Far Beyond These Castle Walls: The Role of the Castle in Fantasy
Look at any fantasy-inspired poster or drawing, or the cover of any fantasy book - especially those in the sword-and-sorcery sub-genre - and the chances are you’ll see a castle, either in the background or right up front. It might be a knight rushing across a bridge on his horse to rescue a princess, or a unicorn prancing on the battlements, or something darker perhaps: a dark, dismal edifice high on a mountain, wreathed in black thunderclouds and eldritch fingers of lightning dancing around its turrets, while a shadowy figure with sharp, bright eyes peers out of the topmost window, watching the world below with malevolent intent.
From the earliest days of fantasy, from fairy tales on, castles, strongholds, fortresses and palaces have been the setting for drama, intrigue, power and magic. This isn’t at all surprising when you consider that many of the heroes of fantasy were, and still are to some degree, noblemen and women, knights or others of high breeding, and that kings, queens, princes and princesses figure highly in fairy tales and stories of fantastic adventure. Castles were always the symbol of a king’s power, or a knight’s status, and usually dominated the landscape, towering over the town or village or even city in or near which they were built, whether protectively or menacingly. A castle - especially a royal one - would be the focus of any settlement, and a concrete statement of where the power lay.
The great and the good lived in castles - or in some cases, the evil, but always the powerful. Ordinary folk were generally not invited, unless summoned there or allowed deliver goods or if they worked perhaps as pages or handmaidens. The castle was its own self-supporting ecosystem, drawing from the village or town only when supplies ran low, and rarely if ever interacting with the inhabitants of that town or village. It was where the balls were, where the jousts were held, where the celebrations and weddings and funerals and parties took place, and where, in times of war, strategy was plotted and troops billeted. It was, in short, the centre of the region.
Castles could be marvellous places. In fairy tales like Cinderella they were the height of society and the ambition to which everyone aspired, from the local lads working as pages or kitchen boys hoping to be chosen as some knight’s squire to the kitchen girls and scullery maids waiting to catch the eye of the handsome prince, and so change their lives forever. When foreign dignitaries visited the area, it was at the castle or palace that they were hosted, and in times of plague and famine it was often the safest place to be. But castles could also be nasty, dark, evil places; crumbling ruins, haunted by spectres or home to a solitary wizard who was known to be very unwelcoming to visitors! They could be the last place you wanted to go, or be taken, from where often nobody ever returned, and they could also be the stronghold of a tyrant who held sway over his people by fear and brutality.
Whichever way you look at it, whichever role the castle fulfilled in the story, they were almost always important, often the centrepiece of a story; the starting or ending point for a quest, the site of fabulous riches or powerful spells to be plundered, or the staging post for a war with the realm’s neighbours. They could be the sites of great joy, such as in
The Princess and the Pea, where a woman’s royal heritage is established - and great despair, as in
Sleeping Beauty, when the wicked queen, snubbed at the birth feast of the princess, curses her to sleep for a hundred years. Feckin’ women, huh?
If not the centrepiece they would certainly figure somewhere in the background, like the posters spoken of in the intro, if only as a mention of “the king’s great palace” or “the castle where we will find the wizard.” Often, the dark, unplumbed depths of the castle - its cells, dungeons and cellars - would be the setting for adventure, and this in its turn would give way to a huge interest in these things through classic role-playing games such as
Dungeons and Dragons, where players take on the persona of fantasy or medieval people and creatures, and travel through a castle, haunted wood, blasted plain or other dangerous location in search of treasures, battling monsters along the way. These pencil-and-paper games of course developed into computer games, the genesis of the MMORPG, Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game, which became so popular with titles like
Warcraft, Everquest and of course the networked version of
Dungeons and Dragons itself.
Castles could be whole worlds unto themselves, so large and cavernous that one could enter one at the beginning of a story, or novel even, and not find a way out, if at all, till the end. Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast trilogy is set entirely within the walls of the eponymous castle, a sprawling, decrepit edifice that has seen better days, while for Jonathan Harker at least, most of the first part of
Dracula takes place within the walls of the count’s lair. Other authors set their stories in or around castles - John Morressey’s
Castle Perilous series revolves around, again, the title building, much fighting takes place in and around various castles in
The Lord of the Rings, particularly
The Two Towers, and of course there are castle aplenty in
A Song of Ice and Fire, or
Game of Thrones to you.
Why are castles so important to fantasy? I think because they are, or can be, as I noted earlier, all but self-contained worlds, often even cut off from the outside land, functioning as a separate entity and needing no reference to the realm beyond. They can host whole adventures, novels, films or even series, and the scope for what can happen in a castle is virtually limitless. Castles play a large part in Gothic fiction too, and on into horror; mostly ruined, crumbling or ill-maintained ones, which give off an air of despair and slow death, often reflecting the mind and soul of the one or ones who live there. A castle can be, and has been, a shining beacon in the distance or the epitome of fear and horror, a crouching spider waiting at the end of the road to take your life, and maybe more.
They’re a symbol of power, prestige and status. A region with a castle - at least, a well-maintained and occupied one - lets you know that there is law in this land, that there is someone who is watching, protecting (or in some cases, oppressing) the subjects of the realm, and from where assistance can be called if needed. They can be a place to find a wife or a husband, fame and glory and power, riches or magic or just a steady job peeling spuds in the royal kitchens. Castles can be a shelter from the storm when war breaks out over the land, or the leeching, filching, grasping hand that demands more and more for the war effort, raising taxes and punishing those who protest. Castles can also be, though perhaps at heart good places, places of fear when gates or battlements are decorated with the heads of traitors or criminals or enemies - a fate we saw befall Ned Stark in
Game of Thrones, and a situation demonstrated with gleeful malevolence by Prince, then King Joffrey to Sansa Stark.
Castles have been known to fly, to go to or provide access to other worlds, other dimensions, to house horrors and dreaded fears as well as riches untold and beauty unthought of. They are frequently the last stand of the hero and his companions, the flag raised in defiance over the battlements as the dragons swoop down, and the site of the chance meeting of star-crossed lovers or long-estranged siblings. They have a power all of their own, their personal magic, and the attraction to castles in fantasy will go on for as long as people dream of all the things they could have, or all the things they fear, symbolised by that shining, or shadowy building perched just on the horizon.