Mimetic Worldbuilding: Historical Fantasy And Why To Do It

Michelangelo Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac"
Front-piece to the Princeton Classics edition of Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis"

In fantasy-type RPGs, we can, without too much oversimplification, delineate two basic types of worldbuilding: the sub-creative and the mimetic. The former is overwhelmingly predominant, for reasons that are hardly mysterious: the inventor of the sub-creative method was none other than J.R.R. Tolkien, who justifiably claims the mantle of founder of the fantasy genre in general.

For Tolkien, sub-creation denoted acting in the image of God by composing a second, imaginary world. This world was not to be the equal of the Primary World, because we would fashion it with the psychic and spiritual tools made initially by God and put at our disposal through his Grace. Moreover, as sub-creators, we would have to take care to remember that we continued to live in the Primary World, which our Secondary World could never replace (so long as we wished to keep our sanity and remain within God's Grace).

Nevertheless, these Secondary Worlds were to be free and independent creations, not dictated, contrived, and pale imitations of the Primary World. Rather, they would be vivid, beautiful, supernatural - populated by creatures of Faerie, larger-than-life heroes, magical animals that talked, and also the darkest villains. The more disbelief in these things was suspended, the more real the Secondary Worlds became. These 'faerie tales' have been told from time immemorial and are an inalienable part of all human cultures - to entertain, to escape the drudgery and misery of the mundane world, and to rekindle hope by showing that there are other Worlds where, despite the presence of Darkness, Good triumphs over Evil in the end.

Fantasy as a literary type was, for Tolkien, a project for restoring the Secondary Worlds of Faerie in the conditions of a runaway modernity. In a thoroughly disenchanted world, he saw all thought, action and communication as being enslaved by the necessity of scientific, socioeconomic or political facts and to which there could be no alternative. Imagination necessary to appreciate sub-creation, and the suspension of disbelief were discouraged or punished, and relegated to the sphere of children: the wise and terrible elves of old shrunk to the tiny, winged Tinkerbells that still inhabited 20th-century tales of 'fancy'. Fantasy was to restore the right to imagine and sub-create to adults who, if anything, were even more victimized by disenchanted modernity than children. In a world where the myths and fairy tales of old were declared to be atavisms or screens veiling "real" social relations or primitive scientific knowledge, and mercilessly caricatured by science and bad drama, sub-creators could not simply retell old tales, but had to fashion them almost de novo in order to imbue them with a heavier dose of imagined reality. These would have to be internally consistent, living worlds, with their own history, genealogies, legends, poetry, and languages (which Tolkien, himself a linguist, would proceed to fashion).

A further stipulation of the sub-creative method in fantasy was the injunction to keep the Secondary world strictly separate from the Primary. Any leaking through, any blurring of boundaries between the two would not only undermine the inner consistency of the former and blur the line between reality and fantasy, but also threaten to implicate the Secondary Worlds in the political conflicts of the Primary, which they were explicitly constructed to escape. It is on those grounds that Tolkien objected to the use of allegory in fantasy. Reducing an elfin or divine being to a manifestation of a natural force weakened sub-creative power. Explicitly rejecting the notion that the War of the Ring was in any key sense an allegory of the Second World War, Tolkien indicated that if it had been such, it would have concluded with the taking of the Ring and its use to augment the power of the victors, which would have obviated the therapeutic power of his sub-creation. Similarly, in contrast to C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles, which were an obvious allegory of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Christ, Tolkien, though he saw the Lord of the Rings as a fundamentally Christian work,  felt that such a heavy-handed insertion of Christianity would not only undermine the integrity of the fantasy, but also of religion: by inserting an explicitly Christian preachiness into Middle Earth, he would also turn the latter into the domain of political and doctrinal struggle. Instead, the truth of Christianity in a compact, symbolic form, which would become only become transparent over time to an emotionally-invested reader.

It requires little argumentation to demonstrate that Tolkien's method was not only successful in introducing a new literary style, but that this style has attained the semblance of hegemony in speculative fiction, in role-playing games, and arguably, even in the culture at large. It is Re-enchantment, rather than Disnechantment which is now feared, because instead of the End of History, we are in fact living through the End of the Future (so it is no surprise that fantasy has displaced science fiction as the ascendant vision of that future). In the 1960s, the Lord of the Rings became a bestseller on the crest of a popular revolt against disenchanted modernity. In the 1970s, it midwifed the birth of D&D and (roleplaying games generally). The Tolkien-created races - elves, dwarves, hobbits/halflings, orcs, as well as humans continue to form the core of the official D&D legendarium. D&D and the fantasy genre has continued to dominate the world of RPGs, and this dominance has only been reinforced with the 5e renaissance, which has brought D&D and gaming into the mainstream. And in the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings movie franchise at the turn of the century, fantasy finally tamed drama, which Tolkien saw as being opposed to it. Now that Secondary Worlds can be dramatically represented in non-caricatured ways, the full power of the culture industry can be brought to bear on the ceaseless expansion of sub-creative worldbuilding - a fact reflected in the imperative to make D&D sessions and descriptions "cinematic". 

Much about the playstyles, play process, and worldbuilding in D&D continues to reflect the imprint of Tolkien's sub-creative method. Consider the officially published settings for 5e, as well as those of earlier editions that many fans call to have updated for the new ruleset: Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Ravnica. All are Secondary Worlds, wholly imagined, wholly fictional, with internal coherence and distinct histories. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are, to an extent, parallel worlds to our own, but it would be hard to suspect them of being allegorical (certainly with respect to contemporary politics and culture). On top of that, the more "ethnic" areas of those worlds that might be recognized as versions of particular cultural regions have been deemphasized (to the point of their near-absence) in newly published materials.

Consider as well the separation of the creatures in these worlds into good and evil. Although alignment as a game feature is in decline (making these Secondary Worlds less like Middle Earth over time), it still exists. Planes of existence that embody these alignments, and planes such as the Faewild parallel Tolkien's Faerie quite closely. The popular reference to D&D-type games as "elf games" is sardonic, but it contains more than a grain of literal truth.

Moreover, claims to the effect that the PCs are heroes, and should be played as heroes, are still quite widespread. How often do we hear comments from people who say that they want their characters to do heroic things, because in real life, they are quite average, and want to escape their hum-drum existence when they are engaged in elf games at the table. And how often do we hear comments to the effect that at that table, they want to deal with simple, diverting fantasy, and not with morally- and politically-complicated issues that suffuse their personal and professional lives? How often do we see people on gaming lists insisting that cultural and political issues have no place there? All of this testifies to the preeminence of the sub-creative model.

Sub-creation: the music of the Ainur

* * *

The sub-creative model is not, however, without its detractors. In his critique "Epic Pooh", Michael Moorcock accused Tolkien of putting on airs, when in fact, there was little difference between the Lord of the Rings, Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, and the Wizard of Oz. All were children's stories, but in claiming that his work was something more, Tolkien was infantilizing his reader, isolating him from sexuality, politics, and other adult themes, and in so doing, promoting a veiled reactionary political agenda. Moorcock, of course, was a fantasy writer, too, but he saw no fundamental distinction between fantasy and other varieties of belles lettres, which were intended to challenge its readers morally, epistemologically, politically, and syntactically. Tolkien-style fantasy writers dismissed most contemporary fiction as "boring", while glorifying pulpy cliches and escapism as the only basis for good writing - a testament, as Moorcock saw it, to the disenchanted and discredited worldview of antimodernist social groupings that formed their worldviews, as well as to the decline of cultural standards in the second half of the 20th century. In opposition to this tendency, Moorcock cited fantasy books that are based on real-world mythological and legendary sources (Gillian Bradshaw), as well as fantasies that incorporate anthropological and non-Western perspectives (Ursula K. Le Guin).

George R.R. Martin, while generally more appreciative of Tolkien as a forbear, similarly faulted him for his lack of realism. Why such stark division into good elves and evil orcs - do the latter also have evil orc babies? Why is there nothing about the monetary system or the taxation policy of the realms of Middle Earth? Why is it based on such a primitive political philosophy - as long as Gondor has a legitimate king descended from the Numenorians, then all is right with the world? (Unsurprisingly, it took a Russian, Kirill Yeskov, to extrapolate a realist spin on Aragorn's claim in the Last Ringbearer, where the Future King turns out to be a politically ambitious ranger who marries an elf princess, practices genocide against Mordor, and ultimately, uses these to assert a royal claim reaching back thousands of years [!]). For Martin, being a good guy or a legitimate ruler is not enough: even in a fantasy world with magic and dragons, you have to make hard choices, and occasionally, act to cruelly to save more lives down the road. All sides in his world advance moral and religious justifications for their actions. On top of that, there are more than two sides. Sometimes, good guys fight good guys, and ally themselves with evil guys to do it. This type of fantasy world accords more with our own historical experience: notably, Martin is quite explicit that the inspiration for A Game of Thrones came from real conflicts (the Wars of the Roses first and foremost).

The concern for realism, and for a more academically informed fiction does not mean jettisoning fantasy altogether. For better or worse, we live in a world Tolkien made, and internally consistent Secondary Worlds - with their own history, with magic, with creatures that don't exist in the primary world - these have become so widespread that they now even infect 'serious' literature (Umberto Eco, Alice Hoffman, Michael Chabon). It does, however, mean adopting a different methodology for fantasy worldbuilding, at least in part, precisely because our world has changed, and with it, so has the meaning of fantasy. Whereas Tolkien was confronted with what he saw as runaway industrialization, disenchantment, and an existential struggle between political ideologies, we are confronted with a more complex, multi-cornered struggle between many identity groups which all advance claims for recognition. Some of these - heretofore the most dominant, but sensing challenges from all sides, have even begun to draw on the Lord of the Rings to justify war-making in defense of such claims and of their purported ethical superiority.

The epigraph to Chapter 11 of David Gress' From Plato to Nato: the Idea of the West and its Opponents. The chapter looks at the conception of the West following the end of the Cold War, and envisions its assault in its traditional homelands by various postmodern ideologies.

In addition to the use of sub-creation toward explicitly political ends in the Primary World, the imagination of new magical worlds into being has become increasingly exhausted, runs into the turned in upon itself, derivative and solipsistic. For commentators (and sometime fantasy writers) such as John Michael Greer, what's missing from popular, pulpy kind of fantasy - precisely the kind that Moorcock disparages, is mimesis:

The distinction between cliché and personal vision is also the difference between the two categories of fantasy mentioned above. Read a volume of Thongor of Lemuria and the thoughts that you’re experiencing are utterly familiar, the generic mindset of pulp fantasy, replayed in an endless loop with only the most minor variations. Read a volume of the Zimiamvian trilogy and the thoughts you’re experiencing are unique to Eddison. You get to see how someone else thinks and feels and experiences life. In the process, the range of thoughts you’re capable of thinking and feelings you’re able to experience gets expanded. That’s what I mean by mimesis: the experience of a work of genuine art guides you toward new ways of being in the world...

In contrast to the currently dominant conception of art as a vehicle for self-expression, the mimetic theory of art stipulates that, "[a]rt is a means—the only one we’ve come up with so far, despite a vast amount of tinkering on the part of assorted mad scientists—of enabling one person to share, in some sense, in another person’s experience of the world."
 
Curiously, although Greer promotes mimetic theory in part to defend Tolkien from (his now mostly forgotten) high-brow critics in the 1950s, the definition of art (or fantasy literature) as a representation that is experienced, understood, and appreciated by a passive recipient is quite a bit different from Tolkien's own idea of sub-creation. It's not that the two approaches are inimically opposed to one another: Tolkien certainly put great stock in being able to spin a good yarn that others could enjoy. But there is nothing in imagining Secondary Worlds into being that necessarily involves effectively sharing the experience with others: sub-creation may involve communion with God, but it is, and not infrequently, a solitary business - I create worlds because that is how I express myself, and if people aren't able to appreciate them, that is their problem, and not mine. In sub-creating, I partake of a divine genius, and that is all the justification I need. 

Though Greer does not explicitly tell us what makes one's artistic representations relatable, he is drawing upon the notion of mimesis introduced by the literary theorist Erich Auerbach shortly before the appearance of the Lord of the Rings. For Auerbach, the ability to think and feel together with an artist was made possible by the fact that the latter successfully represented an external reality which he (typically) had no hand in creating. This reality could be the physical reality of what people do and say, the psychological reality of the tension between the external and internal selves, or the historical reality of trying to change oneself in a constantly changing world: in any case, the imagination of the artist is focused on representing the Primary World rather than trying to create a Secondary one. For Auerbach, this mimesis was the red thread running through Western art and literature, and the successful representation of the Primary World, despite the toil and complexity involved in doing so was the primary criterion in determining whether a particular work was to be adjudged as "great" and accepted into the canon. It is for this reason that fantasy such a difficult time at the hands of tastemakers and literary critics - until recently. Creating worlds that were explicitly not intended to represent reality was seen as a shirking of the artist's responsibility, and avoiding having to learn the difficult techniques of the writer's craft. Fantasy as a whole was seen as self-referential, and hence, not admissible into the canon.

The suitability of the mimetic approach for fantasy worldbuilding has already been broached in the discussion of Moorcock's and Martin's critique of Tolkien. Martin, in particular, insisted that his series could have "the gritty feel of historical fiction as well as some of the magic and awe of epic fantasy". Westeros and Essos have internal consistency - their own timelines, ruling families, languages, gods, magical creatures, and still take inspiration form the Wars of the Roses, the Vietnam war, Hadrian's Wall, and a myriad other real-world influences. In some cases (as with Moorcock's invocation of series based on the Arthurian legends or the Celtic Prydain of Lloyd Alexander), fantasy worlds could even derive their 'inner coherence' from real-world history or mythology. And where but from history does one get ideas about how people, even in fantasy worlds, act in response to the pressures of family, social status, economic scarcity, and geopolitical competitors? Where for Tolkien, sub-creative worldbuilding had to preserve elements of nature, which he thought were steadily being destroyed by industry, for the mimetic worldbuilder, historical and social structures had to be preserved in fiction and game to resist a world in which symbolic production was being overwhelmed by the entertainment industry that had already largely incorporated the sub-creative approach.

Examples of mimetic-type worldbuilding certainly exist in fantasy RPGs, though they have been overshadowed by sub-creative worldbuilding. The first genuinely mimetic FRPG was Backhaus and Simbalist's Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) - a game born out of a desire to simulate a medieval European society, as well as a general dissatisfaction with D&D's lack of realism. C&S had dragons and magic, too, but as add-ons in a setting that had a more-or-less realistic economic system and price lists, a real feudal-type social hierarchy, and a political and legal system that actually impacted PC actions. C&S also had Christianity, which was left out not only by Tolkien but also by Gygax (who, too, was a believer, but also guided by practical considerations, as D&D was hit by a fundamentalist backlash in the early 80s, and had to assert its purely fictional bona fides). The creators of C&S insisted not only on immersion, but also on complexity: the worlds in which characters operated were not to be mere dungeons where one killed monsters, but 'total environments' - an imperative that evokes Braudel's 'total history'.

C&S was followed by a host of mimetic FRPGs - Bushido, Man Myth and Magic, Pendragon, Legend of the Five Rings, Nyambe, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Beginning in the mid-1980s, mimetic settings began to appear under the D&D imprint, which provided them a framework for much wider circulation. Settings like Kara-Tur, al-Qadim and Maztica were mimetic in the sense that they reflected non-Western historical regions and mythology, at least in a way that resonated with the average fantasy fan. As such, they enjoyed a measure of popularity, especially in the 1990s. However, these settings were incorporated into, that is, subordinated to, generic fantasy settings such as Forgotten Realms. And despite the fact that Forgotten Realms has served as a vehicle for the vast majority of 5e adventure paths, these specific regions have not appeared, except in passing, in any 5e publications.

Map depicting the world in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series -
a good example of mimetic worldbuilding

More importantly, these settings have come under attack from within the 5e gaming community on account of being Orientalist, culturally appropriative, and not reflective of the diverse and multicultural fanbase of the current D&D game. I have addressed these charges elsewhere, and will not recapitulate my arguments here. I will underline, however, that the attack aimed at a broader target than mere exoticism. In its insistence that the D&D franchise has accepted multiculturalism, thereby dictating its system design "to embrace the construction of Orientalist fictional worlds where the Orient and Occident mix, mingle, and wage war", it took aim at mimetic worldbuilding in general. The idea that historico-cultural bonds (of any kind) could no longer play the role of suffusing settings with inner consistency, implied that settings now had to be wholly fictional, thus ruling out 'total environments' of the C&S type, even if the latter did not partake of any cultural appropriation. D&D, according to this perspective, has outgrown mimetic worldbuilding: if it survives, it would only be in niche markets and communities, perhaps wedded to complex mechanics, and appealing to people who were more interested in historical simulation, rather than freewheeling play, and 'having fun'.

A separate issue, but one that nevertheless resonates with charges of Orientalism leveled at mimetic settings, is the explicit Eurocentricity of mimetic theory. As laid out by Auerbach, mimesis was a key component in specifically Western cultural production, rooted as it was in the Homeric Epic, classical Greek drama, and Old Testament theological history. This led many scholars to deny that regions outside Europe had mimetic artistic production of any sort. One might, therefore object that an approach to worldbuilding that is grounded in a theory positing an absolutely external, transcendent reality is grounded in cultural imperialism - it is precisely such an objection that I find implicit in the insistence that worldbuilding be 'multicultural' referred to in the preceding paragraph. However, historical cognition is not a purely 'Western' phenomenon - examples of Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, etc. histories are simply too numerous to mention, so historical simulation in itself does not constitute Orientalism or cultural appropriation. Moreover, the notion that mimetic cultural production is absent outside the West has been convincingly challenged. Writing about mimesis in the case of Chinese aesthetics, Ming Dong Gu demonstrates that the Chinese system of writing, Chinese landscape painting, and the description of social life in Chinese literary works all testify to the presence of mimesis in Chinese culture. Owing to the centrality of epic and drama, which stress narrative, in Greek aesthetics, and of lyric poetry, which stresses spontaneity and embellishment in the Chinese, mimesis does not occupy a dominant role in the latter. However, both the world-creating and the world-reflecting "models exist in Chinese aesthetic thought, but the emphasis seems to rest on the second model. Mimetic theory must exist in any literary tradition that has formed a system of aesthetic thought, because imitation is a basic human instinct". In fact, a multiplicity of appraoches is present in the West as well, as is demonstrable in Tolkien's case in particular: despite the political uses neoconservatives have found for the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is clear that world-creation is not a Western or even specfically Christian feature - sub-creation is a universal divine gift. If for Tolkien, the overemphasis on world-reflection demonstrated an imbalance which he attempted to correct, the same might be said regarding greater emphasis on the mimetic in Chinese culture since the Revolution.

On the whole, arguments that mimetic worldbuilding in RPGs is culturally imperialist, or only of interest to niche gamers, strike me as being off-base. If anything, I think there is likely to be increased interest in such worldbuilding, given the market-saturation of sub-creative games, the presence of a new player base that flowed into the hobby as a result of the 5e generational shift. As they mature, many of the new, younger players are probably going to be looking to play (and to make) something different and more complex, just as the original cohort of RPG players did in the late 80s and 90s. Recommending more mimetic, historically-realistic settings, are:

• Simulation. Well-made, well-researched historical RPGs can be a highly effective tool in exploring life in past societies. Just like VR technology can give us the sense of what ancient cities may have looked like, historical RPGs can tell us how life in these and similar societies might have been experienced. The recent 'dramaturgical turn' that has accompanied the rise of streamed games has been to the hobby's benefit, because psychological exploration of a PC's emotions and inner world has greatly augmented the role-playing aspect of RPGs. Paying a similar level of attention to making vivid and realistic settings can do the same to the simulation aspects.

• Immersion. A world with inner coherence is much easier to achieve if it borrows heavily from historical exemplars. I don't claim that sub-creative worlds cannot do this, but how many GMs are worldbuilders like Tolkien? Of course, Tolkien's own worldbuilding drew on the mimetic method as well - particularly, Celtic, Germanic, and Finnish mythology (as well as the Old Testament). Similarly mixing and matching historical influences, or emphasizing particular elements for the purposes of closer exploration can also aid in understanding processes of historical change, much like alternative histories or hypotheticals can.

• Difference. For all the talk about multiculturalism, making worlds that look like fantasy versions of present-day United States does little to effectively promote difference, or escapism. When (again, following Tolkien), the simmering Cauldron of Story in which setting elements cook over time turns out to contain the same ingredients time after time, or when people insist that the Cauldron must contain all ingredients, sub-creation suffers as well, because playing in such settings, while possibly entertaining in small doses, becomes no more escapist than shopping at the local supermarket. If the Cauldron is cooking up a story and not a shopping list, the limitation of ingredients, and some notion about which ingredients go with which others, can make the final dish much more enjoyable. Historical settings provide us with tried-and-true recipes, giving us a solid base on which to experiment.

• Critique. Oftentimes, history textbooks are no less clear on who the good guys and bad guys are than is the Lord of the Rings. We know who the oppressors, the righteous downtrodden, the conniving compradors, and the barbaric monsters are. But whether accurate or distorted, these roles and labels are constructed over time. If we look at particular historical (and quasi-historical) transition points in which characters of some verisimilitude act and operate, we begin to see that these roles can be quite fluid, and that the outcome of interactions between different groups is not predetermined. If we are really to "interrogate" colonialism (or autocracy), we see how they emerged because of decisions people make, and sometimes, because of unforeseen circumstances. As we saw earlier with Martin, "if you want to do anything, you can’t keep clean hands. You will have to make difficult and often unattractive decisions. And you might have episodes where you look like the good guys but we’re not going to cut and roll credits there. You will certainly also find yourselves in the position of bad guys."

The degree of mimesis is obviously going to differ in each case of worldbuilding. Some people will opt for near-complete historical simulation (in which case, we are no longer really talking about historical fantasy). Others will want to borrow different elements, mix and match, go for alternative history, and have a lot, some, or no magic in their settings. But the question of magic brings us to another approach to mimetic worldbuilding, one that may apply more to largely or even wholly fictional worlds. To use Martin's case as an illustration, he allowed his friend to convince him to put dragons into A Song of Ice and Fire, likely because in an age where reenchantment has returned into a society that still possesses tremendous technological potential to alter its environment, mimetic worldbuilding seems like an especially apt choice because of its allegorical potential. Play as social critique suggests that it can also be applied toward thinking deeply about one's own society, deriving ways to transform it in a desired direction, but also finding ways to accept changes that cannot be turned back. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this function belonged to utopian and dystopian fiction, but as these genres became increasingly formulaic and overloaded with predictable sets of political signifiers, their utility declined.

Tolkien's sub-creative approach, as we have seen, evinces a powerful allergy toward allegory. In this, it follows the well-marked out path of the Romantics, which whose aesthetics eschewed allegory in favor of symbolism (notwithstanding Moorcock's criticism of Tolkien's obsession with the soil and conservative 'good sense' as anti-romantic, the latter explicitly regarded romance as a close synonym to 'fairy story'). Like the Romantics, Tolkien found allegory heavy-handed, and disparaged it in favor of the symbol. Allegory was the product of another age - the Baroque.

Allegory conveys historicity and temporality, whereas the symbol encapsulates immediacy and makes it seem eternal. A symbol functions like a revelation, a lightning flash, whereas allegory is always a construction. A symbol fuses the signifier and signified, whereas allegory separates them. As Todorov explained, “the symbol is, allegory signifies"... The reader’s task is not to empathize, as was customary with contemporary sentimental novels, but to decipher... Allegory, dissolves all suspension of disbelief... The Romantic poets reacted to the rupture of modernity not only with the rhetorical choice of symbolism, to capture a lost unity for which they yearned, but also with allegories that represented and emphasized the experience of laceration. As Andrea Cesarini put it, allegory as “an alternative rhetorical procedure to symbolism ... renounces any nostalgic attempt at recomposition, is bitterly pessimistic, [and] lucidly catastrophic'.

Tolkien's strategy was clearly to try to capture lost, timeless unity. The utopians (including early science fiction authors) as allegorists accepted the revolutionary rupture of modernity, and tried to shine a light on the way ahead. And occult philosophers like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin - an allegorist of the French Revolution and the the main hero of the article just cited, as well Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin, call on our reasonable faculties to make sense of the tragedy that the winds of revolutionary change wreak, while yet leaving ourselves open to the possibility of salvation despite the bleak landscape that we perceive. Curiously, as for Saint-Martin, the allegorical tale might even feature a struggle between Good and Evil, though unlike for Tolkien, the tale, simplistic on its face, is more important for what it leaves out for the reader to infer about what Good and Evil is by reading between the lines.  

Paul Klee, "Angelus Novus" - the image that served as the
basis for Benjamin's backward-flying Angel of History

A good allegory uses a good code, which can be interpreted in multiple different ways. Read allegorically, A Song of Ice and Fire is not simply about dragons as stand-ins for modern weaponry. It's about how big wars started by those seeking power rarely end well - for them. It's about how rediscovering the magic of the past can simultaneously lead to the salvation of the world, as well as its destruction: who can doubt that Westeros as we know it will not survive the clash of dragons and Others? And who can doubt that Daenerys' fight to rid the world of slavery will end, not in a post-historical triumph of the one right political system, but tragically, with her own death, and possibly the death of magic (we know that one of the dragons has already perished)? In that sense, the Lord of the Rings is allegorical as well, and also concludes with the death of magic.

Our age is also about the rediscovery of magic. Today, there is much talk about the old magic of tribes that causes us to divide people into us and them, and to demand blood sacrifices to keep the bonds between us strong. Somewhat less frequently, we remember that those who not long ago called for the rediscovery of 'true' liberalism - one with little state interference in the economy, with negative rather than positive freedoms, one which laid out the only truth path to modernity - also stirred up old magic, and perhaps the most dangerous tribe of all. Then, why not spin an allegory about elves - attractive, long-lived, talented, public-minded, ethical, ruling on the basis of meritorious service to civilized life - and, increasingly, cut off from their less attractive but more numerous subjects - whom they no longer benefit, who tire of their tutelage, and who see through their self-serving and self-destructive attempts to cling to power? If RPGs are a new art form, as many claim, why do they need to be art for art's sake, as opposed to a medium that can also explore pressing issues of primary reality? 

Notes in the Margin: I'm starting a Facebook Group for discussing Historical Fantasy worldbuilding. If you're interested in mimetic worldbuilding and other theoretical approaches, and, more importantly, practical issues involved in designing and running such worlds, check out the Never-was Worlds group.

    

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Historical Realism in Worldbuilding: Some Lessons from George R. R. Martin

I've been pretty straight here about being a Thrones fan, and I don't really see the point of turning up one's nose at the HBO series. Both the show and the books are epochal - to me, as a partisan of epic fantasy, and I have no problem with regarding Martin as the Tolkien of our time.

Epochal does not, however, mean he is without sin - which is exactly the attitude Martin adopts toward Tolkien himself. In a famous Rolling Stone interview where Martin lays out his vision of epic fantasy (which is close to what I have been referring to here as historical fantasy), he specifically faults the genre's founder for his lack of political, economic, and ethical realism:

Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren't gone – they're in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? 

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I've tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don't have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king.

Few fantasy worldbuilders today would reject the gist of Martin's critique. The style of fantasy centered on a struggle between the forces of Good against the forces of an aesthetically evident Evil, an in the absence of a context formed by political, economic, psychological and sexual factors does has become cliché, and does not answer the demands of a mentality that struggles to come to terms with the contemporary world - always the touchstone for our fantastic extrapolations.

However, just because Martin does wonder about the Lannisters' tax rate, the terms on which they borrow from the Iron Bank of Braavos, and strategies that lead less-than perfect geopolitical contestants to success against their enemies does not mean his own construction is devoid of outlandish elements that don't resonate with historical experience. It would be easy to categorize Middle Earth as a fundamentally Romantic, philological construction with Martin's world as an essentially social-scientific one, but this is not the case, strictly speaking. Martin has been clear that unlike Tolkien (and like many GMs), he is a situational world-builder. While Tolkien started with languages, cultures, and mythology, only a small part of which become manifest in the novels (the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings) as a tip of a largely submerged iceberg, Martin's own world is the iceberg tip that floats on a raft. In other words, Martin starts with characters and a story, and only fills in blank geographic or structural blanks spots as it becomes necessary to do so. This situational approach might make narrative sense, but such a haphazard method can also lead to a simplistic and nonviable constructions. In certain respects, Tolkien's Middle Earth is actually more realistic than Westeros.

Three key issues in Martin's worldbuilding stand out for me as failures of historical imagination.

La Très Longue Durée

Historical structures can be quite long-lived, and dwarf individual or even familial memories. Imperial dynasties and regional divisions of labor may persist for roughly half a millennium. Beyond that scope, structures rarely survive intact, and if they do endure, they often have little impact on most people, and are beyond their ken. If a more long-term temporality does exist, it is, in the words of Fernand Braudel, a time of the sages.

I actually think that Braudel was a bit blinkered in his estimation of social structures. Surely, despite mutations and reconfigurations, Imperial China has survived, both structurally and in memory, for over 2000 years, while Pharaonic Egypt lasted for 3000. Commercial entities, such as the Silk Road, lasted for 1500 years, or perhaps 2000. Religious or cultural systems such as Buddhism have persisted for 2500 years.

But beyond that, social structures wear out - migrations, tectonic environmental and geopolitical shifts, and the full working out of systemic possibilities - the growth of social systems to such an extent that they become unbalanced and decentered - eventually take their toll. Beyond the examples cited above - which are all exceptionally durable - few if any continuities persisting for over three millennia can be found.

Yet, in Martin's world, the Wall separating the Seven Kingdoms from the wild lands beyond has stood for 8000 years. For the purposes of comparison, imagine a fortification built between the Neolithic settlements of Jericho and Çatalhöyük, still standing, and in continual use until our own day. To be sure, the Wall was built with magic, and in response to the existential threat represented to all living beings by the Others/White Walkers. The maintenance of such a structure would have been a priority, given its purpose, but how long could it have lasted as the danger receded?

More incredible than the maintenance of the physical/magical structure is the the persistence of the social institution of the Night's Watch, The order is also 8000 years old, and Lord Commander Jon Snow is the 998th since its inception. This mind-bogglingly long institutional durability has no precedent in our own world. As there have been no issues with the White Walkers during that span of time, it's reasonable to assume that the order would have long passed out of existence due to irrelevance. And indeed, the neglect of the Wall by established authorities during the period in which Martin's epic is set suggests that it would likely have perished long ago (if it were unneeded for narrative purposes). If we assume that a symbolic system durable enough to preserve knowledge with some degree of accuracy over that enormous length of time existed, and that a dedicated group of people were capable of devoting significant resources to keeping the Watch alive also survived, the Watch would have turned into the governing institution of Westeros (likely with strong religious overtones), rather than a peripheral grouping made up of society's rejects. But we see that the pharaonic monarchy, created, according to Egyptian religious conceptions, for a roughly analogous reason - to maintain order on earth after the gods withdrew to heaven - lasted less than half that time. The purpose of its most impressive monuments - the pyramids - was forgotten soon thereafter. And the Pharaonic monarchy was exceptional in every way in the context of the world that surrounded it.

Bran's big, beautiful 8000-year old Wall. Paid for by the Wildlings.

Worse still, the person credited with constructing the Wall - Bran the Builder, was also the founder of House Stark, that has similarly survived for 8000 years. Several other ruling houses, including the Arryns of the Vale, and the Lannisters of Casterly Rock trace their origin to the Age of Heroes, which concluded a respectable 6000 years before the present time. Of course, these fabulous lifespans can be explained away by saying that the founders, along with the Age of Heroes itself, is the stuff of legend, but that doesn't really clinch the case. The period known as the Age of Heroes in Greece, which at least partly informs Martin's notion, lasted six generations. In more recent times, dynasties in Georgia and Ethiopia have claimed descent from the Biblical House of David, which (assuming it existed) dates back around 3000 years. Having a 6000- 8000 year old dynasty would be the rough equivalent of an actual ruling house in 1800 CE claiming descent from Ut-Napishtim (though perhaps even this would be a stretch - it's not clear how old the legend actually is). A cultural region like India is dealing with much larger time-scales than Europe or Western Asia, but even here, there, there is no House of Pandava ruling during historical times. Appropriately, the protagonists of the Indian heroic age are of divine origin, which would make sense when dealing with memories of such great antiquity. In Martin's world, the human and divine spheres are much more strictly delineated, and foundational heroes are clearly human, whereas the gods (on which more below) are fairly abstract entities.

Why this matters. Martin's main conceit - that people in fantasy worlds that are suffused with wondrous elements like dragons and functional magic should still be motivated by factors that readers can understand - the need for survival, greed, power, lust - ultimately derives from a pragmatic anthropology that understands humans as imperfect beings driven by the reality of being mortal. We compete for scarce resources, try to pass them down to our descendants, wish to connect with (or possess) other people while we still draw breath, and so on. These motivations are a singularly bad fit for a culture with an astoundingly long historical memory, and incredibly long-lived institutions, which, if they existed, can be reasonably expected to impress a much different sort of mentality - one much more oriented toward eternity. Most probably, this would be a society not governed by a warrior aristocracy (as Westeros is) or an oligarchy (as are most of the cities of Essos), but by some sort of priestly or administrative elite, which would socialize people into paying much more deference to ancestors or the hereafter (even if selfish motivations still make their demands felt).

Conversely, societies much closer to the ones Martin describes would have far less memory of their own historicity, and would merge any remembered and not clearly recorded past with myth in a few generations. If any undistorted memory of heroic ages is retained, it would probably be in possession of a long-lived people with an entirely different set of motivations than normal humans. The retention of very long-term historical memory by an immortal race like the elves of Middle Earth is actually a much more realistic construction than what we see in Martin's world (where, significantly, the elves' analog - the Children of the Forest - are virtually extinct). Leaving room for such a race - perhaps more noble if more inscrutable - makes more sense and creates more dramatic tension (if GMs and players are able to sustain it) in a fantastic environment.

As Many As The Grains Of Sand On The Seashore

If the temporal canvas of Martin's world is too uniform to be useful for realistic worldbuilding, the same evaluation also applies to Westerosi demography. It is too undifferentiated, with too few distinct ethnicities (it's likely no accident that the main political units are associated with ruling dynasties and not with distinct identity groups), no clear conception of the relationship between urban and rural populations, and impossibly large armies given the continent's social structure and level of development. It is the latter I want to focus on here, as military matters occupy a significant amount of Martin's attention, and army sizes are discussed in much greater detail than other Westerosi structures (some fans in fact use these as the baseline for calculating Westeros' overall population).

The War of the Five Kings involves far larger armies than are probably warranted by Westeros' demography and political order. The North - the least populous of its major realms, is able to field an army of 20,000 people - and this for a kingdom roughly analogous to Scotland, whose ruling family has just lost its dynast, and is in open rebellion against the central authority. The Lannisters muster an army of over 60,000, which they can split into two, while Renly Baratheon's army includes an astounding 100,000 men - and that figure does not include those (admittedly few) bannermen who stayed loyal to his brother Stannis. These armies, significantly, are raised by calling upon personal relations with one's vassals, and are not mercenary groups or standing armies maintained by the state (which also makes it a mystery why the state is so deeply in debt to the Iron Bank: war-making is the main cause of state indebtedness, but the phenomenon only dates back to early modern times in our own world, because that is when large states began to depart from the practices of feudal warfare).

For the purposes of comparison, in major European conflicts prior to the 16th century, the warring sides were only able to field a fraction of such forces. The Battle of Agincourt - a decisive engagement of the Hundred Years War between two powerful Western European kingdoms - featured 6000 - 9000 soldiers on the side of the English against a French force that is estimated to have numbered anywhere between 12000 and 36000 (along with the Holy Roman Empire, France was the most populous realm in Europe, numbering around 15 million people). Nearly simultaneously, at the other end of Europe, the Battle of Grunwald pitted between 16000 and 39000 soldiers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commowealth against 11000 to 27000-strong army of the Teutonic Knights (whose defeat ended their career as a power in Eastern Europe). If we go by average sizes, the larger sides in each of these conflicts would be significantly smaller than than either the Lannister or the Baratheon army. For purposes of comparison, the Battle of Bosworth Field - the decisive contest of the Wars of the Roses - the conflict often cited as a major inspiration for Game of Thrones - had no more than 12000 combatants on either side. And several centuries earlier, the enormous and potentially civilization-altering Mongol invasion force that subjugated the Russian principalities, and decisively defeated Polish, Hungarian, and German armies likely consisted of roughly 40,000 Mongol mounted archers (not counting allied auxiliaries, which probably doubled the size of Batu's force).

Clearly, the Iron Bank needs to impose austerity policies on Casterly Rock

One notable effort to evaluate Martin's army sizes by a professional demographer unequivocally concludes that they were overinflated:

Westeros is allegedly based on Medieval Europe. You wouldn’t know it from the army sizes. We’ve seen or heard about dozens of battles with 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, or more combatants, sometimes that many on each side. For comparison, the historically decisive Battle of Agincourt probably had under 30,000 soldiers. The Battle of Hastings had 25,000 at most. The incredibly vast Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel turned back the Arab advance, may have had 60,000 combatants. But crucially: these battles were decades or hundreds of years apart, rarely involving the same armies. The Battle of Yarmouk, after which the Caliphate siezed the entire Byzantine East, had just 50,000 fighters or so, with the result that the Caliphate conquered the entire region. Crucially, it should be noted that contemporaries gave much higher numbers: the Byzantines were routinely asserted to be fielding 100,000 men, while Muslims were depicted as leading hundreds of thousands. Conveniently, the sum total of GRRM’s descriptions of armies would suggest that Westeros can field between 200,000 and 650,000 soldiers, depending on conditions. Those numbers are almost certainly too large, with too robust an ability to recover losses. Medieval armies were small, except in cases where they were extremely professionalized, like the Byzantine armies, or Charles Martel’s Frankish army. Holding a Medieval army together was very hard, as was supplying it. The frequency with which there are large armies in Westeros is just ridiculous. The most reasonable explanation is that GRRM is an unreliable narrator, as he is for land area: these armies probably are not as big as he claims in many cases, and losses probably are not as steep.

Why this matters. People's worlds can contain armies of any size without necessarily detracting from anyone's enjoyment of playing in it. But if a fantasy world is recommended precisely on the basis of its realism, armies larger than the economy or political system can sustain stand out as incongruous elements. To quote again from Lyman Stone's blog:

what bothers me, as a really picky nerd, is when people think that it’s a particularly well-crafted setting. It is not. Westeros is shoddily assembled as far as political, cultural, or demographic realism goes. There is too much dynastic stability, too little cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity, the basic size of the world seems to change to fit the immediate exigencies of the plot, the cities and armies are implausibly large in many cases, and even careful analysis makes it hard to determine even a wide ballpark for population. None of these criticisms matter in a setting not trading on its claims to a kind of “realism.” But for a setting whose market value in some sense depends on its “realism,” yeah, it’s an issue.

Aside from expecting verisimilitude, there is another reason why overmilitarized Westeros is problematic worldbuilding. A region capable of fielding such large armies is a region in social flux, where change is relatively fast-paced. Westeros, as we have just seen, is socially static, with few significant demographic shifts, a very uniform ethnic structure, and the predominance of very durable temporal mentalities. A heavily militarized world would feature frequent and profound social shifts, the sudden disappearance of durable groups, and the appearance of new worldviews. Such a world would look a lot less like medieval England, where vassal "bannermen" are subinfeudated to big lords, and a lot more like the 1st millennium BCE Near East, where strong states were able to field large standing armies, wars were highly destructive, and sent long-established peoples like the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Medes into historical oblivion. Armies during this period attained sizes, as well as destructive and transformative power that would not be seen again until the Napoleonic Age.  Such a fast-changing world would not be one where even dragons are discounted as a decisive military factor within a mere century of their (rather inexplicable) disappearance. And such a world would be one where strange new religions sprang up nearly overnight to help people adjust to a transformed reality.

Which brings me to the last point I want to discuss here - Martin's religions.

Bad Religion

Despite claiming to agree that 'religion is an important element in fantasy-type societies', Martin does display a certain amount of discomfort (1:03:38) in discussing it. He prefers to steer clear of questions about religion in general (e.g. how religion is interrelated with ethnicity), and approaches his religions, like other key aspects of his world, situationally. It is therefore not surprising that a one-time interviewer clearly implies that in comparison with medieval Europe, Westerosi religion is much more in the background, much less determinative of what motivates people to act.

The established religions in Westeros do seem rather pale in comparison with medieval Christianity, and with other historical religions. The Faith of the Seven, though it does have a hierarchy (and, as Martin legitimately points out, a 'pope') is about as generic a religion as one can conceive. A godhead in the form of a Septad - Father, Warrior, Smith, Mother, Maiden, Crone, Stranger - is so boring that even its officiants can't bear to recite each divine person's attributes at key public ceremonies. Not only do these "gods" lack decent names and personalities, they also don't appear to have immanent servitors or messengers in the form of saints, angels, or demigods. Nearly all expressions of piety by people - especially peasants, who are obviously suffering under the oppression of a fairly rapacious and impious nobility, and even moreso after the outbreak of war - are formulaic and devoid of passion. The seeming lack of tension with the older faith of the First Men (whose gods have no names at all) speaks to the tepid character of the Faith of the Seven, which Westeros could probably do without. A more sanguine variant - the cult of the Sparrows, and its transformation into a Faith Militant - is a little closer a historical religion, with the character of the High Sparrow being reminiscent of Savonarola, but even that is weak brew, that is easily dispensed with by Cersei's one act of incendiary violence. The religion of the Lord of Light bears the hallmarks of Zoroastrianism, and its practitioners actually possess power (as one would expect in a fantasy world). But this cult is a foreign import - from Essos - the part of the world currently least subject to historical change!

May the Father lull you to sleep with dad jokes...

I would expect the religion of the Lord of Light, and heretical sects like the Sparrows to occupy center stage in a world like Martin's, rather than clawing away at the margins. A world featuring erratic seasons which do not have uniform duration, and which can last for years, is a world in which static faiths like the Faith of the Seven - much better suited for conditions of regular season cycles - wouldn't survive. In fact, religions heavily focused on divine unpredictability, millenarian expectations, saving, and calculation would likely have developed much faster in Martin's world than in our own (though admittedly, the Citadel and the institution of the Maesters speak to the fact that Westerosi science is quite advanced in comparison to medieval science).

Why this matters. Worldbuilders, including many RPG GMs, are just as uncomfortable with religion as Martin is. As a result, religious institutions in game settings are frequently simplistic caricatures - they are either ridiculously pious to the exclusion of any other human trait or emotion, or ridiculously corrupt, and led by hierophants who believe only in the pursuit of power. Aside from dogmatic preaching, religious establishments are wall furniture - it's where you go when you need healing that party members are incapable of providing. To my mind, worldbuilding can only benefit by drawing from more historical exemplars which represent religions as a fundamental part of most people's worldview that is evident in everyday life, passionate and contemplative, as well as morally complex.  

The Sociology of the Murderhobo

Part 1: Two types of fantasy literature and their divergent perspectives on adventuring heroes

Most decent gamers know that the game should center on the player characters. If a gamemaster overemphasizes the setting at the expense of the group that is supposed to represent the setting’s heroes, the players will quickly tire of the game, and move on to something else. But most decent gamers also know that playing their characters as murderhoboes is a negative example to be avoided, or at least downplayed to the extent possible. Players whose characters lack all meaningful social bonds, and only interface with society when it presents him (typically) with someone to kill, something to take, or at best, something to buy are commonly looked down on for reducing a multifaceted and immersive tabletop gaming experience to a video game without graphics. 

To a known extent, the imperative to keep the focus squarely on the PCs, and, on the other hand, the need to embed them within a larger social environment which is replete with particular institutions, hierarchical orders, histories, and symbolic systems point in contradictory directions. Allowing for a little oversimplification, we might say that each approach is informed by a distinct fantasy aesthetic (both of which influenced fantasy gaming in important ways). The ‘hero-driven’ perspective in which society functions as a backdrop is rooted in Swords & Sorcery and Weird Fiction genres. The social world inhabited by their protagonists is violent, corrupt, broken, or simply distant, and irrelevant in terms of helping them overcome the challenges that face them. Their societies have lost, are unaware of, or are actively trying to conceal any information that the heroes might find useful. In these genres, the significant loci in which meanings are created are: ruins, hidden or abandoned laboratories, lost tombs, grottoes in which mysterious cults perform grotesque rituals. These “dungeons”, along with the proverbial taverns (and occasionally libraries) where tips about these sites may be sought, and entertainment between adventures procured, form the central axis around which the world of adventurers revolves. In the nodes where the adventuring life happens, the shackles of civilized society weaken or fall away completely, creating a space for the heroes to explore freely, to prove themselves on the basis of merit, not accident of birth, connections, or knowledge of arcane social codes. 

The resonance of this aesthetic with the Myth of the Frontier that animates a specifically American imaginary is, of course, far from accidental. The figure of the heroic loner (with his posse) echoes the gunslinger of the Wild West – rootless, always on the move, operating beyond the law, laconic. He is not necessarily a cold-blooded killer, but violence is his preferred method for dealing with problems. He is not typically driven by greed, but the procurement of supplies that allow him to perpetuate his way of life require him to take what he needs beyond any payment he receives for putting his gun up for hire. He is not necessarily racist, and perhaps even admires and emulates the free and noble savages that live beyond the frontier; but Indian Country is the terrain in which he operates. He is not necessarily amoral, and generally lives by an idiosyncratic moral code, but he is usually at odds with authority figures, and pessimistic about reintegrating himself into society when the frontier becomes closed.  

Blaze Tracy, a prototype of the FRPG "adventurer"

 

The closure of the American frontier at the end of the 19^th century, combined an ever-greater integration of the United States as an imperial power with the rest of the world produced literary mutations of the Wild West genre that became the progenitors of modern fantasy. The invention of “Western Civilization” to legitimate the US joining of the Allied cause reflected the end point of the conciliation process between the culture of American and European elites that had been moving in different directions since the 18^th century. Aspects of European history became sacralized, in order to locate the roots of the Euro-American “miracle” that enabled the West to establish dominion over the whole world. Many of these aspects evinced a heavily racialized character. But in popular culture, the pseudo-Aryan Cimmerian nomad Conan rejected the stifling, corrupt, arcane, and effete character of civilization, just as Depression-era America struggled with the legacy of global economic integration and the burdens of becoming a global power. Simultaneously, the heroes and antiheroes of Lovecraft’s Weird Fiction confronted the immigrant, the politically mobilized but still undereducated industrial worker, the native, whose culture the Western intellectual was now charged with studying, understanding, and managing. But unlike the European colonial administrator who promised rationality and progress as the fruits of his mission civilisatrice, Randolph Carter and Charles Dexter Ward faced only an uncaring and irrational universe, social atomization and isolation, gargantuan monstrosities that hid at the bottom of the ocean and on distant planets, and could expect only madness as the reward for their efforts. For Lovecraft, the frontiers of civilization and science neither offered freedom from the dead hand of civilization, nor held promise of eventual social salvation or integration.

The second, European strand of fantasy literature, offered a very different perspective on the relationship between the hero and society. To be sure, the foundational works of the Epic or Heroic Fantasy genres exhibit certain similarities to their American counterparts. They were critiques of industrial and secular society, and celebrated the country at the expense of the city, and counterpoised the Heart to Instrumental Reason. They championed a binary morality that did not seek an understanding of different cultures, but called for a resistance to, and if possible, the decisive defeat of Evil. They incorporated a decidedly retrogressive vision of history: society degenerated from an ancient Golden Age, rather than steadily progressing into the Kingdom of Freedom. And they drew upon historical and folkloric exemplars whose images had been formulated during the period of the Völkerwanderung, when the Roman Empire collapsed, and the limes avenged themselves and engulfed civilization. The martial monster-slayers like Beowulf, and the cave-dwelling saints of early Christianity were not wholly dissimilar to the cowboy heroes of the American frontier.

Nevertheless the valence of this type of fantasy literature differed profoundly, and in some respects, diametrically from the Western, Swords & Sorcery, and Weird Fiction. Its heroes, rather than being antinomian frontiersmen, were deeply rooted. The hobbits who played a decisive role in the epic struggle depicted in the Lord of the Rings were everymen who loved their country. Though Frodo’s struggles as the Ringbearer ultimately made it impossible for him to reintegrate into the Shire’s bucolic lifestyle, he retires to the paradisical Valinor, rather than becoming a harrier and critic of civilization. The Ranger who would have been the main hero of a Western or Swords & Sorcery narrative comes to terms with his own limitations, and settles down: he marries the girl, and accepts the responsibilities of kingship. In contrast to Conan, who also became a king, Aragorn does not seize Gondor (though some Russian interpreters beg to differ), but comes to rule it by right of descent, and marries a high-born immortal princess, not a stolen concubine. For Tolkien, Aragorn and Arwen were conscious attempts at a(n) (English) mythmaking. The frontier hero Blaze Tracy, and of course Conan, were, of course, also (American) mythological figures, But whereas they and their authors stood for breaking with established tradition, Tolkien stood for recovering a lost one. Whereas their values were entirely pragmatic, and typically at odds with those of religious authority, Tolkien presented the marriage in the Return of the King as an echo of a peaceful Nordic religion, which had become displaced by violent Viking myths in the imagination of 19^th century ideologues. For Tolkien, no less than for his friend C. S. Lewis (though in more oblique forms), myth bore a normative, not an iconoclastic, function.   

The Epic Fantasy hero rejects the frontier, and promotes social reintegration

 

Similarly, though different realms may side with Good or with Evil, they tend toward representing genuine societies. Orcs and people from the "wrong" parts of the world do ally with the Dark Lord, but they are not irredeemable or evil in an absolute sense – even Sauron was not always so. More importantly, there is no undifferentiated civilization or society. Instead, there are men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits – all with distinct characters, traditions, histories, political institutions, and above all, languages, that make them unique. In some quarters, there is a tendency to glorify the earliest days of Dungeons and Dragons, when it was more of a stylistic hodge-podge including science fiction and weird horror elements, and before the sui generis fantasy elements asserted their dominance. The elements that gave D&D its mass appeal are the same ones that made the Lord of the Rings trilogy, both in print and on screen, the most successful of fantasy franchises.  

Along with language and customs, history also serves as a grounding element for epic fantasy. Certainly, the narrative takes place at a time of crisis, when the normal flow of time has been broken by an irruption of a world-shaking evil whose existence has long been forgotten. And yet, the institutions that are contemporary to the narrative – the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, the line of Numenorian kings, the elven realms, and the Dark Lord’s Ring very much derive from the antiquity of this same world that is breaking through the newer archaeological strata that have accumulated in the interim. When that happens, they are recognized as part of that world’s past, not some utterly alien element or incommensurate temporality for which the mundane world is of no importance. And in the end, when the crisis is overcome, the restoration of normal time with the dawning of a new Age is of the utmost importance. The new Age may be prosaic, it might lack the beauty of the old (with the departure of the elves), but it is a time in which a decent, ordinary life (of, say, a hobbit) is possible, and the preservation of such a life bears inherent worth, because the world continues to be threatened by cosmic evil, that aims to wipe out or conquer all life. The significance of the mundane comes across even more clearly in more recent epic fantasy. George R. R. Martin’s world is also threatened with annihilation, yet the author insists on suffusing it with a more-or-less believable economy and states system. The main characters find themselves in existential conflicts, yet ones heavily colored by the imperative of dynastic restoration.

To return to the main issue: if the epic fantasy tradition, with its greater emphasis on the social situation of its heroes is a legitimate and deeply rooted influence on fantasy role-playing games, how do we go about immersing fantasy RPG heroes in such a world? It should go without saying that the degree of immersion is a matter of personal taste, and for most game masters, it lies along a continuum, rather than being a simple choice between a Swords & Sorcery dungeon world and an Epic Fantasy milieu. There is no reason for everyone to prioritize the latter. A world where the power of society is all-embracing certainly constrains player action beyond a point that would be realistic or enjoyable (though playing in such a dystopian world could offer its own rewards). But the point is, there is no reason to automatically assume that the setting for a fantasy RPG is properly an extrapolation of a Western-type frontier.

In Part II, we will analyze the historical emergence of the “adventurer” as a concept and sociological type, and discover that both are rooted in a process of mutation of a mature civilization, closer to that depicted by epic fantasy, rather than one being born de novo along a frontier, or one experiencing a complete or near complete collapse of key social structures that is exemplified by Swords & Sorcery or Weird Fiction.