Judith Tarr

Rawn did her own thing in her own way. She cast the female gaze on a genre heavy with all-male quest fellowships, trophy females, and the occasional Smurfette. Her world was male-dominated and highly patriarchal, but she populated it with notable numbers of well-drawn female characters.

So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.

Finding a 'sacrificial lamb' on whom to tag blame for complicated problems is an important instrument in the toolkit of politicians, because it deflects blame for the nation's economic woes away from their own regulatory lapses, economic mismanagement and coddling to labor unions.