Hugin & Munin Journal

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major plot revelations from Nine Princes in Amber , The Rook , Planescape: Torment , Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , The Wheel of Time , and The Buried Giant . Fantasy heroes are often required to investigate themselves. They wake in unfamiliar rooms with wounds they cannot explain. They recognise a language they do not remember learning. A stranger calls them by another name, or their hands know how to fight before their minds know why. Somewhere behind the person moving through the story is another life: concealed, stolen, suppressed, or inaccessible. The missing past is useful in obvious ways. It creates mystery, delays exposition, and allows the protagonist to discover the world alongside the reader. Its deeper attraction lies elsewhere. Once a character loses access to their own history, identity can no longer remain an assumption. It becomes a problem the story must examine. An orphan has a missing origin ; an amnesiac has a m...

Fantasy has always had too many orphans. The child raised by unpleasant relatives. The foundling discovered at the edge of a forest. The farm boy whose father never speaks about the past. The girl carrying a pendant that belonged to a mother nobody will discuss. Somewhere along the journey, an old retainer notices a familiar face, a sealed letter is opened, or a dying wizard reveals what several adults have apparently known for years: the insignificant child is the lost heir, the final descendant, the rightful bearer of a name that once mattered. The obvious explanation is practical. Dead parents cannot forbid the quest, demand that the protagonist return before dark, or ask why a twelve-year-old has been entrusted with the survival of the kingdom. Orphanhood gives a young character freedom that would otherwise require implausibly negligent adults. Convenience explains why the trope is useful, but not why fantasy so often fills the space left by the parents with royal ancestry, m...

I am no longer sure how I first saw Vidocq , or whether my memory of Brotherhood of the Wolf belongs more to the cinema or the DVD shelf. The uncertainty has become part of the memory. I know roughly when I encountered them and what they felt like at the time, but not whether either recollection begins in a cinema seat, in front of a television, in a rental shop, or somewhere in the early-internet haze of trailers, covers, recommendations, and half-remembered searches. With Le pacte des loups , released in Sweden as Vargarnas pakt , the record is clearer. The Swedish Film Database records a cinema release on 5 October 2001 , followed by a Swedish DVD release in February 2002. Vidocq seems more likely to belong to the next layer of discovery: the DVD shelf, an imported recommendation, or an online search that led to something strange but suddenly obtainable. The same database lists Scanbox as its Swedish DVD distributor in 2003 , which fits my recollection better than a conventional...

Fantasy has no trouble marching to war. Its maps almost invite it. Mountain passes divide kingdoms, old roads connect fortified cities, rivers create vulnerable crossings and castles stand precisely where an army will eventually need to take them. Even when no map is printed, epic fantasy trains the reader to think territorially. Power occupies a capital, claims a border and fears whatever may descend through the northern pass. That is the sharp contrast with the sea. Fantasy has ships, pirates, islands, voyages, monsters and storms , but it has developed armies far more often than navies as complete fictional institutions. On land, the genre readily imagines campaigns, mercenary companies, sieges, occupation, supply lines and civilian devastation. At sea, ships more often remain vehicles for escape, discovery or outlaw adventure. The difference is not simply that land battles are easier to picture. Land war moves through the political and geographical structures fantasy already ...

Fantasy goes to sea more often than it joins the navy. The genre has ships, islands, sea monsters, cursed maps, smugglers, merchants, magical storms, hidden archipelagos, drowned cities and pirates enough to fill a hundred taverns. The sea is one of fantasy’s most reliable borders: the blue distance between kingdoms, the route to elsewhere and the place where maps lose confidence. The gap is not nautical fantasy. It is naval fantasy. What appears less often is fantasy that treats naval service as a complete fictional machine: command, discipline, weather, logistics, rank, ship handling, promotion, blockade, prize law, medicine, punishment, intelligence and the education of judgment under pressure. Patrick O’Brian and C. S. Forester built historical fiction around that machinery. David Weber carried much of it into space opera. Fantasy more commonly treats the ship as transport, refuge, family enterprise or outlaw stage. This is a tendency rather than an absolute absence. There ...

A king can be confronted. A tyrant can be named. A dragon can be found in its cave. A bureaucracy sends a letter. That is why bureaucracy occupies such a strange place in fantasy and science fiction. It lacks the glamour of monarchy, the spectacle of empire and the seductive clarity of a villain. It does not need a throne room or anyone particularly cruel. Its power moves through files, categories, registers, queues, hearings, thresholds and decisions whose authorship has dissolved into procedure. Bureaucracy is not a political system in the same sense as monarchy or democracy. It is an administrative form capable of serving almost any political order . Republics use it to distribute benefits and enforce rights. Empires use it to classify subjects and collect tribute. Dictatorships use it to turn persecution into routine administration. Corporations use it to coordinate actions across offices whose employees may never meet. Its horror is not simply inefficiency. Bureaucracy can...