End Of An Age / Literature

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• Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is set against the backdrop of the decline of the French aristocracy and the corresponding rise of the middle class between the 1870s and 1920s.
• The Banned and the Banished sets one of these up, then argues that it's actually a good thing, because What Measure Is a Non-Super? is no longer in effect.
• According to J. R. R. Tolkien, this is the entire point of Beowulf: after the age of heroes comes to an end, the Geats face a dark and uncertain future.
• Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End follows this form, with two twists: the setting is science fiction, not fantasy and the present-day real-world is construed to be the Golden Age, relative to a (future) alien invasion.
• Part of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia is that only children may enter it, so as the cast ages they become excluded from coming back.
• David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series takes place in the last years of the world-spanning Han Empire. One of the main protagonists has made it his life's calling to forestall the end.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, ancient civilizations (such as Atlantis) had risen and fallen. Evil Sorcerers frequently find their magic from olden days.
• The Dark Tower: All-World, where Roland lives and most of the action takes place, was once dominated by magic, which was used to power the twelve Beams which hold the world together. The setting's Precursors eventually replaced the magic with technology, and when they died out in nuclear war, the machines began to break down, causing the world to fall apart at the seams, both literally and metaphysically.
• Dirge for Prester John: John's reign is the downfall of the immortal land Pentexore.
• Discworld:
  • Sourcery might be considered the last gasp of the age of, well, sourcery. Magic, and the humans who wield it, have been considerably scaled down since then, making things less wondrous but a hell of a lot safer. The events of Sourcery also killed off many of the most powerful and dangerous wizards which lead to Ridcully becoming Archchancellor and ending the age of Klingon Promotion among the wizards. The wizards become more laid back, less aggressive and more scholarly wizards were able to rise to positions of power.
  • Men at Arms started the transformation of the City Watch into a modern police force and ended the age of the police being marginalized by the guilds, palace guards or the army. Old school coppers like Colon and Nobby don't really fit into it anymore and are nostalgic about how things used to be.
  • Interesting Times features the last gasp of Cohen the Barbarian and his band of geriatric barbarian heroes — a literally dying breed of men on the Disc whose days are soon to be ended by encroaching civilization, and the fact that they've been pretty much everywhere on the Disc anyway. The Silver Horde elect to go out with a very big bang, first here and in the loose "sequel", The Last Hero.
  • Jingo and Going Postal: as incidental detail in both books, the ferocious and savage non-human species called the Gnolls, who like rogue Apache Indians terrorised the overland trade routes through the wilderness in Equal Rites, are seen to capitulate to realpolitik and give themselves up to encroaching civilization, like reservation Indians in 1890. Jingo sees their debased remnant entering Ankh-Morpork to take up the bottom rung on the social ladder, as scavengers and rubbish-pickers. In Going Postal there is a strong hint, from the coachmen who are relieved the former hunting grounds of the Gnolls are suddenly so empty, that the last wild gnolls were victims of a sudden and mysterious genocide akin to the defeat of the Native Americans.
    And we never knew what caused it, Mr Lipwig.
  • Unseen Academicals ended the old, very brutal way of playing football and many of the old movers-and-shakers are not happy with it.
  • The short story "Troll Bridge" is basically about Cohen and Chert being the last gasps of bold warriors who kill things without asking many questions, and trolls who live under bridges and eat people until the aforementioned bold warrior kills them. The Disc is mostly about what happens to a Heroic Fantasy world afterwards.
• Halfway through the Hell of The Divine Comedy, the decline of humanity throughout the ages is visualized by a giant statue of crying old man. The tears are not water, but blood, and they don't come from the statue's eyes, but from it's many cracks. Looking at the statue's golden head, one would hardly be able to notice the tears, but looking down, the cracks in the statue become more and more pervasive as the statue's gold turns to silver, which turns to bronze, and then to iron, and finally to broken clay. From the tears of this crumbling monument to civilization comes the four rivers of Hell, which come together at the Devil's pit.
• Don Quixote killed off the Chivalric Romance as a serious literary genre by deconstructing all tropes present in works in the genre.
• In Dragonlance this actually happens twice. Once after the Cataclysm, when all of the gods(except for the Gods of Magic) withdraw their presence from Krynn, taking with them Priestly magic. Wizardly magic is still around, but Wizards try and keep a low-profile due to persecution. All of Krynn enters a dark age that takes three centuries to recover from. The gods return during the War of the Lance. It happens again after the Chaos War, with the gods going away except for Takhisis due to her stealing away the world. All magic is gone from the world this time around, but it only takes about five years for Mysticism(which is akin to Priestly magic, except it relies on the casters faith in themselves) to be discovered and Primal Sorcery(actually the oldest type of magic, akin to Wizardly magic) is re-discovered fifteen years or so later.
• Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East and Book of Swords trilogies both end this way. At the end of Empire, Ardneh undoes the Change, restoring the power of science and technology, and sending the power of magic into a (very) slow retreat. At the end of the Book of Swords, the gods die.
• The Empirium Trilogy: The end of the Angelic Wars ushered in the Second Age and the fall of elementals is what ushered in the Third. Even before Queen Rielle's last spell nullified all elemental magic, it's stated that magic in general was on the decline.
• Eurico the Presbyter is set on the dying days of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania just before being conquered by the Muslims. The realm is marked by social and moral decline where corruption is rampant and petty kings and nobles squabble among themselves.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ruminates on the twilight of the optimism of the 1960s in America.
• The Gods Are Bastards: The end of the Age of Adventures — and the various characters' and organizations' reactions to it — is a running theme of the story and a driving force behind much of the plot.
• The book Gone with the Wind: Ashley tells Scarlett that following the collapse of the Confederacy, the former cottonbelt aristocrats are living a day-to-day götterdämmerung.
• In A Harvest of War firearms make their first appearance in Draeze, the urban setting of the novel, ending the pre-gunpowder era.
• Horus Heresy:
  • The formal destruction of the Church of the Lightning Stone at the hands of the Emperor and the self-martyrdom of its last priest, Uriah Olathaire. Representing not only the beginning of the Great Crusade, but the end of Christianity and human culture as we would recognize it.
  • The Horus Heresy proper, with the Drop Site Massacre of Isstvan V, the slaying of Horus and the internment of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne, ended the Emperor's Great Crusade.
• How to Train Your Dragon it's hinted by the older Hiccup narrating that the end of the the time of Viking heroes, as well as the disappearance of the dragons, will be brought on by his younger self.
  • Later revealed that Hiccup had to end the age of dragons because humans were becoming too dangerous to coexist with, even though he himself loved dragons. Thus, after becoming king he strikes a pact that states that after his death, if humanity has not changed, the dragons will go into hiding until humanity is ready to coexist with them without enslaving and killing them. Hiccup is, as of such, the last great viking hero.
• Arthurian Legend: Many stories, including the musical Camelot and T.H. White's book The Once and Future King, focus on how swell the age of Camelot was and how much it sucks that it's over.
• Kings of the Wyld: With the monster population down and the world safe, gone are the days where a few strong fighters could wander into a nearby forest, kill a bunch of monsters, and get a name for themselves. Now most of the fighting is done in arenas, and the pageantry of the mercenaries has been cranked up until the knob falls off. Gabe's Rousing Speech at the end points out that the world is obviously not saved, since there's a giant horde attacking Castia.
• The Lord of Bembibre narrates the fall of the Templars, who go from being a powerful and respected Order to being hated, disbanded, persecuted and wiped out.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings is literally set at the end of the Third Age, with the last of the High Elves leaving for the land of the godlike archangels (Valar). This is an ongoing process, with unnumbered years where the Valar coexisted directly with Middle-Earth, three Ages of ascendance for the elves, and then a slow dimming away, with Middle-Earth eventually becoming the world we know today. These are called the Ages of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the Fourth Age is the first Age of Man. As such it is both Götterdämmerung (for the First and Second Ages) and The Magic Goes Away (for the Third).
  • This trope is the heart and soul of The Silmarillion, which details the history of Tolkien's universe from the beginning of time up until the events of Lord of the Rings. Each Age of the world ended with the irretrievable loss of some precious entity or artifact and the overall image is of a world that "grows ever colder" (in Gandalf's words). So for example, the First Age ended with the War of Wrath where Morgoth was defeated in a titanic battle and finally imprisoned by the Valar, but not before most of Beleriand is destroyed and two of the three Silmarils, the last unpoisoned light on Earth, were lost forever.
  • The Fall of Númenor:
    • The rebellion of Ar-Pharazôn leads to the destruction of the greatest Mannish civilization and the Blessed Realm being removed from the physical world forever.
    • The War of the Last Alliance ends up with the last High Elven kingdom being destroyed, the defeat of Sauron and the end of the Second Age.
  • The Gondorians suffered from this after the time of the "Ship-Kings." Their great, mighty nation dwindled away as a kingless state. Arnor on the other hand never recovered from their losses in the War of the Last Alliance, and Isildur's death a few years later.
• Guy Gavriel Kay does this in both The Lions of Al-Rassan, and The Last Light of the Sun. The former deals with the end of Moorish Spain, and the latter with the last Viking raids on England. Both are very nostalgically written, and capture the uncertainty and sadness that comes with the end of something grand, be it good or bad.
• Lumbanico, the Cubic Planet: Pirela, Ustrum and Mela find the forgotten tunnels connecting the Arista's hidden mountain valleys to the outside world, putting an end to seven hundred years of separation between Aristans and Outsiders. Risperim is not looking forward to outsiders travelling through the Arista freely, but when Fimo points out that both peoples cannot remain isolated forever, the old Guardian of the Mountains states resignedly he has no choice but get used to the fact.
• Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome deals with the gradual political collapse of the Roman Republic from the time of Marius and Sulla to the transformation into the Empire under Augustus.
• Jack Kerouac's On the Road: Used symbolically when Sal finally settles with his wife and leads a peaceful life, leaving Dean, the embodiment of his reckless youth, to wander behind.
• On Stranger Tides depicts the end of two ages: one ending is that of The Golden Age of Piracy (with the King's Pardon an important plot point), and the other is that of the age of magic.
• Orkneyinga Saga: The summer after the death of Svein Asleifarson on what was supposed to be his last viking expedition, his sons Olaf and Andres set up partition walls in Svein's great drinking hall at Gairsay. This marks the end of Viking Age customs, as people other than kings and jarls do no longer go raiding and have no longer need of drinking halls.
• The Revelation Space Series by Alastair Reynolds had the Belle Epoque which came to an abrupt end with the Melding Plague which destroyed all nanotechnology. In one moving scene the protagonist is traveling in a train to Chasm City when an automated holographic display activates, showing the city in its former glory. The local residents just stare straight ahead, doing their best to ignore it.
• The novelization of Revenge of the Sith brings up the concept in its introduction, which gives brief rundown on the situation of the Republic as it stands, how important Anakin and Obi-Wan are to it, and then finishes with a single sentence:
  Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.
• Roadside Picnic: The ending of the book, pretty much. Humanity has reached the point where the Zone has become another fact of life, and the anomalies are just another risk you take when stepping outside your door, like being run over by a car. The old-school stalkers are either dead or retired, with most new Zone exploration done either by specialist army units or drones. Even Redrick's final excursion into the Zone is The Last Dance for him, and he intends to either succeed in his goals and retire, or die trying.
• Shannara has this. First came the age of the faeries, featuring various magical nature spirits, which ended in apocalypse. Second was the modern, technological age, which also ended in apocalypse. The third, current age is one mainly of magic, although the lost technology from the past shows up occasionally, and the most recent books have solar powered airships. That is, sailing ships that use sunlight focused through crystals to levitate and billow the sail.
• In the Sir Apropos of Nothing book The Woad to Wuin, part of Hecate's We Can Rule Together offer is the threat that if she fails, the world will sink from an age of magic, heroes, gods, and destiny into an age that's nothing but mundane. Since Apropos is a Cosmic Plaything who's suffered a lot of pain from all those things, he turns her down in the hope that a mundane world will be safer all around.
• Spice and Wolf:
  • Holo decides to leave the villagers she helped because they say that they don't need a harvest god anymore. While she initially helped them by making the crops grow, she occasionally had to do the opposite to prevent the growing village from being struck by the Tragedy of the Commons, which made them resent her. Before she leaves, we see her portrayed in the village harvest festivities as an oppressive force and a thief instead of a wise benefactor.
  • This trope is made more explicit as Lawrence and Holo travel further northward towards her home. The old spirits of nature that reigned before the rise of humans have been killed or forced to flee their homes by the Moon-Hunting Bear, the survivors quietly blending into human society. Even Holo later on that her kind's era is fading, though that doesn't mean she can't find a new life with Lawrence.
• The The Supervillainy Saga has the Age of Superheroes coming to an end. The Age of Superheroes began in the 1930s with the rise of Ultragod (Superman), the Nightwalker (Batman), and Guinevere (Wonder Woman). Now, two out of the three are dead and the public has grown sick of superpowered beings duking it out. Gary Karkofsky a.k.a Merciless is trying to preserve the Age for as long as he can but unwittingly hastens it by killing several archvillains.
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand ends with the capture of Seville by Ferdinand III in 1248, putting an end to the Taifa of Seville, which had existed since 1023, and to fifty hundred thirty-seven years of Islamic rule.
• The first book of The Traitor Son Cycle definitely has this feel — the Wild, once far beyond the Wall, is now commonplace within Man-controlled territories, the the once-powerful Morean Empire is growing bankrupt, and the battle of Lissen Carak, which would be little more than a skirmish just twenty years ago, is considered the most important conflict of this generation. Over time, however, as the heroes make progress, it becomes less of an end of an era, and more a beginning of a new, possibly better one.
• Treasure Island, though not given a specific date, is believed to be set about twenty years after The Golden Age of Piracy. All the most infamous pirates, such as the dreaded Captain Flint, are gone, survived only by crew members who have (ostensibly) gone straight.
• The Troy Saga by David Gemmell deals with this in the third, and final, book as it's stated by one of the characters that the "Age of Heroes" is at an end as the war between Troy and the Mykene leaves both sides devastated and depleted by the conflict, ushering in a Dark Age. Fittingly, the time setting of the period of the book overlaps with the real-life end of an age; The Bronze Age collapse.
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: Upon having his proposal for a dam on the Snake River rejected by the bureau, Grant realized that the era of dam building in the United States was over and no new dam projects would be built.
• Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series includes an effectively infinite number of these, including one explicitly described, and a second implied at the end. The series also combines this with the Dawn of an Era: new Talents of the Power are being discovered, lost ones are being found anew, vast advances in technology are being made. The present Age is ending; a new one is beginning. One character even lampshades it upon seeing a demonstration of the world's first firearm, saying: "The world just changed in a very big way."
• In Wolf Hall, Cromwell contemplates the end of England's age of chivalry, which he doesn't consider to be such a bad thing. He himself has argued against costly wars where the King leads his army, the banking houses of Florence and Antwerp are starting to be the ones with real power in Europe, and most displays of chivalry are now confined to tourneys and the tilting yard. This is particularly evident when the Earl of Northumberland says he can do what he likes because of his army; Cromwell threatens to take that army right from under him by having the man's creditors call in his debts all at once, and the threat works.

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