I had an interesting thought yesterday. I was pondering, what if some of the archaic literature we relied upon to document past events was actually fictional accounts intended to be read for leisure?
This prompted me to ask what ancient or medieval (preferably before the 15th century) do you know of? Some may describe The Iliad as historical fiction, what do you think.
P.S. Regarding fictional accounts mistook as historical, I found this enlightening discussion on reddit, libreddit link.
Narrow, literalist readings of Jewish writings collected in the Ketuvim (Writings) section of the Tanakh (Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim) fit that.
There wasn’t a hard distinction between learning and leisure like we pretend there is today. A story could have a kernel of historical truth, or perhaps a lot, or none at all; convey important truths about society, the world and our place in it; and be told dramatically to capture attention (ie entertaining) so listeners pay attention to those truths and remember them in difficult situations.
Jewish tradition is to look for 4 levels of meaning in a text, including allegorical and hidden meanings as well as the general plot. Even those who believe the surface level as literally true spend most of their time working with interpretation, what lessons we can learn from the stories.
Then along comes a Greek proselytiser who insisted the particular salvation religion he followed was literally True and therefore better than other salvation religions. And that literalness got read back into a different people’s texts, came to be seen by most of the world as the only way to read them and here we are today.