Mythic Fantasy

Many fantasy stories draw their inspiration from mythology and legend, which in turn often developed out of the remnants of dead religions. The great majority of the creatures that can be found in the fantasy genre began in traditional myths of one sort or another – such as the now-familiar staple elves and dwarves, for instance, which derive from Norse myth. So in one sense, all fantasy is derived from myth, directly or indirectly. So in order to make it a useful distinction, mythic fantasy is the name given to tales that are set within one specific traditional mythological milieu.

There are as many subdivisions as there are mythologies of course, but not all of them generate the same amount of mythic fantasy. Although the Norse and Greek myths have probably been the most influential in contributing to the flavour of modern fantasy, they are not particularly common settings for modern works. Perhaps they’re the victims of their own success, too familiar in terms of general fantasy to be appealing as a mythic story venue.

Other mythic cycles seem to be more attractive to fantasy writers. The Arthurian legend cycle of western Europe remains one of the most popular mythic fantasy settings. The historical origins of the ‘real’ King Arthur remain obscure. There are some mentions of a 5th-century British war-leader in some of the ancient chronicles, but they are tantalisingly slight, and generate a lot of debate. Anyhow, whatever the truth is, it certainly bears precious little relation to the mythic figure.

King Arthur's Domain, Tintagel by IDS

King Arthur’s creation in the sense we know him now dates from 1136, in the “Historia Regum Britanniae” (The History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Although it claimed to be a historical account, Geoffrey’s manuscript was highly coloured, and devoted a large part of its text to the story of Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin the magician and the traitor Mordred – quite probably drawing its inspiration from older cycles of Welsh mythology. Despite its factual implausibility, the Historia was a big success amongst the nobility of England and France, and Arthur quickly became a favourite subject of medieval romances all over Western Europe.

Robert Wace added the Round Table in 1155, with the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot arriving some twenty-five years later through Chretien de Troyes. Many others contributed, until the whole cycle was broadly cemented in its current form by Thomas Malory in Le Morte D’Arthur, around 1470. The definitive modern Arthurian fantasy – so far, anyhow – remains TH White’s “The Once and Future King” (1958). Although the text makes use of anachronistic comparisons and similes, and the story itself is considerably more overtly magical than most, this is still the most influential piece of Arthuriana.

Ancient China is another common setting for mythic fantasies. China has a unique depth of continuous cultural history to draw on, and its own self-image of its mythological past is enthusiastically magical. There are many domestic Chinese fantasies of course – in the West, the best known are “Outlaws of the Marsh”, by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (c. 1380), and “Journey to the West” by Wu Ch’eng-en (1592), better known as “Monkey”. Both of these epics are boisterous, highly magical and, like Homer’s “Odyssey” and “Iliad”, highly repetitive, at least in their original forms.

Yangtzi Gorge by Britrob

A much more contemporary example of the same sort of mythic tale is “Blades from the Willows” by Li Shanji (1946), which was serialised in Chinese newspapers in the same way as the Sword & Sorcery stories originally were. Although it only made it into print in English n 1991, “Blades from the Willows” was hugely influential in establishing the Wu Xia story style – the oriental analogue of Sword & Sorcery that most of the Hong Kong magical martial arts movies fit into. These movies – and the comics and books that they have inspired – remain the true inheritors of Chinese mythic fantasy, and they have become hugely popular all around the world.

It should be no surprise to hear that plenty of western authors have turned to Chinese myth for inspiration. Many have met with reasonable commercial success, in the west anyway. The most important was Ernest Bramah, who created a series of wryly humorous books about the mannered wandering story-teller Kai Lung and the tall tales he span. The first of these, “The Wallet of Kai Lung”, was published in 1900. A more recent master of the same charmingly humorous ‘Chinoiserie’ is Barry Hughart, who produced a delightful trilogy of novels about the mystery-solving sage Li Kao and his assistant Number Ten Ox, starting with “Bridge of Birds” in 1984.

A third important source of mythic fantasy is the “Alf Layla-wa-Layla” (literally ‘A Thousand Nights and a Night’), commonly known in English as the Arabian Nights. It is one of the world’s greatest compendiums of stories. It contains an immense cycle of tales that Scheherazade supposedly told to her cruel husband, the King, on a nightly basis, in order to keep him from having her killed. The contents are very varied in origin. Tales seem to have come from Arabia, Persia, India and even Egypt, and there is much dispute as to exactly when they took their ‘final’ form. The rough consensus seems to be that they took shape between about 900 AD and the year 1400. Many probably started as professionally written stories, rather than as folk tales; Arabic Middle Age culture was highly civilized and literate.

Not all of the stories of the Arabian Nights are fantasies, but the role-call of tales found within its pages is impressive: “Aladdin and His Magic Lamp”, “The Ebony Horse”, “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad”, “The City of Brass”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, “Julnar the Sea-Born” and many others. The first printed edition of the book was produced in France at the start of the 18th century, translated and edited by Antoine Galland. None of the earlier, hand-written manuscripts survive, and there is considerable controversy as to how much of the content Galland actually created himself.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, though. The origins of myth are lost in history, like the seeds of truth that may have given rise to them. That doesn’t change the vital role that that the world’s mythologies have played in shaping modern fantasy.