Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy

Short Fantasy Fiction took a massive beating last year. Two premier fantasy publications, Realms of Fantasy and the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror Anthology, ceased publication. Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine switched to bi-monthly publication to stop its own bleeding.

That isn't to say that short fantasy fiction is dead (again) in America. There are still lively and leading outlets: with relative newcomer, Black Gate Magazine chief among them. But short fiction authors wouldn't mind a map to redemption.

I found one.

In long fiction.

Specifically, Theodore Beale's Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy.
This remarkable book is notable for having successfully turned the fantasy novel as it is currently recognized on its ear.

The tropes, icons and themes of what I would call "standard" medievalesque fantasy fiction are challenged directly. Without the convenient cover of parody or satire, Beale plays it straight with his setting: conflicted regions, separated loosely into basic people groups: humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls and other commonly-known fantasy species.

The Catholic Church shepherds (and, if need be, supresses, opposes or spies on) the social, political and spiritual objectives of the land's inhabitants. After all, in a genre (high fantasy) practically predicated on the Divine Right of Kings, how does an author express his story without careful attention to the "divine" governance of that right?

As (surprisingly) innovative as this approach is Beale does something even greater: he avoids writing his epic in epic style, choosing, instead, to tell a novella-length narrative accompanied by short fiction and Church documents.

It works great, but the reviews have been really mixed, or rather, mixed up. I can't tell you the number of reviews that found one of the novel's strengths - its abruptness - to be confusing and disappointing. They laud the short interwoven articles and short stories, but fail to make the connection between the "main" story and its interconnected sublots. For a book purporting to be the comprehensive theological treatise on a cultural controversy, it isn't quite clear why this approach has been so misunderstood.

I hope in time Summa Elvetica's interweaving of created history and unique approach to the problem of Christianity in high fantasy will be recognized for what it is, and not what readers think it is not.

If you read the appendices of Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion, you already know the power of the multi-documental approach. If you write short fiction, one could do far worse than to study Beale.