Further Reading

Historical Accuracy and the Literary Middle Ages 

 Tom Rippon (STARIS Project Intern 2021)

 

‘The severer antiquary may think that, by thus intermingling fiction with truth, I am polluting the well of history with modern inventions, and impressing upon the rising generation false ideas of the age which I describe’. – Sir Walter Scott.[i]

During the discussion at the inaugural workshop for Retelling Medieval Tales, the question of balancing historical accuracy with the stated aim of increasing diversity in depictions of the Middle Ages in children’s literature was identified as a point of debate: to what extent should historical accuracy shape modern depictions of the Middle Ages? Since this question concerns matters of cultural depiction, it is therefore logical to examine how those cultural depictions have changed over time and whether they have already ‘[impressed] upon the rising generation false ideas of the age’.  

Social diversity is undoubtedly one of the most controversial points in this debate, since our perception of the Middle Ages is so often shaped by a cultural output centred around a white, Christian Europe. In reality, medieval Europe was more diverse than these depictions suggest, with, for example, contact with the Muslim world taking place during the period of the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate in Spain after the conquest of the latter between 711 and 716.[ii] These cultural exchanges are reflected in the literature of the period, with conversion narratives and accounts of the Holy Land being a staple of medieval crusader literature, with some Occitan and Old French poets, such as Gaucelm Faidit and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, accompanying crusaders to the Holy Land.[iii] Furthermore, it is not uncommon for medieval works to include characters from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Karen Sullivan notes that one of the clerics transcribing the tales of the knights of the Round Table in the Prose Lancelot (c.13th century, Old French) is known as Sapient of Baghdad, and that ‘the twelfth and thirteenth-century authors of Arthurian romances […] have consulted the “histoires” (estoires) of these ancient clerics and have used them as the source of their works’.[iv] Not only are characters such as the Persian cleric present in the social spaces of thirteenth-century romance, but they may take prominent roles in the stories of the transmission of Arthurian nationalising lore. With the medieval poets themselves acknowledging their indebtedness to the writings – pseudo-historical or fictional – of these characters, there exists a precedent for retelling these tales from diverse perspectives for the modern age.  

The legends of King Arthur are a prime example of the blending of history and narrative invention over the centuries and the variation in Arthurian lore is evidence that medieval poets freely altered the tales they received to suit their audience. One of the earliest mentions of Arthur is in Nennius’ Historia Britonum (c.9th century), which emphasises: ‘Arthur pugnabat […] cum regibus Brittonum, sed ipse dux erat bellorum’,[v] thus refuting the notion of royalty all together, a great departure from the notion of ‘The Once and Future King’, with which we are so familiar. This older version of Arthur was slowly altered to form the current King Arthur of popular culture, a process which continued unchallenged until the first half of the twentieth-century, as Nathan Starr explains: ‘contemporary novelists have added fresh and original material to the legend in “modernizing” Arthur by making him more ancient; in other words, by reviving the shadowy Celt who probably fought against the Germanic invaders of Britain in the sixth century’.[vi] What makes this depiction of Arthur seem so modern despite its likely similarity to the real Arthur, if such a figure existed, is its contrast to the dominant character-type that culminated in the Victorian era under Tennyson. Indeed, the vision that we currently possess of the Middle Ages is largely a Victorian construction stemming from works such as Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or ‘The Lady of Shalott’, whose titular character watches the road by which: 

 

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,  

An abbot on an ambling pad, 

Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,  

Or long-hair’d page in crimson clad,  

Goes by to tower’d Camelot (lines 52-59).[vii]

 

Margaret Reid identifies a key shift in the usage of medieval tales post-Malory, arguing that modern writers (post-1600) are more likely to take isolated tales, episodes and characters from larger romance works and adapt them to suit their own social purposes. Put simply, Tennyson and his contemporaries reconstructed the Middle Ages along the lines of Victorian morality and social convention, creating a vision that testifies more to their own industrial age fantasies than to the historical Middle Ages.[viii] In tailoring their narratives to the social and aesthetic tastes of the nineteenth-century, Victorian writers both responded to the contemporary literary trend towards the Gothic and helped to form the lasting cultural image of the Middle Ages centred around quasi-mythical characters. It is indicative of literature’s dual nature as a form which both responds to and creates popular imaginations of people, places and periods that this vision of the Middle Ages still endures today; contemporary cultural depictions of the time are both the product of and reproduce a ‘cinematic medievalism [which] is the culmination of conflating fact and fiction in an attempt to make the Robin Hood myth seem “real”’.[ix] Just as the character of Robin Hood is emblematic of the Middle Ages of current popular culture, so too is the process of myth-making at work here emblematic of the wider cultural construction of the period. We have reached a point where the image of the Middle Ages is so determined by post-medieval texts that we require modern texts to reproduce these conventions before we can recognise their subject matter as being “the Middle Ages”.  

It is at this point that we return to Scott’s assessment of the situation in his dedication to Ivanhoe: he underlines that a work depicting a historical period must be relatable and comprehensible to the modern reader,[x] and applying this argument to even a brief comparative overview of cultural depictions of the Middle Ages reveals its strengths and pitfalls. Although it seems that this practice has perpetuated a vision of the medieval period that emphasises the values and conventions of writers post-Malory, it also creates an impetus for us to adapt depictions of the Middle Ages to the social milieu of modern Britain. Whilst the increased inclusion of characters from diverse cultural origins may risk overstating the diversity of medieval Britain, despite the well-documented presence of such persons in medieval literature, this concern is counter-balanced by the need for literature to write for its own social context and to reflect the constitution of its contemporary readership. To retell medieval tales with a focus on diversity is, therefore, both an attempt to depict with greater accuracy the social diversity of the period by refuting the practices of Victorian Arthurian romance, and an evolution of those same practices, refashioning the Middle Ages in light of our own social values to reflect the audience of today; for the literary Middle Ages are merely ‘castle walls | And snowy mountains old in story’ ready to be retold anew.[xi] 

 

Bibliography  

Costambeys, Marios, Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale (eds.), The Making of the Middle             Ages, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007 [online 2019]),               DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781846310683.001.0001 

DeGategno, Paul J., Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry, (New York: Twayne, 1994) 

Marín-Guzmán, Roberto, “Ethnic Groups and Social Classes in Muslim Spain”, Islamic   Studies, 30 (1991), 37-66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20840024  

Marshall, John, “Riding with Robin Hood: English Pageantry and the Making of a Legend”,        in Costambeys et al, The Making of the Middle Ages, 93-117 

Nennius, Historia Britonum, ed. by Joseph Stevenson, (London: Sumptibus Societatis, 1838),             https://archive.org/details/historiabritonum00nenn/page/48/mode/2up [Accessed   8.5.2022] 

Paterson, Linda, “Introduction”, in Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric         Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137-1336, (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018),   pp.1-24, DOI: 10.1017/9781787442092.003 

Reid, Margaret, The Arthurian Legend: Comparison of Treatment in Modern and Mediaeval        Literature, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938) 

Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, ed. by A.N. Wilson, (London: Penguin, 1984) 

Starr, Nathan, King Arthur Today: The Arthurian Legend in English and American Literature      1901-1953, (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1954) 

Sullivan, Karen, The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions, (Chicago:       University of Chicago Press, 2018) 

Lord Tennyson, Alfred, Selected Poems, ed. by Christopher Ricks, (London: Penguin, 2007) 

Wood, Ian, “The Use and Abuse of the Early Middle Ages, 1750-2000”, in Costambeys et al,       The Making of the Middle Ages, 36-53 

 

Notes:

[i] “Dedicatory Epistle to The Rev. Dr Dryasdust, F.A.S.”, in Ivanhoe, ed. by A.N. Wilson, (London: Penguin, 1984), pp.521-33 (p.526). 

[ii] Roberto Marín-Guzmán, “Ethnic Groups and Social Classes in Muslim Spain”, Islamic Studies, 30 (1991), 37-66 (pp.40-41), http://www.jstor.org/stable/20840024

[iii] Linda Paterson, “Introduction”, in Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137-1336, (Cambridge: Brewer, 2018), pp.1-24 (pp.1-3), DOI: 10.1017/9781787442092.003.

[iv] King Arthur Today: The Arthurian Legend in English and American Literature 1901-1953, (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1954), p.84. 

[v] ‘Arthur fought […] with the kings of the Britons, but he himself was a warlord’ [original translation]; Historia Britonum, ed. by Joseph Stevenson, (London: Sumptibus Societatis, 1838), pp.47-48, https://archive.org/details/historiabritonum00nenn/page/48/mode/2up [Accessed 8.5.2022]. 

[vi] King Arthur Today: The Arthurian Legend in English and American Literature 1901-1953, (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1954), p.84. 

[vii] Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”, in Selected Poems, ed. by Christopher Ricks, (London: Penguin, 2007), pp.8-13 (p.9). 

[viii] Arthurian Legend: Comparison of Treatment in Modern and Mediaeval Literature, (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1938), pp.9-13. 

[ix] John Marshall, “Riding with Robin Hood: English Pageantry and the Making of a Legend”, in The Making of the Middle Ages, ed. by Marios Costambeys, Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007 [online 2019]), pp.93-116 (p.94), DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9781846310683.003.0006. 

[x] Scott, pp.526-27. 

[xi] Tennyson, “The Princess”, Selected Poems, p.94 (lines 1-2).