Every night I see her in my dreams. She is brutally taken away from me. I can see her face disappear, melting away. And I can never catch her, no matter how hard I try. It has been 3 years now. Where are you Eleanore? My baby.

3 years since her disappearance… Will I ever find her? Every day my hope and my heart are shrinking. She is the only reason left for me to carry on in this world.

This damn world. A smoking ruin. They are all gone: kings, lords, peasants, all gone! An act of God they say. A strange one, I say. There’s only a few of us left now, picking up the scraps. What is the point of this life?

A movement on my left, barely noticeable. In a heartbeat he is on me. I deflect the blow, but he hits me in the leg. The pain wakes me up. The adrenaline pumps in! I throw my boot in his face as hard as I can, despite the pain. I kick my dear Samson in his side to get away from my aggressor. I reach for my crossbow, put a bolt in, aim and hit him straight in the throat. One gone.

One of them is running at me from the back, too late to reload. I throw the crossbow away, reach for my sword and parry his strike, just in time. He is not very good. Quickly, I get him in the shoulder. Screams of pain. The third one runs at me, I turn to face him and quickly realize it was a ruse to attract attention. They both disappear in the woods and I’m left alone in silence. Just me, the pain and the raider.

I check the body. Not much on him, a few coins. A pity. I have to clean this leg wound. Rickenwood, and this woman Salma, are only half a day away now. I can make it. Come on Samson, time to pull your weight!

I reach Rickenwood just before nightfall. I buy my way in. Salma is in the yellow house I’m told. The one without shutters. When I finally reach the house, the door opens.

There she is, standing. A small woman, in her thirties, blond hair, round figure. She says in a low voice: “Come on in. We have to talk about Eleanore.”

From Unpublished by Antoine Ribordy

Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by imaginary worlds. I used to love writing about them in school projects that we had to hand over. Teachers thought I was a bit weird though (and they were right!).

This fascination carried over to role-playing games, for which I would create my own stories and characters. I explored amazing worlds in the realms of Fantasy (Heroic, Dark, Historic), Science-Fiction, Steampunk (think Castle in the Sky or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), Space Opera (think Star Wars), Cyberpunk (think Blade Runner) and Post-Apocalyptic (think Mad Max). Since then I must admit I have put my creativity for fantasy on the back-burner for a while. You know how it goes, life, studies, family, blah, blah, blah.

Until now, hence my little story introduction. You are allowed to laugh about it, that’s fine. And don’t worry, I don’t intend to publish it. Unless…

This fascination for imaginary worlds has followed me over the years on the consumer front. I love the way your brain can take you to any universe you like through your imagination, how you can carve every little details of a scenery by sheer thought. And I am happy to have the opportunity today to be creative again through posting on this blog.

Imaginary worlds are best explored in Fantasy works in a large sense (including Science-Fiction and derivatives). Most of you are aware of the modern variants of fantasy, but do you know what the equivalent of modern fantasy was in the 15^th century? I didn’t either, until I decided to research it. And this is the topic of this new post. We will explore the origin and development of fantasy over our history.

I will admit I haven’t been a big fan of history classes at school, and haven’t done particularly well at them. So it is kind of ironic that I have had to go through history for this research on fantasy. It has been an exciting opportunity for catching up and exploring fascinating parts of history. I’m happy I went through it (and that it’s done, too!). But without further rambling, let’s dig into it.

Fantasy, over time, has been relayed by the classic mediums of storytelling. And these mediums have also evolved over that time. Here is a list of them, in no particular order:

1. Manuscript, book
2. Forum (physical or online), presentation
3. Oral storytelling
4. Blogs
5. Theater, circus
6. Painting
7. Comics
8. Films, cartoons, animation films
9. Video Games
10. Virtual Reality

Note that the topic of the evolution of storytelling and mediums over our history is not the topic of this post. Here we will only focus on the history of fantasy. But it is important to mention them as they are the means of carrying stories and messages.

To explore fantasy, we will cover the following historical periods:

1. Classical Antiquity
2. Middle Ages
3. Early Modern Period
4. Long Nineteenth Century
5. Contemporary Period

In the new post, we will start this extraordinary voyage with Classical Antiquity.