It’s true, I may not blog a lot myself—I always mean to, but it just doesn't seem to happen—but I do my best to find other fascinating writers, both new and established, for you to discover along with me. Gail Z. Martin is one of the wonder women at Broad Universe http://broaduniverse.org/, which is a professional organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and
celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction and fantasy. One of the nicer benefits of joining is meeting so many great women with so many interests in common. For example, the following speculation.
What is it about the Middle Ages that makes us think of magic?
Maybe it’s because those times seem so far removed from our own that it’s difficult to believe they were actually real, and not just an elaborate backstory created by Hollywood. Especially here in the United States, where our oldest buildings are only from the 1500s, anything older seems hard to imagine.
Of course, magic was considered to be real during the Middle Ages. Throughout Europe, witch hunts
brought many innocents to a bad end. Educated people lived in fear of witches and curses, werewolves and vampires. Given the lack of scientific knowledge, illness, natural disasters and even crop failures were blamed on magic, which seemed the most likely explanation.I spend a lot of time researching background elements for my epic fantasy series, and it’s no surprise that I’m frequently drawing on medieval sources, legends, and real-life occurrences involving magic. I’m fascinated with a world where magic was believed to be real, a world whose inhabitants saw mystery—and horror—at every turn. What did it feel like to live in a world where so little was explainable? How vulnerable would you feel if there were no scientific explanations for the weather, disease, mental illness, blights and pestilence, if those and other hardships seemed to arise from curses and evil spells?
Medieval Europe was a place of dark forests and wild seas. The world was still not well explored, so the discovery of previously unknown peoples, places, animals and objects seemed magical in the literal sense of the word. The Old Religions acknowledged magic as real, venerating it in their legends and rituals. Catholicism disdained magic, but replaced it with an unending series of miracles and miracle-working saints whose legends often ventured into what can only be termed “magic.”
And yet, people really don’t change. Examine today’s urban myths, and you’ll find more than a hint of magical thinking as people try to explain big, complicated events with simple causes. Logic need not apply, and many urban myths and conspiracy theories won’t hold up for a moment to scientific evidence, but there is something soothing at a primal level about simple, organic explanations in our nano-tech world.
I guess that’s why I love writing epic fantasy with magic. I enjoy the idea of a world that isn’t completely explainable, filled with wonder and mystery, where magic can and does happen and things aren’t always as they seem. In our world full of satellite images, Google Glass, and cellular biology, sometimes it’s fun to imagine not knowing everything. I enjoy the mystery.
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More about Gail Z. Martin
Gail Z. Martin is the author of Ice Forged in her new The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga (Orbit Books), plus The Chronicles of The Necromancer series (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven & Dark Lady’s Chosen) and The Fallen Kings Cycle (The Sworn and The Dread). She is also the author of two series on ebook short stories: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures and the Deadly Curiosities Series. Find her online at www.AscendantKingdoms.com.
Gail's Videos
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One thing about the stories left to us from the medieval period where magic features: the authors/editors had their own notion of what magic was and how to describe it. You don't get fireballs in Chretien de Troyes or Marie de France, or for that matter, in the Ulster cycle, the Book of Conquests, or the Kalevala.
ReplyDeleteWhat you *do* get are shapechangers (whether their own shapes or someone else's), beguiling magic, illusions, and charms against the above.
Perhaps because of this, the tone of the later iterations of these sorts of stories feels more like magical realism than what we have come to think of as fantasy, in that the fantastic elements often don't feel like that big of a deal in the context of the story. They're simply there, like trees and rocks and water, part of the landscape.
Excellent points, Jeffrey. Thanks!
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