Why fantasy writers should read old books

A case for primary sources

If you're a fantasy writer and you're interested in creating secondary worlds that feel authentic to the period you're taking inspiration from, I think the best thing you can do is read primary sources. That might look like epic literary works such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh, social satires like The Canterbury Tales, histories like The Peloponnesian War, military guides like Sun Tzu's The Art of War, or countless other works of law, philosophy, theology, mythology, and scripture. If you’re unused to reading old texts like the ones I just mentioned, this might seem a daunting task at first. But I guarantee that if you push through the initial difficulty, you'll find the benefits are well worth it. Primary sources are an absolute joy to read and they bring you face to face with a speaker from a long-past culture. The more you engage with them, the better attuned you’ll be to the attitudes, voices, and values of the period you're drawing on for ideas . 

One of the things I love about old literature is that it is full of surprises. It doesn’t fit into the neat little boxes we generally use to categorize the past, relying on simplistic and condescending stereotypes to make sense of historic cultures. The voices of the past speak to us in ways sometimes alien, sometimes familiar, always entertaining. The warriors of Homer’s Iliad startle me every time with their pettiness and rage, their complete lack of the stoic reserve we often think of as a traditional heroic trait. In Confessions, Augustine recalls his days of adolescent rebellion in strikingly modern terms, describing how he and his friends steal a farmer’s pears only to throw them away, reveling in their power to transgress for the sake of it. Even historical narratives are often written with an eye for drama and literary flourish that is rare in modern scholarship. Just pick up Herodotus’ Histories and notice the way he weaves myth and recent history, putting epic speeches in the mouths of his historical subjects, and developing theme and characterization like any writer of fiction. Reading works like these can help us get a sense of the complexities and contradictions of historical periods and bring those sensibilities into our own writing.

I recognize that for many people, old books like the ones above can seem formidable or even boring. And while not everyone has or will develop the same tastes, I do think that an enjoyment of older works of literature is largely developed through exposure. Like coffee or wine, medieval and ancient literature is an acquired taste; the more of it you try, the more familiar it becomes. And we are better able to appreciate things with which we have some familiarity.

I’m extremely fortunate in that I got to study history and literature in university and had access to professors who provided a broad and accessible overview of a period while assigning a representative selection of primary and secondary sources. All this meant that by the time I finally decided to take writing fiction more seriously, I had already benefited from a rich immersion in a great deal of history. And as a long-time student of the Middle Ages who has chosen to write medieval fantasy, I am playing to my strengths, situated fully in my comfort zone.

But let’s say that you’ve never formally studied history or literature and you’re planning on writing a book set in a secondary world largely inspired by a specific historical time and place. How can you best go about wrapping your head around this period and authentically reproducing aspects of the culture?

Let’s take, for example, the setting that my own fantasy novel is inspired by: the British Isles of the High and Late Middle Ages (roughly 1066-1485). If you’re just starting out, you might begin by consulting popular Internet articles like Wikipedia. You might look for YouTube videos with information on historical events, famous people, and even more focused subjects such as warfare, religion, or diet. You might find podcasts and blogs or other popular educational sources. These sources can be a great way to get your feet wet if you’re just embarking on your research journey, but they are also often lacking in depth and low on evidence.

A much better place to begin is with well-regarded, well-researched secondary sources. This might be a general history of the period, something like David Carpenter’s The Struggle for Mastery: Britain, 1066–1284. Or you might find the biography of an important figure, such as Edward I or Eleanor of Aquitaine. Secondary sources are especially helpful for researching specific topics like religion, gender roles, battle formations, weapons technology, and more. They also answer the kinds of specific questions that I find come up all the time when writing, questions like “What kind of food would a monk eat?” or “How would the crime of robbery be punished?” One difficulty you will run into when it comes to secondary sources is that scholarly books (published by an academic press) are usually prohibitively expensive. Unless you have access to a university library, you probably won’t be able to get your hands on these. Secondary sources written for a more popular audience do tend to be more affordable but may be less rigorously researched.

Secondary sources are immensely helpful for anyone trying to gain a good understanding of a specific period. But no amount of scholarly research can make up for the visceral experience of reading texts composed by people who actually lived in the time period you’re trying to mimic. With secondary sources, we’re approaching the past through the filter of modern scholarship, however faithfully that scholarship attempts to represent the past. We’re always viewing the period at an academic distance, studying it secondhand. And I don’t think this approach is conducive to writing fiction, at least not the type of fiction I like to create. My goal, which I’m sure many share, is transport readers to another world, a world that feels authentically antiquated, inhabited by people whose values and ways of understanding are often different from those of a modern reader.

One of the best pieces of positive feedback I’ve ever received was from a member of a local writer’s group who told me that the world of my novel felt like an authentically historic place inhabited by characters with a distinctive worldview (the fact that this was nearly a year ago and I’m still talking about it shows you just how happy I was to get this comment). To the extent to which this is true, I have to credit it to all the time I’ve spent reading and thinking about primary sources from the Middle Ages (and earlier. It also really helps to read the literature that informed the literature of your period). When I sit down to write dialogue or battle descriptions, I find I’m often channeling the language and pacing of Anglo-Saxon poetry and medieval romance, Homeric epic and the Bible. It can’t be an exact channeling, of course — no one¹ wants to read a fantasy novel where all the characters talk in Chaucerian Middle English — but I think it works really well when it sounds like the author is translating archaic prose or poetry into a modern idiom, in much the same way that a modern translator might present Dante’s fourteenth-century Italian for modern English readers. This is one of the many things that J.R.R Tolkien does so well, and it’s no coincidence that he was more steeped in medieval language and literature than the rest of us can ever hope to be. A more modern example is Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my favourite living authors (and a fellow Canadian!). His novels feel like a hybrid between historical fiction and high fantasy and you can tell he has immersed himself in the periods he’s writing about, spending time in the geographical locations and studying modern scholarship, but also throwing himself into the literature. It certainly comes through in his worldbuilding, characterization, and prose, especially if you’re also familiar with the times and places on which he is drawing.

In his essay, ”On the Reading of Old Books,” C. S. Lewis makes the case that reading primary sources is more rewarding than studying modern scholarship. He addresses the “strange idea” that “the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.” The reason we balk at the idea of reading old literature is because we feel unworthy of what we see as an arduous task. The student “feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand” the ancient text. So instead we turn to more contemporary books and articles to tell us what the older books say, presumably in a way that will be much more intelligible to us. But this idea of greater intelligibility is a myth. As Lewis observes, the great writers of the past are often easier to read and comprehend than a lot of modern scholarship. The “firsthand knowledge” we gain from these texts “is much easier and more delightful to acquire.”²

As fantasy writers, we spend a lot of our time on the standard writing practices of plotting and character development, but also on worldbuilding. Historical research is an integral component of this worldbuilding process, allowing authors to borrow from the rich tapestry of human history, adopting some things directly and transforming others. The reading of primary sources should, I think, play a key role in this research. The more you familiarize yourself with the language and literature of the culture you are using as inspiration, the better you’ll be able to imbue everything from your characterization to your dialogue to your prose with historically informed believability.

1. Even as I write this, I realize there is probably a readership for exactly this.

2. Lewis’ essay originally served as a preface to an English translation of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.