INTRODUCTION

Human imagination both produces and is sustained by story, by the narratives of the past and present, and these are in turn fuelled by the environments which give rise to them. Sarah Salih has observed: “We know the medieval, through its extant material culture, in the form of fragments,” and, she adds, “considerable popular interest in the medieval coexists with a lack of precise information about it, so that its image is multiple, fragmentary and visually unclear” (Salih 2009: 22). The ways in which modern culture understands the medieval past – and, as I shall argue – quite a bit of itself are thus shaped by medievalist re-representation of that past, as much as by material survivals from the Middle Ages.

The medieval, thanks very largely to Tolkien, has become a conventional setting for fantasy, offering the benefits of intertextual allusion and an assumed pre-existing familiarity with medieval or pseudo-medieval cultures. It is of course possible to write fantasy set elsewhere, or in the future (at which point it becomes science-fiction) or in a different past period. Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004), for example, is set in 18th-century England, though that is, in technical terms, an intrusion fantasy – in which magic erupts into a historically plausible reality. China Miéville and Neil Gaiman have written intrusion fantasies set in modern London and modern America respectively (e.g. Miéville 1998, 2010; Gaiman 1996, 2001). Immersion fantasies (the mode in which George R.R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire is written) are more traditionally imagined: as complete worlds whose difference from modernity has to be marked. Yet the time and space within which the story is set cannot be totally unfamiliar if the author's world-building task is not to be exhausting. Thus, a medieval setting functions as both recognisable and estranged, in part because of its fragmentary survival in our own culture. As Arthur Lindley observes, speaking here of medieval film, but making an argument equally valid for medieval fantasy in other media, “films of the medieval period present their matere in an analogical relation: as type or anti-type of current circumstances, as allegorical representation of them, or as estranged retelling. The distant past may mirror us – we, not it, are the real subject – but it does not lead to us” (Lindley 2014).