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'Fantastic Neomedievalism': The Image Of The Middle Ages In Popular

Fantasy

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Kim Selling, “Fantastic Neomedievalism: The Image of the Middle Ages in
Popular Fantasy”, In Flashes of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from The War of the
Worlds Centennial, Nineteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Ed. David Ketterer, Praeger Publishers: Westport, CT. 2004, pp. 211-218.

‘Fantastic Neomedievalism’:
The Image of the Middle Ages in Popular Fantasy
Kim Selling

In his (1986) book, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco states that “the Return
of the Middle Ages” is a “hot topic”:

We are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed

interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic
neomedievalism and responsible philological examination (63).

Despite his broad-ranging survey of the manifestations of medievalism, from Star Wars,
Disneyland and Conan the Barbarian to the Pre-Raphaelites, occultism, Barbara Tuchman and
Jacques Le Goff, Eco tends to refer to forms of “fantastic neomedievalism”, such as ‘sword-
and-sorcery’ fantasy literature, medieval theme parks, comics or graphic novels such as
Camelot 3000 or Elric, with some scorn. He implies that the “avalanche of pseudo-medieval
pulp in paperbacks, midway between Nazi nostalgia and occultism,” is hardly worthy of
serious academic consideration beside the Middle Ages of “responsible philological
examination” (62-3).1 However, formal medieval scholarship constitutes only one small part
of a wider cultural reading of the medieval in western societies (albeit a vital and highly
significant part), within which fantasy literature plays an important role (Carey, Exegesis).
Contrary to Eco’s opinion, ‘fantastic neomedievalism’ is a fascinating field, which offers the
chance of compiling a ‘sociological profile’ of late twentieth-century western culture. This
necessitates, as Marc Baer suggests, a close examination of “both text and context… with
context as a sort of text” (306; emphasis mine).

In coining the term ‘fantastic neomedievalism’, Eco (unwittingly) hints at the umbilical
connection between fantasy literature and the phenomenon of ‘medievalism’. Medievalism
can be described as both an interest in the Middle Ages and a type of social movement
characterised by an adoption or recreation of particular aspects of the medieval world. 2
This is demonstrated in the Golden Age sentiment of the eighteenth-century Gothic vogue in
England, and in much contemporary ‘alternative’ culture, such as the New Age movement,
Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games, and the re-creational Society for Creative
Anachronism, all of which have strong associations with fantasy literature. 3 Thus, I define
fantastic neomedievalism specifically as the intersection between the field of fantasy and the
field of medievalism. While interest in the Middle Ages has never completely disappeared, 4
there has been a remarkable revival of medievalism in recent years, and the fantasy genre
has simultaneously experienced exponential growth and popularity in English-speaking
countries such as Britain, the United States, and Australia. This suggests that they are
perhaps overlapping parts of a more widespread social phenomenon expressing a cultural
search for alterity or ‘otherness’ in late twentieth century western societies.

Following Brian Attebery’s reading in Strategies of Fantasy (1992), the fantasy genre I am
referring to is the “fuzzy set” of texts clustered around Tolkien’s archetypal The Lord of the
Rings (12-14). What initially drew my attention was the observation that out of all the
imaginary landscapes one could place a fantasy in, a consistent choice of setting is one
resembling a simplified version of the western European Middle Ages (Zahorski and Boyer,
62-3). A significant number of fantasy authors persistently locate their stories in
environments where the characters wear medieval dress, fight with swords, and live in
hierarchical, vaguely feudal, semi-pastoral societies with low levels of technology. 5 Some
examples are Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, David Eddings’ Belgariad; Ursula K.
Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet, Robyn Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Thomas
Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson.

The question remains why choose the Middle Ages as a setting for fantasy? The Middle
Ages are well known and comfortable. The familiarity and coherence of the medieval
European landscape provides, as Attebery points out, a convenient way of engaging the
reader, filling in the background without having to make up a new fantasy world from
scratch (132). More importantly, the medieval image is instantly recognizable in myth and
symbol through the western fairy tale and Romance traditions. Magic swords, dragons and
unicorns are readily accepted as being routine features of the ‘fantastic’ Middle Ages, along
with beautiful princesses and knights-in-shining-armour. A reconstructed medieval world
is, as Attebery says, “the most accessible milieu in which such statements could have been
made within the discourse of reporting” (132). At the same time, the Middle Ages retain
that quality of exotic ‘otherness’ which renders it, as Cawelti says, “just sufficiently far from
our ordinary reality to make us less inclined to apply our ordinary standards of plausibility
and probability to it” (19).

A key attribute of fantasy is its ability to transport the participant or reader into the realm of
‘non-ordinary’ or ‘transformed’ experience wherein the marvellous may happen. In 1976
Cawelti argued that popular cultural art forms such as fantasy, function primarily as
‘entertainment’ and ‘recreation’ (19). The ‘escapist’ tendency of formula literature is
discussed as a positive attribute, fulfilling important psychological needs in our society
related to game, play, and wish-fulfilment. This ‘re-creative’ property of fantasy is also akin
to the religious concept of the ‘sacred’, which has been used fruitfully to analyze the
transformative experiences of pilgrimage and tourism.6 The need for escape and excitement
through recreation is especially important, as Cawelti notes, “to get away from the boredom
and ennui that are particularly prevalent in the relatively secure, routine, and organized
lives of the great majority of the contemporary American and western European public”
(15). The fantastic medieval image lends itself admirably to the purpose of providing a
satisfying escapist encounter through the “construction of an ideal world without the
disorder, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the limitations of the world of our experience”
(Cawelti, 13-16).

The reassuring predictability of the familiar medieval atmosphere fulfils the need to depart
from the ‘everyday’ world, and contributes to the lure of fantasy through the creation of
realms where good and evil are clearly delineated. A good example is Guy Gavriel Kay’s
popular high fantasy, The Fionavar Tapestry, in which five university students from Toronto
are swept into the feudal land of Fionavar where they become powerful heroes and save the
world. The Fionavar Tapestry is a stunning example of the ‘wish-fulfilment’ function of
fantasy, which Rosemary Jackson aptly terms, “a literature of desire” (3). A nostalgic longing
for a pastoral past and the ‘simpler’ world of childhood arguably fuels this desire, and
Fionavar’s exotic medieval setting is exciting and magical, contrasting strongly with the
mundaneness of the characters’ ordinary existence in the ‘real’ world.

The historical Middle Ages thus becomes mythologized as the ‘olden days’, or fairy-tale
“Once upon a time”, where history flows into one mythical continuum, as demonstrated in
the popular TV series, Hercules, the Legendary Journeys, and Xena: Warrior Princess. The
construction of the Middle Ages as ‘fantasy’ has a much longer history, however, stretching
back at least as far as the eighteenth century in the English-speaking world. One could
regard it as a kind of ‘Edenism’ which views the past as an idyllic period from which the
present has deteriorated, and it is potentially the basis of a powerful critique of modernity.

England in the eighteenth century witnessed a general revival of interest in the Middle Ages.
The ‘Gothic’ vogue swept through the ranks of the intellectual and artistic elite, and an
image of the Middle Ages was constructed around a set of binary oppositions pitting
‘Nature’ and ‘the primitive’ against urban civilisation, and the supernatural against scientific
rationalism. 7 Neo-classical and Enlightenment ideals began to be critically scrutinized by
thinkers such as Rousseau, and the distorting influences of excessive ‘civilization’ and
rationalisation at the expense of emotion led to a call to ‘return to nature’ and the simplicity
of ‘primitive’ societies. 8 The ‘primitive’ past of western classical civilisation was in fact the
hitherto despised European Middle Ages. The romancing of the Middle Ages is evident in
the works of Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto.

The medieval ‘Other’, which had previously lurked -- dark, obscure and barbaric -- between
its brighter, fairer historical siblings, classical antiquity and the Renaissance, was now
lauded for the very attributes that had previously been the cause of its shame. ‘Modernity’
consciously separated itself from the preceding Middle Ages, which were defined
categorically as ‘pre-modern’ and hence barbaric and chaotic. These ‘primitive’ aspects of
‘Gothic’ medievalism became positive values, connoting liberty, simplicity and authenticity
of lifestyle and emotion, vigour and spirit, and the Middle Ages were held up as a yardstick
against which modernity was found wanting. This Romantic construction of the Middle
Ages as iconic ‘Other’ is one of the lasting myths of modernity, which has retained its deep
symbolic and cultural value as a medium for social critique. The ‘antimodern’ impetus
behind this image of the Middle Ages as a Golden Age is exploited vigorously in the rhetoric
of modern fantasy.

The cultural condition at the end of the twentieth century, known as ‘postmodernism’,
involves the breakdown of historical metanarratives that have been in play since the
Enlightenment, resulting in, as Mark Taylor puts it, “profound spiritual, social, and political
dislocation” (77). Patterson (65) and Stock argue that ‘modernity’ is seen as beginning with
the Renaissance, and the Middle Ages are represented as pre-modern and hence as ‘Other’.
Much of the post-modern concern with ‘otherness’, seems to stem from a more general
search for identity, community, and meaning, arising from the sense of Durkheimian
‘anomie’ and rootlessness that people experience in a very fluid, socially mobile, industrial
world (Camilleri and Falk, 227).

By contrast, the medieval world of modern fantasy literature is persistently portrayed as a

time when life was rich, satisfying and authentic: people had causes to fight for that imbued
existence with meaning and purpose. The Middle Ages of popular imagination tends to be
polarized between the ‘dark and dirty’ Middle Ages, and the pre-industrial Golden Age of
myth. On the whole, the medievalism of mainstream high fantasy presents a very selective
and positive image of the Middle Ages, following the example set by J. R. R. Tolkien’s
‘antimodernist’ text The Lord of the Rings. 9 Given the predominance of this romanticized,
idealistic version of the Medieval, one could almost forget that an equally valid image is the
filthy and oppressive world of the Crusades and the Inquisition, where life could be likened
to that in ‘the state of nature’, to quote Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

The modern genre of fantasy, with its central medieval imagery, is a “complex blend of
accommodation and protest” which both challenges and conforms to certain dominant
ideologies in western society (Jackson Lears, xiii). 10 The tension between conflicting images
of the Middle Ages can be seen as part of the continual struggle between the discourses of
Reason and Irrationality in society, and reflects competition between different groups for
control of knowledge (Ward, 57-118). Scholars such as Elkins, Manlove and Attebery, have
pointed out that fantasy challenges the hegemony of ‘Reason’ by its normalising of irrational
‘magic’ and raises questions about the dominant status of ‘realistic’ fiction within the literary
institution. The present popularity of a positive medieval image may reflect to some extent
a swing away from faith in scientific rationalism and a need for reaffirmation of ‘irrational’,
intuitive forms of knowledge.

Camilleri and Falk propose that this may be due to disillusionment with the hegemony of
scientific, ‘rational’ discourse, and the increasing secularisation manifested by the decline of
institutionalized Christianity in the West (214-15). This has led to a kind of ‘spiritual void’
which people seek to fill by turning to the past and alternative forms of spirituality.
Fantastic neomedievalism has had a particularly strong influence on the popular New Age
movement, in which fantasy literature plays an important role. 11 The term ‘New Age’
describes a loose agglomeration of groups and interests, including neo-Pagan and neo-
Christian religions, UFO-cults, alchemy, astrology, herbalism, aromatherapy and crystal
healing. The millenialist and mystical overtones in New Age socio-religious movements can
be seen as attempts to fill a spiritual vacuum and foster a sense of community and identity,
and the rise of interest in magic, the occult and witchcraft may be read as symptomatic of a
“broader cultural interest in the ‘irrational’” (Ward, 63). The overwhelming medieval belief
in the supernatural -- saints, miracles, relics and witchcraft -- provides a powerful image of
an age of spirituality, which contrasts sharply with the image of the twentieth century as
sanitised, spiritually barren and meaningless.

Sheri Tepper’s (1991) novel, Beauty, hinges on an idyllic image of the Middle Ages as a time
of innocence, simplicity and wholesomeness, retaining a sense of the sacred which vanishes
with the advent of industrialization and modernization. Beauty’s time-travelling medieval
heroine (also called Beauty), unfavourably compares her experience of the dystopias of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries with her own fourteenth century:

Later came science and electric lights, a time when people sitting in well-illuminated
rooms said, ‘Nonsense, we can conceive of anything at all.’ Any horror. Any
disgusting, vomit-making thing… ‘We can speak it, we can say it, make stories of it,
until there is nothing that is not there on the page for the eye to see, for the mind to
comprehend, for the child in each of us to be corrupted and eternally tainted by.
Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable (410-11).

With the advent of “electric lights” and “science”, nothing is sacred or mysterious anymore,
and the fruits of this forbidden knowledge of power over nature eventually corrupt and
destroy Beauty’s innocent medieval Eden. The overall effect is the glorification of the
Middle Ages to the detriment of the present. Implicit is a dissatisfaction with, and critique
of, the rational materialism and scepticism of modern capitalist society. ‘Progress’ is
regarded as ultimately dehumanizing, and there is a yearning for the richness and
‘authenticity’ that medieval life is imagined to possess, and a lament for the lost ‘sense of
wonder’ that less ‘rational’ people supposedly feel in relation to the natural world. As C. S.
Lewis once put it, the Middle Ages of fantasy fiction are imagined as “a larger, brighter,
bitterer, more dangerous world than ours” (qtd. in Cantor, 213).

It is clear that modern fantasy is a commercial industry with a sizeable market, with
products including not only written texts, but also art and film, which have been created by
and in turn generated a wide network of social phenomena, including New Age religions
and recreational groups such as the international Society for Creative Anachronism. Thus
‘fantasy’ is more than just a purely literary ‘genre’ and can be viewed as a kind of sub-
cultural community which includes texts, (not just literature, but art, film, graphic novels),
recreational and fan groups, audience/participants and authors/producers. 12 At its centre
is an image of the Middle Ages constructed primarily as a reaction to, and critique of, late-
capitalist Western society. Viewed as a sub-cultural text-centred community, fantasy, with
its heavy reliance on an image of the medieval, constitutes as Sylvia Kelso says, “a cultural
response to the post-modern moment that has been ignored or downgraded, not merely by
canonical critics, but by constructors of postmodernism and proponents of non-canonical
literature like science fiction” (9).

Fantasy literature can in many ways be seen as a reaction against the rationalistic, anti-
heroic, materialistic and empiricist discourses upon which modern western culture and
society are founded (Elkins, 23-31). A closer examination of the ‘social matrix’ of fantasy
literature, such as this study of fantastic neomedievalism, will hopefully help to redress the
bias against the study of popular fantasy, and draw attention to the significant and powerful
role fantasy plays in the shaping of the modern imagination.

Notes
1
See also Domenico Pietropaolo’s article, ‘Eco on Medievalism’, in Medievalism in Europe, Ed.
Leslie J. Workman
2
Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman. (1981), provides a
general discussion of medievalism from the late 1700s to WWI, and the series Studies in Medievalism,
(D. S. Brewer, Cambridge), is an excellent resource for twentieth-century medievalism.
3
Hilary Carey notes the influence of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature on Space-oriented and
Earth-oriented New Age religions respectively, and on various recreational groups.
4
For example, in Arthurian literature (thanks due to Roger Schlobin for this observation).
5
Orson Scott Card, for example, in his How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, outlines a basic
author’s approach to the publishing category of fantasy: “A rustic setting always suggests fantasy; to
suggest science fiction, you need sheet metal and plastic. You need rivets.”
6
See Nelson H. H. Graburn, ‘Tourism: The Sacred Journey’, pp.22-3, on ‘non-ordinary’ experiences
and notions of ‘the sacred’ in relation to recreational activities.
7
Alice Chandler’s A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature.
(1970) is a seminal text on medievalism in the nineteenth century.
8
Margaret Omberg, Scandinavian Themes in English Poetry, 1760-1800. (1976), has an excellent
discussion on eighteenth-century Primitivism, esp. pp.108ff.
9
Norman F. Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), provides an interesting perspective of J. R. R.
Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as medievalists and fantasists, examining how and why they utilized a
positive medieval image through the interactions between their social backgrounds and their scholarly
and literary works. Ch.6, ‘The Oxford Fantasists’, pp.205-233.
10
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture 1880-1920. (1981), xiii, discusses the ambivalent nature of antimodernism.
11
Irving Hexham documented the powerful influence of The Lord of the Rings on British New Age in
its infancy in Glastonbury, King Arthur, Hippies, Freaks and the New Age. (1971).
12
See Justine Larbalestier’s discussion of the field/community of science fiction in The Battle of the
Sexes in Science Fiction: From the Pulps to the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award, Unpublished
Ph.D thesis, The University of Sydney (1996) Ch. 1, 1-35.

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