My last post really got me thinking about the nature of fantasy settings. When I sat down today, it was originally to write about the geography of Essin, yet I found myself writing more and more about the settings which inspired Essin, and the complex, fascinating history they share. So I converted this post to be about my musings and ramblings on fantasy worlds and how they came to be.
The most famous fantasy worlds are, more often than not, derived from mythical versions of medieval Europe. With Tolkien’s works, this is explicitly the case: Europe “at a different stage of imagination.” Robert Howard’s Hyborian Age setting for Conan the Barbarian and King Kull is much like Middle Earth. It’s our world, (primarily Europe and Africa) but in an age so remote, it seems alien.
For a while now I’ve been fascinated by this distinction, that of a fantasy earth versus an entirely alien, yet still fantasy-familiar planet. I’ve tried time and again to track down the first such world in fiction: a wholly original setting, whose history/future has nothing to do with our pale blue dot. There are many candidates from many authors, but I think Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon might be among the earliest and most influential examples. Nehwon might be more well-known by the name of its most prominent city, Lankhmar, or through its two famous heroes, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I think the long line of standalone, Earth-like-but-not-Earth fantasy worlds can be traced back to these stories, by way of the single most influential game ever created, Dungeons & Dragons.
It’s well known that Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the other TSR designers responsible for D&D were big fans of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Their love for the Mouser specifically is what sparked the creation of the Thief/Rogue class for one of the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons. I’d also reason—and this may just be conjecture on my part—that the setting for these stories was also a major factor in early D&D. Nehwon had cultures that paralleled Earth’s, but its geography, history, and laws of physics were so vastly different from our own, that it couldn’t possibly be mistaken for Earth.
The earliest long-running campaigns in the game were set in Gygax’s “Greyhawk” and Arneson’s “Blackmoor” worlds (the latter would be retconned into “Mystara”). These settings, much like Nehwon, had distinctive maps and lore, and also shared another crucial aspect with Leiber’s world: Travel between the fantasy world and our own Earth was possible.
The earliest story Leiber wrote for his heroic duo, “Adept’s Gambit,” was actually set on Earth, and Leiber—much like Howard before him—intended his characters to exist in a whimsical, historical setting, yet thankfully changed his mind. Still, that earthbound story remains canon in the lives of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Leiber later wrote a tale of how they fell into our world through a series of mystical incidents.
All of that is to say, most early fantasy settings have some tenuous connection to Earth. The world of Greyhawk is called “Oerth,” Ed Greenwood’s famous Forgotten Realms was originally envisioned as the source for all of mankind’s myths, and a great many columns in early D&D magazines were written from the point of view of some traveling sage visiting our odd, mundane world.
It’s strange how distinctly “fantasy” it has become to set stories in their own little universes, with rules much different from our own. It’s not something that science fiction stories regularly do. Most sci-fi worlds are planets in other galaxies or Earth in any number of dismal futures. Yet, with fantasy, the norm has become “a world like Earth, but it’s not Earth.” The many, many worlds of Dungeons & Dragons have fully embraced this weird fact in the past, and there exist 2 separate settings/systems dedicated to leaving one fantasy world and traveling—via mystical, magical means—to another: Spelljammer and Planescape.
Well, I can ramble and speculate all I like about this, but I suspect the truth is far simpler. The people who dream up these fantasy worlds—those worlds that aren’t Earth but bear so much in common with Earth—are just nerds. They’re nerds like me. Nerds that care a lot about detail and consistency. And when it comes to being consistent with a fantasy world’s rules? It’s far easier just to set the thing in its own little pocket universe. Just think of some of the logical questions about these worlds:
Why are there humans on this planet? Surely evolution didn’t work just like—
Doesn’t matter, it’s not our universe.
How is it that this alien world has the same system of government as 14th century—
Doesn’t matter, it’s not our universe.
What about architecture? These aliens can’t have built castles the same way—
It does not matter.
It’s not our universe.
And maybe you find that lazy. Certainly, it can be a bit lazy when every fantasy setting has elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, humans, halflings, all because Tolkien codified the genre back in the ‘50s…
But this is fantasy.
It’s not about extreme detail or stringent physical laws. Sure, people create entire languages or magic systems, flesh out brand new cultures, and sculpt convincing landmasses, all for their fantasy worlds, but at the end of the day, it’s all about fantasizing.
And really, the fact that so many fantasy worlds are so similar to Earth just echoes Tolkien’s original sentiment about his own laboriously created world. What is a fantasy world, if not Earth at a different stage of imagination?