All TTRPGs owe an immense debt to J.R.R. Tolkein. Gygax and Arneson were clearly inspired by the works of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The massive influence of the Middle Earth books, in effect, launched an entire genre that had hitherto been confined to the sporadic output of a handful of Victorian and Edwardian authors. I am not seeking to diminish Tolkein’s achievement as the author of the most successful works of fantasy literature in history (though, personally, I frequently find his prose heavy going). However, as I came to learn more about the high and late medieval world, I began to have an unsettling feeling that there was something not quite right about the medieval settings of TTRPGs. In the end, I think I have distilled the source of the unease down to this: The vast majority of medieval TTRPG settings are the product of a century-old, profoundly incomplete, portrait of the medieval world.
The study of medieval English history was at its zenith in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In terms of the sheer amount of labour in archives (and, indeed, in the creation of those archives as organised repositories in the first place), the volume of publication of sources and scholarly articles and the resultant discovery and dissemination of information, the scale and scope of activity was unprecedented. Anyone who has studied medieval English political and legal history in any depth will be forever grateful to the Victorian and later authors and editors of The Rolls Series, The Calendar of Patent Rolls, The Publications of the Selden Society and the dozens of other series that proliferated at the time. At the same time, there was an explosion of interest in wider medieval English and Western European culture. In architecture this was expressed through the Gothic Revival movement that gave us the crumbling limestone wedding cake that is the Houses of Parliament. In art it is embodied in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and in literature through the reclamation of romance literature, fairy tales and folklore as exemplified by the works of the Grimm brothers. Musically, the best-known instance is, of course, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Yet all this energy and industry had its limitations. It was overwhelmingly ‘Whiggish’ history, an attempt to explain and justify the purported heights of politics and culture scaled by nineteenth century Europe in general and imperial Great Britain in particular. In political, constitutional and legal history, this led to the imposition of anachronistic notions of ‘parliamentary democracy’ or ‘the disinterested rule of law’ in what amounted to an attempt to ret-con a (mostly) smooth upward trajectory towards the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, as if medieval people had this goal in mind all along.
At the same time the artists, architects, painters, glaziers and sculptors that made up the Arts and Crafts Movement laboured to create an idealized pastiche of medieval artistic output and working conditions based on deeply romanticized ideas of the society and culture of the Middle Ages. In literature the popularity of tales of chivalry and courtly love as found in the Arthurian legends existed alongside the demand for the rescuing of folklore traditions. A consistent theme in all of this cultural activity was a reactionary impulse to try to hold back the rising tide of industrialization, consumerism and modernism. I’m not convinced by a lot of the efforts to psychoanalyse Tolkein, but I do think the observation that The Lord of the Rings in particular contains a strain of nostaglic pastoralism and mistrust of industrial modernity is valid.
It is interesting and relevant to observe at this point that what is missing from these great programmes of study is much interest in medieval ‘natural philosophy’. Doubtless this has a lot to do with the fact that the history of science requires an interdisciplinary approach that sat uncomfortably with the institutional drive towards subject specialisation in the academy and in education more generally. This is why some of the earliest works on the subject are by people such as the French physicist Pierre Duhem or the astronomer J.L.E. Dreyer - working scientists rather than historians. However, I think it also has something to do with the desire for those Victorian and Edwardian scholars and artists to see in the Middle Ages the foundations of the modern world or the solutions to its perceived problems. In the light of the vast leaps that had been made in biology, chemistry, physics and medicine, the ideas and beliefs of medieval people were idle curiosities at best and superstitious barbarism at worst. As the nineteenth century essayist Thomas de Quincy caustically observed, by his day even Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was as much use as an outdated cookbook. How much more trivial - almost embarassing in light of the new learning - were the works of John Gaddesden on medicine, Ramon Llull on chemistry, Bartholomaeus Anglicus on zoology or Nicole Oresme on astronomy. One may as well have sought to publish the definitive scholarly edition of the works of Merlin.
What this means is that the earliest days of fantastical literature coincided with and emerged from a broader artistic and creative movement that produced a theme park version of the Middle Ages both in terms of the literature of medieval high culture and the imagined lives and beliefs of those below the lettered and landed elite. Historians, writers, folklorists and artists created a compelling sense of a vanished age while, at the same time, they utterly ignored those fields of worldly knowledge - cosmology, astronomy, astrology, alchemy, zoology, anatomy and medicine - that were foundational to the medieval conception and explanation of reality. This was the same division that C.P. Snow would crystallize in his vision of the ‘two cultures’ in his famous 1959 Rede Lecture.
Tolkein’s immeasurable contribution to the emergence of TTRPGs in general and pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds in particular has contributed enormously to this division. Not that this is Tolkein’s fault. He was educated during the age of the late Victorian creation of an imagined medieval England and it would be astonishing if he did not reflect the resulting assumptions and concerns. It could even be persuasively argued that, among his peers as an author of fantasy, he was more concerned than most to explain Middle Earth in terms that were not merely ‘literary conventions’. Among the long and eclectic list of his influences are high medieval cosmology and theology as much as Old English and Classical literature. But it would be idle to pretend that these sources were explored in any depth in the core works describing Middle Earth or that they play any substantial role in the overwhelmingly casual consumption of his most well-known books, let alone how they were employed as the basis for TTRPGs.
The result? Medieval fantasy TTRPG settings are not reflective of anything resembling the reality of the Middle Ages. They are instead a pale simulacrum of nineteenth and early twentieth century literary notions of the period that float, weightless and disconnected, far above the actual beliefs that grounded medieval people’s stories of courtesy, magic, miracles, love, war, illness, life and death. Is it any wonder that these settings feel… thin, like butter spread over too much bread.