Below appears the abstract I submitted to the Tales after Tolkien panel at the 2013 International Congress on Medieval Studies. After drafting the paper, I realized that my idea was not the best to advance, but I did not have the time to make what occurred to me to be the best case. I am revisiting the paper, and I will hopefully be correcting my earlier errors as I do so.
The main thrust of modern fantasy literature, beginning with Tolkien, presents a vision of what Douglas A. Anderson calls in his introduction to Tales before Tolkien heroic romance, acting in a tradition embodied in the medieval Arthurian narratives up to and including Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Although there are a number of prominent exceptions to the prevailing trend of fantasy literature (J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series comes to mind), a large portion of fantastic narratives occur in a common setting. The usual milieu is a feudal society with few gradations either of nobility or of the non-noble classes, in which a few sizable states enact conflict through armies generally reflecting Western Europe at approximately the time of the High Middle Ages. Tolkien’s Middle-earth corpus presents such a milieu, as do such popular fantasy arcs as that of Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, and George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire.
Although Robin Hobb’s Tawny Man trilogy deploys a number of the “standard” features of the common modern fantasy literature setting, it displays deviations from those features in several regards. Notable among them is the depiction of cultures deriving from other parts of the medieval than the most commonly evoked Continent of the Crusades, particularly that of the Out Isles. Presenting such a culture and its interactions with the “more advanced” society of the Six Duchies, one largely in line with civilizations typical of modern fantasy literature, affords Hobb’s series a more nuanced and more authentically medieval setting than those of many of her contemporaries.