This chapter focuses on the idea of rivers as frontier or boundary, beginning with stories from Late Antiquity, and including a discussion of the ways that river frontiers are porous and permeable. A case study of the monastery of Prüm shows the complexity of these dynamics. The main focus of the chapter is on the impact of the Viking raids on medieval monastic writers, and how their stories about this moment created a new view of rivers as sites of danger and disruption. Then, the chapter explores ways that rivers were seen as sites of destruction and oblivion – an alternate to the idea of rivers and memory explored in the previous chapter. Finally, it looks at how monastic communities reinvented their histories in the wake of the Viking attacks, and how this helped them in turn to reimagine and restore their relationships with rivers.

This concluding chapter showcases the ways that rivers and their stories bound stories and places across the ages, despite very tangible changes to the environmental and urban contexts of Europe post 1000. These stories helped people on the other end of the year 1000 shift to negotiate, as had Ausonius and Fortunatus, between change and continuity, past and present. It starts with a discussion of a thirteenth century artwork, the Metz ceiling, connecting it to Late Antique and early medieval ideas of hybrid animals, hybrid identities, and other kinds of barrier crossing in and around water. It concludes with an exploration of the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (c. 1100) as hybrid/composite text. How did its author use the stories of the past? How did artists and authors in the Central Middle Ages assess and assemble the inherited ideas about rivers and their relation to human identity? Just as rivers are continually reshaped yet (mostly) endure, their stories and uses shift over time, yet persist. There is always a riverscape that is shaping contemporary cultures that are also looking back to the past to find meaning in nature.

One of the most common criticisms of Fantasy is that it is repetitive, derivative and uninspired. This chapter argues that this is a misconception. Rather than repeating, Fantasy iterates: its creators self-consciously rework tropes and patterns in manners that acknowledge the necessarily entangled nature of human communications and cultures. Drawing on work by Colin Burrow on imitation and Linda Hutcheon on adaptation, it argues that originality is recent, problematic and overrated as a criterion for judging art, and that fantasies demonstrate a productive awareness of culture as being collaborative and renegotiable. The main subjects discussed include Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and The Dark Lord of Derkholm; Thomas Malory’s Launcelot and T. H. White’s Lancelot; Death in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman; dragons many and various; Terry Brooks’ much-maligned The Sword of Shannara; fan fiction and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance series; and the marriage of lore and mechanics in Magic: The Gathering. The chapter closes by considering the archetype-focused criticism of Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell, discussing both the attractions of such models and how imposing grand patterns can blind us to both stories’ irreducible specifics and their exclusions.