Early this year, I was seized by the compulsion to respond to a string of interview quotes given on a rather old controversy in the fantasy community. The argument, more or less, was that contemporary “Grimdark” fantasy, of the “gritty and realistic” ilk, was nothing worth getting worked up over because its moral and philosophical underpinnings were no different than many of the early Sword and Sorcery fantasists. I ended up responding with an argument hinging on philosophical questions about moral frameworks, but my original impulse was to get into what realism means in fantasy. My thesis was that contemporary fantasy was a significant step forward insofar as its worldview was increasingly informed by real historiography.
Early Sword and Sorcery was self-consciously oversimplified and mythologically inspired. Tolkien brought in an overbearing moral framework and doubled down on the myth, but dumped in a bunch of historical detail, so we ended up with a genre inextricably bound up in a historical setting but without any apparent interest in historians or their work. So when George RR Martin--who is extremely well-read in fantasy--made the claim that ASOIAF owed more to history and historical fiction than any earlier fantasy, it marked a new trend in the genre that, I think, brought a lot of much-needed perspective. The article was going to enumerate important elements of that perspective, like materialism, microhistory, cultural relativism, and feminist and anti-racist revisionism.
The problem was that Martin is very famous, and his interview claims were already much-discussed in the fantasy community. The main product of that familiarity is a raft of listicles enumerating historical figures and events that “Inspired Game of Thrones.” I was never able to find a take that got at the meat of the underlying approach, as I hoped to do. Nonetheless, I was beset by a lurking anxiety that the thesis of my essay was laughably obvious to the only people who might give a shit about them. (This is one of those things about writing that in theory you ought to be able to rationalize your way out of, but somehow remains a persistent worry.)
In the interest of doing my due diligence, I periodically googled new iterations of my topic terms, hoping to stumble onto something I hadn’t seen yet. An accident of synchronicity had it that Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature had just come out during this period, and I scooped it up eagerly (from my university library; it costs $105 new). It’s a great book, and I’m still disappointed I haven’t seen more people in the fantasy community engaging with it.
The problem came when I got into Young’s chapter on Game of Thrones. She frames Martin’s historicist ambitions as a projection of contemporary cultural needs and tropes onto a medieval setting that can’t necessarily bear them authentically.
That’s sort of a postmodernist truism, though. Everything, from Young’s book itself to the most up-to-date history research to even primary source documents from the period, imposes a self-serving lens on the medieval world. The problem Young is alluding to, I think, is not so much the fact of Martin’s partly anachronistic medievalism, nor his historicist aspirations, but how the particular politics of Martin’s world interact with the politics of (in this case) race in the fantasy community generally. Race representation and Eurocentrism are arguably Martin’s weakest suit as an author of progressive and historically-informed fantasy, but rather than simply recognizing that and upholding the criticism as a note for future authors, it has (of course) become a battleground of internet racism. And as you might imagine, that noxious conversation has infuriated activists and academics working to push a more inclusive understanding of the medieval past.
These recurring arguments, battled against a steady supply of fresh, ignorant interlocutors, have understandably tainted the name of historicist fantasy. Ironically, activists like Medieval POC, who has created a vast library of work in support of fantasy and historical fiction that is historically accurate precisely because it includes people of color, find themselves outright scorning the very idea that ASOIAF is a step in the same direction as their work. The apparent prevalence of that attitude among medievalists and activists gave me pause. They were a community I aspired to join, so it wouldn’t be very helpful to step in advancing an argument they were 1) used to associating with racists and 2) already quite familiar with, being engaged in advocating for it themselves.
Rhetoric like this tweet feels like a slap in the face to the sort of reasonable claims about Thrones’ historicism I hoped to make. But in retrospect, it’s apparent that that reaction misses the point. The language has already been politicized. What is at stake here is not whether historical accuracy is desirable, but which version of history is accurate, which side can best demonstrate that their definition hews closer to primary research than ideological tradition. Regardless of focus or intent, defending Thrones as a historicist work without sufficient caveats is an implicit vote for the “that’s just the way things were back then” camp.
Reading more of Helen Young’s work makes the political angle more clear. Young’s first edited volume on fantasy medievalism features a chapter by Shiloh Carroll on ASOIAF. Carroll has written many iterations of this same article, in which she lays out Martin’s aspersions on 'Disneyland’ medievalisms and horn-tooting for his own 'realistic' approach. Reading those earlier articles traces a path of declining patience for Martin’s historicist ambitions. Young’s summary of the chapter in the introduction foreshadows Carroll’s contempt:
“Martin has fetishized a version of the Middle Ages that he believes is as authentic as possible under the circumstances, and this fetishization leads to the inclusion of problematic elements, such as rape, incest, chattel slavery, and violence against women. Martin justifies the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse of his characters by claiming that his world is more realistic than other fantasy worlds, but in truth it is merely a more violent and amoral neomedievalist fantasy.”
And Carroll’s own language even goes so far as to disparage historicity in general:
“Although the debate on the authenticity of a fictional text’s portrayal of the Middle Ages is problematic and counterproductive, Martin’s decision to dismiss a sizeable portion of a genre based on his own ideas about the historical reality of the Middle Ages reveals much about his narrative choices in ASOIAF.”
Damn. Carroll doesn’t elaborate on why exactly it would be categorically “counterproductive,” or whether this proscription applies to historical fiction as well as second-world fantasy. Together with Young’s introduction, it seems quite clear that Carroll thinks historicism is presumptuous, and in practice amounts to little more than a marketing ploy and an excuse for his excesses. Presumably this doesn’t apply to historicist work like Medieval POC’s efforts, and the elision of that clarification suggests some uncomfortably narrow framing.
An instructive counterpoint is found in a chapter in Young’s most recent book. The chapter largely consists of a very flattering review of Nicola Griffith’s Hild. I see Hild as an important advance in historicist fantasy--which is, to be fair, an odd framing since Hild is 100% historical fiction and 0% fantasy. But Hild does bear several traits in common with ASOIAF: a setting based on medieval England, a plot based on political machinations in a materialist framework, and an abundance of important female characters.
Hild, however, takes all those traits much farther. Hild’s Britain is a meticulously researched landscape alive with details of language, ethnicity, and ecology. Its political intrigue is less engaging and dramatic, but places more emphasis on nuanced historical forces like trade and religion. And not only does it have an exclusively female POV, with strong emphasis on Hild’s female friends and family; it also has an almost complete shift towards the feminine sphere of material and political life. Battles and journeys take place (and at moments, Hild can be quite as brutal and gory as Game of Thrones) but they feel deliberately sidelined and foreshortened in favor of weaving, butter-churning, and more indirect, power-behind-the-throne modes of political influence.
These are not the elements singled out in the chapter, however. The reviewer, Robin Anne Reid, emphasizes Hild’s feminist premises, but gushes particularly over the places where Griffith intentionally blurred and invented history to better fit her intersectional feminist framework: “This clear political revisioning of the distant past as an aspect of contemporary activism is one of the elements that makes Griffith’s novel so powerful and unique.” This is, of course, very nearly the same thing Martin was blasted for in other chapters.
But the apparent double standard makes sense--of course it’s better for a work to be consciously and artfully progressive than to unconsciously propagate colonialist tropes in lieu of creative worldbuilding. The question I’m interested in is how that distinction is framed.
Two lines can be drawn between Game of Thrones and Hild. My intuition is to align the two in an upward trend of increasing historicism, to say the genre is improving over time. The other line, which Young and her cohort seem to use, divides them into opposite sides of a political argument, both blurring historical authenticity but in the service of different narratives about the present. The progressive framing is convenient insofar as it addresses the weird linguistic doublethink caused by two conflicting invocations of "historicism." But it is fatally undermined by the fact that the word is pulled between those two competing visions. Regardless of the appeal of the progressive story, it's politically necessary to repudiate Martin’s claim to historicism. It’s more important to make sure people know historicism doesn’t look like that, doesn’t justify those things, than to acknowledge the series as a flawed but revolutionary landmark in the genre’s rough merger with history. Both framings are necessary to understand the whole landscape of contemporary fantasy. A rising expectation of historical fidelity and historiographic technique has taken hold in the last couple of generations of epic fantasy. On the other hand, overtly regressive factions like the Sad Puppies have done their best to ensure this trend isn’t simply fantasy arguing against a past version of itself.
I don't have a satisfactory thesis to end on, because in a sense there's really no question to answer. I've gotten up to speed with the state of the conversation, and the perverse impact this nest of semiotics and ideology had on me has largely faded. And in the months spent wrapping my head around the conversation, I've lost some of the fervor of my original thesis. Part of that has come from realizing just how thin my view of contemporary fantasy has been, not necessarily sufficient to make generalizing statements about the genre. Within the relatively few books I have read, I felt like I was cherry picking and stretching to match inklings of representation of major trends in academic history. Those ideas deserve better, and in many cases have probably already received it in one of the dozens of recent books in my to-read pile. I think the general argument is still valid, but the case is best stated in the abstract, not getting ahead of myself by touting any existing book too strongly.