Non-Feudal Political Systems in Fantasy

[marycatelli]

I was on this one.  And derailed it in the first minutes by commenting that actually, most fantasy, though pseudo-medieval, are not in fact, very feudal in structure.

So we panelists hashed out how badly they do it, with the lack of the structures of vassals and all that.  And one panelist objected that it was a response to a very specific set of circumstances and another said that it has, actually, arisen in other situations.

About half way through it lurched on to the topic of governmental systems that are atypical of fantasy.  I mentioned the Shire, which is a Kropotkin-type anarchy and populated by hobbits, who are much better than humans and complacent unimaginative stick-in-the-muds, which is why it works.

The Empire and a panelist complained about how simple Empires are, with the Emperor, who has free time, and a few officials.  Especially Galactic Empires.  (I recommended the Ciaphas Cain and Gaunt's Ghosts series to him afterward, and he observed that games often do it better because the gamers expected it.  True, and the better Warhammer 40000 tie-in use it!)

The description asked if Marxism could work in a fantasy world, I said it didn't work in the real world, and another panelist said it could only work in a fantasy world, and thus we exhausted that in two sentences.

Update: 'cause I remembered something important -- we also riffed on how much you should go into.  Absolute monarchs without vast bureaucracies mean you just have to convince the king, rather than all the log rolling you would have to do in, say, the US.  If the politics is not central to the story, that may be just what the writer needs to keep the focus where it belongs for that story -- off the politics.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

And derailed in the first minutes by commenting that actually, most fantasy, though pseudo-medieval, are not in fact, very feudal in structure.

(*nods*)

Indeed, they tend to be more absolutist ancien regime than they are medieval. Medieval Europe was characterized by loose central authority (everywhere but in England, which was proto-absolutist and may by its familiarity have skewed fantasy kingdoms in its direction) and competing claims of loyalty (from Church, from class organizatinons such as guilds and chivalric orders, and from several levels of State ranging all the way from Emperors down to Barons). The "competing claims of loyalty" aspect is significant because virtually every major medieval conflict and many medieval institutions sprung from such competing claims.

[marycatelli]

Hmm. I would say they tend to be more fairy tale. Sure, you have the absolute king and not the infrastructure of feudalism, but then you don't have the massive courts and bureaucracy of the ancien regime.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

You've got a point. What I think much fantasy does is to assume the obedience of all but outright rebels to the King, but ignore the historically-demonstrable need for said "massive courts and bureaucracy" to achieve this outcome. Incidentally, a lot of medieval political history, especially in the High to Late Middle Ages, could be summarized as "the monarchy taming the nobility."

[marycatelli]

which is fine for fun if you want to avoid the clutter, but perhaps could use a little polishing.

Heck, you can even use it as background

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, a great deal of fantasy is falsely labelled ‘pseudo-mediaeval’ merely because it contains no industrial-age technology. Swords and kings are mediaeval, you see; even if they are bronze swords and Assyrian kings. This kind of lazy thinking runs all through fantasy fandom and (to a mercifully lesser extent) publishing, because many people find it easier to swallow the resultant absurdities than to actually learn anything about history.

To those who know, the claim that ‘mediaeval fantasy’ is unrealistic unless based on feudalism — I’m not saying you made this claim, but I have seen and heard it made — is flatly ridiculous. The thing most people think of as feudalism, with the strict hierarchy of vassals and subordinate tenants and detailed laws concerning tenure and infeudation, is really post-mediaeval; indeed, it hardly existed at all, for it was a French invention, almost a legal fiction, and had scarcely been codified before Louis XIV swept the whole thing into the gilded rubbish-bin of Versailles. Something describable as feudalism, but not run by French rules, existed at various times in most of Western Europe north of the Alps, but never in Russia or the Balkans, still less in any other part of the world.

All of which means, for instance, that Dave Duncan’s early Iron Age fantasies (The Seventh Sword, in particular) get lumped in as ‘medieval’, by a venial error of two thousand years, and that the Shire (with clocks ticking on the mantelpiece and Lobelia brandishing her umberella) is taken as evidence of Tolkien’s hopeless mediaevalism.

I’m sorry if I seem to be hijacking the combox, but this has been giving me the dry gripes lately and you just reminded me of it.

[marycatelli]

On the contrary -- fascinating rant.

(Besides, I love comments. 0:)