"High Fantasy" and its setting - & why is it often mirroring the "Medieval" or "Renaissance" period.

[naaaaiiiiillllll!!!]

Try Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy. Its the early 20th Century in Imperial Britian, wizards are the ruling class, and history went very differently as a result (the American Revolution is just strating in book 2, I think.)

Gladstone being an insanely powerful wizard is a plot point.

Wow, I haven’t heard of that book series in ~20 years. As a kid I tried reading it after “Artemis Fowl” but never finished. I remember it having really extensive footnotes that took up huge parts of the page and made reading a slog.

In speaking of “Artemis Fowl”, that’s a series that tries to explore a “fantasy” universe with technology (albeit a bit weak on magic). Eoin Colfer once described it as “Die Hard with Fairies” but it’s really more about magical creatures living underground making contact with modern humans — you could replace fairies, dwarves, and pixies with aliens and it would be a SciFi story instead of a proper fantasy.

That might be an unavoidable trend. Once technology becomes a thing, fantasy quickly turns into science fiction and you have to treat the story like scifi.

 

[Jarolleon]

Well, the whole style evolved out of adaptions of (Northern) European traditional tales like Vösungasaga, Nibelungenlied, the Eddas Chansons de geste, the Arturian cycle etc. These stories where often seen as historical when they where written down, but clash with a modern understanding of history.
That what Tolkien used to make his "new" world out of. By remaining true to a historical mode of storytelling it no longer fit into actual history, so he made up a whole new world to fit it in.
A similiar thing happened for Robert E. Howard for whom "Sword and Sorcery" was coined. He wrote historical tales but got tired of the amount of research he had to do for each one, so instead made up the prehistoric world of Conan where he could use real world influences without having to source everything precicely.
As for modern "High Fantasy", I'm not sure what you mean, you use a very custom definition. The style is very historically based. Would the Napoleonic Era with magic be High Fantasy for you? Is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell something that would count?

That makes the Solomon Kane stories more interesting, if they were so painstakingly researched that R.E. Howard got tired of writing them. There's a fragment called "In the Walls of Assur" where an Assyrian remnant colony uses the kind of rapid-fire archery that made the Nubian bowmen famous, but has no cavalry. You could assume it's a lazy confusion of cultures, but it's also quite possible that the exiles had passed through Nubia and adopted their archery techniques, and when the diseases of sub-Saharan Africa killed their horses they went all-in on it.

 

[FuckMeGentlyWithAChainsaw]

That makes the Solomon Kane stories more interesting, if they were so painstakingly researched that R.E. Howard got tired of writing them.

Lol, Solomon Kane wasn't what I was thinking of, those stories have some wild African pseudo history even ignoring the vampires and pyramid bound daemons.
His stories taking place in Europe and the Middle East tend to be a lot more historically based.
For example The Shadow of the Vulture , the story introducing Red Sonya, narrates the whole siege of Vienna in 1529 about as close as any pulp adventure was ever going to get. And Howard was doing his research in small town libraries in Texas without any academic backing.

 

[Monolith]

Wow, I haven’t heard of that book series in ~20 years. As a kid I tried reading it after “Artemis Fowl” but never finished. I remember it having really extensive footnotes that took up huge parts of the page and made reading a slog.

In speaking of “Artemis Fowl”, that’s a series that tries to explore a “fantasy” universe with technology (albeit a bit weak on magic). Eoin Colfer once described it as “Die Hard with Fairies” but it’s really more about magical creatures living underground making contact with modern humans — you could replace fairies, dwarves, and pixies with aliens and it would be a SciFi story instead of a proper fantasy.

That might be an unavoidable trend. Once technology becomes a thing, fantasy quickly turns into science fiction and you have to treat the story like scifi.

Can confirm, I let the one high-tech faction leak into the world far too much.

 

[naaaaiiiiillllll!!!]

Can confirm, I let the one high-tech faction leak into the world far too much.

I mean, we can get into the whole "what's the difference between fantasy and science fiction?" argument that seemingly never ends. I mean most libraries and bookstores have a dedicated "Fantasy/SciFi" section but not individual "Fantasy" and "SciFi" shelves...

I personally don't care but I have family and acquaintances that get really wound up whenever the "Frank Herbert's "Dune" is fantasy" argument comes up.

More on-topic to the thread, I think the phrases "High Fantasy" and "Low Fantasy" may not be ideal. A better way of classifying fantasy stories would be based on the presence of a "soft magic system" or a "hard magic system". Tolkien's work falls under soft magic (no spells, training, and it's more of a general mysticism that permeates that universe) while DnD and Harry Potter would be "hard magic" as magic is much more rigid and standardized in those universes.

 

[Mayor Cody Travers]

Well, the whole style evolved out of adaptions of (Northern) European traditional tales like Vösungasaga, Nibelungenlied, the Eddas Chansons de geste, the Arturian cycle etc.

I think that for modern authors anything from the Renaissance on also feels too modern in attitude. The entire spirit of the Enlightenment contradicts the spirit of magic.

I do kind of think that part of the problem is that as modern technology emerges, a proper empirical science should emerge too. In real life that science largely scrubbed away a lot of the magical and mystical ideas from civilization.

I agree with the general points all you guys said but want to add something else in to complement it all:

The European mythology spoken of is specifically Germanic mythology, and the "medieval fantasy" setting the Dark Ages/Early Medieval Period of Europe when the Germanic kingdoms' small elite populations were busy intermarrying and acculturating with the majority of Roman locals they conquered. While we now have enough primary sources and archeology to back it up on what this period was like, it's still a lot less written-down than a lot of classical history was - where we can get tons of exact dates from contemporaries themselves - and the feudalism that developed can feel a step back from the cosmopolitan heights of the Hellenistic and Roman Empire eras, whose politics and society could sometimes feel downright modern at times despite having kings and nobles too.

This IMO combines to allow fantasy as we know it to work: we can create a raw timeline of "what really happened" (paralleling the primary sources or archeological work found) and contrast that "reality" with what the "heroes" or elites of the gestating nations ( still "primitive" and getting used to the higher culture and technology of the lands they conquered) stated (which we can turn into the prose, viewpoints, and setting of the story itself). What we "know" was some warlord conquering a half-decimated land instead becomes a noble king leading his people into a promised land in THEIR eyes, for example. Aggrandizing history, more or less?

 

[Lazy Printer]

I wonder why authors don't seems to draw inspiration from the classical world, aside from the fact that they mostly "copy" well stabilished works. Another things, i don't know why but i just hate modern dungeon and dragons aesthetics, the armors speacilly, not only the armor but the whole feel of the setting, too much magic i suppose.

 

[Tragi-Chan]

I rather like the Bas-Lag books of China Miéville. The setting is hard to describe - it feels broadly steampunk, but it also has things like robots and weather control. Magic is treated almost as its own branch of science. There are no wizards per se, but, for instance, a surgeon might know some hexes that make them able to do impossible procedures or a blacksmith might be able to weld cold metal. There are also machines that use magic, either as a power source or as part of their function - there’s a sword that uses a combination of magic and probability mathematics to hit not only where its wielder hits, but where they might hit.

To be honest, the magical stuff is probably the least crazy aspect of the world.