[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Right onto our second speaker and this time for a longer presentation.
I'm very pleased to welcome Welcome Pond West from Regent's Park College here at Oxford.
Edward Bond teaches Old and Middle English literature. Uh, he's a researcher in Old Norse as well.
Um, and he's going to be taking up the wider subject of the importance of medieval literature to the fantastic.
Thank you both. Well, thank you for having me here.
I wanted to start the discussion with by by mentioning a letter of J.R.R. Tolkien's and what she was
and what she he advises that if one of your children is to ask you whether dragons are still real,
you don't answer. No, you answer instead. Oh, I don't think there are dragons in England anymore.
And I wanted to start with this because I like the sensitivity to hoping that you don't, um, ruin the possibility of the fantastic for your children,
but also specifically with the fact that it locates the fantastic in one of two places,
either a long time ago there are not dragons in England anymore, or somewhere else altogether.
Geographically, they aren't in England.
I'm going to start with the point about them being elsewhere geographic, because I'm not going to spend very long on it, and that's that.
There's a long history of locating the fantastic in places other than here.
Um, in the medieval period writings of John Mandeville and Marco Polo,
though he really did visit the East, he added many fantastical elements to his stories,
or the stories of Prester John or John, who was thought to have existed variously in India or somewhere in the Orient,
or perhaps out in Mongolia, or down even in Ethiopia.
I'll attest to ideas of there being fantastical places somewhere away from us that
are vastly more interesting and perhaps magical than what we encounter every day.
I want to touch on those to mention that medieval people did have some idea of locating the fantastic someplace other than where they were before,
kind of moving on mostly to the chronological distance between between us and the fantastic.
I like Tolkien's quote both as a jumping off point to mentioning this as a theme in medieval literature,
but also as a theme in modern writing because of the way it impacts the way we look at the fantastic.
Now, Gabriel mentioned that. There we go.
The one of the most popular traits and modern fantasy is to locate it in a kind of medieval past,
or a fantastical otherworld with a highly medieval aesthetic.
And I want to start with these three thinkers. Not if I'm going to dwell on very long, either.
Over on the left, you have Max Faber, who popularised ideas about the disenchantment of the modern world.
And the middle. You have Carl Jung, who really also popularised disenchantment in slightly different ways.
And over there is the Canadian Roman Catholic philosopher philosopher Charles Taylor,
who I've been getting lots of questions about in my time at Oxford and who previously I'd never heard of.
But apparently he's really popularised the idea of disenchantment. All of them sort of pin the loss of enchantment in the world on.
Well, certainly Faber and Taylor pin it on the Protestant Reformation,
the idea that suddenly you have a choice of deciding what is true and no things are no longer accepted.
Simply metaphysical properties of things are no longer given, they're no longer accepted without question.
And this is thought to have begun the process that led to things like, um,
enlightenment thought and modern science and other aspects of modern thought that separate
us from the medieval and since standard historical periodisation into the medieval period,
broadly around the time of the Reformation. This rings true with the way that we characterise the fantastic by medieval a little bit.
So I thought they're a nice place to start. Um, young in the middle talks really more on how disenchantment applies to us not seeing
the significance in the sort of the metaphysical significance behind things.
Because all of them popularise the talk of disenchantment,
and because it all seems to send us back to the Middle Ages for what we look for and what makes good fantasy.
I thought they would also be good thinkers to bring into this discussion, particularly in how they impact our looking at medieval.
The medieval aesthetic and medieval talk, and further thinkers have followed in their their thoughts.
Several more I hear about frequently at Oxford men like Eamonn Duffy and Brad Gregory,
who also talk of disenchantment beginning with the Reformation, an idea that I'm sure Tolkien had some sympathy for as a Roman Catholic himself.
Um, but I also wanted to move from them to the medieval period with this quote from Chaucer.
And I think this ties in nicely with Gabriel's presentation and the old days of King Arthur, of which the Britons speaking with great honour.
All was this land fulfilled of fairy, the elf queen with her jolly campaign or sorry company.
I was trying to do the modern English pronunciation, and because I'm nervous, I.
I bungled all of them. Uh, this was, um, danced full often and many a green mead.
This was the old opinion, as I read, I speak of many hundred years ago.
But now can no man see none elves no more. For now.
The great charity and prayers of limb to limb tours and other holy friars.
So medieval folk and to some extent associated disenchantment with the coming of Christianity.
Um, so some common themes that tie their view of an enchanted past together with ours, even as we look to their presence as our past.
Other separations from the enchanted past have occurred throughout history.
Herodotus looks back at the building of the pyramids in Egypt is something that must have been absolutely fantastical.
He's writing in the fifth century BC. Homer looks back at a time when gods and men took part in the same sociopolitical conflicts.
And he's writing probably if if there is a Homer at all in the eighth century BC.
Um, the book of Genesis and the Bible looks back at a time before Noah's flood when there were Nephilim, whatever that means.
Possibly giants walking the earth. So it's not exactly new to the modern period.
There might be something very distinct about the enchantment we think we've lost. That does throw us back to the Middle Ages,
but you can look at fantastic literature from really throughout the sweep of history
to look at people thinking that something's been lost from previous time period.
Um, sometimes that which has been lost is something that is worth mourning,
and sometimes it's something that we're very grateful to have gotten rid of.
Um, medieval literature will feature a little bit of both.
So I want to start with one. That's not a stance that's not clearly good or bad, at least at first glance.
And that's an Anglo-Saxon poem called The Ruin. You'll probably be familiar with the arrival of the English into these islands,
right around the time that the Roman legions were withdrawing, sometime after 412.
The exact details are not entirely known to us, but the English did encounter the ruins of Roman buildings,
and this one seems to have provoked a special and a special degree of existential dread.
And the poet, um, who looks upon the, uh, the ruins as a rat leeches.
There is this whale stone where the bracken burps, that a birthstone burrows into your work,
looking back at what he believes to be the ancient work of giants.
Because who else could have composed, sorry, constructed something so extraordinary as the Roman ruins?
That's some kind of art form that's been lost to the Anglo-Saxons.
So we think probably mostly built in would.
The Giants as a theme may very likely connect back to that same mention of the Nephilim in the Book of Genesis.
It's not 100% clear from this poem, but another bit of Old English writing you'll be more familiar with.
Where it is much clearer is Beowulf, where Grendel is descended from Cain,
and Cain and his progeny are thought to have been wiped off of the face of the world in the same flood that destroyed the Nephilim.
And so there's sort of an implication when giants are mentioned as among the offspring of Cain,
that that fleeting reference to the sons of God marrying the daughters of men,
and there were giants on the world in the time in Genesis,
could be a reference to all the descendants of Cain, among whom are also mentioned Orkney, us and of us.
Um. So other fantastical creatures.
And of course, Grendel is a shock to the community and [INAUDIBLE], right?
He is emphatically not supposed to exist anymore.
So there are elements of the fantastic coming back into the medieval imagination as an element of the past that's not supposed to exist,
not as a piece of the past up there they're longing for in wishing they still had.
Which I think is an interesting counterpoint to some of our talk of fantasy work, provokes a longing for some kind of a lost past in us.
Both approaches to the past are evident in Beowulf, though, um, we might talk, I think,
at great length about the role of a lost past talked about throughout the poem, certainly its relationship with the theme of death.
Um, the poem begins with shield shavings funeral, which is a spectacle, and throughout the poem we're encountered, we encounter, um,
great descriptions of extraordinary wealth, lots of gold, uh,
seems to have characterised the medieval English understanding of their their pre-Christian past.
Gold and rings, and Lord is giving rings, Hale wrote, is a spectacular hall, also covered in gold and covered in and with an extraordinary tile floor,
evocative more of the Roman ruins than of the what we think Anglo-Saxon wood buildings looked like.
Um, but we also know from the narrator that Hale wrote, is doomed to be destroyed by fire.
So there's a lingering notion that much of the wealth and much of the extravagance of this lost world will all be lost.
And that's going to happen sometime between the poem and the time that the reader is listening to it.
And nowhere is this more evident than in the quote that I've put here, which is toward the end of the poem,
which describes Bale's death and the fear that the guests have, knowing that their Lord has gone,
that they might soon be gone, to the idea that the extraordinary strength and and, um, and in battle,
the physical battle that's being lost with people like Bale from the past is something that does leave.
Leave, um, their people open to utter destruction.
So there is something to be longed for and mourned at some aspects of the past and some other aspects of the fantastical past that are,
um, entirely terrifying. And I like the fact that we we get both themes, and we certainly do in modern fantasy, too.
Um, I wanted to continue on by talking of the theme of where we'll go next.
Where exactly the Phantom's the fantastic is hiding.
If it has gone at least from England now, or in this case, Ireland.
I'll make a reference to two Irish medieval Irish texts here.
I want to issue a quick apology. First.
I'm aware after the time that I've lived in England that there is either a sizeable or otherwise very passionate
demographic of English people who either have Irish ancestry or otherwise really passionate about Ireland.
And I'm aware that nothing infuriates you more than an American saying anything about Ireland.
And I would like to, if you're sharpening your pitchforks, if I could just ask for your grace going forward.
I also, um, I'm going to be trying to pronounce the names in these texts according to the
reconstructed pronunciations from Middle Irish and not according to modern Irish.
So if they sound bad, it is partly because I'm not doing a very good job, but also because I'm not following modern Irish pronunciation systems.
So another reason to maybe ask for your grace. Well, actually, first, yes, this one in modern Irish should be called the lyric of all.
But in Middle Irish it's called the LaVar Cavallo with the emphasis on the first syllables.
I want to start with this one. It translates roughly to the book of the Seasonings of Ireland or the takings invasions.
And it's a pseudo history, and we'll talk more about pseudo histories in a moment. It's a pseudo history of Ireland written.
It's heavily influenced by learned and Christian Latin writings in the medieval period,
and it posits a history of Ireland that sort of weaves what remains of their folklore,
pre-Christian and otherwise, into the long history of Ireland, that grafts into the learned Christian histories of the world,
roughly aligning with the six ages of the world and positing different phases of invasion in Ireland's history,
first with the descendants of a man named Cheshire and then a man named Portland,
and then a man named Nevis before the arrival of a peoples called the Fair Bollig,
and then finally the poor and modern Irish or Tuatha and Middle Irish.
The fourth, a da, which means the God peoples, later revised into the north Jamie Dornan,
the children of the goddess Danu these are the people who are thought to represent the pre-Christian deities of Ireland,
and they're the ones driven into a sort of underground otherworld by the arrival of the descendants of a man named Miel Espana,
which just translates to the Spanish soldier, the mythical founder of the good Delic,
or Gaelic peoples, a word we'll have to come back to in a minute.
Um, and I mentioned this book because that basic theme of the tour de and being driven underground
into a kind of otherworld that exists alongside our own or alongside that of Irish Gael,
them as being a place of locating the fantastic from the past.
Yes, but in a currently kind of a new holding pen and otherworld that is kind of neither here nor there,
but kind of there and kind of locational and different features of the landscape,
especially Neolithic tumulus, like the heavily revised Newgrange picture there on the lower left,
um, one of many sites where mortals from from our world are thought to be able to contact.
The tool, also called the sheath sheath mounds are the the hidden people.
This is a word often translated as fairies, and I bring this up because it's another element of the fantastic past,
but because it exists now alongside our own,
it gives us another access to the fantastical that's not simply far away in a geographic sense, but it's far away in a surprisingly near sense.
And. That's about all I'm going to say about this text for now.
But moving forward from that, we will return to that theme shortly.
I also want to talk of past efforts to reclaim elements of an enchanted power, of an enchanted past,
the idea that something from that past is worth reclaiming and worth, um, making part of our culture again for the sake of enchantment.
So I arrive another Middle Irish text us from the 12th century called the Ogle of Missionaries.
And this text is a it's I'm really only going to talk about it's frame story.
The frame story is a story of culture.
McClarnon and Oshima Finn, who are the last surviving members of, uh, Finn McConnell's uh, war band called The Sea.
The story begins with them going about Ireland and visiting all the other last survivors of the Finn,
all mourning the end of the age in which Finn McCall and his band, uh, wandered about having great adventures.
And now that age is coming to a close and everything is get growing dimmer and darker,
the world is less fantastic, and everybody is finally dying off.
Uh, Finn and Ashing have been kept alive, sort of miraculously, for far more centuries than what's normally natural.
But then the sun rises and everything becomes bright again, because over the hill comes Saint Patrick, pictured lower left.
Um Saint Patrick meets Finn Michael and Austin Mac Finn.
It turns out that the reason they've been kept alive all these centuries is so they
can tell him all the stories of the fantastic past and of Finn and his war band,
and that they can give him to Saint Patrick and guide him about Ireland as
they teach him about the landscape and how the law ties in with the landscape,
so that he can then carry that lower forward. He is now representative of the new Christian era in Ireland,
and now Irish Christians can repurpose that lore and keep telling the stories and the fantastic and stay with us through the storytelling.
Over there on the right is a picture of Austin or Austin and modern Irish and Ocean and Scott's garlic.
And that illustration is actually from, uh, James McPherson's reimagining of the Austin stories and the 19th century.
So we can't get away from, uh, different later revisions of the story just yet.
But, um. A reminder that just as there are no two texts that are quite alike in the transmission history of the glove,
so to the stories get reinvented time and time again, as Gabriel was telling us earlier.
Um. So that moves us into things that I hope will tie a little bit more to Oxford.
So I don't know how many of you are from here.
And tying to the landscape here seems like an important thing to take from the angle of and apply to our.
So our, our lecture here, uh,
I mentioned pseudo history as a moment ago and really the paragon of all pseudo histories in the medieval period would be,
uh, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who may or may not have been Welsh, who may or may not have known Welsh,
but he certainly claims to have been reviving a bit of Welsh history by turning putting it down into his own pseudo history,
which he claims to have derived from a book,
an ancient book of the Britons and the British tongue given to him by Um Walter of Oxford, the Archdeacon here.
Geoffrey may have even written this, and and what's in the now defunct Saint George's College, which was probably somewhere around Oxford Castle.
Somewhere around the the old tower there. This is not certain, but it was at least popularly believed here.
And, um. Geoffrey takes a wide range of folklore sources and classical sources, and possibly some things just of his own invention,
and weaves a fantastical history for Britain, from the arrival of a mythical founder figure named Brutus.
I'll come back to just a minute and just a moment to the final demise of the Britannica speaking peoples,
um, hegemony over the islands under Arthur at the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.
What's really interesting about this to me is that in the talk of re enchantment and finding something from the past that gives us access to,
to sort of enchanting the present, I'm intrigued by one of Jeffrey's main inspirations, which is Virgil's Aeneid.
Picture there in the lower left.
Um, Virgil takes all of Homer's work and decides to situate Rome's enchanted past in the same mythical world as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
But in doing that,
he tries to sort of repurpose it going forward into something that promises that Rome is going to rise to the same heights that Troy once held.
So there is a sense in which he's looking back at the fantastic of the past and looking forward at the promised fantastic of the future,
in which I think is an intriguing way to try to, um.
Go about the project of using the past as re enchantment and the fact that Jeffrey draws from this.
I think it's also very interesting because whether or not he was Welsh,
certainly promising a return to some kind of a lost Britannic past seems to be part of the hope expressed in his work.
Uh, and two things to say about that.
The first is that Brutus, the mythical founding figure of Britain, is much like Innes, the protagonist of the Iliad,
uh, a refugee descended from the Trojans who's escaped and is bringing civilisation to a new place.
And also much talked about in the scholarship is what is the probability that
Geoffrey wrote this in a way to legitimise the Norman aristocracy in Britain,
who had sort of vague connections to the Britons through their close proximity to Britain?
They brought over a lot of Breton lights with them.
To the Breton spoke a botanic language not entirely unlike Welsh, but not entirely like Welsh either.
And so this ties them into the same sort of lost Trojan and ostensibly Christian past that,
um, would give them a legitimacy, possibly over the Anglo-Saxon conquered.
So you can tie re enchantment now, to some extent to political ventures.
I'm not entirely clear how much this should be attributed to Jeffrey and his own intentions,
but the fair bit of ink has been spilt over the way it's been used since Jeffrey in the early centuries especially.
Sorry. It's often been treated as real history.
That said, there's also been a very real degree to which it's been also sort of treated as pseudo historical in the very early period,
it certainly popularised or did not originate the practice of claiming Trojan ancestry for your country.
And, um, as other other groups that go on to do and inspired a number, a number of other pseudo histories.
And what's interesting to me about the pseudo history of created especially for this is that, um,
it posits a kind of ancient platonic past that's either Christian or looks forward to Christianity and some kind of, um, mystical way.
And into that past, you can kind of throw, uh, a variety of stories that just needed to be deposited somewhere.
And that have allegorical resonances with Christianity in a way that evokes the fantastic and the medieval mind.
And so I use it to introduce the next. I particularly enjoy this one, but I'm going to switch the two slides around.
Sorry. So, Sir Orfeo is a fun one.
This is a medieval romance and it's in Middle English, but it advertises itself as a Breton ley.
So the sort of turn to Geoffrey right quick, because Geoffrey did in fact popularise this, this sort of lost botanic history.
This helped trigger an interest in the Arthurian legend that existed before, but really, really got going, especially after him.
It was especially popular in the court of Henry the Second, for reasons I will come back to.
Henry the Second's wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine,
also found it very popular in her court in France and looked for Breton storytellers come to tell her stories,
stories about this sort of lost Britannic past. Breton ladies become very popular in French, especially the influence of Marie de France.
And then lots of English writers started calling all sorts of things Breton was.
So, Orfeo, you will probably already guessed, but you'll guess even more now.
It's a story of a king somewhere in the fantastic Britannic past,
whose wife is stolen away by the King of Fairy Land, and he has to go and get her back.
If that's not ringing a bell, that's the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from classical mythology,
which has undergone a process of being reimagined as an actual king rather than a god.
And that way you can sanitise it for Christian taste. And it's not deities we're dealing with.
It's some kind of, um, real life hero who had to have some kind of interaction with the Fairy Otherworld.
So once again, we're locating a sort of fairy otherworld in a place that is both near and far away.
But also, we're putting this in the ancient past, where things were already more mystical.
So you have different layers of how the fantastic is being built up.
I wanted to start with this because since we have changed Hades into the fairy Otherworld,
this description of all the near dead people in the Fairy Otherworld and Orpheus goes down to find his wife.
Um, whether they have their without heads or the The Falcon Luck manuscript mentions women who died in childbirth,
to which I should have picked from that manuscript. So you could see more, because that's another fascinating dimension.
But all people who have been killed but aren't quite dead yet. So the fairy world can exist in some sort of halfway place between living and the dead,
which I find, I find very interesting for the sake of reimagining death for these purposes.
And it allows us to play with the allegorical dimensions of life and death in a way that,
uh, that evokes the fantastic, but that doesn't necessarily demand any finality.
And sure enough, whereas in the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice see, Orpheus looks back and can't get his wife out of the dead.
And so Orpheus, he succeeds, and everybody lives happily ever after.
So it is an entirely different world, uh, a different story, but set in, in this world of sort of hypothetical pre,
pre Anglo-Saxon Britain where everything was still more mystical as a much less heavy theme from the text.
I wanted to bring up this one too, and this is a popular.
Component of fantasy. Even now, I think this describes just how lavish the fairy otherworld is.
There are columns of burnished gold, and everything is made of precious stones, and there's light everywhere, whether it's day or night.
The idea that the fairy otherworld is. Is filled with, with finery has one that will appear.
Time and again. And fantasy. I think one of the more interesting modern places, it appears,
is that J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord of the rings and C.S. Lewis in the Narnia books seem to really love descriptions of food,
and I think this is maybe, maybe a survivor of the same kind of theme.
It's finery in a in a different sense, but but a really enjoyable one.
And this harkens back to, I think, to the descriptions of finery and, and the imagined pre-Christian past of the Anglo-Saxons and Beowulf.
So I want to be sure to leave that there. We can come back to that in a moment.
How am I for time? Okay. So, uh.
I'll do this one quickly, just to be sure. Second, wait in the Green Knight is other fun one,
and it is also set in a much more obviously Arthurian part of the Arthurian past, in which it really is Arthur's court.
And it's Arthur's nephew who goes out on on an adventure.
Importantly, I do like the way that it starts. Arthur won't eat until he's heard stories of adventure from his courtiers, which I have.
I've read articles and I've met scholars here who insisted.
That means that Arthur's kingdom is already fading away, and he's looking back to his younger glory days at the beginning of the story.
And he's longing for them. The fact that his nephew Gawain is able to sort of bring them a story is, um, of course, the conceit of the whole romance,
but the fact that it does start that way seems interesting, too, if subfloor and anything else I've mentioned before.
But I also like the fact that the that the other world,
the fantastic verse and to his hall sort of unexpected and in a way that that that trips everybody up a little bit,
uh, asking for somebody to cut off of is cut off his head.
And, um, there's an element of the strange emerging into what's otherwise, uh, the everyday setting of the course, which is also described lavishly.
So I guess we do still have the fantastic past as the setting.
Um, and that notion, again, that the fantastic and sort of come into your everyday space in this case is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is to test going and to just sort of call him to a, to a higher sense of chivalry and knighthood.
And it does wind up testing and it does find him wanting.
But I like the fact that we now have the fantastic intruding on the everyday, or at least a highly fantastic reimagining of the everyday,
just to play with the continued themes of which way back and forth we have the
fantastic intruding from other places or or ordinary people having to go to it.
So we'll I'll skip past that really quickly and return, I think, to something else potentially Oxford related, if only somewhat.
The use of the fantastic past for socio political aims.
Something I know would be of concern now and in or in any time period.
But I wanted to talk about some of the ways that it can happen in the medieval period, too.
I mentioned the Oxford connection first and foremost,
because one of the key ways the Arthurian legend becomes popular is because of the tendency to of English kings,
especially Norman kings, to get crosswise with the papacy in the medieval period.
Over there on the right, that's a picture of the murder of sort of Saint Thomas Becket.
It seems like a good place to start because he was. His death was ordered by King Henry the Second, who ruled from here in Oxford.
If you want to go see a historical marker, the marks for his palace used to be.
It's over there by the Ashmolean. And he probably kept his mistress Rosamond, in, um, Godstone Abbey, just up the river from here.
So many connections to Oxford.
But one of the uses of the Arthurian legend, or one of the the things that makes it so handy to have this sort of fantastical past,
is the way in which it can be sort of leveraged to give the English kings a bit of legitimacy in their strife against the papacy.
Worth noting that the Henry's son,
John also had some issues of the papacy in his dispute over the ordination of Archbishop Stephen Langton and his following excommunication.
But one of the the in the broader nexus of stories that all get funnelled into
Arthurian and into this sort of mythical past of a pre Anglo-Saxon England.
One of the key stories is the arrival of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who lent Jesus his tomb, uh, on this island,
ostensibly either bringing Jesus as a child or later bringing Jesus blood in the form of the Holy Grail.
And this is integral to many different versions of the Arthurian legend.
But the idea that there is some ancient semblance of the Christian church here that
predates the arrival of of Rome's influence through the Augustinian mission at Canterbury,
um, and especially tied to Glastonbury. Pictured there on the left,
gives at least the literary imagination of the time a way of framing England's past as something that
shares in the same deep connections to Christian history that Rome can claim for its own legitimacy,
and the fact that this ancient British past also claims Rome's secular legitimacy from Troy is just a great double whammy.
Um, this happens in the myths, in the midst of controversy surrounding investiture, which again gets back to Archbishop Stephen Langton,
but also conciliar ism with the question of how much role does Rome have in determining the course of the Church of England?
What is so important about this to the reception of the wider Arthurian legend?
The medieval period is that because Arthur gained some legitimacy both through his kingship and his descent from Troy,
and also from some kind of connection to Joseph of Arimathea, um,
he can become sort of a figure who represents both divine and political justice all the same time.
It's important to note, too, that many of his meagre and milder attributes in some versions of the legend, uh,
always sort of characterised by the fact that the Virgin Mary is painted on a shield,
seemed to contribute to this overall notion of him being a sort of a, uh, somewhat holy kind of king.
Obviously, there are many flaws to that oversimplification, and we'll come back to in a minute to.
But it helps to position any claims, any claims of connecting the Norman monarchy to this kind of figure,
or at least pasting this kind of fantastical pass on to England in a way that that
is especially useful for conceiving of England as a holy place that may have some,
some kind of distinction from the church, which is sort of above or otherwise free from Norman justice.
You can flee to a church and gain sanctuary if you're trying to run from Norman Justice, for example.
So finding a way to unite the two in your imagination is handy.
We will come back to that in a minute. I won't dwell a whole lot on Thomas Malory,
but particularly I'm interested now also in reclaiming this kind of mystical past of a grand and semi holy England.
I've given a quote not from Malory, but from Caxton here,
because that shows you how Malory has been received by later generations, more so than simply what he wrote himself.
This is a bit of hand-wringing over the fact that, um,
Caxton wants people to read the Arthurian legend so they can learn how to behave well from the good behaviour in the Arthurian legend.
It's more nuanced than just that. He dismisses the bad behaviour in it, too.
But the fact that there was a time period when chivalry was a real thing is of some importance.
Legend would have that, um, Thomas Malory wrote much or possibly all of the morte d'Arthur from prison.
Whether that's true or not, I hear is a really controversial question, because the identity of who Thomas Malory is is hotly contested.
Or was there multiple Thomas Malory from the time period?
And some people believe it's a pseudonym, and some people believe that it's a misattribution.
But, um, the what certainly seems to be the case is that whoever he was,
he lived sometime toward the end of the Wars of the roses, when England was at war with itself.
And so it's at least very realistic to imagine that looking back at a lost time period of finery and chivalry and good behaviour
was something he associated with watching England rip itself apart and longing for a past that may or may or may not have existed.
But that certainly was better than the presence, which is, I think, the thing we all have and we, uh, romanticise the past.
And whether or not that's really Mallory's intention, it certainly seems to be Paxton's intention.
And for many centuries, Caxton edition of Malory was. Our primary source for the text before the rediscovery of the Winchester manuscript.
Um. That's really the main point I want to look at with Malory for now is that longing for a
past that was nobler is also seems to be closely tied with our ideas of the fantastic.
The scholars have noted that Malory and his use of the sources for other bits.
The Arthurian legend has actually removed a lot of fantastical elements.
Whether this is really to play up the fact that the the morals of the past were more fantastic or not,
as is debated, but as at least a lingering possibility.
So in talking of retrieving the past. I thought I mentioned another Oxford connection.
The man in the lower left is William Morris, and Morris Automotive was based over there on, I think, Holywell Roads, the name of it.
And I mention this because in 19th century,
as as much of European society was rapidly moving towards the cities and also rapidly, um, industrialising.
There was a widespread view that some aspect of the past was being lost all over again.
The recurring theme now,
and this also coincides with the hope of finding sort of a rekindled interest in the past by looking at England's shared medieval identity.
So William Morris is a great example of of trying to bring forward this kind of re enchantment in his art.
This is looks sort of like a medieval tapestry, but it's not. It's one of Morris's designs.
But he also produced, uh,
textiles that evoked medieval art and is a founding member of both what we call the Pre-Raphaelite movement and also the Arts and Crafts movement,
with varying forms of Arts and Crafts movement,
specifically with varying forms of of textiles and of wallpapers that all have prints inspired by medieval tapestries and medieval art.
Trying to bring something to the industrialised world that evokes the the and chairman of the past.
Again, the medieval period is the one that's chosen for this, which plays really well, I think,
with Gabriel's talk of the centrality of the medieval identity to our modern ideas of fantasy.
I want to take a quick sidestep and talk about medieval cosmology, which I think is a bigger topic than we can say a whole lot about.
But the idea, this old geocentric notion of the universe in which all of the different layers of,
of the universe that are marked out by the different seven heavens sort of interlock like a Russian matryoshka,
one of those nesting dolls, and they all sort of spin and grind against each other in the way that the moving stars or the
planets rise and fall and the heavens impacts the way different elements interact with each other.
And different personalities change here on Earth. The way that plays together with where medieval thinkers located angels and located different
spirits and different forces and located different levels of heaven you could rise to,
gave the world kind of a sense of no ability. And I think a lot of times when we talk about re-engineer,
what we're longing for is a sense of mystery and the lack of nobility that we
think is lost in the face of modern science thinking can understand anything.
I think the reality is you can play either one in kind of either direction, but the no ability back then seems to me,
seems to be more closely aligned with kind of a mystical or a metaphysical.
No ability, I suppose a modern scientific, if you would be more of a middle of mechanistic.
No. And so I think especially now, as you get people who are interested in the fantasy,
who then fall back to reading medieval literature and find it very interesting to read
things like Dante or you move through different seven the different layers of heaven,
especially in Paradiso, and learn about their significance and their relationship to life here on earth.
That does provide a kind of enchantment, not unlike, um, the other fantastical elements we've been looking at.
So I wanted to make a brief aside to it.
I want to mention this quote by C.S. Lewis, because I know we associate him with a lot of modern fantasy, too.
And, um,
it's that I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old model has term for the way everything fits together in medieval thought.
The old model delights me, as I believe it delighted our ancestors.
Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety and coherence in the same degree.
It's possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it has a serious defect.
It was not true. Um.
Which I think is a something worth kind of bring it to mind too, as we think of the relocation of the fantastic increasingly into other worlds,
not necessarily other worlds that are accessible like those of medieval Ireland,
accessible through the sheathed mounds but now entirely relocated to other books.
Things like Tolkien's Lord of the rings, Lewis's Narnia, what have you.
Um, and I wanted to bring that to mind just because it's, it seems related to our concepts of enchantment,
and it's certainly related to the way we now look at the Middle Ages is one of enchantment,
even if probably they didn't view it as quite the same thing as the fantastic.
So we don't talk to about re enchantment through the study of folklore.
This is one that I find very interesting.
I won't take too much of your time on it, but overall over on the right we have Yakub and Vilhelm Grimm, who you know from compiling fairy tales,
but the they're compiling fairy tales again at a time when society was industrialising and everybody's moving to the cities,
and folklore was something that everybody was afraid is going to be lost.
This initiates sort of an interest in compiling folklore everywhere you get, people like Osborne said.
And Mo, whose, um, Norwegian folk tales are pictured there on the left, who go about Norway gathering up folk tales.
There you get Croft and Croker and and to some degree Yates over in Ireland, who do the same thing with Irish mythology,
going about different regions of Europe and gathering up those folk tales in the hope that you can rekindle some kind of lost identity of the past.
Something now mystical, that's been lost with the rise of industrialisation,
seems to me not unrelated to the way we receive the concepts of the medieval fantastic and the way we imagine everything from that,
from those folk stories to be set in the Middle Ages. So I wanted to briefly touch on the fact that the distinct form of this and Ireland.
Again, my continued apologies, but there we have, um, from the Celtic Revival depictions.
The tour had two of her J on the right and of the Druids with the mistletoe on the left.
The fact that you could sort of reincarnate scholarly ideas of what the Druids might have been like and really play them up for romantic purposes,
something that was not has not been as well received when it was done amongst the Germanic speaking peoples,
because that led to things like Faulkners operas and far nastier things later.
But the degree to which trying to sort of reincorporate some of the same charm and into daily life, that also seems noteworthy to me,
and the way it plays together with trying to sort of recover lost ideas about what a nation's identity might be,
will come up again in just a moment, especially as we tie everything back up of the Arthurian legend in a moment.
But first, I'm also interested and reincarnated. That's here at Oxford again and religious settings.
I mentioned finery is an important facet of enchantment and medieval writing.
Well, I can think of no more entertaining example because you can go walk through it, uh,
that the Oxford Movement was an effort to try to re enchant Anglicanism by by trying to add elements of medieval belief back into it,
especially sometimes that were illegal. We don't want to talk too much about it because I'm not a theologian.
I'm not here to learn about theology, but the way it aligns with aesthetic movements to try to bring back Gothic
architecture from the medieval period and bring back a little of not bring back,
but use lots of the Arts and Crafts movement, um, wallpapers and curtain hangings and things like that.
Keble College here was built during that. Look at all the gold everywhere. Beowulf would die.
Um, it's, uh, efforts to make things in Oxford look medieval, when in fact they weren't are really the main thing I wanted to look at,
but also the way that does play together with trying to tie back to the medieval past and the context of religion.
And I particularly am interested in the way some of these thinkers, especially Daubney and, um,
let's sorry, let me make sure I have the other guy's name right here on the lower, lower corner.
Oh, I don't have it off the top of my head, but they actually sort of repurpose a lot of the old arguments about Glastonbury and Canterbury
and their arguments that the Anglican Church is a special third branch of apostolic succession.
And they did actually claim that the Anglican Church was founded by Joseph of Arimathea.
So you do see the return of a lot of medieval ideas of enchantment in the 19th century in ways that still inform our ideas about fantasy now,
and the fact that you can go see them at Oxford.
There are great many medieval looking buildings here that are in fact Victorian to date at that time period.
So I also wanted to end just very briefly with TV, but I won't take we don't have very much time, so I'll just briefly run through it.
I mentioned the love of finery and fantasy, and I mentioned the way that with Tolkien and Lewis it seems to appear and the love of food.
And one of my favourite things about white is his love of describing clutter and the way you find fantasy there.
And since it does bring us back to the Arthurian legend, I thought it would be a fun place to end.
And this is a I'm not going to read the whole thing because it was many pages long.
But when Arthur first meets Merlin and goes into his house, there's a fantastic.
And I mean that in both senses of the word description of all the clutter in there.
And so among the things and the list of Vernons clutter is extensive numbers of taxidermied animals,
including a caulking drill, which is an old word for a crocodile, and then a long list of birds.
And my favourite little mention is a reputed phoenix.
But then the narrator says, of course it couldn't have been a phoenix, because everybody knows there can only be one at a time.
And then long descriptions of leather bound books, some of them chained, and also the smell of must and solid brownness,
which was most with which was most secure, which I thought was a nice description of the the feeling of going into an old library,
and then things like y of animals crawling around, fly fishing lures and astrolabe to make reference back to the medieval model of the heavens,
but also a Bunsen burner to make reference forward to the modern concept of science.
And Encyclopaedia Britannica, just to round out our anachronisms, paint boxes and a finally a talking owl.
What I like about this is the way you can sort of access the feeling of the fantastic by exploring all these basically educational,
but still mundane items, always with a little hint. There's something fantastic hiding around the corner or a pew to Phoenix.
Oh, but it's not real. Oh an owl. Oh it is, it is real. It does talk, you know.
And I like that way of accessing the fantastic through fantasy.
How are we for time? Should I just end it? Two minutes.
Yeah, I think I think I'll cut it there because I think I think the last few things were already better said by Gabriel.
So I think that's a better, a better note to end on.
Anyway. Um, so thanks very much for your time. Thank you very much.
Bond and and Gabriel as well. That's exactly what we were looking for in terms of setting the scene.
The importance of medieval literature to fantasy and the appropriations.
So I think we've got time for questions. Um, first of all, shall we look to the room?
Does anyone have a question or comment? I wondered if I could ask.
You talked a lot about the I think you talked some kind of the medieval ideas of, um,
looking back to the past as being quite linked to nationalism and that idea of national identity.
Um, do you think that can sometimes be quite harmful and especially in like a modern culture where with kind of thinking about,
um, Britain's impact on the rest of the world and how that sometimes justified through medievalism.
Yeah, I. I deliberately skirted around some of that for fear that it would be insensitive to say some of it directly,
but is it which actually might have the opposite effect.
So I probably should have thought about the importance of saying some of it.
So I guess I'm glad you asked, because I mentioned with, uh, the, um,
the collection of folklore and the way in Germany that led to things like the rise of honours operas, and you've had some fairly nasty opinions.
But I guess to be more, more blunt, um, Faulkner's operas became a real, a real core piece of Nazi, um, iconography.
Is that a bad word? Um, and there's been a real pushback against that kind of study of the Germanic languages and the Germanic past.
That has been, I think, much more thorough.
There's not been quite the same political need for one with the medieval Irish stuff, because Ireland hasn't been out conquering anybody.
And um, but yeah, so the short answer is that, yeah, it can be.
And I mean, you could argue and the ins and outs of the political scene between Henry the Second and the Pope are a distant from us now.
But, I mean, it was being used for things that I'm sure some found harmful the time to perhaps for different reasons.
But, um, yeah, it could all be weaponized if used in cautiously, but I would hope that everybody in here plans to use it cautiously.
So, uh, we have one question. Uh, you connected the story of Sir Thomas Becket to the use of a fantastical past to achieve political aims.
Could you talk a little more about how saints and pilgrim stories connect to the medieval base for contemporary fantasy?
Yeah, I wrote a thesis on it, so I should have. I should have a better answer, but I was just stumped by the number of things that came to my head.
Because you have you have sort of a competition between them, don't you? And that in Rome really sort of at this time period,
around the time of Henry the Second and John Rome would have more of an influence on, on the fantastical component of the saints.
And then I don't want to posit a clear and like sharp distinction against the Arthurian stuff, because I think that's not exactly true.
This is versions play a really big hand and, um, and popularising the Arthurian legend.
And it's especially in its spread up in Scandinavia, um.
Around Bergen. So there's a lot of there's a lot of cross pollination between the two.
So I start with Beckett. Is that the right thing to do? Because with Beckett, a quick on the really popular science life.
Um, but positing an entire separate history in which there is sort of a fantastic and highly Christianised or Christianised history that
looks sort of like science lives does create a bit of extra tension just in legitimising or or sort of magically legitimising.
I don't know that anybody really believe that so much as it was just a popular theme in the literature.
Uh, the British crown, that was the main point I was trying to get at.
But the fact that you do have a lot of really virginal type characters in the Arthurian legend,
it seems to be an influence from, if not specifically, the Cistercians, certainly the role of saints like Galahad, Percival.
And even though Arthur has an affair with a sister and is married and such, his depictions, especially in Malory, can be often very meek and mild.
You get back to the fact that Geoffrey always hasn't, with Mary painted on a shield,
trying to capture something saintly about him does seem to be one of the aims of the story,
in that you can find a lot of room for just fun and character complexity and complexity for talking about sin.
And the way that does play off hagiographic themes is important because he's of course not really fulfilling any of them.
But in a sense, he's kind of. Broadcasting them all the same.
It's in broken form. So it's not a great answer to your question.
But there's, you know, the hagiographic component is, I think, very real, probably one that isn't very much talked about anymore.
So now I'm wondering if that's what the lecture should have been about after all. But. I just hope that was helpful.
Yeah. No, I was just thinking of pre conquest lives of the Saints.
So right now for each of them.
Um, and if you is one of the common plot plot structures in that which he's drawing from other sources is once the saint is martyred,
usually for a martyr, then it's the miracles afterwards, because that's what that's what earns you money.
If you've got a saint that's going to sort of blind or sort of somehow disable the
thieves trying to get into their tomb or something and perform post posthumous miracles.
That's the people that are the ones that people want to come and see on pilgrimage, and they'll come on pilgrimage and they'll give you money,
etc. so it's a common plot structure post, post death, that that's where the fantasy comes in.
Or fantastical elements. There we go. Thank you. Sorry.
Can I just follow up on that? Also, you've got a whole bunch of, uh, dragon bashing saints.
Like, I want you to become more creative, aren't you? And of course, when, uh, Jack, I was like, oh, you know, that episode is really apocryphal.
Everyone else, like, let's ignore him. Let's just throw in the Dragon episode, all right?
And then you've got, uh, some icons and George and all that. But, um, I was listening to you, and it occurred to me something I never thought before.
Um, you know, when you have an experience called the fairy, the otherworld, it's supposed to be dangerous, right?
We see the absolute answer, or, you know, you kind of said, yeah, they all lived happily ever after.
But, uh, Nate, you were teaching never speaks again. She's a zombie.
Like, it's a terrifying. And.
And then, of course, with surgery in the night, you know, once he's got the experience, he's kind of permanently marked with that experience.
And then I kind of didn't really see that until Tolkien talks about Fury as, um,
you know, something quite dangerous and something which kind of affects you.
Um, and I'm wondering maybe from your experience and maybe Stuart and Caroline and others, do we have this in the more recent fantasy,
because suddenly we've got the idea that magical fairy or whatever can be both good and bad.
But do we have this, like, you know, we don't go.
That's dangerous. Um, well, I mean, the example that springs to mind is when I mentioned about Nora and, um, Maurice with the.
Because they get sucked into the elven world, don't they? And that is a place of danger in that strange case.
So that would be the one I'd immediately. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So. Yeah, I would say that it's it obviously does go through the 19th century as well.
The perilous fight. We've we've mentioned that already and it may come up in a bit about, you know,
the perilous realm is is talking called it the fact that you could get dragged off into a,
an underground cavern of fairy land or the woods or whatever.
And as Caroline mentioned, time completely changes there.
But you may never get away from the enchantment.
So it does run through particularly folklore and fairy tale, and it has been picked up in modern modern tales.
Yeah, and I would. Sorry. Just so the elves in The Hobbit are not particularly nice either.
They they're probably based on Ser or Fiona as well, because, you know, they capture the dwarves.
They won't let them out. They're all. Yeah. Keith Miller.
Yeah. How modern is modern for for your questions purpose.
I'm thinking maybe 2020 first century is like, you know, our view of these things changed us.
Uh, like, our view of religion changed a lot of of society changed.
Um, like, I'm struggling to think of a more recent example.
Probably, uh, except for an entity wise Encyclopaedia Ferris, where there's like a scholar who goes to whatever North country.
And so, you know, these guys are dangerous and it's like, you know, reading features at all, like they're they're just plain dangerous.
But this is for the purposes of of the book.
Lord, um, is the premise of Fairy core, isn't it,
that the world of the fairies is both alluring and it has all of the the splendour of the fairy king's kingdom and all fair.
And indeed you get it in folk tale all the time that the the place of the fairies is where you want to go, and they want to keep you there.
And escaping is really, really hard. Um, with fairy core, the return to the, the, uh, the contemporary world,
or the normal world as it were, is usually quite temporary, partly because these series.
So you've always got to go back again for your next fix of the fairy world, I think.
Um, although Goblin Market, um, the Christina Rossetti's poem doesn't mention the word fairy.
Nevertheless, it's absolutely chock full of that kind of fairy, particularly the trope of fairy food and how dangerous it is.
I'm just writing a book about fairies.
Well, my my knowledge of modern fantasy, sort of, uh, I've exhausted for this talk, so, uh, but I'll give a plug for tomorrow.
I think Felix Taylor is talking about Arthur Machen, and he writes some weird tales about the little people,
about resurfacing in the 19 tens, 1920s, and they're not particularly nice.
So. Um, so I would just like to really thank again, Gabriel and Bond for a wonderful session on medieval.
Thank you very.