Modernism Intruding into the Aesthetic of Historical Fantasy Fiction

Fantasy films offer us an escape from our real world reality. We are allowed to believe in magic and dragons and spirits and fairies. We just roll with primitive ideas as a sort of thought experiment. What if it were all true?



And yet, there are modern understandings which get smuggled into these movies. Any impossible camera shot where we zoom out from our world into the heavens will reveal our world to be an oblate spheroid with a moon (or moons) in proper Newtonian orbits. The modern worldview governs this allegedly fantastic space. Our modern cosmology is smuggled into our world of fantastic beasts and spells. This is an intrusion.



Also notice the intrusion of modernity with the obligatory introduction of gun powder weapons into these spaces. No matter how powerful the magic of our mages, we will encounter gunpowder bombs, primitive canons, and perhaps even hand canons. The new world of coming industrial age is always just around the corner, but why? Traditional castles became obsolete when heavy canons appeared on battlefields. And yet we never see a star-fortress (the sort needed to stand bombardment by canon) in these worlds.


No matter how hard we try, it seems we are always trying to smuggle the "now" into the past, even if it is a fantasy past which never existed.



The worst offenders are those stories that offer a mundane explanation of fantastic tales of old, like The 13th Warrior which offers a "just so" account of how a tale like Beowulf could have happened in the real world in which there are no monsters. Such exercises deflate the very purpose of entering into fantasy, like those "smart" people who have always have a ready explanation of "love" as mere result of neurochemicals (as if "dopamine" is all there is to say about love).





And there are some who object to features of fantasy films for failing to accord to modern understandings of geography and geology and engineering. "You couldn't build that city!" "You wouldn't find a beach there!" as if we should construct our mythological realms in accord with plate tectonics and modern building codes. Fantasy realms are, by definition, fantastic. And yet there are people who quibble about the "reality" of the shoreline of Westeros, the plant life Middle Earth, the geology of Conan's world.



https://www.livescience.com/44599-me...f-thrones.html


https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1803/1803.11390.pdf


Of course, there are all sorts of valid choices to be made. We can do a mundane fantasy movie. We can have a world with dragons and spherical worlds in Newtonian orbits which have "real world" explanations for why winter is coming for so long and lasting for so long, but also being variable. But then again, who cares? We can also just tell a fantasy story, and I think writers would be well-advised to be careful how much modernism they allow to creep in their worlds, lest they deflate the magic of the realm by revealing it to be our world in disguise.

This paragraph is a work of art. Perfectly tailored to ignite my worst and most trolling impulses to the point I ALMOST think you had me in mind as you typed it up. Kudos!

Instead, I'll just ask when the last time you watched 13th Warrior, as I feel is an almost undeniably well-crafted and executed film with tons of virtues. Perhaps I'd swap it out as your first example with Fuqua's King Arthur

The 13th Warrior is very good. I saw it when I was younger and was kind of afraid it wouldn't hold up many years (and more importantly, many many more movies) later, but it totally did. I think the complaint would be valid if it were literally a Beowulf adaptation, rather than just sort of taking the vibe and doing something different with it. To my mind that's the way you're "supposed" to do a modern take on a classic, as opposed to trying to supplant it or supersede it or do something else to it that starts with su.

Was originally a Crichton novel, by the way, called Eaters of the Dead.

All that said, I agree with the general points. It's interesting to consider all the things about our world that are often thoughtlessly transplanted into supposedly "fantasy" tales. Some of this is inevitable, since most of the time the purpose of fantasy is just to illuminate some human concern from another angle, but not always.

To be clear, I think that the 13 Warrior was enjoyable. A good film can have a bad aesthetic, or an aesthetic impulse that should not be indulged in too frequently. It is of the worst offenders, because it commits so completely to the task making the origins of the tale of Beowulf mundane. What is great about Beowulf is not that it is an historically accurate or even plausible account of the Geats, but rather because it is literature (e.g., the themes, the images, the kennings). Beowulf was in no more need of a modern rationalization that The Force was in need of being explained in terms of midichlorians. The only difference is that the former manged to "stick the landing" (i.e., not needed, but pretty good nonetheless) where the latter did not.



My objection here is not so much with any particular product, but with the tendency to consciously or unconsciously smuggle modern scientific rationalizations into tales of yore. I am concerned that the norms of the genre might subtly shift in the direction of such irrational rationalizations.



What I propose instead is to accept the invitation to "go through the looking glass." Take "realism" seriously in terms of what was historically accurate of the time (e.g., Beowulf should not have a cellphone nor should he wield a bronze gladius). To the extent that your fantasy is historical (either because you are retelling an historical tale, or because you want your fantasy to fit in the past somehow), honor history. At the same time, pull up short in depiction at the shoreline of their ignorance. Don't go beyond their world to show wonders only known in our own. And if we are retelling an old tale, we should also (in the main), attempt to honor the "irrationalities" of their world. OK, "here there be dragons." How did they describe their dragons? Egger's VVitch was quite effective because it worked from historical materials, inviting us into their nuttiness.



Literature is one of our main lines of defense against reality. It offers resources to remake the world as something other than it is. Fantasy not only offers us a means for radically revisioning reality, but (in the case of historical fantasy) a sort of bridge to the past which fuses the rationality and irrationality of a past age into an experience for the audience.