“Where are the wizards?” my cousin asked me, half an hour into a family screening of Braveheart. I saw where he was coming from. The film has all the trademarks of high fantasy: battles on green hills, warriors wearing chainmail and carrying wooden clubs, an absence of modern technology and a strange antiquated vernacular. There was going to be no magic, I explained; the film was simply set in Scotland in the Middle Ages. His disappointment was palpable.
On surveying my collection of fantasy movies and video games the next day, I realised that almost all of them were set in a place that resembled 13th-century Scotland, from The Lord of the Rings to Skyrim to Game of Thrones. Given that fantasy is the only genre that gives writers unlimited creative licence to dream up the wildest worlds, why do we see the same tired clichés deployed time and again?
The modern fantasy mould was cast by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, a pair of British medievalists who studied together at Oxford, and, following the ideology of their times, concocted societies that were divided by race. The fact of being an elf, dwarf, human or orc defined your morality and physical abilities — and racial difference could be justification enough for war. Today’s fantasy mega-IPs such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and games from Monster Hunter to The Witcher all follow in this tradition. They are steeped in European mythology and centre on white heroes.