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Classic Fantasy
Feb. 6th, 2008 06:26 amOnce upon a time all stories were oral. And when they began to be written down the early stories were almost all what we would today consider fantasy. The question for the current discussion though is..did the authors consider them fantasy? I am willing to posit that they both did and did not. Sort of a hedging bets sort of thing. But there they were, in what was considered print in the days before moveable type.
Soon forgotten were the books from Ireland and Wales. But on both sides of the Channel the stories of Arthur began to gain speed. Some of them posed as history, some as fantasy, most as a blend of the two. In the 15th C came arguably the classic of the time..Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur.
In the 16th C Arthur was left out and the faerie left in with Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen. Which was the first to admit to being a literary work as opposed to history or quasimythology.
As a side note..another aspect were the collectors of which there were many, esp in the 18th and 19th Centurey. My favourite would still actually be not fiction but music..the Francis J Child Ballad collection. Which, if you write fantasy, you should find..or at least some of the people who have recorded them.
Soon forgotten were the books from Ireland and Wales. But on both sides of the Channel the stories of Arthur began to gain speed. Some of them posed as history, some as fantasy, most as a blend of the two. In the 15th C came arguably the classic of the time..Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur.
In the 16th C Arthur was left out and the faerie left in with Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen. Which was the first to admit to being a literary work as opposed to history or quasimythology.
As a side note..another aspect were the collectors of which there were many, esp in the 18th and 19th Centurey. My favourite would still actually be not fiction but music..the Francis J Child Ballad collection. Which, if you write fantasy, you should find..or at least some of the people who have recorded them.
