This was a really great article. This part stood out to me in particular:
> But what these tales are absolutely forbidden from representing is any agent or action that falls into the social class or milieu of the people who chiefly collected and read them. So the Grimms’ own world of government employees, highly literate women, libraries and universities is perhaps the most profoundly forbidden space of the folk tale. Indeed you might even say that not including that world is what makes a tale seem folkish, rather than, say, novelish. Part of the fiction of the Volk is that there is an absolute social void between the princes, the kings, the princesses on the one hand, and the tailors, discharged soldiers, huntsmen, kitchen maids and impoverished forest dwellers on the other.
I wonder why we don't see this perspective more often in modern popular fantasy. It seems that for the most part, they stick close to Tolkien or Arthurian models, primarily following the exploits of kings and knights. Even the popular fantasy authors who actively seek to subvert the genre's tropes tend to stick close to that perspective. And when we are treated to the perspective of a "common" person, they often turn out to have been born special for some reason, soon finding out they're some powerful person's lost heir or the subject of some prophecy, with the character being swept off into the world of the ruling class. Obviously, a lot of folk tales end with the commoner running off with a prince or princess, which isn't terribly dissimilar, but I don't remember Cinderella or Snow White being special beyond being pretty and charming.
It may be a blind spot of my own, but I can't think of many examples of fantasy with truly common folk as the primary perspective.
The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is definitely one, as well as a bunch of the "big epics" like the Malazan empire / The annals of the Black Company?
It may be less common than "high castles", but that is either because of opportunity cost (non-special characters do not survive well this kind of world, so their stories are either short or picaresque) or feature creep if they start from the bottom: if you want an uplifting tale, upwards mobility is needed and at some point only the king is up...
>It may be a blind spot of my own, but I can't think of many examples of fantasy with truly common folk as the primary perspective.
How common and how fantastic?
Conan is a hillman. He just becomes more accomplished over time.
Fafyrd is from a frozen waste, trained as a skald. Notable only because he left his tribe interested in civilization.
Vaatzes from KJ Parkers Engineer Trilogy is foreman. A really good engineer, but replaced instantly when he is banished.
Sort of inverted with Saevus Corax, where the main guy is trying really hard not to be royalty, and so he scavenges dead people on battlefields for a living hoping no one will find him.
> I don't remember Cinderella or Snow White being special beyond being pretty and charming.
Snow White was, at least in the canonical Disney 1937 version, "the fairest of them all": the most attractive person known to the magic mirror.
Cinderella was the chosen one, high femme edition: rather than being handed a magic ring or sword she got a pair of shoes and a carriage. Both of these are folk tales that fit the fantasy trope mould.
Really I think this is a slightly circular problem of genre, because if you try to write this sort of story without centering on The Chosen One you end up just doing literary realism.
(possibly urban fantasy gets into this more, by explicitly starting from the modern post-feudal world. Anyway, I agree with you that it's a great article!)
There's an error in the text. It says they were Huguenots who left after the Edict of Nantes, which is not true. They left after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had protected Huguenots until then. This last edict is called the Edict of Fontainebleau.
So they left after the Edict of Fontainebleau.
Fantasy is such an underappreciated genre. I recently read an ARC on RoyalRoad of all places by one of our own (it’s called Farisa’s Crossing) and was blown away.
The way I explain it to my friends who only read contemporary literary fiction is that fantasy is what we’ve been doing as storytellers for thousands of years, which means there’s a lot of implicit knowledge in the craft when done at the highest levels. I also enjoy literary fiction for the writing and the sheer talent it takes to make ordinary, believable events nearly fantastic—or at least compelling—but it’s not either/ or and the idea that there’s some hierarchy of genres is hogwash.
On this site, I was thinking this would be referring to Ogres in the Steve Jackson sense of autonomous AI supertanks featured in the the classic board game (and several computer games since)
PostgreSQL, former name Postgres, is the successor of INGRES = INteractive Graphics REtrieval System. Maybe OGRES is the Original Gangster REtrieval System.
I think parent was let down by the wording. The paradox is: "the people who go to the nude beach to be naked are not the people you actually want to see naked".
There's no implication that the people who go there want to be seen naked, just that they aren't easy on the eyes (of any innocent bystanders).
