#fantasy read-list

Fantasy read-list

Part A: Ancient fantasy

3) Medieval fantasy - the Arthuriana

While one root of the fantasy genre lies within the mythologies of the world, the other is coming from numerous medieval tales and supernatural stories, most of them being centered around what we call today the “Arthurian myth” or the “Arthuriana”. Though, in truth, the genre of these texts is a bit bigger - it is the “Matter of Britain”, which is larger than the Arthurian texts themselves.

And we will begin our list with... French texts! It might surprise you - you might say “But aren’t Arthurian texts all English?”. No. The Matter of Britain designates all the medieval texts that are not the “Matter of Rome” or the “Matter of Thebes” (aka coming from the texts and topics of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece). Britain is, of course, England, as in “Great-Britain”. But if there is a GREAT Britain, it means there is a “Little Britain”... And this Little Britain is none other than the Bretagne region of France, aka the north-west of France. The Arthurian myth is half-rooted in England, yes, but another half of the origins and founding texts of the Arthurian legend come from France. The famous Broceliande forest is in France, not in England. 

# The founding texts of the French Arthurian literature are without a doubt the novels of Chrétien de Troyes. Considered the very first French novel of history, they created many of the well-known “Arthurian legends” of today. There is a total of five of these novels. Two are indirectly tied to the Arthurian world - Eric and Enide, Cligès. Two are right at the heart of the Arthuriana: Yvain or the Knight of the Lion, as well as Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart. And his final novel is incomplete, but it is the one that created the most famous part of the Arthurian literature: Perceval or the Story of the Grail, the first literary apparition of the famous “Holy Grail” (fun fact: the Grail wasn’t originally a cup, but a fish-plate. Go read the book, you’ll understand Xp). 

# Equating and rivaling Chrétien’s novels, we find the lais of Marie de France. A “lai” is actually a short fiction typical of the Middle-Ages, something halfway between a narrative poem and a fairytale, telling short, concise, but very efficient stories. We have a LOT of lais that came to us anonymously, carrying numerous literary stories or folktales of medieval times - but in France the most famous lais are those attributed to a certain “Mary of France”. She wrote twenty or so VERY famous lais that are seen as one of the defining feature of old medieval French literature. We are talking Bisclaveret, one of the oldest werewolf stories, we are talking of the supernatural romance of Guigemar, we are talking about the twin-shenanigans of Le Fresne, about the tragic love of Chevrefoil, and about the Arthurian lai of Lanval, about a man in love with a fairy but wooed by Guinevere herself. 

Mind you, there are other lais not composed by Marie de France, such as the one of Guingamor or the one of Sir Orfeo, but they are mostly anonymous.

# The works of Robert de Boron. Robert de Boron continued the work started by Chrétien de Troyes (and also took inspiration from the poet’s Wave semi-historical semi-fictional work, such as the Roman de Brut, a historical chronicle where Merlin and dragons appear), and built the next “step” in the Arthurian myth in France. Unfortunately we do not have his full work anymore, merely a fragment of his poem “Merlin” (where he presents the famous story of the “born of a demon” episode), a short “Perceval” story, and his full “Estoire du Graal ou Joseph d’Arimathie”, which is where the background of the Grail as the cup that collected Christ’s blood appears. Together they are considered as “le Petit Cycle du Graal”, “The Small Cycle of the Grail”, preceeding the following item...

# More interestingly, after the enormous success of Chrétien de Troyes’ work, there was an entire series of books that were created, remembered today as the Lancelot-Graal, or the Prose Lancelot, the Vulgate Cycle. These are five texts in prose (in opposition to Chrétien and Boron’s verse works), who continue or rewrite the previous author’s texts - these are L’Estoire del Saint Graal (L’Histoire du Saint Graal/The History of the Holy Grail), L’Estoire de Merlin (L’Histoire de Merlin/Merlin in prose),  Le Lancelot (also called Lancelot in prose or Lancelot proper), La Queste del Saint Graal (The Quest of the Holy Grail), and La Mort d’Artu (The death of Artu). This cycle was followed by three prose texts known as “The Post-Vulgate Cycle” (Histoire du Saint Graal, Merlin, Queste-Mort Artu) which are merely the transcription in prose of some of Boron works, mixed with a rewrite of the “Tristan en prose”, an old novel of the Tristan and Iseult cycle (and the first that links the legendary duo with the Arthurian world).

# The Roman de Perceforest is a quite unique work designed to unite the “romans d’Alexandre” (Alexandrian novels, a big branch of medieval French literature centered around the adventure of Alexander the Great) and the Arthurian novels - more importantly, Perceforest is the oldest known literary version of the fairytale Sleeping Beauty.

# A section should be left here for the various novels involving the fairy Mélusine, one of the main characters of the French medieval legends. In fact, she is recognized (by Georges Dumézil’s work and those that continued it) as one of the two archetypal fairies of the middle-ages (the Melusinian fairy being the fairy entering the human world to live with humans, opposing the Morganian fairy who snatches humans into the otherworld). The legend of Mélusine was most notably recorded in Jean d’Arras “Roman de Mélusine”, and in Coudrette’s own “Roman de Mélusine”.

# There are many, MANY more literary works of medieval France, but to stay in the angle of “ancient fantasy” I will merely quote two more. On one side, la Chanson des quatre fils d’Aymon, a famous medieval epic which notably depicts the figure of Maugis the Enchanter, the other main sorcerer of medieval texts alongside Merlin (he has his own poem, La Chanson de Maugis d’Aigremont). On the other, the one one, the classic, the best-seller, the unavoidable Roman de Renart, the Novel of Reynart, the tentacular set of texts depicting the numerous adventures of the most famous European trickster in an animalistic parody of the Arthurian world.

If we jump outside of France to England, we have a different set of texts:

# The works of Geoffrey of Monmouth. This man wrote some of the earliest works part of the “Arthurian myth”, and from which a lot of elements were taken to create the “Arthuriana”. While his most famous work is “Historia Regum Britanniae”, a semi-historical chronicle of the kings of Britain which contains one of the earliest appearance of King Arthur as we know him today, he also wrote two texts fundamental to the figure of Merlin: Prophetiae Merlini, and Vita Merlini. 

# Otia Imperialia, by Gervase of Tilbury. It was a work created as a gift to emperor Otto V, and it was supposed to be an encyclopedia of geographical, historical and scientific matters - but it is actually containing a LOT of mythical and legendary elements, including entire part of the “Arthurian myth” presented as historical facts - hence its latter name “The Book of Marvels”. 

# Of course, we can’t list the major Arthuriana English works without talking about the most famous one: “Le Morte d’Arthur”, the final result of the “evolution” of the Arthurian myth. Thomas Malory’s attempt at creating a complete legend uniting all of the English and French Arthurian texts (though heavily inspired by the Lancelot-Graal cycle I described above). This text became the “definitive Arthurian text” in England for a very long time - and in more recent days, it was the main inspiration for the famous Arthurian novel “The Once and Future King” by T. H. White.

Part B: The First Classical Fantasy

2) On the other side, a century of France... 

As I said in my previous post, for this section I will limit myself to two geographical areas: on one side the British Isles (especially England/Scotland), and now France. More specifically, the France of fairytales! 

Maybe you didn’t know, but the genre of fairy tales, and the very name “fairy tale” was invented by the French! Now, it is true that fairytales existed long before that as oral tales spread from generations to generations, and it is also true that fairy tales had entered literature and been written down before the French started to write down their own... But the fairytale genre as we know it today, and the specific name “fairy tale”, “conte de fées”, is a purely French AND literary invention. 

# If we really want to go back to the very roots of fairy tales in literature, the oldest fairytale text we have still today, it would be a specific segment of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (or The Metamorphoses depending on your favorite title). In it, you find the Tale of Psyche and Cupid, and this story, which got MASSIVELY popular during the Renaissance, is actually the “original” fairytale. In it you will find all sorts of very common fairytale tropes and elements (the hidden husband one must not see, the wicked stepmother imposing three impossible tasks, the bride wandering in search of her missing husband and asking inanimate elements given a voice...), as well as the traditional fairytale context (an old woman telling the story to a younger audience to carry a specific message). In fact, all French fairytale authors recognized Psyche and Cupid as an influence and inspiration for their own tales, often making references to it, or including it among the “fairytales” of their time. 

# The French invented the genre and baptized it, but the Italian started writing the tales and began the new fashion! The first true corpus, the first literary block of fairytales, is actually dating from the 16th century Italy. Two authors, Straparola and Basile, inspired by the structure, genre and enormous success of Boccace’s Decameron, published two anthologies respectively titled, Piacevoli Notti (The Facetious Nights) and the Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales. These books were anthologies of what we would call today fairytales, stories of metamorphosed princes, and fairies, and ogres, and magical animals, and bizarre transformations, and curses needing to be broken, and damsels needing to be rescued... In fact, these books contain the “literary ancestors” and the “literary prototypes” of some of the very famous fairytales we know today. The ancestors of Sleeping Beauty (The Sun, the Moon and Thalia), Cinderella (Cenerentola), Snow-White (Lo cuorvo/The Raven), Rapunzel (Petrosinella) or Puss in Boots (Costantino Fortunato, Cagliuso)... 

However be warned: these books were intended to be licentious, rude and saucy. They were not meant to be refined and delicate tales - far from it! Scatological jokes are found everywhere, many of the tales are sexual in nature, there’s a lot of very gory and bloody moments... It was basically a series sex-blood-and-poop supernatural comedies where most of the characters were grotesque caricatures or laughable beings. We are far, far away from the Disney fairytales... 

# The big success and admiration caused by the Italian works prompted however the French to try their hand at the genre. They took inspiration from these stories, as well as from the actual oral fairytales that were told and spread in France itself, and turned them into literary works meant to entertain the salons and the courts. This was the birth of the French fairytale, at the end of the 17th century - and the birth of the fairytale itself, since the name “fairy tale” was invented to designate the work of these authors. 

The greatest author of French fairytale is, of course, Charles Perrault with his Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Stories or Tales of the Past), mistakenly referred to by everyone today as Les Contes de Ma Mère L’Oie (Mother Goose Fairytales - no relationship to the Mother Goose of nursery rhymes). Charles Perrault is today the only name remembered by the general public and audience when it comes to fairytales. He is THE face of fairytales in France and part of the “trio of fairytale names” alongside Grimm and Andersen. He wrote some of the most famous fairytales: Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella... He also wrote fairytales that are considered today classics of French culture, even though they are not as well known internationally: Donkey Skin, Diamonds and Toads or Little Thumbling. The first Disney fairytale movies (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella) were based on his stories! 

But another name should seat alongside his. If Charles Perrault was the father of fairytales, madame d’Aulnoy was their mother. She was for centuries just as famous and recognized as Charles Perrault - when Tchaikovsky made his “Sleeping Beauty” ballet, he made heavy references to both Perrault and d’Aulnoy - only to be completely ignored and erased by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for all sorts of reasons (including the fact she was a woman). But Madame d’Aulnoy had stories translated all the way to Russia and India, and she wrote twice more fairytales as Perrault, and she was the author of the very first chronological French fairytale! (L’Ile de la Félicité, The Island of Felicity). Her fairytales were compiled in Les Contes des Fées (The Tales of Fairies), and Contes Nouveaux, ou Les Fées à la mode (New Tales, or Fairies in fashion) - and while for quite some times madame d’Aulnoy fell into obscurity, many of her tales are still known somehow and stayed classics that people could not attribute a name to. The White Doe (an incorrect translation of “The Doe in the Wood), The White Cat, The Blue Bird, The Sheep, Cunning Cinders, The Orange-Tree and the Bee, The Yellow Dwarf, The Story of Pretty Goldilocks (an incorrect translation of “Beauty with Golden Hair”), Green Serpent... 

A similar warning should be held as with the Italian fairytales - because the French fairytales aren’t exactly as you would imagine. These fairytales were very literary - far away from the short, lacking, simplified folklore-like tales a la Grimm. They were pieces of literature meant to be read as entertainment for aristocrats and bourgeois, in literary salons. As a result, these pieces were heavily influenced (and heavily referenced) things such as the Greco-Roman poems, or the medieval Arthuriana tales, and the most shocking and vulgar sexual and scatological elements of the Italian fairytales were removed (the violence and bloody part sometimes also). But it doesn’t mean these stories were the innocent tales we know today either... These fairytales were aimed at adults, and written by adults - which means, beyond all the cultural references, there are a lot of wordplays, social critics, courtly caricatures and hidden messages between the lines. The sexual elements might not be overtly present for example, but they are here, and can be found for those that pay attention. These stories have “morals” at the end, but if you pay attention to the tale and read carefully, you realize these morals either do not make any sense or are inadequated to the tales they come with - and that’s because fairy tales were deeply subversive and humoristic tales. People today forgot that these fairytales were meant to be read, re-read, analyzed and dissected by those that spend their days reading and discussing about it - things are never so simple... 

# While Perrault and d’Aulnoy are the two giants of French fairytales, and the ones embodying the genre by themselves, they were but part of a wider circle of fairytale authors who together built the genre at the end of the 17th century. But unfortunately most of them fell into obscurity... Perrault for example had a series of back-and-forth coworks with a friend named Catherine Bernard and his niece mademoiselle Lhéritier, both fairytale authors too. In fact, the “game” of their “discussion through their work” can be seen in a series of three fairytales that they wrote together, each author varying on a given story and referencing each-other in the process: Catherine Bernard wrote Riquet à la houppe (Riquet with the Tuft), Charles Perrault wrote his own Riquet à la houppe in return, and mademoiselle Lhéritier formed a third variation with the story Ricdin-Ricdon. Other fairytale authors of the time include madame de Murat/comtesse de Murat, mademoiselle de La Force, or Louise de Bossigny/comtesse d’Auneuil. Yes, the fairytale scene was dominated by women, since the fairytale as a genre we perceived as “feminine” in nature. There were however a few men in it too, alongside Perrault, such as the knight de Mailly with his Les Illustres Fées (Illustrious Fairies) or Jean de Préchac with his Contes moins contes que les autres (Fairy tales less fairy than others). 

A handful of these fairytales not written by either Perrault or d’Aulnoy ended up translated in English by Andrew Lang, who included them in his famous Fairy Books. For example, The Wizard King, Alphege or the Green Monkey, Fairer-than-a-Fairy (The Yellow Fairy Book) or The Story of the Queen of the Flowery Isles (The Grey Fairy Book).

# These people were however only the first wave, the first generation of what would become a “century of fairytales” in France. After this first wave, the publication of a new work at the beginning of the 18th century shook French literature: Antoine Galland translation+rewriting of The One Thousand and One Nights, also known later as The Arabian Nights. This work created a new wave and passion in France for “Arabian-flavored fairytales”. Everybody knows the Arabian Nights today, thanks to the everlasting success of some of its pieces (Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, The Tale of Scheherazade...), but less people know that after its publication in France tons of other books were published, either translating-rewriting actual Arabian folktales, or completely inventing Arabian-flavors fairytales to ride on the new fashion. Pétis de la Croix published Les Milles et Un Jours, Contes Persans, “The One Thousand and One Days, Persian tales” to rival Galland’s own book. Jean-Paul Bignon wrote a book called Les Aventures d’Abdalla (The Adventures of Abdalla), and Jacques Cazotte a fairytale called La Patte de Chat (The Cat’s Paw). I could go on to list a lot of works, but to show you the “One Thousand and One” mania - after the success of 1001 Nights and 1001 Days, a man called Thomas-Simon Gueulette came to bank on the phenomenon, and wrote, among other things, The One Thousand and One Hours, Peruvian tales and The One Thousand and One Quarter-of-Hours, Tartar Tales. 

# Then came what could be considered either the second or third “wave” or “generation” of fairytales. It is technically the third since it follows the original wave (Perrault and d’Aulnoy times, end of the 17th) and the Arabian wave (begining of the 18th). But it can also be counted as the second generation, since it was the decision in the mid 18th century to rewrite French fairytales a la Perrault and d’Aulnoy, rejecting the whole Arabian wave that had fallen over literature. So, technically the “return” of French fairytales. 

The most defining and famous story to come of this generation was, Beauty and the Beast. The version most well-known today, due to being the shortest, most simplified and most recent, was the one written by Mme Leprince de Beaumont, in her Magasin des Enfants. Beaumont’s Magasin des Enfants was heavily praised and a great best-seller at the time because she was the one who had the idea of making fairytales 1- for children and 2- educational, with ACTUAL morals in them, and not fake or subversive morals like before. If people think fairytales are sweet stories for children, it is partially her fault, as she began the creation of what we would call today “children literature”. However Leprince de Beaumont did not invent the Beauty and the Beast fairytale - in truth she rewrote a previous literary version, much longer and more complex, written by madame de Villeneuve in her book La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins (The Young American Girl and the sea tales). Madame de Villeneuve was another fairy-tale author of this “fairytale renewal”. Other names I could mention are the comtesse de Ségur, who wrote a set of fairytales that were translated in English as Old French Fairytales (she was also a defender of fairytales being made into educational stories for children), and mademoiselle de Lubert, who went the opposite road and rather tried to recreate subversive, comical, bizarre fairytales in the style of madame d’Aulnoy - writing tales such as Princess Camion, Bear Skin, Prince Glacé et Princesse Etincelante (Prince Frozen and Princess Shining), Blancherose (Whiterose)... 

Similarly to what I described before, a lot of these fairytales ended up in Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books. Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess, Prince Darling (The Blue Fairy Book), Rosanella, The Fairy Gifts (The Green Fairy Book)... 

# The “century of fairy tales” in France ended up with the publication of one specific book - or rather a set of books. Le Cabinet des Fées, by Charles-Joseph Meyer. As we reached the end of the 18th century, Meyer noticed that fairy tales had fallen out of fashion. None were written anymore, nobody was interested in them, nothing was reprinted, and a lot of fairytales (and their authors) were starting to fall into oblivion. Meyer, who was a massive fan of fairytales, hated that, and decided to preserve the fairytale genre by collecting ALL of the literary fairytales of France in one big anthology. It took him four years of publication, from 1785 to 1789, but in a total of forty-one books he managed to collect and compile the greatest collection of French literary fairytales that was ever known - even saving from destruction a handful of anonymous fairytales we wouldn’t know existed today if it wasn’t for his work. In a paradoxical way, while this ultimate collection did save the fairytale genre from disappearing, it also marked the end of the “century of fairytales”, as it set in stone what had been done before and marked in the history of literature the fairytale genre as “closed off”. All the French fairytales were here to be read, and there was nothing more to add. 

Fantasy read-list 

Part A: Ancient fantasy

1) Mythological fantasy (Greco-Roman)

The oldest form of fantasy in the history of mankind is, without a doubt, mythology. The roots of the modern fantasy genre are found in the old myths and legends of the Antiquity - and so this read-list will open with a few works of reference when it comes to mythology, the most famous texts covering the legends of old.

# The “founding duo”: Homer and Hesiod

These two poets form the oldest Greek mythological texts known to history, and together they created the basis on which classical Greek mythology formed itself (though Hesiod and Homer had conflicting mythology, with numerous differences in pantheons, relationships and cosmogonies, resulting in an “Homeric” Greek mythology - older and more archaic - and an “Hesiodic” Greek mythology - the most famous and widespread one, the “classical” pantheon). 

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the two greatest epics of Ancient Greece, and the two works from which the epic genre originally defined itself. The Homeric Hymns were probably not written by Homer himself, just written in his style, but they are also a series of mini-epics each depicting the greatest adventures and most famous legends of the Greek gods.

Hesiod’s Theogony is the cosmogony of Ancient Greece, and the creation legend of its mythology. He also collected/wrote several Greek myths in his Works and Days.

# Callimachus’ Aetia (a poem explaining the mythological origins of rites, cults and worships, in the style of the Theogony) and Hymns (hymns to the god in the style of the Homeric Hymns)

# Apollonius’ Argonautica. Another famous Greek epic, and the main source of information for the myth of Jason, Medea and the Argonauts.

# The trio of famous Ancient Greece tragedy playwrights. Aeschylus, author of Prometheus Bound, the Seven Against Thebes, and the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides).  Sophocles, with his Theban trilogy (Oedipus-Rex, Oedipus at Column, Antigone) and other plays such as Ajax or the Women of Trachis. Euripides, famous for his Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Herakles, Iphigenia in Tauris, The Bacchae and many more... 

Plus, in a different genre, Artistophanes, the “father of comedy” or “prince of comedy”: The Birds and The Frogs are his most mythological plays, though other classics of his include The Clouds, The Wasps or Lysistrata... 

# The fourth volume of Diodorus Siculus’ “Bibliotheca historica”, which is a true encyclopedia of all the Greek myths and legends Diodorus could find.

# The “founding duo” of Roman myths: the Roman equivalent of Hesiod and Homer, with works just as influential as them.

Virgil, who with his Aeneid formed a “sequel” to Homer’s Iliad and created the greatest Roman epic of history - he also collected/rewrote several myths in his Bucolics and Georgics. 

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the other main piece of literature that defined Ancient Roman literature and mythology as a whole, and for the longest time in Europe it stayed the main source of information about Greco-Roman mythology - to the point Ovid’s Metamorphoses was much more well-known than Hesiod or Homer’s own works. Other works of his with mythological tales include his Ars Amatoria and his Fasti. 

# Titus Livius’ “Ab urbe condita”, a work containing the history of Rome, but opening with the myths and legends concerning the foundation of this city.

# Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses, the lesser-know “twin” of Ovid’s own Metamorphoses.

# Hyginus’ Fabulae and De Astronomica. Compilation of myths and legends told with a scientific mind. 

# Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. A strange, bizarre, mystic and comical novel of late Ancient Rome, which contains the most famous version of the legend of Psyche and Cupid.

# The works of Lucian, another author of late Antiquity. Highlights include The Dialogues of the Gods, a parody of the Homeric epics and mythology ; Lover of Lies, which contains the earliest version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” tale ; and A True Story, considered by many to be the earliest work of sci-fi.

# The Orphic Hymns, and the Orphic Argonautica, the two main texts informing us about the “Orphic religion”, a mystery cult with its own mythology, cosmogony and beliefs completely separate from the “classical” Greek mythology of Hesiod/Homer. 

After an article about “Greco-Roman fantasy” or Antique fantasy, I also have found an article evoking the role and importance of the Arthurian myth in fantasy (well, two articles actually). 

The first one is an article by Sara Doke, who offers her own chronology of the Arthurian literature. You will be able to compare it with my original Arthuriana post, and see the slight differences.

1) For Sara Doke, the beginning of it all, the foundation of the Arthurian literature, the first works of the Arthurian world as we understand it today, would be Geoffrey of Monmouth’s works: The Prophecies of Merlin, The History of the Kings of Britain, and the Life of Merlin. (You will often hear these orks referred to by their Latin names, such as Vita Merlini or Prophetiae Merlini).

2) Then, there was the “spark” that actually ignited and gave life to the Arthurian legend and literature. This “spark” was a set of two authors, who used the work of Monmouth as a basis for their work. On one side, Robert Wace with his Roman de Brut, followed by his Roman de Rou (not to be confused by Layamon’s own Roman de Brut, an English rewrite of the original French epic). On the other side, the author I heavily talked about in my original post: Chrétien de Troyes, the “father of the matter of Britain”, and the shaper of the Arthurian myth as we know it today - with his five novels, Erec and Enide, Cliges, Yvain the Knight of the Lion, Lancelot the Knight of the Cart, and Perceval the Story of the Grail. 

3) The third step of the Arthurian evolution was a series of works that slowly shifted the focus of the plot and stories away from the knights of the Round Table themselves, away from their individual and personal adventures, to rather follow the quest of the Grail, which became the main “end-goal” of the Arthuriana. This was the time of Robert of Robon who, through his cycle of works (Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin, and others lost to time), opened the way for the Vulgate Cycle (or “Lancelot-Grail”), with its History of Merlin, Lancelot Proper, Quest for the Holy Grail, Death of King Arthur... The Vulgate Cycle was then followed by the Post-Vulgate Cycle, which took back the material, books and stories of the Vulgate, but fused them with another very popular literary work of the time: the Prose Tristan. 

4) After the Post-Vulgate Cycle, Sara Doke notes that there was a disinterest in the matter of Britain and the Arthuriana throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. We will have to wait until sir Thomas Malory’s work, Le Morte d’Arthur, for a new Arthurian boom/Arthurian wave. By gathering together the versions of the Vulgate, of the Post-Vulgate and of the Chrétien novels, sir Thomas Mallory created a work that would become THE defining story of the Arthurian legend, and the main reference for all posterior Arthurian authors. Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (later adapted into the famous Disney movie The Sword in the Stone), Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Stenbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights... They all were inspired by and taking their Arthurian vision from Le Morte d’Arthur. 

5) Sara Doke concludes her chronology by a handful of more modern works, that truly turn the Arthurian myth into moder “fantasy”. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novels (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment, The Wicked Day). Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles. Lawhead’s The Pendragon Cycle. Doke also mentions French authors that English-speaker might not be accustomed to: René Barjavel with his L’Enchanteur (The Enchanter), Michel Rio with his Merlin et Morgane, Jean Markale with his Le Cycle du Graal, Jean-Louis Fetjaine with his Le Pas de Merlin followed by Brocéliande... 

To conclude this post, we leave Sara Doke for another article, this time written by P.J.G. Mergey, who is rather focused on movies based on the Arthurian myth. He does mention a non-movie piece, Wagner’s opera Parsifal, to prove that the Arthurian texts have always been producing visual entertainment. In terms of actual movies, Mergey mentions 2004′s King Arthur, John Boorman’s Excalibur, 2007′s The Last Legion and 1995′s The First Knight.  As he speaks of The Last Legion, he mentions that the mystery of the “missing legion” was notably brought to the public by Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, a historical novel that was adapted two times nto a movies - in 2011, by the same name, and in 2010 as “Centurion”. 

Two last mentions. Talking about the character of Mebd/Mabd, Mergey mentions an old Irish epic I am not sure I talked about before: Tain Bo Cuailnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, of which Mebd/Mabd is one of the main characters.

Part B: The First Classical Fantasy

1) On one side, the British Isles... 

We looked at the most ancient roots of the fantasy genre, which are... well, literaly antique roots - the texts of the Antiquity, the myths and mythologies of the world, the legends of the so-called “pagans” and the tales of long-gone societies, cultures and civilizations. Plus the true, literal “medieval fantasy” and some Arthuriana sprinkled at the top. Now I want to explore the Renaissance fantasy - or rather the first wave and apparition in literature of true “proto-fantasy”. These classical works that are still heavy influences and inspirations on modern fantasy pieces, but are younger than all the mythological and medieval stuff. 

Given this huge read-list promises to be very big, very long and span over several years, I will try to restrain myself here to two nation-tied phenomenon. And in this specific post I will look at a given wave of “classical proto-fantasy” in the British Isles... Beginning with none other than...

# Shakespeare. William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avalon, the greatest playwright of England and a man whose work shaped our common imagination and popular culture today. Of course, since this list is focused about the wide genre of fantasy, I must start by listing his more openly supernatural and fantastical plays. On one side you have a lighter, more colorful and whimsical world of wonders and magic, in the shape of supernatural comedies, be it A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its now world-known depiction of the fairy court as the Titania-Oberon-Puck triangle, or The Tempest, which implanted archetypal figures such as Prospero the wizard, Ariel the aerial spirit or the monstrous Caliban. On the darker side of fantasy, you have the grim and nightmarish tragedies that are Hamlet, one of the most famous cases of royal hauntings and madness in the history of theater, or Macbeth, which changed forever the way people view witches throught its iconic trio of Weird Sisters. 

But the beautiful thing with Shakespeare is that even in his more “mundane” and “realistic” works, the magic never truly goes away. Thanks to his poetic writing and his love of symbolism and mysticism, Shakespeare maintains throughout his work a fantastical ambiance, an ambiguous tone that opens the door for many oniric sequences or supernatural readings. The description of Mab, queen of fairies, in Romeo and Juliet was just as influential on fairy folklore as A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The abnormal storm and pagan madness of King Lear leaves one wondering about the true cosmic powers at work here. And even in historical works witchcraft is never far away - such as with Richard III, where devilish forces and hellish characters are at play in an well-recorded historical event... 

# But beyond Shakespeare, or rather all around him, there was a constellation of other poets and playwrights who helped conceive, flesh out and develop this “wonder-wave” that swept across Elizabethan England. Take Shakespeare’s most famous rival for example, Christopher Marlowe, who wrote The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the first ever adaptation of the Faust legend for the stage. You have Edmund Spenser and his mystical fay epic, The Faerie Queene, which influenced not just Shakespeare but many more authors of knight adventures and fairy works. I can also mention Michael Drayton’s Nimphidia, The Court of Fairy (or Nymphidia depending on how you write it), a poem drawing from Shakespeare’s fairy characters to depict all the affairs, treacheries and secrets at the otherworld’s court ; or the various Elizabethan retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphosis written by John Lily (Endymion, Midas, Galathea...). 

# And of course, I have to point out here that beyond specific authors, Shakespeare’s fantastical works drew from a lot of various sources, all representing different fragments or aspects of the way people approached the supernatural, folklore and legends in their time. For example, the more Jacobean play The Witch by Thomas Middleton, which had elements reused for Macbeth ; or the Daemonologie of King James, which also influenced Shakespeare’s writing of demons and witches. I can also drop here names going from quite obscure today, such as The Spanish Tragedy of Thomas Kyd, to behemoths of culture, like Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

# Speaking of a man of the Isles who explored and influenced the fairy literature... I have to mention Robert Kirk, and his treatise on fairies and ghost known as The Secret Commonwealth. To this day, Kirk is still considered one of the greatest folklorists and collector of supernatural tale and fairy/ghost/witch beliefs of the 17th century, and The Secret Commonwealth stays one of the major “fairy books”. 

# Leaving a bit the topic of fairies, I will conclude this post with one name... Ossian. During the 18th century, James Macpherson discovered and translated ancient Gaelic texts of Scotland - a series of epic poems attributed to a legendary bard by the name of Ossian. He started by translating Fingal, An Epic Poem in Six Books, and then worked on Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, before collecting it all as The Works of Ossian. This discovery and translated was a HUGE phenomenon, and a revolution in the world of culture. Up until that point, people had praised the Homeric epics and thought the “Homeric phenomenon” was a one-time thing that couldn’t have happened anywhere else but Ancient Greece... And yet here were these great, glorious, excellently done, epic poems of mythical heroes and ancient witchcraft and gods, attributed to a mythical god-inspired bard and poet, part of another form of Antiquity than the Greco-Roman one. People jubilated upon discovering the “Celtic Homer”, and praised these grea poems proving that the Greek epics could be challenged by Gaelic sagas... 

And to conclude this season’s fantasy read-list section, I will list down there some additional works and references (taken from various articles of the same vein as those I previously quoted).

# When talking about the Pentamerone, one of the articles wrote about Rabelais’ work, and I have to introduce him here. Rabelais is one of the 16th century most famous French author, still famous to this day for his series of four books detailing the adventures of the giants Pantagruel and Gargantua. These books (Pantagruel, Gargantua, Tiers Livre, Le Quart Livre) are parodies of knighthood novels, medieval adventures and various fantastical stories, depicting the extravagant, convoluted and hilarious lives of two giants, Pantagruel and later his son Gargantua, in medieval (and early Renaissance) France. Parodying knight adventures and Arthurian fiction by having as a hero extravagant and goofy giants excessive in everything they do, these books are prone to all sorts of vulgar behaviors (sex, food, piss and poop are everywhere in these very organic books, where sometimes entire civilizations grow inside the giant’s body) and to all sorts of cartoonish shenanigans opposing the giants (and various trickster friends, such as Panurge) against caricatural, grotesque or dreadfully ineffective enemies. But these books also served as actual satire and scientifico-social criticism: Rabelais being a physician, a man of letters, an humanist and an anti-cleric, he used these books to expose the most ridiculous medicine theories, to denounce and caricature the various cultural institutions of his time, and bring forward all sorts of humanist ideals through allegories and metaphors, mixing high-minded preoccupations about civilizations, educations and humanity, among all sorts of medieval grotesque farces. Just as an example – the very fact of choosing giants allows for the farcical content (they stop wildfires by pissing on it, they gorge themselves on an impossible long list of foods and drinks in “gargantuan” meals, their mothers are described giving birth to entire zoos of animals and entire caravans alongside their baby…), but also reflects what the humanists wanted men to become, “giants” of culture and arts, who knew everything about all domains, be it politics, medicine, sports, war, literature, and were able to do anything and prepared for any situation, towering over things such as superstitions, ignorance and vices.

# When talking about Rabelais, another name must be brought up alongside him – another great parodist of knight-and-adventure novels, another great satirist author of the 16th century, but Spanish this time, not French: Cervantes, who by himself destroyed the whole knight-novel genre with his now classic El ingenioso hildago don Quixote de la Mancha, while also deconstructing and denouncing an obsessively strict and essentially absurd Spanish society.

# One article talking about the 1001 Nights evoked the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and since I am not sure if I included it in previous lists, I will place it here.

# The same article detailed and highlighted the differences between the four great “historical” translations of The One Thousand and One Nights. The first translation, in French by Antoine-Galland, is noted to belong to the fashion of “fairy tales” of the time, a la Perrault and madame d’Aulnoy. As a result this translation focuses on the wonders, magics and supernatural forces of the tale, while removing all the more gruesome, shocking or vulgar elements to fit an upper-class, aristocratic, elegant audience. Then came the first English translation, by sir Richard Burton, which rather focused on the sexual elements of The One Thousand and One Nights, insisting on these oriental tales as erotic ones. This was a focus taken back by the second historical French translation of the text, by Joseph-Charles Mardrus, who him went even further and on top of putting back all the sex Galland had removed, also highlighted and insisted on homoerotic tonalities, especially on all the “saphic” elements. The last historical translation, presented as an in-between between the “marvel” and the “vulgar” traditions, is the French one of René R. Khawam, which forms a just balance between the “poetry of wonders” and the “bacchanals”.

# In an article about Perrault, two very important texts of French literature are mentioned. On one side, Les Fables de La Fontaine. La Fontaine was one of the great authors of the 17th century France, admired notably by Perrault himself, and today all French kids know him by his fables. If English-speakers know Aesop’s Fables, French-speakers know La Fontaine Fables – the latter often rewrites or remakes of the former, all depicting talking animals having short adventures with a moral at the end, but with the meaning of fables usually updated to a more modern context and the monarchic society of Renaissance France. They are still considered today one of the great classics of French literature. The other work, which was greatly renowned during the 17th century, but is quite forgotten today, is L’Enéide Burlesque, the Burlesque Aeneid, by “the brothers Perrault”. This is one of the many famous “burlesque” parodies of the time – another one, more remembered today, is “Le Virgile travesti”, “The transvestite Virgil” of Scarron, one of the great humorist writers of the 17th century. The whole idea of the “burlesque” humor was to take a work of a given genre, and write it in a language that didn’t fit this genre by the standards of the time. In the case of these parodies, they both took the Aeneid, a classical Roman epic, and retold it in the language most opposed to this noble and admired genre – they are basically vulgar retellings of the Aeneid filled with insults, colloquial terms, humoristic nicknames, and other “common” expressions and “lowly” terms usually found in the mouth of peasants and the like.

# Among the various stage works, music and movies adapted out of Perrault’s fairytales, I found explicit mentions of Rossini’s Cinderella opera, Prokofiev’s Cinderella, Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, Maurice Ravel’s Ma Mère L’Oye, Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Méliès’ Little Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard, Tex Avery’s parody of Little Red Riding Hood, and Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne (Donkey Skin). With a special mention for Tahar Ben Jelloun’s work, Mes contes de Perrault (My Perrault fairytales), where the Franco-Moroccan author rewrites the stories of the Perrault in the Arabian fashion of The One Hundred and One Nights (Riquet with the tuft becomes Hakim with the tuft, Little Red Riding Hood becomes Little Red Burqa, etc…).  

# While I will probably talk more of nursery rhymes in the next section of this read-list, a brief mention should be made here of Mother Goose as a character, and her association with nursery rhymes – all things invented by the British! I talked about it previously, but the “Mother Goose” in the title of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye, is not an actual character of literature or folklore. “Tales of Mother Goose” was just a common folk expression for fairy tales and folktales in France (similarly people talked of “old woman’s tales”, of “wolf’s tale”, of “sleeping-while-standing tales”, of “donkey-skin tales”…). But when these stories were translated into English, “Mother Goose” because a character in its own right, brought to life by some specific English editors for a series of books that on top of covering fairytales, also started collecting and spreading nursery rhymes. The oldest nursery rhyme book involving Mother Goose would be 1764’s Mother Goose’s Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle, which was the work that would associate forever Mother Goose with nursery rhymes. Mother Goose’s popularity was also helped by several stage shows in the early 19th century that made the literature figure a famous pantomime character: one of these shows being the notable Harlequin and Mother Goose, or the Golden Egg.

I thought I had concluded the whole “A” part of my big fantasy read-list last spring... 

... BUT FATE WOULD HAVE IT OTHERWISE! In between then and now I found a collection of articles covering the evolution and chronology of fantasy literature, and they added a lot more of titles and informations that I think I will add to my “Fantasy read-list”. 

My original “A-1″ post dealt with works of fiction and poetry that, beyond being masterpieces of the Greco-Roman literature, were the key basis of Greco-Roman mythology as we know it today, and massive inspirations for the later fantasy genre. Here, I will use an article written by Fabien Clavel asking the question “Is there an Antique fantasy?” to add some names to this list.

Not the names of works written in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome however. No, when it comes to the great classics from “before Christ”, the same names are dropped - Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses... The only antique work Fabien Clavel mentions that I did not mention was Lucan’s Pharsalia. Also called “On the Civil War” it is, as the name says, an epic poem retelling the actual civil war that opposed Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Why would a historical work fit into the world of fantasy you ask? Because this epic retelling is pretty-fantasy likes, with several omens and oracles of the gods (including trees that start bleeding like humans), and even scenes of necromancy where the ghosts of the dead answer the protagonists’ questions. 

Fabien Clavel’s article, however, focuses much more on the modern fantasy inspired by the Greek and Roman myths, that he classifies into four categories.

1) The retellings. Works of fantasy that retell classic legends or well-known myth of Greco-Roman antiquity. You find in this category the works of the fantasy author David Gemmel, be it his Troy trilogy (retelling of the Trojan war) or his Lion of Macedon trilogy (a more fantastical version of Alexander the Great’s life). You have Gene Wolf’s Soldier of the Mist, about the titular soldier, cursed with both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, and forced to find his way home through mythical Ancient Greece. There is C.S. Lewis’ last novel, Till we have faces, his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth from The Golden Ass. And in French literature, you have Maurice Druon’s Les Mémoires de Zeus, an autobiography of Zeus himself. 

2) The “feminist” works - which technically are a sub-division of the “retellings”, since they are retellings of ancient legends and tales, but with the twist that the focus is placed on female characters, often side-lined or pushed away from Greco-Roman narratives. In this category you will find Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (the Odyssey through Penelope’s eyes), Maron Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand (the Trojan War as told by Cassandra), Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia (an exploration of the titular character, from the Aeneid). To get out of the  English literature, you will also have the work of the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo, The Moment, or the Creusiad, another Aeneid retelling focusing on the character of Creusa. 

3) The “appropriation” works. No, this is not used in a negative way but a neutral one. In this category, Clavel places all the works that are not a precise retelling of a given myth or legend, but rather a fantasy story reusing the elements, tropes, characters and settings of Greek or Roman mythology. You have Thomas Burnett Swann’s Trilogy of the Minotaur, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic series - and in French literature you have Rachel Tanner’s Le Cycle de Mithra, an uchrony imagining what the world would look like if Mithraism had become the official religion of the Roman Empire instead of Christianity. 

4) The “interaction” tales - aka, fantasy works that take elements of Greek mythology and have them be confronted by elements not belonging to Greek mythology. For example, there is the Merlin Codex series by Robert Holdstock, describing how Merlin the Enchanter resurrects Jason and the Argonauts in the Arthurian world. There is also in France Johan Heliot’s Reconquérants, an uchrony fantasy about a group of lost Roman colonizers who built a second Roman Empire in Northern America, and fifteen centuries later try to return to the “old world” they left behind only to find it overrun with mythical creatures. Finally, Clavel adds the Percy Jackson series, the new best-selling series of teenage fantasy fiction/urban fantasy a la “Harry Potter”, describing the adventures of an American teenage boy discovering the Greek gods moved to America, that he is the son of Poseidon, and that monsters of Greek mythology are trying to kill him. 

Clavel concludes his article by saying how hard it is to pinpoint exactly where the influence of Greek mythology stops in the fantasy world, since elements of Greek legends are omnipresent and overused in the fantasy genre. To illustrate this he mentions the centaurs, that appeared in four of the classic works of fantasy for children that are however VERY different from each other: Harry Potter, the Narnia Chronicles, the Artemis Fowl series, and The Neverending Story. 

This read-list won’t just cover “fantasy” in the modern sense of the world, as the post-Tolkien books, oh no.