To help us continue to pay our writers, please consider subscribing. When I teach, I encounter those visions, and Alexander’s work is one of the places I go toe explain to students why they may not be hearing what I’m saying between their knowledge and what sources actually show us.This essay first appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly, Issue #8. The nature of those works and the genre of those works give us different visions of the Middle Ages.
There are many varieties of fantasy Middle Ages, but they all have this path in common. The way that Middle Ages has developed over years, from Alexander’s own reading of the Welsh Middle Ages right through to the popular acceptance of the Disney version of his novels, is a clear path and shows us that kind of trail that is visible for so many works that are apparently Medievalist. It’s the Middle Ages of The Chronicles of Prydain. It’s not the Middle Ages as I studied it as a Medievalist. It enables readers to develop a taste for it. Alexander’s retelling – with all its changes and all its Americanisation – creates a bridge for those who have never encountered the Middle Ages. We often talk about the importance of novels in literary terms, but this demonstrates the importance of novels in terms of much wider culture. This comfortable relationship with the fantasy Middle Ages has given us many styles of games (from RPG to board to computer) and it helps bind some groups of re-enactors together in their re-enactment choices. I often think of this as ‘Disneyfication’ as a code for one kind of play, and because it’s the most obvious kind of play that comes from Alexander’s series. In this case it’s from a respected and loved set of stories that are used to give a feeling of the Middle Ages (even if there is not much or nothing of the actual Middle Ages in them) and to create a world that is great to read about and even to play in.
Inspiration and creation come from somewhere and lead somewhere else. It always has a link (often many links) to what the writers know or think they knew about history and about how worlds operate.Īlexander’s work demonstrates very clearly how this bridge works for writers and for readers. That fantasy is never completely invented. It’s the bridge by which history links to fantasy. For me, then, the Disney version of Alexander’s creation that is inspired by (but doesn’t follow) an actual medieval text sums up many peoples’ preferred Middle Ages. I wonder, sometimes, if this isn’t the Middle Ages most people prefer – one of creative invention and adventure and magic rather than one of connection to our actual past.
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