Grognardia’s The Christianity of Early Gaming
Posted on 09 January 2012
I had written before about the trope of the Crystal Dragon Jesus that appears in too much modern fantasy and anime set in the Middle Ages or a milieu meant to be evocative of it.
In the pages of WELL AT THE WORLD’S END by Morris, at the dawn of modern fantasy, the clerics are clearly Christian clerics of the Roman Catholic Church.
During the high period of Pulp fantasy, there is no hint of such a thing. Crystal Dragon Jesus is not found in the adventures of Conan the Barbarian or Jirel of Joiry or Elric of Melnibone.
The high noon of modern fantasy, THE LORD OF THE RINGS of JRR Tolkien was set in a world meant to be evocative of Beowulf, the pre-Christian North, albeit with parallels to the fallen Roman empire seen in the lost and sundered kingdoms of Numenor, and the siege of Constantinople by the Turk seen in the battle with Minas Tirith. But there are no monks, nuns, bishops, hermits, pilgrims nor crusaders in Middle Earth, and no one drives back a Nazgul with a crucifix.
By the time Jack Vance wrote his LYONESSE (which may be the dusk of modern fantasy, since I have read nothing since then to compare) Brother Umphred is again a Roman Catholic cleric, albeit, as are all men of the cloth in any Jack Vance story, an unregenerate vermin with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.
The trope is common in modern fantasy to have all the trappings of Catholic hierarchy, just with no Jesus at the head. What I had not previously pondered was where this trope originates. Where does it come from?
Over at Grognardia, James Maliszewski, in an article written in 2008 points out that Gary Gygax may have been the big influence creating the trope.
… the cleric owes the better part of its existence to Hammer horror films, but, if you read OD&D, you can see that the class quickly evolved beyond its origins as a mere vampire hunter-cum-medic. The influence of historical medieval wargaming on the game shouldn’t be overlooked. Everyone remembers Chainmail because of its Fantasy Supplement, but Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax didn’t write these rules in order to facilitate miniatures battles between dragons and elves but instead to recreate the warfare and technology of the European Middle Ages. Gygax, by his own account, was very keen on medieval history, at least on the military side of things (no doubt the source of his pole arm-philia). Given this, is it any wonder that the armored, mace-wielding cleric bears a strong resemblance to the religious knights of the Crusades?
If you read OD&D carefully, you soon notice that a lot of the paraphernalia associated with clerics has Christian origins. The equipment list, for example, includes wooden and silver crosses, not the “holy symbols” of AD&D and later editions (Interestingly, there are no crucifixes, which I think is significant). The cleric’s level titles include a number of specifically Christian terms (vicar, curate, and bishop). The illustrations of clerics in OD&D — and even early AD&D — always show them dressed in obviously Christian priestly garb. And of course many of the cleric’s spells draw on Christian (and Jewish) religious writings and folklore. Indeed, the cleric’s focus on defense and protection spells is, I think, more evidence of the Christian origins of the class. What’s even more telling is the fact, even as late as Eldritch Wizardry, there are few (if any) explicit references to gods in OD&D. There’s much talk of demons, devils,and, tellingly, saints, but gods aren’t much talked about until Supplement IV’s release in 1976.
I once asked Gary Gygax directly about the question of why this was so and he explained that he felt it unseemly to include anything too explicitly Christian in a mere game, even if he assumed a kind of quasi-Christian or crypto-Christian underpinning for the whole thing. This is also why his demons and devils used somewhat obscure names rather than very familiar ones. All the old school love for statting up Satan/Lucifer was something Gary didn’t feel was proper. It’s the same reason why, even in late AD&D, we get planetars, solars, and devas but never “angels.” Interestingly, the original Blackmoor campaign, as I understand it, had a Church, complete with a hierarchy, but no named gods. Again — and someone can correct me if I’m mistaken on this — there’s an assumption of a quasi-Christianity lurking in the background.
My comment:
Kudos to anyone coining the term pole arm-philia to describe Gary Gygax. To this day, I know the difference between a Ranseur, a Glaive-Guisarm, and a Bifork due to D&D.
When I first became aware, as a child, that there were Christian television preachers denouncing D&D for its alleged Satanist influences, I was appalled. To this day, I wonder if it was not their Christian dislike of the occult that prompted the outcry, but, rather, their Protestant dislike of Catholicism.
D&D take place in a thoroughly Catholic milieu, although, to be sure, Gygax throws in all the elements from Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, as well as the kitchen sink:
The Lawful Good hierarchy is the Roman Catholic Church, the Paladins work for Charlemagne in Paris; Lawful Evil are the Paynims who serve the Sultan raiding from the South; Chaotic Evil are the Vikings raiding from the North; the Rangers work for Aragorn son of Arathorn, who is the one remaining heir to the Holy Roman Empire; and the various witches and magic-users worship and serve the Old Gods of Olympus, or the new devils of Hell, and the druids worship Epona and their pagan gods. Elves inhabit the Black Forest of Germany, where no man goes, and Dwarves live in Switzerland and provide a bodyguard for the Pope. Thieves all come from the Court of Miracles in Paris or Lankhmar, which might as well be Alexandria or Byzantium. And monks, um, came back in large numbers from China along the Silk Road with Marco Polo. The only thing D&D does not propose is that Magic Users are despised like Jews in the Middle Ages, courted by kings as necessary, or protected by the Church, but subject to popular outrage — but that would be a detail added, if he chose, by the dungeon master.
To me, it sounds as if Gygax wanted to include as much of Medieval flavor as he could without actually making his game set in the real Middle Ages. Medieval flavor means kings who are not absolute monarchs and an international Church with considerable power and prestige, and the ruins of a once-great civilization still around.
The only element missing in Gygax, which I take to be a sine qua non of the real Middle Ages, was a certain degree of respect paid to the Greek Emperor, or, later, the Holy Roman Emperor, as the legitimate heir, if in name only, to the Roman power and authority. The political theory of the Middle Ages was not nationalism but what we would now call one-world-government, or Imperialism.
Mr Maliszewski does not say outright, but it sounds as if Gygax was too respectful of Christianity, or of his customer’s feelings, to include Christian hierarchy by name in his game. Read the article for yourself, and decide.
AND FOR YOUR FURTHER READING PLEASURE:
Over at the Steampunk scholar, Gotthammer has a few thoughts about the curious absence of Christianity or Christmas in most Steampunk literature. The oddness of the absence is peculiar because the Victorian Era was one of the most deeply and openly religious in history. It would be like setting a bunch of Pilgrim-themed novels in Massachusetts Bay colony, with the characters all in broadcloth with buckles on their hats, but not mentioning Puritan Christianity.
Another thing I believe this points to is the huge influence that Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions had on Gygax; bigger even, I think, than that of the Lord of the Rings. Without Holger Carlsen you have no Paladin class(you also have no regenerating trolls, a trope that has taken over fantasy gaming and literature, but that’s a side note). There is also alignment introduced: Law vs Chaos, in a more personal way than Moorcock’s inhuman and uncaring forces.
In another sense, I think Anderson here also influenced not necessarily Gygax but a host of Dungeon Masters who came later, by having the engineer-trained Holger trying to understand pre-modern monsters in modern terms. A giant’s gold is cursed if you take it from his petrified corpse because when carbon degrades to silicon a radioactive isotope is created. A fire-breathing dragon has an enormously hot interior, so pumping water down its throat creates a steam ‘boiler’ explosion. At least in my D&D history, the idea of taking the pre-modern fantasy stew and seasoning with just a dab of chemistry and physics has been an influential one.
Indeed. Pratt and De Camp’s Incomplete Enchanter series was another influence of the same kind, as Gygax himself acknowledged.
Hi, Scholar-at-Arms:
You beat me to the punch citing Poul Anderson’s THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS as a source for role playing games. (Smiles) But, since I was never “into” role playing games, I would have stressed Poul Anderson’s influence on FANTASY. And scientific, intelligent fantasy given how Holger Carlsen used his engineering training to avoid harm from the dead troll’s body and to beat the dragon.
I would have also mentioned THE BROKEN SWORD as a work of fantasy (along with THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS) where Catholic Christianity was treated seriously and with respect. Including treating Christian ethics seriously. THE BROKEN SWORD has one female character horrified and dismayed to discover she had unknowingly committed incest with her brother, who, having been raised by the amoral elves, did not care about incest. THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS ends with Holger Carlsen converting to the Catholic Church.
In fact, THE BROKEN SWORD was first published in 1954, a little time BEFORE Tolkien’s THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks
In “The Battle for Middle-earth” (Eerdmans 2004), Fleming Rutledge argues that “The Lord of the Rings” is a Catholic allegory, with the overt Catholicism (strongly) muted. (This would be in contrast the C. S. Lewis’ heavy-handed Protestant imagery in the Narnia and sci-fi books.)
Lewis and Tolkien were friends with common interests in Christianity and Medievalism. Both were on the Oxford faculty, both served in WWI, both were members of the “Inklings”, a writing group, and both were practicing, believing Christians. Of course, you know all this, and I am being pedantic. I apologize.
What interests me is how two such cultivated and apparently sensitive men could have survived the horrors of the trenches. Was it their Christianity? Or was it their Englishness?
Mr Rutledge manages to make two errors in two words, if he describes Mr Lewis’ imagery as heavyhanded or Protestant. He makes a third error in calling Lord of the Rings an allegory, particularly in the teeth of Professor Tolkien’s explicit denial thereof. To quote the Bard of Middle Earth himself “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence”
Lewis was an atheist during his army service, converting only in 1929. Whatever the merits of Englishness, you cannot invoke theism as an explanation for his survival.
As for why they survived (I take it you mean “without going mad” rather than “without being killed”, which was essentially a matter of luck), why the assumption that intelligent men had a more difficult time dealing with their experience? Did officers, for example, go mad at a greater rate than other ranks? (Presumably officers were on average more intelligent and/or sensitive.)
Note that most men of the right age did serve and only a minority went mad. The horrors of the trenches, bad as they undoubtedly were, cannot have been a Cthulhoid maelstrom of instant insanity; men apparently did find ways of dealing with it.
And neither was Lewis English, coming of Anglo-Irish stock that originated (on his father’s side) with a Welsh grandfather who ended up in Dublin, and the family eventually ended up in Belfast.
As he says in “Surprised by Joy”:
“No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England. The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape… I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.”
“Note that most men of the right age did serve and only a minority went mad.”
Yeah, exactly.
English officers tended to be more educated primarily because they were more highborn/rich/upper class (though Tolkien himself came from a poor family). The English army of WW1 wasn’t exactly a meritocracy. Of course this wasn’t necessarily good for the upper class, as officers were killed at a much higher rate than enlisted men.
“men apparently did find ways of dealing with it.”
Trench wives!
I talk about this book all the time, but if you want a good look at Tolkien’s life during the war years, I highly recommend John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth:
http://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Great-War-Threshold-Middle-earth/dp/0618574816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326206400&sr=8-1
Lots of people “survived” trench warfare, of course, who were not Christian or English. But the above does a great job showing how WWI affected Tolkien differently than other writers, and why that might be so.
Hey John, if you’re idealized self was a fantasy RPG character, how would you describe him?
To get the ball rolling, here’s mine:
Sean the Sorcerer
25th level Neutral Evil Human Magic-User/Assassin
Head of the Occult Order of the Black Sun/God-Emperor of the Black Sun Empire
Master of high energy thaumaturgy, potions, poisons, demonology, enchantment and combat falconry
Carries a Black Sun Staff (symbol of spiritual authority, magical tool and hand-to-hand weapon) and an obsidian dagger (useful for magical workings and human sacrifice as well as combat)
When he’s not conducting rituals atop the pyramidal Black Sun Temple, Sean can be see atop his black tower, manipulating the energies of the sun and lightning, releasing falcons upon the human and animal game below, or stargazing at the black rift in meditation up on the mysteries of the galactic Black Sun.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Your turn…
Ah, but I am not a player character, I am from the monster manual.
Wright the Weighty of the Commonwealth of Letters
Race: Houyhnhnm
Languages: Elfish, Geek, Vulcan.
1st level split character class Philosopher, Lawyer, Newspaperman, Sciencefictioneer.
Feats: napping, procrastinating, missspelling.
Arms: Carries a sword cane in hand a revolver on the pocket of his trench-coat, neither of which is he skilled at.
Armor: a +1 layer of blubber.
This creature of pure reason can pass unnoticed at any science fiction convention, being of the same weight and girth as a horse. He is fluent in Geek, able to quote reams of lines from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL as well as from THE PRINCESS BRIDE — and he can answer accurately in what issue of SUPERMAN’S PAL JIMMY OLSEN Darkseid first appeared. His special weakness is that he will engage any rational being in an argument on whether Logan’s claws can penetrate Steve Roger’s shield for 1d4 rounds of time wasted.
“Dwarves live in Switzerland and provide a bodyguard for the Pope”
I love the image that conjures up.
What an unexpected pleasure it is to head on over to one of my regular blog stops and find one of my own posts to be the subject of one of yours! You’ve done my a great honor, sir, which is why it pains me to point out that, though you properly spelled my alphabet soup of a surname, you misspelled the name of my blog
And to think I used to edit a newspaper. Oy.
I’ve changed it. Tell me if it is correct now.
“You’ve done my a great honor…”
Muphry’s law!
Indeed!
“The oddness of the absence is peculiar because the Victorian Era was one of the most deeply and openly religious in history.”
Um. I agree that it is unrealistic to leave the clergy out of a Victorian setting, but I don’t know that I’d characterize the period as “deeply religious.” Some Victorian clergy were truly pious and, of them, a talented few were good at their ministries, but a depressing number went into the clergy because clergy, politics, and military were about the only careers socially acceptable for a “gentleman.” (Doctors were borderline.) Darwin was in that category, to take a famous instance. He was slated for the clergy by default, but really, his heart was in natural history from the start.
Read “The Warden” by Anthony Trollope. The main male characters are almost all clergy. There’s plenty of church politics and even moral conflict, but precious little talk of Christ.
I see your Anthony Trollope, and raise you one William Boothe and on David Livingstone.
“The Salvation Army began in 1865 when William Booth, a London minister, gave up the comfort of his pulpit and decided to take his message into the streets where it would reach the poor, the homeless, the hungry and the destitute. His original aim was to send converts to established churches of the day, but soon he realized that the poor did not feel comfortable or welcome in the pews of most of the churches and chapels of Victorian England. Regular churchgoers were appalled when these shabbily dressed, unwashed people came to join them in worship.”
It was also a time of an unheard of effort of overseas missionary work, of which David Livingstone is the best remembered because of Henry Morton Stanley’d famously understated greeting upon finding the lost missionary doctor in the wilds of darkest Africa.
Well, in that sense, was ever a period deeply religious?
My friends and I once created an alternate-historical RPG setting (for a homebrew system) that is almost disturbingly similar to the one you describe.
Though the dwarf civilization under the Alps wasn’t Christian, the younger culture (originally founded by Alpine exiles) under the Pyrenees largely was. Also, we had elves in the British Isles as well. (Where also the druids and their culture had managed to hang on, in Wales and a few other places.) Magic had been recognized by the Church as basically a type of technology, as long as stringent conditions were met. (Trafficking with extraplanar beings was Right Out, as were necromancy, divining the future, and so forth.)
All intelligent races were regarded by the Church (as by the Roman Empire before them) as ‘human’, though there was controversy whether non-humans could be ordained.
Constantinopolis had gotten taken over by a Dark Lord lich who basically scared everybody, whether Christian, Paynim, or pagan. At least one Crusade had been undertaken against him, with little success.
Ah, the memories!
As per the absence of Christianity in Steampunk literature question I can offer this illustration.
Many years ago, my homeschooling wife would play “Bible trivia” with our children. She would ask them a question and if they answered correctly they received a small piece of candy. She would adjust the questions to suit the age and learning of the child accordingly.
One afternoon, some neighbor kids wanted to join in. Knowing they did not attend any church and were public schooled she tried to give them the easiest softball questions she could.
Q: Who built the Ark?
A: George Washington???
Q: Who was crucified on the cross?
A: Abraham Lincoln???
I believe the reason Steampunk literature is lacking in Christian symbolism is because our culture is devoid of any cultural Christianity. How can one refer to that of which their audience has no reference.
I don’t think ignorance of Christianity is exactly the reason Christianity is absent from Steampunk. I think it’s deliberate on the part of many of the writers of steampunk because steampunk is not EXACTLY Victorian historical fiction.* Rather, it is an alternate history in which SCIENCE! is the primary virtue, and whose heroes are Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Steampunk functions exactly because it is religious, but the religious system is one in which science is mythologized instead of saints or gods. That’s why you have the fetishization of clockworks and glass tubing with mysterious bubbling liquids – scientific apparatus which accomplish no scientific purpose in steampunk costumery but give the feeling of SCIENCE!. Just look at Girl Genius (which I highly recommend, and it’s FREE: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ ). Its Sparks may seem to be scientists because they work in labs and make machines, but the Spark (of genius) itself functions structurally like a magic power (at times, very much as in a roleplaying game: roll 2d6 for the number of clockwork men Agatha Heterodyne can build). This is an alternate Victorian Age in which the Great Awakening does not matter because people built differential engines to worship instead.
Ironically, at least one of the so-called founders of steampunk is Christian: Tim Powers (whose foundational book The Anubis Gates, as he himself notes, is not steampunk, though it is wonderful and everyone should read it). And having read KW Jeter’s The Glass Hammer, I know that there are Gnostic Christian influences on him too. (Of course, both were friends with Philip K. Dick.)
* This is why I find Charles Stross’ criticism of steampunk as marginalizing the injustices of the Victorian Age to be very silly. Well, one reason, at least.
* sigh * Muphry’s Law strikes again. I assume everyone can understand my furst sentence regardless.
I asked my webgoblin to add an editing feature so you could correct your comments. It did not appear?
I haven’t observed it yet myself. No more Goblin Snacks for him!
No, but I am using Firefox with a heavy amount of security – JavaScript blocking and the like. Someone using IE might have more luck.
Well, there’s religion in the background of my steampunk.
I was exasperated and nonplussed by the “Satanic D & D” hysteria, knowing that Gary was a “Jehovah’s Witness”. Perhaps you do not consider that being a “real” Christian, but it was enough to get him sneered at and reviled by “liberal” gaming fans in terms that had everything to do with being one of Those Christians, and nothing to do with his sect.
Me? I consider anyone hated by the Satan’s little puppets the “liberal” gaming fans to be Christian enough for me.
My master his disciples once: “Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us.”
A heretic is not a heathen; a heretic is a misinstructed Christian. If he has never heard the truth, his ignorance is what we call “invincible” that is, not blameworthy. A schismatic is not even a heretic.
Now, I’d prefer if a Christian were orthodox rather than believing some fad from the 1600′s, but hey, half a Eucharist is better than no daily bread, if you take my meaning.
I am sure they feel the same way about me, or more so, aghast that I pray the Rosary or honor the Mother of Our Lord or like stained glass windows or think the Roman Pontiff was always in charge of all the branches of the Church. But the war is dreadful and the event is dire and the stakes are the immortal souls of men. Once these horrors are over, and we all are feasting together in perfect brotherhood and accord by the rivers of living water beneath the shade of those trees whose leaves cure the nations, whoever was wrong about the Filioque controversy or Sola Scriptura or the Real Presence or the number and nature of the natures in Christ, will roar with laughter at his own errors, and beg in flowing tears forgiveness of all those he hated and wounded in the quarrel, and whoever was right will be so filled with abundant grace that he will pat his brother on the shoulder and say, “There, there! It is all over now! Like a bad dream, our quarrels on earth are swallowed up in a crystal sea of love! There is no need to weep!”
I assume I will be one of the weepers not one of the guys going “there, there” so I attempt to be as charitable as my cold and arrogant nature allows during theological disputes with my honest opponents.
The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn saga of Tad Williams has a pretty obvious Catholic Church in it, complete with crucified Messiah. However, that is the only series I have read that has such a parallel.