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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3508970" data-attributes="member: 4937">My guess is that it has a very large deal to do with the fact that Gygax was himself a medievalist and facinated by bits of medieval lore.  His Greyhawk setting has alot of medieval trappings.  Arneson's Blackmoor is much less medieval in inspiration.But that's not really an explanation.  The really important question is why did Gygax's vision win out of over Arneson's?  What is it about medieval trappings that is so appealing to Western readers.  Is it just Tolkien?  Or is Tolkien just part of the same phenomenom?I don't know if I know the whole answer, but I do have several suggestions.First, the Medieval period is one of two major 'heroic ages' in Western history - the other being the late bronze age of Homer.  Both periods are marked by revolutions in the techonology of personal defense that allowed trained warriors to be a match for many opponents and so both produce mythic heroic literature.  Secondly, the Medieval period is the period in which English literature and history first flowered, and I think those stylistic and cultural echoes still influence what we consider poetic and beautiful in language.  Beowulf and Chaucer are still very influential, even if the language has gone on to change beyond easy recognition.  It's important and attractive because its the real beginning of who we are as northern Europeans.Thirdly, its an era that has repeatedly been turned to over the centuries as a setting for Romantic stories, and so its built up a huge body of myths and literature surrounding it which nothing else in our history compares to.  There is a commonality of cultural experience to the middle ages which isn't shared with any other period.  Granted, much of that cultural experience is shallow sterotypes, but that doesn't change the fact that it is shared cultural experience.I think it is very hard to build a comparable body of mythic lore.  Not even Tolkien really did that, since so much of his creation was indebted to the mythic lore of the real middle ages.  To create a comparably powerful body of mythic lore that had no relation to the middle ages would be an even larger task than what Tolkien attempted.</blockquote>

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