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This is a loose riff inspired, but not very tightly tied to, the kerfuffle over at SF Diplomat's discussion of fantasy by way of GRRM and then subsequent war with GRRM supporters.
I've seen the charge made in various quarters, though: fantasy basically supports an authoritarian worldview. This is usually supported by pointing to a number of "rightful king returns" books which have become a staple of extruded fantasy product, among them, most obviously, Eddings' Belgariad, and Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. The Lord of the Rings, with the Aragorn subplot (developed relatively late in the evolution of the books, as the HoME papers show fairly clearly, and wrenched out of the original context of the Numenorean fall, which wasn't exactly complimentary to monarchy) is the obvious grandfather of all these, with the "nobility/royalty will show through" plot from traditional stories -- the Perceval stories come to mind, as do the foundling/recognition stories going all the way back to the Greek novel -- standing behind that in a long chain of predecessors.
It's worth noting that Tolkien, at least, was certainly not an authoritarian in person; his letters show someone with an entrenched distrust of established authority, and someone who was very unlikely to confuse the eucatastrophic tropes of classic fairy-stories with real life. The advantage he made up for the descendants of Luthien ("The hands of a king are the hands of a healer", which Aragorn extends by implication to Elrond in a later comment) has no parallel in real life, unless you really believe in the King's Touch. (Even that was supposed to be conferred by the office, not by pure heredity.) And Ar-Pharazon was a descendant of Luthien as well... Likewise, GRRM seems to be a liberal on the US spectrum.
The more the stories tend to push a "blood will show through, whatever the training", the more arbitrary the advantages tend to be. Aragorn had been brought up in the House of Elrond with a more "elevated" education than just about any other human in Middle-Earth; and I can't imagine that the training in swordsmanship and the like would have been exactly poor there, either. But books like the Belgariad and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, with their kings brought up as peasants, are less nuanced.[1]. However, it should be noted that although this trope is popular, it's not really all that popular: it's completely missing from GRRM, Erikson, and Kay. And it's parodied in Pratchett's Captain Carrot.
The opposite theme, by the way -- that men in (legitimate) power are usually cruel, dangerous, violent, and power-hungry people whose attention one wants to avoid -- would seem to have a widespread presence in fantasy as well (think of the various kings in ASoIaF or the traits of the various rulers in the Malazan Book of the Fallen) which is at least as strong as the same theme in Dunnett's historical novels, where courts are invariably snakepits.
The more general claim is that the mere fact of depicting, in a neutral manner, a society of either pure monarchical or at the best tight-knit oligarchical form makes the books implicit endorsement of authoritarianism. Following this world view, the least one should do is show the groaning wretches suffering under the grinding boot of arbitrary authority, if not always include a revolutionary movement or two.[2] In short, be China Mieville.
The question is closely related to another one: is fantasy fundamentally a "cozy" wish-fulfilling genre? The prevalence of authoritarian polities may derive from "real" mediaeval history, but having the advent of a Good King set things to rights is basically as much a child's wish-fulfillment fantasy as it is a serious defence of authoritarianism. Once the question is posed in that way, it's easier to see that it's meaningful, if at all, applied only to a very small subset of fantasy. It doesn't apply to Tolkien as a whole (witness the Silmarillion and the overall tragic frame of the whole story of Middle-Earth, whatever the temporary uptick at the end of the Third Age may be like - and witness his unwise or actively bad rulers, as well, in the same framework). It certainly doesn't apply to GRRM or Steven Erikson or Mary Gentle or China Mieville, who are gritty, or to Dunsany, Tolkien and others who are heavily melancholy. (Many variants of the Arthurian story inherit this directly from the overall failure of the Arthurian kingdom after Camlann). In some cases it comes along with a fairy-tale framework where fairy tales and their typical attendant eucatastrophe stand as close models to the work in question (Lud-in-the-Mist, maybe), or along with an inherited setting which assumes a particular Good Monarch (Arthur or Charlemagne) but where that's mainly part of the background rather than the foreground.
[1]Note that the female equivalent of this is the Cinderella story -- the underlying theme in both Perceval and Cinderella being that real breeding will not be stifled by having been brought up with absolutely no exposure to chivalry, court manners, etc. But both those stories were shaped in a genuinely aristocratic context and polished to reflect the desired worldview of the aristocrats back at themselves. Any story based around a "discovery" complete with infant clothes and identifying knick-knacks (The Winter's Tale, for example, but also H.M.S. Pinafore and Major Barbara, which are playing with the theme) requires an aristocratic worldview which correlates ability with heredity very tightly as at least a background to play off.
[2] Never mind that, apart from crackpot radical millenarians of the sort Norman Cohn deals with in The Pursuit of the Millenium, just about all revolutionary movements in the (real) mediaeval period were simply rebellions aimed at replacing one set of rulers with another, and there's no reason to believe that a mediaevaloid society in a fantasy world would be any different.
I've seen the charge made in various quarters, though: fantasy basically supports an authoritarian worldview. This is usually supported by pointing to a number of "rightful king returns" books which have become a staple of extruded fantasy product, among them, most obviously, Eddings' Belgariad, and Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. The Lord of the Rings, with the Aragorn subplot (developed relatively late in the evolution of the books, as the HoME papers show fairly clearly, and wrenched out of the original context of the Numenorean fall, which wasn't exactly complimentary to monarchy) is the obvious grandfather of all these, with the "nobility/royalty will show through" plot from traditional stories -- the Perceval stories come to mind, as do the foundling/recognition stories going all the way back to the Greek novel -- standing behind that in a long chain of predecessors.
It's worth noting that Tolkien, at least, was certainly not an authoritarian in person; his letters show someone with an entrenched distrust of established authority, and someone who was very unlikely to confuse the eucatastrophic tropes of classic fairy-stories with real life. The advantage he made up for the descendants of Luthien ("The hands of a king are the hands of a healer", which Aragorn extends by implication to Elrond in a later comment) has no parallel in real life, unless you really believe in the King's Touch. (Even that was supposed to be conferred by the office, not by pure heredity.) And Ar-Pharazon was a descendant of Luthien as well... Likewise, GRRM seems to be a liberal on the US spectrum.
The more the stories tend to push a "blood will show through, whatever the training", the more arbitrary the advantages tend to be. Aragorn had been brought up in the House of Elrond with a more "elevated" education than just about any other human in Middle-Earth; and I can't imagine that the training in swordsmanship and the like would have been exactly poor there, either. But books like the Belgariad and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, with their kings brought up as peasants, are less nuanced.[1]. However, it should be noted that although this trope is popular, it's not really all that popular: it's completely missing from GRRM, Erikson, and Kay. And it's parodied in Pratchett's Captain Carrot.
The opposite theme, by the way -- that men in (legitimate) power are usually cruel, dangerous, violent, and power-hungry people whose attention one wants to avoid -- would seem to have a widespread presence in fantasy as well (think of the various kings in ASoIaF or the traits of the various rulers in the Malazan Book of the Fallen) which is at least as strong as the same theme in Dunnett's historical novels, where courts are invariably snakepits.
The more general claim is that the mere fact of depicting, in a neutral manner, a society of either pure monarchical or at the best tight-knit oligarchical form makes the books implicit endorsement of authoritarianism. Following this world view, the least one should do is show the groaning wretches suffering under the grinding boot of arbitrary authority, if not always include a revolutionary movement or two.[2] In short, be China Mieville.
The question is closely related to another one: is fantasy fundamentally a "cozy" wish-fulfilling genre? The prevalence of authoritarian polities may derive from "real" mediaeval history, but having the advent of a Good King set things to rights is basically as much a child's wish-fulfillment fantasy as it is a serious defence of authoritarianism. Once the question is posed in that way, it's easier to see that it's meaningful, if at all, applied only to a very small subset of fantasy. It doesn't apply to Tolkien as a whole (witness the Silmarillion and the overall tragic frame of the whole story of Middle-Earth, whatever the temporary uptick at the end of the Third Age may be like - and witness his unwise or actively bad rulers, as well, in the same framework). It certainly doesn't apply to GRRM or Steven Erikson or Mary Gentle or China Mieville, who are gritty, or to Dunsany, Tolkien and others who are heavily melancholy. (Many variants of the Arthurian story inherit this directly from the overall failure of the Arthurian kingdom after Camlann). In some cases it comes along with a fairy-tale framework where fairy tales and their typical attendant eucatastrophe stand as close models to the work in question (Lud-in-the-Mist, maybe), or along with an inherited setting which assumes a particular Good Monarch (Arthur or Charlemagne) but where that's mainly part of the background rather than the foreground.
[1]Note that the female equivalent of this is the Cinderella story -- the underlying theme in both Perceval and Cinderella being that real breeding will not be stifled by having been brought up with absolutely no exposure to chivalry, court manners, etc. But both those stories were shaped in a genuinely aristocratic context and polished to reflect the desired worldview of the aristocrats back at themselves. Any story based around a "discovery" complete with infant clothes and identifying knick-knacks (The Winter's Tale, for example, but also H.M.S. Pinafore and Major Barbara, which are playing with the theme) requires an aristocratic worldview which correlates ability with heredity very tightly as at least a background to play off.
[2] Never mind that, apart from crackpot radical millenarians of the sort Norman Cohn deals with in The Pursuit of the Millenium, just about all revolutionary movements in the (real) mediaeval period were simply rebellions aimed at replacing one set of rulers with another, and there's no reason to believe that a mediaevaloid society in a fantasy world would be any different.
