Quote:
Originally Posted by Geralt
What are you even talking about? Fantastical creatures have been present in literature since the beginning. Just crack open any of the Greek, Indian,Chinese or any other epics and you'll find them. Fantasy has been around since mankind started telling each other stories. What place? It was always here in one form or other.
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And nobody noticed that since 325AD and Gutenberg no such literature has ever been issued?
It was the Renaissance (which actually means, and I am sure you know this, the
pagan renaissance) when authors escaped the rigid church chains and could, stepwise, regain the upper hand in lay literature without fearing (or fearing less
) the heresy accusations and the associated burning at stake. Forbidden teachings started to flourish, staring with the science (it was a large vacuum there), then with literature, in particular political, and finally, as the public changed (males went to work, wives stayed at home) with romances and stories.
The East-Europe folklore is different, it is populated with "cute, dumb" monsters, that have their place only to get outsmarted by mythical heroes. In other words, the typical story is that a muliple-head dragon kidnaps the king's daughter, only to be saved by the local hero, via tricks (and here we have the teaching of the story) and/or with the smart aid of various good will people or creatures that lend him their help because (yet another teaching) the hero proved to be a good man in many respects (the hero is tested for his qualities), then he get her for wife and half of the kingdom. As probably many know, there were no kingdoms in East-Europe, not before late 1800'ies, and since the arrival of the Turks. And with so many stories like that, halving and halving kingdoms, even USA would have become smaller than Las Vegas. Those monsters rarely terrorised normal people, they simple went hunting king's daughters. I don't mind one, myself
. For instance, it was the Germanic settlers that brought the scary Nordic stories into eg Carpathians, including vampires, undeads, and bad spirits.