seusomon
Explorer
For me, the key to understanding this is to appreciate that the categories of "fiction" and "nonfiction", as presently understood, are a comparatively recent development in human history; they depend on a worldview wherein some kind of objective verification (actual or potential) of reported events is a defining criterion. We are now very used to this way of looking at the stories we tell, but it is is not a universal distinction, and has only come to dominate our own way of thinking in recent centuries.
In earlier times, stories tended to grow organically, receiving different treatments from different storytellers, but not self-consciously created in the way a modern person sits down to write a novel or a history book. Stories served to entertain, to instruct, to inform, and to create a shared world. Stories that were about remote times or places (as many of the well-repeated ones were) could freely use imaginative or extraordinary elements. No doubt some listeners were more credulous than others, but without a worldview that demanded that a story be classified as "fiction" or "nonfiction" before it could be interpreted, differences in credulity probably did not have much effect on how the story was received.
Through the centuries, as the world became more circumscribed by increasing literacy, detailed cartography, extensive written records, and developments in science and technology, the difference between stories that were historical accounts and stories that were more fanciful or inventive came into clearer focus. Finally, by the time of the enlightenment, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction became firmly established, so much so that Coleridge would later have to speak of the "willing suspension of disbelief" to explain how someone could appreciate a work of fiction - no such suspension would have been required in Hellenistic times, for example.
So what I am getting at is that "fantasy" as a genre of fiction, in which a writer self-consciously introduces imaginative, fanciful, magical, or mythic elements into a story of his or her own invention, only becomes possible when the fiction/nonfiction distinction has come to define the terms of the art of storytelling.
I think it is anachronistic to say that Homer "knew he was writing fiction" (or some equivalent statement). The category didn't exist then. Odysseus was a Trojan war hero, and versions of his story were no doubt commonly told and retold. Homer used his artistry to tell the story as richly and as engagingly as he could, and his version was preserved in writing so we can read it today.
Today, we mine the elements of old stories and myths to create fantasy, a genre that is self-consciously fictional, a deliberate "what if the world were different?" exercise intended to stimulate the imagination and to entertain. A modern person, raised on Tolkien, can certainly pick up a translation of Beowulf or the Mabinogion and read them as fantasy adventures, but we do so with a very different mindset than those who originally told and heard those stories. Saying that those tales were early examples of the Fantasy genre isn't a very good way of capturing the relationship between the two: the old stories have inspired and been mined for raw material by modern writers with an agenda that would have been quite alien to peoples of the past.
In earlier times, stories tended to grow organically, receiving different treatments from different storytellers, but not self-consciously created in the way a modern person sits down to write a novel or a history book. Stories served to entertain, to instruct, to inform, and to create a shared world. Stories that were about remote times or places (as many of the well-repeated ones were) could freely use imaginative or extraordinary elements. No doubt some listeners were more credulous than others, but without a worldview that demanded that a story be classified as "fiction" or "nonfiction" before it could be interpreted, differences in credulity probably did not have much effect on how the story was received.
Through the centuries, as the world became more circumscribed by increasing literacy, detailed cartography, extensive written records, and developments in science and technology, the difference between stories that were historical accounts and stories that were more fanciful or inventive came into clearer focus. Finally, by the time of the enlightenment, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction became firmly established, so much so that Coleridge would later have to speak of the "willing suspension of disbelief" to explain how someone could appreciate a work of fiction - no such suspension would have been required in Hellenistic times, for example.
So what I am getting at is that "fantasy" as a genre of fiction, in which a writer self-consciously introduces imaginative, fanciful, magical, or mythic elements into a story of his or her own invention, only becomes possible when the fiction/nonfiction distinction has come to define the terms of the art of storytelling.
I think it is anachronistic to say that Homer "knew he was writing fiction" (or some equivalent statement). The category didn't exist then. Odysseus was a Trojan war hero, and versions of his story were no doubt commonly told and retold. Homer used his artistry to tell the story as richly and as engagingly as he could, and his version was preserved in writing so we can read it today.
Today, we mine the elements of old stories and myths to create fantasy, a genre that is self-consciously fictional, a deliberate "what if the world were different?" exercise intended to stimulate the imagination and to entertain. A modern person, raised on Tolkien, can certainly pick up a translation of Beowulf or the Mabinogion and read them as fantasy adventures, but we do so with a very different mindset than those who originally told and heard those stories. Saying that those tales were early examples of the Fantasy genre isn't a very good way of capturing the relationship between the two: the old stories have inspired and been mined for raw material by modern writers with an agenda that would have been quite alien to peoples of the past.
