Wilderness in Fantasy: An Overview

Wilderness is part and parcel of our conception of the fantasy genre. Swamps, mountains, caves, and above all forests are the natural homes of the dragons, faeries, and witches that have fed the genre for centuries. In this post, I want to lay out a brief overview of how the wilderness concept has evolved and informed fantasy, in very broad strokes, and set up some more detailed explorations in the future.

Wilderness is not so much an ecological condition as a cultural invention. It is defined by an absence of human modification--though whether this connotes an appealing purity or appalling desolation depends, essentially, on when you're living. The term has been applied to a wide variety of landscapes, often places with a deep legacy of human influence not apparent to naive travelers, like the Americas. For our purposes, wilderness is an ancient, alien, inhospitable landscape with a deep reserve of mystery.

Cultural relationships with wilderness have undergone some tremendous changes over the last few hundred years, and fantasy has reacted to and occasionally played a part in that evolution. If you're unfamiliar with the topic and are looking for some background information, my conception of wilderness comes from Bill Cronon's seminal essay, The Trouble with Wilderness. Cronon is a brilliantly readable and insightful author, and the essay is well worth the read if you're at all interested in the topic.

The city-wilderness dichotomy in fantasy can be traced back to some of the oldest recorded mythology, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the divine Cedar Forest to kill the monstrous forest spirit Humbaba. This story already holds many of the iconic elements of the fantasy story - aristocratic men journey into an enchanted wilderness to kill its chimeric monster avatar.  

art by Jason Bennett

Christian formulations gave the wilderness a new spiritual spin. It is the setting for Exodus, the 40 year test of faith, and the scene of Christ's Temptation by the Devil. Hermits, saints, and mystics undertook wilderness trials that self-consciously imitated the Temptation. Harsh landscapes offered great tests of faith, but also the possibility of greater spiritual attainment. Demons made mountaintops their homes, but if they were conquered, one was unusually close to Heaven. Depictions of the Temptation also continue the chimera motif, giving the Devil goat horns or chicken legs to communicate his unholy nature. 

Art by Simon Bening

Chivalric Romances are more or less explicitly modeled on these Biblical stories. Knights are judged for their strength and skill in battle, of course, but their most important attribute is their purity. The trials haunting the mysterious forests of Arthurian legends are more likely to threaten a knight's virtue through temptation and trickery than to attack his body directly. 

The monsters, witches, and fairies haunting the forest weren't its only fictional flavor, however. European forests were simply not the dense, unfamiliar, and wild places these stories often depicted. Forests were used intensively for charcoal, firewood, animal forage, and other wood products. They were coppiced, pollarded, and occasionally even planted. Royal forests were carefully managed to encourage, and frequently even stocked, with game animals, carefully monitored by hunting staff to be conjured on a whim for royal hunting parties. While the medieval world was swathed in geographic uncertainty, rife with hostile factions, and bounded by mysterious frontiers, the European forest was, by and large, none of these things. 

In Don Quixote, Cervantes calls attention to this mythic exaggeration. Quixote sets out to find evil knights and monsters haunting a mythic landscape, but instead encounters only working people in a working landscape. Inns become castles, muleteers become brigands, and of course windmills become giants. The distinction has been lost a bit for contemporary audiences, but Cervantes' point is clear: fantasy romances require a wilderness; if there is none at hand, one must be imagined.

Art by Juan Gallego

As fantasy proper emerged in the Romantic period (several centuries after the classic Chivalric Romances were published, of course), its wilderness setting was increasingly pushed out of the contemporary landscape and into new compartments. Gothic novels cordoned the fantastic off within haunted houses and cursed family lineages. Post-apocalypse stories turned the landscape into a wilderness through the passage of time. But the primary current of Romantic fantasy existed in fairy stories--not literary fairy tales, which were also quite popular at the time, but stories about magical and mischievous societies inhabiting parallel or microcosmic worlds, drawing extensively from Celtic and Germanic folklore. 

Fairy stories reified the dichotomy of wilderness and domesticity, remaking the spiritual wilderness of the Chivalric Romance as the magical land of Faerie. Depictions of Faerie vary wildly, but it is generally reached through some sort of Portal--generally found in a natural setting, in the woods again, or down a river, or within a bramble thicket--though sometimes a cabinet or wardrobe will do. It is generally either overlain directly on our world, visible only to those initiated by magic spells, places, or fruit, or found in microcosms much larger than they appear from the outside. 

The "portal to Faerie" device has fallen out of favor to some extent, and in the 20th century fantasy works have embraced the "secondary world" model canonized by Tolkien. In some sense, this can be seen as a return to the fictive wildernesses of the Romances--characters begin at home, on the farm, and some event sends them off on a journey to a distant goal across a countryside filled with war, monsters, and witches. But where earlier fantasies were largely (and my generalization brush is fairly thick here) more dreamlike, mythic, and often allegorical, Tolkien's wilderness was an obtrusively physical place. Pragmatic concerns like food, while addressed with fantastical elements like lembas bread, are as much a concern for the hobbits as maintaining their faith. (The spiritual element lingers in Tolkien-it is not a coincidence that Frodo's wilderness trek in the wastes of Mordor lasts forty days). 

This pragmatic view of wilderness paralleled cultural developments like the outdoor recreation movement and the environmental movement. The ideological forces in Lord of the Rings illustrate some of the contradictory tendencies in 20th century views of the environment: the Shire represents civilization, but in a picturesque agrarian format that was rapidly disappearing due to industrialization. Wilderness hinders the Fellowship, but it is Sauron's military-industrial complex that is truly antithetical to civilization. 

A more concrete wilderness has enabled fantasy to engage with nature in more materialistic ways. Dragons are objects of scientific study in A Natural History of Dragons and geopolitical hard power in A Song of Ice and Fire. Geralt, protagonist of the Witcher series, refuses to kill any monsters whose species are endangered. The entire fantasy wilderness world is marketed as a tourist attraction in Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm.

The Romantic era also brought a new appreciation of wilderness as an aesthetic phenomenon. Wild landscapes, especially those with enormous trees, jagged rocks, waterfalls, and above all, grandiose topography, were glorified as "sublime," natural temples where the glory of God was especially apparent and spiritual communion was facilitated. The aesthetic of the sublime has been one of the biggest influences on the depiction of fantasy landscapes, serving up topography ostensibly even more excessive and "epic" than nature can provide.

Only in the last 30 years or so has the genre opened up to stories set primarily in cities, which illustrates the depth of its historic attachment to wilderness. Urban Fantasy follows urban ecology in deconstructing the artificial divide between city and wilderness, embracing a worldview in which cities hold as much magic as the countryside--if one knows how to look for it. China Mieville's Kraken makes the city of London a vital magical entity in its own right, and populates it with a wilderness of monsters and magicians dense and varied as its cosmopolitan inhabitants. 

For the rest of this series, I might dive into some of these examples in greater depth (let me know if anything sparks any particular curiosity for you!), explore some of the social denizens of fantasy wilderness, like ruins, werewolves, and fairies, and track their interactions with broader cultural ideas about wilderness.

Sinister Landscapes in Black Death

A placeholder post to showcase screenshots from Black Death and some Caspar David Friedrich paintings as loose points of reference. Click on one to enter slideshow view.

(This one is by Thomas Cole, called Cross at Sunset)

Why Fantasy Needs Postmodernism: Morality

This post is meant as an introduction or synopsis of a concept that should be very familiar to long-time readers of fantasy, especially fans of some of the postmodern-influenced contemporary fantasy I'll be covering in this series (and if you're not a fan of Game of Thrones, c'mon). Anyway, don't expect anything groundbreaking here.

Fantasy Violence

Fantasy, high or low, dark or heroic, usually involves a lot of murder. Bloody sword fighting and gruesome monster slaying are so deeply enmeshed in the genre that few works are bold enough to eschew them entirely. There is a bit of dissonance, then, in the fact that fantasy works are often belittled as children's media. Children can't be exposed to raw ultra-violence, so fighting that takes place in these stories has to be put in some kind of context, a space where it is regulated, justified, or comprehended.

The Heroic Frame

There are a few moral frames that are typically used for this purpose. The first, because it's probably the oldest, is the heroic frame. It views violence as an occasion to demonstrate personal virtues: loyalty to the clan, willpower and courage, but most of all strength and skill in the practice of violence itself. This sort of violence is often ritualized in formal duels and accompanied by song, dance, and often a minimum of actual death. It represents warfare in many indigenous cultures, and in Western cultures it has become entirely subsumed by sports.

Some fantasy works, especially products of historical cultures, use this frame for violence (The Iliad, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros) but it is not typically sufficient in works that involve larger political strife. Most contemporary works that depict men who fight and kill for personal honor use that trait as a shorthand for evil.

The Postmodern Frame

The newest frame for violence, as far as I'm aware, is postmodern. The postmodern frame paints violence as the inevitable consequence of ecological, economic, and political conflicts. They make no attempt to justify violence, occasionally commenting on the tragic circumstances that spawn it. It generally acknowledges that both parties bear some blame for violence, that both believe themselves to be doing right in some measure. I'll be covering some of these works in this series, but some conspicuous examples are The Wire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Game of Thrones.

The Moral Frame

The one overwhelmingly common frame for fantasy violence is moral. The moral frame is familiar from works like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. The binary of good and evil in these worlds is common to many religions, but most directly reflects and references Christianity. Western fantasy has deep roots in late medieval chivalric romances (King Arthur and his many continental counterparts) and the expressions of morality in contemporary fantasy can be traced back to those explicitly Christian stories.

Much of early modern fantasy was explicitly allegorical and, especially insofar as it was aimed at children, contained explicit moral lessons. In a long tradition of what Simon Schama calls "grafting," Christian authors used pagan stories, creatures, and settings to enliven what was essentially Bible commentary. C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are the most famous example, though he got the idea from his predecessor George MacDonald.

The Lord of the Rings series, written by Lewis' friend and fellow Christian fantasist JRR Tolkien, was often interpreted as a comparable allegory, especially for political realities at the time he wrote it (World War II) or conceived it (World War I). Tolkien found this unduly limiting; his ambitions were broader. Steven Allen Carr tells us that:

Tolkien in fact encouraged the view of his work as an open-ended allegory, yet denied particularly specific allegorical applications. . . . According to National Public Radio, Tolkien considered Lord of the Rings “an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power,” – in other words, a kind of master allegory.

Thus the story is not meant to represent World War 1 specifically; it can be mapped onto any war. The Ring doesn't represent nuclear weapons; it represents any war machine of unbalanced power. As a "master allegory," the iconography of Middle Earth has had a long and illustrious history as a political narrative, particularly in foreign policy. This history is reviewed in Steven Allen Carr's 2002 piece Confronting Lord of the Rings as Allegory.

Following in Tolkien's tradition (and reflecting the shift to secularism and away from symbolism in art generally), most contemporary fantasy works are not allegorical. The stories they are telling don't come from the Bible or reference its characters in a specific sense - Obi-Wan is not intended as a Christlike figure (though Gandalf may be). But they persist in reaching for Tolkien's "master allegory," which in the abstract refers to the existence of good and evil in the judgments and outcomes of the world itself.

(Image from http://chipweir.weebly.com/the-hobbit-reading-blog/gandalf-a-christ-figure)

In Christianity, Evil literally exists, is personified by Satan, and is propagated by minions under his sway. The Dark Side of the Force, Sauron, and Voldemort, are all to a greater or lesser degree analogues of this system (the extent to which this is literal or simply implicit can vary, but the result is the same). Evil is portrayed as a temptation that acts a test of the protagonists' moral fortitude and commitment to Go(o)d. One's position in this divine conflict is to some extent preordained - entire races are irretrievably corrupted to evil, while some men are born to be righteous kings who fight on God's behalf.

Murder committed against Satan's servants is justified, even necessary. It's a task that needs doing, that can only be completed by virtuous and powerful men, and the completion of which improves the world and reflects well upon them. When Sauron's forces are defeated, Aragorn pardons his human thralls, but hunts down and kills every orc that can be found. It was only recently, in the postmodern era, that it became possible for us to memorialize the nearly three million people Luke Skywalker killed when he destroyed the Death Star.

Of course, Christian fantasists didn't apply their worldview to stories to justify and contextualize violence meant primarily for entertainment. Dragon slaying was a spiritual metaphor. Recapitulating the worldview of medieval fantasies today is not, I think, a harmful instance of cultural appropriation, but it certainly feels inadequate and superficial.

Escaping the Moral Frame

Binary moral narratives should by all rights be dead by now. They simply don't suit the realities of a complex and globalized world, a multicultural world, and a world informed by a wealth of scientific context. The binary worldview has a bunch of corollaries with destructive consequences for real people. Its implicit racial and national essentialism, legacy of classism, and the jingoist dehumanization of putative enemies express themselves in pernicious social issues.

That said, I'm not going to argue that fantasy fiction is actually causing these issues, or that alternatives will make a meaningful dent in changing them (though it can directly achieve smaller goals, like representation of diversity). Fiction is just one part of a massive cultural dialogue, and the dialogue determines the influence of individual works as much as they set the dialogue.

I think it's more interesting to argue that binary morality limits storytelling in a profound way, and that stories that escape it are opening a whole new world of plot and characterization opportunities. Video games offer the most extreme case study. RPGs (Bioware is by far the most prominent example) often mechanize morality explicitly by applying good and evil point values to certain actions.

Players expect that making "good" choices will have the intended results, eliminating a degree of spontaneity and failing to make the player question the limitations of their understanding and intentions. Storylines must be written to fit into this binary framework, pruning away ambiguity and stories that function more on quirk and flavor than moral conflict. In extreme cases, players stop thinking about their choices at all and simply vote by party lines. Games encourage this by rewarding ideological purists with special items and abilities.

Ambiguity is interesting, provocative, and fun. It creates complex characters. Imagine a character like Arya Stark happening in Lord of the Rings, or Ender Wiggin in Star Wars. Remember how clumsy Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side was in Revenge of the Sith, how artificial and strained it felt. And as much as you might hate it at the time, you know it's a good thing for narrative interest when bad things happen to good characters - when old mentors and assholes aren't the only protagonists with faulty plot armor.

When violence isn't the righteous removal of evil from the world, it needs to be addressed in other ways. It regains some of its rightful brutality, and it can resensitize us to its realities. Characters see the consequences of their choices; they experience grief, guilt, and pain, and grow as a result. Readers are forced to empathize with enemies who once would have been anonymous soldiers trudging into a heroic meat grinder.

The best postmodern stories present several sides of a story. The Wire and Game of Thrones encourage us to identify with some characters over others, but they never let us accept that people like Cersei Lannister are simply evil. Their actions have logic and context, human emotions, and emerged from a particular personal history.

By presenting multiple perspectives, postmodern fantasy can illustrate the limitations of our viewpoints and ideologies, calling attention to if not resolving partisan and international gridlock (condemning people who disagree with you as evil feels great but is ultimately counterproductive). Smart writers can also incorporate material forces that drove historical conflicts in our world.

For the purposes of this piece, I tried to stick to very popular examples I could count on most readers having some familiarity with. The rest of this series will highlight a number of postmodern fantasy works more or less off the beaten path, so if you're here looking for recommendations, hang in there and check back later.

PS While modern authors have done great things with non-binary morality, it's certainly not a new approach. And outside of genre literature, things have been a lot more nuanced for a very long time.

PPS Postmodern works are not inherently superior to binary works. I still love Star Wars. :/ Execution matters as much as anything, and there are of course dozens of hacks writing postmodern fantasy, especially now that Game of Thrones is so popular. I'll be one of them, some day!