Aged in Oaken Heroes: Heroic Fantasy and Imagined History - James Enge

Anyway, it is widely agreed that heroic fantasy is set in some age before we learned that “digital watches were a pretty neat idea”, a period frequently described as the Middle Ages. And this is almost perfectly dumb. For one thing, not every age without highly developed machines is medieval. How about Hawaii before the Europeans got there? How about a post-machine age (apocalyptic or otherwise)? How about the pre-medieval world? In any case, magic is itself a kind of science and/or technology, and it may pervade the world of a heroic fantasy. No technology in heroic fantasy? Morlock is skeptical. Then there’s the question of what the Middle Ages are, anyway. Broadly, they are a chunk of time in western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and before the Renaissance. 3.5 out of 5 http://jamesenge.com/2012/10/10/aged-in-oaken-heroes-heroic-fantasy-imagined-history/