Historical Investigation: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)
"It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance"
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) begins with a promise. “The following work was found in a library of an ancient catholic (sic) family in the north of England. It was printed in Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.” The promise: that this story was real.
And that’s what Walpole’s 18th century audience believed, so much so that in a second printing he included an additional preface admitting that the story was fiction. Walpole goes on to give us the very first grasping of a definition for urban fantasy:
“It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability; in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.”
Let’s set the scene. Otranto begins with the impending nuptials of Conrad and Isabella, two youths who live in the sprawling castle that serves as the seat of the Sicilian principality of Otranto. Conrad is the sickly son of Manfred and Hippolita, prince and princess of Otranto. They also have a much healthier and more intelligent daughter, Matilda, who Manfred could not care less about because she cannot inherit Otranto or carry on his family name.
Isabella is the daughter of Frederic, the marquis of Vincenza. Manfred’s grandfather, Ricardo, stole Otranto by poisoning Alfonso, a distant relative of Frederic’s and a well-regarded prince whose statue still adorns the local chapel.
After losing his wife, Frederic fought a crusade in the Holy Land and has been missing for years, presumed dead. Manfred connived to take Isabella from her guardians intending to seal the breach between the two families and to ensure the continuation of his line. For you see, within the first two pages of Otranto, we are treated to two revelations.
The first is that Manfred and his family have been haunted by an “ancient prophesy” that they would lose Otranto whenever the “real owner” should be “grown too large to inhabit it”. Curious.
The second revelation is that Conrad is dead.
Crushed to death by a helmet, described as a hundred times larger than normal, that has seemingly fallen from the sky. The helmet is in the exact shape of Alfonso’s, as seen on his statue. Manfred’s subjects are distraught, bewildered by this impossible event and the death of the heir.
But Manfred’s reaction is even curiouser. He immediately turns his attentions, and affections, to Isabella. He must have heirs, male ones if at all possible, to continue his line and try to avoid the prophesy. He is so insistent, so aggressive that Isabella runs and hides, eventually finding her way through an underground passage to the nearby chapel.
Isabella is aided by the lamentable protagonist of Otranto, Theodore. He is introduced as a mere “peasant boy” who points out that the helmet is identical to Alfonso’s. For his trouble, he gets put into the helmet as a punishment. Fortunately, the helmet has burst through the castle walls into the very room where Isabella is hiding.
The pair have their meet-cute and Theodore helps her into the underground passage and covers for her while she makes her escape. Manfred sentences Theodore to death, because of course he does. But in the moment of Theodore’s execution, the parish priest cries out to save him because Theodore is in fact his long-lost son! And oh, perhaps even the direct descendent of Alfonso himself?
While Manfred dithers—and sees a portrait of Ricardo get up off the wall and walk down a corridor—forces from Vincenza arrive and issue a challenge from Frederic (who is not dead): return Isabella or face off in single combat. They also arrive with a curiously large saber. One that might be of a piece with the curiously large helmet? Perhaps implying that these rightful owners have finally grown large enough to kick Manfred out…
Manfred welcomes the knights to dinner and tries to play nice while Matilda gets to know Theodore. They have their meet-cute, and now we have a love triangle. Theodore loves Matilda, Isabella loves Theodore, and no one, really, loves Manfred. Maltida frees Theodore who encounters the chief knight from Vincenza and, assuming he is one of Manfred’s knights, grievously injures him. We are then treated to a two-sided twist. First, Theodore discovers his error and his overwhelmed with shame, and then second, Theodore and the readers discover that this is no mere knight, but Frederic himself.
In what is perhaps the strangest and most antiquated turn of events: Manfred has his surgeons save Frederic’s life and they make nice. So nice, in fact, that they decide that they should marry each other’s daughters. Yes, Manfred can marry Isabella if Frederic can marry Matilda. Hippolita seems concerned by this but will do whatever Manfred wants.
Manfred is obviously thrilled. The only thing that stops this is Frederic being visited by a talking skeleton, who may be a monk who he encountered in the Holy Lands. That and Manfred murdering one of the daughters, and though it was a mistake, it was no accident. I will leave the baffling and tragic conclusion to you.
Various prints included in this essay are from Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (“imaginary prisons”), a series of etchings produced in the mid-18th century that feature imaginary spaces and architecture of a particularly Gothic variety. Mario Praz’s 1968 introduction in the Penguin Classics edition of Three Gothic Novels digs into how these prints inspired many of the earlier Gothic authors like Walpole, William Beckford, and Mary Shelley.
It’s hard to ignore once you see them. When we talk about “Gothic” stories we immediately think of ruins. Vast, ancient spaces that hold the ghosts of a troubled past. Piranesi brought these spaces to vivid life, but it was Walpole who took the extra step of imbuing them with the supernatural.
We have to return to Walpole’s goal stated in the preface: combining two genres. He had seen fantastical stories and he had seen traditional fiction, but he had never seen the two combined. So, apparently inspired by a dream, he took the disturbing images of Piranesi and crafted a truly strange narrative of real people and places alongside the fantastical. My working definition of urban fantasy is, “a story with fantasy elements that takes place in a world recognizably our own.” It seems that Walpole has prefigured this definition more than 250 years ago.
But not really. It’s not just a stretch to call Otranto urban fantasy, it’s simply not true. Even granting a lot of leeway, it is at best a historical (intrusion) fantasy, or maybe historical magical realism, given that it takes place more than 200 years before it was written.
An implication of my definition of urban fantasy (and perhaps this bears updating) is that the “urban” moniker implies modernity. I would say that urban fantasies written in the modern time period (1980s and beyond) need to be set around 20 years, give or take, from the time the story was written. Otherwise, we move past the urban fantasy border into other genres, like historical fantasy, post-apocalyptic fantasy, possibly science fiction if it takes place far in the future.
The Castle of Otranto is an important work because it created the Gothic novel. It would inspire generations of authors who would go on to create well-established genres like horror, science fiction, and weird fiction. And those genres all border on urban fantasy. Urban fantasy partakes in and supersedes all of those genres and more. As the urban fantasy genre would not exist without those bordering genres, it also would not exist without Otranto. It is a distant relative on the evolutionary tree of literary genres.
The connections are recognizable, but urban fantasy takes most of the conventions that were established in Otranto (and other works) and expands and broadens them. If Otranto is the helmet on the statue of Alfonso, urban fantasy is the three-ton casque that fell on our heads many generations later.
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