Wittering on Divine

(I can’t help but wonder how many people are going to get that joke…)
So, here’s a question for you: Precisely when, and why, did polytheism become the default assumption for fantasy?
There’s nothing at all wrong with fantasy novels describing polytheistic cultures. A great number of my favorite fantasy series do, and indeed, most of my own fantasy writing does so as well. But it seems peculiar to me that it’s become the de facto standard, from which any deviation is a noteworthy surprise.
Consider that most fantasy–or, I should clarify, most American and British fantasy, anyway–is based loosely on Medieval Western Europe. Not all, of course, and not usually with any strong degree of accuracy, but in a very general sense. You have your knights in armor, your feudal culture, your castles and keeps, and so forth. You even, in many such series–Eddings’ Elenium springing to mind as the first such example–have a powerful, organized clergy that is clearly reminiscent of the Catholic Church. Except, of course, that it’s polytheistic.
Why, I’ve often wondered, should that be?

It’s certainly not historically accurate–pagans existed in Europe during the Middle Ages, but they weren’t precisely the dominant culture. And while most fantasy novels aren’t concerned with historical accuracy, not taking place in our world, it’s a bizarre shift from what is otherwise an often culturally accurate (or semi-accurate) setting.
It’s not a tradition that stems form the roots of fantasy. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was monotheistic. There were plenty of Valar and Maiar (effectively angels), but Eru Ilúvatar is the one and only god. While so much of Tolkien has formed the basis for modern fantasy as a genre, religion is clearly an exception.
Nor does it stem from the more popular examples of pre-Tolkien fantasy–or if it does, it does so inaccurately. The Hyborian Age of Howard’s Conan is polytheistic–I’m guessing most of you have heard the phrase “By Crom!” at least once–but the gods didn’t form a single unified pantheon. Rather, they were grouped by culture or region; Crom is a Cimmerian deity, for instance, rather than being worshiped through Hyboria as a whole. Most modern polytheistic fantasy–again, not all, by any means, but most–tends toward a more pantheistic approach, with the gods unified in a single extended family that holds sway (more or less) universally.
But even then, many fantasy writers deviate from historical views of pantheistic faiths. The Ancient Greeks, for instance, didn’t normally choose a single member of the Olympians to receive the bulk of their worship. While a specific priest might serve a particular god, and an individual might concentrate on one deity a little more than the others, your average person worshiped the gods, plural. If you were heading out to sea, you damn well sacrificed to Poseidon; if you were to be married, you invoked Hera; and so forth. Yet in much modern fantasy, characters and even entire societies are often devoted to a single deity from amongst the pantheon, as though the gods were cultural, not a single pantheon. It’s a peculiar mish-mash of both these forms of polytheism, while being historically accurate to neither. And again, there’s nothing wrong with this–the ogre tribes in The Conqueror’s Shadow are devoted to Chalsene, so as I said, this is something I’ve done myself–but also again, the question remains, where does it come from?
Partly, I think, it’s yet another of D&D’s influences on fantasy writing, as I’ve talked about before. Although it wasn’t much addressed in the early editions, as D&D developed its own ideas of “religion” in the context of the game, I believe those ideas influenced the writers of the time. This, however, is very much a chicken-and-egg sort of argument; D&D helped spread this view of religion in fantasy, but it didn’t create it.
(I really need to stop using the “chicken and egg” metaphor, since I feel I’ve solved that question to my satisfaction.)
So where else? I’m not positive by any means, but I have a few guesses.
In part, I think it comes from a misunderstanding of polytheism/pantheism. Because modern Western culture is so thoroughly monotheistic–again, speaking in generalities here, not universal truths–I think a lot of folks have difficulty entirely wrapping their minds around what it means to worship more than one god. So they write about worlds with multiple deities, but they still have characters choose a single deity to receive the bulk of their worship. It allows for the inclusion of an “alien” belief system, while still making the general practices and attitudes familiar ones to the monotheistic writer (and reader). They want to evoke the feel of true mythology–the same sort of sense you’d get from Greek or Norse legend–but either lack knowledge of, or choose to discard, the historical practices that went with it.
For others, I think it comes–or rather, it originally came–from a deliberate desire to set things apart form historical Earth. Creating a made-up pantheon is an immediate and obvious way to say “Hey, look! This isn’t the world you know!” Of course, you could do that by making up a new monotheistic faith, too, but I think some writers might worry that people would then mistake their writing for some sort of commentary on real-world faith. (Or, for that matter, they may feel they’re being disrespectful to their own real-world faith if they’re writing about something too similar to it.)
This is all just theorizing on my part, of course. I haven’t made any concerted effort to trace the use of pantheism in fantasy back to its source, so I don’t know precisely when it became the norm (though I can generalize). And of course, these days, many writers (myself sometimes included) go this route simply because it’s become one of the tropes of fantasy. (Some of you are yelling at me now for advocating the use of tropes purely for the tropes’ sake. In response, I’d argue that sometimes, you’re absolutely right–but that if religion isn’t central to a given story, sometimes it’s best to go with what’s expected and allow religion to fade into the background, as just another part of the culture, and thus allow the writer to focus on what is different about/important to the book. If you’re interested, I talked a bit more about my views on the use of classic tropes in a recent guest blog over at SF Signal.)
I’d be fascinated in hearing any other theories (or even recorded facts) regarding the motivations of the genre’s original trailblazers; while I think there’s some veracity to my hypotheses above, they are, in the end, only educated guesses.
I guess you could say I’m taking them on faith.