Fantasy fiction is the ultimate speculative genre: it lets you bend and recreate the very laws of reality. At the same time, fantasy is known for premodern, or at most Early Modern-esque, settings that fire the imagination.

So, why isn’t there more polygamy? 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware haremlit is a thing, but why isn’t polygamy a common practice in many/more of the fantasy societies found in multiple big-name fantasy series?

I suspect the answer to this question is that at least in the West, the market is mostly supplied by Western authors. And for a long time, a great many of the settings borrowed liberally from Medieval Europe, or else were meant to evoke fanciful and romantic ideas of it.

But authors are using more diverse cultural settings as inspiration, and I can’t help hoping that more of them will explore polygamy along the way.

After all, for a great many cultures over the course of thousands of years, polygamy was normal. As it turns out, in some ways we’re the weird ones for having such a hang-up about it.

Also, before we go on, please be advised that because this is a post about polygamy in fantasy fiction, I am contractually obliged to furnish 19th-century Western depictions of Ottoman harems–quite steamy and potentially NSFW depictions, at that. You’ve been warned.

What is Polygamy?

Polygamy, meaning plural marriage, is an ancient breeding pattern that Homo sapiens shares in one way or another with plenty of other animals, including other social primates.

To be fair, though, our two closest relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are promiscuous and don’t form stable pair-bonds.  

In the modern West and many other cultures, pair-bonding is monogamous, but it’s not hard to see why it evolved in the direction of one-male, multiple-female marriages (polygynous polygamy).

Because human pair bonds rely on males to provide resources to females and their dependent offspring, males who are particularly good at getting resources can have multiple wives.

Writing in Psychology Today in 2009, Nigel Barber notes that “[s]ome level of polygamy is observed in virtually every society even if covertly.” After all, even in the U.S. and other developed countries, some men serially marry and divorce (consider the marital career of America’s 45^th president).

Where is Polygamy Practiced?

Polygamy, Barber explains, is still common in a number of poorer countries, where “about a sixth of women share their husbands with 55 percent doing so in Benin [a small country in West Africa].”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing is the reasons Barber gives for why polygamy is practiced where it is:

“My research on 32 countries where polygamy is practiced by at least 5% of married women yielded answers (1). Polygamy increased where there was a scarcity of males in the population. Countries having a heavy infectious disease load had many more polygamous marriages. Women there evidently shopped for highly disease-resistant (i.e., physically attractive) men to father their offspring. They also care more about physical attractiveness and have a higher sex drive (2). Moreover, there were more polygamous wives in countries where men could monopolize wealth whether in terms of money or arable land (analogous to animal territories). (My results corroborated earlier research).”

What About Polyandry?

While polygynous polygamy is relatively common throughout much of world history and in many different parts of the world, the reverse practice of polyandry, or polyandrous polygamy, is much, much, much rarer.

The main examples of polyandrous cultures come from societies in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. The typical pattern in these cultures is for one bride to marry two or more brothers.

It’s interesting to note that whereas polygyny provides one man with the opportunity to have many more children than he could if he was a strict monogamist, polyandry means two or more men are more limited in their fertility than they would be if they were all monogamists.  

Why Be Polygamous?

Taking a big-picture anthropological view of something like polygamy is helpful for making sense of it, particularly for those of us from cultures that generally frown on it. But why is that, anyway?

Barber argues that polygynous polygamy “works well in underdeveloped tropical countries but not so well for developed high-latitude countries.” His reasons are completely fascinating:

“At least three factors are critical. First, instead of a scarcity of males, developed countries have an excess thanks to better public health that saves more males than females.

“Second, colder winters made it impossible for mothers to raise children without substantial help from their husbands.

“Third, developed countries are highly urbanized and it is very difficult to raise large families in cities because children are such a drain on finances that it is impossible for most men to support multiple families. In agricultural societies, by contrast, kids contribute to the family economy by working.”

Elite men have historically been the most obvious beneficiaries of polygynous polygamy. The Ottoman sultans kept harems that fascinated Western imaginations for centuries. The harem was an institution for begetting potential heirs.

Because any of the sultan’s sons could succeed the sultan, the early Ottoman state was vulnerable to wars of succession. This changed only when Mehmed II, called the Conqueror because he took Constantinople in 1453, came up with a solution:

“Any of my sons ascend the throne, it acceptable for him to kill his brothers for the common benefit of the people (nizam-i alem). The majority of the ulama (muslim scholars) have approved this; let action be taken accordingly.”

Of course, many other elite males have also kept harems: ‘Abbasid caliphs, Achaemenid Persian emperors, Egyptian pharaohs, and so on. Polygynous polygamy is even found among hunter-gatherers:

“In the most comprehensive study, 90 percent of hunter-gatherer populations around the globe had some degree of polygynous marriage, while just 10 percent had only monogamous marriage. Of the societies with polygyny, about 14 percent of men and 22 percent of women were polygynously married. Even among highly egalitarian hunter-gatherers, such as those living in the Congo Basin, 14 to 20 percent of men married polygynously.”

Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World (pp. 260-261). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

After the advent of agriculture, though, elite males in societies around the world took polygyny to staggering extremes. Here are a few more examples from Joseph Henrich:

“In the South Pacific at the time of European contact, Tongan chiefs had a few high-ranking wives who helped solidify alliances with other powerful families, and a few hundred secondary wives.

“In Africa, Ashante and Zulu kings each had 1,000 or more wives. However, these are just the paramount chiefs or kings; there was usually a fleet of lesser elites who maintained smaller harems for themselves. Zande kings, for example, each had more than 500 wives, but their chiefs also each maintained about 30 or 40 wives, and sometimes as many as 100.

“In Asia, things were often even more extreme: medieval Khmer kings in Cambodia possessed five elite wives and several thousand secondary wives who were themselves graded into various classes. In early China (1046–771 BCE), Western Zhou kings had one queen, three consorts, nine wives of secondary rank, 27 wives of third rank, and 81 concubines. By the second century CE, Han emperors had harems of 6,000 women.”

Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World (pp. 261-262). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So, why be polygamous? If you’re an elite male, why not?

But there’s a lot more to polygynous polygamy than the men’s perspective.

What About the Women?

It’s important to recognize that polygynous polygamy has advantages for women as well as for men. It’s easy to see the benefits for the men who end up with multiple wives and/or concubines, but the women also benefit.

Think about it: if you’re a young unmarried woman in a society with polygynous polygamy, you have the option to marry an unmarried man or a married man.

Sure, marrying a single man means you don’t have to share. And most likely you never will, since some men having multiple wives means other men must go without wives altogether (more on that below). 

But it also means that you have the option of marrying a successful man who already has another wife or even multiple wives. That could be a great deal for the attractive daughter of a poor family.

Also, What About the Men?

Of course, one trade-off with any system of polygynous polygamy is that most men must still be monogamous, and a significant number of men will be without wives altogether.

This ties directly into the advantages of monogamy. What happens when a substantial minority of men have no chance of getting married? The answer seems to be a certain level of unpleasantness and violence.

Writing for Psychology Today, author Neel Burton explains:

“While polygyny may benefit the men involved, it denies wives to other men, especially young, low-status men, who, like all men, tend to measure their success by their manhood, that is, by the twin parameters of social status and fertility.

“With little to lose or look forward to, these frustrated men are much more likely to turn to crime and violence, including sexual violence and warmongering. It is perhaps telling that polygamy is practiced in almost all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index.”

But Wait, What About Polyandry?

Like we saw earlier, certain Himalayan and Tibetan cultures have traditionally practiced systems of polyandry in which one bride marries two or more brothers. This practice also coexists with monogamy in these societies.

Anthropologist Melvyn C. Goldstein notes that in Tibet, polyandry has traditionally been found among many economic classes but was particularly common in peasant landowning families:

“The eldest brother usually dominates the household, though all the brothers are, in theory, equal sexual partners of the shared wife, and children are considered shared. Where there is no such equality, there is sometimes conflict. Monogamy and polygyny are also practiced, he notes — polygyny (more than one wife) being practiced sometimes if the first wife is barren. Polyandry is not a requirement but a choice of brothers. Sometimes a brother chooses to leave the polyandrous household, though any children he may have fathered to that date stay in the household. Marriage ceremonies sometimes only include the eldest brother and sometimes all the (adult) brothers. Where there are brothers at the time of marriage who are not of age, they may join the household later.”

So, why be polyandrous? What polyandry allowed these cultures to do was keep landholdings and wealth in one single family line, without dividing anything up.

As Goldstein explains:

“Goldstein reports that, when he asked Tibetans why they don’t simply have monogamous marriages of the brothers and share the land among heirs (rather than splitting it up as other cultures would do), the Tibetans said that there would be competition among the mothers to advance their own children.

“Goldstein also notes that for the men involved, given the limited farmland, the practice of polyandry is beneficial to the brothers because work and responsibility are shared, and younger brothers are more likely to have a secure standard of living. Because Tibetans prefer not to divide the family’s land, family pressure works against a younger brother achieving success on his own.”

Story Possibilities

I’ve touched on some of the anthropological and historical realities of polygamy, but there’s no way I can do justice to a subject as big as this in a blog post.

There’s a rich vein of anthropological and historical information available on polygamous societies, and so many of them make fascinating potential sources of inspiration for fantasy worlds.

My current WIP is the fourth draft of my sword-and-sorcery novel, set in an Iron Age setting with some very loose inspiration from the very ancient Middle East.

My protagonist’s people are loosely based on ancient Indo-European, particularly Indo-Iranian, people. They’re a society dominated by an aristocratic warrior elite, of which my protagonist is a member. Like many real-world cultures, including the ones I used as inspiration, they practice polygynous polygamy. The rest of the society includes free peasants and slaves.

Despite my deep fascination with history in general and the Middle East in particular, despite my fascination with various cultures, it took me until this current draft to understand that the political and social system I created for my protagonist created obvious incentives for conflict that I could use to propel the story forward.

Reading Henrich’s book, The WEIRDest People in the World, I started to realize that my perspective was WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed.

My protagonist inhabits a pre-modern world, so it makes sense to give him and his people a pre-modern cultural psychology. And since they practice polygynous polygamy, there was an obvious motivation for my protagonist to seek adventure and conquest in foreign lands so that he could acquire slave-girls to serve as concubines both for himself and for his followers.

Creating a fantasy world with cultures that practice polygynous polygamy is a great way to explore all kinds of story possibilities.

Here are a few story hooks I came up with:

• A young woman is married off to an older man with multiple wives.
  • Maybe she’s a noblewoman who needs to save her kingdom from invasion
  • Maybe she’s a commoner seeking resources and connections to help her family
  • Maybe she has, or discovers, a magical secret
• A woman who is happily married as a single wife finds her life disrupted when her husband takes a second wife.
  • Maybe the second wife is a sorceress or magical being in disguise
  • Maybe this culture has rules of succession that pit brother against brother—maybe they even have an Ottoman-style custom of fratricide
• A man who is happily married to one or more wives needs to take a second wife.
  • Maybe he doesn’t want to, but he needs the marriage to create a political alliance
  • Maybe there’s a magical secret involved
  • Maybe he needs an heir, and his prior wife/wives haven’t given him one

These story hooks are anything but exhaustive, and they don’t even touch polyandry. How about you, dear reader? What story hooks can you come up with?

Also, if anyone has good recommendations for fantasy series with polygamous societies, please let me know in the comments.