I’ve heard it said that you should write what you know, which is nonsense – I suspect I know more about the logistical workings of the supermarket trolley system than the vast majority of the population and I’ve yet to see an opportunity to work it into a story. But I do know a little about two or three subjects which I’ve tried to combine in my adventure stories.

The first subject is an early medieval setting – popularly known as the Dark Ages. With a Roman or high medieval background for a story I find everything is quite sharply demarcated, defined and established; Constantinople falls there, Augustus wins Philipi here and so on and so forth. There’s very little room for me to tinker with it. In my mind, putting a giant into, say, 15th century England or a dragon into 2nd century Rome is just as unthinkable as inviting yourself to a party of strangers; clumsy and awkward, not to mention terribly gauche.

Not so for the twilight world of Europe after the fall of Rome – now there’s a rich vein! Everything shrouded in darkness and conflict, warchiefs carving kingdoms from chaos, bloodthirsty pagan raiders, nations struggling to be born – you can stuff this era with heroes, monsters and magic and they’ll all fit right in. I’m particularly fond of it as a Welshman; an era where we weren’t quite a nation but something very close to it, caught between the retreating Roman tide and the oncoming Saxon wave.

The second subject is the Weird, in its most vulgar, commercially debased and unsophisticated form. You know what I mean.

Look, you can have the subtle, suggestive mystery of Aickman, the all-encompassing, elegant nihilism of Ligotti, or the cosmic wonder of Machen- these are all well and good, but I’ve always loved the monsters.

The Brothers Whateley. Shoggoths. Flying polyps. Centuries-old body-stealing Necromancers. Basically anything that would probably burst if you hit it too hard, if it didn’t cause you to have a nervous breakdown just by looking at it first. I’m afraid the taste caught me early on in high school when I first discovered Lovecraft and I’ve never quite been able to mature past it. Weird monsters and the Dark Ages are a perfect fit. Grendel and his mother could have stepped out of the pages of any story published in Weird Tales, and no-one would notice a shoggoth if you hid it between a giant and a troll.

The third thing I’ve tried to add to the mix are protagonists with some psychological depth, and who share the spiritual concerns of their era, written (I sincerely hope) with some conviction and sympathy. This is where it gets complicated, for religious people tend to fare badly in Weird Fiction.

It’s hardly surprising. Religion is where you go for certain assurances about the way the world works at a fundamental level. Take the Baltimore Catechism - Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? Creator of Heaven and Earth, and of all things. Two weighty questions that have puzzled philosophers for aeons answered in a couple of snappy sentences - that’s what good old-fashioned religion is all about.

But the Weird is not about offering answers. Quite the opposite. Even if it is possible to create Weird fiction that is not inherently nihilistic (and I think it is certainly possible; the work of Arthur Machen and Reggie Oliver offer excellent examples of a Weird based in a more-or-less Christian metaphysical worldview) the usual point of having Weird forces in a story is to break apart the safe and tidy worldview of the hapless protagonist. To show reality tearing apart at the seams. A character who bases their entire identity on what they believe to be certain, unshakeable facts about the world, only to have those facts thrown into severe doubt, would appear ripe for the kind of gibbering madness that is so tragically common among Weird Fiction protagonists.

And of course, the early medieval era in Europe was dominated by religion. By dogma. By certainty. Faith suffused everything – art, poetry, law, culture. Heresy was certainly possible, but outright unbelief was practically unthinkable. In such a culture of belief, then, it would seem to follow that a mere glimpse of even the smallest shoggoth would have sent any saint or scholar you care to name sliding into a pit of madness and despair.

But I think such a view, although intuitive, doesn’t give due credit to how people of that era actually thought. Theirs was a world dominated by the hope and comforts of a faith well-supplied with saints and miracles, true, but there was still plenty of room at the margins for the bizarre, the strange and the uncategoriseable.

If you want an excellent visual example of this look no further than the Mappa Mundi. Created in or around the year 1300 (a little later, perhaps, than my favoured period but still applicable nonetheless), it is a great atlas that depicts the world as it was then believed to be. You have Jerusalem at the centre, naturally, as befits the City of Christ. The Garden of Eden is apparently to be found north of the Tower of Babel, which itself resides in the city of Babylon. The Red Sea has been marked out in startling red ink, with the wandering path of the Israelites through the desert clearly illustrated. So far, so expected (notably, the isle of Britain is relegated to an awkward crush of land in the southwest corner).

But look a little closer and some puzzling anomalies quickly become apparent. Greek legends such as the Labyrinth and the Golden Fleece are lovingly rendered on the vellum, which raised, I have to imagine, some tough questions vis a vis the compatibility of these Pagan stories with revealed Christian Truth. What has Jason or Theseus to do with Jerusalem? They are there, nonetheless.

Look to the margins and that’s where things become rather wild. In the North-east we have a Sciapod – a man-like being whose lower half is composed of one large foot – shading himself with his large appendage. In the East, in Africa, you can find a warlike Blemmyes brandishing a spear; Blemmyes, of course, being creatures with no head and faces in their chest. Far to the West, not far from Britain, there are two snarling Cynocephali engaged in bloody battle – Cynocephali being known popularly as dog-heads. To the average inhabitant of any early medieval town or village these creatures were just as likely to exist as China or America.

What is striking about these inclusions is the awkward questions it raises for the religious orthodoxy of the day. Christ told his disciples that they were to be fishers of men – where does that leave the dogheads? Are they included in the Great Commission? The Blemmyes and Sciapods seem more apparently human, but even then there would vast gaps to bridge in pursuit of conversion. Matters were complicated enough with Japan and South America, and that was with people who share the exact same bodily form and functions; one can only imagine the cultural gulf between ourselves and a race who have never suffered the indignity of having to regularly employ a hairdresser.

The possible religious reaction to an encounter with an alien race has provided good fodder for science fiction over the years (A Case of Conscience, The Sparrow) but it seems to me that the amusing thought experiment believers and atheists entertain themselves with today was almost a reality for people of the Dark Ages; in the modern age we can at least be certain that our planet is not observed by envious eyes from the Martian canals, nor that the jungles of Venus heave with exotic life. To an early medieval person, however, the possibility of encountering a Blemmyes or something like it was a real one. And they seem to have taken it more or less in their stride. How?

A kind of explanation can be found in Gerald of Wales’ Journey Through Wales, one of my favourite medieval texts. Written in the 13th century as a kind of travelogue as Gerald and a handful of other clerics toured the country preaching the first Crusade, the eponymous Gerald stuffs his narrative with various stories and legends found within his native Wales, along with a good deal of self-promotion. There are stories of violent Welsh encounters with the Anglo-Normans, folk tales, vengeful saints and miracles, but also a story we might today call a fairy tale, which Gerald assures us is true.

It concerns a young boy who, after running away from his lessons, is led by two little men of Pygmy stature into a strange but beautiful country of rivers and meadows where there is no sun, no moon and no stars. In this land, Gerald reports, the little people hunt and play with greyhounds and horses adapted to their size. They subsist off a milk-based diet and (somewhat scandalously) do not engage in public worship. Being lovers of honesty and truth they have no use for oaths, and view our hopelessly corrupt society with contempt. The child enjoys himself for a time but it all ends badly, of course, with the boy (on the counsel of his wicked mother) trying to steal a golden ball from the little people and suffering banishment for his pains. Gerald tells us that the boy – now a priest - cannot stop himself from weeping every time he speaks of it.

If we can suspend our disbelief for a few moments and assume Gerald really did know a man who claimed to have encountered a mysterious Otherworld, we may well ask how a religious man in an era of faith reconciles his beliefs with what is, to all intents and purposes, an encounter with the Alien. With the Weird.

Gerald, reflecting on the story told above, answers thoughtfully: “If a scrupulous inquirer should ask my opinion of the relation here inserted,” he writes, “I answer with Augustine that ‘the divine miracles are to be admired, not discussed.’ Nor do I, by denial, place bounds to the divine power, nor, by assent, insolently extend what cannot be extended…These things, therefore, I should place…among those particulars which are neither to be affirmed, nor too positively denied.”

We must not doubt excessively nor be too credulous. Keep the faith and keep an open mind, in other words.

It’s a striking statement of faithfulness, humility and perhaps even wisdom. In fact, I would argue that, when facing a Weird monster, you would want a Gerald by your side far more than you would any modern personality, for the Dark Age mind held plenty of space for things we too often dismiss out of hand.

In any case, I hope this gives some justification for why my characters don’t instantly become gibbering wrecks when confronted by the Weird in my work, and instead pick up a spear or sword and simply get on with it.

Harry Piper was born, brought up and currently lives in south Wales. With such a geographic and cultural background he knew early on he could only write in one of two genres—grim social realism or heroic fantasy. He chose the latter, and has been much happier for it. His story “The Thing in the Field” appears in Warlords, Warlocks & Witches. In 2020 DMR Books published The Great Die Slow and Other Tales of Dark Adventure, a collection of seven of Piper’s stories set in a Dark Age Celtic landscape shrouded in myth and legend