Why do books, films, television programmes and computer games set in the world of wizards, warriors, elves and dragons have such an enduring appeal?

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to The Lord of the Rings, everybody loves a magical fantasy

We live in the most technologically advanced society ever known, full of wonders which would have been unimaginable only a generation ago. Every bit of our world has been mapped, catalogued and photographed. From our mobile telephones or laptops, it is possible to summon up satellite pictures of any part of the earth’s surface and to zoom in and see what every city, forest, desert and plain looks like. With the GPS facility on our phones, being lost or out of touch with other people is unheard of for most of us in our day-to-day lives. There are of course great advantages to this lifestyle, but there is too a downside; a price to be paid. This lies in the loss of wonder; the realisation that the world is no longer a mysterious place and that no hiding place is left for anything much out of the ordinary, whether it is the Loch Ness monster or lost valley of Shangri-La in the Himalayas. If these things existed, then we would spot them on Google Earth or on some webcam or other. This goes some way toward explaining the attraction of an alternative world, which is still largely unmapped and where one might stumble across the most amazing people and places; even go where no man or woman has ever before set foot. Unknown creatures dwell there, as well as races other than humans.

     The strange thing is not that so many of us have a vague desire for such alluring and magical lands, which we encounter in books, films and computer games, and seem to be so much more attractive than our own, it is that the features of these imaginary worlds almost invariably conform to the same parameters. In other words, we do not all dream up completely individual fantasies of this kind, but tend instead to use a broadly similar template or pattern. When we read fantasy fiction, watch a television series or film, or play a computer game, we subconsciously judge them against a common framework. The film version of The Lord of the Rings was so successful for this very reason; that it resembled closely the magical world with which most of us are already subconsciously familiar. The television series Game of Thrones was set in a similar universe of wizards, dragons and warriors. Fiction of this kind strikes a chord in those of European heritage and it sometimes seems that we are unthinkingly comparing narratives like these with some original of which we are only vaguely aware. A more recent example of this appeal of the lost world may be found in the Disney film Maleficent. The features of this landscape may be traced from the Arthurian legends, through to Grimm’s fairy tales and then on to the world of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Let us pause for a moment and consider what this imaginary country, for which we feel a wistful longing, is like.

     The first thing which we observe is that this is a pre-industrial era. Technology has not advanced beyond the spinning wheel and blacksmith’s forge. Machinery is wholly unknown. At the very latest, we might be looking at the medieval period, but it is altogether possible it is centuries, or even millennia, earlier than this. The land is largely untamed, with vast primeval forests and moors haunted by bears, wolves and other, even stranger, creatures such as dragons or men who can change at will into ferocious beasts. There are few cities if any. Most people live in villages surrounded by cultivated fields. Here and there are strongholds and castles of local chieftains and warlords; some of whom style themselves princes or even kings. These leaders range from wise and kind to capricious and cruel.

     The laws of nature in this universe are precisely the same as in our own. Those living there must eat and therefore grow crops, keep sheep and cattle; as well as hunting wild animals such as boar. The climate is temperate, with the same seasons with which we are familiar. The further north one travels, the colder it gets. There are no deserts or jungles and in general what we see of the flora and fauna put us in mind of Europe rather than any other of the continents which we know. The force of gravity is roughly the same as that found on Earth, night alternates with day and men and women have a natural lifespan. They grow old and die or can be killed in wars. This is not some land of wish-fulfilment, where everybody is happy or immortal. Some people are rich and others poor. There are beggars and princes. In between these two extremes are the mass of ordinary people, the warriors, farmers, craftsmen and their families.  In addition to these human inhabitants whose abilities are much the same as our own, there are various other individuals who are possessed of strange powers. These are the wizards and witches. Wizards are usually solitary beings, often wanderers with no permanent home. They very commonly carry staffs, wands or sceptres; long stick-like objects endowed with special power. Witches are sometimes a little more gregarious. One would not expect to find three or four wizards working together, but half a dozen witches might very well cooperate to cast some especially powerful spell. They may use cauldrons when conjuring up a particularly potent enchantment.

     The society which lives in this strange world is divided into three different classes or castes. These are wizards or priests, the two categories are sometimes interchangeable, warriors, and ordinary farmers and workers. Although on rare occasions a member of the labouring classes might aspire to, or even achieve, the ambition of becoming a warrior or wizard, the reverse never happens. The idea of a knight or wandering man of magic working for a living like anybody else is unthinkable.

     This is not of course, as has already been remarked, some place of wish-fulfilment; still less is it any sort of paradise. There is misery, sickness and poverty and the lengths of the lives of men and women are strictly limited. Nor is it the Land of Eternal Youth or any other form of mystical after-world. People grow old and die, misfortunes befall them, they are hungry and thirsty, life can be hard, with no promise of reward. If you wanted to dream up a fantasy world where everybody is happy and content and all our troubles melt away, this is not what you would come up with. Life here is as arduous, disappointing and hazardous as it is in the real world. It is important to realise this; if you were setting out to invent a heaven where we would all live happily ever after, this would not be the sort of scenario you would devise.

     It was remarked above that the physical world imposes the same constraints upon those living in what might be termed the magical realm as in this world; but under certain circumstances these may be evaded or overthrown. In our world, of course, we can defy gravity or prolong life by means of machinery based on scientific principles; spaceships, jet aircraft and heart transplants to give a few examples. In this other world, the laws of nature can be bent by the use of magic. If anybody wishes to travel through the air, it might be done not by going to an airport but rather by means of dragons, flying carpets or broomsticks.

      The humans often seem to share their world with other races; each of which has distinctive characteristics. In mines and caves live the small, dark dwarves, who are often surly and overly fond of gold. Then there are the fays or fairies, beings who live in the woodland and are seldom glimpsed by the humans.

     We have described above what might loosely be thought of as fairy tale land. It is the setting for most traditional stories like Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and all the rest that we remember from childhood. It is also where the Hobbits live and one would not be at all surprised to bump into Gandalf there, or Merlin, King Arthur or, for that matter, the cast of Game of Thrones! All of them would be quite at home in the land we have just looked at. Which, when you think about it, is more than a little odd. To those listed above who would not be out of place, we can add all the characters from C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, many of those from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, the cast of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the men from Beowulf and the men and women from Middle English classics like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

     So powerful is the attraction of this imaginary landscape and so universal the themes and characters found within it, the heroic warrior on a quest, the solitary wizard, the Little People and so on, that it appears likely that the whole thing, stage and actors both, has a common origin. This cannot lie in the literature of the past, for already the earliest written versions of this world are clearly based upon one original. The Icelandic Eddas, Le Morte d’Arthur, the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast; none of these can be the source of the original images. All draw though from that source, which undoubtedly lies in the pre-literate past.

     Having sketched out the topography and described some of the inhabitants of the world of fantasy and fairy tales as we know it today, I want to talk a little about a broadly similar landscape which actually did exist and see if there might be a connection between the two. Having done so, we can make a comparison between these places and see if one might have been the inspiration for the other.

     Picture, if you will, a space roughly the size of a continent, corresponding, as a matter of interest, to the dimensions of Middle Earth in the maps drawn by Tolkien’s son Christopher for the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. In the north of this huge territory are frozen wastes and, just as in our own world, the further south one travels, the warmer it becomes. For this reason, those living here regard the right hand as wholesome and good and the left-hand path as bad and undesirable. This is because they orient themselves not by facing north, as we do, but east. The right-hand way then leads to warmer and more pleasant climes and the left to the inhospitable wastelands in the north. Working out directions by reference to the north is connected with our use of magnetic compasses, a technology which was not to be found in the place at which we are looking.

     There are no cities in the largely unexplored and wild forests, plains and mountains, merely small villages and a scattering of farmsteads. In that respect, it might perhaps be compared to the American West of the mid-nineteenth century. The parallel is a pleasing and appropriate one, for most of those living here are not the indigenous inhabitants. They came originally from the east, which is why they face towards their homeland when they orient themselves for direction. Here and there are forts or castles, some of which are ruled over by men who view themselves as kings.

     In modern society, there are strict delineations between the real world and the spiritual, between the living and the dead, between fact and fiction. No such distinction exists here. Some rivers and lakes are inhabited by local deities who must be placated, in case they snatch children and drag them under the water to drown. The dead can be a menace as well, because they do not automatically leave the world of the living after their hearts stop beating. Some of them linger on or return and cause misfortune to those still living. They too must be treated with respect and propitiated. Gods sometimes adopt human form and walk the earth. Offending such a one can bring ruin upon a family.

     Luckily, there are men and women who can help people to keep on the right side of the angry and vengeful dead and know too how to keep both the elder gods and the minor deities happy, so that they will look favourably upon the farms and cause the crops to grow in due season. The men who undertake these religious and magical duties are wizards and they can be distinguished by the tall, pointed hats which they wear, as well as by the wands or staffs which they carry with them. They interpret the will of the gods and sometimes predict the future by various methods of divination. They also explain which sacrifices must be made to ensure that the earth continues to yield a good harvest and that enemies are kept at bay.

     One example of the sort of sacrifice which is regularly advised has a familiar ring to it. In the story of King Arthur, as it has come down to us, he is the possessor of an important sword called Excalibur.  As he lies wounded and at the point of death, he orders his companion to take Excalibur and hurl it into a nearby lake. When this is done, a woman’s arm rises up from the water and catches the hilt of the sword, before brandishing it three times and then sinking back into the lake with it. It has been caught by the mysterious ‘Lady of the Lake’; either an enchantress or perhaps a primeval deity of the water.  

     This story of the Lady of the Lake and the sword thrown into the water for her is a well-known one, but strikes us today as bizarre in the extreme. Why ever would anybody throw a perfectly good sword, especially a famous one like this, into a lake? It makes no sense in the real world. For those living in the world at which we are now looking, it made perfect sense to be ready and willing to give up a precious object in this way, if it meant keeping gods, wizards and witches on your side. They often sacrificed weaponry in this way, by depositing it in rivers and lakes. Their swords, shields and helmets were very important to them, luxury items which would today be the equivalent of a new sports car, but if it meant showing gratitude for victory in a battle or a plentiful harvest, then they did not hesitate. Some pools near their villages were clogged up with dozens of swords.

     Rites like this, when people would gather to give us something which was very precious and important to them, were key to understanding this society.  It was a hazardous and uncertain land, where dangers lurked at every turn. Those perils came in many forms and it was not always easy to recognise the true nature of either animals or men or women. A shabby-looking individual with his face concealed by a hood might be a wandering tramp, but he might equally well turn out to be a wizard or even a god.

     Outside the villages and on the edge of civilised and tamed farmland live wolves, bears and large cats. Even these are not always what they seem. Some of these ferocious beasts are really men who have used magic to transform themselves into animals. Such men might farm their fields by day and then turn into wolves at night; especially during a full moon. One can never be sure of strangers. An old beggar-woman may turn out to be a beautiful enchantress in disguise, an old man walking the roads might be the king of the gods, visiting the earth to see how his subjects are behaving. For this reason, it is wise to be hospitable to lone travellers and to give alms to beggars. Those who neglect these duties have sometimes been cursed by a witch or punished by the gods.

     At night, when the work was done, the villagers would listen to stories and the re-telling of legends. Sometimes they would tell each other tales of long ago, but the wizards who visited them were also professional bards and they would relate poems and stories to entertain their hosts. Some of these are still known to us today. Beauty and the Beast was one of them and the idea of a fairy causing a man to be changed into a hideous animal caused no raised eyebrows, for all those listening had heard of similar cases. Rumpelstiltskin was also a favourite, because there too one of the Little People played a central role.

     Stories about the ‘good folk’ or ‘hidden people’ struck a chord with those in this world, because they were as much a real and present danger as the wolves which sometimes carried away lambs from their flocks. Sometimes babies would be stolen away by the fairies or they might raid an orchard and take all the apples from the trees. Tools and farm implements could be stolen at night. Younger people believed the Little People to be supernatural beings, but some of the older villagers remembered that they themselves were relative newcomers to the land and that they had driven out the original inhabitants, killing most of them. A remnant lingered on though, eking out a wretched existence in forests and caves, conducting low-key guerrilla operations against the invaders, by kidnapping their children and engaging in acts of minor terrorism.

     The two worlds at which we have looked are so similar as to be all but indistinguishable. It takes no great leap of faith to believe that one is derived from the other. The second of the two descriptions given above is of Bronze Age Europe and although a little imagination and colour has been added and a few shrewd guesses made to fill in one or two blanks, the facts are presented pretty much as the most recent work in archaeology and genetics suggest.

     Of course, the question we must next address is the extent to which it is reasonable to believe that we most of us have in our minds an image of European life in the Bronze Age, some 4,000 years ago and that this exerts a powerful influence upon our choice of television programme or the computer games which we play. This sounds, on the face of it, a little fanciful. However, as we shall see, it certainly happens. The story of Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake is a good instance of this. The practice of Bronze Age weapons being consigned to rivers and lakes ended at or before the Roman occupation of Britain. The first written account of Arthur’s sword being deposited in a lake in the same way may be found over a 1,000 years later. Assuming that it is not mere coincidence, which seems unlikely for such a peculiar incident, and that it was indeed based upon the sacrifice of swords and other war-gear to spirits and fairies of the water, then stories of this practice must have been passed down from generation to generation and kept alive purely by word of mouth. Examining the influence of the short stories which were dreamed up in an attempt to make sense of the world in which they lived will shed light upon this idea. We know these narratives today as fairy tales, although not all of them by any means feature fairies or elves.

     Talk of ‘fairy tales’ today and most people will understand us to be referring either to old stories for children or, alternatively, just lies; ‘fairy tales’ having become a euphemism for falsehoods. Actually of course, real fairy tales are neither of these things but rather short stories and anecdotes about life and death in what we have described above as the magical realm. Fairy tales is something of a misnomer of course, because not all these tales are about fairies. Rather, they all take place in that strange landscape at which we have been looking. As the author of The Lord of the Rings wrote in an essay on the subject called ‘On Fairy-Stories’, these are, ‘stories about the adventures of men in Faërie’. In other words, the primary feature of fairy tales is not the Little People or the talking animals which might be found there, but rather the way in which humans interact with these other sentient beings.

     It might be worth going off at a slight tangent for a moment to remark that we are so used to the idea of fiction as being a ‘thing’, that we sometimes forget what a strange idea it is to write whole books about events which never happened. One quite understands why stories about gods and goddesses and foundation myths of nations might be devised and repeated, even though there may not be any more truth in them than there is in the works of fantasy novelists such as Terry Pratchett. Such works serve a useful purpose, perhaps unifying a people and endowing them with an identity. For the Romans, the story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf and of the intrigues and adventures of their pantheon of deities were an integral part of their culture. These legends are not fiction though; at least not in the same way that Little Red Riding Hood and Jane Eyre are.

     Thinking of Jane Eyre reminds us that the whole European literary tradition, the idea of novels to give one example, is inextricably linked to what we now dismiss patronisingly as ‘fairy tales’. The reason for this is that the themes and plots of those first stories told in Europe are incredibly ancient and are the foundation for the entire story-telling tradition which we now call ‘fiction’. The most successful and beloved of classic novels are often merely extended versions of familiar fairy tales. Just how old are those fairy tales which we still relate to our children at bedtime?

     In 2016 an article was published in the Royal Society Open Science magazine about the origins of some of the most popular and well-known European fairy tales; things such as the story of Rumpelstiltskin and his attempts to get hold of a human baby. Another old story which was studied was Beauty and the Beast, a perennial favourite which has been made into two successful films in recent years. Researchers studied themes and language in much the way that the DNA of populations is examined in order to trace the origin of this or that ethnic group. Most of the traditional fairy stories which we know were only written down for the first time as lately as the sixteenth century. This has led to the idea that far from being ancient oral traditions, tales like Beauty and the Beast are no more than literary creations from the Tudor period.

     The methods used to establish the age of stories like Rumpelstiltskin are difficult to explain. Essentially, the aim was to distinguish between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ transmission of the basic structures of narratives. Horizontal spread means the way that a particular tale can be spread geographically from one part of the world to another, while vertical transmission refers to the way that it is handed on in the same place by word of mouth. The question studied was whether there was enough evidence to say if the fairy tales had been invented by somebody a few centuries ago and written down or if they might have been handed down in an oral tradition for a lot longer. In the same way that biological inheritance can be studied and measured, so too can language structures.

     All but three or four of the languages of Europe descend from a single, original language which was being spoken in what is now Ukraine, some thousands of years ago. Just as the descent of European and Indian languages may be charted from the original Proto-Indo-European, so too were differing versions of the fairy tales in languages as varied as Greek, Russian, Hindi and Welsh by those conducting the study, the results of which were published in 2016. The variations were contrasted and compared and a family tree put together, showing how the narrative structure had altered over time and across space. The conclusions reached by this meticulous study were absolutely breath-taking. The story of Jack and the Beanstalk was found to be part of a family of tales which could be summarised as ‘The Boy who Stole the Ogre’s Treasure’. The original of this family of stories, versions of which can be found as far afield as Iran and India, was circulating about 5,000 years ago, just at the time that the Proto-Indo-European language was splitting into western and eastern branches. In other words, a staple of bedtime stories and British pantomimes was being told around hearths during the Bronze Age. Beauty and the Beast proved to be a little more recent, dating only from around 2000 BC. One story though, The Smith and the Devil, turned out to be the oldest of all.

     Versions of The Smith and the Devil are to be found across the whole of Europe and much of south Asia, as far east as Bangladesh. A worker in metal, iron in later stories although possibly copper or bronze in the earliest iterations of the tale, makes a deal with a malevolent, supernatural being. After the coming of Christianity to Europe, the being is identified as the devil, but in other cultures he can be a genie or other evil spirit. The deal entails the smith or metal-worker gaining great power in exchange for his soul. The idea of somebody making a pact with the devil in this way is of course a fairly common one in folklore. There is even an adjective for such transactions; Faustian. This is from the story of Faust, who made such an agreement with the devil which he ended up regretting. The Smith and the Devil has rather a different ending, because the human manages to outwit the entity with whom he entered into the arrangement. One of the powers which the smith received in exchange for his soul was the ability to weld or braze an object to any other thing he chose. For a man working at a forge, this would of course be a very useful skill to possess. The first use which the smith made of his new ability was to fix the devil to a tree, so that he would never be able to come and collect the smith’s soul.

     All the indications are that this story was passed down by word of mouth from an original which was first told 6000 years ago. Returning now to Beauty and the Beast, a relative youngster which is probably no more than 4,000 years old, we consider what was said above about stories of this kind being the inspiration for, and foundation of, most of the literature which we have subsequently seen in Europe. Some readers may have thought this claim a little fanciful, but consider for a moment the essential feature of Beauty and the Beast. It boils down to this, an innocent young woman, a virgin, comes to a large house or castle which is inhabited by a man under some tragedy or enchantment which makes him behave like a beast at times. She falls in love with him and the enchantment or sadness is lifted and he becomes an ordinary, loving husband.

     We have here the theme of Jane Eyre, of course. The same thing happens, with the virgin going to live in the huge house in a remote location. The place is ruled by a man under some kind of spell, which causes him to be sometimes unpleasant and at other times sad. He is redeemed by the maiden’s love and they live happily ever after. This plot also forms the basis for the film, The Sound of Music. Another example would be Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. There is something about the idea of the virgin and the intimidating man under a curse or enchantment which appeals to us, even in the twenty-first century.

     Just as we tend to judge fantasy novels and films according how closely they align with a sub-conscious mental pattern to which we compare them, so too do we use a similar process when evaluating all fiction, by seeking familiar points of reference. It may be a startling revelation that the enduring success of a film like The Sound of Music owes a debt to a fable dating back to the Bronze Age, but the same can be said of many other novels, films and television series. The child with mysterious parentage is such an idea and has contributed in no small measure to the enormous popularity of the books about Harry Potter, to give one example.

     Merlin is a key player in one of the earliest versions which we have of the child who has unknown parents and turns out to be more important than anybody could guess. Those familiar with the legends associated with King Arthur will know that his father was King Uther. Because the times were so perilous and Uther feared that harm might befall his baby son, he entrusted the child to Merlin, who promised to make sure that he would grow up safely. Merlin placed the child with a foster family; Sir Ector and his son Kay. Arthur grew up not knowing his parents or realising that he had a special destiny. This theme is one which features often in Indo-European myths; the hero who does not know that he is special. We see it with Achilles and Theseus in Greek mythology, Romulus and Remus in Roman myths and of course, more recently Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars cycle, Aquaman in a recent film of that name and Harry Potter. Wizards and wise men always have a role to play in these stories.

     We have seen that some of our fairy tales have their origins 5,000 or 6,000 years ago in the early days of the Bronze Age. It has even been suggested that one old story, that of the swan maiden, might date from the Palaeolithic, that is to say the Old Stone Age which ended over 11,000 years ago. It seems certain that humans have been making up stories about weird events such as a witch imprisoning a young girl in a tower or a little girl wandering into a house occupied by a family of talking bears, from before the dawn of civilisation. These stories were being told at a time when there was no writing and the people telling them were often living in tents or other makeshift dwelling-places.

This then is why the magical realm, the stage upon which so many of our fantasy narratives are set, exerts such a fascination for us. It is an integral part of European history, our roots if you will and memories of that Bronze Age world have been handed down to us, first by word of mouth and later by the medium of print, film, television and , computer, for over 5,000 years.