If you were expecting a post about dragons, I hate to disappoint you. but that’s not what this is going to be. I think dragons are fine, and there are lots of fantasy books with dragons that I’ve enjoyed (Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood comes to mind, as does The Hobbit, which is, after all, a classic for a reason), but I’ve never read a dragon book that made me go crazy for dragons.
(And yes, I’ve read the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McAffrey, or at least the first two books. I can appreciate how other people like them, but frankly, the dragons are just way too OP for me. I mean, come on: not only can they teleport anywhere on the planet, but they can also travel through time? That’s just too much.)
Rather, I want to explore the idea of “here be dragons”—specifically, how it was that before the modern age, every civilization’s map of the world had a huge part of it that was dark and unexplored. Until that period ended, I don’t think it was possible for the modern fantasy genre to emerge.
Some people think that fantasy is an old genre, with roots that go back at least as far as the Roman Empire (some lists include The Golden Ass by Apuleius as the first fantasy book) and possibly much longer. But I think that fantasy is a much more modern genre, and as such has much more in common with science fiction than it does with the ancient myths and legends from which the genre often draws inspiration.
It all comes back to this idea of “here be dragons.” Until the modern age, it wasn’t possible to write fantasy fiction because for all anyone knew, there might actually be dragons, or hobbits, or elves, or dwarves, or unicorns in some unexplored part of the world. Indeed, the medieval world was full of fanciful stories that many people actually believed, such as the mythical tales of Prester John that motivated so many crusaders, or the rumors that prima nocta had been forced upon the people just over the next mountain range (as far as we can tell, prima nocta was never actually practiced, but almost all European cultures thought that it had been enforced somewhere else).
If you went back in time and tried to write a fantasy novel for these people, they probably would have read it the way we read some of our more elaborate and creative conspiracy theories today. Part of the reason we enjoy fantasy is because we know that it’s fictional. The suspension of disbelief allows us to enjoy the story without constantly asking ourselves “wait—is this real?” or excitedly shouting “nuh-uh—no way!” Instead, we can just cozy up in our reading nook and let the story carry us away to another world, knowing that it only exists in our head.
The modern era began with the fall of the Roman Byzantine Empire and the Age of Exploration in the 14th century. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, though, that the Europeans had fully explored the world, filling in those parts of the world map that said (in one way or another) “here be dragons.” It’s not a coincidence that proto-fantasy writers like Lord Dunsaney and William Morris came onto the scene at this time. At first, people didn’t know what to make of these mythologies and adventure tales set in fictional worlds, but they paved the way for later writers like Howard and Tolkien to forge the fantasy genre as we know it today.
Science fiction and fantasy may seem like opposites, but they are really more like two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially modern genres, but where science fiction broadly looks to the future, fantasy looks to the past. Indeed, a large part of fantasy’s appeal is this sense of nostalgic longing that it gives us for a world that never actually was. Tolkien was a master of this. Howard was too, though he was a little more explicit about it in his worldbuilding: his Hyborian Age is supposed to be set in our own world, many thousands of years ago in the prehistoric era, as evidenced by the maps he drew up, and the way his Picts carry through all of his stories, including the Roman-era tales of Bran Mak Morn.
All of this is to say that while we read fantasy for very different reasons than why we read science fiction, we read both genres as children of the modern age, and the genres would make very little sense to us otherwise. If you took Lord of the Rings back in a time machine to the middle ages, it wouldn’t give them that nostalgic sense of yearning for a simpler time. Frankly, it would probably leave most of them feeling confused (and wondering why there’s a distinct lack of religion—even though, to our modern sensibilities, Lord of the Rings has lots of subtle Christian symbolism).
Every book is a product of the culture that created it, and as such, modern fantasy has far more in common with its brother genre science fiction than with its great-great grandfathers: pagan mythology, Christian allegory, epic poetry, etc. Fantasy certainly draws from all of these, but until the world was fully mapped—until “here be dragons” had been fully excised from our understanding of the world—the fantasy genre as we know and love it today was still gestating in the womb.
I love your analysis 🙂