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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Golden Age

Tagged: Theme.

An idyllic past age from which the present represents a sad fall or Thinning. The term's first recorded use is in the ancient Greek Hesiod's Works and Days (eighth century BC) (see also Greek and Latin Classics); the Bible's garden of Eden represents another lost Golden Age. The Golden Age is conceptually distinct from magic Otherworlds, but the two are often mixed in fantasy's legendary pasts. Thus the popularity of Arthurian romance (see Arthur) in the female-ruled courts of Eleanor of Acquitaine and Marie de Champagne has been attributed – e.g. in Jean Markale's Women of the Celts (1975) – to nostalgia for the pivotal roles played in Celtic legend by magical "ladies of the foundation" and "sovereignty" givers: Morgan Le Fay, Vivian, or the Lady of the Lake. The success of modern works like Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon (1983) suggests the attractiveness, for female writers and readers, of rewriting legendary histories into an Alternate-World past Golden Age where women's roles are more prominent (see also Goddess). Indeed, Edmund Spenser's verse epic The Faerie Queen (1590-1596) shows a "Gloriana" flatteringly based on Elizabeth Tudor, reigning in a nostalgic quasi-Arthurian Golden Age. Temporal Cycles may promise a new Golden Age – as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Hellas (1822), where "The golden years return ..." – but one which will again give way to iron and leaden years. [JH/DRL]

see also: Arcadia; Dreamtime; Et in Arcadia Ego.



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