Magic, p.17
Magic, page 17
The role of the cavalry changed with the invention of the metal stirrup by the nomads of central Asia some time in the early centuries of the Christian era. What a difference it made. Without a proper stirrup, the cavalryman was insecurely balanced on his horse, and if he used a spear too incautiously he could be easily pulled or pushed off his mount. Under those conditions, horsemen were better off using arrows, as the Parthian cavalry did. With a good stirrup, on the other hand, the cavalryman could wedge his feet securely and place the full weight of himself and his horse behind the spear. No footman of the period could stand against that.
When the Goths were fleeing from the Huns in the fourth century, they did manage to borrow the Hunnish stirrup, and in 378, the Gothic horsemen demolished the Roman legions at the Battle of Adrianople. The cavalry was then supreme for a thousand years, and the era of knighthood began.
Still, however much knights were idealized and heroicized in fiction, in actual life they were cruel, despotic, and ferocious in their treatment of the lower classes, and when they were finally and disgracefully defeated, we all cheered.
The time came when the lower classes learned to fight the horsemen by keeping them at a distance and skewering them. In this the lower classes were greatly aided by that inevitable accompaniment of arrogant aristocracy—invincible stupidity. The Flemish burghers learned how to use the long pike in a steady line (the rebirth of the Macedonian phalanx) and slaughtered the French horsemen at the Battle of Courtrai in 1302. The English longbowmen massacred French horsemen from a distance at the Battles of Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415), and Villeneuve (1420). The Swiss pikemen demolished the Burgundian horsemen in 1477, and by then gunpowder had established itself and knighthood was all over.
But we still remember it in a golden glow of romance and, most of all, in the Arthurian legend—the tales of King Arthur of Britain and his Knights of the Round Table. In fact, anytime we speak of “knights” we think of those tales and, most of all, of Sir Lancelot.
The Arthurian legend began with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, in about 1136, wrote his History of British Kings, and in the process talked of Uther Pendragon, his son Arthur, and their helpful wizard, Merlin. It is not history, but myth and legend, yet it fascinated its readers, who then, as today, would rather have history appeal to their superstitions and patriotism than to any abstract and bloodless passion for truth. If you want an excellent modern retelling of Geoffrey’s tales, read The High Kings by Joy Chant (1983).
About 1170, a French poet, Chrétien de Troyes, took up the tale and added straightforward romance. It was he who first invented the adulterous passion of Lancelot and Guinevere, and the mystical tale of the search for the Holy Grail. Since Chrétien made no pretense to even the shadow of historical truth, his tales were even more popular than Geoffrey’s.
Sir Thomas Malory put together the scattered fragments of the Arthurian legend into Morte d’Arthur (“The Death of Arthur”), and it is his version, published in 1485, that we know best today.
The legend has never died, and in each century it has been retold. In modern times there are Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859), Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), and T. H. White’s Once and Future King (1958). From the last of these, the musical Camelot was taken. Most recently, there is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982).
The Arthurian legend is strictly fantasy. It is loaded with wizards, enchantresses, spells, and magicking. Those who attempted to remove the fantasy and present the legend in a realistic manner were least successful. I found Tennyson to be dishwaterishly dull, for instance. Twain introduces the time-travel motif, which makes for anachronistic amusement, but by turning Merlin into a flim-flam faker, he greatly detracts from the interest of the tale.
White, on the other hand, especially in The Sword in the Stone (1939), which is the first volume of his tetralogy, even adds to the fantasy, and his version rises superior to Malory for that reason (in my opinion). The same can be said of Bradley’s painstaking tour de force.
It is not surprising, then, that modern fantasy writers turn every now and then to knightly romanticism and, in particular, to aspects of the Arthurian legend and try their teeth on it.
GIANTS IN THE EARTH
GIANTS ARE SUCH A COMMON ELEMENT in fantasies, myths, and legends of all societies that one must wonder where the notion comes from. Even the Bible adds its voice to the subject: “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4).
To be sure, there are giants in the earth these days. The blue whale of Antarctic waters is not only the largest animal alive today but is probably the largest animal that ever lived. The sequoias and redwoods of the Pacific Coast are not only the largest and tallest plants alive today but probably the largest plants that ever lived.
People lived parochial lives in ancient times, rarely traveling more than a few miles from home, and tales of large animals in foreign climes must have lost nothing in the telling. As the tales passed from mouth to mouth, they undoubtedly grew ever more dramatic. Thus, whales became biblical “leviathans” and hippopotamuses became biblical “behemoths,” and in the tales of the medieval rabbis, both leviathans and behemoths became monsters of truly mountainous size.
But giants need not merely be the magnifications of distant truths. They can be the outcome of reason. In mythmaking days, it was natural to suppose that the forces of nature were expressions of life. The wind was the breath of gods; storms were the result of their anger; the lightning was their hurled artillery. Volcanoes arose from the overflowing forges of underground gods, and earthquakes from their uneasy shifting when asleep, or in chains. Naturally, for living things (presumably humanoid in shape) to produce these effects, gods must be colossal in strength and size. It makes sense, doesn’t it?
Then, too, in ancient times, it sometimes happened that a settled civilization decayed, stumbled, and was overrun by a more primitive, but more vigorous, band of warriors. We can picture the warriors wondering at the works of the civilization they have conquered—the massive walls surrounding the cities, the large temples or other structures, and so on.
Being innocent of the advanced technology developed by the civilization they have conquered, they cannot imagine how those structures were made. They themselves could not have done it, and it would therefore be ridiculous to suppose that the inferior people they had conquered could have done it. The logical assumption was that a race of giants did it.
The Dorian barbarians who overthrew the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece noted the thick, large-stoned walls of Mycenae and assumed they were built by those giants called Cyclopes. We still speak of large walls built of unpolished stones held in place by their own weight rather than by mortar as “cyclopean.”
And it’s not only naive ancients who believed this. Some people today, surveying the pyramids of Egypt and convinced that the ancient Egyptians could not have built them, fantasize their own version of giants and demigods as having built them. They naively suggest that astronauts from other worlds did the job. (Why astronauts, with technologies capable of interstellar flight, should have constructed huge piles of stone rather than have built something of steel and concrete beats me.)
We have the advantage today of knowing that there were indeed giants in the past—in the long, long past. For a period of a hundred million years, the land thundered under the legs of giant reptiles. The brachiosaur was the bulkiest and most massive land animal that ever lived, the tyrannosaur the most dreadful carnivore. There were pteranodons, which were flying reptiles that, in some cases, were as large as a large airplane.
Could some “racial memory” have implanted in the human mind giants and monsters derived from these reptiles, all of whom died out some sixty million years before the first primitive hominids made their appearance? As an example, could the dragons of so many myths be the pteranodons in reality? Not likely. It is much more reasonable to suppose that dragons were originally an expression of the giant pythons and anacondas that do exist. They were trimmed out with wings merely because that was commonly done as an expression of speed (think of winged horses such as Pegasus), and their fire-breathing is an expression of the poison venom of some snakes.
Of course, if an extinct creature is only recently extinct, it might serve. The elephant bird, or aepyornis, of Madagascar still survived in medieval times. It weighed half a ton and was the largest bird that ever existed. It must surely have been the inspiration for the flying bird-monster, the “roc,” that we find in the Sinbad tales of The Arabian Nights.
Of course, even creatures never encountered in life by any human beings leave their bones behind, bones that are fossilized to a greater or lesser extent. It was only in the nineteenth century that these fossil remnants were correctly interpreted, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t found, and misinterpreted, in earlier centuries.
In prehistoric times, for instance, there were pygmy elephants and hippopotamuses on the Mediterranean islands. Even a pygmy elephant has a large skull, and some of these were dug up in historic times on the island of Sicily. It was natural to assume them to be remnants of humanoid giants. The nasal cavity in the skull looked as though it might represent a large centrally located single eye. That could be the origin of the giant one-eyed Cyclops (Greek for “circular eye”) in the Odyssey.
Did humanoid giants ever exist? The closest example, as far as we know, is a giant primate that lived until a few million years ago.
Human beings are themselves giant primates, for we are among the largest of the entire group. The only primate that is clearly larger and more massive than we are is the male gorilla, but there was once a super-gorilla we call Gigantopithecus (Greek for “giant ape”). He could stand up to nine feet tall and must have weighed something like eight hundred pounds.
The diet of Gigantopithecus was apparently very much like that of human beings, and it had teeth that were very human in shape but were, of course, much larger. In fact, when modern paleontologists first came across such teeth, it seemed possible that they might be those of outsize human beings. It took a while before other bones were discovered that made the apishness of Gigantopithecus abundantly clear.
It might well be that such teeth, showing up here and there, seemed evidence of the one time existence of fearsome humanoid giants.
There remains one other point to make. We have all—every one of us—at one time lived in a world of giants. When we were infants and small children, we were surrounded by giants. These were, for the most part, benevolent giants, but not in every case. And even when benevolent, the giants often denied us what we wanted and it was clear that we could not fight their power. So it was a frightening and frustrating world, and we may all be permanently scarred with the fear of the large in consequence.
WHEN FANTASY BECAME FANTASY
IN SOME WAYS, ALL FICTION WRITING is fantasy. If a tale is truly fiction, it never happened; and if it never happened, it is fantasy; it is a creation of the mind, the imagination. For that matter, if we want to be very strict about it, much supposed “nonfiction” is fantasy, too.
The fact is, though, we don’t want to be very strict about it. If we define fantasy in such a way as to include almost everything, then the word loses its force and it comes to mean no more than “writing.”
Let us look for a different definition. Fantasy should mean not only something that is not so and therefore exists only as an idea, but also something that could not possibly be so and therefore can exist in no other way than as an idea.
Thus, Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby is not a fantasy. Though its characters never existed and its events never took place, those characters and events could have existed without upsetting the accepted order of the universe.
On the other hand, Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is clearly a fantasy, for it deals with ghosts and with abstractions such as “Christmas Past,” which have been made concrete. The accepted order of the universe does not include ghosts and concretized abstractions.
In fact, we can be stricter still and insist that fantasy must deal not only with matters that we conceive as not capable of existence in our universe, but which we insist are incapable of existence even in a universe modified by reasonable scientific advance. If reasonable scientific advance could make them possible, then we would have science fiction. (To be sure, an ingenious person can manipulate the possibilities of scientific advance in such a way that what we would casually think of as fantasy can be made into a kind of science fiction. Usually, however, the manipulation is not bothered with, so that fantasy and science fiction remain distinct.)
And now that we have an idea as to what we mean by fantasy as a restricted branch of literature, we have a right to ask how old it is. It might seem a fair guess that fantasy is forever; that it is as old as language; as old as the human imagination.
It would seem that over the Stone Age campfires, our uncivilized ancestors froze each other’s blood with tales of monsters, and ghosts, and demons of all sorts.
We’ll never know that for sure, of course, so if we prefer to cling to greater certainties, we have to turn to the oldest surviving scraps of literature, and these, we find, are quite likely to deal with fantasy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, written by nameless Sumerians about 2700 B.C., is, I believe, the oldest surviving work of fiction, and it contains elements of fantasy—gods, monsters, plants that confer immortality, and so on. The Iliad and Odyssey are to some extent fantasies, especially the latter. The tales of Polyphemus the Cyclops and of Circe the Witch remain, to this day, among the most popular fantasies in existence.
Folk tales are almost invariably fantasies; The Arabian Nights are fantasies, for instance, as are Snow White and Cinderella. Every age has its fantasies and even the twentieth century has developed some that rival those of the past in skill and popularity. Consider Mary Poppins, The Hobbit, and Watership Down.
And yet—when is a fantasy not a fantasy?
The answer, surely, is this: When its events are not accepted as running contrary to the accepted order of the universe. Even more so, when its events, however fantastic they may seem, are accepted as literal truth.
Thus, the Bible is filled with wonder tales—the speaking serpent in the Garden of Eden; the speaking ass that Balaam bestrode; the parting of the Red Sea; the deeds of Elijah and Elisha; the activities of Jesus as a healer. If these were encountered by some well-educated Chinese scientist who had never heard of the Bible before, he would have no hesitation in labeling the book a fantasy collection. Naturally, pious Jews and Christians would reject such a view with horror and would consider it blasphemous.
In the same way, unsophisticated people of the past who believed in the Olympian gods and goddesses and who had no doubt that strange monsters existed in the misty regions beyond the small patch of ground they knew well, would accept Homer’s tales as accurate history in all its details.
And, in later times, those who believed in ghosts, or afreets, or ghouls, or fairies, or elves would accept tales involving them as at least true in concept, if not necessarily in detail, and they would not be thought of as fantasies at all.
How far into the present does this notion of fantasies that are not fantasies extend? Obviously, right into the present and, probably, into the future as far as the mind can see. Every religion seems like a fantasy to outsiders, but as holy truth to those of the faith. There are always people who are unsophisticated, because of youth or lack of modern secular and scientific education, who believe in Santa Claus, in zombies and voodoo, in the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny, and so on.
There are even adults who, to all appearances, are intelligent, educated, and sophisticated, who are nevertheless believers in astrology, spiritualism, creation science, or other irrationalities that seem like nonsensical fantasy to those of us who are untainted by such things.
In that case, when, if ever, did we start thinking of fantasy as fantasy?
No doubt there were always some skeptics, some people we would view today as hard-headed realists, in even the most superstitious and faith-ridden times. These people scorned anything not based on observational and rational evidence, and were firm in the belief that what most people accepted without question was, in actuality, mere fantasy.
This is, however, not enough. The occasional skeptic can barely make a mark on society. Did there come a time, however, when such rationalism became an accepted part of a secular society and when people in reasonably large numbers were educated into the belief that the universe could be understood only by reason, so that anything beyond that was fantasy?
Such a state of affairs began to arrive in the western world after the end of the period of the religious wars and the coming of the Age of Reason. The latter half of the seventeenth century, the time of the Royal Society and of Isaac Newton, marks the dividing line.
Even then, however, rationality was confined to a rather thin layer of the educated. It was not till the nineteenth century that, in the western world, there gradually arose the notion of mass education under the control of a secular state. For the first time, there were extensive regions in which large percentages of the population were educated in school systems that were not run by some religious group or other. And then, for the first time, there arose large numbers of individuals who could tell what fantasy was and who enjoyed it all the more because they recognized it as pure exercises of untrammeled imagination.
