Timeline: 1200 - 1500
During the age of chivalry, wherein knights served kings and the idea of fair play, rules and respect for one’s opponent in battle, as well as a sense of (among the knights at least) a duty of care for the common folk prevailed, romance and chivalric literature became very popular. Tales of knights-errant - probably sparked by the tales of the search for the Holy Grail - abounded, and also gave birth to the idea of a quest, which would and has become such a central theme in the larger part of fantasy literature. Quests would often be set to test a knight or other adventurer’s mettle, to allow him to prove something, to himself or others, or to help a patron recover or regain something that was important to them, perhaps to the kingdom. Quests were of course never easy, fraught with danger, sometimes confusing directions given, and always enemies waiting to thwart the efforts of he who quested.
Drawing on both mythology and fairy tales as well as real history, and since many, indeed most of the earliest ones were written in verse, this provided minstrels and balladeers with material for their songs, and also allowed the stories to be disseminated (through the minstrel’s art and via his wandering nature) to more than would have been able to read them, given that there was a large percentage of the common folk who could not read at all. These stories inevitably contained a moral, often to do with religion or love, or both, and reinforced the ideas of loyalty, bravery, steadfastness and dedication to one’s duty, particularly his quest. Invariably, the hero’s quest was successful, or if not, its failure served as a sort of epiphany to show him that what was more important than the object he sought was his own development and personal improvement. The quest might reveal some answer about life, or the quester, or his world, or God.
Romance tales were generally at this time broken up into three distinct forms or cycles, these being the
Matter of Rome (Italian stories centring on Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), the
Matter of France (regarding Charlemagne) and the
Matter of Britain (which mostly featured, as already mentioned, King Arthur and his knights). There were of course stories which fell outside of this format, as there are in almost every form of literature, but most of these chivalric romances seem to have served mostly as a sort of ongoing propaganda tool for the various kings about whom they were written, or in whose reign at any rate they were set. They would reinforce the king’s bravery, wisdom and cunning through the quests handed out, who they were given to and how they were rewarded when accomplished.
They also, of course, encouraged young boys reading them (or to whom they were read) to emulate the great knights and squires in the tales, thereby providing a free advertisement for the notions and practice of chivalry, and giving young boys a grounding in how they were expected to behave when grown. Almost a kind of fantasy training manual, in one way, I suppose you could say. At the same time, they showed the girls how to behave, what was expected of them and what they could look forward to when they grew up. Even if hardly any of them ever got carried away by a prince on a white charger, or rescued from a deep sleep by a handsome knight, the tales carried codes of conduct and instructions as to how the young were supposed to perceive the world, and how they should behave in it once they had attained what was accepted as adulthood. Naturally, none of this included any explicit knowledge of sex or even explored romance any deeper than the surface, but then, these were stories, after all, and their principle aim was to entertain.
Nevertheless, lessons were taught, and many of a moral nature, through these romances. One of the most important was the idea of monogamy, chastity until marrying age and respect for one’s elders, all pretty much enshrined in the ideas of chivalry anyway. Every knight, every princess, human or otherwise (as fairies and elves and goblins and other creatures began to slowly creep into the romances, blending in folklore to the story to make it more attractive and fantastical), every king and queen was expected to conduct themselves according to these tenets, which is probably why Lancelot’s pursuit of Guinevere is so shocking, or was, at the time. Not only did the bravest knight in Arthur’s court go after the King’s wife, but he, Lancelot, was also Arthur’s friend. So there’s a quadruple betrayal here: knight to king (no I’m not describing a chess move!) and friend to friend, and then from Guinevere’s side queen to king and wife to husband. Betrayed every way, that kind of treachery can bring down a kingdom.
And so it did, almost. Arthur’s being mystically and inextricably linked with the land meant that when things went badly for him, his realm reflected this, suffering as he did; crops would not grow, weather turned bad, the entire mood of Britain soured. Only through the recovery of Christ’s cup from the Last Supper could the king, and the land, be healed. And thus began the Quest for the Holy Grail, which kickstarted the imagination of many a fantasy writer, and while it wasn’t the very first quest, it did form the template for almost all of what came afterwards. In the chivalric romances, love was pure, unsullied and from God. It was not seen as a base, bestial thing but as an idealised, well, romantic sort of power that attracted men and women together, but nothing was mentioned of what happened after the knight won the lady, save perhaps a footnote about their offspring, the younger reader or listener left to work out for themselves how
that came about!
Timeline: 1500 - 1600
As a time of rebirth and enlightenment across Europe, the Renaissance was an era in which fantasy literature began to flower. The first proper recorded work of fantasy to collect and transcribe fairy and folk tales was created, perhaps not surprisingly since the revolution in learning, art and literature began there, by an Italian, one Giambattista Basile, in his
Pentamorone, whose Italian title translates to
Tale of Tales and is rendered as, wait for it,
lo cunto de li cunti! Titter, titter, chortle, chortle, dirty laughter. All right, got that out of our systems now, have we? Let’s move on.
This work would in fact form the basis of later translations and retellings of fairy tales, notably by two brothers who were both called Grimm, who heaped praise upon Basile for his work. The
Pentamorone sort of reflects in style the far earlier
1001 Nights (or
Arabian Nights, as it has become more popularly known) in that the basis is that someone has to tell stories to someone else in the narrative, and these become the fairy tales, of which many are known today.
Although a lot of his material were historical epics such as
Richard III and
Henry V, Julius Caesar and
King Lear, Shakespeare brought a lot of fantasy into his own writings, especially the comic ones such as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream but also more serious fare such as
Hamlet and
MacBeth, with ghosts in the former and witches in the latter, and audiences loved to see - and some more literate ones read about - such fantastic creatures and beings, leading to an interest in things that were not rooted in the real world, and a resurgence in the popularity of fairy tales and legends.
Timeline: 1600 - 1800
With the dawn of the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, when logic and hard-nosed reality ruled, such ideas were frowned upon as suitable only for children, and the Romantic Era blossomed as a direct reaction to the cold, scientific ideas of the seventeenth century. Having its beginnings in the final decades of the eighteenth century and carrying on, and gaining support in the nineteenth, the Romantic Era produced such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, James McPherson, Goethe and Walter Scott, and while the Brothers Grimm, as already mentioned, began collating and writing their fairy stories around this time, others such as Elias Lönnrot set about compiling the folk tales of their own country, in his case Finland and Karelia, an epic cycle entitled
Kalevala, much of the incentive for such being his desire to preserve the mythology of his homeland. These, then, provided much fodder for later fantasy works.
Two important authors in this time were Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Madame D’Aulnoy (1650-1705), the latter of whom actually coined the term “fairy tales” for her work. Perhaps there’s a case for considering these two, along with the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as the progenitors or grandparents of the fairy tale in fantasy literature. Perrault rewrote and published such standards we know today as
Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and
Puss-in-Boots, and in the process created a whole new fantasy literature genre, fairy tales. Madame D’Aulnoy, who among other things wrote court memoirs and histories, seems to have concentrated on the more anthropomorphic aspect of fairy tales, perhaps inadvertently presaging the advent of cartoon animals over three hundred years later. Her tales were a lot more adult in nature, and definitely
not for children. I’m not one hundred percent sure whether these were tales she transcribed, like Basile and later the Brothers Grimm, or if she made them up herself (I think it might be the latter) but at any rate, she worked on her material almost a century and a half before the Grimms were born.
Although many “serious” writers frowned on the whole idea of fairy tales and fantasy works, considering them only for children, and even then vulgar and common, figures like Voltaire himself embarked on writing fantasy stories, such as
The Princess of Babylon and
The White Bull. Nevertheless, in general as you would probably expect, the Age of Enlightenment was not good for the fantasy/fairy story genre, to say nothing of various Catholic Inquisitions who would have frowned on such material, calling it pagan, ungodly, blasphemous and heretical. So it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that fantasy began to fight back, in what has become known to history as the Age of Romance, or Romanticism. This in turn gave rise to a format of literature not only important to fantasy, but to horror too: the gothic novel or story.
Gothic literature can really be described in one word: dark. Everything about gothic writing hinges on the more macabre, scary and supernatural elements of storytelling, with mores that we are now very familiar with and can identify as belonging to this genre, such as haunted castles, ghosts, mysterious recluses, people living in attics and garrets, curses, bequests, funerals, wild weather, family secrets and romance, often doomed or cursed. The first novel accepted as being written in the Gothic style, the one that kicked the whole thing off, is Horatio Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto, in 1764. Some of the more well-known ones of course are Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, along with the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights. Gothic literature really took hold in the Victorian era, giving rise to the “penny dreadful” stories that thrilled the lower classes, who could identify with much of what was written in them, and shocked the upper classes (though in truth, many a rich, well-bred lady probably hid a penny dreadful under her satin coverlet) who despised their vulgarity.
Timeline: 1800 - 1900
And with the dawn of Victoria’s long reign fantasy was back in vogue again, chiefly through the move away from the too-rigid reasoning of the last century and on the back of the rise of the penny dreadful and Gothic literature in general. This period would see the publication of some of what are now accepted as the world’s greatest authors, such as Shelley, Lewis Carroll, Dickens and William Morris. Perhaps it had to do with the “common” people becoming more literate and aware of their world than they might have been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but more people were reading, and most of them didn’t want stuffy tracts about politics or history or battles or philosophy: they wanted to be entertained.
And fantasy was the great entertainer. You really didn’t have to “know” anything - that is, be educated about the subject, unlike in other types of literature, where you might be lost if you didn’t have at least a working knowledge and grasp of the subject - because everything was either explained or didn’t need to be. If a fairy flew, a fairy flew and there was no cause for explanation. If a castle floated in the clouds or resided at the bottom of the ocean, that was all accepted. Fantasy - and, to another extent, horror - all required and require a willing suspension of disbelief. We know these things can’t happen, but we don’t care. It’s a story, so it doesn’t have to be true.
Fantasy really gathered steam in the nineteenth century, classic works such as
Alice in Wonderland, The Fall of the House of Usher and
Frankenstein ensuring that it would never again have to retreat to the shadows (some of what was written was, technically, at home in the shadows, but you know what I mean) and was here to stay. People like H. Rider Haggard, George MacDonald and even Oscar Wilde did a lot to advance the art, while later writers such as H.P Lovecraft and Hans Christian Anderson would pull the genre in two diametrically opposed directions. Some authors, such as CS Lewis and Lewis Carroll, would concentrate on writing for, and about, children, while Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Shelley definitely had a more adult audience in mind.