person to hit me or anyone else over the head.

Anyway, I know his books sell exceedingly well, but they don't seem to inspire the same sort of enthusiastic and ... er, non-critical ... following as Eddings et. al, which is what I meant by including him in with the less "popular" writers.

I totally agree with you, KatG, that for many readers realistic seems to translate to sheer blood-thirstiness. Not the way I define realism or "grittiness," but to each his own.

And I have never understood why a medieval European type culture seems to require, in the mind of some readers, that every last detail of flora and fauna should be medieval European as well, except when it's utterly fantastical. Why should elk where no elk had been seen before be any less likely than, say, unicorns? (It would be different if elk couldn't live under the conditions in question.) It's an alternate world, and so long as the various elements are compatible with each other why shouldn't there be some mixing and matching?

Knowing which elements actually are compatible and consistent, each with the rest, is where research comes in. Making new combinations out of these is where imagination comes in.

All in my personal opinion, of course.

[Miriamele]

It doesn't bother me at all if a medieval-type fantasy world doesn't conform to the way the real Middle Ages were here on Earth. Fantasy is supposed to be just that, fantasy. It shouldn't have to conform to anything, really, so long as what the author is doing works and their world feels right. Plenty of historical novels are loaded with historical realism. It's not what I look for in fantasy. I want more of an escape. I want to enjoy the place I'm visiting. :)

[allanon]

Because magic replaces tehnology. Fantasy worlds are far more advanced than medieval western kingdoms. Also, medieval times are different in various parts of the world. The Byzantnine Empire, for example, were much more advanced and "civilized" than the western kingdoms, even if the intrigues of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", pale, when compared to the political games the the mperor in Constantinople.

[Jay_T]

As for non-epic fantasy writers, comparing them to epic fantasy writers on realistic settings hardly seems fair, especially as many of them are writing about contemporary settings. They don't show the dirt there either, or much of anything else, as we can fill in for ourselves what a clock, or a tea kettle on a stove might look like.

I wasn't comparing epic authors to non-epic authors; the mentioning of their names was in relation to the false notion that all fantasy is intended to be romantic. It most certainly is not.

Now that you mention it however, regarding where the setting is IMHO is irrelevant. Some authors are exceptional (Neal Stephenson comes to mind with his Baroque Cycle) in depiciting there settings in something other then vanilla world based on extreme, polarized, absolutes. I'm not saying this is not intentional or always a product of an author with sub-par ability, in fact my thinking it is intentional is what is so bothersome. Mieville can construct a world full of wonders and monsters, but I'll be damned if New Crobuzon isn't fully rendered (in comparison to the genre). Martin describes a captiol city (Kings Landing) as the only wa a highly populated/traffic city could be desribed; not some shining testement/ornate structure shining in the horizon. Apparently all cities are either OZ, or Mordor in some people's minds.

I think a wonderful research tool would be Italo Calvino's brilliant book Invisible Cities, in regards to a range of different locale descriptions.

I'm not even say such structures have no place; but I find many authors (the bulk of them) fail to find a range, recognizing the existence of a middle ground.

Every sub-genre, has authors that excel at adding some sense of not just realism, but common sense to there HUMAN based society and character behavior.

[Duanawitch]

Odd bunch, those medievalists. But for the most part I think they're fun.

Thanks Homer! :p

I've done a little bit of work on the "mediaevalising" impulse in western, and particularly British culture (mostly in film and 18th + early 19th C. literature, but its mostly applicable) and the conclusions are fascinating with reference to so-called "medieval fantasy".

First, I think it's true that people intuit a historical period - they have basic assumptions about its culture, politics and social hierarchy that are absorbed via a process of cultural osmosis. And this might be from any number of diverse sources which are themselves mediaevalising: film, books, music, art, textiles, even documentaries. The process of creating this "faux-Middle Ages" began in the Middle Ages itself, where royal courts "played" at tournaments and banquets, dressing up like their Romance counterparts. Edward III's Order of the Garter was a mediaevalising device that harks back to a largely pretend chivalric past, just as Walter Scott was to do in the early 19th C with Ivanhoe.

Most people recognise that this sense of the time period is a kind of "faux-medieval", but it has its rules and is wholly recognisable. I don't think the rules are unsimilar to 12th century Romance epic: journeys and quests made into wild places, lowly men discovering their courtly lineage, maidens, castles, seemingly arbitrary tasks, magic (and often the perilous women that go with magical practise). One of the things it isn't is gritty and I agree with KatG on why these points of emission are acceptable and necessary. I think this kind of "mediaeval" is in use by some fantasy authors today - particularly Eddings and Goodkind; so we call it medieval, while we really know it as "mediaevalism": a phantom of mediaeval life. In these cases I'd say the setting isn't so important as our assumptions about it - it feels like a time out of time in a way. :)

I enjoy the merging, melting hybridisation of historicism in fantasy novels; realism is for those historians who believe the truth about the past is out there (I'm not one of them...all history is a kind of fiction in my opinion).

Knowing which elements actually are compatible and consistent, each with the rest, is where research comes in.

Yes! I think *this* is why novels like GRRM's aSoIaF appear more "historical" than their counterparts - a consistent evocation of a fantasy time, whether it's based on mediaeval structures or Renaissance or a combination of the two or of any. Our thoughts on history shouldn't be constrained my any sense of order or stasis; we don't owe it to anyone to be "realistic" and wouldn't gain anything by it.

In some ways I think the appeals of history and good fantasy are the same: they show us how human beings relate to one another during great upheaval, joy or sorrow. Both history and fiction pick out these moments for us; both the novelist and the historian help to crystalise them. And the reader of both history and fantasy ultimately attempts to relate to them, isolate their emotional relevancy to the present (which is always the past's shaper and master). In the face of that, what does realism matter? What does it even mean?