History in Fantasy – Part 3

 

In my last two posts about History in Fantasy (Part 1 | Part 2), I gave an overall summary of historical influences in fantasy fiction and mentioned some works of historical fantasy. In this post, I will point out a small list of works inspired by history, but were translated into a secondary world.

 

In August of this year, I talked about the secondary world in fantasy fiction and how it is rooted in the medieval period—thanks to the father of modern epic fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien. As a medieval scholar, Tolkien created an immense world from the inspiration of history, mythology and literature, yet giving us a unique world never seen before his time. Though Tolkien’s work has a handful of solid characters, the world of Middle-earth, and its distinctive histories therein, is what enriched his story. In today’s modern fantasy, authors who were influenced by Tolkien were also inspired by their love for history, and so they continued the genre with such inspiration.

Katherine Kurtz’s understanding of medieval Europe aided the creation of her world in the Deryni novels. Kurtz’s Eleven Kingdoms is an alternate medieval Europe, harboring the same structure and societies of the era, yet she realigns it with her own dynasties, religion, and histories, while adding in magic to give her world its fantastic element. First published in the 1970’s, the beginning of the Deryni series is said to have been the work of fantasy fiction which popularized the use of an alternate Europe in the genre. Since there are so many similarities to the structure of medieval Europe in the Deryni series, it is not a work of fantasy that has fleshed out an in-depth, epic fantasy world, but it is surely one of the originating works of fantasy which took the genre down a different path in the use of the secondary world—with the help of history.

Like Katherine Kurtz, Guy Gavriel Kay uses the method of taking a historical period and alternating it within a fantastical world, yet still heavily inspired by real historical events and societies. His novel Tigana pulls inspiration from medieval Italy, in a world with two moons, containing some sorcery and a story of freedom fighters against tyranny. His novel, The Last Light of the Sun, was clearly based on the Viking invasion on the Anglo-Saxons in the 9^TH century. As usual, Kay set the story in an alternate world and changed names of people, nations, and groups, putting in fantasy elements (like faeries).

Kurtz and Kay are mostly referred to as authors of historical fantasy, rather than epic/high fantasy, due to the way they take actual history and simply change the names of things and drop in some kind of fantasy element. However, I would say that their efforts to try to take the reader out of the real world and place them in a setting that is more than alternate history with fantasy elements is to be commended.

R. Scott Bakker’s epic fantasy series, The Prince of Nothing, is inspired by the Crusades, where the two main religions in Bakker’s world (the Inrithi and the Fanim) are in a Holy War, which is the setting of the series. Budding fantasy authors, Brian McClellan and Django Wexler, are both writing their own worlds of fantasy fiction set in a period akin to the Napoleonic era. McClellan’s Powder Mage series and Wexler’s Shadow Campaigns series are a part of the few epic fantasy novels that take place outside the medieval times and in the Age of Enlightenment.

I think what we can say here is that history has had a profound impact on the setting of fantasy fiction. Mythology may have brought about the fantastic elements that populate the fantasy stories, but history has been the building block for setting the stage for the fantastic populace. For decades now, fantasy writers have been taking pieces of history, whether with subtlety or without, and building their worlds and their plots with it. History has been the inspiration for many different genres of fiction, but fantasy fiction has more fun with it, and tries to reinvent it with what-ifs and elements of things out of this world. 

RELATED POSTS: 
History in Fantasy - Part 1 
History in Fantasy - Part 2 
The Secondary World
Inspirations of Fantasy
Epic Worldbuilding
Flintlock Fantasy