The existence of medieval Witchcraft (documented by the church) disqualifies reality itself from this tag.
Not really. Witchcraft and sorcery (the terminology varies) were factually practised by wide ranges of people in virtually all cultures known - the trope of "court wizard" is no fiction and such were still common enough in the margins of European royal courts as late as the 17th century, for example, and a 1015 royal decree from Norway outlaws both sorcery and berserkr (indicating both were thought very real by contemporaries). YMMV if Rasputin counts as a very late outlier of the "court mystic" phenomenon. And the Ahnenerbe interviewed an Old Skool hedge wizard in Finnish Karelia in the mid-late Thirties so yeah.
Functional magic is an entirely different story as the sum total of concrete verifiable effects (other than psychological and social) produced by untold millenia of very earnest human magic-working is... lacking. This is arguably the watershed between (pseudo-)historical fiction and pure fantasy - though it isn't unusual for authors to portray ostensibly supernatural elements taken at a face value in-universe in a way that leaves the reader ambivalent over how much of it is real (Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles trilogy treats Merlin et al like this for ex).
last edited at Aug 13, 2020 7:10AM
