Editing Dark Age (section)

==The appeal of the Dark Age==
How do you like your medieval fantasy? Do you like it to be harsher, grittier and on the cruder side? Then the Dark Ages are a good place to mine for ideas. People are living in tiny, isolated settlements with mud-walled buildings while a [[Monarchy|king]] theoretically reigns over them, but actual power lies in the hands of local nobles and knights. Viking raiders are cruising the seas on longships searching for gold and thralls and doing battle with scruffy knights in dirty scale and mail who are at best marginally more civilized than the pagan "barbarians" with whom they're fighting, and both are more likely to preserve their deeds in song than with words written down in books. Monasteries full of monks are copying down a few ancient texts that they cannot read for future generations. You can even work in a bit of a [[Post Apocalyptic]] vibe with a Dark Age setting, where people build crude wooden fortresses and barn-like halls exist alongside the remains of more impressive structures from a now fallen empire. Civilization once stood here and it might do so again, but now all is an age of turmoil and the sword.

Not to say that these guys did not have a creative side. Some of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the world were produced during the Dark Ages, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, and this period is also home to the elaborate spiral patterns and tapestries of Celtic art. In general the aesthetics of the time are more abstract than the Classical era before it or the High Middle Ages and Renaissance ahead of it.