About the Carolina Crown 2023 Show

𝔊rowing up, I was surrounded by musicians. My great uncle had been a touring performer in decades past and was still playing local gigs while I was in elementary school. When I was in middle school and had signed up for band, myself, he and my father both played in a local big band--and this in the mid- to late-1990s, when swing music was experiencing a resurgence in popularity. My dad had himself been in marching bands in his younger years, and I remember him telling stories of taking part in drum-and-bugle corps contests in the American Midwest--as well as taking me to similar contests when they would come through central Texas. Band was a large part of my growing up, and it remained so after I moved back to the Texas Hill Country from years living elsewhere.

The show banner
Image from the Carolina Crown website, used for commentary

When, then, I saw that DCI's Carolina Crown would be marching a show titled "The Round Table: Echoes of Camelot," I was very interested (even if circumstances conspired to keep me from attending performances or addressing the show until now). I'm a medievalist (specifically a Malorian, per my dissertation) and an old band-nerd; how could I not be interested? After watching a recording of the show (by ObiWannaBrick31), I note that, although the show is excellent (and it is excellent; not for nothing did it take second place at the 2023 World Championship), it falls into common traps of medievalist based-ons and modern retellings.

There are a couple of caveats to note, of course. For one, the performance is only some thirteen and a half minutes, and it is put on by (talented, skilled, and dedicated) children and young adults (DCI performers range in age from 13 to 22). There's only so much that can be fit into so short a time, so some things will necessarily be left out. Too, there's only so much time to learn things that someone no older than 22 can have, and most of what the performers have clearly learned pertains to the show--how to play their instruments (again, exceptionally well; I do not want to be misconstrued as denigrating the performers' efforts) and to move their bodies in singularly demanding ways, and in concert with one another. The people putting on the show are not experts in late medieval literature, and certainly not in Malory's work upon which the show is avowedly based; they are doing the best they can (which, again, is quite good work as a musical performance).

It is the case that there are things the show gets right. Given the age-range of the performers, the featured King Arthur--clearly delineated by the royal purple--is necessarily young and presumably impetuous. In the show, the colorguardsman who performs the character shows enthusiasm that bespeaks vital adolescence, very much the kind of thing to be associated with the sometimes rash king. (Let us not forget that Malory's Arthur orders mass infanticide, surely an ill-considered act, and is rebuked by Merlin for not thinking through things presented to him.) The Round Table featured prominently in the show--center-field at the 50-yard line--borrows with only little amendment from the Round Table in Winchester's Great Hall. Further, the instrumentalists adopt a pose at several points in the performance that brings to mind the exaggerated postures associated with instrumental musicians in medieval illuminations such as that at the foot of fol. 97v of Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264. Finally, as I watched the show again, I saw in its ending at least echoes of the hic jacet Arturus, rex quondam rexque futurus with which Arthur's part in Malory ends. There are several other such touches to be found in the show, and it is consequently clear that those who worked to put it together did so with at least some idea of their source materials--which is better than many other medievalist works that might be found.

The show's King Arthur and his Round Table
Image taken from ObiWannaBrick31's recording,
posted to YouTube and used here for commentary

A stricken pose
Image taken from ObiWannaBrick31's recording,
posted to YouTube and used here for commentary

So much said, however, and as aforementioned, "The Round Table: Echoes of Camelot" suffers the same kinds of problems many medievalist works do. Among them is the intense compression of time imposed upon the premodern, something I've discussed before. Examples begin with the opening of the program and the performers' uniforms. Those of the drum majors and instrumentalists are shaped and textured to evoke chain mail supplemented by selected inclusions of plate, somewhat bringing to mind the 1995 First Knight--a distinctly medievalist move to make. But the tabard- or surcoat-like portions of those uniforms feature artwork reflecting distinctly post-medieval techniques and sensibilities on the front and what very much appears to be Old English writing on the back--medieval, yes, but centuries earlier than Malory. This is not helped by the selection of music for the show, as advertised, which includes no medieval music; the earliest composer represented is Mozart, while several contemporary composers are on display.

Drum major, obverse
Image taken from ObiWannaBrick31's recording,
posted to YouTube and used here for commentary

Drum major, reverse
Image taken from ObiWannaBrick31's recording,
posted to YouTube and used here for commentary

The selectiveness of the presentation, although both understandable and necessary given the constraints on available performance time, also strikes me as somewhat...strange. Yes, the Lancelot / Guinevere relationship factors heavily into Le Morte d'Arthur, and, yes, it is as a result of that that Arthur's Logres is undone. But it is not the only narrative thread to be found in the work, and it can be argued that it is not the most important of them. (The Grail narrative is one contender, as is the Roman Imperial narrative. Readerly perspective will do much to determine what counts as "most important.") For one thing, in Malory, the attraction between Lancelot and Guinevere is not a one-sided thing; for the show, "A flawed hero, the gallant Sir Lancelot, surrenders to the beauty of Queen Guinevere." The implication is one of seduction, seeming to lay the fault at the feet of Guinevere, and, while Malory does not hold her blameless (remember that she enters a convent after Arthur's death, penitent), he certainly does not ascribe to her such wiles, nor yet does he excuse Lancelot.

The show does highlight the strife between Arthur and Lancelot after the revelation of the former's cuckoldry by the latter, but it conflates that strife--which, remember, would have been pacified by Papal decree in Malory but for the insistence by Gawain (notably absent from the show) on his right of vengeance for his slain brothers, Arthur's nephews--with that of the Dolorous Day, in which Arthur's own nephew-son, Mordred, kills Arthur. Notably, it does not do much, if anything, to reinforce the idea that Lancelot was "the man of moost worship in the world"--that is, the greatest in martial might. Notably, too, the show ends with Arthur rather than with how Malory's work ends--with Lancelot pining to death for Guinevere, who had herself died while in a convent repenting of her deed, Constantyn son of Cador assuming rule, and several of the elder Knights of the Round Table establishing realms in the Middle East. (Admittedly, it would be hard to represent as much in a marching show.)

If that's Mordred, it's not been emphasized previously.
It doesn't look like the show's Lancelot, either.
Image taken from ObiWannaBrick31's recording,
posted to YouTube and used here for commentary

At root, then, for all that the music is excellent and the marching and choreography equally so (and, again, they are), "The Round Table: Echoes of Camelot" works from what seems a relatively shallow understanding of its ostensible source materials. That it gets right what it does get right suggests that the people who composed the show--who selected the music, who scripted the choreography, who built and purchased the props--had solid access to the best scholarly understandings of those materials. (I doubt it's hard to access, truly; my experience with scholars is that they are eager to share what they know, even if often only because they want to feel intelligent, and being solicited for their understandings does much to make such a feeling. Nor do I exempt myself from it, though whether I still count as a scholar--or ever did--can certainly be argued.)

Some of it, as noted above, is an artifact of the time available in a marching show; there is, again, only so much that thirteen and a half minutes can show. Some of it, though, speaks to prevailing popular unconcern for more than the basics of such stories. The details of Arthurian myths, whether in Malory's pivotal-in-English collection of them or in other sources, are not important to most. The specific story presented, focusing on the tension between love and marriage (maugre Sinatra) among Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, could just as easily take other names; there is hardly a shortage of love triangles to be found. (Indeed, one is alluded to in the selection of songs for the show: Tristan and Isolde [and Mark].)

What effect, then, has reliance upon Arthurian myth if many of its details are elided?

Perhaps it is that the commonality of Arthurian myth makes the show more accessible to more audiences and offers a ready-made set of associations around which to build a show. Most of the audience of a DCI show can be assumed to be broadly familiar with such figures as Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot, as well as with the broad strokes of the legend and major figures and events in it: the swords (in the stone and Excalibur, often conflated), the Round Table, the Day of Destiny. Most of the audience of a DCI show can be assumed to have ideas about what knights look like, about what the world in which knights are commonly believed to live look like. And much of the audience of a DCI show in 2023 could be expected to have grown up with or be familiar with any number of medievalist productions, whether television series showing on major networks and streaming services, books by a variety of authors, video games, or other media.

It certainly didn't hurt the Carolina Crown to make such use of the materials, and that corps is to be commended for its performance. I have to wonder, though, if it could have done as well on the field and done better on its homework--just as I wonder if I could do better on my own.

Once upon a Time Rewatch 1.1, "Pilot"

Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

---

1.1, "Pilot"

Written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz
Directed by Mark Mylod

Synopsis

That's neither ominous nor disheartening...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Following a brief textual introduction, a richly-clad rider races along a causeway (that obviously sees a lot of wheeled traffic) and through a forest as snow begins to fall. He joins a group of dwarves who surround the glassy coffin of a pale woman; he bids the coffin opened and kisses the woman within. After a rippling of rainbow magic, she wakes, Snow White responding to Prince Charming once again. The two are wed in a towering, stained-glass-walled room with many in attendance, the ceremony interrupted by the entrance of a dark-clad queen who proclaims her evil intent to destroy the happiness of all there gathered.

Yeah, the aspect's off, and the illustration's odd...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

The whole is revealed to be a story in a book, read by a boy on a bus bound for Boston. As he arrives there, a woman in a red dress makes her way into a restaurant to meet a date--as a pretext to pursue a bail-jumper; she is a bail bondsperson, taking her quarry. After, she returns to a hotel room, where the boy confronts her, naming her as Emma Swan and claiming to be her son, Henry. Emma is understandably taken aback by the revelation, as by the assertion that Henry is the child she gave up for adoption a decade earlier. He tries to enlist her to return to his home: Storybrooke, Maine. She agrees to take him home.

Pretty, yes?
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

A castle towers over an inlet amid mountains. In it, the pregnant Snow White muses over the evil queen's threat, with Charming trying to comfort her; she reminds him of the queen's evil and suggests visiting an imprisoned figure. Charming reluctantly agrees.

Emma drives Henry back out of Boston as he resumes reading from his book; he asserts the truth of the stories therein, as well as the power of belief. He notes that Emma herself is in the book, the story from which he reads treating the visit of Snow White and Prince Charming to the imprisoned figure--Rumpelstiltskin. After Snow White agrees to give Rumpelstiltskin the name of her unborn child, he informs her of the queen's machinations; a dark curse is in the offing, one that will trap them all in time and in a place where what they value is gone from them. "No more happy endings," he says, but notes that the child will be their savior on its twenty-eighth birthday; the child's name is revealed to be Emma.

That's neither ominous nor disheartening...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

At length, Emma and Henry reach Storybrooke. She pulls the car to a stop in front of a library with a stilled clock, and Henry notes that time is frozen as he explicates the situation: "The evil queen sent a bunch of fairy-tale characters here," trapping them. His therapist, Archie, meets them, expressing concern and informing Emma that Henry's mother is the mayor; she goes to return him home.

Snow White, Charming, dwarves, and others gather around a round table to confer about what to do. Discussion is not productive until a blue fairy arrives, bringing enchanted wood that can be used to save the as-yet-unborn Emma--and only one other.

Henry resists being returned to his mother, the mayor, Regina Mills. Regina, for her part, is happy to see her son, and she and Emma confer about Henry's situation. The circumstances of his adoption are noted, as are his current difficulties. Emma notes the strange book, which surprises Regina; Emma is surprised in turn to be hastened on her way away, but as she tries to leave town, she sees she still has Henry's book--and she crashes, swerving to avoid a wolf in the road just as she reaches the edge of town.

That's neither ominous nor disheartening...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Geppetto and his son, Pinocchio, work on the tree to effect Emma's escape from the coming curse. Snow White looks out over her domain before conferring with Charming about which of them will accompany Emma. The decision is made to send Snow White with their daughter, and she goes into labor as the curse begins to encroach.

Emma wakes in jail, having evidently wrecked her car while driving drunk. She, another prisoner, and a local confer briefly before Regina enters, noting Henry's absence; a search for the boy begins, with Emma showing her skills. They point to Henry's teacher--who appears to be Snow White, bird-handling and all. Regina confronts her, but it yields no useful information--but does present an opportunity for Henry's teacher to wax eloquent on the value of story before making a painful gaffe and offering Emma direction.

The birth proceeds as the curse approaches--along with the evil queen. Geppetto's work is completed, and Emma is taken to it for her safety shortly after her delivery; Charming saves the child at the cost of himself. Snow White later finds Charming--and their daughter absent, while the queen gloats over her partial success as the curse takes hold.

In Storybrooke, Emma finds Henry at a dilapidated playscape. He implores her for aid and forgives her for giving him up for adoption; she denies that she is a savior, but she affirms the reason for giving him up for adoption and relates her own background as a foster-child. She also takes him back to Regina once again; their ensuring conversation irks Regina greatly, prompting her to threaten Emma. Henry is despondent, and Regina takes away his book, beginning to panic at events.

Henry's teacher volunteers in a hospital, comforting patients--including one who looks much like Charming. Emma takes a room at a local inn, where a sinister landlord, Mr. Gold, greets her. And the library clock begins to tick again.

Discussion

Okay, so, first thing's first: it's Disney. Given that the series ran on ABC, it's not unexpected--nor yet is the fact that the series, rather than being medievalist in itself, is predominantly neomedievalist--that is, rather than going to medieval antecedents more or less directly, it works from sources that are themselves interpretations or reimaginings of medieval antecedents. In the main, the series uses Disney's interpretations of fairy tales and other public domain narratives as its touchstones, rather than the things Disney interprets. (Kavita Mudan Finn offers discussion of the phenomenon here.) In doing so, the series reinforces the already-existing overdetermination of such narratives by Disney, but that is not to be wondered at; media production is a business, after all, it's better business to pay less for materials than to pay more, and using what you already own is cheap. Nor yet is it to be blithely set aside; yes, "it's just a show," but it's one that does get watched with children, and even adults are often deeply influenced by the entertainment media they consume; consequently, the series is in position to shape and shade popular understandings of the medieval, not because it treats the medieval, but because it is perceived as doing so. (Paul Sturtevant's book, discussed here and here, speaks to the idea, among others.) So there's that.

Even with that, though, there are medievalist things that the episode gets right. The round table, for one thing, calls back powerfully to Arthurian legend, perhaps the medieval narrative most likely to be familiar to the general viewership of the series (a prime-time show on ABC will necessarily be trying to reach the broadest possible audience, something that might explain some of the simplifications, etc., at work in the series). The involvement of the fairies in world-shifting lines up with traditional stories, as well.

There are also things the episode gets wrong (aside from some dubious costume decisions--even aside from the historical issues, to which others can speak with greater knowledge and insight than I, several of the pairs of pants worn look like they would chafe). Although there are people of color present and active in the neomedievalist fairy-tale world, they are not among the "important" protagonists for the most part; they tend to be subordinate figures, with the exception of the evil queen--a Latina coded as overtly and, well, evilly sexual. The stereotyping is...not to Disney's credit, and it problematically reinforces both the usual ills associated with reductive typing and what Helen Young describes as the myth of the monochrome Middle Ages, the notion that the only people, or the only people who mattered, in medieval Europe were white people. And, again, since popular media narratives exercise influence, and those promulgated by Disney are positioned to exercise more influence, the already-problematic stereotyping is...even worse.

As a note, I'll be away on vacation next week, so no update. Join us again on 17 June 2021!

New Rewatch Series: Once upon a Time

𝔗his one's going to take a while.

My opportunities to watch things are somewhat limited, as might be expected. Most of them involve time with family, and, since part of that family is a daughter who, as I write this, is seven years old, there are certain...limitations on what I can get away with. The others involve down-time at my workplace, where there are even more limits, despite my being in the position I'm in. (It's outside academe, but even were I still seated in the ivory tower, there would be limits to what I could watch at work, even were I writing about it.) So it should not be a surprise that a lot of what I have been able to re/watch here has focused on family-friendly and children's materials, nor should it be a surprise that it would continue to be so.

It's not a secret from my family that I do translate what we end up watching into such work as I still do; I've said as much to them, and they've seen me at work at it. It's also not a secret that my wife and I met in graduate school; we tell people, and with no small truth, that we fell in love over early English noun declensions, having gotten to know one another as we sat together for a class on Beowulf. Consequently, she knows what I do, and she occasionally makes recommendations for what I might treat next. I value her opinion, of course, and when she started watching again a series she's started watching while we lived in New York City, and she commented that I might look at its mis/use of the medieval/ist, I agreed that it might be a good thing to do.

A few things have happened in the interim, though, and it is only recently that she made the comment again, this time while I am not currently engaged in another project. Thus, moving ahead, I'll be turning my attentions to the ABC series Once upon a Time. As a seven-season series running to some 155 episodes, I'll be on the project for some time, and that's fine; it's good to have work to do. I'll likely intersperse it with other commentaries, because there's a lot of other stuff to attend to, but the main thrust will be on the series until I get done.

As ever, of course, the blog is happy to accept commentary and guest submissions; send them to talesaftertolkien@gmail.com, and welcome!

It's not as clear as other posters, for example...
The series poster from Disney+, used here for commentary.

 Read the next entry in the series here!

A Few Comments about Still Another Comic

 𝔄 couple of weeks ago, I put together a brief piece on Gemma Correll's 5 April 2021 "Serf's Up" on The Nib, working in the same line as an earlier piece on Joseph Faill's punning comic on A Pleasant Waste of Time. I note in that piece an attempt to work toward explicating the joke and likely killing it as I dissect it; I am evidently some kind of a serial killer.

The comic in question,
presented here to facilitate commentary.

A different comic I recently encountered, Humon's "Glow Up" on Scandinavia and the World (the most recent of the offerings on that site as of this writing), suggests itself as the next such victim. I've read the comic intermittently for some years, having stumbled onto it via social media sharing from one friend or another some time ago. (My apologies to said friend that I do not recall who actually pointed me at it.) And this is not the first of the offerings on the site to suggest itself as something worth looking at for its neo/medievalism, to be certain--but the most recent is the easiest to access.

In the comic, a character representing an older Svalbard (the age inferred due to the collar ruff) chastises another representing Norway for use of cosmetics, citing shared "tough Viking ancestors" as justification; another character representing those ancestors emerges and questions the rebuke. Obviously, there are simplifications and inaccuracies to be found in a two-panel comic, in addition to the usual problems of compressing time. The characters have to serve as short-hand for entire nations and attitudes associated with them, and the Viking character, with horned helmet, is a historically "incorrect" presentation whose appearance makes use of a theoretical combination of Scandinavian flags (not unlike the combination of flags that create the United Kingdom's banner) and a device commonly noted as indicating humor because it is known to be both a medievalist trope and inaccurate. (In brief, as I am informed by several Scandinavians of my acquaintance, folks know Vikings didn't wear horned helmets; any presentation of them as doing so is meant to be taken other-than-seriously. It is not hard to read a rebuke of those who adhere to views of horned helmets as practical battle-wear in the assumption.) As with earlier commentaries on comics, though, the inaccuracies seem to be occasioned by concerns of medium; while it is the case that jokes can inhere in small details (as argued here, for example), jokes that aim to address broad audiences generally do better to make them in broad strokes.

The crux of the joke, that the Vikings adorned themselves, does proceed from historical accuracies, however, and some that are often disregarded by the same kinds of folks who will proclaim loudly, following one ideologue often and appropriately subjected to ridicule, that "the facts don't care about your feelings"--all while disregarding emergent facts to suit narratives they maintain only because they make them feel good (most often about maintaining execrable ideologies as some means to cover their own ample and abundant inadequacies). As attested here, here, here, and elsewhere, the "tough Viking ancestors" were greatly concerned about their appearances, taking time and care with them unusual--and, again, remarked upon--in the region. They wore jewelry; they styled their hair and beards; they wore makeup. In brief, they did many of the things often associated (derisively, unfortunately) with femininity--even as they are often held up as exemplars of "real manhood" by ill-informed, worse-aligned people.

I know it's "only a webcomic." I know "it doesn't matter." But I also know the comic stands in opposition to that which ought well and always to be opposed, and I know that it grounds itself in authentic detail about the medieval--as well, yes, as inauthentic detail deriving from the medievalist or neomedieval--to do so. And I believe that that kind of thing ought to be encouraged.

A Follow-up on Another Piece

𝔑ot too long ago, I had a piece pop out on The Public Medievalist regarding the medievalism of the Knight Man stage and robot from Mega Man VI, an 8-bit NES game. As it happens, Knight Man is not the only Robot Master to borrow from the medieval, nor is Mega Man VI the only one of the Blue Bomber's games to pull from that sourcing, to get some things right and some far less so. Another example of such things that comes to mind is Shade Man from Mega Man VII, a 16-bit SNES game; like the Mega Man VI example, some things are right, some things are not, and the correct and incorrect both matter.

The man himself...
Image from the
MegaMan Knowledge Base, here,
used for commentary.

Like Knight Man from the previous game, Shade Man inhabits a castle that makes much of medievalist imagery. Crumbling stone columns support high-ceilinged rooms hung with chains and sporting stained glass, as if in some strange medieval cathedral. It is replete with suits of armor, too, and hosts enemies who come charging at the heroic character with lances at the ready--and both speak to medieval tropes that pervade both history and literature. Indeed, Mega Man pressing through the castle and defeating a series of knightly foes rings of the kinds of things described in Le Morte d'Arthur and any number of other chivalric romances, so that much is in line with antecedents both in the game series and in the medieval/ist work from which the stage and robot borrow.

Unlike the earlier game, though, Shade Man does not borrow quite so much from the perceived medieval as from the overtly medievalist. Yes, there is something of the demonic in his appearance, but in function he is more the bat-like vampire of Dracula and its borrowers than he is some medieval monster--and his castle, shrouded in gloom under the light of a full moon, seems to borrow more from the Gothic motifs of Castle of Otranto than from more "truly" medieval work. (Indeed, one of the foes faced in the stage is a small robot that falls as a helmet from above, echoing the death of Conrad early in that novel.) And there are other borrowings of medievalist presentations, as well; among the more notable is the invocation (via music) of the medievalist Ghosts 'n  Goblins games in the stage, which games feature the spear-throwing, armor-clad Arthur as he quests against evil. So there's that, as well.

To be fair, the conflation of the medieval and the medievalist is nothing new to the game. After all, the medievalist sources form which it borrows are themselves such conflations, and they are hardly the only examples of such things to be found. (This webspace attests to no few of them, among others.) For better or worse, the ideas are firmly linked in popular conception, and failing to acknowledge so much is a wilful omission that does nobody any good. That said, however, my comments from the end of the Public Medievalist piece remain true:

Popular media presentations like the Mega Man games inform much public understanding of what the medieval was and is. If nothing else, repeating information sets up expectations of what is real or realistic. As such, every iteration of wrong information, every instance of inaccuracy, perpetuates misconceptions and closes off avenues of understanding that much further.

Furthermore, games like Mega Man were openly geared towards children. When people are taught early on that things are a certain way, it is all the harder for those who will teach them later in life to ensure that, as they grow up, they proceed from a sound and solid understanding of what was as they work toward what they will be. Even such idle pastimes as video games can have a deep and lasting effect on their players.

The shallow and clumsy use of the Middle Ages in Mega Man isn’t an obvious problem. But, like the issues within Game of Thrones, it forms a foundation for more troubling portrayals and abuses of the medieval world. Perhaps by addressing the formative misunderstandings presented by Mega Man and other games, we can go some way to countering such bigger issues.

There is clearly still no small amount of work to do.

A Few Comments about Another Comic

𝔄 while back, I opined about Joseph Faill's punning comic on A Pleasant Waste of Time, commenting on the joke upon which the comic depends and, it might well be asserted, killing it in the process of dissection. Even so, I stand by the comments I made then; the point of the comic was to elicit a laugh from a broad audience, and it succeeds at that, although it is lamentable that it has to do so the way it has to do so. We can and should do better.

The comic in question this time around:
Gemma Correll's 5 April 2021 "Serf's Up" on The Nib,
used here for commentary.

A different comic I recently encountered, Gemma Correll's 5 April 2021 "Serf's Up" on The Nib, attested in the caption of the comic I reproduce for the sake of commentary, does appear to do better than Faill. Its situation would seem to circumscribe its audience a bit more than Faill's comic--The Nib has a decided political slant, and it is not one that aligns with as much of academic medievailsm as might be expected (as attested and endured by such folks as Mary Rambaran-Olm, Dorothy Kim, Kavita Mudan Finn, Jonathan Hsy, and Adam Miyashiro; the list is not exhaustive)--and it is perhaps one with that that the comic is able to partake to a greater degree of the usage and visual conventions of the time. The inclusion of what looks like mimicry of an insular majuscule, the ð, and the æ, along with visual cues (hairstyles and some clothing items) and literary references (Chaucer, twice) appear to ground the comic more firmly in the observed medieval than Faill's comic does. In effect, the comic appears to assume a more informed audience and gives that audience more information to make its joke.

That said, the comic gets things wrong in its attempt to make the joke land. The "older" letters, ð and æ, appear to be presented in lowercase or miniscule, inconsistent with the all-caps lettering of the rest of the comic. It might be that the capital forms, Ð and Æ, would not read well in the medium, and a visual medium has to attend to such things; a webcomic does best when it scans easily and quickly, and the lowercase forms do scan quicker than the capitals. So, there might be justification for the seeming error, but it still attracts attention to itself, and that attention distracts from the joke. And there are concerns, as ever, about the flattening and compression of the Middle Ages, as though the several centuries were a constant bloc--but I've spoken to that kind of thing before, and at length, including in materials linked in this commentary.

Even so, the central thrust of the comic--the complaints voiced now are much the same complaints voiced throughout history--is well received. It's true enough; Malory comments aspersively on anticipated lewd interpretations of Lancelot and Guinevere--remarking that "loue that tyme was not as is now adayes"--as well as upon those who sought to cleave to Mordred rather than Arthur, calling that group "newe fangle." His are but two examples, easily found; there are others, all speaking to the theme of "cildas þissum dægum" or somesuch thing. People are people and have been people as long as there have been people; there is no golden age, whether in the pre-Classical or Classical periods, or, maugre the heads of white nationalists, in the medieval; we do well to remember it, and cartoonists such as Correll do well to remind us of it.

Some Thoughts about Some Dungeon Synth

𝔄s I have continued to work in this webspace and others, I have tended to do so with music of one sort or another playing in the background. It's often instrumental music; vocals tend to pull my attention to them to a degree I find incompatible with working on writing, as they sound too much like someone is trying to talk to me for me to be able to focus elsewhere. And as I was casting about for such music, I came across the Dungeon Synth Archives on YouTube, which both fit the kind of ambient, instrumental music I was seeking and suggested itself as presenting medievalisms that do not seldom make of themselves some kinds of tales after Tolkien.

Because I always try to have a blast when I work...
Gif from Giphy.com, deriving from Monty Python,
and used for commentary

While I have linked the channel above, plowing through examples does not necessarily or efficiently describe a genre. What dungeon synth is reported as being varies. Wikipedia, that first-use go-to reference, calls it here "a subgenre of dark ambient music that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s" that "employs aesthetics and themes typically associated with black metal and applies it to dreamier ambient songs" in which "use of dark soundscapes suggests medieval or fantasy motifs, often with a nocturnal aesthetic" and which "is often compared to video game music, as it is occasionally applied in those settings." Another source, Andrew Werdna's Dungeon Synth blog--much like this webspace-- describes it here as "the sound of the ancient crypt. The breath of the tomb, that can only be properly conveyed in music that is primitive, necro, lo-fi, forgotten, obscure, and ignored by all of mainstream society." Robert Newsome's 2017 comments on Bandcamp identify it as "Drawing its musical themes from Medieval and Renaissance compositions and its aesthetic sensibilities from black metal and fantasy literature [...] the perfect soundtrack for this kind of escapist fantasy," much like "the 'intro' track to your favorite metal album, but stretched out to album length"; Jonathan Carron's 2021 comments on Invisible Oranges call it initially "a style of grim fantasy ambient that would serve as intros, interludes, and full releases played and traded among black metal musicians in the 1990s" that works well for many internet subcultures

Admittedly, there is always peril in posting genre definitions; there are always exceptions, of course, and there are always ambiguities to consider. This webspace has noted such things in the past; consider, for example the boundaries of "the medieval," as here. My own attempts at offering definitions have been...less than inspiring, I think, as these all attest. So I will not pretend that the definitions I note above are complete, comprehensive, or definitive; they are functional, and that has to be enough.

You're gonna look at this and say it's not medievalist?
Image is one of the video thumbnails on the
Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel,
used for commentary

A quick glance at the albums uploaded to the Archive linked above notes a number of names that come from Tolkien or seem to evoke him and his work; "Aldaron" is both the name of a group with an album of dungeon synth and a by-name for one of Tolkien's Valar, while "Oshanoe" would read as well as a medievalist fantasy nation-state as it does as a performing name, and "Castle Zagyx" is a clear evocation of the Castle Zagyg that informs older Dungeons & Dragons--itself a decidedly medievalist  and Tolkienist construction. Other performance- and album-names are more overtly medieval: Walpurgisnacht and Tir, Mari Lwyd and Vale Minstrel, Fen Walker and Myrrdin all speak to northern and western Europe between the end of Western Rome and whatever temporal point might be used to mark the end of the Middle Ages.

It is clear that there are attempts to link the music back, either directly to perceptions of the medieval or vicariously through linking to works that link to the medieval. How accurate those attempts are, it surpasses me to say; there will be limits imposed due to instrumentation--"synth" is not exactly something attainable with the kinds of instruments available in the European Middle Ages, although I do know that time had more available than is commonly recognized--but I did not succeed as a music major, leaving that course of study before reaching the parts of it that would have let me speak with certainty to the accuracy of intonation and melodic and harmonic structures, for example, or performance practices. But this blog always welcomes outside contributions, so those who read it and who are thus knowledgeable would find their comments on the matter welcomed.

For myself, however, I have some reading and writing to do, and this should give me some more music with which to do both.

Thoughts about The Magic of the Unicorn

Read the previous piece in the series here.

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ℑ don't think it even approaches being a secret that I am a nerd, and a big one. I don't think its anything resembling a secret, either, that I (quietly?) encourage my daughter, seven years old as I write this, to follow along in my nerdiness. She's picked up a fair bit of it in musical taste so far, which pleases me, and there are glimmers of it in such things as a recent question she asked me: "Daddy, what's a gelatinous cube?" I am pleased to report that she appreciated a quick perusal of an older-edition Monster Manual for an answer, and it looks to be time to encourage her towards roleplaying games.

The cover, of course.
Image taken from the book's webpage,
used for commentary.

With that thought in mind, I looked at other bookshelves in my home than those where my RPG materials rest, seeing if I couldn't find something that might serve as a solid introduction to the genre for her but that would be accessible to her; she reads, and at or above grade level, and I'm proud of her for it, but there's a lot of RPG material that's dry and difficult slogging, especially for a seven-year-old. Fortunately, because I am a nerd and am married to a nerd, and both of us remember such things fondly from our own earlier years, we have a number of Choose Your Own Adventure books on hand--and Deborah Lerme Goodman's The Magic of the Unicorn (Chooseco, 2017; ISBN 978-1-937133-25-2) was the one that came off of the shelf for me.

Like all examples of the genre, The Magic of the Unicorn rewards re-readings and consideration of choices to be made; there are multiple endings to be found, and not all of them are particularly pleasant, although no few of them are. And while the specific text may be a bit ambitious for my daughter at this point--she's in first grade now, and the book checks out at a fifth-grade reading level--the ability to make choices and have them matter is something that my little girl appreciates. Too, she likes unicorns and dragons and the like that appear in the text, even though she doesn't always like every ending she runs into as we read it together.

The more pertinent stuff for this webspace, though, is how the text presents the medieval. It certainly presents itself as presenting it; ad copy on the book's webpage offers the following description:

Only a unicorn's horn can purify the water in your medieval village, so you set off to find one. Can you solve the town riddle and find the sorceress? Does a unicorn reside in the forest? A fire-breathing dragon, angry warlock, and powerful wood-witch all stand in your path.

So, that is there. The first sentence of the book complicates the matter, however; reading "The summer of 1507 is exceptionally dry throughout Flanders" (1), the statement regarding setting puts the events of the book into the ambiguous, liminal period that could be considered either medieval or early modern, depending on definitions of the terms (as noted here). While it does get the bit about the drought right, the ambiguous placement in time sits...oddly with me as I read it against the description of the book as medieval.

The rest of the text and the paratext work to make the book more medieval, however. Although there is much of the hovels-and-heraldry stereotyping at work, there are a lot of details that ring true. A weaver figures eminently, and weaving was among the major economic drivers of Flanders at the time. Too, monastic figures and churches take up a fair bit of space in the work, reinforcing the association with the medieval (yes, such figures extend well outside the medieval, but the medieval is often presented as typified by the interpenetration of Christian institutions into civil ones), and "typical" feudal structures are very much in place. In all, as might be expected from a children's book (and about which I have opined before), The Magic of the Unicorn works from an idealized, condensed, compressed understanding of the medieval that does well enough--again, unpleasant endings await readers, averting the Disneyfication of the period--and it could do better without losing narrative thrust or confusing younger readers.

That said, there are things the book does well. An early encounter along one narrative line in the text is with "Simon, a traveling peddler [the protagonist has] always liked" (7). The accompanying illustration (6), at least in the edition of the text I have, is of a dark-skinned man in what appear to be good clothes--they compare favorably with even some of the noble figures presented in the book, and better than the clothes worn by the prominent weaver (37)--so the problems of the monochrome Middle Ages and the Manichean allegory are averted (at least in part; tokenism may still be regarded as an issue of concern). Too, while there is much flattening of the medieval in the text, and there are decidedly fantastical elements in it--dragons, griffins, alchemy, and the titular magic and unicorn--the book does not avoid peril, injury, and death--including in what seems very much an oubliette, medievalist if not necessarily medieval; the book's medievalism is not all knights and princesses and pageantry, even as it is not all grim and grime and gory. And in maintaining at least that much nuance, it does decently enough for an elementary school read--although it, like all of us, could do better.

Sorry, I'm Not There Yet

So.

Such joy at avoiding the comparison...
Image from Tenor.com, used for commentary.

 

At the moment, I'm not amid any rewatches or rereads (other than the ongoing Hobb one), my daughter's watching YouTube life-hack videos, my wife's largely watching other things and reading for work, and my own media consumption is more or less in that same line. Consequently, I've been casting about for things about which to write. An online friend of mine--goes by Box--suggested that I might try to read Skeletor as an iteration of Æþelræd Unræd, and I looked into that possibility; while it could be argued that He-Man is a strange iteration of tropes regarding Danes, putting Skeletor in even such a position as Ironside's father would be a stretch even I am not willing to try.

Too, as I was doing some idle reading, I came across one of what I have found are many private projects positing what the United States might come to look like after an unspecified event resulted in the loss of modern technologies--a feudal America, as it is described. It piqued my interest initially, as could be expected; it'd certainly be a tale after Tolkien, and it's the kind of thing of which no few RPG settings are made (and, honestly, the concept's one that'd be interesting to play in). But as I reviewed the project and its author, I noted some...problems in it--not the relative age of the source, no, because I can work with things done in good faith that have simply been superseded by new information, but in some of the associations and assertions. I'm not linking it here for those reasons.

Honestly, there are enough problems with the medieval, broadly conceived, being deployed by hate groups to bolster execrable ideologies--and it is clear that there are more such groups doing more foul work that should be tolerated. How wrong such things are is amply and abundantly attested by far more intelligent and capable scholars than I--Mary Rambaran-Olm, Dorothy Kim, Adam Miyashiro, Jonathan Hsy, and others--whose work is well worth reading and investigating. I do what I can to address well-meaning errors in my groups; people make honest mistakes, working from information that has been superseded or that they accepted in good faith from people who did not act in the same. And, here, at least, I continue to call for the repudiation of hateful, wrong-headed ideologies that try to prop up systems of oppression and unwarranted violence; I may not be able to raise my hand against the evils of the world, but I can, at least, join others in raising my voice against them.

Some Further Notes about the Kerrville Renaissance Festival

𝔗his past weekend, I once again attended the Kerrville Renaissance Festival--about which I've written before, here and here. (It can still be found on Twitter and Facebook, as well as elsewhere.) This year, I did not win free tickets; instead, the event was opened for all for free, so long as they came in wearing masks; as might be expected, there was some negative comment about the mask requirement, with at least one person I saw writing that "If I have to wear a mask, I'm not coming," but most of the people I saw on site were masked unless they were eating or performing, and the performers made a point of keeping their distance from the audience.

Coming to the entry on 30 January 2021.
The photo, like all of them in this post, is mine.

When we arrived--once again, my wife and daughter went with me--the weather was a bit chilly and quite overcast, with drizzle falling; it's a welcome thing in the Texas Hill Country in most any season, and it might have contributed to the relatively sparse attendance that had preceded us into the event. Soon enough, though, the clouds began clearing off, the drizzle stopped, and the sun came out to warm the area--something that received some comment in one of the performances we watched.

The Bedouin Dancers taking the stage.

The camp at some distance.

Some tabled discussion.

There were a couple of those, as might well be expected. Once again, we watched the Bedouin Dancers of San Antonio perform, with several of the faces familiar when they peaked out from behind their masks and the dances still commanding attention. We also looked at the mock-up Viking encampment that stood not far away from where the dancers performed, something with which my daughter found herself fascinated. It was, as most such things are, partial, with some things that would be expected of an encampment, even one meant to be up only for a few days, absent (some might say happily for some things, admittedly, and I doubt that the reenactors stayed overnight in their tents). Such events, as I have commented in the past, do not capture the "real," although they celebrate things and allow for release and enjoyment that are welcome in all times--but perhaps especially in times of strain. And I will note, too, that there seemed to be an effort made by the reenactors to be more inclusive in their company--as well as less of the overt racism I saw and heard last year, which I have to count to the good. The coded / covert / dog-whistly stuff seemed less in evidence, as well, though whether that was out of the increasing recognition that populations of earlier times were not so homogenous as has been traditionally believed or out of some other concern (perhaps worry about blowback) is unclear to me; admittedly, I'll take either explanation, if not both.

Berds! I lurve berds!

Sumer is icumen in...

The show that really caught my attention, however, was that of Ermagerd Bard, whom we got to watch when we stopped for a bit to eat (teriyaki jerky and popcorn served for a snack, both of which are so authentically early modern--almost as much as the smoked turkey legs available not far off). The performer, who polled the audience before beginning and tailored her show to suit, seemed to me to have done her homework, working not only to get the seeming of medievalism, but to ground her performance in what is known--and in both amateur and professional work--of the medieval; the scholar that remains in me appreciated her showing her work in even so casual a manner as noting some scholarly disagreement...which she did after leading the audience in a round over "Sumer Is Icumen In." (I even sang along, and I managed not to get pelted with...anything, really.) It was a fit choice, given the aforementioned shift in weather, and the performer commented upon it as she explained for the lay audience what the lyrics of the song mean, both denotatively and connotatively. The audience seemed quite interested in the lewd overtones of the work, with several I overheard noting their surprise that such things would have been in a song several centuries old. (Indeed, one or two, young children in tow, got up fairly quickly. I doubt it was in response to a sudden need for a diaper change, although I suppose it could have been.) And although I already knew about it, I was pleased to hear it explained well; I was happy to have a bit of thought go into things, more than I usually get to see when I attend such festivals.

We did a few other things at the festival, mostly walking around and looking about. We took a carriage ride that was pretty nice, and I was tickled that several of the folks manning show and craft booths noted "Oi! Must be rich people, getting to ride in a carriage and all!" It seemed to me that several more of the folks working--and there were fewer; the event was spare in both attendance and staffing, although it was still quite fun--were in on the joke than in past years. I hope that that part of it is a tendency that continues; I'll look for it next year, I hope, when there might be a bit more "normal" an event to attend.

No, I wasn't in a contest...though I'd've won...

Guest Post: Ruth Lewis, "Provoking Thoughts: Reflections on the Section ‘Legacies of Tolkien’s Whiteness’ in the Call for Papers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Conference in the July 2020 Beyond Bree"

The following essay was kindly submitted by contributor Ruth Lewis, a British zoologist, writer, and illustrator with a strong interest in Tolkien. It is presented below with only minimal editorial adjustment. 

A version of the call for papers to which the essay responds can be found here.

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'ℑs Tolkien racist’ is an ‘old chestnut’ which should have long since been consigned to Frequently Asked Questions lists, right alongside ‘Do Balrogs have wings?’ and ‘Is Tolkien anti-feminist?’. That it is still being asked in as serious a forum as the Kalamazoo meeting is probably due in part to the phenomenon that Tom Shippey remarked on in Author of the Century with the example of Germaine Greer, who ranted on about Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings with total certainty – only to admit afterwards that she hadn’t read the book.
It is well worth remembering that Victorian and Edwardian Britain were not one single block of opinion about ‘race’. Ignorance and knowledge, distaste and interest, distant theory and on-the-spot practicality were all present, all muddled together, all subjects of discussion. Theory was tested in the hardest of practical exams, the unforgiving real world. Practical superiority of British forces over non-European peoples was not guaranteed until very late on indeed, within living memory for much of Tolkien’s lifetime. For every runaway victory such as Omdurman, there was a cracking defeat such as Isandhlwana. It is also worth remembering that Empire was not a foregone conclusion, but a matter of hot debate. As Tolkien grew up, as he wrote, every possible shade of opinion about ‘empire’ and ‘race’ that we can imagine – and some that might surprise us – coexisted within British society and thought. Only by recovering that historical reality can we understand how J.R.R. Tolkien could think with or against the turbulent intellectual currents of his own time.
The other reason why we are still asking questions such as ‘Is Tolkien racist?’ is, in fact, a backhanded compliment. We are still reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, unlike the works of most of Tolkien’s contemporaries and even many of his juniors. So it is a little too easy to criticise as if Tolkien were a living writer who could be expected to come up with a ‘woke’ bestseller next, and not someone born in 1892, who died in 1973. Stop and think about that for a minute; how much have attitudes changed since the 1970s? We don’t say half as much about the woeful presentation of women and non-Western European characters in books by the likes of Ian Fleming or Dennis Wheatley. They are dead in both senses, physically and culturally (the James Bond movies long since departed from any serious relationship with Fleming’s writing). Tolkien in contrast is still a living influence in our culture, and therefore we do ask these questions.
The problem with asking ‘is Tolkien racist’ one more time is that it blocks consideration of more interesting questions – such as ‘how do readers actually respond to books from outside their own culture?’, or even ‘what kind of book is The Lord of the Rings?’.
Now, I know that last looks like another old chestnut – but if we want to ask why Tolkien does not have the sort of ‘active female characters’ we prize, or any obvious non-European ones, in The Lord of the Rings, we need to ask it. Yes, on the surface The Lord of the Rings is fantasy. Scratch the surface, though, and it is amazingly realistic in some ways… such as moon phases, times and distances covered, and, yes, the composition of the Fellowship. At no point in time prior to the First World War would such a group have included women unless the setting explicitly included unusual peoples such as the Sarmatians who did have Amazons. That, by the way, is exactly what we find in the Silmarillion-tradition, with the Second House of the Edain and their women warriors. The same goes for people from outside the immediate geographical point of origin of a group such as the Fellowship of the Ring. It could happen, but the circumstances would be unusual.
The irony is that the very history and medieval fiction that gets cited as something too parochial to be useful in creating exactly such unusual circumstances and wider views is often much more diverse than we think. Even in recent times, ‘alternative’ voices do exist but don’t often get heard – such as the Dundee house-husband who told one 1920s journalist that it was harder work looking after one baby than being a riveter in the shipyards. Go back further and things change in strange ways. In the 3rd century CE a Greek author named Heliodorus could write a novel (yes, they did exist back then) called Aithiopika which is filled to the brim with active women, non-European characters, and cultural diversity, where nothing goes quite as we expect. To give just one example, in the final act the day is saved by ‘naked philosophers’ teaching a non-violent Way who persuade the Ethiopian king to change his mind by force of argument, not force of arms. There are men in skirts and women with weapons in Anglo-Saxon graves, ‘traditionally queer’ people obviously accepted by their community as such to be buried that way. There are medieval romances that cheerfully take their characters across seas and cultures, that don’t just see everyone different as an evil ‘other’, that do include surprising figures. Modern accounts of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival don’t often mention his half-brother Feirefiz, son of a Grail knight and an eastern princess, his piebald appearance showing his mixed ancestry, who may start out bringing an army to claim his heritage but ends up as a Grail Knight and the husband of a former Grail Maiden. Even on Munsalvasche, it seems, there may be many ways up the mountain.
Our current perceptions of ‘the medieval’ are the problem, far more than the real material. To present this material as ‘racist’, or to use it as a basis for secondary writing in that mode, is, bluntly, a perversion of the facts. That it can happen is regrettably not a surprise, given the nationalist ideas at the heart of much of the 19th century rediscovery of medieval literature. Just as serious if not more so has been the repeated narrowing of our view of medieval writing that has happened across the 20th century.
Stories like Bevis of Hampton (a medieval bestseller which I believe exists in a Yiddish translation, a copy of which turned up in Cairo – a lesson take by this!), which were available in versions for primary-school use in Britain before the First World War, are barely accessible for postgraduate readers nowadays. Eastern and Southern Europe is largely excluded from our perceived ‘medieval’ world of writing at the moment, let alone anywhere further away.
Whole areas of story widely familiar throughout the medieval era and across continents – such as the persistence of the Trojan legends that linked authors as various as Guido Delle Colonne in Sicily, Snorri Sturluson in Iceland and the Gawain-poet in England – have disappeared from view. Mehmed Osmanli bynamed Fatih, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople, could use an ‘heirs of Troy’ strategy in propaganda and expect to be taken seriously, not laughed at – but we’re just puzzled. Snorri was using an ‘It’s Trojan, really’ strategy to rescue Norse myth and legend, but we don’t even see that far less ‘get’ it, either. We have lost sight of material that created important links across time and space, rather than being local and restricted. (And there is an even more crushing restriction in publication of medieval manuscripts; secular rather than sacred books barely get a nod. The Victorian ‘monks and missals’ idea persists to a ludicrous extent in the popular view of medieval books. That shapes people’s idea of where it is appropriate to use medievally-inspired styles, while books of history and legend languish unnoticed and rich possibilities for modern book art are ignored.)
In a very similar way, at the moment we really do not see the sheer spread of ‘medieval romance’. This was a web of story that in its day reached from Iceland to Baghdad and beyond, with readers eager for new stories translating and reworking tales across languages and cultures.
That takes me back to the question of reader response. There is a definite tendency to see Tolkien as a very English writer, whose local inspiration is perceived as shining through his writing. We have somehow lost sight of the possibility that it doesn’t always work like that. For some reason, useful critical ideas such as ‘the implied author’ or even ‘author writing in character’ have not made it into discussions of Tolkien’s work as far as I know. Preserved footage of the man himself, as well as some of his letters, makes it very clear that Tolkien is a ‘slippery’ author, a man whose distaste for Drama in theory is not matched by inability in fact or on paper – a man with a sense of humour about himself and the world. That makes ‘straight-faced’ interpretation awfully dangerous. In The Akallabeth, for one large example, Tolkien is channeling the Gildas of ‘On the Ruin of Britain’ quite successfully. The ‘implied author’ of that work is a decidedly unreliable chronicler whose position within the fiction needs to be thought about quite as much as the flesh-and-blood person holding the pen. ‘The mask of the actor’ can be ‘the mask of the author’ too, and where we can see it happening once, we really ought to be watching out for it elsewhere. Consideration of reader reaction, ideas about how we read and what we can do with (or to!) a text which we read, are another set of critical concepts which I for one have not seen brought into discussion of Tolkien. Teek-aye – sorry, let me translate; OK – I know I’m increasingly out of touch with, especially, American writing on Tolkien, and out of date on literary theory. The book at my side as I type this is Margaret Anne Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, Fontana/HarperCollins 1996. But just perhaps some of these ideas might still be useful to think with, before we start throwing babies out with the bathwater.
There is or was plenty of anecdotal evidence that people who read Tolkien can see his books quite differently to the ‘Englishness’ paradigm. On the specific question of ‘how do you think of hobbits’, for instance, the reader with an ‘innocent eye’ does seem to imagine them as people of their own country and culture. That doesn’t sound so odd from countries so closely connected we forget how different they are, such as France or the Netherlands. But encountering somebody from India who thought of hobbits as Indians, as my husband did, really shakes up the ‘Englishness’ idea. How far does an author impose ideas and how far can people adapt the text in front of them as they read? Any postmodernist critic would say yes of course that happens – but even they don’t quite seem to see how deep and strange the process can be. Fantasy of all genres should be open to wide and wild reader re-interpretations – just like medieval romance.
It is one of the deeper ironies of modern Tolkien fandom and scholarship that in a supposedly global world, we rarely hear other voices. Nor do we see creative work from outside a narrow band of ‘acceptable fantasy art’. The Dutch artist Cor Blok’s Tolkien calendars ran headlong into that problem, for one example – and that’s a European artist whose style just happened to be too unusual for many people to accept it. Diversity does not get encouraged. The work involved in doing it differently is not recognised. That could change. In fact, all of what I have written about could change.
Criticism of the ‘Is So-and-so a such-and-such?’ variety is only worthwhile in my view, if it takes into account the specifics of real lives and real books in real time, rather than the nebulous realm of ‘everybody knows’. Anything else is unfair to authors who can’t answer back. There is also often an implied ‘…so should we be reading this?’ hanging off the end of questions like that. We laugh at fuddy-duddy judges in 20th century censorship trials asking if the jury want their servants or their children reading this – and fail to see it when we get close to the same position.
If we want to understand the reality of life and of fiction in ‘the medieval era’, however we define that, we need to look back past the 20th and 19th centuries. We need to stop reading secondary sources and start reading original works, with as fresh an eye and as wide a scope as we can manage. The medieval web of story may be tattered and torn, but far, far more of it still exists than most people realise. In our own particular area, people have been much too ready to trust what Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman about there being nothing but ‘chapbook stuff’ left of English medieval literature. Tolkien was not on the witness stand in court under oath there, he was trying to sell two very difficult books to a sceptical publisher. Anybody of Waldman’s age at the time who had been educated in Britain would probably have realised they were being handed the proverbial ‘pig in a poke’; we certainly need to beware of the cat in the bag. If we want to see new, different approaches in both scholarship and creative work, we mustn’t take anybody’s word for it – not even Tolkien’s.
We have a moment just now where there is a wish for change, for difference, for a wider, more diverse and more interesting world. As in all moments of change, we need to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If we put in the work that is necessary, we could see genuine and beneficial change in both scholarship and creativity that draw on the medieval world. Doing things differently is not easy, but it can be very rewarding.

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The Tales after Tolkien Society welcomes contributions to the blog from members and from interested parties. Please send yours to talesaftertolkien@gmail.com, and thank you!