Ruins are iconic elements of the modern fantasy landscape, from long-abandoned fortresses of ancient civilizations to massive underground complexes overrun with ghouls. They’ve become so commonplace that we take them for granted, as if elaborate dungeons, or even ruins themselves, were a significant element of the real medieval world. But in many ways, they are as fantastical as the monsters and magic in the genre, and come from a fictional history rich in theme and ideology.
Ruins are a symbol of civilization subsumed within the wilderness. They connote a lost battle with the forces of time and nature. Aesthetically, they evoke deep time, incomprehensibly distant lives, and exotic cultures. Ruins are common settings in fantasy in part because fantasies often take place in wilderness, and ruins are an element of the wilderness with a story to tell. The ruin aesthetic is a synthesis of manmade and natural elements. Monsters, bandits, and spirits inhabit ruins, and powerful relics can be found within. As embodiments of history, they are a natural partner for the genre's world-building impulses.
Fictional ruins differ in three main respects from real dilapidated and abandoned structures. They are often symbols of a lost age of greatness and the values associated with it. They’re grandiose and exotic, prizing elaborate ornamentation over function, often to absurd lengths. Moreover, they are outward-facing, designed to expect an audience even as they decay. In this piece I’ll trace the origins of these ideas across disparate literary genres and show how they ended up in the contemporary fantasy vocabulary.
It's strange to imagine Europeans, living for millenia in the shadow of Roman ruins, ever lacking a concept of their meaning. But Michel Makarius tells us "the ruin emerged into human consciousness [in the fifteenth century]." That late medieval framework began a process that eventually culminated in the post-apocalyptic fiction genre, the folly ruins craze, the Gothic aesthetic, and later, academic archaeology and the adventure genre.
Ruins After the Apocalypse
Post-apocalyptic fiction seems like an inherently modern preoccupation. It is a way to cope with the anxious realization that we had the capacity to meaningfully destroy our presence on the planet, first through nuclear weapons and later with ecological collapse, climate change, and global pandemic. Yet the genre is nearly two hundred years old, and arguably marks the beginning of the Western obsession with ruins.
Nineteenth century authors were less concerned by runaway technological capacity than moral and social decay. (I’d like to say that the idea that lazy and nihilistic youths could destroy civilization by abandoning traditional values was abandoned with time, but millennials are unfortunately still dealing with it.) Though the genre began with a proper sci-fi apocalypse-Mary Shelley’s Last Man is the last one because everyone else was killed in a global plague—most authors used it to lay out curmudgeonly political diatribes. H.P. Lovecraft’s vile racism is well known, but Edgar Allen Poe’s comparable failings have received less attention for some reason. His post-apocalyptic fiction, Mellonta Tauta, takes aim at democracy:
He has been occupied all the day in the attempt to convince me that the ancient Amriccans governed themselves!- did ever anybody hear of such an absurdity?. . . He says that they started with the queerest idea conceivable, viz: that all men are born free and equal. . . Every man "voted," as they called it- that is to say meddled with public affairs . . .As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth- unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government- for dogs.
This is classic reactionary politics. Democracy was one new idea that drew the ire of conservatives, but their favorite target was a broader phenomenon called decadence. The accumulation of social wealth from burgeoning global trade and colonies permitted a level of luxury and indulgence that nineteenth century authors thought to be corrosive to vigor, work ethic, and strong leadership. The theory comes from Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was widely read as a cautionary parable with alarming parallels to contemporary London. It was intuitive for his arrogant readers in the British elite to imagine Rome and London as two peaks in a cycle from barbarism to civilization to decadence and back. Social theories developed this idea, elaborating a metaphor in which societies were like organisms, with a natural life expectancy.
The Cycle of Civilizations
Thus nineteenth century intellectuals, with a dawning awareness of their own mortality, looked to Rome as a sister and predecessor of the British Empire, and found new immediacy in the lessons of its ruins. Their aesthetic lodged in the imaginations of writers and painters. With an almost perverse fascination, they began to depict the familiar sights and landmarks of their lives cast into ruin. Architect John Soane commissioned two ruined depictions of his Bank of England design before it was even constructed.
Joseph Gandy's Aerial View of Sir John Soane's Bank of England in ruins, 1830
These scenes were often presented through the eyes of an observer from the next Empire in the cycle. These observers, as future kindred spirits of the authors, were also obsessed with the mortality of their own society and the aesthetic of ruins. In retrospect, America is the obvious heir to the British Empire in a cycle of civilizations model, and plenty of writers made this guess at the time. But the guess that stuck, for some reason, was New Zealand. Gustave Dore created the iconic illustration of this future observer, known as the New Zealander, sitting on a rock sketching the ruined docks of London just as Dore and his contemporaries did in Rome. Curiously, the New Zealander is typically thought of as a Maori rather than a descendant of white colonists, which hints at the racial dimension of Victorian social anxieties. London was not only vulnerable in its place as capital of the global empire, but the principle threat to its legacy was people of color.
Gustave Dore's frontispiece for London: A Pilgrimage, 1872
The cycle of civilizations, represented in the landscape by ruins, has seen plenty of use in genre fiction. It’s the premise of Asimov’s Foundation series and the amazing Canticle for Leibowitz. It is the general premise of world-building and history in a lot of fantasy universes, from Game of Thrones’ Valyria (a fairly clear Rome analogue) to the Elder Scrolls, which goes so far as to number the Empires. The broad strokes of Middle Earth’s history—the ages of elves, dwarves, and hobbits naturally give way to the Age of Men—follow the logic of the cycle of civilizations, if not the details of the formula.
It is not atypical for fantasy authors to share the authoritarian, backwards-looking social outlook of the nineteenth century apocalypse writers. The Arthurian legend, in which the rightful king (and his legacy) leaves the country to devolve until his messianic return, is fundamentally a Monarchist wish fulfillment narrative, if not outright propaganda. It’s also fundamentally a particularly aggressive framing of the cycle concept (remember the original framing blames the fall of civilization on decadence in the ruling class).
Tolkien’s Gondor is a great example. The capital, Osgiliath, is left in ruins and overrun by orcs when the ruling family interbreeds with barbarians, alienating the aristocracy and causing a civil war. Osgiliath is only recovered when the long-lost heir to the crown returns and smashes Gondor’s enemies once and for all. The fall of Gondor, which permitted Sauron to marshal his forces and threaten the west, happened because of a mixed-race marriage.
The world of Dark Souls is premised in a metaphysical and spiritual cycle that is mirrored in the rise and especially the fall of myriad civilizations. Straid of Olaphis, frozen in stone until many cycles after his kingdom has fallen, is a sort of reverse New Zealander. He explains the fundamental relationship of the game's central thematic dichotomy-Fire and Dark-to the rich landscape of ruins explored in the game.
Many kingdoms rose and fell on this tract of earth; mine was by no means the first. Anything that has a beginning also has an end. No flame, however brilliant, does not one day splutter and fade. But then, from the ashes, the flame reignites, and a new kingdom is born, sporting a new face.
A palimpsest of ruins in Dark Souls 2, 2014
The Political Folly Ruin
Ruins are not simply buildings in disrepair. They are swallowed up by the wilderness, often completely engulfed by vegetation. 19th century audiences were adept at reading symbology into art and sculpture. Plants vining over the crumbling facades of classical architecture communicated a powerful political message. Plants represented wild nature, and the animal passions latent in man but suppressed in civilized society. In ruins, the civilizing impulse has been dashed by beastly nature. The vices in men that caused the decline mirror the vines that follow it.
The Ruins of Eldena by Caspar David Friedrich, 1825
The first sham ruin in Britain was a rather explicit political statement. Thomas Cobham’s Temple of Modern Virtue, built in 1741, was a classical (Greco-Roman) temple scattered in pieces on the lawn. It included a decapitated statue of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and was situated opposite from the Temple of Ancient Virtue, another classical temple built with no apparent damage. A guidebook associated with it informed viewers that its purpose was to “let us see the ruinous State of decayed Modern virtue,” lest the symbolism remain unclear.
Thousands of these "folly" ruins were constructed across Europe, often in classical and medieval styles, though many were orientalist or original designs. Architects like Sanderson Miller made careers out of designing and placing follies on aristocratic estates. Horace Walpole and several authors of Gothic novels were among their customers. The vocabulary of exaggerated medieval imagery they created has deeply informed the fantasy genre ever since.
Sanderson Miller's Wimpole Folly, designed in 1751 and constructed in the 1770s
Semiotics is fickle; the same symbology can be used to carry the opposite message. While many ruins used classical architecture as a stand-in for the virtues of civilization, Gothic styles connoted more recent regimes in Europe. Forward looking, perhaps republican elites commissioned follies of medieval castles to represent the downfall of the feudal regime.
The ruins of these once magnificent edifices, are the pride and boast of this island: we may well be proud of them; not merely in a picturesque point of view: we may glory that the abodes of tyranny and superstition are in ruin -Uvedale Price, quoted in Stewart, 1996
Ruins and the Gothic Aesthetic
Folly ruins are facades constructed in a non-functional, intentionally damaged state. They were designed with an aesthetic of structural degradation intended more to convey the idea of decay than to mimic any archaeological phenomenon. Thus the folly abstracted the process and the look of ruination from history. In doing so, it created a new, unified aesthetic: not a building plus time, but simply a ruin, sui generis. It is this self-evident and self-justifying unity that fantasy and especially video games have taken from Gothic architecture.
Follies also abstracted historicity from the landscape. As folly ruins gained popularity, they lost some of their political meaning and entered the vocabulary of landscape artists and architects. The picturesque movement seized on folly ruins as a way to add the appearance of quaint and nostalgic antiquity to a landscape that, even in long-inhabited Britain, might lack exposed signs of the past. Of perhaps greater relevance for fantasy, however, was the rise of the Gothic aesthetic.
Developing in parallel in literature and architecture, the Gothic Revival invested the ruins of medieval Europe with political and personal significance. Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto was among the first Gothic novels, and it pioneered many of the movement's tropes and fixations. Its setting is an ancient family castle haunted by mysterious noises and doors that close by themselves, and its protagonists must cope with the legacy of an ancestral curse. Later entries in the genre, including famous early exemplars of horror like Bram Stoker's Dracula, would ramp up the association of supernatural terror and architectural decay, bringing the ruin to life (sometimes literally) and populating it with manifestations of doom and gloom. Poe's Fall of the House of Usher carries the metaphorical identification of House with Family to its literal end.
Castle of Otranto was also one of the first books to blend the fantastical elements of the medieval romance with the relative psychological realism of the modern novel, charting the course that almost all fantasy since has followed. The fantasy in Otranto is sparse, if unsubtle: the inciting event is a giant helmet that appears in the sky and crushes the protagonist's son, a fantasy idea that still feels unique and bold today.
Illustration from Castle of Otranto
The Gothic Castle
The Gothic has been a rich source for fantasy ideas and aesthetics, but its biggest contribution may be the haunted castle. A haunted castle is not just a building, but an embodiment of the past. As Walter Benjamin put it, "In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting." All the tropes of Gothic castle, from ghosts to curses to vampires and necromancy, are manifestations of the castle and its history. They are an expression of the abstraction of the ruin: the Gothic castle has transcended its dead stones and become an idea, an independent force in the story.
Crimson Peak, 2015. The quote is not from that scene, but it looks like it could be, right?
Gothic writers brought ruins to life, arming them to do battle directly with the protagonists. The haunted castle is not a safe haven in the dangerous wilderness but a concentration of it. Its ghouls are heightened, more ancient and threatening and uncanny than wild animals. It is not incidental that Gothic architecture was, during the revival, incessantly compared to the lofty and dense canopy of the ancient oak forest.
Gothic Church Ruins by Carl Blechen, 1826
Romantic artists expanded the conflation of nature and artifice in ruins. Both landscape architects and painters embedded ruins in natural landscapes as they would a rock outcrop. They were depicted alongside other markers of the sublime, like dark, looming thunderclouds, to link them further with nature. Once conflated, the relationship could extend either direction: nature could be seen as a ruin itself.
Under closer examination, the Earth seems more like an old ruin than a modern and regular place ... whence comes then this appalling disorder on the surface, in the bowels of the Earth? - Johann Karl Kruger
As the aesthetic bounds of the Gothic widened, the nature of the castle grew to accommodate its larger role. Eventually, castles accumulated such a unique and encompassing identity that they could exist as worlds sufficient unto themselves. Gormenghast in Titus Groan, or the massive labyrinths of games like Castlevania and Rogue Legacy. Like the follies (one of which was commissioned by Horace Walpole himself), these massive castles abandoned historical authenticity and the pretense of function entirely in order to suit the exaggerated whims of the author.
Illustration of Gormenghast by Ian Miller
In games, castles are setting-characters constructed to match wits with players. This is illustrated most clearly in tabletop RPGs, where a person must forego a character and play as the environment itself. The monsters, traps, and treasures in game castles are carefully placed to make traversal difficult but accessible. Real ruins are indifferent, rarely designed to engage physically with future humans.
Exotic Ruins and the Classic Adventure
The heyday of ruins in the folly and Gothic coincided with the peak of European colonialism around the world. Colonists took the Western obsession with ruins global, where it found fertile material in the mysterious ancient civilizations of the New World and in Asia. Tropes like the cursed ruin found new homes in temples and tombs. European colonists also brought a new pseudo-academic perspective to ruins, and the scientific travelogue became wildly popular in part by building on the traditions of romance and Gothic novels.
The adventure genre thus originated largely as fictionalized elaborations of the juiciest parts of scientific travelogues. Books like Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative, ethnographic accounts like James Cook's Journals, and especially archaeological work in Egypt, Greece, and Central America were extraordinarily popular, and created an audience for exotic and astonishing stories about the wonders of the still-mysterious world. The genre's iconic incarnation is the Indiana Jones series, which is itself a pastiche of an already-waning genre. It is very much alive today, however, in titles like Marlow Briggs, and especially the new Tomb Raider games.
Still from Rise of the Tomb Raider, 2015
The adventure genre developed many of the most important elements of the modern fantasy ruin. Exotic ruins-pharaoh's tombs, ancient temples, elaborate monuments-are designed by jealous engineers to fend off grave robbers, with a bevy of traps and mazes. Vengeful spirits guard treasures that are variously valuable, useful, or mystically potent. But more importantly, adventure stories broadened the architectural palette of ruins to include all the non-Western architectural elements seen in fantasy today. The Zelda series, which has spanned dozens of temple ruins, is a good case study, creating a thorough archive of global architecture in fantasy (summarized at The Architecture of Zelda).
In the process, adventure stories brought to fantasy colonial narratives of the exotic pushed into the realm of fiction by science. In fantasy narratives, temples are generally constructed by people with religious beliefs that are weird if not antagonistic and demonic to the protagonists' worldview, superstitious in ways that Christianity, or its stand-ins, are not. They invoke animal worship, human sacrifice, and idolatry, and while these tropes often occur explicitly in the plot, much of the work is done in the setting, by the architecture of the ruins themselves.
Illustration by Don Maitz, a 20th century fantasy artist, for H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, 1885
The roots of adventure stories in archaeology have not been forgotten. Archaeologists tell stories by interpreting the physical, chemical, and cultural traits of objects and their relationships to each other. This process can't be translated into a book or movie narrative: those media can only transmit stories, not offer the viewer the opportunity to become the archaeologist. Moving through space, noting the positions and juxtapositions of artifacts, interpreting their traits, experimenting with their uses, is an experience only video games can offer.
In general, players are more like early imperialist archaeologists than modern scientists. They are simply there to steal the most valuable, exotic, and potent items in service of a political agenda (or, in most games, to just accumulate them in implausible phantom pockets). But a few of the best games really understand the strengths and weaknesses of the medium for storytelling, and use them to make the player discover stories told in layers of archaeological evidence.
From Software's Souls games all take place in ruined kingdoms inhabited by desiccated corpses (ruined humans). Their stories are constructed through sparse dialogue and mountains of environmental clues and artifacts. The evidence is complex and ambiguous, and its interpretation has been akin to scientific investigation, with evidence rigorously and objectively accumulated on wikis and then used to construct widely debated hypotheses on forums and YouTube videos. The Souls series is perhaps the richest exploration of ruins in games, incorporating a unique cycle of civilizations premise and exploring themes of fall and ruin at many levels (explored tangentially in my post on poison and plague motifs in Dark Souls 2).
Concept art from Dark Souls, 2011
PS
This topic ended up being a lot richer than I was anticipating, and this article has been in the works for far longer than I'd like to admit. I might explore some other aspects in future posts, like the tropes surrounding statues, or the mystique of the unexplained Collapse, or the ruin themes in Dark Souls, or perhaps the relationship between ruins, pagans, and the mystical powers of the land. Let me know if any of that sounds interesting.
References
Jamroonjamroenpit, Ploy. THE RUINS OF EMPIRE. Diss. Department of History, University of Sydney, 2011.
Makarius, Michel. Ruines. Ed. Flammarion, 2004.
Stewart, David. "Political Ruins: Gothic Sham Ruins and the'45." The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1996): 400-411.
Woodward, Christopher. In ruins. Random House, 2002.