Grimdark Ages On the Neomedievalism of ‘Warhammer 40,000’

Abstract

Commonly described as ‘grimdark’, the fictional universe of the increasingly popular ‘Warhammer 40,000’ franchise is a dystopian 41st millennium, which is portrayed as a new dark age of humanity. Since its inception in the 1980s, its game designers and writers have employed popular notions of the Middle Ages and embellished them with fictional elements to paint the darkest possible version of the future. In his renowned essay ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, which predates the first edition of the miniature wargame ‘Warhammer 40,000’ by one year, Umberto Eco called such combinations of medieval and fictional themes ‘neomedieval’. This paper provides an overview of the most conspicuous neomedieval themes in the narrative universe of ‘Warhammer 40,000’: the use of the historiographical concept of the ‘Dark Ages’; the fictional languages of the 41st millennium, High Gothic and Low Gothic; and the Imperial Cult of the God-Emperor, its crusaders, and the concept of heresy. The paper is concluded by a case study of so-called ‘purity seals’, neomedieval textual amulets that are ubiquitous in the fictional universe of ‘Warhammer’, but have recently also appeared in the very real Russo-Ukrainian War.