Folktales

Most of these folktales were not new, they were simply adapted from even older ones. Aesop’s fables may have been some of the earliest examples, but the morals in many of the medieval and modern tales are much less obvious. These folktales did not reach their final forms until much later, with the Grimm Brothers (to be discussed presently). Meanwhile, folktales took a hiatus with the Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment. (Whilst many did continue in oral form, and some were published in books, no new folktales were created, although many were modified in ever decreasing proportions.) During these periods, which together stretch from about 1300 to about 1800, humanity was experiencing an explosion of knowledge and reason like never before. As a result, folklore was not really a required medium; there was simply to much to learn about the world around us!

However, this does not mean that fantasy was dead. Instead, it continued in a completely different medium: the traveler’s tale. This first began in the late Middle Ages, with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. In this story, written in Middle English, some pilgrims on the road to Canterbury entertain each other with tales they have picked up, some of them supposedly true, but all of them quite spectacular! After Marco Polo went to China and reported the wonders that he saw there, it seemed to the world as if anything was possible, and as a result, traveler’s tales and fantastic accounts purporting to be true sprung up everywhere. One such case is The Unfortunate Traveller, written by Thomas Nash in 1594, detailing the unhappy life of Jack Wilton, who has many (unlikely) adventures.

This continued with Shakespeare, whose many plays included some clearly fantastic ones, with many of the elements now common in fantasy literature. Shakespeare was almost certainly inspired by various Greek and Roman myths and legends. Two such plays are A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written about 1595, and The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, written about 1611. The first tells of the rather insane and very funny adventures of four lovers in a magical forest inhabited by Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the faeries, their entourages, and Puck, a “mischievous little sprite” who gets his hands on some magical flowers and, by the end of the night, has all the lovers in love with the wrong people! (Fortunately, it all turns out okay at the end.) The Tempest is a much more serious play, which is the story of Duke Prospero, who has been banished to a remote island and uses his wizardry and his servant, an air-spirit named Ariel, to get revenge on the evil people who banished him, find a husband for his daughter, Miranda, and at last reclaim his dukedom.

Towards the end of the Enlightenment, the best example of the traveler’s tale was published: Gulliver’s Travels, written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift, about a man who, during the course of many Sinbadian adventures, travels to many remote (and nonexistent) places, meets their inhabitants, and sees the degradation and hypocrisy of humankind (the tale was actually a satire, but nowadays it is often read as straight literature).

After the Enlightenment, fantasy at last began to come into its own as people realized that almost every major continent had been explored and science was beginning to explain all the wonders of the world. As a result, people turned to fantasy to help take them away from this world and into the one of their imaginations. This began with the revival of folklore, now as children’s stories. The Grimm Brothers were mainly responsible for this; their release of Grimm’s Fairy Tales (an updated version of Household Tales) in 1857 set the final versions of almost all the folktales that we know today.

However, people were not content with just folktales; instead, authors began writing a new type of book... the fantasy book.