Medieval on your mind

After graduating high school, and floating around between New England and Texas in a series of low-level retail management positions, I had decided to get my 19 year old behind into a college somewhere. Any college, anywhere. I reasoned that having a college degree and spending the time to get it was far better than wearing a Sam Goody name tag for the rest of my working days.

Now that you’ve got something of an idea of what it’s like to inhabit a medieval mind, let’s move to some more fiction, this time however it is written as history, and was constructed in the 15th century. The ever popular Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. Written while Mallory was imprisoned, this sweeping saga incorporates many of what we’ve come to think of as the Arthurian Legends. Lancelot (from the French) is here, along with Merlin (the Welsh, Mryydion) and of course Arthur and Guinevere and all the rest of the gang. Malory has done what most medieval Arthurists do, which is to contemporize the players in his drama to his own age. The 5th century Arthur, who we can trace to a quasi-mythical figure in England or Wales who united the various warlords to repel the Saxon threat after the Roman legions took their flags and went home has become the plate wearing, jousting and chivalrous hero we’ve latched on to in our own century.

Now that you’ve been with Arthur and Baudolino, let’s hook up with Chaucer. When I first started a class on the Canturbury Tales, I was prepared to be a bit bored. We were reading it in it’s original Middle English (which isn’t as hard as it sounds with a good edition) and I was prepared to be bored. What I wasn’t prepared for was sex, violence, political commentary and the foundations of modern English fiction. Yikes! Geoffrey doesn’t pull any punches in his tales, and I’m sure there’s a long history of medieval lads and lasses tittering behind closed doors with a group of their peers, as a sort of predecessor to Porkys on cable and teenage boys staying up past their bedtime.

We’ve got the violence, sex and love triangles out of the way it’s time to get anachronistic with two more modern works of literature which are on my must-read-to-be-a-medievalist-list. The first is T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I first read this book when I was about 16 and it blew me away. It’s horribly anachronistic, having Merlin travel to Bermuda and many other such instances but at the same time it’s wonderfully endearing. This is the first time that I ever really felt for Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. I felt their pain in loving each other as friends and the forbidden love that could not be. The book ends with one of the most poignant moments in Medieval fiction I’ve yet to read. You may be interested to note that the book is divided into a series of shorter ‘books’, the first of which is the basis for Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.

The last bit of literature I’ll be rambling on about today is a series of four books by one of my favorite speculative fiction authors, Dan Simmons. The Hyperion series may at first strike you as having nothing whatever to do with the Medieval period, until you realize that it’s an amazingly written retelling of good ol’ Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Simmons is really something as a storyteller, taking the lives of people who exist in a fictional far future and making them as human and honest as the person next to you. What has this to do with the medieval mind? At heart it’s still a story of those of us who are lost seeking some sort of truth through a journey that is both physical and spiritual.

I hope you’ll find these books interesting. I know that I did, in fact they form a solid literary foundation for me when I try to get into the mind of a medieval person. It’s an interesting place to be.