Why are all Medieval stories fantasy?

General
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Just looked it up, and yours is the usual definition (476-1453.) I hadn’t thought of the Middle Ages as being defined as far apart as the two emperors; it looks like I wasn’t counting the Low Middle Ages. We’re on the same page as far as which centuries of that were the Dark Ages.

My forte starts about 3000 years ago (the trifecta of Antiquity being everything before and Modern being everything after that millennium is something I’d completely forgotten), so I can be hazy about centuries. Thanks for correcting my definitions there.

As for the whole droit de seigneur thing… I think I only ever heard about it in the context of Braveheart, so that makes sense. To throw out a similar myth, the iron maiden was invented by museum owners.

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@Sashira No worries. Just glad we’re understanding the dates the other gave.

And I’m somehow not surprised by that on the iron maiden. It looks like something someone would do if they had too much time on their hands - a Count Rugen from The Princess Bride sort of device, if less inspired.

Medieval interrogation involving torture as a matter of course does not seem to be as mythical, sadly.

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Yeah, iron maiden was a stupid idea from romantic imagination. Our inquisition had tons of better and more cruel methods to obtain confessions. Iron maiden is too lethal and not enough pain to served . The droid of seigneur is just a french term and more modern that the primitive ius malacandi and other medieval concepts. In Spanish culture many of the typical droights of laid with the peasant bride and free right to punch your peasants always don’t include break of hands or limps never was active. Anyway, medieval right sucks badly, but has interesting premises. Guilds rights are awesome so if any of you want made a realistic medieval cog, probably the guilds and or monasteries are the places. Their privileges and structure allows enough space to make a not only grim story.

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@interestedparty
1a) I think it’s because it’s easier to write a fantasy story since the author doesn’t need so much reasearch and can write things as they like without having to care about accuracy.
b) In a choice game, magic and non-human races offer more choices. Note that many games set in present days feature magic, super powers or supernatural

2)Actually, It is not neglected on this website. There is Lords of Aswick on Hosted Games, there are some WIPs, the most recent of them being Life, Tyranny, Revolution & Medieval England, Choice of Games announced that they’ll make a Choice of the Viking game and @jeantown wants to make a Robin Hood game after she has finished Guenevere.
Many other settings have not a single WIP, I would call that neglected.

  1. I like your ideas. Why don’t you make a game based on one or two of these concepts?

@Elfwine
I guess you haven’t played Samurai of Hyuga?

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Someone asked me this before. I suck at writing stories; I’m a great idea guy, but when it come to putting things to paper my plans fall apart

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@WulfyK Played a little of and lost interest - long story short, I didn’t like being the kind of ronin the story was writing.

But I hope it finishes.

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@Interestedparty I suck at writing too. Let’s hope someone else get inspired by your proposals.

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I feel a blog post coming on, and I apologize in advance. :slight_smile:

Apart from the fact that all Arthurian lit is inherently fantasy from its first appearance, one of my main reasons for writing pseudo-medieval fantasy rather than realistic historical fiction is that I get exhausted dealing with the Historical Accuracy Police. Some people’s favorite pastime seems to be tearing apart medieval-setting historical fiction because the author failed to represent what the Middle Ages were “really” like.

We will never know what the Middle Ages were “really” like. Yes, there are some things we can know for sure. Charlemagne probably did not have a cell phone and Eleanor of Aquitaine probably was not a ninja. But there are a lot of things we’ll never know, and never understand. History, especially medieval European history, is just a lot of guesswork based on sources that don’t – can’t – make a ton of sense to us now.

Medieval European people lived prior to our current idea of science, which deeply informs our understanding of reality. Medieval writers and artists were generally more interested in symbolic meaning than what we would think of as literal or empirical truth. I’ll never forget reading Roger Ray’s article on medieval historiography (in the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages; sadly not available online) where he talks about how medieval chroniclers would sometimes write “Nothing true happened this year.” It’s not that no events happened, it’s that events didn’t seem to reflect a higher reality, and were therefore not meaningful. Medieval writers and artists also had no problem changing the literal truth to reflect what they thought was the greater truth.

It’s also worth pointing out that nothing written in the Middle Ages was written in the languages we speak now. All of the information we have – whether it’s written, drawn, or archaeological – comes to us through many, many interpretive filters of present-day culture. One of the things any good academic program in medieval history teaches on Day 1 is that it’s impossible to be objective about history, so the best thing you can do is examine your subjectivities and be as self-aware as possible.

It’s my experience that the Historical Accuracy Police have not usually examined their subjectivities very well, nor have most of them read many, or any, actual medieval texts in the original languages. I get really tired of dealing with people who think they know everything about the Middle Ages on the basis of museum exhibits, college survey courses, and pop history books from Barnes and Noble. (I’m not knocking museum exhibits, college survey courses, or pop history books! I love all of those things. I just think there’s a lot of stuff we can’t know for sure.)

Also: Medieval people themselves had almost no sense of historical accuracy. They were perfectly happy to draw pictures of Moses in 12th-century clothing. The same goes for their storytelling. To them, what “really” happened was what made for a meaningful story about higher truths. So I very much believe that most fantasy lit, while its material differs greatly from actual medieval culture, is very, very true to the spirit of medieval storytelling – truer than “historically accurate” fiction, which is a modern invention.

I do enjoy historical fiction and respect the people who write it; in fact, I’m often overprotective of them when the Historical Accuracy Police step in and try to tell them how wrong they are. I just know that I myself am not up to dealing with that particular headache every day, and that’s a big part of why I write fantasy.

Also because dragons are cool.

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You are totally true about history accuracy about Medieval times. But We really had totally accurate account of many aspects of the society, guilds and religious orders economic accounts gives an boring but accurate description of people number, gender ,social class amount they give to church etc… Donations . I live near Santiago of Compostela greath cathedral and we had a lot of books and account info from s XII . Vatican has an amazing archive with treaties etc and letters . We have laws from that time in all europe. In fact historical laws is something laws schools teach all over Europe. There are tons of laws we have original copies. Sadly, that accuracy never was used to write what the hell really happened in battles and live in general people loved put dragons angels and demons all over the place, heck half of Spanish battles victory on the war with muslims is basically "Santiago Matamoros appeared flying in his white horse killing all the Muslims "

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Also while it’s probably not a big deal for a game whether there were five or six thousand or if the other side had ten or twelve thousand, the numbers given by the writers of the day get so inflated it might as well be just as fantastic if it did have dragons and demons and angels. God help the poor modern writer who has to sort out what happened when both elements are used in full force.

Not impossible to get good enough for a game numbers if you’re willing to spend the time researching, but the so-called histories won’t be very much help.

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@poison_mara Sure, we have records of laws, but there are SO many things those records can’t tell us.

To take an example of a 20th-century law: Some states in the US used to have a literacy requirement for people to be allowed to vote. A law like that would basically just say “Citizens have to prove they can read in order to vote.” What it wouldn’t say is that the law was created to prevent African Americans from voting. African Americans were given an outrageously difficult, deliberately misleading “literacy test,” and not allowed to vote if they didn’t pass it. White people weren’t even given the test. Just reading the law itself wouldn’t tell you that it was a means of racial discrimination, or how that discrimination was enacted. Laws get made for all sorts of reasons, and their implementation is highly subjective. Even today, many US states have laws on the books that aren’t enforced at all, laws that are only enforced sometimes, and other laws that are enforced in very strange ways you could never guess just from reading the law.

To take an example from the Middle Ages: Extant confessional manuals for priests specify particular periods of penance for particular sins. So, for example, a person who steals something is supposed to do penance for three years. But that “three years” could be fulfilled in lots of different ways which aren’t specified by the rule. Depending on the people involved and the circumstances, the three years of penance might be paid for with alms (later indulgences) or converted into harsher, shorter penances, or conducted by family members, or just waived by a compassionate priest. Taking the confessional manual at literal face value would be a mistake.

As for economic accounts and treaties, sure, that’s valuable information, but without context, there’s so much we can’t know. Were the treaties observed loosely or meticulously, or at all? What happened to all those donations to Santiago de Compostela after they were given, and why did X or Y person make a donation, and did the donation have the result the donor was hoping for?

I’m not saying we have no records, just that almost everything we think we know about the context of those records is a guess.

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I’m not entirely sure it’s entirely a guess. But its certainly more along the lines of a scientific hypothesis (as opposed to undeniable fact or as close as any discipline gets to that) - especially with how much has to be translated.

Not just in the sense Old English is a foreign language, but in the sense that medieval people thought they lived in a world that we would find to be fantasy. Maybe not literally magic everywhere, but “mundane reality” was as compared to Heaven, not as compared to Middle-Earth.

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How would you be able to give these examples if the Middle Ages were an unknown territory, other than the obvious like “they didn’t have cell phones”? Of course there are things we can never understand about a time and place we never lived. That doesn’t mean we’re flailing in the dark.

If written accounts are inaccurate, there are other sources. For example, if there’s general misinformation about who was executed and why, if you find the executioner’s own records they might be a better source. The usual concepts apply: double-check against other sources, consider why people would have a reason to lie, when in doubt go back to the physical evidence. Artifacts and skeletons can’t tell you everything (and as @Elfwine mentioned are based on our current understanding of how to interpret them) but they don’t lie. If the evidence contradicts the records, guess which one is wrong.

If you don’t want to bother with accuracy, dragons are a good shorthand for “this is not how it happened, but it suits my purposes.” But it’s disingenuous to suggest that we can’t know anything significant about the time period. If “we can’t take their word for what happened” were the end of the story, we would know nothing about civilizations with no written records.

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@Sashira Respectfully disagree, but I’ve already said my piece.

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Ooh, a brouhaha over medieval historiography. Those’re always fun. Good thing my own areas of academic training and interest neatly bracket it, so that I can safely say I know (next-to) nothing and have absolutely no dog in this fight.

As someone who is deeply interested in the military and political historiography, especially that of Antiquity – an area that shares many, though not all, of medieval historiography’s issues – I think @jeantown has overshot the mark a bit. (But only a bit.) “Guess” is likely too harsh and is connotatively inappropriate, as it suggests that there is little methodology at work and that any correspondence to actual events is the result of luck or coincidence. “Informed speculation” is probably more apt: We can know with near-certainty, for instance, that a major engagement occurred in the vicinity of Agincourt in the early Fifteenth Century based upon the extant records and archaeology. And, if one is sufficiently mental to try, a semi-coherent narrative of its events can be stitched together by examining the local geography, contemporary sources on all things militaria, and the physical artifacts which are still on occasion being found in the French countryside. (See, e.g., Keegan in The Face of Battle.) But that’s a prime example informed speculation: It’s a reasonable amalgamation of the existing data, but due to the paucity and conflicting nature of the primary sources, we’ll likely never be able to know much beyond the broadest strokes. So it’s absolutely worthwhile to remember the historiographical problems with medieval sources and the limitations of our own understandings, especially on finer points. (The OP’s characterization of most of the (male) landed nobility as “corrupt, greedy . . . rapists or murderers . . . [and] unpleasant to be around” begs for such perspective, as we just know don’t have enough about the day-to-day goings on of life back-when to make and support such a broad generalization.)

And, apropos of the comments about primary sourcing coming through us through many intermediary translators and interpreters, allow me to offer my favorite counterpoint: Thucydides and his The History of the Peloponnesian War. The first work of analytical history in the Western canon is, as far as we can tell from the archaeological record, more or less unchanged since at least the First Century AD. But then again, Thucydides stops mid-sentence two-thirds of the way through, so maybe time-ninja Eleanor of Aquitaine excised it so that we never got to the part where the Athenians break out the giant robots and Sparta retaliates with a Persian-funded orbital death ray.

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Okay, I’ll revoke “guess” in favor of “informed speculation.” :slight_smile:

My frustration isn’t with the fun and fulfilling academic detective work of piecing together what evidence we have (while trying to be aware of our subjectivities, of course). I think that’s a worthwhile pursuit, because history is a mirror by which we learn about ourselves in ways we couldn’t otherwise.

My frustration, as I said, is with the Historical Accuracy Police who have never even read a primary source document (much less in its original language, much less in unedited manuscript form) and yet feel it necessary to tear down historical fiction for lack of “accuracy.” My frustration is with the people who love to give ill-informed lectures on what we do and don’t know, when they don’t have a clue what the actual evidence is, or how to interpret it without leaping to conclusions. Those people are the reason why I write fantasy instead of historical fiction – I’m choosing the battles I have the energy to fight.

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@jeantown And what do you think about creating fictional but realistic settings as done in Lords of Aswick?

This would give the author the creative freedom of fantasy but doesn’t need to include magic and dragons that @interestedparty mentioned.

To avoid confusion: This comment doesn’t refer to Guenevere. Magic was an important part of the medieval Arthurian legends and you’re just staying true to the canon.

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@WulfyK That’s exactly what I hope to do with the distant-future Robin Hood game. I intend to treat it as another non-historical AU England, but the setting will be much more realistic – no magic or other supernatural elements, none of the utterly ridiculous anachronism of Guenevere. Basically historically plausible but not historically accurate.

Does that count as medieval but not fantasy?

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I would definitely count it

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Me too. Alt-historical fiction almost.

Definitely something I’d love to see more of as well as more directly historical - it satisfies the same desire for something based on reality as opposed to myth (which is not to say myth is undesirable, simply that much can be done with a “realistic setting”).