Poul Anderson once wrote, “Probably [today’s rising popularity of heroic fantasy] is part of a larger movement back toward old-fashioned storytelling, with colorful backgrounds, events, and characters, tales wherein people do take arms against a sea of troubles and usually win.”

His argument parallels the deliberate attempts by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien to bring a sense of wonder or awe back into literature. But Anderson also cautioned writers against falling into a simplistic understanding of their task. In his essay “On Thud and Blunder,” he insisted, “Beneath the magic, derring-do, and other glamour, an imaginary world has to work right. In particular, a pre-industrial society, which is what virtually all hf uses for a setting, differs from ours today in countless ways.”

My encounter with this essay nudged me in the direction of reading about agriculture and transportation in classical and medieval times. For better or worse, I’m strongly influenced by the American literary tradition’s obsession with realism, so I care that a person needs about six pounds of food and about four to sixteen pounds of water each day to survive in a healthy condition. I care that one horse needs, according to my sources, about ten pounds of grain and about ten pounds of other forage each day.

For me, thinking about weight and travel time imposed a welcomed constraint on my grand conflict. Even marching an army from Point A to Point B is an enormous logistical task. And a clash between two gigantic armies might, from one angle of view, present a wondrous spectacle; from another angle of view, though, it manifests a deliberate refusal to see the people who might starve during the next winter because the horses and soldiers have consumed too much of the available grain supplies.