The Persistence of Miscegenation Anxiety in Neo-Medieval Fantasy

Whether in their depictions of Jews or Saracens, giants or monsters, the storytellers of medieval Christian Europe showed great anxiety over the threat of miscegenation. Neo-medieval fantasy, for all its modernity and other signs of social progress, has not succeeded in dispelling this anxiety.

Take for instance roleplaying games. Racial categories are an important mechanic in these games, as a player's chosen race will invest her character with specific benefits and drawbacks. Although it can be said that D&D's racial system has made substantial improvements since its earliest incarnations (when “Elf,” “Dwarf,” and “Goblin” were classified as character classes), the games still have improvements to make. In both Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, character races are traditionally limited to pure-bred versions of the fantasy classics (human, elf, dwarf, goblin, etc) or to “half” versions of these species. Never mind the fact that this makes creating characters of more complicated racial background discouragingly difficult, but even the half species present a host of problems.

Pathfinder's half-orc and half-elf races, as depicted in official Pathfinder literature. Image courtesy Shianra.

Let's look at Pathfinder's half-orc and half-elf races. Like the half species in D&D (which include half-troll, half-dwarf, and half-drow, among others), all of Pathfinder's sentient beings of mixed race are given names which isolate them from their human lineage. There are no “half-humans” in most RPGs, placing humans in a position of racial prestige that subjects half-human children to a kind of “one-drop” rule of racial belonging. The scenarios of racial mixing in these games are equally problematic, as these unions are implied to be culturally unacceptable, produce children who go on to be outsiders, and are often enacted by force (typically by an “inferior” racial Other). Although game masters and players may always modify the rules of these games, developers have some responsibility to avoid perpetuating medieval social attitudes. Considering the relative ease with which this element could be removed from the game, there is little excuse for its persistence other than gaming tradition.

Not all forms of neo-medieval fantasy have such opportunities to exorcise miscegenation anxiety. Video games (even more so than tabletop RPGs) are locked into a system of rooted racial classes mostly as a result of technological limitation. As a fan of The Elder Scrolls series, I turn to these games in an investigation of racial mixing in fantasy video games.

The series contains ten playable races, and these races in turn are slotted into the categories of “human,” “mer” (or “elf”), and “beast.” To TES's credit, the ten races of Tamriel are depicted as able to breed with one another regardless of category, producing fully functional children who engage actively in society.

From left to right: Bosmer (mer), Redguard (human), Khajiit (beast). Images courtesy Elder Scrolls Online Update

However, not once in the series will the player meet a half-Bosmer, half-Redguard character. Nor will she meet any other character who appears to be the product of racial miscegenation. In the TES universe, children born of interracial unions take on the mother's race exclusively. This reproductive science resembles that in “The Man of Law's Tale” and “The King of Tars,” where white Christian women give birth to white Christian children despite their unions with non-white and/or non-Christian men. In TES as well as in medieval literature, mixed race beings are regarded as genetically impossible. In the case of a video game, this decision likely represents an unwillingness to spend the additional time and money it would take to design infinite unique racial combinations. Yet this explanation is not without its anxieties, as it refuses to acknowledge the multiplicity of backgrounds and experiences made possible and even encouraged by a fantasy setting.

The fantasy world created in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice is not so racially constrained as either roleplaying games or video games. This is due in part to the fact that the author custom-builds his characters, so to speak, and a mixed race character is no more difficult to write than any other character. The characters in Martin's books are also (almost exclusively) human and may thus seem more capable of mixing.

Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo as depicted in HBO's Game of Thrones. Images courtesy Game of Thrones Wiki

Yet there are uneasy moments in Martin's books, and not all of them are moments of graphic violence. The moment that stands out is the stillborn child born to the white, Aryan-styled Daenerys Targaryen and her dark-skinned, pseudo-Mongolian husband Khal Drogo. In bidding for her husband's life, Daenerys unwittingly sacrifices the life of her son, and the creature she births is both monstrous and dead. This child calls to mind the horrors of miscegenation as depicted in “The King of Tars,” when the white Christian princess—having become pregnant by her black Saracen husband—gives birth to a tumorous lump instead of a baby. Though blood magic is implied to have played a role in the deformation of Daenerys' child, the reader cannot know for sure who is to blame, and a kind of disturbing uncertainty remains to fill the void.

Ultimately, the ghost of miscegenation anxiety which remains in the neo-medieval fantasy genre does not linger with intent. However, this does not mean that problematic moments should be ignored, and ignorance is no excuse for offense.

The Jewry and the Quarter: Dunmer as Medieval Jewish Allegory in TES V: Skyrim

Allegory is everything to fantasy storytelling, and nowhere in modern fantasy does racial and ethnic allegory loom larger than in Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series. Connections between the races of Tamriel and those of Earth have long been drawn, and these connections and theories range from the insightful to the strange to the ignorant. At risk of being classified as the latter, I seek to prove that the diasporic Dunmer who appear in TES V: Skyrim can serve as allegory for the Jews who lived in medieval Europe. A close reading of one particular geographic location in the game—the city of Windhelm's Gray quarter—will provide most of my evidence and points of discussion.

Dunmer woman and man, as seen in TES V: Skyrim. Photo courtesy The Elder Scrolls Wiki.

The Dunmer, otherwise called Dark Elves, are a race of Elven people based out of the nation of Morrowind who also live in diasporic communities abroad. Like the Jews depicted in anti-semitic middle and late medieval illuminations, the Dunmer are dark-skinned, their facial features more dramatic and severe than their Nord counterparts (who play the role of medieval Christians in this allegory). Ancestry is pivotal to Dunmer culture, holding a kind of cult status, and the race maintains a sense of tight religious and ethnic community due to a racial history of both triumph and affliction.

Nowhere is the Dunmer-Jewish allegory more evident than in the ghetto that is the Gray Quarter, a narrow street in the city of Windhelm where all of the city's Dunmer citizenry have been corralled (the name of the quarter derives from the skin color of its inhabitants, who are made out to be racial Others by the city's human majority). The street is almost a carbon copy of the many Jewry Lanes once present in Europe, streets to which all Jewish citizens were relegated to work and do business.

A view of Windhelm's Gray Quarter. Photo courtesy The Elder Scrolls Wiki.

The Dunmer are not natives of Windhelm, having been driven to the nation of Skyrim as refugees by a catastrophic volcanic eruption. A Nord historian, his racial biases evident in his writing, calls these newcomers a “lazy, discontented rabble,” accusing them of generating unrest and bringing their bizarre, “native customs” into the city.

The characters who inhabit the Gray Quarter, however, are the ones who bring the allegory to life, complicating a simple academic comparison with their lived experiences.

Players may speak to a Dunmer pawnbroker in the Gray Quarter, an elf by the name of Aval Atheron, whose occupation problematically coincides with medieval Jewish stereotypes but whose power to voice his own experiences gives him an advantage over the two-dimensional Jews in medieval British literature. Aval expresses his discontent at the treatment he and the other Dunmer receive, informing the player that the Nords “don't let my kind live anywhere outside that slum.” Jews in medieval Britain and much of Europe were required by law to live on the assigned Jewry Lane or face harsh repercussions—for the most part, the same seems to be true of the Dunmer.

Another encounter—this one with Aval's sister Suvaris Atheron—shows the player just what kind of treatment Dunmer face in Windhelm. When the player first enters the city, (s)he sees Suvaris harassed by Nord citizens who accuse her of being a spy and threaten, “Maybe we'll pay you a visit tonight, little spy,” a threat with disturbing sexual implications as well as racial. When the player speaks with her, Suvaris replies that the Nords “come up with any excuse to despise us.” Such was the common fate of Jews in medieval Europe, who were villainized in Christian nations as well-poisoners and child-murderers, among other things.

Problematic to this allegory, however, are the Dunmer characters in Windhelm's Gray Quarter who openly embody the stereotypes of medieval Jews. Revyn Sadri, for instance, owns a pawnshop in the Gray Quarter and acquires his goods through nefarious means. This “greedy Dunmer” mirrors the “greedy Jew” archetype depicted in “Theophilus” and other medieval sources. Likewise, the innkeeper Ambarys Rendar expresses an open hatred for the Nords and shows little concern even at their deaths, a fact which brings to mind the malicious, scheming Jewish characters in “The Miracle of the Boy Singer” and other Marian miracle stories.

These instances aside, I do not feel The Elder Scrolls set out to create a malicious or entrapped image of Dunmer-as-tormented-Jews nor that—beyond the walls of the Gray Quarter—this allegory holds up. Other Dunmer in Skyrim, including a few who live just outside the walls of Windhelm, live free of the same persecution faced by the ghetto Dunmer and without malice toward the Nords. Their ancient history and the majority of their modern culture share few common features with that of Europe's Jews. That the Dunmer of Skyrim and the Jews depicted in medieval Christian literature share so similarities may be an accident on the part of the game developers or a product of my own over-active imagination. Yet such allegories may prove fruitful for those who wish to better relate the fantasy world to human history, just so long as these allegories are made in fairness and with a critical eye.