Andrew LiVecchi

One of the most challenging tasks in writing epic fantasy inspired by ancient or medieval Europe is remaining faithful to the spirit of the age while avoiding the tendency to filter everything through a contemporary worldview. To some extent this is impossible. We can’t help but be people of our time, nor can we fully pretend to be ancient bards or medieval monks, ignorant of the developments in history, natural science, and psychology since 1500. What we can do is seek to embody the sense of magic and enchantment of premodernity, while still writing stories that remain accessible to modern readers.

If you’re unfamiliar with his work, Kay writes highly literary, deeply researched epic fantasy based on specific periods of medieval history. He prepares for his novels by spending time in the locations where his books are set—or almost set, since they’re fantasy—places like the south of France, Venice, or Istanbul, and reading up on primary and secondary historical sources as if preparing to write historical fiction.

Few works of medieval literature are as central to the “monster canon” or as influential on modern fantasy as the Old English epic Beowulf. The poem offers not one but three monstrous antagonists for its hero to confront. Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem, and while the manuscript dates to the tenth or eleventh century, the story itself is much older, originating as an oral poem from the centuries before English became a written language. Its subject matter reflects this long history: a Scandinavian, pre-Christian setting filtered through a later Christian narrative voice.

Did the ancient Celts actually tattoo themselves? Historians have debated this for decades. As with most things related to Iron-Age Celtic culture, our sources come, not from the Celts themselves, but from Greek and Roman writers who often portrayed them as barbarians to emphasize their otherness.

Vampires. Mummies. Zombies. The undead are everywhere in modern horror and fantasy, from Salem’s Lot to The Walking Dead. But they’re far from a recent obsession. Long before even the nineteenth-century Gothic novels of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, we find the undead represented in the folklore traditions of every culture—the Ro-Langs of Tibet, the Vrykolakas of Greece, the Sluagh of Ireland, and so on.

If you’ve ever taken a first-year English course at university, I’m willing to bet that you’ve encountered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This fourteenth-century romance is one of the most well-known works of medieval English literature and a classic entry in the Arthurian corpus.

Of all the monsters of Western folklore, the werewolf is among the most iconic and enduring. From the ancient Greek lycanthrope, to the Roman versipellis, to the “man-wolf” of medieval Europe’s Germanic and Celtic peoples, to the Early Modern witch-hunts, to its widespread presence in modern popular culture, the werewolf has enjoyed near-constant popularity throughout the ages. He appears today in a variety of media and genres — film and television, video games and books, romance and horror.

If you consume even a small amount of modern fantasy, you’re probably used to seeing monsters in a vaguely medieval setting. It is common to see knights, princesses, and peasants living alongside and/or doing battle against a range of fantastical creatures: dragons, ogres, giants, trolls, orcs, elves, dwarves, and more. Medieval Europe has become, in many ways and for many reasons, the default setting for epic fantasy.

In an older post, I talked about why I think writers of fantasy and historical fiction should read primary sources to understand the period from which they are taking inspiration. In this post, I’m going to provide some examples of what kinds of sources writers should be reading.

In the last post, we looked at the Battle of the Allia in 390 BC. At the Allia, the Gauls and Romans met in what was to be the first of many conflicts between their peoples, culminating in Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul in 50 BC. In this first battle, however, it is the Gallic […]