Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature, by Aisling Byrne

Abstract

Aisling Byrne’s book is a rich, fascinating and erudite reassessment of the ‘otherworld’ in the literature of the British Isles. Impressively wide ranging in scope and ambition, the book offers new perspectives on the fantastic realms of medieval vernacular and Latin texts, exploring how otherworld spaces operate within literary texts and how they interact with the historical world in which they were produced. Byrne identifies a ‘counter-intuitive closeness’ between real and ‘other’ worlds (p. 184) and the book concludes with a most interesting chapter on the ways in which the history and geography of real locations are shaped by literary otherworld tropes in sources such as maps and chronicles. This is an important and valuable book which adds much to our knowledge of medieval otherworlds and offers a productive series of frameworks not only for theorising such spaces but for thinking about what they might tell us about medieval attitudes to the relationship between fantasy and history.