On September 26 and 27, academics from all around the world will meet online and in person at the University of Heidelberg for the second ever Warhammer conference. This global gathering might be the nerdiest activity ever to take place in Europe, as experts from multiple academic disciplines present their papers that connect Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar to their varied areas of study. If last year’s conference was a success, the follow-up suggests the idea has sticking power – and that’s important.
Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and Age of Sigmar warrant study. Each of the Warhammer universes, and the cross-universe concepts like the Warhammer Chaos gods or the aesthetics of grimdark, is a juggernaut in pop-culture, experienced directly by millions and indirectly by many more thanks to its influence on other media. It’s a force that reflects the culture it comes from, and shapes that culture – a mirror to our world, and also a wind of change blowing through it.
That’s why academics should be studying Warhammer. Their calling (if not the day to day reality of their job) is to increase the sum total of human knowledge. The game, the models, the hundreds of Warhammer 40k books, and the many and varied ways that fans react to those things, are all rich seams to mine for insights about modern people and the ways we think about the world.
But it’s the benefits for Warhammer fans that interest me. I think that the Warhammer Conference – or at least, the kind of discussions it engenders – could make being a Warhammer fan much, much less boring, and offer a way to escape from a cycle of discourse that is at once antagonistic and useless.
When people really get into Warhammer 40k, they often get into the lore. There are many great (and some rubbish) content creators who put a lot of effort into explaining it. That’s a necessary role, given how vast and contradictory 40k lore is, and how few easy entry points there are. I do it myself, whenever I expand Wargamer’s guides to the Warhammer 40k factions or similar.
Figuring out what Warhammer 40k lore actually says is a bit like being a historian (albeit a historian of a fake history), as you pore through original sources for quotes. YouTubers Snipe and Wib have an excellent video (embedded above) which shows just how hard it can be to track what is, and isn’t, canon. Interpreting that lore is more like being a priest, as you synthesise a coherent story from the inconquerable mountain of texts that the ‘truth’ is spread across.
This lore is an endless source of interesting facts and inspiration for hobby projects – I love it. But it’s also the site of never-ending culture war debates. Take the interminable arguments about whether or not there are any good guys in Warhammer 40k, or whether or not female Space Marines could or should exist. These arguments are often argued as if the various 40k books were historical documents (they aren’t) that reflect an objective reality (they don’t), or religious texts that contain an immutable metaphysical truth (Emperor I hope not).
There aren’t definitive answers to this kind of question in 40k lore, because – as anyone who has engaged with it for a long time knows – it’s incomplete, contradictory, mutable, repeatedly retconned, and infinitely smaller than the complexity of reality. You’ve got to fill in the gaps by making assertions based on what you think is ‘realistic’ – and so the argument isn’t really about 40k lore, but about what you think reality is like.
Fandom is an unproductive place to fight a proxy wars about the nature of reality, and the hostility it generates sucks. But the real tragedy for me is how boring it is. It’s a missed opportunity. The fiction of Warhammer 40k can be used as a lens to brings blurry truths about the world into sharp focus – provided you drop any pretense about what you’re doing. And the papers being presented at the Warhammer conference show some of the many, many different ways to do that.
I’ll pick some examples. Richard Calnon – a retired US army HR officer – is presenting “The Emperor of Mankind: A Multi-Dimensional Leadership Analysis Through the Horus Heresy Series”, a talk that uses the behaviour of the Emperor of Mankind as an example of different leadership styles and how and why they fail. He’s not just listing the lore of the Emperor’s failures or successes, he’s using them as a tool to explain principles of leadership theory.
Or what about “Analyzing Orkish Speech in Brutal Kunnin: A Quantitative Approach to Linguistic Stylization in Warhammer 40k” by linguist and translator Gabriel Oliviera? The talk applies linguistic analysis to the Ork speech to uncover the deep patterns that make it feel ‘Orky’. Wouldn’t it be cool to know why the Orks sound like Orks, in more detail than just ‘they’re like soccer hooligans’? Not to mention hte practical uses for anyone who wants to translate Ork speech into a language other than English.
Then there’s artist Markus Ressel’s paper “The Gaze of the Gods: Chaos, Symbolism, and Humanity’s Reflections”. This connects the visual and symbolic language of Chaos to real historical fears and spiritual beliefs – not necessarily the ones that the artists behind Warhammer were directly referencing, but placing Warhammer’s aesthetics in the timeless web of human expression.
If this sounds highfaluting, well yeah, academia can be like that. But it’s also enriching. Philosopher Thomas Arnold’s paper “Grimdark Metaphysics: Is there an Ultimate Reality in WH40K?” connects the beliefs of different 40k races and entities to real theories of metaphysics, theories about the absolute structure of reality that go beyond even science, ideas so fundamental that they infiltrate every other system of understanding the world.
This two day conference is a buffet of ideas. The presentations examine Warhammer 40k from angles you won’t see on YouTube, and use Warhammer as a vantage point to look out over parts of the world you’ve likely never encountered before. You can attend this year’s sessions online via Teams for free from the website, and watch all of last year’s recorded sessions on YouTube – like this keynote interview with grandee John Blanche:
I don’t think an annual two day conference is going to suddenly transform Warhammer discourse. But it does signpost a new path for anyone who loves to think about Warhammer, and is sick of interminable lore-based arguments. And while academic writing remains inaccessible for many people – a problem exacerbated by academic publishers paywalling journals – content creators in other fandoms have already shown how academic ideas can be presented in ways that are accessible and entertaining.
Magic: The Gathering YouTuber Spice8Rack‘s videos might start with an in-depth retrospectives on the lore and mechanical design of the original Tarkir block, then delve into the history and reality of colonialism and cultural erasure, or ask the question “What do the mechanics Mill and Discard really represent in the lore?” as a tool to explore historical and contemporary ideas of memory and madness.
Over in videogame land, Noah Caldwell Gervais’ monstrous whole-franchise retrospectives – single videos reviewing every entry in a videogame series – trail related ideas like the tail of a comet. Perhaps the most inspired are his two Fallout roadtrips, in which he attempts to find the real world locations referenced in the videogames, investigating the history and geography of America as he travels through it.
Having more and better and more easily available ideas in the Warhammer discourse won’t make any of us healthier, wealthier, or morally superior. The understanding they bring might have value in the long term, poking our grey matter and stopping it from rotting, giving us pieces of ideas we might make use of later – but even that isn’t the point. They’re just damn good fun.
If you like to overthink Warhammer 40k as much as I do – and understand the difference between ‘open-minded discussion’ and ‘being a dick’ – come and join team Wargamer in the official Wargamer Discord community!
And if you do want to get deep into Warhammer 40k lore, check out our Horus Heresy reading order. It’s full of recommendations for uncovering the stories of each of the Space Marine legions without getting mired in all 64 (and more) books.