Neal Hebert's creation of archeological artifacts from the fantasy realm of our D & D game (one here, and more to come) made me think about the different ways such artifacts can be interpreted, given their role in the world in question.
In this regard, David Brin is my hero.
Among other things,this brilliant, hilarious, and thought-provoking essay reads The Lord of the Rings trilogy as if it really were a published history book in the world it describes. It's an essay I return to again and again. Mark Silcox and I discussed it in one of our papers and in our book. Here's the brilliant beginning (about the actual world, not Middle Earth).
It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat. (Sexist language is meaningfully accurate here; those cultures had no word for "sexism," it was simply assumed.)
They then proceeded to announce rules and 'traditions' ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.
Please, try to find even one exception. You won't succeed. Putting aside cultural superficialities, on every continent society quickly shaped itself into a pyramid, with a few well-armed bullies at the top... accompanied by some fast talking guys with painted faces or spangled cloaks who curried favor by weaving stories to explain why the bullies should remain on top.
He then discusses how Enlightenment is the only way everyone else manages to successfully rebel against the bullies, but then how Romanticism ends up rebelling against the rebellion. Some of his article discusses how Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are typical romantics in this regard. But the article really, really shines when it bids us to think of what the real Middle Earth must have been like.
. . . .enlightenment
can never completely replace older modes of thinking. The need for
stirring, illogical tales and images runs deep within us all. (Some of
us earn a good living that way.) Without romance, we'd be sorry
creatures, indeed.
Still, scientific/progressive society has been known
to listen to its critics, and not just now and then. Name one feudal
society whose leaders did that.
Were any orcs or 'dark men' offered coalition
positions in King Aragorn's cabinet, at the end of the Ring War? Was
Mordor given a benign Marshall Plan?
I think not.
. . . .things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)
My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.
So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?
Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?
. . . .Next time you re-read LOTR, count the number of examples. . . .cases where powerful beings are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?
. . . .Ask yourself - "How would Sauron have described the situation?"
And then -- "What might 'really' have happened?"
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy. This clearcut and undeniable fact. Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil dark lord"?
Or might they instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.
I think that one can make the point even stronger a Brin is missing what really went on with the elves.
There were elves working for Sauron, but LOTR calls them 'hobgoblins,' saying that they were elves that had been corrupted into a different species. Again, this is clearly part of the whitewash for Aragorn's genocide. Ask yourself what really went on with the elves supposedly going peacefully West at the end, and in reference to the good (i.e. non-hobgoblin) elves, just think of how Native Americans are romanticized in weird ways in movies like Dances With Wolves.
In any case, it's a fantastically entertaining essay with a lot of wisdom. The whole thing is on-line if you follow the link above.
Actually, the problem is that most interesting monsters that can be represented in terms of this mythology are best represented as mixtures of the above.
Sorry if this is obscure. The challenge is to design worlds where discredited psychological theories are not only true, but implicated in the way magic works. This is a steampunk trope.
Anyhow, the next trick would be to flatten the map and make the distance between regions (the extent to which they are contiguous, or the amount of distinct regions that have to be traversed to get from one region to the next) relevant. Then for example, the unseelie fey could inhabit a set of connected spaces (hopefully keeping the topology the same as Gall's picture of the human skull). Unfortunately, all of the actual maps I've found have all 37 regions, adding the ten that were Spurzheim's contribution to the pseudo-science. That's too many planes.
Maybe we should just use Freud instead.