Elric_ The Sleeping Sorceress - Michael Moorcock [137]
Chief of these is Amadis de Gaul, probably created by the Portuguese Vasco Lobeira, comprising in the original four long books but, in sequels by a host of imitators, making up some fifty books in all. Whereas the original Chivalric Romances were a mixture of ancient pagan legend, later Christian revision, history and myth, the decadent Romances, though borrowing heavily from the original body, were of definite authorship. They were, in fact, the first novels. The fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries produced a vast spate of these with titles like Palmerin of England (a four-volume Romance reprinted in 1807, translated by Southey), Tirante the White, Felixmarte of Hyrcania, The Mirror of Chivalry and hundreds more.
It was these Romances that Cervantes satirized in Don Quixote and, in rejecting the Romance form, laid the foundations for the modern novel in his pastoral and picaresque stories.
About fifty years after Don Quixote debunked the form, the last of its examples was published. It had given way to the novel of country life and the colourful novel of thieves and vagabonds, though, in drama and poetry we still find evidence of its appeal—The Faerie Queene, for instance, makes direct use of Romantic imagery, while the Jacobean Tragedy, with its emphasis on gratuitous horror was later to influence the Gothic.
For over a hundred years, as the Age of Reason reigned, the prose romance was unpopular with intellectual and general public alike and it took an aesthetic and antiquarian politician, Sir Horace Walpole, to instigate the return of the romance in Britain with what is generally thought to be the first real Gothic novel—The Castle of Otranto. Though there were one or two hints in other works that it was coming, it was Walpole’s short novel that launched the Romantic Revival in English literature. This was published in 1764. It deals with all kinds of sensational supernatural events in and about the grotesque Castle, makes no attempt to rationalize them, from the mysterious appearance one day of a gigantic helmet in the first chapter, to the “awful spectre” who reminds one of the characters of his duty in the last chapter.
Since later articles will deal with examples in detail, I won’t bother to describe the best of the Gothics here. These included the works of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho), Matthew Gregory Lewis (Ambrosio; or, The Monk), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Charles Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer) and many, many more. For fifty years, from 1770 to 1820, the Gothic novel was the most popular form in England and its influence remained with later writers such as Scott, the Brontës, even Austen, Le Fanu and, of course, Poe and the Victorian/Edwardian school of horror-story writers. In fact it never really died after The Castle of Otranto, but continued to develop to the present day (my own early “Elric” stories are written, I feel, in the tradition of the Chivalric and Gothic Romance).
The fantasy story, with its overtones of romance and its undertones of the “inner world of the psyche,” has never lost its appeal, though it often goes through periods where serious critics abhor it and a large section of the public disdains it. If we take into consideration folk-epics and religious works such as the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, traditional tales such as The Arabian Nights and the Norse Eddara, we can see that its development has been continuous since primitive man first began to invent stories. For better or worse, this can hardly be said of any other form.
I should like to finish this introductory article to a series which will deal with specific works of fantasy with a quote from Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pages 180–181):
It [the second part of Goethe’s Faust] is a strange something that