Your Yore and My Yore
Posted on 19 January 2012
A while back I wrote a humor piece on the appeal of High Fantasy versus Sword and Sorcery, where I opined that no one has a real taste for High Fantasy who does not think the modern age has lost something precious.
To my bewilderment, I was savagely criticized for this innocuous comment. Inquiry to the critic proved useless, as he was not in a mood to explain himself.
In that original post, I never explained the statement, and this was for two reasons. First, I thought it was self-explanatory. Second, to this hour, no one (especially not my critic) has asked me to explain it.
Let me explain it now:
As far as I know, each fan might have a different thing on his list of the things the modern world has lost: one might regret the rise of smoggy factories; another the loss of small-town intimacy; a third the dreary secularism of the age; a fourth might miss the lack of chivalry; a fifth might wish she had lived in the days of horses rather than honking automobiles; a sixth might wonder what life was like when maps had edges beyond which was the unknown; a seventh might regret the loss of the pomp of monarchy, or the days when kings indeed took the sword in hand and stood on the battlefield with their men; an eighth might appreciate the care with which craftsmen made beautiful things; an ninth might bemoan the loss of the frontier, or the lack of churchbell music, or the slattern ugliness of modern dress; a tenth might simply think cloaks look nicer than overcoats; an eleventh might be enamored with the glamour of swordplay; or a twelfth might be attracted to the charm of hearing a harpist in the hall singing the ancient lays of heroes of yore rather than rock&shriek music “Yeah, yeah, yeah” over a tinny transistor radio.
And the list goes on.
Of these things, some might admire some things about the past and detest others.Your ‘yore’ is not necessarily the same as my ‘yore.’
Some of the things on this list really were better in the old days, and some only are romantic nostalgia. But real or imaginary, that is the appeal.
And more than all of this, the fan of High Fantasy regrets the loss of magic in the world.
People used to believe in wizards and saints, witches and good fairies, or at least some people did or said they did. (Skepticism was not unknown then, as ancient writings will attest.) Now, in real life, if you time traveled back into the land of yore, you might find charlatans as convincing as Uri Geller, and witches no different from Lucrezia Borgia whose ‘magic’ consisted of poisoning people. But the allure and appeal of fairytale magicians is that we here in this world don’t have magic ( or at least you agnostics don’t).
My point is you don’t have to believe in any of this stuff to enjoy the book, and you don’t have to want to be one of Conan’s corsairs sweating at the oar or a serf living in Ithilien under the kindly bootheel of King Aragorn Elessar Telcontar to enjoy the yarns of his exploits. But you do have to sympathize with the nostalgia of it.
I keep using the word ‘nostalgia’ — but this word is misleading, since the past we are glamorizing is not the real past.
I should hasten to add that Sword and Sorcery, or low fantasy, has less glamor because its glamor is a darker hue. Call it blue collar glamor if you like, stories not about epic quests but about pirates and barbarians and footpads.
To use a military SF analogy, GRAY LENSMAN stars more admirals and generals than it does footsoldiers, and it concerns itself with the big picture of the intergalactic war. We never find out the fate of the gun-crew of the number 13 heavy-bore DeLamiter ray-cannon serving aboard the Brittania during the battle of Klovis. By contrast, STARSHIP TROOPERS concerns one footslogger who never makes it past First Lieutenant, and neither the causes nor the resolution of the war is on stage, nor anything about the big picture. We do not even know, to this day, if the Klendathau or the Humans win that war.
The Lensman are like a High Fantasy figures, by whose hand Sauron of Eddore and the Dark Galaxy of Mordor is obliterated. Mr Rico is more like Solomon Kane or the Gray Mouser, a man who fights the battle in front of him. No dark thrones fall.
In either case, high fantasy or low, the past in fantasy stories is never the real past. The whole innovation of William Morris, who basically invented modern fantasy, was that the tales of yore took place beyond the fields we know, somewhere off the edge of the map even though we now live in a world whose every land from pole to pole has been mapped.
These are not historical novels. Some of them of not placed on Earth at all, but an air of the familiar and half-remembered things hangs over them alongside the air of strangeness and mystery.
Even when the world is utterly fantastic, as for example the lands about the seas of Melnibone or Lankhmar, or utterly strange, as the years beyond the Tragic Millennium when Hawkmoon and Count Brass dwell, or the years of the Dying Earth when Cugel the Clever or the Dying Urth when Severian the Lame have their lives, or the years after the death of Earth, where the Last Redoubt rises beneath a sky that long ago forgot it sun, and Mirdath the Beautiful dwells far across the volcanic crater-scape of the night lands draped in dark influences from aspects of reality unknown to sunlit worlds, yes, even in such worlds as these, the props and backdrops and tropes of our earthly past will make an appearance, if indeed the tale is to be considered fantasy and not science fiction: even if they are strange in appearance, or haunted, it is yet swords or battleaxes our heroes wield, and their arms and armor, their titles and dignities and names, will remind the reader of past things of history: this is why Count Brass is a count and not a congressman. This is why Stormbringer is a sword no less than Terminus Est.
Even if the tales take place on Earth, such as the adventures of Solomon Kane, Puritan, or Conan the Barbarian, they take place in some corner of time where things that do not happen now happened then, and if it is not off the edge of the map, it is somewhere in the blank pages before the first chapter of the history book:
The white gulls wheeled above the cliffs, the air was slashed with foam,
The long tides moaned along the strand when Solomon Kane came home.
He walked in silence strange and dazed through the little Devon town,
His gaze, like a ghost’s come back to life, roamed up the streets and down.
The people followed wonderingly to mark his spectral stare,
And in the tavern silently they thronged about him there.
He heard as a man hears in a dream the worn old rafters creak,
And Solomon lifted his drinking-jack and spoke as a ghost might speak:
“There sat Sir Richard Grenville once; in smoke and flame he passed.
“And we were one to fifty-three, but we gave them blast for blast.
“From crimson dawn to crimson dawn, we held the Dons at bay.
“The dead lay littered on our decks, our masts were shot away.
“We beat them back with broken blades, till crimsom ran the tide;
“Death thundered in the cannon smoke when Richard Grenville died.
“We should have blown her hull apart and sunk beneath the Main.”
The people saw upon his wrist the scars of the racks of Spain.
“Where is Bess?” said Solomon Kane. “Woe that I caused her tears.”
“In the quiet churchyard by the sea she has slept these seven years.”
The sea-wind moaned at the window-pane, and Solomon bowed his head.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the fairest fade,” he said.
His eyes were mytical deep pools that drowned unearthly things,
And Solomon lifted up his head and spoke of his wanderings.
“Mine eyes have looked on sorcery in dark and naked lands,
“Horror born of the jungle gloom and death on the pathless sands.
“And I have known a deathless queen in a city old as Death,
“Where towering pyramids of skulls her glory witnesseth.
“Her kiss was like an adder’s fang, with the sweetness Lilith had,
“And her red-eyed vassals howled for blood in that City of the Mad.
“And I have slain a vampire shape that drank a black king white,
“And I have roamed through grisly hills where dead men walked at night.
“And I have seen heads fall like fruit in a slaver’s barracoon,
“And I have seen winged demons fly all naked in the moon.
“My feet are weary of wandering and age comes on apace;
“I fain would dwell in Devon now, forever in my place.”
The howling of the ocean pack came whistling down the gale,
And Solomon Kane threw up his head like a hound that sniffs the trail.
A-down the wind like a running pack the hounds of the ocean bayed,
And Solomon Kane rose up again and girt his Spanish blade.
In his strange cold eyes a vagrant gleam grew wayward and blind and bright,
And Solomon put the people by and went into the night.
A wild moon rode the wild white clouds, the waves in white crests flowed,
When Solomon Kane went forth again and no man knew his road.
They glimpsed him etched against the moon, where clouds on hilltop thinned;
They heard an eery echoed call that whistled down the wind.
Our world may have white gulls and Spanish Dons, but once we are facing vampire-queens of Atlantis, we have, without knowing it, stepped into a stranger and darker world than ours, even if that world, in her madness, still thinks she is our Earth.
Can one feel nostalgia for a past that never was? Ah, to a degree all nostalgia is fairy glamor for pasts that never were, made golden by the alchemy of memory.
Is there something unwholesome or dangerous in this glamor? Should sober men dwell in their thoughts on worlds that might have been and never were? Again, all elfin glamor has some danger to it. Not for nothing do the fairy queens and all their chivalry and vassals otherworldly live in what we mortals call the Perilous Realm.
Can one feel nostalgia for a past that never was?
Certainly. If one can read LotR without feeling a nostalgia for Numinor and the days when elves were mighty, one might not be able to pass a Turing test.
As far as unwholesome… I have a theory: Fiction is meant to teach us a worldview. Certainly, while I may have narrative or characterization issues with a giant chunk of the Star Trek franchise, watching Star Trek from infancy instilled a sense of wonder in me that endures still– to this day, I expect to find surprising things around every corner.
(Funny thing is, when you expect that, you typically do.)
I will throw my hat in with Lewis here: High fantasy teaches, or perhaps draws out, that sense of sehnsucht which is perhaps natural to human beings and certainly something a sober-minded Christian should have: longing for that world that we only occasionally glimpse.
“Is there something unwholesome or dangerous in this glamor? Should sober men dwell in their thoughts on worlds that might have been and never were?”
I shall consult heads wiser than mine. Prof. Tolkien believed that myth-making was a very human, even Christian act, in which Man imitated his Creator. Like other human actions, it can be used for good or ill, and the virtue of mythopoeia, I suppose(as an amateur Aristotelian/Thomist), must lie between excess (failing to distinguish fantasy from reality or neglecting one’s duties in the primary world) and deficiency (failing to be creative or failure to enjoy any kind of creativity).
“The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.”
-fragment from Mythopoeia, JRR Tolkien
I keep using the word ‘nostalgia’ — but this word is misleading, since the past we are glamorizing is not the real past.
I think we might say that the nostalgia is for the ideals of the past, what lived in the hearts and minds of our fathers, what they saw in the world and has been dimmed in our vision. Fantasy does this by asking, “What if mythology were history?” That is, it takes all elements of the old tales and rearranges them into a pattern with a consistent set of rules, a chronology, and a grounding that allows us to enter a new world with a suspension of disbelief.
Part of this is necessity, ancient and modern minds being in some respects markedly different, and thus needing different devices to handle the same basic elements. The Silmarillion bombed where the The Lord of the Rings succeeded because the latter was built a a modern novel and the form was in the pure, unadulterated form of an ancient epic, which left a lot of people scratching their heads. Part of it is taste. The influence of Christianity on this in this respect (and the whole creation of the genre), aside from underlying themes, was/is immense: a linear view of history, an emphasis on precise metaphysics, the underlying structure of narrative, and so on. These “true myths” are reflections of the True Myth, in whole or in part. The differing types of nostalgia are just preferences for different patterns in the same tapestry.
My own preference is for the earlier Middle Ages. The High Middle Ages was the zenith, but Courtly Love (not Chivalry) is an irritating symptom of decadence setting in. Then you get the over-ripeness of the Late Middle Ages; the the Avignon papacy, the Anti-Popes, the Realist/Nominalist debate, the Free Companies, and all the other rot that goes with that period. Give me some newly-baptized Anglo-Saxon chief, whose hard, fierce pagan virtues find new purpose in Christ, and you got me by the nose.
I wish I had thought to say this! Good point!
Part of the Sword & Sorcery nostalgia is the belief that things were more real, or authentic — or, I suspect would be the most accurate if least used description — intensely felt. To be sure, adrenaline does sharpen reactions, and you were more likely to get it in times of old.
Now, I will not say this is why most of the people opposed you (I doubt it was) but I may offer A reason for why some people would react violently to an attack on modern times.
If I may cite for a moment:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2008/02/nazis/
As you said here, personal reasons trigger emotional reactions. You hate and despise the Nazi movement because they hurt people like those you love. That’s not a bad reason. I hate the Nazis for all they did and all they stand for too.
I would have never lived without modern medicine. I was born via c-section. I was born with a cleft lip and pallet and was unable to nurse naturally. Since then I have had several strange and rare medical problems that would have killed or crippled me. My parents would also be long dead without modern medicine. My life, and my family’s lives, would be gone in any era before our own.
I am hardly the only one like that. IIRC you would also be dead without modern medicine. If people are making emotional reactions, they think of the people much like those people they love who would be dead without modern medicine. They think of plague and starvation, cruelty and horror. Many of them either believe that the Christian civilization of Europe was terrible as well and see little in it (I am not one of them). All would agree that most places were very, very bad. Nasty, nasty empires existed at the time that committed atrocities without number.
Am I angry at your statement? Not at all. We have lost things as we have grown. We have made great strides, but we have very clearly lost a sense of chivalry, of rightness, of magic. But I would say something like sympathy may drive the anger directed at you. Irrational and misdirected anger, but possibly from a higher source. Then again, it might just be irrational fury directed at someone suggesting that other people might possibly have been wiser or kinder than they.
Then again, I myself have little taste for sword and sorcery, and very little nostalgia in general. I absolutely love this epoch in history. I see it as grand and epic and exciting.
As opposed to the atrocities without number committed in the modern age?
I still don’t get it. Saying “fans of a genre I don’t write in have the personality characteristic of romantic longing for a glamorized version of the past” is not the same as saying “Modern medicine is EVIL — I wish that I and all my loved ones were dead before 35.”
I do see how someone, with considerable mental strain, if he were looking for a fight and trying to get mad at an innocent bystander could conflate the two sentences, but not a man whose ability to twist words out of their meaning was not at the TV news commentator level.
No, I think this is because I am a Christian and the Middle Ages were Christian. I said similar things back when I was an atheist, and never ran into this sort of ranting, maniacal hatred before.
The moment I turned Christian, I started running into the this hatred all the time, and, eerily enough, from friends of mine who did not realize that their words were hateful — to them, to insult God and Christ and the Church was as natural as breathing, as natural as a Cowboy whose parents had be scalped to breathe out hatred against ‘Injuns’ without a second thought. Save that in this case, there are no scalps.
The secular world view cannot explain the persistence and the depth of this animadversion to Christ. This is one reason why I no longer believe the secular view: the theory does not explains the facts on the ground.
It gets even funnier when people attack steampunk for nostaglia and complain that it was a terrible era and we should be glad it is gone from the earth — in a very, very, very Victorian manner. It invariably hold to the Whig interpretation of history in its explanation that the modern era is of course better than the Victorian one.
All escapist literature obviously is trying to discard something in the modern world (look at the name of the genre!), or add something worthwhile that it thinks we’ve lost. But it doesn’t need to have anything to do with high fantasy. In Le Morte d’Arthur, Malory constantly bemoans the loss of chivalry, honor, and romantic love in his debased “modern” age (the 1400s), as compared to the noble sentiments that animate the Arthurian heroes.
Similarly, in The Man In the Iron Mask, Dumas comes right out and says that the decadent later musketeers (of ~1660) are puny and inferior to the giants who strode the earth back in ~1635, showing the heroes of The Three Musketeers as titans who are able to defeat literally hundreds of enemies in a conflict, and decide the fate of nations.
But if we read a Spanish picaresque novel, we see a different side of history. Look at Don Quixote – the hero is amusing because he believes in escapism, and is constantly thwarted by the real world. So both types of attitudes exist even in “normal” historical literature, and not just in high fantasy vs. sword and sorcery.
I would go further to state that it has nothing to do with whether the book focuses on high important people or on the commoner. Certainly the Lord of the Rings is as nostalgic and high fantasy as they come, yet the most important characters by far are the hobbits – embodiment of the underclass. Similarly, the Game of Thrones focuses on the rulers and lords of the nations, but portrays them as slimy plotters, seducers, and assassins, thus making it more “realistic” I guess if you think realism is sordid. I’m not trying to condemn Game of Thrones, mind you, any more than Wright was condemning Conan. Both types of approaches have their place.
I think I have to agree, nostalgia is not the sole province of fantasy. But I will also say that the books you list are the kinds of non-genre books that fantasy readers also tend to read.