Today we are perfectly aware that crime fiction and other novels are based purely on

imagination. We know full well that characters like Harry Potter aren’t real and that
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson never actually walked the streets of London.
However, had these books been published in the Middle Ages, their readers would have
thought that the stories about Harry, Holmes and Watson were real – simply because
there were books about them.
New research reveals how our ancestors came up with the idea to tell tall tales in
books.

“In the Middle Ages, books were perceived as exclusive and authoritative. People
automatically assumed that whatever was written in a book had to be true,” says
Professor Lars Boje Mortensen of the Institute of History and Civilization at the
University of Southern Denmark.

“Most people only knew the Bible, which was believed to tell the truth about the world.
Because of this, it came as a big surprise when books full of fabrications first started to
appear in the 12th century.”
The preliminary research that Mortensen and his colleagues have carried out has been
published in the book Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction.

Monks regarded words of books as old truths

Historians and anthropologists assume that people have always told each other stories
– including those that their listeners knew were pure fiction. But it was actually not until
the High Middle Ages that writing fiction became common practice. Up until the High
Middle Ages in the 12th century, books were surrounded by grave seriousness.
The average person only ever saw books in church, where the priest read from the
Bible. Because of this, the written word was generally associated with truth.
The perception of books was no different among learned monks, who studied books
about science and philosophy in the large monasteries of the Middle Ages.
The monks presumed that the descriptions of the paths of the planets and the human
soul were ancient truths. Truths like the words of the Bible. The books read by the
religious men had been passed on from generation to generation for centuries, and this
meant that they acquired a special authority.

The practically religious relationship with books started to change gradually at the end
of the 12th century – and has continued to change ever since.

“We can only understand something as fiction if an ‘invisible contract’ has been formed
between author and reader beforehand. A contract that says: ‘this is only make-
believe’,” says Mortensen.
Hell was invented by curious men
The ‘invisible contract’ between writers of fiction and their readers first appeared in the
Middle Ages. The new study shows that the contract materialized over the course of
several centuries. It all started a few hundred years after the death of Jesus, when it
became common practice to think up continuations to the events in the Bible and write
them down as truth.
Christians in the Middle Ages and antiquity didn’t feel that the Bible provided them with
all the answers they were looking for. The great book offers a lot of information about
the life of Jesus, but there are also gaps in the descriptions, such as when the Son of
God returns to Earth after his death and stays there for almost 40 days.
Mortensen and his colleagues have reached their findings by reading religious,
philosophical, scientific and historic books from antiquity and the Middle Ages.
While reading, they estimated whether the books established a fiction contract with their
readers: did the book suggest a tacit agreement that it was all make-believe, or was the
reader supposed to believe every single word?
This enabled the researchers to piece together when signs of a tacit agreement or
‘fiction contract’ first started to appear in Europe.
“Some started to wonder: why doesn’t it say anything much about what Jesus actually
said, when he returned to Earth? People started to think up answers to that. They filled
in the gaps in the Bible by writing so-called apocryphal gospels as a supplement. In
other words, they used their imagination to fill in the gaps,” says the researcher.
Our idea of hell is one of the concepts to have been introduced in that way. In the Bible
it only says that the apostle Paul converted to Christianity after visiting a mysterious
place. The place convinced him that Christianity was good.
“He had a vision in which he was removed from Earth, only later to return. But how did
the other world look? That ‘gap’ in the Bible was filled with a description of ‘Hell’ – the
place people imagined Paul had been to,” he says.
“Thus began the descriptions of Hell that we know today.”
Historians made up things too
There are several examples of books from the Middle Ages and antiquity being partly or
entirely fictional. Most of these were history books with fictional elements.
That is one of the most important findings published in the new book Medieval
Narratives between History and Fiction. The first signs of the beginning of fiction already
materialized during antiquity, but at the time no-one realized, as the ‘fiction contract’ had
yet to be invented.
The Bible wasn’t the only book to receive imaginative makeovers and extensions. In the
centuries that followed, historical accounts were supplemented with a little imagination. 

One such example is the medieval history of Denmark, 

Saxo Grammaticus, from around 1200. Saxo’s book was riddled with fictional tales,
designed to create coherence between a number of legends that had been passed
down through history.
However, as the ‘fiction contract’ between readers and writers had not yet been
established, people readily assumed that the descriptions they found in the books were
true.
“It’s our impression that it was actually perceived as historical fact, because there was
no clear-cut line between fiction and non-fiction at the time,” says Mortensen.
Alexander the Great in a submarine
As time passed, the number of supplementary stories increased. And they grew better
and wilder – as so often happens with good stories.
“During the course of the Middle Ages, the supplementary stories were rewritten so
many times that people eventually figured out that they were just tall tales and pretense.
The most extreme examples are the historic accounts of the life of Alexander the
Great,” he explains.
“Those books contain elements where Alexander the Great is flying in a kind of airplane.
He sails in a submarine of sorts, and he meets a variety of mysterious beings. Those
were popular books in the Middle Ages.”
In that way, people gradually got used to the fact that books could also be a form of
entertainment – and that they were not necessarily telling the truth from cover to cover.
Thus, the road was paved for the novels we know today.
King Arthur stories were the first novels
The first straightforward work of fiction was written in the 1170s by the Frenchman
Chrétien de Troyes. The book, a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table, became immensely popular.