Gail Ashton-Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture-Bloomsbury Academic (2015) PDF

Medieval Afterlives in
Contemporary Culture
Also Available from Bloomsbury
The Medieval British Literature Handbook, edited by Daniel T. Kline

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Gail Ashton
Medieval English Romance in Context, Gail Ashton
Medieval Afterlives in
Edited by Gail Ashton
Bloomsbury Academic
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Living Medieval 1
Part 1 True To Life: In the Performance
1 Spamalot: Lovingly Ripping Off/Ripping on the Establishment 11

Jeff Massey and Brian Cogan
2 Medievalisms in Contemporary Opera 22
Robert S. Sturges
3 Medieval Religious Plays in England: Afterlives and New Lives

through Performance 32
Margaret Rogerson
4 Staging Chaucer: Mike Poulton and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales 48
Sarah Peverley
5 You Can’t Do This to Disney! Popular Medievalisms in the Classroom 58

Meriem Pagès
6 Medieval Times: Tournaments and Jousting in Twenty-First-Century

North America 67
Elizabeth Emery

vi Contents
Part 2 To Turn You On: The Pleasures of Texts – Film, TV, Gaming
7 From Anglo-Saxon to Angelina: Adapting Beowulf for Film 81

Stewart Brookes
8 Contemporary Neo-Medieval Digital Gaming: An Overview of Genre 93

Daniel T. Kline
9 Survey of Twenty-First Century ‘Medieval’ Film 103

Lesley Coote
10 ‘Camelot must come before all else’: Fantasy and Family in the BBC Merlin 115
Philippa Semper
11 Electronic Tolkien: Characterization in Film and Video Games 124

Carol L. Robinson
12 The BBC Canterbury Tales (2003) 134

Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Part 3 More Than This: Reimaginings and Reappropriations
13 Global Chaucers 147

Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy
14 Silence in the Library? – Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out 157

Gail Ashton
15 Coming of Age in the Middle Ages: The Quest for Identity in Medieval
Novels for Young Adults 167
Angela Jane Weisl
16 Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox 177

Louise D’Arcens
17 Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as Contemporary Cult Figures 187

Fiona Tolhurst
18 Conjuring the Ghosts of Camelot: Tintagel and the Medievalism

of Heritage Tourism 200
Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein
Part 4 Avalon: Icons and Artefacts
19 Medievalism and Heroism in Arthurian Literature for Young People 213

Ann F. Howey
Contents vii
20 New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms 223

Karolyn Kinane
21 Twenty-First-Century Templar 234

Cory James Rushton
22 Malory’s Afterlives in Contemporary Culture 243

Raluca L. Radulescu
23 ‘We Are Robin Hood’: The Outlaw Tradition in Contemporary

Popular Culture 251
Rob Gossedge
24 Harry Potter and Medievalism 263

Renée Ward
Part 5 The Space Between: New Media and Fandom
25 Social Networking, Participatory Culture and the Fandom World

of Harry Potter 277
Amanda K. Allen
26 ‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ and Other Hellish Tales: Comics Adaptations

of Dante 291
Jason Tondro
27 From Camelot to Kaamelott: The Arthurian Legend in British,

American and French Comics 301
Daniel Nastali
28 Afterlives of Medieval Manuscripts 310

Wendy Scase
29 Medieval Memes 322

Maggie M. Williams and Lauren C. Razzore
Notes on Contributors 333

Select Bibliography 339
Index 351
Acknowledgements
This project would never have come to fruition without the support, enthusiasm, patience
and warmth of Bloomsbury’s David Avital, who believed in it from the start. Thanks also to
Mark Richardson at Bloomsbury for his practical assistance and general running around.
The list of people who have contributed to the endless dialogues and collaborative
endeavour both of the print volume here and of the web-arm of Medieval Afterlives in
Contemporary Culture is long. To all of you, a huge thank you, and if I miss anyone here,
please accept my apologies: Patience Agbabi; Pat Brown; Brantley L. Bryant aka LeVostreGC;
Jane Draycott; Steve Ellis and the anonymous reader for endorsing the proposal; Catherine
Fisher; Liam Evans-Ford at the York Mysteries; Matthew Francis; Hannah Grainger, Simon
Lloyd and Helen McGowan at Coventry Cathedral and the Coventry Mysteries; Gwyneth
Lewis; Karen Maitland; Geoff Readman at the Lincoln Mysteries; Jill Taylor and Ros Hallifax
at the Lichfield Mysteries; Claire Townsend, Libraries Manager at Lichfield Cathedral; Rev.
Canon Dr Pete Wilcox, now Dean of Liverpool Cathedral and Canon at Lichfield Cathedral,
2006–12; Fergus Wilde, archivist and librarian at Chethams School of Music; everyone I
spoke to at English Heritage; and, of course, the anonymous Senior Examiner for English
who spoke to me when it might have been wiser not to.
To all my contributors for their wonderful chapters, and for their unfailing patience,
diligence and general good humour: without you all there would be no book. Special thanks
to Candy Barrington and Jonathan Hsy for allowing me to guest blog at Global Chaucers and
for their invaluable help over the Southwark Cathedral event in April 2014, to Bob Sturges
for always going above and beyond and to Jeff Massey who kept me laughing.
And, last but not least, so much love, so many thanks to Geoff, Jeanette and Michelle, who
simply keep me going.
Geoff, I dedicate this book to you. We may not have been Lancelot and Guinevere, but you
have been my knight for 34 years. A story is never over.
Introduction: Living Medieval
I come from Tolkien’s Middle Earth, lived a neo-medieval past, a child, a young girl, in a
world I read about in books – Arthurian stories, half-dreamed, half-forgotten, snippets of
folk tales, legends retold in the dark to my sister and cousins, ‘adult’ fiction I slipped into my
mum’s library choices, Anya Seton’s Katherine – a particular revelation. Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s
Prologue and Tale’ and the ‘Tale of the Prioress’ were my ‘A’-level set texts at seventeen.
I hated the round-the-class, line-by-line ‘translation,’ loved the narrative swerve and verve,
the sly interjections and subtle deflections. I had been handed a key without a door to open;
that came years later as a postgraduate with Valerie Edden and Steve Ellis at the University of
Birmingham. At teacher-training college the intellectual snob in me deplored our reading of
Coghill’s ‘modernized’ ‘Miller’s Tale’, even as I now applaud its inclusion at all.
There were days out to midlands cathedrals and abbeys – Worcester, Hereford, Lichfield,
Gloucester. On a school trip to Chester I wanted to cry when I heard the monk’s unaccompanied
chant and stood in the stream of light from the cathedral’s stained glass. I slid out with the
others for a sneaky smoke behind the coaches instead. Special Sundays took us to Cannock
Chase, a vast forest that once covered as far as we then lived, the very street in fact; at primary
school I learnt that we were named after that Norman hunting ground: Leighswood, a clearing
in the trees. While my uncles watched re-runs of Richard Greene in The Adventures of Robin
Hood (original series, 1955–9), I read their American comics, dark fantasies of Batman and
Gotham City. I longed to see the Bayeux Tapestry we kept hearing about in history but we
were not princesses, and had never travelled farther than Wales.
Today, 30 years later, I inhabit the land of Richard II’s famous bowmen, Gawain country,
or near enough. A short distance to the west is the Wirral plain and the mountains of North
Wales. Just south are the Roaches. My friend and fellow medievalist John Anderson told me
this was the site of the Green Chapel. Every year we said we’d go. He died before we could
make it, another quest to make alone which is, I guess, the exact point of a quest. I think of
John whenever someone mentions the Pearl poet. Most of us have, or have had, a copy of
his edition of Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1978, with
A. C. Cawley) somewhere on our shelves.
Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture
2
Each day when I walk the dog I track the fringes of Lyme Park with its moors rising to the
Peak District, one of the backbones of England, and its medieval deer park. Herds of these
fallow and red deer have roamed this country for more years than I care to count. Sometimes
I glimpse them ghosting a path, drifting like smoke across a field. I always hold my breath.
These are my ympe-tree mornings, border crossings into another reality, at once familiar, at
once so strangely out of key.
a few of my favourite things ...

I have never been to Runescape or been caught in a Dungeon Siege. I don’t watch Merlin or
Game of Thrones. I don’t read Chaucer for pleasure or anything at all in Middle English,
even as its cadences go round in my head. Fragments, phrases, narrative freeze-frames surface
like wondrous fish at the oddest of times. I still love the cover of Avalon (1987, Roxy Music,
EG Records Ltd) with its silhouetted helmeted ‘knight’ – the horns suggest he’s a berserker –
hawk on his (or her) gloved fist, the moody Celtic kit and caboodle of it. I love it so much
that its song titles are the section headings for this book. Put on a film like Shrek or How
To Train Your Dragon, anything to do with Harry Potter, and I will watch compulsively,
repeatedly. I love medieval romance’s sense of loss, its interlacings, ‘magic’ objects, even its
formulaic genre, and, best of all, its contemporary reincarnations in fantasy and sci-fi: so
much bricolage, so much creative reinterpretation and reimaginings.
Sometimes it makes me laugh out loud. How amazing is Full Metal Jousting (Emery, this
volume)? The wacko ‘love childs’ and imaginative leaps of Harry Potter’s fandom (See Allen,
this volume)? That Mickey Mouse has his own Dantaesque comic book (Tondro, this volume),
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog (Brantley L. Bryant 2010), or that Afrikaans renders Alisoun in
the ‘Miller’s Tale’ as Alisoen, ‘arse’ and ‘kiss’ (John Boje 1999. See Barrington and Hsy, this
volume)? What did I do until www.fyeah.medievalandrenaissancememes with its mash-ups of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, music and art, or Chaucer’s Tales California Dreamin’-style ? Or that
today I saw a removal van called ‘Knights of Old’ (a Northamptonshire village), its motto
‘service with honour’? That I get to see a ‘medievalist’ Bayeux Tapestry after all, Aled Lewis’s
‘The Coruscant Tapestry,’ a hand-stitched narrative of film stills from Star Wars (See website
accompanying this book)?
Gordon’s alive!
What do we mean by heritage? Sometimes it has a reality of its own, it’s an artefact, a ruined
site or building. Or it may have been built over, fake (D’Arcens, this volume), a composite
(Finke and Aronstein, this volume), even almost overlooked: those strange stones or objects
you can’t quite recall until you get to a place like Stamford with its Eleanor Cross or
re-imagine Bamburgh as Lancelot’s Joyous Garde.1
There is a medievalist past around every corner, and we take it for granted. It may not look
like what any of us were expecting, but then we don’t know the reality of that time in any
case. Which of us can say this or that is authentic, or authoritative? When did historiography,
Introduction 3
chronicle, a mappa mundi became ‘history’? Travel anywhere in the United Kingdom and
you thread through a living heritage of Viking and Anglo-Saxon place names, towns and trails
recalling saints’ shrines and cults, cities hoarding medieval cathedrals and castles, fortified
walls. The Normans left their cultural marks all over Europe and Scandinavia. In Australia,
‘fake’ heritage sites invoke a conflicted colonial presence, while the United States is ‘medieval’
to its (electronic) core with its Renaissance faires, Medieval Times Extravaganza, conventions
(like Kalamazoo), games, websites, fanzines, memes, blogs and social media platforms.
Of course, academics want to theorize the past. We might define ‘medievalism’ as any
attempt to reimagine or reinvent the medieval. Or call it neomedieval to signal its inauthenticity,
that it looks to ‘simulate’ what we think of as medieval rather than ‘reproduce or otherwise
recover it’. In so doing, we render a version that’s then ‘more medieval than the medieval,’2
a fantasy – often nostalgic – a facade, something that takes us into an ‘alternative universe
of medievalisms’3 just as we might fall asleep under a tree and wake up in a de-familiarized
‘homescape’, or be translated, in every sense, in cyberspace. Sometimes, we can even out-
medieval the neo-medieval text, take a fantastic other-world and double-bluff to imagine it
anew, a ‘medievalist’ text – like the Star Wars Bayeux Tapestry mentioned previously, if you
will.
I still like that at somewhere like Whitby on the northeast coast of England, a huge ruined
abbey can host goths and steampunks, that Celtic paraphernalia and neo-medieval artefacts –
a knight’s helmet, his glove – sit, literally, next door to the Holland and Barrett health store
(See Kinane, this volume). And if any of us had forgotten that this, and all of mine and your
favourite things, are medieval-ish, then the librarian who decided not to participate in this
project – for fear that ‘their’ mappa mundi might be degraded by its more eclectic or pop-
culture bedfellows – certainly missed the point.
We’re off to see the wizard ...

Academia still largely privileges reading and print, even as students and other consumers of
medievalisms – plural intentional – immerse themselves in a world that is entirely different:
more participatory, perhaps even cult, and where texts circulate and are shared across all kinds
of platforms. For such ‘readers’, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, medieval English
courses are already ‘live’. They play its games or have ‘played stories as games, many times,
and with friends’, create its avatars, its generic mash-ups of movie clips, memes, comics, fan
fictions. They reimagine canonical texts, make collages of sound, text, vision and, ‘familiar
with multimedia both as consumers and producers,’ are tuned in to a constant ‘informational
background hum’ that their teachers may not even know about.4
These kinds of medievalisms are not strictly literary texts. They may be unstable, fragmentary,
even incomplete. They are self-referential, unlikely to be copyrighted or authoritative, and
‘arrive at platforms and audiences better suited to, or better able to grasp, their complexities
than conventional academic forums’.5 Many of these texts are more familiar than their
medieval counterparts. They certainly have more popular appeal which may draw students to
our courses (Pagès, this volume) – outside the United Kingdom at least (see website, ‘What the
Dickens Shall We Do About Chaucer’) – even as it obscures the medieval ‘original’.
4
We are, of course, looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Who are better placed
than medievalists to teach to contemporary cultural hermeneutics (how we make meaning) or
examine ‘the sources of scholarly research and knowledge, and the potential for opening them
up?’6 New technologies both ‘supplement’ print and ‘provide different reading experiences’,
while ‘distinctions between writers, critics, and readers become less sharp and less significant’.7
Each time we sit Dante’s Inferno alongside Jimbo’s Inferno (Tondro, this volume) or The
Da Vinci Code we open up a space for frictions, frissons and follow-ons that a traditional
curriculum might close down. And if the chapters in this volume and its website speak to a
‘glorious collision’ of academic and more open virtual worlds (Williams and Razzore, this
volume), might they not also point the way towards a more medieval-ish medieval?
Students are, of course, not the only people who might be interested in medievalisms. The
democratic electronic dialogues that proliferate all over the web allow anyone within their
‘para-academic’ sphere open access to comment, collaborate, consume and even produce
medieval afterlives (Williams and Razzore, this volume). This new cultural capital doesn’t
replace the academy with its books, conferences and research outputs; but it does intersect
it, and we do need to engage it. Its buzzwords – collaboration, interdisciplinary, popular –
suggest it’s not subject to the same ‘rules’ of research or kinds of valorization we are used to.
Above all, it charges a circuit of persistent medievalism. Every scholar who participates in its
collision, every teacher who colludes with it, reinvigorates themselves, their students and our
discipline. A student may become a teacher, a parent, a reader, a writer, a fan: old fields, then,
new corn.
School’s Out
I’m an accidental medievalist, the tale too long to tell. An academic paper was once returned to
me for revision on the grounds that I am the kind of writer who sees connections everywhere.
I rather thought that was the point of literature with its myriad associative threads and sub-
texts, its dissonances, jumping-off points. That notion, plus my conviction that medievalisms
matters, that it’s the warp and weft of contemporary cultures and its markers, inspired this
project. Meriem Pagès (this volume) describes medievalisms as ‘Medieval Studies’ petulant
little sibling, it insists that we pay attention to it.’ Her comment invokes both its current
thrust for acknowledgement as a discipline in its own right and a lingering anxiety about
its academic credentials perpetrated every time an institution jangles the keys to its castle-
keep or research assessment tut-tuts at a word like ‘popular’. These are, of course, necessary
conversations. If I don’t mention the p-word (periodization) or if I here elide labels such as
‘neomedieval’ and ‘medievalist’, this is, in part, because I feel such arguments are reductive,
a distraction, but more: that they have been better rehearsed elsewhere (see website, Keynote
Works).
Nevertheless, this project ultimately has to be part of that nexus of contention and debate.
So I wanted to edit another volume on medieval afterlives, on living medievalisms, because
there is still not enough on these very texts in all their varieties and reincarnations that
confront the joys, creativities and intellectual challenges which provoke most of us to study
literature in the first place (Ashton and Kline 2012, p. 8).
Introduction 5
Its brief was simple: to celebrate and talk about a representative range of contemporary
medievalisms in its diverse contexts. Contributors were invited to offer general survey, personal
experience and/or opinion, critical-cum-theoretical investigation – in any combination – and
in a clear lively style as free of academic apparatus as they could make it. So, too, mindful of
the need to streamline a large and potentially unwieldy volume, we offer a Select Bibliography
rather than the traditional catch-all to be read in conjunction with chapter endnotes and
Keynote Works (see accompanying website). The print volume and accompanying integral
website are conceived together, as part of a consciously more associative, less authoritative,
dialogue. There is no overarching thesis or pivotal principle of organization. Ease of navigation
demands a certain structure, but the section headings are neither defining nor circumscribing,
nor its essays standard length.
This book would not exist without the fascinating conversations, digressions and collabora-
tions of all the contributors represented here, and many who are not. The brief overview which
follows can never do justice to their passion, knowledge, acuity and sheer exuberance, but here
it is, for what it’s worth (for more, see Abstracts on the accompanying website).
Go Play Your Video Games

Section I, True to Life, centres on different kinds of performativities, from the stage or arena to
the classroom and the street. Jeff Massey and Brian Cogan take us on a lively tour of Spamalot
(Broadway debut 2005) to kick-start the volume. Robert Sturges surveys the ways in which
contemporary opera regularly makes use of western European medieval characters, narratives
and settings in their libretti, and often adapt medieval musical forms as well. Margaret
Rogerson considers recent reinterpretations and reinventions of the tradition of medieval
English religious drama in, among others, the York (2012) and Chester (2013) Mystery
Plays, while Sarah Peverley offers a close reading of Mike Poulton’s 2005 stage adaptation of
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Meriem Pagès discusses
how to engage twenty-first-century ‘medievalist’ students by using contemporary medievalisms
as pedagogical, ‘performance’ tools. And Elizabeth Emery explores a contemporary North
American fascination with medieval tournaments shaped by anxieties related to class, gender
and economics.
Section II, To Turn You On, focuses on the pleasurable texts of film, TV and video games.
In a nod to medieval and Anglo-Saxon intersections, Stewart Brookes explores the creative
reimaginings of some screen adaptations of Beowulf. Daniel Kline surveys a host of popular
medieval digital games and considers game narratives and gaming mechanics. Lesley Coote’s
survey engages major trends in twenty-first ‘medieval’ film, from epic to fantasy to animation,
and Philippa Semper examines the past as a fantasy about family in the BBC Merlin. Carol
Robinson writes on simulation and fiction, the different ways in which film and video games
have adapted Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Kathleen Coyne Kelly examines the complex processes
of adaptation via the BBC’s 2003 screening of six of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Section III is concerned with reimaginings and reappropriations, some of them cult, and,
fittingly then, More Than This. Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy look to illuminate global
conversations about Chaucer’s writings in non-Anglophone languages, while Gail Ashton
6
considers six contemporary poets who have reappropriated medieval texts to explore the ways
in which their works and poetics variously inhabit a popular culture–academic continuum.
Angela Jane Weisl takes us on a quest for identity in medieval novels for Young Adults. Louise
D’Arcens explores the paradoxical phenomenon of ‘medieval Australia’ whereby ‘medieval’
comes to represent both colonial modernity and ancient indigeneity. Fiona Tolhurst makes a
personal pilgrimage to Norwich and explores the paradoxes of the contemporary cults of Julian
of Norwich and Margery Kempe. And Laurie Finke and Susan Aronstein focus on the conflicted
medieval ‘heritage’ of Tintagel in Cornwall, allegedly the birthplace of King Arthur.
Avalon, Section IV, looks at cultural icons and artefacts, beginning with Ann Howey,
who returns to the genre of Young Adult fiction to survey notions of medievalism and
heroism in Arthurian literature for young people. Karolyn Kinane explores manifestations
of the medieval in two different but related religious movements, Neopaganism and the
New Age.
Cory James Rushton discusses the conflicted ‘past’ of the Knights Templar across a range
of contemporary genres and reworkings, and Rob Gossedge examines the outlaw tradition
of Robin Hood in contemporary popular culture. Raluca Radulescu focuses on two Malory
afterlives, Mike Poulton’s script for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2010) and Peter
Ackroyd’s retelling of Malory’s Morte Darthur (2010). Renée Ward explores the many ways
in which movie, experiential and material medievalisms allow readers and fans to interact
with J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
Ward’s chapter segues into Section V, The Space Between, which continues a series of
dialogues about new media, and fandoms. So, Amanda Allen discusses Harry Potter’s afterlives
in fandom texts across multiple social networking platforms. Daniel Nastali considers the
various manifestations of the Arthurian legend in British, American and French comics, while
Jason Tondro surveys seven different adaptations, appropriations and responses to Dante’s
Inferno in comics form. Wendy Scase explores the ways in which contemporary digital
technologies are giving medieval manuscript books an unprecedented new lease of afterlife.
Maggie M. Williams and Lauren C. Razzore explore a range of internet memes, such as the
Bayeux Tapestry Meme and the Medieval History Ryan Gosling Meme, that take medieval
culture as their inspiration, and, fittingly, close this volume with a chapter that urges us all
onwards into a medieval yet to come.
Who Wants to Live Forever?

Let us not pretend that the only way forward is to embrace electronic media. Such platforms
quickly become obsolete, are subject to fashions and trends, may be superseded by bigger,
better versions. They are high maintenance, demanding our constant attention. They need
to be open access, to facilitate ease of usage if they are not to become yet another ‘keeper of
the keys’, another academic stronghold (See Scase, this volume). They close the gap between
‘high’ and popular culture as fast as they advance the apparent decline of print literacy. But
the medievalisms of this volume in all its different shapes and translations simultaneously
speak to, within, across, outside and beyond every medieval text we have ever read, taught or
studied. Hereford’s virtual mappa mundi, the British Library’s Caxton online, the Lindisfarne
Gospels Durham Project (See website, Libraries and Archives) collide with the Robbins Digital
Introduction 7
Library Project8 and every critical edition of the medieval works or manuscripts most of us
still read or otherwise think about. Elsewhere, Alnwick Castle meets Wizard Wrock and Harry
Potter slash fiction, as well as Camelot (Starz 2011), Pillars of Earth (Starz 2010) and Game of
Thrones (HBO 2011 – Season 6, 2014), plus every medieval faire and tournament from here
to the United States. Chaucer intersects Agbabi and Greenlaw, the BBC, the RSC, a host of
non-Anglophone translations (See Ashton, Kelly, Peverley, Barrington and Hsy, this volume).
Tolkien and Dante converse with comics, video games, memes, film and opera. BABEL’s cross-
disciplinary collective9 loves MEMO (Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organisation, edited
by Pam Clements and Carol Robinson); Kalamazoo hearts ‘Medievally Speaking,’ Bonnie
Wheeler’s New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan) rubs up against Boydell and Brewer’s
Medievalism series (edited by Karl Fugelso and Chris Jones). Enough.
I trust that readers, both scholarly and otherwise, come to Medieval Afterlives in
Contemporary Culture with an open heart and creative mind, aware of its publishing
constraints and apparent partialities (Volume 2?), and mindful too of how to ride two horses
at once: the scholars’ steed with its academic armour and heavyweight heraldry, and the
unicorn flickering through the trees into a fantastic, futuristic, medieval-ish past.
May we turn every dream to good.
For the website accompanying this book go to www.bloomsbury.com/medieval-afterlives
Notes
1. Bamburgh Castle is rumoured to be the site of Lancelot’s ‘Joyous Garde.’ For more, see website
accompanying this book. Eleanor crosses are monuments to Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I.
Most of the 12 crosses placed to mark the villages that her body passed through on the way to its
burial site in Westminster Abbey are now gone. Stamford has a fragment. Northampton has one of
the remaining relics.
2. Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly (2010), ‘Neomedievalism, Hyperrealism, and Simulation’.
Studies in Medievalism 19: 12–24, 15.
3. C. L. Robinson and S. Clements (2010), ‘Living Neomedievalism’. Studies in Medievalism 18(3):
78–107, 56.
4. Bryan Alexander (2006), ‘A Threat to Professional Identity? The Resistance to Computer-Mediated
Teaching’, in Michael Hanrahan and Deborah L. Madsen (eds), Teaching, Technology, Textuality:
Approaches to New Media, pp. 27–35, citation p. 34.
5. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (2012), ‘Introduction: Now and Then’, in Gail Ashton and Daniel
T. Kline (eds), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, pp. 1–13,
citation p. 9.
6. Carolyn Dinshaw (2012), How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness
of Time. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, p. xii, emphasis mine.
7. Jim O’Loughlin (2006), ‘A Technology of Our Own: The Place of Computers and the Case of the
Small Press’, in Michael Hanrahan and Deborah L. Madsen (eds), Teaching, Technology, Textuality:
Approaches to New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 69–80, citations p. 75, emphasis mine.
8. This includes, among others, the Camelot project, the Crusades and the Robin Hood projects, and
the TEAMS Middle English texts online. See www.d.lib.rochester.edu.
9. See http://www.babelworkinggroup.org.
8
Part ONE
True To Life:
In the Performance
10
chapter one
Spamalot: Lovingly
Ripping Off/Ripping
on the Establishment
Jeff Massey and Brian Cogan
ACT ONE: A SILLY PLACE

Camelot – as every schoolchild knows – is a shining, medieval castle populated by heroic
Arthurian knights and swooning damsels, a magical kingdom popularized by myriad French
Romancers since the thirteenth century.
Camelot – as every theatre geek knows – is a shining, neo-medieval musical populated by
baritone Arthurian knights and mezzo damsels, a magical theatrical extravaganza popularized
by Broadway legends Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe in the twentieth century.
And then there’s Spamalot. As over 2 million theatre-goers in over a dozen countries
know, Spamalot is a shining, neo-medieval musical comedy populated by singing knights in
gaudy tights, Laker Girls, airborne cows, a killer rabbit and a semi-aquatic diva that somehow
became a money-making juggernaut, thanks to the guidance of Monty Python member Eric
Idle and his long-time musical collaborator John du Prez.
In the popular patois of Hollywoodland, Spamalot might be thought of as ‘Camelot meets
Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ – a cult-inspired marriage made in box-office heaven!
And, indeed, at its core, Spamalot is a modern musical comedy set in a medieval England
(c. 932 AD) that is simultaneously and self-consciously a Broadway stage (c. 2005 AD). Yet
this neo-medieval theatrical mash-up is fraught with complications, not least of which is the
scathing dismissal of the musical Camelot (1960) within its bastard cinematic progenitor,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). If Camelot portrayed the scrubbed, polished and
shiny version of all things ‘medieval’, then Monty Python and the Holy Grail called attention
12
to the intertextual and metatheatrical graffiti rudely spray-painted on the walls of Camelot
itself: Medium Aevum i domum!
The anti-authoritarian streak of Holy Grail is established fairly early in the film’s quest
(scene 7), as King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his knights look down upon a distant
castle: Camelot. It’s a lovely set shot, well illustrated, and in any other production it would
set the stage nicely for an interior scene change. Yet this simple film convention (the exterior
set shot) draws pointed meta-criticism from the Pythons. Amidst the wide-eyed wonder of
the other characters, Arthur’s pantomimetic pack-horse, Patsy (Terry Gilliam, the troupe’s
prop master, co-director of the film and resident animator) gruffly states, ‘It’s only a model!’
This overt breaking of the fourth wall calls into immediate question the ‘reality’ of the
medieval wonderland, Camelot, and what follows calls into question the value of an overly
romanticized – indeed, musical – Middle Ages.
After quickly ‘shushing’ Patsy (thus breaking the breaking of the fourth wall), Arthur and
company are granted a sudden view inside the distant castle, and the audience is treated to a
vigorously ridiculous send-up of theatrical medievalism: various armoured knights perform
‘Knights of the Round Table’, a high-spirited and jig-laden musical number which includes
various knights who claim to ‘dance whene’er we’re able,’ who ‘do routines and chorus scenes’,
who attempt ‘rhymes that are quite un-sing-able’ and who ‘sequin vests and impersonate Clark
Gable’. On top of all that, they anachronistically claim to ‘eat ham and jam and Spam, a lot’.
A denouncement not only of established authorial strongholds (literally represented by the
castle Camelot), this scene also vocally critiques the middle-of-the-road banality of musicals
like Camelot. Faced with such saccharine – if rhythmic – dreck, the straight-laced King Arthur
dourly states, ‘No, on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot: ‘tis a silly place.’
Yet go there they do (some thirty years later), in Idle and du Prez’s Spamalot, a light-
hearted romp through a decidedly optimistic Middle Ages that – rather than actively avoid
the silly idealism of Camelot and Camelot – embraces it. In the modern musical, instead of
choosing to run away from Camelot, Arthur and his company happily take a break from
their dour medieval plotline (to ‘bring chivalry to a rude and churlish time’) and opt to visit
a distinctly Vegas-inspired Camelot.1 There, Arthur and company sing and dance under neon
lights through an updated version of ‘Knights of the Round Table’; scantily clad chorus girls
pop out of prams; and The Lady of the Lake does an armoured striptease before launching
into a Liza Minnelli-inspired scat session with King Arthur. So heartily do the medieval
knights embrace the glitz of Vegas/Camelot that it takes God Himself to pull them away from
the leggy show-girls, oversized dice and roulette-wheel Round Table, ultimately setting them
on their proper quest: the search for the Holy Grail.
The Pythons – on television and on the big screen – broke generic conventions with
anarchic glee, and Idle’s neo-medieval treatment of the Python’s neo-medieval treatment
of the neo-medieval Broadway musical and the medieval Arthurian legends likewise seems
gleefully anarchic. Yet Spamalot – despite myriad direct and indirect borrowings from various
Python projects – is not entirely Monty Python, but rather ‘pythonesque’, ‘python-like’ or
perhaps even ‘python-lite’. In the end, it’s more gleeful than anarchic, a polite parody of
theatrical neo-medievalism rather than a searing satire of overly romanticized medievalism.
Spamalot: Lovingly Ripping Off/Ripping on the Establishment 13
As such, it may very well suggest a change in cultural attitudes towards ‘the medieval’ since
the 1970s.
ACT TWO: MONTY PYTHON AND ‘PYTHONESQUE’

For those who managed to miss the 1970s, Monty Python is the collective name of a (largely)
British comedy troupe who starred in the groundbreaking BBC television series, Monty Python’s
Flying Circus (1969–74). The all-male cast – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin,
Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam (at the time, the lone American) – revelled in surreal
intellectual comedy, merciless satires of established authority figures and generic ‘mash-ups’.
It was a triumph of televisual anarchy, and as such garnered cult status, especially among anti-
authoritarian audiences looking for inspiration in the rebellious 1970s.
The Pythons themselves were part of the growing 1960s’ counterculture, one that saw
a world controlled by a hierarchical class-based system, a world normalized by a medium
(television) that promulgated simple assumptions and biases while trivializing serious thought
and discussion. As Marci Landy writes, Flying Circus was a ‘self conscious reference to the
medium of television’ and the members of Python were ‘acutely conscious of television as
perpetrator of misinformation’.2 The Python’s deconstruction of the narrative standards of
broadcast television, as well as their questioning of authority figures, was grounded in a
wide variety of political and social movements (from Dadaism and Fluxus to Marxism and
Existentialism), all taken to their seemingly inevitable extremes in the absurdly mashed-up
sketches of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
After Flying Circus, the Pythons toured a bit, recorded a handful of comedy albums and
produced a modest string of cultish films, from the controversial Life of Brian (jokingly pitched
by Eric Idle as ‘Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory!’), to the slightly less controversial Meaning of Life
(which simply included the Mary Poppins-esque musical number, ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’,
and the grotesquely explosive Mr Creosote). Eventually, and for various reasons, the troupe
went their separate ways, although ‘partial Python’ projects involving two or more members
often popped up throughout the years. Cleese became a roguish Hollywood actor; Gilliam a
rogue Hollywood producer. Palin starred in TV travelogues and wrote autobiographies; Jones
starred in TV histories and wrote medieval biographies.3 Idle (the Greedy Bastard) relentlessly
cashed in on his Python reputation whenever possible; Chapman (the lazy bastard) simply
cashed out.4
Despite having not worked ‘as a team’ since the 1980s, the Pythons’ anti-establishment
humour has wormed its way into the modern mainstream; even that Grand Old Dame of
conservatism, the Oxford English Dictionary, recently acknowledged the troupe’s impact on
modern culture by logging the term ‘pythonesque’ into the official English lexicon:
PYTHONESQUE
adjective
After the style of or resembling the absurdist or surrealist humour of Monty Python’s
Flying Circus, a British television comedy series (1969–74)
14
Quite a feat for a bunch of fringe semi-anarchists hell-bent on undermining perceived authority
via surreal comedy, comic intellectualism and fart jokes.
ACT FIVE, er, THREE: THE HOLY GRAIL

However great their many collective and individual contributions may be, the Pythons’ first
and – among medievalists, at least – greatest cinematic feat remains Monty Python and the
Holy Grail (1975), an oft-biting parody of the quests of ‘The Matter of Britain’: the tales
surrounding the legendary Knights of the Round Table and their leader, Arthur, king of the
Britons.
The film – after a brief metatheatrical tussle in the opening credits between Swedish moose
and South American llamas – opens in ‘England: 932 AD’, which is, on the whole, a pretty
dismal looking place. Shot with an ‘excretory verisimilitude’ by co-directors Gilliam and
Jones that colours – or discolours – their presentation of The Middle Ages,5 Monty Python
and the Holy Grail displays a viciously anti-authoritarian streak, relentlessly ridiculing the
assumptive power of kings, texts and history. Famously, the only character at the start of the
film who ‘hasn’t got shit all over him’ is the right-wise king of all England, Arthur himself …
and even he, by the end of the film, becomes drenched in French offal.6 As John Cleese once
pithily noted, Holy Grail is ‘full of angry political crap’.
The film begins, in earnest, as Arthur and his faithful steed, Patsy (a serf banging two empty
halves of a coconut together), set out to gather the Knights of the Round Table to their cause:
‘The Quest for the Holy Grail.’ Along the way, the various English kuh-nigguts encounter
verbally abusive French soldiers (‘Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of
elderberries!’), construct a Trojan Rabbit (‘Uhm, look, if we build this large wooden badger’),
heroically run away from a three-headed ogre (‘He bravely turned his tail and fled’), oversee
a witch trial (‘She turned me into a newt!’), literally disarm a taciturn Black Knight (‘None
shall pass!’), nearly withstand the temptations of ‘eight score young blondes and brunettes
between the ages of sixteen and nineteen and a half ’ at Castle Anthrax (‘Shit!’), procure a
shrubbery (‘with a nice little two level effect’), encounter a pyrokinetic wizard (‘They call
me. … Tim?’), attempt to rescue a ‘maiden’ from Swamp Castle (‘She’s got huge … tracts of
land’), answer various trivia questions (‘You have to know these things when you’re the king,
you know’), face a killer bunny (‘Look at the bones, man!’) and otherwise pursue all those
ubiquitous mini-quests that populate medieval Arthurian romances, marathon D&D sessions
and modern video games.
Curiously, what with all their knees bent running about, Arthur and his cinematic knights
never set foot in Camelot nor sit at the Round Table – two major motifs appearing in nearly all
of Arthuriana since Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. For, as noted above, after witnessing
an inane musical number replete with high-stepping jigs, barbershop choruses and timpani
helmets, Arthur decides – against all tradition – not to go to Camelot at all, for ‘tis a silly
place’. Arthur’s terse judgement of the self-indulgent (‘we eat ham and jam and Spam, a lot’),
bourgeoisie (‘we’re opera mad in Camelot’) and domesticated (‘I have to push the pram a
lot’) denizens of Camelot says quite a lot about the Pythons at the time and how the film then
worked as a cultural critique not just of medievalism (‘silly’), but also of British class structure
(‘silly’) and even divisions in contemporary British politics (‘silly’).7
ACT FOUR: FROM SCREEN TO STAGE

Given the Pythons’ deft subversion of television and film genres, it is no wonder that the
musical Spamalot would play with theatre conventions. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was the
first British television programme to realize that (a) there were generic conventions attached to
different media; and (b) these generic conventions were entirely arbitrary. Idle, the main force
behind Spamalot and the resident ‘lyrical Python’, knew that while some of the conventions
of television or film could be translated to the stage (the ‘Finland’ travelogue that inexplicably
begins the musical, for example), he and co-creator John du Prez also realized that musical
theatre had its own conventions and visual codes: impractically loud duets, overwrought
dance numbers, needlessly extravagant scenery and (most importantly?) ubiquitous Jewish
performers. To create a truly Python-esque musical, they would need to violate and remix
those conventions as readily as Python had done to television or film earlier.
Yet rather than rail angrily against the establishment as Monty Python was wont to do in its
heyday, Spamalot is content to – very effectively – nudge-nudge-wink-wink its way to pointing
out Broadway’s foibles and conventions. As Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein (two self-
identified ‘Marxist feminist scholars’) have deftly noted, ‘Spamalot … adapts its cinematic
original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of
nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.’8 For fans of Python still looking for
biting social commentary (Cleese’s ‘angry political crap’), this play’s not the thing.
Of course, what with today’s prices and all, the folks in modern theatre stalls are not
(generally) the downtrodden looking for a rebellious singing voice; the once young,
disenfranchised and avant-garde fans of Monty Python’s Flying Circus who can afford to see
a Broadway show (or O2 Arena spectacle) have generally got old(er), rich(er) and decidedly
more bourgeoisie.9 But so have the Pythons, so we’ll call it a draw.
Ultimately, despite its direct narrative borrowings from the film and its parodic generic
reflection of the musical, Camelot meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail is far too simple a
Hollywood formula for this complicated, and highly entertaining, theatrical/medieval mash-
up. Its success as a play, in the end, relies upon an audience attuned to three distinct elements:
‘pythonesque’ humour, theatrical conventions and modern medievalism. That’s quite a list of
prerequisites for a modern audience, and yet the play has proven quite a success.
After a brief trial run in Chicago, Spamalot premiered on Broadway’s Shubert Theater
on 14 February 2005, opened a month later, and ran successfully until 17 January 2009.
The show received generally rave reviews and sold exceedingly well, raking in over
$175 million at the box office. It was something of a critical darling as well: the original
Broadway performances garnered 14 Tony Awards nominations and won three (including
Best Musical, Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, and Best Direction of a
Musical), while London’s 2007 Palace Theatre performances earned seven Laurence Olivier
Award nominations.10 As of 2014, the show continues to tour the United States (including,
16
metatheatrically, in Las Vegas), has enjoyed successful runs in London’s West End and has
played in various venues throughout Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy,
France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
Japan and South Korea. By most standards of musical theatre, it’s been a roaring success and
has very likely exposed Monty Python to the widest audience of their career, decades after
they had stopped performing as a group.
The original Broadway cast included Tim Curry – perhaps best known for his portrayal
of Dr Frankenfurter (a ‘sweet transvestite’) in the cult Rocky Horror Picture Show – as King
Arthur; Sara Ramirez – now Dr Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy – as The Lady of the Lake;
David Hyde Pierce – neurotic Dr Niles Crane of Frazier fame – as Sir Robin; and Hank
Azaria – the polyglot voice actor on The Simpsons – as Lancelot.11 Of course, the original
cast included more ‘traditional’ stage actors as well, including Tony Award–winner Michael
McGrath as Patsy, Christopher Sieber as Galahad, Steven Rosen as Bedevere and Christian
Borle as Not Dead Fred (among others). As with Python’s film projects, nearly all of the actors
play multiple roles in each performance.
The role of God – a Gilliam animation voiced by Chapman in Monty Python and the Holy
Grail – was originally dubbed for the stage by Cleese, but in 2013–14, London’s Playhouse
Theatre creatively featured a string of ‘Charity Celebrity Gods’ in their Spamalot performances,
wherein the role of God was played (via ‘visual recording’) serially by Python alums Eric Idle
and Michael Palin, as well as British luminaries Hugh Bonneville, Bradley Walsh, Barbara
Windsor, Simon Callow, Christopher Biggins, Larry Lamb, Brian May, Michael Ball, Gary
Lineker, Tim Walker and Brian Cox.12 Everyone, it seems, wanted in on the act.
Part of this allure – Python worship aside – may reside in the highly British nature of
Spamalot, not only narratively but also generically. According to Idle, Spamalot is essentially
‘panto’ (a.k.a. ‘pantomime’), a seasonally popular eighteenth-century participatory theatre
that can trace its English roots back to the medieval mumming tradition. Millie Taylor, who
explores the many traditional elements of panto in British Pantomime Performance (2007),
summates pantomime as ‘a simple retelling of a well-known story performed by stock
characters, where the framing and sending up of the performance, the play with distance
through the interaction with the audience, the physical comedy and artifice of the music,
dance and spectacular scenic illusion, and the implicit sexuality are equally important to
appealing to a wide audience constituency.’13 Cross-dressing, pantomime animals, audience
participation, recycled/repurposed music, a good fairy, slapstick, a chorus, a rousing (cheery)
song confronting fears and a transformation scene/climax are all typical of panto performances,
and such a structuralist catalogue reads like a to-do list for Idle’s musical. Indeed, as Idle
himself understands it, ‘Panto is an odd hybrid of Vaudeville, Stand-up, Drag show, Variety,
Review, Broadway, Musical and Fairy Tale. It’s full of double-entendres and cheap theatrical
effects.’14 Both Taylor’s formal and Idle’s casually formal definitions work reasonably well for
a show that is full of recycled plotlines and songs, pantomime horses, slapstick, one-liners,
quick costume/identity changes, narrative self-reference, lounge singers, glitzy showstoppers,
chorus girls, legendary heroes, risqué humour, strip teases and at least one metatheatrically
overt ‘large and very expensive forest’.15 Like the Hormel mystery meat from which the play
takes its name, a great deal – ‘a lot,’ really – goes into Spamalot.
ACT THREE, er, FIVE: THE MATTER OF SPAMALOT

The Matter of Britain – the tales of Arthur and his most puissant Knights of the Round Table,
tales that inform British popular legend and reify the United Kingdom’s cultural heritage – is
carried on, in a pythonesque fashion, via Spamalot, promulgating the core heroic legends
of Britain to the far corners of the musical theatre world (including the United States and
Canada).16 And so, as promised in paragraph one, henceforth witness a ‘simple’ genealogy
(or provenance, to cop a fine medieval literary term) of the Broadway musical that became an
international theatrical sensation:
1. Spamalot is informed by a long English tradition of Arthurian legend that can be
traced back as far as 1975 and the cult film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
2. No, wait … first came the BBC’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74).
3. Well, actually, first came the Hollywood movie Camelot (1967).
4. Scratch that – first came the Broadway musical Camelot (1960–63).
5. Which was loosely based on T. H. White’s YA novel, The Once and Future King
(1958).
6. Of course, White was influenced by the highly romanticized Victorian retellings of the
Arthurian cycle, notably Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85).
7. The Victorian poet Tennyson, in turn, relied upon the medieval ‘knight prisoner’ Sir
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for his inspiration (1485).
8. And Malory – as every kuh-niggut knows – collated his seminal Matter of Britain from
the myriad popular French and English Romances (‘as the French book sayeth’) of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
9. Finally (?), the French Book doubtless drew upon the popular tales of Arthur and
Arthuriana that hath been in circulation since the early Middle Ages, including works
such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie, Wace’s Roman de Brut,
and Layamon’s Brut (c. 1138, 1155, and 1200, respectively).
10. And finally (finally!), we’re pretty sure that Stonehenge was somehow involved.17
In any event, the ‘Matter of Spamalot’ has had a long and popular run in popular culture
well before it ever hit Broadway in 2005 AD. Add to this long genesis an über-talented (if
sometimes moistened) diva, her Laker Girls, a one-time transsexual Transylvanian doctor,
some men ‘prancing ’bout in gaudy tights,’ and a great deal of overt metatheatricality, and
voila! A highly successful Broadway musical ‘lovingly ripped off ’ (as the promos note) from
a low-budget British cult film of the 1970s.18
ACT SIX: METATHEATRICAL BROADWAY MEDIEVALISM

Whether initially appearing on the small screen, big screen, album or in live shows, the
presence of previously recorded Python ‘numbers’ in Spamalot serves to viscerally connect
the modern Broadway comedy to the Cult of Python. Most obviously, Spamalot expands
18
upon the once-satiric ‘Knights of the Round Table’ (making it a centrepiece of all that is
attractive – rather than silly – about medieval Broadway) and lifts Neil Innis’ ‘Brave Sir Robin’
on-the-spot balladeering directly from Holy Grail. But it also appropriates lesser-known songs
from the Python canon, including the innocuous travel-jingle ‘Finland’ (from Contractual
Obligation Album) and ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ (the closing number in Life of
Brian). ‘Finland’ is performed ‘accidentally’ (‘Ohh. … England!’) in Spamalot to deflate the
Historian’s pedantic introduction and to undermine the seriousness of the play before it even
gets started (thus serving as a musical version of the metatheatrically bilingual opening credits
in Holy Grail). Meanwhile, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ is presented twice, first
as a rousing anthem and again as a sincerely optimistic send-off to theatre-goers exiting a play
that has ended happily with a slew of marriages (as opposed to the heavy irony with which it
is sung as the titular hero is crucified in Life of Brian).
Such choices were not made lightly. Idle was well aware of the cult status of Monty Python
and the Holy Grail while penning Spamalot. As he noted, ‘You have to maintain true to the
people, the purists who want to see this. There are many out there; it’s a very popular movie.
So there’s no point in straying too far from that. That’s what we’re doing. But at the same
time, you have to recognize this is a stageshow.’19
Yet, if the ‘nostalgia factor’ of reincarnated Python numbers cannot be denied, for
many theatre-goers the most successful songs in the show are the new ones, most of which
lampoon the artifice of musical theatre itself. The highly self-referential ballad, ‘The Song
that Goes Like This’ riffs on Andrew Lloyd Webber duets no less than twice in the show
(dualing duets?); the faux eleven o’clock number, ‘Diva’s Lament (Whatever Happened to
My Part?)’, draws attention to the singer’s role in the performance of the play rather than
the performance of her character in the story; and the rather on-the-nose extravaganza, ‘You
Won’t Succeed on Broadway,’ refers, matter-of-factly, to the unwritten ‘Hebraic Union rules’
of Broadway production.20 And – just as Spamalot is advertised as ‘lovingly ripped off ’ from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail – each of these new songs lovingly rips off their theatrical
sources generically, thematically and ideologically.
Indeed, perhaps the key difference between the musical lampoon in Spamalot and the
medieval satire in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the adverbial ‘lovingly’: Spamalot
occupies its parodic space so effectively that it ultimately valorizes rather than satirizes its
targets, emphatically ending each performance with a rousing sing-along after everyone in
the cast has happily found his/her metaphoric ‘grail’. Significantly, for most of the characters
in this musical comedy, that grail is marriage. Spamalot thus endorses rather than subverts
theatrical convention by conforming to one of the oldest definitions of Comedy: end with a
marriage. Compared to the ‘fuck you’ non-ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (has
there ever been a more confounding end to what is ostensibly a Comedy?), the predictably
happy ending of Spamalot – complete with an inverted version of ‘Always Look On the
Bright Side of Life’ (sans irony) – places the play outside of the anti-authoritarian sphere of
traditional Python and into the realm of ‘pythonesque’ or perhaps even ‘Python-lite’.
Yet, Spamalot remains an effective parody. Just as a good deal of the humour in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail comes from the incongruous juxtaposition of medieval tropes and
modern sensibilities (most famously in the ‘Constitutional Peasants’ scene, during which King
Arthur must explain his divinely appointed leadership to an anachronistically Marxist peasant,
Dennis), Spamalot finds much of its humour in anachronism, metatheatrical self-awareness,
ironic asides, overt theatrical references and the repeated breaking of the fourth wall. Hell, at
one point, Bedevere actually comments, ‘How clever: it [the Grail] went through the fourth
wall.’ It don’t get much more metatheatrical than that, folks.
Significantly, there are two major types of metatheatricality in the play: those calling
attention to medieval tropes and those to theatrical conventions. Broadway-bound
metatheatrical shout-outs persistently remind the audience that they are watching a play that
is always semi-aware that it is a play. Lines such as: ‘Have a drink and a pee, we’ll be back for
act three’; ‘What a dark and extremely expensive forest’; ‘You must put on … a musical!’;
‘You’ve been on Broadway the whole time’; and ‘So you see it’s all a show, happy ending and
all’ underscore the characters’ sporadic awareness of their own theatricality. In turn, such
metatheatrics require audiences to become active spectators, to consider the implications of
theatrical codes and conventions thus yoked to pythonesque humour.
Other asides and breaks approach the metaphysical, especially those that remind the
audience that they are watching medieval characters who are aware that they are medieval
characters, or theatrical figures ... or both. For example, at one point, Arthur asks his knights –
apropos of nothing – ‘Why do they call us the Middle Ages when nothing yet comes after us?’
A brain-teaser, to be sure. Soon after, when God utters the edict unto Arthur to ‘seek the Holy
Grail’, it falls upon Arthur to explain to his rather dense knights – as many a professor has
explained to many a student – ‘Look, it’s not just about a missing mug; it’s a metaphor!’
But perhaps the most timey-wimey bit of metatheatrical genre-mashing occurs when the
recently outed Lancelot turns to his same-sex beloved and says: ‘Just think, Herbert; in
1000 years this will still be controversial.’ Temporal and cultural boundaries may have never
been so succinctly blurred on stage, the medieval never presented as so current as in this one
metatheatrical moment. A sharp contrast to the fecund verisimilitude of Holy Grail (wherein
every temporal mash-up results in conflict or failure) Spamalot suggests that (for better or for
worse) the Middle Ages were not so very different from today.
CURTAIN: KEEP ’EM LAUGHING AS YOU GO

To paraphrase two very nice gentlemen who have recently written a whole book on the
teachings of Monty Python: Spamalot is not angry or anti-authoritarian or even biting satire;
it’s a mild nibbling of the show-hand that feeds it. But whether it is considered Python,
pythonesque or Python-lite, Spamalot is evidence of the enduring appeal of medievalism,
neo-medievalism and medieval tropes – regardless of whether the 2 million theatre-goers (so
far!) have ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, listened to Camelot or read Le Morte
d’Arthur. The fact that Spamalot relies upon an audience at least moderately familiar with
pythonesque humour, theatrical conventions and modern medievalism speaks to the enduring
resonance of all three seemingly disparate fields of popular culture.
Spamalot still echoes – if through a glass darkly – the general anti-authoritarianism of
Monty Python by pointedly recalling the twisted anachronisms of Monty Python and the
Holy Grail; perhaps surprisingly, amidst all the Broadway hoopla, the play even brings to light
20
some new medievalisms, including a Tony Award–winning Lady of the Lake. Yet unlike the
earlier Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which satirizes the ridiculous nature of authority –
whether legendary or otherwise – the ‘silly’ actions of the medieval Arthur and his crew in
Spamalot are either dismissed as immutable (and thus not a particular fault of the Middle
Ages, but eternal human foibles) or actually valorized. In other words, the neo-medieval
milieu of Spamalot has not, in fact, got shit all over it. As a result, the pythonesque England of
932 AD continues to shine on the theatrical stage of 2014, a grail-shaped beacon of hopeful
modern medievalism.
Notes
1. As Arthur slyly notes: ‘What happens in Camelot, stays in Camelot’.
2. Marci Landy (2006), Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
pp. 35 and 30.
3. Jones’s scholarly endeavours have garnered him critical attention among academics for some
time, culminating in the recent collection edited by R. F. Yeager and Toshiyuki Takayima (2010),
The Medieval Python: The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
4. Graham Chapman died of cancer in 1989, although he (and his urn) made a brief return during
the ‘Live at Aspen’ reunion in 1998.
5. For more on Python and excrement, see Daniel T. Kline (2012), ‘Acephalic History: A Battaillian
Reading of Monty Python and the Holy Grail’, in Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (eds), Medieval
Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71–83.
6. Presumably the worst kind of ordure for a British king to endure.
7. For a further – and slightly less silly – analysis of medievalism in Monty Python and the Holy
Grail, see, for example, Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey (eds) (2014), Everything I Ever Needed To
Know About _______* I Learned From Monty Python. New York: Thomas Dunne, pp. 155–84.
8. Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein (November 2007), ‘Got Grail? Monty Python and the
Broadway Stage’. Theatre Survey 48(2): 289–311, 290.
9. Not your present authors, of course. Harrumph harrumph. Anarchy anarchy, yadda yadda, pass
the biscuits.
10. That’s one Tony shy of Camelot, for those keeping score at home.
11. Although it must be noted that – much to the current authors’ delight – Alan Tudyk (of Firefly and
A Knight’s Tale) was an outstanding stand-in for Azaria at the performances we saw.
12. See http://www.spamalotwestend.co.uk/celebrity_gods for additional details.
13. Millie Tyler (2007), British Pantomime Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 15.
14. See Idle’s promotional self-interview at Monty Python’s Daily Llama, ‘The Tale of Spamalot:
Part 3’, http://www.dailyllama.com/news/2004/index.html.
15. Although Finke and Aronstein argue that panto ‘has been thoroughly absorbed by the melting pot
of Broadway’ (310 n. 11), Idle’s generic self-identification – and the play’s nearly point-for-point
appropriation of the British genre’s tropes – remain informative. Spamalot tries, at least, to be
very, very British.
16. Of course, ‘The Matter of Britain’ is but one of the ‘matters’ that mattered in medieval Europe.
There was also ‘The Matter of Rome’ (tales of the last great empire before Britain, before
‘Romani ite domum!’) and ‘The Matter of France’ (sons of silly persons, the lot of them).
17. Although quite honestly, we may have got our British parody groups confused at this point.
18. As the promo caption from theatricalrights.com sells it: ‘Lovingly ripped off from the classic
film comedy MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, SPAMALOT retells the legend of
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and features a bevy of beautiful show girls, not
to mention cows, killer rabbits, and French people. Did we mention the bevy of beautiful show
girls?’
19. From Ernio Hernandez’s 1 March 2004 interview with Idle: ‘Creator Eric Idle Talks of Monty
Python’s Spamalot Quest From Film to Musical’ at http://www.playbill.com/news/article/84680-
Creator-Eric-Idle-Talks-of-Monty-Pythons-Spamalot-Quest-From-Film-to-Musical.
20. That last joke did not translate particularly well when the show travelled overseas and was
subsequently dropped from many European performances. See, for example, the Public Reviews
review of the Mayflower Theatre (Southampton) show, which applauds ‘the rewritten version of
“You Won’t Succeed in Showbiz.” Whereas the London version stuck to the Broadway concept
of you will not get anywhere without the backing of a Jew, we now home in on Simon Cowell
and the “X factor” generation and the fact your musical will not succeed without a TV star.’ See
http://www.thepublicreviews.com/spamalot-mayflower-theatre-southampton/.
chapter two
Medievalisms in
Contemporary Opera
Robert S. Sturges
Opera has a long and important history of medievalism. The major repertory operas com-
posed in the nineteenth century regularly used medieval subjects, literary or historical, as the
basis for their plots, and the late nineteenth-century masters, Verdi and Wagner, in particular,
devoted significant portions of their careers to medievalist opera, culminating in Wagner’s
mature music dramas based on the medieval legends of Parsifal, Tristan and the Ring of the
Nibelungs. Indeed, a chapter on ‘medievalism in contemporary opera’ might focus on con-
temporary stagings of Verdi’s and Wagner’s works and the degree to which they do or do not
attempt to reproduce in visual terms their libretti’s medieval settings. Contemporary opera
has also seen an efflorescence of children’s and fairy-tale operas that employ more or less
medieval settings, enough to deserve an article of their own; one example is Jukka Linkola’s
Finnish Robin Hood, which has been explicitly promoted as family entertainment,1 and an-
other children’s opera on the Robin Hood theme will be discussed at the end of this chapter.
Some recent operas also draw on Asian and Arabic sources from the medieval period; one ex-
ample is Toshio Hosokawa’s Matsukaze, based on the fourteenth-century Japanese Noh play.
Here, however, we focus on a dozen representative contemporary operas that explicitly
draw on historical or literary sources from the western European Middle Ages of the fifth
through the fifteenth centuries. Some of the most distinguished and successful of contemporary
operas (as well as one or two of the most reviled) can be accurately described as ‘medievalist’
in this sense. The term ‘opera’ is here employed flexibly, as contemporary music-drama may
or may not conform to audience expectations of the genre as it is most widely known in its
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manifestations.
Although it lies slightly outside our temporal boundaries, any discussion of medievalism in
contemporary opera must begin with Olivier Messiaen’s only opera, Saint François d’Assise,
Medievalisms in Contemporary Opera 23
because of Messiaen’s influence on subsequent composers. It concerns the post-conversion

spiritual experiences of the thirteenth-century saint, Francis of Assisi. Messiaen (1908–92)
was a major twentieth-century French composer, heavily influenced by his Roman Catholic
faith and by medieval literature even as he adopted avant-garde compositional techniques.
Saint François d’Assise (premiered 1983) draws on all these influences. Messiaen composed
the opera’s libretto himself, adapting thirteenth-century Italian sources associated with
St Francis, including Thomas of Celano’s vita, the anonymous collection of anecdotes known
as the Fioretti, or Little Flowers of St. Francis, and the famous prayer attributed to the saint,
the ‘Canticle of the Sun’, as well as the later Franciscan Reflections on the Stigmata.
The characters represented in the opera are St Francis himself (baritone), several of his
followers, a leper (tenor) and an angel (soprano) who appears to him repeatedly. A choir
regularly comments on the action. Only the angel’s role is composed for a female voice, and
even this character is referred to with masculine pronouns throughout. The libretto is divided
into eight scenes in three acts, each illustrating an aspect of Franciscan spirituality. In the
first act, Francis instructs Brother Leo in humility, sings the ‘Canticle,’ and with the angel’s
encouragement, kisses the leper, thus effecting his cure. In Act Two, the Angel poses theological
questions to the friars while Francis is at prayer, and instructs Francis in the spiritual value of
music; Francis then preaches his famous sermon to the birds. In the third act, Francis receives
the stigmata, dies, and is guided to heaven by the angel and the leper’s spirit.
Rather than focusing on Francis’s conversion from a well-to-do man of the world to a
Christian ascetic and mystic, or on his often-romanticized relationship with St Clare, Messiaen,
like the Fioretti, is concerned above all with the saint’s spiritual progress, and that of his
followers, after the conversion has taken place. At the time of the opera’s premiere, Messiaen
was criticized for lessening the dramatic tension in this way, but remarked, in a reference to
the Fioretti, that he found sin uninteresting, and preferred flowers.2 In its religious didacticism,
the opera thus follows the practice of much medieval religious literature.
Although the source material is medieval, Messiaen’s music is modern and innovative, with
piccolos, glockenspiels, xylophones, etc. imitating bird song in the sermon scene, for example
(a trademark of Messiaen’s). Saint François d’Assise was not produced again for several years
after its premiere, but in the past twenty years it has become one of the few contemporary
operas to gain a place in the repertory, not only with relatively frequent stage productions,
but with four CD recordings and a DVD as well.3
Another major contemporary composer to tackle medieval subject matter in an opera is the
English composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, whose large-scale opera Gawain premiered in its
original form in 1991; a revised version premiered in 1994, and a third version in 1999.
The libretto, by David Harsent, is based on the well-known anonymous Middle English
romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and follows the romance’s plot fairly closely,
though with significant alterations in emphasis. For one example, whereas the Middle English
poem reveals that Morgan le Fay was behind the Green Knight’s challenges to King Arthur’s
court and to Gawain only at the end, the opera presents this information at the beginning and
throughout Act I, in duets between the unseen Morgan (soprano) and the Lady de Hautdesert
(mezzo-soprano). Morgan, who does not speak at all in the romance, also gets the opera’s
final aria. By giving voice to Morgan both early and at the end, the libretto thus functions
24
not only as a romance narrative, but also as an ongoing critique of the Arthurian world of
romance, which is represented from Morgan’s point of view as a realm of boredom and failed
ideals. Gawain’s own flaws are also emphasized at the expense of his heroism.
Birtwistle is well known for his use of mythic and other traditional material, so the Arthurian
legend is a natural fit for him. His music, though clearly modernist, also draws on premodern
concepts of natural and ritual time: ‘it spirals around a basically circular path,’4 for instance,
by repeating the scene of the Green Knight’s entrance and challenge, with variations, and
also by using the repetition of musical phrases to indicate the cyclical passing of the seasons,
as Gawain (baritone) waits out the appointed time for his second encounter with the Green
Knight (bass-baritone). This segment also draws on sixteenth-century motet forms. While
not as widely produced as Saint François d’Assise, Gawain, in its various forms, is a respected
opera, and has been recorded.5
Perhaps the most widely known among more recent medievalist operas by less well-
established composers is Tan Dun’s Marco Polo (1996), with an allusive libretto by Paul
Griffiths, which, like Gawain, concerns a journey conceived in both physical and spiritual
terms. In this case, the journey, taking place both literally and in memory, is that of the
thirteenth-century European traveller Marco Polo from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan
in China. Marco Polo is subtitled ‘an opera within an opera’, as the two journeys play out
in parallel: thus, a meta-opera, ‘The Book of Timespace,’ comments on the physical travels.
The role of Marco Polo is split between two singers who regularly appear together, ‘Marco’
(mezzo-soprano), representing the man of action, and ‘Polo’ (tenor), representing the inner
man of memory and reflection. Also, as in Gawain, the spiritual aspect of the journey is
presented in terms of the changing seasons in ‘The Book of Timespace’.
In some ways, Marco Polo’s voyage from West to East reverses that of the composer. Tan Dun
was born in Hunan province, China, in 1957, during the period of Mao’s Cultural Revolution;
after professional training in Beijing and achieving early fame in China, he won a scholarship
to study at Columbia University in 1986 and has since remained in the United States.
These parallel journeys in multiculturalism are reflected in the opera’s mixture of styles,
which constitute yet another, this time musical, journey. The music in ‘The Book of Timespace’,
largely delivered by a Beijing Opera singer in the recorded versions, is suggestive of Chinese
operatic traditions, while the scenes depicting the physical voyage draw on Western operatic
conventions, supplemented by historical and cultural allusions to other styles. Thus, an
early scene in the medieval Venetian piazza includes choral music reminiscent of medieval
Gregorian plainchant; a ‘desert’ scene includes Indian instrumentation like tablas and a sitar,
etc. All these musical styles mix together with an effect of postmodern bricolage or random
assemblage, which is further emphasized by the use of multiple languages in the libretto.
In addition to the basic narrative of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century travels and the
medieval musical allusions, Marco Polo includes a number of other medievalist elements as
well. For instance, ‘Marco’ and ‘Polo’ are accompanied on their journey by three ‘shadows’
who take on different appearances. The second shadow (soprano) appears at one point as
‘Sheherazada’, the legendary storyteller of the Arabic Middle Ages, while the third shadow
(baritone) appears most often as Dante, who, like Marco Polo himself, lived in Italy in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dante guides the travellers with words adapted from his
Divine Comedy, especially canto I of the Inferno. The commentary on the action in the meta-
opera ‘The Book of Timespace’ is also reminiscent of the role of onstage commentators –
Expositors, Doctors, Prologues and the like – who sometimes appear in medieval European
religious drama. All these elements make for a highly complex and exciting – some would say
merely confused6 – operatic experience. Marco Polo premiered in Munich in 1996 and has
been produced several times; it has been recorded on both CD and DVD.7
The twenty-first century has seen the production of further distinguished new medievalist
operas. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho premiered her first opera, L’Amour de loin (Love
from Afar), in 2000 to great acclaim; she has cited a production of Messiaen’s Saint François
d’Assise as one of her inspirations, along with Debussy’s early twentieth-century (and vaguely
medievalist) masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande. Since its premiere, Saariaho’s opera has, for a
contemporary opera, been widely performed and recorded both on CD and on DVD.8
With a French libretto by the Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf, L’Amour de loin
shares with Marco Polo an interest in journeys, both physical and spiritual, between West
and East. Similar to the plot of Marco Polo, that of L’Amour de loin centres on a historical
figure; in this case, the twelfth-century Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Like many of
the troubadour poets, Jaufré was concerned with the concept of an unattainable love, the
‘love from afar’ of the opera’s title; some of his original poetry on this theme is incorporated
into the libretto. In Maalouf ’s text, which follows Marcabru’s twelfth-century biography of
Jaufré, the poet (tenor) is haunted by the idea of a distant love before he is able to attach the
concept to a living woman; a chorus of his companions initially mocks his idealism. It is only
when an anonymous Pilgrim (mezzo-soprano), who travels back and forth between Europe
and the Middle East, informs him that such a woman really exists, that Jaufré falls in love –
from afar – specifically with her.
The woman in question is Clémence, Countess of the Crusader state of Tripoli (soprano);
the Pilgrim on one of his journeys tells her about Jaufré’s devotion and begins carrying mes-
sages between the two, leading to Jaufré’s desire for a physical meeting, despite the Countess’s
initial preference for their relationship to remain in the ideal realm. Jaufré accompanies the
Pilgrim on a final journey to Tripoli, but falls sick en route; at the end, the lovers are briefly
united and they declare their love before Jaufré dies in Clémence’s arms. Clémence, blaming
herself, decides to enter a convent; the final moments of the opera are Clémence’s prayer, but
it remains unclear whether she is addressing God or Jaufré.
The libretto thus incorporates not only Jaufré’s lyric poetry, but the conventions of
medieval romance as well: the male lover dying in his beloved’s arms after a sea voyage, for
instance, is reminiscent of the Tristan legend, while Clémence’s final, somewhat ambiguous,
decision to become a nun may remind audiences of both medieval fictional characters like
Guinevere and historical ones like Héloïse. At the same time, its thematic concerns are also
contemporary: erotic obsession, for instance, and the distance between East and West, as well
as that between body and spirit.
Saariaho’s music follows suit: although much of the music, especially that composed for
Clémence in her moments of self-doubt, is modernist, dissonant and atonal, that associated
with Jaufré and his poetry is often more traditional, and deliberately evokes the medieval
modal sound-world of the troubadours. Music and libretto thus both successfully combine
26
the modern and the medieval. Critical response has by and large been enthusiastic; L’Amour
de loin received the Grawemeyer Award for Composition, and the CD recording won a
Grammy award.
Two further major contemporary operas based on medieval sources have been widely
reviewed and recently recorded as well: James MacMillan’s The Sacrifice (2005–6), and
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012). The Sacrifice is set in the modern world, but for its
plot and structure draws on ‘Branwen, Daughter of Llyr’, the ‘second branch’ of the medieval
Welsh story collection The Mabinogion; the manuscripts containing these stories date back to
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but the tales themselves are older. What Macmillan
and his librettist, Michael Symmons Roberts, found in the tale of ‘Branwen’ is the age-old
story of ethnic warfare (between the Welsh and Irish in this story) and the attempt to end it by
means of a marriage between members of the opposing parties. Specifically, Symmons Roberts
found ‘the long-standing enmity between the islands of Britain and the island of Ireland, and
the attempt to broker a peace deal by arranging a marriage between members of both sides’.9
The story thus has special relevance to the modern English/Irish conflicts, but the opera also
attempts to find a more universal application.
The libretto eliminates the fantastical aspects of the story in favour of realism. It concerns
a woman, Sian (soprano), the daughter of a General (baritone), who must choose between
her lover and countryman Evan (baritone) and a representative of the enemy, Mal (tenor).
In an attempt to achieve peace, she consistently chooses Mal, but because of Mal’s and
Evan’s mutual distrust, her attempt fails: Evan attacks Mal at the wedding, and though Mal’s
followers give Evan up to the General’s men, Evan returns seven years later and kills Mal’s
and Sian’s young son. Mal and his followers now want revenge, and the General sacrifices
himself by dressing in Evan’s clothes and receiving the bullet meant for Evan.
Despite its modern setting, then, The Sacrifice follows the plot of ‘Branwen’ fairly closely.
In the medieval text, Sian/Branwen is the sister rather than the daughter of the Welsh leader
Bendigeid Vran, and the latter’s sacrifice (his head is removed and magically allows his followers
to forget the tragedy) is one of the fantastic elements replaced by more realistic elements in
the libretto. Evan/Evnissyen is also a sibling rather than a lover, and thus motivated by ethnic
distrust of the Irish rather than romantic love. But the basic plot elements – the marriage as
an attempt to broker peace between rival ethnic groups, the murder of the child, the failure to
achieve peace – remain, as do other references to the medieval setting: the mythical Birds of
Rhiannon are transformed into a girls’ singing group, for instance. Macmillan’s music, too –
more traditional and tuneful than either Tan Dun’s or Kaija Saariaho’s – makes reference to
medieval music, for instance, in the Requiem Mass sung for the dead child at the beginning
of Act III. While warmly received by audiences, Macmillan’s accessible music with its Celtic
tunefulness has found less favour with critics, some of whom consider it merely old-fashioned
and clichéd.10
George Benjamin’s Written on Skin has generated more critical excitement. As a teenager
Benjamin studied with Messiaen, and his musical style reflects Messiaen’s modernism, though
critics have also noted his remarkable originality.11 Although his is not ‘medieval music’ in any
historical sense, according to Benjamin, ‘the idea is to make an orchestral radiance to suggest
the art of illumination.’12 In other words, his goal is to imitate the impact of a medieval
cultural practice, manuscript illumination, by means of a modern musical style. He achieves

this aim with a large orchestra including some unusual instruments like viola da gamba, glass
harmonica and bongos.
The reproduction of the impact of medieval illumination – suggested by the opera’s
title, with its literal reference to manuscript production on animal skins, as well as its erotic
overtones – is important to Written on Skin because the plot of the libretto by Martin Crimp
centres on the art of illumination. It is based on the thirteenth-century troubadour razo (a brief
biography) of Guillem de Cabestanh, also known as ‘The Eaten Heart’. Another version of
the tale appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron.
In Crimp’s text, a man known as the Protector (bass-baritone) hires an illuminator known
as the Boy (countertenor) to produce a deluxe, but conventional, manuscript in praise of the
Protector. His wife Agnès (soprano) is sexually attracted to the Boy, and hopes to influence
him towards a more realistic depiction of women. When he produces a realistic, erotic picture
of Agnès herself, they embark on a love affair. The Protector hears rumours of a ‘secret page’
depicting the affair, but the Boy convinces him that he is sleeping not with Agnès but with her
sister Marie (mezzo-soprano). Agnès, committed to truth-telling, is angry with the Boy for
lying, and insists that he create illuminations that will destroy the Protector’s conventional view
of reality. The Boy completes his work with a series of shocking images depicting the Protector
as he really is, and leaves him with the ‘secret page’, which contains a written description of
the Boy’s affair with Agnès. The Protector murders the Boy and serves his heart to Agnès for
dinner; Agnès defies him, insisting that now she will have the Boy with her forever. She commits
suicide by leaping from the balcony, an image presented onstage as one final illumination.
Benjamin has suggested that this opera ‘inhabits a strange hybrid territory – both 21st-
century and Medieval’.13 The link with the twenty-first century is provided by a framing
device of three angels who comment on the action from a modern perspective, but who also
take on roles within the main narrative, as the Boy, Marie, and Marie’s husband John (tenor).
In the framing scenes, the angels criticize aspects of medieval culture that have bled into the
modern world, primarily the oppression of women and the cruelty of religion. Also distancing
the audience from the medieval action is the characters’ practice of singing in the third person
as they describe their own actions.
Benjamin’s opera has garnered enthusiastic reviews. It has been hailed as a ‘masterpiece’ and
as ‘the best opera written over the last 20 years’.14 It is available on DVD as well as on CD.15
A number of other operas by distinguished composers have yet to be recorded as of this
writing, and are therefore less accessible for most audiences; nevertheless, they deserve
mention in a survey of this sort. The Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli’s Richard III,
with a libretto in English by Ian Burton, is an operatic take on Shakespeare’s play, itself an
exercise in medievalism, harkening back to the end of the Wars of the Roses. Burton’s libretto
follows Shakespeare’s plot and even uses some of Shakespeare’s language, but condenses
the play to a manageable length to be set to music. Thus, the opera consists of two acts:
the first chronicling Richard’s rise to power and the shorter second act his fall and defeat
at the hands of the future Henry VII. Battistelli’s demanding, atonal, postmodernist musical
style has little room for either medieval or Renaissance musical references; indeed, both
Burton and Battistelli are primarily interested in using the medieval Richard (baritone)
28
as ‘a prototype for the 20th-century monster’.16 The opera has been generally well reviewed,
but not yet recorded.17 Battistelli is also the composer of an orchestral work based on another
of Shakespeare’s medievalist plays, Macbeth: ‘Fair Is Foul, Foul Is Fair’ (2009).
Another opera on a medievalist, rather than medieval, text, and one that also made an impact
at its premiere and has been produced a number of times, but has not yet received a recording,
is the American film composer Elliott Goldenthal’s Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big
Bad. Its libretto, by the poet J. D. McClatchy and the premiere’s director (and composer’s
wife) Julie Taymor, tells the story of the monster from Beowulf. However, it is based not on
the Old English epic poem, but on John Gardner’s popular 1971 novel Grendel. It tells the
monster’s story from his own point of view, and much of the novel’s philosophical speculation
is retained in the libretto; the ‘hero’ Beowulf does not appear until near the end. Grendel (bass-
baritone), like Richard III, is here understood as a figure for alienated modern humanity in all
its uncertainty and suspicion of heroism. His main interactions are not with Beowulf, but with
the Dragon (soprano), who encourages Grendel to pursue his own monstrously alienated path.
Goldenthal’s music has been received less enthusiastically than the spectacle provided by the
original production: it is highly eclectic and full of references to various historical styles, but
Goldenthal has been criticized for failing to find his own stylistic voice.18
Even more widely disliked was the Russian composer Vladimir Martynov’s operatic (or in
his terms, anti-operatic) adaptation of Dante’s thirteenth-century combination of lyric poetry,
critical analysis and autobiography, Vita Nuova (2009). The libretto, by Martynov and Edward
Boyakov, attempts to trace the story of the spiritual love that Dante (tenor) experiences with
Beatrice (soprano), a love personified in the character Amor (mezzo-soprano) and endangered
by another Lady or Donna (soprano). At the same time, it uses Dante’s commentary on his
poems about that story to deconstruct the history of opera. Martynov’s aim is to remove
at least some modern influences from classical music and restore it to the purity of Russian
Orthodox Church music. Thus, the libretto was composed in Church Latin and modern
Russian as well as Dante’s medieval Italian, and Martynov’s music references the medieval
liturgy, making use of other styles – Wagnerian, Straussian, etc. – primarily to critique them.
Vita Nuova the (anti-)opera has gained few admirers among music critics, who have found it
‘stupefying’ and ‘inferior’.19
As of this writing, the most recent significant medievalist ‘opera’ is David Lang’s love fail,
which premiered in 2012.20 It is also, of all the works discussed here, the least conventionally
operatic. It was commissioned by the all-female early-music a capella quartet Anonymous 4,
and has been described as a ‘meditation’.21 For the libretto, Lang adapted various medieval
narratives of Tristan and Iseult, by Gottfried von Strassburg, Marie de France and others,
eliminating the characters’ proper names and emphasizing quirky incidents like Iseult’s
interpretation of Tristan’s inscription in Marie’s lay of ‘Chievrefoil’. It also gains a modern
sensibility through the incorporation of several examples of Lydia Davis’s impersonal flash
fiction. Lang’s work might be seen as anti-Wagnerian, focusing not on the transcendent power
of love, but on its everyday failures. Like the libretto, Lang’s music, in the words of one critic,
‘finds common ground between the austere language of medieval music and crunchy, pungent
modern styles’. If in some ways the most modern of the works considered here, love fail might
thus also be seen as the most medieval. The term ‘austere’ provides a clue: Lang has managed
to find common ground between the austerity of medieval church music and the astringency
of modern atonality. The same critic asks whether love fail is indeed an opera: ‘a theatrical
song cycle? A work of musical drama?’22 Most critics have approved of its ambiguities.
We may conclude this survey with three contemporary examples of crossover between
opera and popular culture. In the 2001 film Hannibal, the serial killer Hannibal Lecter, in
disguise as a Dante scholar, attends a performance of an opera based on La Vita nuova, though
quite a different one from Martynov’s. The viewer hears and sees only a short excerpt: a
duet for soprano and tenor based on Dante’s sonnet from the third section of La Vita nuova
beginning ‘A ciascun’alma presa’. This particular sonnet draws on the ‘eaten heart’ motif
familiar from Written on Skin – an apt choice of listening material for Hannibal the Cannibal.
The opera is, in reality, non-existent; Patrick Cassidy composed the song specifically for the
film, and musically it imitates the early operas of the Italian Renaissance.23
The pop singer Rufus Wainwright is the composer of the opera (including its French
libretto) Prima Donna (2012), about an ageing diva; it is loosely based on Maria Callas’s life
in the 1970s. Régine Saint Laurent (soprano) longs to return to her glory days, which involves
confronting her disastrous final performance in an opera entitled Aliénor. This opera-within-
the-opera, part of which is presented in Act II of Prima Donna, concerns the life of Eleanor
of Aquitaine, the twelfth-century queen of France and then of England. Eleanor’s marriage to
Henry II of England is presented as a passionate love story reflecting the real emotional lives
of the performers. The musical style is nineteenth-century operatic. Reviews from classical
music critics were mostly unfavourable, though pop-music critics were more generous in their
assessments.24
Finally, Frank Schwemmer’s comic children’s opera Robin Hood (2007) crosses over with
the genre of video games. Its hero, a boy named Daniel, plays a Robin Hood game which,
when he taps the wrong button, transports him through time into the real Middle Ages, where
he and his friends help Robin Hood fight the evil Sherriff of Nottingham. Daniel’s father
makes the same mistake, and Daniel’s mother must interact with the video game in order to
save her family.25 Robin Hood’s accessible music is designed for wide popular appeal.
These three examples of opera/pop-culture crossover, with film, popular music and
video games, suggest that in the popular imagination, at least – perhaps because of lingering
impressions left by Verdi and Wagner – ‘opera’ means ‘medieval’. They may also show that
medievalism, with its equal appeal to audiences for ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ entertainment,
helps blur the lines between them in contemporary culture.
Notes
1. See the Hollywood-style trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeIPE5T3szQ.
2. See the article by Christopher Dingle in The Guardian, 28 August 2008, available online at http://
www.theguardian.com/music/2008/aug/29/classicalmusicandopera.proms, accessed 7 August 2013.
3. Cybélia CD, cond. Seiji Ozawa, 1983; KRO CD, cond. Kent Nagano, 1986; Orfeo/Naxos CD,
cond. Lothar Zagrosek (partial recording), 1998; Deutsche Grammophon CD, cond. Kent Nagano,
1999; Opus Arte DVD, cond. Ingo Metzmacher, 2009. A large number of video excerpts are
available on YouTube.
30
4. Rhian Samuel (July 1992), ‘Birtwistle’s Gawain: An Essay and a Diary’. Cambridge Opera Journal
4(2): 163–78, at p. 167.
5. Collins Classics CD, cond. Elgar Howarth, 1996.
6. See the review by Susan Nickalls in the Financial Times, 23 May 2013, available online at http://
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/cddd26b0-c3a8-11e2-aa5b-00144feab7de.html#axzz2avzfXqA9,
accessed 3 August 2013.
7. Sony Classical CD, cond. Tan Dun, 1996; Opus Arte DVD, cond. Tan Dun, 2008. Video excerpts
are available on YouTube.
8. Harmonia Mundi CD, cond. Kent Nagano, 2009; Deutsche Grammaphon DVD, cond. Esa-Pekka
Salonen, 2004. Video excerpts are available on YouTube. For the debts to Messiaen and Debussy,
see the booklet accompanying the DVD, pp. 4, 7.
9. Booklet accompanying Chandos CD, cond. Anthony Negus, 2010, p. 12.
10. See the following reviews of the CD: Tim Ashley’s in The Guardian, 11 February 2010, available
online at http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/11/purves-wno-macmillan-the-sacrifice;
Andrew Clark’s in the Financial Times, 16 January 2010, available online at http://www.ft.com/
intl/cms/s/0/0945dc6a-ff49-11de-823b-00144feab49a.html#axzz2b8bWaku9. These may be
supplemented with Rupert Christiansens’s Telegraph review of a live performance, 24 September
2007, available online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/3668125/The-Sacrifice-
Just-a-little-too-slick.html; all accessed 5 August 2013.
11. See the New Yorker review, ‘Illuminated’, by Alex Ross, 25 March 2013, available online at http://
www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/03/25/130325crmu_music_ross, accessed 6 August
2013.
12. George Benjamin, quoted in the Associated Press review by Mike Silverman, 29 July 2013,
available online at http://omg.yahoo.com/news/written-skin-operas-masterpiece-124609917.html,
13. Quoted in booklet accompanying Nimbus CD, cond. George Benjamin, 2013, p. 8.
14. Alex Ross review; review by Renaud Machard, Le Monde, 9 July 2012, quoted at http://www.
medici.tv/#!/george-benjamin-written-on-skin-aix-en-provence-2012, accessed 6 August 2013.
15. Opus Arte DVD, cond. George Benjamin, 2013; reviewed by Matthew Gurewitsch in Opera
News, May 2014, p. 65. Video excerpts are also available on YouTube.
16. George Loomis, review in the New York Times, 9 February 2005, available online at http://www.
nytimes.com/2005/02/08/arts/08iht-lon9.html, accessed 6 August 2013.
17. In addition to Loomis’s review, see that by Roderic Dunnett in the Independent, 16 February
2005, available online at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Opera_World/message/5917, accessed
6 August 2013. Several video excerpts are available on YouTube.
18. See David Finkle’s review for Theatermania, 12 July 2006, available online at http://www.
theatermania.com/new-york-city-theater/reviews/07-2006/grendel_8619.html, accessed 6 August
2013. A somewhat more positive assessment is that of Alex Ross for The New Yorker, 21 August
2006, available online at http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/08/hartke_rorem_go.html, both
19. See the review by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, 1 March 2009, available online
at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/arts/music/02vita.html, and that by Tim Ashley in The
Guardian, 20 February 2009, available online at http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/feb/21/
review-vita-nuova. A somewhat more positive response is the review by Robert Zaller in Broad
Street Review, 3 March 2009, available online at http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/
main/article/vita_nuova_at_alice_tully_hall_new_york; all accessed 6 August 2013. Video excerpts

are available on YouTube.
20. A video excerpt is available at http://vimeo.com/55806874.
21. See Donald Brown’s review in New Haven Review, 30 June 2012, available online at http://www.
newhavenreview.com/index.php/2012/06/remote-happiness-david-langs-love-fail-is-a-meditation-
on-love/, accessed 6 August 2013.
22. Anthony Tommasini’s review in the New York Times, 7 December 2012, available online at http://
www.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/arts/music/david-langs-love-fail-performed-by-anonymous-4.
html?_r=0, accessed 6 August 2013.
23. Hannibal, dir. Ridley Scott, MGM DVD, 2001.
24. Compare the reviews by classical critic Zachary Woolfe in the New York Times, 20 February
2012, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/arts/music/prima-donna-by-rufus-
wainwright-makes-american-debut.html, and of pop critic Melissa Maerz in Entertainment
Weekly, 20 February 2012, available online at http://music-mix.ew.com/2012/02/20/rufus-
wainwright-opera-prima-donna/, both accessed 6 August 2013. Prima Donna has not, at this
writing, been recorded, but a documentary about its production has been released on DVD: Prima
Donna: The Making of an Opera, dir. George Scott, Decca DVD, 2009. Video excerpts from
Prima Donna are available on YouTube.
25. Robin Hood has not been recorded as of this writing, but video excerpts are available on YouTube.
chapter three
Medieval Religious Plays in

England: Afterlives and New
Lives through Performance
Margaret Rogerson
This chapter is concerned with modern productions of religious plays in England, in

particular, with reinventions of the biblical or so-called Creation to Doomsday ‘cycles of
mystery plays’, a form of outdoor devotional theatre that once graced the streets of a number
of medieval communities. These plays consisted of a series of chronologically arranged
episodes from the Old and New Testaments presented on pageant wagons. Portable stages
of this kind travelled in procession through the cities of York and Chester on the feast of
Corpus Christi, transferring to the three-day Whitsun festival in their later years in Chester.1
Modern performance rarely attempts what some scholars would regard as a full cycle, that
is, a presentation of all the biblical episodes contained in the surviving play-texts.2 The cycles
as recorded in the manuscripts are too large for such performance to be the norm and, for
practical reasons, the community and church groups discussed here restrict their efforts to
shortened adaptations of the originals: either extracts from or condensed versions of the
Middle English texts, or hybrid versions that mix and match from more than one of the
medieval sources. The occasion for such performances is usually a local arts or community
festival, a significant departure from the devotional milieu of the Middle Ages, although, as
we will see below, the community of Aldermaston stages a Nativity play based on episodes
from the York cycle during the Christmas season.
In this context we can also take note of newly devised Creation to Doomsday mystery
plays such as the Durham Mysteries and the Gloucester Mysteries as well as a recent vogue
for Passion Plays, whose performance often coincides with Easter, a factor that aligns them
Medieval Religious Plays in England 33
with the medieval tradition of presentation on an important religious occasion. Communities

intending to present Passion Plays in the United Kingdom can look for support and advice
to the Passion Play Trust, a registered charity, whose website makes it clear that there is an
overtly evangelical purpose, as well as devotional and community-building ones, driving such
performances, describing them as drawing attention to ‘the real story of Easter’ empowering
it ‘to speak again to new audiences in new contexts’:
Passion plays use theatre to bring the words of the Gospel to life in new, often vivid
and startling, ways. They show how the message of second chances, forgiveness and new
opportunities has the potential to speak life and hope into communities struggling with
poverty, crime, addiction or hopelessness and boredom.3
In January 2014 the Passion Play Trust hosted its third annual conference, calling interested
persons together from across the United Kingdom to listen to the experiences of others
presenting Passion Plays and other biblical dramas, to watch performances, and to talk among
themselves. The power of networking should not be underestimated. It can provoke healthy
competition and enthusiasm and could well strengthen the modern continuation of this
theatrical tradition.
Tony Jasper and Kenneth Pickering have lamented that modern productions of medieval
plays ‘have often been less a means of evangelism and more an exercise in social cohesion’
(Jasper et al. 2010, p. 202). The modern Passion Plays in the United Kingdom, then, offer
a counter to this complaint. So too do Passion Plays elsewhere around the world, some of
which, such as The Elijah Factor, performed in Disney, Oklahoma, go so far as to include altar
calls, ‘a chance for audience members to step forward and “accept” Jesus, during or right after
the performance’ (Chansky 2006, p. 126).4 In this tendency towards evangelism, Passion Plays
do not replicate the medieval mysteries, which were more a means of expressing the piety of
the communities that performed them. As Clifford Davidson puts it, the medieval plays were
‘a devotional experience for … spiritual benefit … indeed, acts of mercy’ (Davidson 2013,
p. 167), the means by which, according to the Doomsday episodes from the cycles, salvation
was to be achieved by the medieval Christian.
Modern Passion Plays in the United Kingdom sometimes refer to the seventeenth-century
German Passion Play from the village of Oberammergau as part of their ancestry. This is
understandable because the Oberammergau play, devised in 1634 and performed every
ten years thereafter in thanksgiving for delivery from the plague, has a high profile. It was
cancelled during the Second World War, but reopened in 1950, remaining a magnet for
religious tourism on the occasion of its performance every decade, and providing a healthy
living from visitors to the village in the intervening years.5 But although modern English
Passion Plays are not necessarily inspired by or based on the English Creation to Doomsday
plays from the distant past, they offer food for thought to those scholars whose business it is
to investigate the drama of pre-Shakespearean England.
In what follows here I focus on two issues. The first of these is the notion of community
identity forged by the performance of biblical plays, then and now. Scholars claim that this is
true of the period of the initial flowering of the mysteries before the suppression of religious
34
theatre in England by royal decree in the late sixteenth century. The same claim can be made for
twenty-first century enterprises in which citizens of towns such as Winchester mount biblical
plays, in their case a Passion Play, that perform local identity ‘using the corporate achievement
of the plays, together with their content’, to proclaim their town ‘as a commercially vibrant,
regional centre of Christian ideology, and as a unified and vigorous community’ (McGavin
2010, p. 202).
The status of the biblical play as a community event in the modern world can, indeed,
be termed an ‘afterlife’ for the medieval model, but I suggest below as the second issue for
discussion, that modern productions can also engender a ‘new life’ of a somewhat different
kind for this form of theatre. It is my contention that performance can do more than replicate
aspects of the original lives of medieval English plays; it can also encourage scholars to revisit
research questions that have remained unsolved and even some that appear to have been
solved already. In other words, performance can inject new life into academic discourse.
I have considered one example of performance-inspired research elsewhere (Rogerson
2009, pp. 197–204), arguing that the timing of modern wagon productions of selected
mystery plays in York can help to interpret a baffling comment recorded in 1476 that the York
players were allowed to perform ‘but twice’. Modern production suggests that we should
take this reference literally, inferring that each episode was, for practical or logistic reasons,
presented at only two of the twelve ‘stations’, positions outside ecclesiastical or public
buildings or the houses of the elite that were traditionally authorized as places for the wagons
to stop for performance.6 Alexandra Johnston has commented similarly on the logistics of
medieval theatre solved through performance of the morality play, the Castle of Perseverance,
often assumed to be a ‘travelling play’, a view shown through modern production to be
‘unsustainable’ (Johnston 2008, p. 11). I suggest below that modern production might offer
insights into how the medieval mysteries came to adopt the Creation to Doomsday shape as
recorded in the extant manuscripts.
Any consideration of the afterlife of medieval religious theatre in England will, inevitably,
pay homage to the great Creation to Doomsday mystery play cycles of York and Chester,
and the current chapter is no exception. The reasons for this are simple: York and Chester
loom large because of the survival of their virtually complete medieval texts and, moreover,
these cities initially led the way in the tradition of modern production and continue to
do so.
After a run of more than a hundred and fifty years, the medieval theatre of the English
mysteries went dark in the late sixteenth century when political and religious upheavals saw
the curtailment of all religious plays, both Catholic and Protestant, simply because the deity
and other sacred figures were included in their list of dramatis personae. The York plays
are known to have existed in some form in 1377 and to have had their last performance in
1569, while the Chester plays are first recorded in 1421 and were last performed in 1575
(Beadle and Fletcher 2008, pp. xix–xxi). It was not until the second half of the twentieth
century that these Christian dramas sidestepped the regulations that had kept them from
public view for almost 400 years.7 From the first major revivals of the York and Chester
plays in their places of origin at the 1951 Festival of Britain onwards, modern productions
in these cities have proven themselves to be sterling examples of community theatre,
bringing together a cross section of the local population, although not quite as they did in
the Middle Ages, when the craft and trading guilds were responsible for presenting them.
This statement must be qualified in the case of York, where, since 1998, the local guilds that
see themselves as descendants of the medieval playmakers have been increasingly involved
in productions that follow the original practice of performing outdoors on wagon stages
and free of charge. The York guilds took over responsibility for the wagon productions in
2002 and have settled into a four-yearly pattern of performance, the most recent being in
July 2014.8
In this chapter I am concerned with productions in 2012 (York) and 2013 (Chester), in
particular with ways in which these two very different presentations performed community
identity, in the case of York, a community that went beyond the city to encompass a more
universal frame of reference, and in the case of Chester, one that was more distinctly local.
Scholars have long assumed that both medieval texts on which these productions were based
refer to the city in which they were originally performed. In York, topographical reference
to the ‘towre-begon towne’ (l. 5) of the Conspiracy episode, for example, has been taken
as gesturing towards the dramatically imagined Jerusalem and, simultaneously, the real-life
performance space, York. The medieval city of York, like Jerusalem in biblical times, was
a town of many towers, those of the churches along the route of the plays as well as the
towers of the city walls, all of which were part of the backdrop of the everyday life of the
community. Local referencing is even more marked in the Chester cycle, where the medieval-
style midwives of the Nativity episode belong pointedly to ‘this cittye’ (ll. 473, 479, 488),
as well as to Bethlehem.9 In the Harrowing of Hell episode, an alewife, who is taken off to
Satan’s lair at the end of the Chester play, serves as an example to the tavern keepers and
tapsters ‘of this cittye’ (l. 301) of the ultimate fate of those who engage in dishonest dealings
in their trade.
The 2013 production of the Chester Mystery Plays in the nave of the Cathedral – a
rollicking modern-dress musical adaptation of the original text – extended this referencing to
the local community in a number of ways. When Christ entered ‘Jerusalem’ with his disciples,
for example, he did so electronically on the large screens placed on either side of the set. He
rode on a donkey through the streets of modern Chester, past the Eastgate clock, a favourite
photo-opportunity for twenty-first-century tourists, and also, authentically, on the original
medieval performance route. He performed his healing miracles for actors representing the
disabled community of Jerusalem, simultaneously signalling the biblical narrative and the
continuing plight of the disabled in contemporary society. The joy of the biblical inhabitants
of Jerusalem as they received the Saviour was mirrored dramatically in modern Chester,
captured on the big screen as the camera focused on an unscripted performance by a non-cast
member, the local street preacher, Thembi (see Figure 1).
Thembi, whose African name means ‘Faith’ or ‘Hope’, is a familiar figure in Chester,
handing out leaflets near the Cross and offering his message to the passing crowd each day.10
He doggedly performs his faith on the streets, often ignored or avoided by passers-by, but
appreciated by others for his friendliness and his obvious delight in his spiritual conviction.
His appearance in the play straddled the then and now of the Mystery Plays, the biblical past
and Cestrian present.
36
In the Antichrist episode the audience was treated to one of the jauntiest tunes in the
show, ‘It’s Race Day in Chester’. The cast belted out the song and the devil appeared in the
guise of a bookmaker, tempting the crowds with the hope of easy money. He towered over
them from his stand, a ladder (see Figure 2), recalling how he took over God’s throne, also
a ladder, in the Fall of Lucifer episode, where he was dressed as a member of the Painters’
guild (see Figure 3).11 This was highly appropriate in the context of the Antichrist story, when
another false god attempted to usurp the place of the deity and impersonate Jesus at the
Second Coming.
At the end of the performance, following the division of the souls at Doomsday, the
Chester Jesus passed his mantle to a homeless couple, who had been present throughout the
play, infiltrating a number of the episodes and making an almost subliminal impression on
the audience. Now they came into their own, with the homeless man wrapping Jesus’ mantle
around the shoulders of the woman and moving out towards the audience as the show ended
(see Figure 4).
There was more than a point about the problem of homelessness in Chester in this moment.
It universalized the frame of reference, emphasizing the need for compassion and generosity
in the community at large, and encompassing Christians, those of other faiths, and those of no
faith at all beyond a belief in the value of humanity. At the same time, for two reasons, it was
a very medieval touch. In the original Doomsday play from Chester, as in the corresponding
York play, the souls of the dead are judged according to their attention, or lack of attention, to
the Acts of Mercy listed in Matthew 25, that is, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty,
clothing the naked, housing the homeless and visiting those who are sick or imprisoned.
Performing the Acts of Mercy towards the unfortunate was, figuratively, to perform them
towards Jesus, and those who did so were worthy of the kingdom of Heaven. In medieval
Figure 1: The street preacher, Thembi, looks on with wonder as Christ arrives in his city.
Entry into Jerusalem episode on the big screen.
Photograph © Chester Mystery Plays Ltd (2013 production) and Neil Kendall, Photographer.
Figure 2: Lucifer (Francis Tucker) as bookmaker at the Chester Races.

Antichrist episode.
thought, the poor remain as Jesus’ representatives on earth, and so they were in the 2013
mystery play production in Chester, with the homeless couple stepping forward into the
future with the audience, both the people of Chester and those who came from further afield.
This re-contextualization of the play for the modern audience was a nod towards the original
text of the Doomsday episode from Chester, where the four evangelists, who carried on Jesus’
work by spreading the Word, come forward to remind the medieval audience of the lesson
about the doom that awaited them all, confirming the need to perform the Acts of Mercy in
the hope of achieving Heaven.
The York production in 2012 took the mystery plays back to the performance space in the
Museum Gardens where the first modern revival was staged in 1951. Not since 1988 had the
iconic backdrop of the ruined arches of St Mary’s Abbey charmed audiences for the plays
with its antique splendour. For some in York, and for some visitors, this restored the plays to
38
Figure 3: Lucifer (Francis Tucker) proclaims himself ruler of the angels.
Fall of Lucifer episode.
their proper home, although the site, sequestered from the streets and only open to the paying
public, was certainly not the home of the original mysteries (Rogerson 2009, pp. 43–4).
In 2012 as in 1951, however, the Museum Gardens meant much to the local people and
signposted their community for them and those who came as tourists just as the streetscape
of the medieval performance route may have done for those who gathered along it in the
original heyday of the cycle. Like Chester, with its homeless couple, York made a broader
community reference. This was achieved largely through the interpolation of a number of
unscripted scenes involving crowds, including the one illustrated in Figure 5, where refugees
are driven across the stage by armed soldiers, a scene that culminated in the frightening
separation of the women and girls from the men and boys, recalling some of the atrocities
of the Second World War as well as more recent and ongoing acts of inhumanity.12 This
scene, like the other interpolations in York, toned in with the scripted action, commenting
Figure 4: Homeless Man (Michael Davies) and Homeless Woman (Rosamond Peet).
Doomsday episode.
in this case on the Flight into Egypt and Slaughter of the Innocents episodes. The message
of the mystery plays, then and now, seems to be that the problems highlighted by the
narrative belong not just to those who watch and perform the plays, but to humankind in
general.
In York there have been two formats for mystery plays since 1951: large-scale, single-
cast condensed adaptations of the original text performed in a fixed-place setting (in the
Museum Gardens, the Theatre Royal and the Minster) a clear departure from the medieval
episodic, multi-cast productions on wagons; and smaller-scale wagon productions that also
depart from the original by reducing the number of episodes to be performed and of the
number and location of places in which the performances take place. Following the success of
the 2012 production, York is now hoping to present its plays in the Museum Gardens every
four years.
40
Figure 5: Interpolated scene after the Slaughter of the Innocents episode.
Dress rehearsal of the Potters’s cast.
Photograph © Douglas Skilbek.
The York productions in the gardens in the 1950s and particularly the work of their director,
E. Martin Browne, then director of the British Drama League, has had a marked and
continuing impact on modern performance traditions. In December 2013 the Berkshire
village of Aldermaston, for example, staged its fifty-seventh annual York Nativity Play in
the parish church of St Mary the Virgin as part of its celebration of Christmas. This play,
directed throughout its history, which began in 1957, by Pat Eastop, uses Browne’s 1932
edition of plays from the medieval York Nativity sequence. It is performed by the people
of Aldermaston with assistance from the surrounding villages, free of charge apart from
a collection for the restoration of the church and The Children’s Society,13 a fund-raising
tradition that can be traced back to the parish drama of the Middle Ages.14
In Chester the norm for modern community performance of its medieval plays has been
a fixed-place, large-scale production every five years (in the Cathedral Refectory, on the
Cathedral Green, in a Circus Tent, and in the nave of the Cathedral). Since the 1970s, both
the York and Chester plays have been the subject of academic experimentation in their home
cities and, notably, also in Leeds and Toronto.15 These various forms of modern production
have, in more recent years, become widely accessible to scholars and members of an interested
general public through the internet and in other electronic formats.
Both the York and Chester plays are available in modern spelling versions, by Richard
Beadle and Pamela King (1984) for York, and by David Mills (1992) for Chester, thus offering
theatre practitioners a short cut to the medieval originals. Further, the York and Chester plays
are supported by additional information that can be used by both practitioners and scholars
to inform their interpretation of the recorded texts as performance scripts. This contextual
material is in the form a large corpus of documentation related to their original organization,
financing and performance, and is accessible in print and online through the Records of
Early English Drama project. In the case of York, a great deal of medieval religious art and
architecture still exists locally to suggest a visual context for the plays as they were performed
on Corpus Christi Day, a backdrop of sacred imagery to enhance the devotional aspect of the
undertaking as well as its theatricality.16
Other English cities have fared less well, particularly in the area of play-text survival.
Coventry has records of a large-scale wagon production by the local guilds, but only two
texts, a Nativity play and a Passion play, remain from what may have been a New Testament
‘Annunciation to Doomsday’ cycle (King et al. 2000, p. 9). Thus, when Coventry performs
a cycle, it adds to its own stock by borrowing from other cycles and inventing new material.
But, despite the modest remains from the medieval period, the Coventry plays have been
presented on a fairly regular basis and have also inspired a vibrant community arts festival
held each year during the summer since 2010, the Coventry Mysteries Week, ‘devised around
a theme common to all communities and faiths’ that ‘draws together the people of the City in
a shared celebration of the arts’,17 a development that mirrors the expression of community
identity and cohesion through performance of the original mystery plays.
Newcastle has a single extant medieval play on the Flood, but the records suggest a more
extensive Old Testament sequence as well as plays covering the Passion and The Burial of
the Virgin (Davis 1970, p. xliii). Norwich also has a single play of the Expulsion of Adam
and Eve surviving from what appears to have been a Creation to Descent of the Holy Spirit
presentation (Davis 1970, pp. xxix–xxx). To my knowledge neither Newcastle nor Norwich
has attempted to build a modern performance around these fragments.18 Recent mystery
play productions in Norwich have been content with borrowing plays recorded in the late-
fifteenth-century N. Town manuscript, a collection of plays from East Anglia to be discussed
further below.19
The diocese of Lichfield is the home of the ‘Shrewsbury Fragments’, a ‘curious mixture …
of Latin liturgical presentations’ and cycle-style vernacular material, including some sections
that ‘strongly resemble parts of the York Shepherds’’ play (Coldewey 2008, p. 221). The city
of Lichfield has presented its own set of mystery plays as a ‘community-based arts project’
every three years since 1994. The script is the work of Robert Leach, who conceives of
the text as falling into three parts, Old Testament, Nativity and Passion, with Doomsday as
an epilogue. To fashion a Creation to Doomsday look-alike text, Leach has augmented the
Shrewsbury Fragments with material from other medieval sources, principally from York and
Chester, and from N. Town and the Towneley manuscript (often referred to as Wakefield),
also discussed further below.
Lichfield at least has its ‘fragments’, but a number of other medieval full-cycle texts that
can be identified through extant records have been lost in their entirety, such as the Creation
to Doomsday play performed in the Yorkshire port of Beverley (Leach 1901, pp. 218–19).20
The people of modern Beverley have offset this loss with a Passion Play performed, like
the medieval mysteries, free of charge in the streets in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012, a new
tradition that sees the combined local churches presenting the events of the Easter story.21 This
play does not owe its inspiration to the town’s lost mystery plays, although the authors of the
Beverley Passion website are aware of them. It stems, rather, from a modern Easter ceremony
42
in which a cross is carried in procession through the town to the market cross, where a
short service is held. Scholars can perhaps reflect on the connection between processional
activity and Passion Plays in modern Beverley in their thinking about relationships between
the Corpus Christi procession and Corpus Christi play in medieval York. Until 1476 the
procession and play were held in York on the same day (Johnston 1973–4, pp. 58–9),
indicating that they were complementary events. Does the Beverley experience suggest that
there is room to explore the possibility that the medieval York procession, in which the sacred
host was carried through the streets and which culminated in a service, could have directly
inspired the mystery plays?22
Durham, like Beverley, can also boast of a lost Corpus Christi play once performed by
the guildsmen of the local community, although no text survives and its scope is unknown.23
Undeterred, Durham hosted a newly written Creation to Harrowing of Hell play in 2010, its
participants conscious of their association with the medieval tradition of the mysteries and
also of their close association with Durham and the local community.24 These new mysteries,
ten in all, were written by a number of authors in the manner of the medieval models, and
the community performers were from different groups, also in the manner of the guild
performance groups in medieval York and Chester. Unconfirmed plans are for a five-yearly
performance pattern to be established.25
Many English cities have no trace whatsoever of a medieval biblical play, but some have
joined the modern mystery players nonetheless. Gloucester, for example, formed a Company
of Friends from professional and amateur actors across Gloucestershire to present the
Gloucester Mystery Plays, based on the medieval N. Town plays, in the naves of Gloucester
and Worcester Cathedrals (2012–13). The plays were developed as two separate ‘cycles’,
the ‘Advent Cycle’, which included episodes from the Fall of Lucifer to the Death of Herod,
and the ‘Easter Cycle’, from the Life of Christ episodes to Doomsday.26 Gloucester, like the
presenters of the modern Passion Plays, went back to the Middle Ages by attaching its two
cycles to religious festivals.
Gloucester’s choice of N. Town as the source for its play is not new: Lincoln adopted
this text as its own many years ago. Once mistakenly thought by scholars to have originated
in Lincoln (Fletcher 2008, p. 184), it was cemented into the twentieth-century community
largely through the work of Keith Ramsay, who directed productions at Lincoln Cathedral
from 1978 to 2000 (Ramsay 2008). It continues on its four-yearly schedule, the last production
being in 2012.
Lincoln’s appropriation of N. Town is paralleled to some extent by Wakefield’s claims on
the Towneley plays. Once firmly thought by scholars to belong to the town of Wakefield, the
provenance of these plays is now regarded as uncertain.27 Towneley has, however, enjoyed a
rich post-medieval performance life,28 and at the time of writing, a production by the Theatre
Royal Wakefield is being planned for performance in Wakefield Cathedral in the summer
of 2015.
Johnston has noted that ‘there is a growing tendency to regard’ the English Creation to
Doomsday cycles ‘as exceptions rather than the norm’ in the Middle Ages (Johnston 2008,
p. 8). Nevertheless, the cycle format has a considerable allure for modern performers of
biblical plays. As has been outlined above, where there is no cycle or only a partial one,
full-cycle look-alike texts have come into being, thus giving the Creation to Doomsday
format credibility as a norm outside its own time. But two such look-alike texts, N. Town
and Towneley, have survived from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicating that
the form had an allure in the Middle Ages as well.29 These two look-alikes may have been
compiled in imitation of existing play texts, an indication of their popularity if not of the
widespread practice of performance of such plays.
In his study of the N. Town manuscript, Peter Meredith identifies a Mary Play and a two-
part Passion Play, the combination of which presents ‘a remarkably comprehensive coverage
of the history of mankind from Creation to Doomsday, but one which theatrically veers
uneasily between different styles of presentation’ (Meredith 1990, p. 2). He argues that it is
‘a manuscript for lending out’ (Meredith 1990, p. 3) and that its users extracted shorter plays
to suit their particular performance needs rather than attempting a complete cycle. In a more
recent study, Penny Granger proposes that while ‘the separate parts’ of the manuscript were
written for performance ‘the extant text … could have been produced for a private reader,
perhaps for devotional purposes’ (Granger 2009, p. 8). The second medieval look-alike cycle,
Towneley, named after ‘the first-known owners’ of the manuscript (Stevens et al. 1994, p. xv),
appears, in the view of Garrett Epp, to have been a compilation from a number of sources
‘arranged chronologically as a cycle for a reader’ (Epp 2013a, p. 94). In the medieval period,
the cycle form, it seems, enjoyed both a literary and, in some cases as illustrated by the York
and Chester cycles, a theatrical integrity.
At the end of his discussion of modern productions of medieval plays, John McKinnell
asks, ‘what have we learned?’ (McKinnell 2008, p. 320). One factor that emerges for me,
particularly in considering the look-alike texts, both medieval and modern, is the possibility of
accretion of parts to make up a Creation to Doomsday cycle. The recent Gloucester Mystery
Plays, for example, were compiled as two plays that together form a complete cycle, and in the
late Middle Ages, both N. Town and Towneley were shaped by combining pre-existing texts.
As another example of the accretion of texts in this genre, we can consider Tony Harrison’s
The Mysteries for the National Theatre.30 This enterprise began with The Passion performed
on Easter Saturday in 1977; next came The Nativity (1981) and Doomsday (1984); with
the combined Mysteries first performed in 1985. Like the fifteenth-century compilers of the
medieval look-alikes, Harrison would have had the Creation to Doomsday pattern in mind;
indeed he based his scripts largely on the York cycle, taking some material from Chester,
Towneley and N. Town. Does this offer scholars a way to rethink the process by which
the mystery plays of York and Chester might have come into being, not in a ‘big bang’ as
suggested by Barrie Dobson for York (Dobson 1997) but as an accretion over time? Could
they have begun with a single play that gradually accreted other plays to consolidate finally
into the pattern of Creation to Doomsday, which Pamela King has argued was based on the
liturgy (King 2006)? A further question might be whether or not the modern Passion Plays
might accrue other material in future iterations and assume a different shape.
At the Colloquium of La Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval (SITM)
in 2013, Epp spoke of the value of performance in his teaching of medieval theatre, a process
whereby undergraduates engage in ‘productions of some biblical plays’ and frequently
develop new insights ‘that might shame senior drama scholars and theatre practitioners alike’
44
(Epp 2013b, p. 1).This is indeed impressive, but Epp also points out that many of his students
take his course because ‘they are looking to fulfil a period requirement for their degree’ not
because they are fashioning themselves as medieval specialists (Epp 2013b, p. 2). In this he is
aligned with concerns expressed by the editors of the 2013 Yearbook of English Studies about
the diminishing opportunities available at the time of writing for teaching medieval literature,
and particularly drama, in the university sector (King et al. 2013, p. 8). Indeed, in the early
decades of the twenty-first century, this is a worldwide trend, one that could, potentially, have
a negative impact on the future of scholarship in the field, not only because of a failure to
expose at least one if not more generations of students to the fascinations and complexities of
English theatre before Shakespeare, but also because it could encourage early career scholars
to direct their research energies, along with their teaching, elsewhere.
But all is not lost by any means, for, as the Yearbook editors also state, modern performance
renders ‘medieval plays widely available’ (King et al. 2013, p. 9). This access to performance
offers hope of further breakthroughs in thinking about biblical plays for committed researchers
and, potentially, for those, like Epp’s students, without prior background in medieval theatre
scholarship, who take part as audience or presenters. There is, indeed, room for hope that
community performances represent not just ‘afterlives’ for medieval religious drama in the
sense of adaptations for the modern world, but also, potentially, ‘new lives’ for the scholarly
discipline.31
Notes
1. Quotations from medieval texts taken from R. Beadle (ed.) (2009), The York Plays, vol. I. Oxford:
Oxford University Press and R. M. Luminasky and D. Mills (eds) (1974), The Chester Mystery
Cycle, vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. It is not possible to provide a comprehensive list of performances here; for further information
see J. McKinnell (2008), ‘Modern productions of medieval English drama’, in R. Beadle
and A. J. Fletcher (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 287–325, K. Normington (2007), Modern Mysteries:
Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas. Cambridge. D. S. Brewer and T.
Jasper and K. Pickering (2010), Jesus Centre Stage: Theatre, Radio, Church, Television. Godalming,
Surrey: Highland Books. To my knowledge the only instances of strictly full-cycle productions have
been at the University of Toronto; for discussion of recent productions there see, for the York cycle
(1998), directors’ notes in Early Theatre 3 (2000), and for the Chester cycle (2010), review essays
in Early Theatre 13.2 (2010).
3. http://passion-plays.co.uk/about/; for a list of twenty-six Passion Plays performed in the UK in 2014
see http://passion-plays.co.uk/passion-plays-2014/, viewed 24 June 2014.
4. For an in-depth study of American evangelical theatre see J. Stevenson (2013), Sensational
Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
5. For a full discussion of Oberammergau see J. Shapiro (2000), Oberammergau: The Troubling Story
of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play. New York: Pantheon.
6. For maps showing locations of the performance ‘stations’, see R. Beadle (ed.) (2013), The York
Plays, vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. xvi, and M. Rogerson (2009), Playing a Part in
History: The York Mysteries 1951-2006. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 2.
7. For discussion of the legal issues relating to these plays see O. Horner (2001), ‘The Law that
Never Was: A Review of Theatrical Censorship in Britain’. Medieval English Theatre, 23: 34–96,
and also (2002), ‘“The Law that Never Was” – A Codicil: The case of The Just Vengeance’.
Medieval English Theatre, 24: 104–15. The story of this extraordinary renaissance at Festival of
Britain in 1951 has been told elsewhere; see, for example, D. Mills (1998), Recycling the Cycle:
The City of Chester and its Whitsun Plays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Chester, and
Rogerson (2009) for York.
8. The guilds have also organized a number of conferences in which academics and community
theatre practitioners have come together to share their experiences in exploring the local plays.
The first was in 2007 and a fourth is in the early stages of planning for 2015. In 2012 the guilds
held a symposium to which they invited representatives of other mystery play-performing
communities in the United Kingdom.
9. For a detailed discussion of the Chester midwives, see D. Ryan (2003), ‘Playing the midwife’s part
in the English Nativity plays’. Review of English Studies, 54: 435–48.
10. Thembi can be seen in a number of U-Tube clips, see, for example, ‘Chester Street Characters:
The Preacher’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjcxZm9Badg, and ‘Busker Floored by Street
Preacher’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqJY-7ToZ14, viewed 24 June 2014. The ‘busker’
is Phil Gray, whose Candlelight Olympic Peace Tour followed the route of the Olympic Torch
Relay in 2012. In his encounter with Gray, Thembi reads the story of Lazarus and the rich man
from Lk. 16. 22–31, emphasizing that it is the poor who go to heaven, a message closely aligned
to that of the Chester Mystery Plays in 2013.
11. In the medieval cycle the Painters were responsible for the Shepherds’ episode.
12. See M. Rogerson (2013), ‘Medieval mystery plays in the modern world: A question of relevance?’
Yearbook of English Studies, 43: 343–66, 357–66 for further commentary on this production.
13. See further information on the following websites, viewed 24 June 2014: http://www.
mortimervillage.org.uk/assets/AldermastonNativityPlay/NativityPlayDetails2013.pdf, http://www.
aldermaston.co.uk/images/stories/nativity.pdf, http://www.getreading.co.uk/whats-on/theatre/
stage-set-aldermastons-annual-york-6249295.
14. For discussion of parish drama, see Johnston, A. F. (1996), ‘Introduction’, in A. F. Johnston and
W. Hüsken (eds), English Parish Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 7–14.
15. For discussion of academic experiments in York, Chester and Leeds, see J. Oakshott, (2013),
‘The fortune of wheels: Pageant staging rediscovered’. Yearbook of English Studies, 43: 359–65.
For Toronto, see above note 2 and A. F. Johnston (1978), ‘The York Cycle: 1977’. University of
Toronto Quarterly, 48(1): 1–9.
16. See further C. Davidson, with a contribution in collaboration with Sheila White (2013),
Corpus Christi Plays at York: A Context for Religious Drama. New York: AMS Press, especially
pp. 33–86.
17. http://www.coventrymysteries.com/mysteries-week, viewed 24 June 2014. For discussion of
modern productions of the Coventry plays see Normington (2007, pp. 106–18).
18. A filmed performance of the Newcastle Flood play (2009) by students from the University of
Newcastle is available in two parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MOgN3P0BdE, and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvGqFFfXcw8, viewed 24 June 2014.
19. For a description of the manuscript see P. Meredith (ed.) (1990), The Passion Play from The
N. Town Manuscript. London: Longman, pp. 1–5. Students from the Norwich Young People’s
Theatre performed the N. Town Noah play at Norwich Cathedral in 2005, http://www.bbc.
co.uk/norfolk/content/articles/2005/05/26/faith_medieval_mysteries_feature.shtml, viewed
24 June 2014; and in 2013 students from the University of East Anglia presented extracts from
46
N. Town with additional material based on the work of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich,
http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/medieval_east_anglian_mystery_plays_1_732539, viewed
24 June 2014.
20. For discussion of the Beverley play see D. Wyatt (2008), ‘The untimely disappearance of the
Beverley cycle: What the records can and can’t tell us’. Medieval English Theatre, 30: 26–38.
21. For detail see http://www.beverleypassion.org/, viewed 24 June 2014.
22. See further Goldberg (2012), ‘From tableaux to text: The York Corpus Christi Play ca. 1378-
1428’. Viator, 43(2): 247–76 for speculation that the York play developed from Passion tableaux
associated with the Corpus Christi procession.
23. The Records of Early English Drama project is currently investigating the Durham records, http://
www.dur.ac.uk/reed.ne/?page_id=10, viewed 24 June 2014. See also J. J. Anderson (1981), ‘The
Durham Corpus Christi play’. Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 2: 1–3. A ‘Durham
Prologue’ exists but it is not associated with performance in Durham and appears to have been
intended for a play of St Theophilus (D. Grantley (2008), ‘Saints and miracles’, in R. Beadle and
A. Fletcher (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 263–86, p. 264, rather than a mystery play cycle. Similarly, an
Abraham and Isaac play is included in a manuscript compiled at Northampton but may not have
been ‘composed or acted there’ (N. Davis (ed.) (1970), Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, p. iii).
24. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/wear/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/
newsid_8700000/8700955.stm, viewed 24 June 2014.
25. See further review by Peter Lathan, http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/durhammysteries-
rev, viewed 24 June 2014.
26. See http://www.gloucestercathedral.org.uk/uploads/File/137319%20GMP%20Leaflet.pdf and
http://www.gmpfestival.com, viewed 24 June 2014.
27. For further discussion see P. Meredith (2008), ‘The Towneley pageants’, in Beadle and Fletcher
(eds), The Cambridge Companion, pp. 152–82, citation pp. 160–4.
28. See McKinnell (2008), pp. 302–3.
29. The Towneley manuscript has been dated as late as the mid-sixteenth century; see Meredith
(2009), p. 155.
30. For further discussion see B. O’Donoghue (1999), ‘Introduction’, in Tony Harrison (ed.),
Plays One: The Mysteries. London: Faber, pp. 1–8.
31. Recent work by Mariana Lopez in the field of theatre acoustics has opened up exciting
possibilities of virtual performance research into medieval street theatre in York, another example
of ‘new life’ for the early theatre studies, see M. Lopez, S. Pauletto, and G. Kearney (2013a),
‘The application of impulse response measurement techniques to the study of the acoustics of
Stonegate, a performance space used in medieval English drama’. Acta Acustica united with
Acustica, 99: 98–109. Also M. Lopez and S. Pauletto (2013b), ‘The York Mystery Plays: Acoustics
and staging in Stonegate’, http://www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~pber/papers.html, viewed 24 June 2014.
Further reading
Beadle, R. and King, P. M. (eds) (1984), York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Browne, E. M. (ed.) (1932), The York Nativity Play: Adapted from the York Mystery Cycle
(XIV Century). London: Philip Allan.
Chansky, D. (2006), ‘North American Passion Plays: “The greatest story ever told” in the new
millennium’. TDR: The Drama Review, 50(4): 120–45.
Coldewey, J. C. (2008), ‘The non-cycle plays and the East Anglian tradition’, in R. Beadle
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–34.
Dobson, R. B. (1997), ‘Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays
Reassessed’, in A. E. Knight (ed.), The Stage As Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 91–105.
Epp, G. P. J. (2013a), ‘Re-editing Towneley’. Yearbook of English Studies, 43: 87–104.
—(2013b), ‘Stages of pedagogy: teaching early English theatre through performance’, http://www.
staff.amu.edu.pl/~pber/papers.html, viewed 24 June 2014.
Fletcher, A. J. (2008), ‘The N-Town plays’, in R. Beadle and A. J. Fletcher (eds), The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 183–210.
Granger, P. (2009), The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia. Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer.
Johnston, A. F. (1973–4), ‘The procession and play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426’. Leeds
Studies in English, ns 7: 55–62.
—(2008). ‘An introduction to medieval English theatre’, in R. Beadle and A. J. Fletcher (eds), The
Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 1–25.
King, P. M. (2006), The York Mystery Cycle and the Worship of the City. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
King, P. M. and Davidson, C. (eds) (2000), The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays. Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications.
King, P. M., Niebrzydowski, S. and Wyatt, D. (2013), ‘Introduction: “hither we are sent a message for
to say”’. Yearbook of English Studies, 43: 4–11.
Leach, A. F. (1901), ‘Some English plays and players, 1220-1548’, in W. P. Ker, A. S. Napier and
W. W. Skeat (eds), An English Miscellany Presented to Dr Furnivall in Honour of his Seventy-fifth
Birthday. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 205–34.
McGavin, J. J. (2010), ‘Performing communities: civic religious drama’, in E. Treharne and G. Walker
(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 200–18.
Mills, D. (ed.) (1992), The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling.
East Lansing: Colleagues Press.
Ramsay, K. (2008), The Lincoln Mystery Plays: A Personal Odyssey. Lincoln: Nerone.
Stevens, M. and Cawley, A. C. (eds) (1994), The Towneley Plays, vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
chapter four
Staging Chaucer: Mike Poulton

and the Royal Shakespeare
Company’s Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales
Sarah Peverley
Critics have often commented on the dramatic power of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales, but for a text so concerned with orality and the performative nature of storytelling,
there have been surprisingly few successful stage adaptations of the tale.1 To date, the play
that has been most successful in capturing the breadth and depth of Chaucer’s work is Chau-
cer’s The Canterbury Tales, a two-part epic written for the Royal Shakespeare Company
(RSC) by Mike Poulton. Directed by Gregory Doran, Rebecca Gatward and Jonathan Munby,
Part One premiered at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon on 16 November 2005 and
Part Two followed a week later on 23 November. A world tour followed a successful run in
the United Kingdom.
Each part is a self-contained play in its own right, meaning that audiences can watch one or
both, in either order, without compromising their theatrical experience; but with a combined
playing time of approximately six hours, watching the two parts of Poulton’s ambitious ad-
aptation demands stamina and concentration. Following an arrangement that preserves some
of the order and groups of the tales as they occur in the famous Ellesmere Manuscript of The
Canterbury Tales (or to give it its official name, California, San Marino, Huntingdon Library
MS EL 26 C 9), Part One contains ‘The General Prologue’, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, ‘The Miller’s
Tale’, ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, ‘The Cook’s Tale’, ‘The Monk’s Tale’, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘The
Shipman’s Tale’, ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ and concludes with a version
Staging Chaucer 49
of Chaucer’s famous ‘Retraction’. Part Two contains Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’, ‘The
Pardoner’s Tale’, ‘The Physician’s Tale’, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, ‘The Friar’s
Tale’, ‘The Summoner’s Prologue’, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, ‘The Squire’s
Tale’, ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, the meeting with the Canon and his Yeoman, ‘The Manciple’s Tale’
and ‘The Parson’s Prayer’, a brief monologue based on the conclusion of the Parson’s lengthy
treatise on sin, delivered as the pilgrims approach the shrine of Thomas Beckett.
It’s clear from this list that the majority of Chaucer’s tales are represented in the play.
Poulton originally adapted all of the tales except ‘The Tale of Melibee’, but during rehearsals
the RSC cut ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’ concerning St Cecilia and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’
on alchemy, retaining only the confessional opening of the latter in the brief ‘Interlude’ where
the pilgrims meet the Canon and his Yeoman at Boughton-under-Blee. As a result, these
tales also failed to make it into the printed edition of the play.2 Yet despite such omissions
emphasizing the commercial appeal of bawdy and comic tales over more serious moral stories,
the final script still manages to portray the disparate voices, tones and themes of the medieval
text well, and Poulton’s division of the tales between the two halves of the play attempts to
provide a balanced and representative sample of what Chaucer called ‘ernest’ and ‘game’.
Reworking the huge fourteenth-century text to meet the demands of the twenty-first-
century stage, Poulton abridges with considerable success not only the tales, but also the
information provided about the pilgrims. The ‘General Prologue’ in Part One, for example, is
severely condensed and the audience is given only snippets of information about the Host, the
Knight, the Squire, the Yeoman, the Prioress and the Wife of Bath, before Chaucer announces
that he will introduce the ‘rest of this ebullient throng … as we ride along’.3
Following the introduction of the storytelling competition by the Host, the weighty
‘Knight’s Tale’, at least twice as long as the other tales, provides ample ‘romance’ and tragedy
to get us through the relentlessly degenerate behaviour that ensues in the Miller’s, Reeve’s
and Cook’s tales, while the inclusion of the ‘Monk’s Tale’ before the interval provides
structural and thematic symmetry to the group by taking us back to the notion of the tragic
fall first witnessed in the Knight’s account of Arcite’s unhappy ending. Key themes in this
section include male competition, predestination versus free will, tragedy, human experience,
transformation and language.
In retaining the original order of the first four tales, Poulton retains much of the parallelism
that Chaucer created between them and the chaotic range of worlds that collide over the
course of the lengthy drama. The plot of ‘The Miller’s Tale’ mimics, with some adjustment,
that of ‘The Knight’s Tale’, yet both offer dramatically different experiences for the audience
because the realms in which the protagonists operate are so diametrically opposed. The
sombre, stately action and long monologues that make up the Knight’s romance, for example,
give way to the unruly, fast-paced dialogue of ‘The Miller’s Tale’; visually, the grand spectacle
of the tournament in far-away Athens gives way to a small wooden framework evoking
the domestic space of the Carpenter’s house; and, musically, Emily’s ‘heavenishly’ singing
about love in ‘Of every kind of tree’ (Poulton, p. 17) yields to Nicholas’s suggestive ‘I have a
gentle cock’ (Poulton, p. 38). Turning around related motifs, like competition for the same
woman, the first two tales highlight the gulf between the genres and styles of storytelling and
performance as much as their similarities.
50
The Reeve’s desire to take revenge on the Miller for cuckolding a carpenter (because he is
one) works well theatrically because the physical spectacle of the two pilgrims’ squaring up
to each other as they undertake their literary ‘duel’ helps to underline the verbal riposte that
the Reeve gives his rival with his tale. The doubling effect of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is similarly
enhanced in performance, as the ‘death by narrative’ concept that Chaucer takes so much
delight in showcasing in the original Canterbury Tales is palpable and incredibly visual. From
the start, the audience can see the Reeve’s attempt to ‘quit’ the Miller. He puts everything he
has into making the tale as painful as possible for his rival as more and more characters pack
into the space representing the mill: two students take sexual advantage of the Miller’s two
women instead of the one student and woman in ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Reading the tale, it is
not difficult to imagine the scenes played out, but seeing the bed hopping in action softens the
bitterness of the Reeve’s attack and encourages the audience to laugh at the ridiculousness of
the scene and the Reeve’s efforts to punish the Miller.
If visual parallelism and contrast is particularly prominent in Part One, the aural dimension
of theatre is likewise exploited to garner different responses from the audience. The first eight-
een lines of the play mimic the original Middle English of the ‘General Prologue’, so as the play
begins, spectators are subjected to a language that is at once fascinating and alienating. Some
words are recognizable, but great concentration is required to get the gist of what is being said.
As an opening, this works well because it establishes that what the audience is about to watch
is ‘of another time’ while prompting some spectators to wonder what they have let themselves
in for. As Chaucer switches to lines that are more comprehensible, the audience feels a sense of
relief and ‘tuning’ into the language, of understanding more of it and not having to try as hard.
It’s as though somebody has pressed a ‘translate’ button and the audience is suddenly part of
the group instead of distant observers. A clever trick, the first speech creates an interesting
affinity between the audience and Pilgrim Chaucer, who opens the play as a stranger who is
barely understood, but quickly becomes a likeable guide to his strange companions.
In ‘The Cook’s Tale’ too, Poulton uses language, or in this case its absence, to create an
affinity between audience and pilgrims. The rhyme scheme used to describe the ‘licorous
wife, that kept – A shop! Just as a front / But earned her living peddling her ...’ (Poulton,
p. 59) ensures that spectators complete the missing word in their own minds. Rhyming with
‘front’, there is no doubt that the majority of listeners anticipate the word ‘cunt’ in the silence
indicated by the ellipses, thereby lowering themselves to the Cook’s uncouth level. Chaucer
uses a similar technique in the original ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’ as Harry Bailey interrupts Geoffrey
and readers complete the interrupted half line in their own minds, unwittingly compelling the
awful narrative on.
After the Prioress and Knight interrupt the Cook’s tale of ‘swyving and swinking’ (Poulton,
p. 60), the Knight instructs the Host to let the Monk speak. Having tried unsuccessfully to
‘bewail in manner tragical’ since the storytelling competition commenced (Poulton, p. 33),
the Monk introduces tragedy as ‘a certain story’ of somebody ‘that stood in great prosperity/
And then fell down out of his high degree/ Into misery, and ended wretchedly’ (Poulton,
p. 62). This sums up his offering nicely, but comes just as the first half of the play concludes;
the real spectators are forced to leave their fictional counterparts to endure the dramatically
dull bewailing, as they head for a much-needed break.
Staging Chaucer 51
When the play resumes and the audience rejoin the Monk and his long-suffering
companions, some of whom are ‘asleep, others yawning, all bored stiff ’ (Poulton, p. 63),
his heavily truncated tale has been transformed from what would have been theatrical lead
to comedic gold. Just eight lines into the second half of Part One, the Knight interrupts the
monk to save the weary pilgrims:
Ho! That’s enough, good sir! No more of this! …

A little wretchedness goes a long way
Where stories are concerned. (Poulton, p. 63)
In addition to rescuing the other characters, the Knight’s response, and that of the Host who
supports the interruption with ‘You’ll bore to death our goodly company/ With tales of grief,
and pain, and misery’ (Poulton, p. 63), prompts the audience to consider what makes a story
good or bad, just as the original tale does. Likewise, Chaucer’s list of the seventeen tragedies
covered by the monk captures something of the moral ambiguity fundamental to the medieval
text:
This Monk’s told endless tales of tragedy:

Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Hercules,
Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar – both these
Had failed to see the writing on the walls –
Zenobia next, and after that the falls
Of two King Peters, a Duke – Milanese –
King Antiochus, and Holofernes,
Emperor Nero, a Count of Pisa,
Great Alexander, Julius Caesar –
We’d just got on to Lydian Croesus’ fall
When, as you saw, the Knight rescued us all
And shut him up. (Poulton, p. 64)
A dramatic masterstroke, this speech furnishes spectators with a lasting impression of the
Monk’s repetitive and restricted contribution to the competition without forcing them to sit
through what the fictional audience has. In the summary, there is no distinction between the
individuals, moral or otherwise. Good and bad, ancient and medieval, biblical and classical,
mythological and real, male and female are lumped together as Chaucer intended: ‘The
Monk’s Tale’ is an endlessly random and unhelpful catalogue of ‘misery’.
Just as the original text purposefully fails to engage philosophically with the various causes
of the falls and their collective worth – some of the characters fall because of Fortune’s fickle-
ness, some because of women, some because God wills it, and some from a combination of all
three – the monk’s failure to relay his stories to the real audience, and clarify what its response
should be, precludes any possibility of the spectators reflecting on and attempting to define the
significance of the Monk’s choices. Poulton’s telescoping of the narrative around the interval
helps to convey the immovability of the monk’s narrative. In the opinion of the audience
52
hearing the tale, it is mundane and devoid of variety; in its fixedness it is the antithesis of what
makes a good story or, in this case, good theatre. Both audiences, real and imagined, are left
with a keen sense that diversity and unpredictability – the essence of The Canterbury Tales,
whether on stage or page – are essential components of entertainment and good storytelling.
Conveying all of this, and turning it into brilliant theatre, is testament to Poulton’s skill as a
playwright, for the impression that the tale leaves sits perfectly with his unexpected decision
to follow on with an abridged version of ‘The Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale’.
Breaking from the order established in medieval copies of the tales, whereby the Monk’s
offering is followed by ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, the host, intrigued by Chaucer’s summary,
seeks more information about the shy pilgrim, who, thus far, has managed to evade contributing
to the competition. As Chaucer attempts to deflect attention from himself, the Man of Law
steps up as the next storyteller, complaining that every good story he has found, save one, has
been mangled by a ‘drivelling fool’ called Chaucer:
You must’ve heard of Chaucer! His feeble skill –

His shaky metrics, and his rhyming ill,
Might serve to make a lewd ballade or two –
Yet hath this drivelling fool presumed to do
Into the little English he commands
The whole of literature! Imagine, friends!
Ovid – Virgil – Petrarch. … Boccaccio!
Into his witless works the lot must go …
Why scribble out dull tales? Haven’t they been told?
So for my tale how shall I do this day?
I’ve one may serve – let Chaucer keep away! (Poulton, pp. 65–6)
While ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ provides a nice departure from the Monk’s limited view of
what makes a good story – by demonstrating that great joy can follow great suffering – his
prologue continues the theme of incompetent storytelling and replicates self-effacing passages
composed by the real Chaucer. At the same time that the Man of Law labels Chaucer’s works
as spent ‘dull tales’ within earshot of Pilgrim Chaucer, the play itself contradicts what is being
said because the tales are being retold in new and imaginative ways. As a fictional creation
of the real Chaucer, the Man of Law is by his very nature an ironic testament to his creator’s
literary brilliance. Poulton astutely saves Chaucer’s other self-effacing commentary on his
poor literary skill – ‘The Tale of Thopas’ – for Part Two, thus imbuing both parts of the
play with a taste of Chaucer’s metatextual wit, at the same time as taking up the themes of
providence and fortune that drove ‘The Knight’s Tale’.
Yet ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ also exhibits Poulton’s and the RSC’s faithfulness to Chaucer’s
work. There is no attempt to tone down Chaucer’s depiction of Muslim ‘iniquity’ in the
scene where the Sultan’s mother plots Constance’s murder (Poulton, p. 69), nor is there any
attempt to lessen the tale’s insistence that salvation and joy are attainable only through Christ.
The story, like the Prioress’s equally prejudiced tale about the ‘cursed’ Jews who murder a
Christian child (Poulton, p. 93), evokes a side of Chaucer’s tales that is frequently rejected,
Staging Chaucer 53
especially in the theatre, in favour of more ‘palatable’ narratives. Poulton’s treatment is

sensitive to the original texts, tapping into an emotional range not explored again until the
Clerk’s and Physician’s tales in Part Two.
The heaviness of offerings from the Man of Law and the Prioress is quickly offset with the
brazen ‘swyving’ of ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ (Poulton, p. 88) and the playfully elaborate rhetoric
and joyful comedy of ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (divested of much of its philosophical debate on
the signification of dreams, predestination and necessity). Thus, Part One concludes, bringing
viewers back – this time parodically – to the themes of tragedy and providence that opened
the collection. So, Part One ends, quite magnificently, with a version of Chaucer’s retraction,
wherein the audience’s guide, through the myriad of tales, renounces all ‘worldly vanities’
and invites us to ‘pray for all poor pilgrims on the road’.
Part Two contains less sexual debauchery, with only two of the tales involving ‘swyving’:
‘The Merchant’s Tale’ and ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’. Instead, there is a much greater focus
in this half of the play on themes commonly associated with romance: what Chaucer would
have called gentillesse and trouthe, and what we might call nobility of character (regardless of
social rank), moral integrity and honour. Linked with the notion of fidelity to one’s promises,
this half of the play has an ongoing fixation with speech, fictionality and illusion.
Opening with Pilgrim Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’, the play uses the medium of rap to
highlight the distance between appearance and reality, expression and meaning: the same issues
raised by the original text. Like the doggerel of the literary piece, Chaucer’s performance is
at once amusing and cringeworthy; clever in its deliberate awfulness, it is a tale that elicits a
double response from its audience. To the pilgrim audience it is a ‘drasty’ tale that ‘isn’t worth
a turd’ (Poulton, p. 116); to the real audience it underscores how adept Chaucer, Poulton and
the RSC are at parodying and fusing different styles of literature and performance. Musically,
the sleek beat one expects to underline the rap lyrics is absent; constrained by the rhyme
scheme and stinted by deliberately poor metre, the verse makes Chaucer sound ludicrous
and amateurish, just like the medieval tale. As a story, the tale has little momentum and is
peppered with bad rhymes and trite imagery:
Full many a maiden bright, in bower,

Languished to be his paramour
When she should be asleep.
But he was chaste and no lecher
And sweet as is the blackberry’s flower
That berries bear in heaps. (Poulton, p. 114)
The unabashed incongruity, as rap and popular romance clash, makes brilliant theatre because
what the audience sees and hears is at odds with their understanding of the wider context of
the performance. Chaucer’s anachronistic allusion to the Rolling Stones’s ‘(I Can’t Get no)
Satisfaction’ – the line that prompts Poulton’s Host to put an end to the tale – perfectly sums
up the absurdity of the offering by the only poet in the storytelling competition.
When Pilgrim Chaucer introduces more characters from the ‘General Prologue’ after his
tale is cut short, their portraits are kept to a minimum, but what is revealed about them is
54
telling and helps to direct the audience’s judgement of them or raise questions about them
in the same way that the original portraits do. Thus the Summoner’s introduction is reduced
to ‘This red-faced harlot is a Summoner’ and the Pardoner is represented by ‘You heard his
voice? A goat’s voice, light and clear – I’d say that he’s a eunuch, or a queer’, before a brief
account of his trade in false relics is offered (Poulton, p. 117). Both descriptions cast the
pilgrims as reprobates, while the latter, in modernizing Chaucer’s Middle English ‘I trowe he
were a geldyng or a mare’, attempts to convey the sexual equivocality that has led to so much
critical debate about the Pardoner’s original portrait.4
This, however, is as far as the play goes in engaging with the character’s ambiguities.
Poulton and the RSC make it clear that their Pardoner is homosexual and, since this is morally
unacceptable by medieval standards, his sexual orientation reflects his spiritual corruption in
comic ways. In the debate that follows ‘The Cook’s Tale’, the character expresses irrepressible
delight at the mention of sodomy to the shocked silence of the other pilgrims:
KNIGHT.
This is turning into nothing but swyving and swinking and God knows what else –
HOST.
I know. I –
KNIGHT.
Absolute filth! It’ll be sodomy next –
PARDONER.
Will it? (Poulton, p. 60)
Further comedy follows in the homoerotic body language between the Pardoner and
Summoner as they sing ‘Come hither, Love, to me!’ (Poulton, p. 117), and later, as Pilgrim
Chaucer reveals more about the Wife of Bath before her Prologue, it’s made clear that the
Pardoner’s motivation for going on pilgrimages is less than holy:
CHAUCER.
And thrice she’d travelled to Jerusalem
Calling at Rome, as she came back again –
To Sant Iago once – at Compostella –
Boulogne, Cologne. … Why would she want to go to
Boulogne?
PARDONER.
Why would anybody want to go to Boulogne, dearheart?
Either to visit the shrine of Our Lady, or to pick up a
Frenchman. (Poulton, p. 134)
Though such scenes belie the insinuation in Chaucer’s text that the Pardoner is as sexually
sterile as he is spiritually void, or, conversely, as some critics have argued, that his effeminacy
Staging Chaucer 55
singles him out as a womanizer according to medieval physiognomic theory, the Pardoner’s
sexual transgression and trade in false relics communicates the religious vacuity of the original
character by focusing on his inability to practise what he preaches: ‘At bare-faced lying he
cannot be beat /—He has a bit of pillowcase or sheet / The which he’s claiming was Our
Lady’s veil’ (Poulton, p. 117).
The lack of spiritual substance behind his preaching that ‘money is the root of all evil’ is
made most manifest in the ‘kiss my relics’ scene (Poulton, p. 126). Here the visual medium of
theatre is brilliantly effective at highlighting the connection between his spiritual corruption
and sexual deviancy, as the Pardoner invites the Host to kneel before him and kiss his
suggestively placed relics. The comedic power of this moment leaves a lasting impression
of his wickedness and of the other pilgrim’s distaste for him, and goes a long way towards
making up for the fact that the lengthy preamble to his tale – where he confesses to cheating
the poor and needy – is radically pared down.
By following Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Thopas’ with ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, and omitting the
Pardoner’s lengthy prologue and account of ‘tavern sins’, Poulton begins Part Two with a
focus on honour and fulfilment of oaths, Sir Thopas’s comical pursuit of honour in pledging
to find a fairy maiden he hasn’t met disintegrates into the oath-breaking of the Pardoner’s
three rioters and the Pardoner’s dishonourable pursuit of money. The theme of morality (or
a lack of it) continues throughout the three tales that follow from the Physician, Wife of Bath
and Friar, as the maidenhead of the women in the Physician’s and Wife’s tales becomes the
focal point around which honour is negotiated. Equally, the pledging of ‘trouthe’ versus the
use of deceitful language in the Wife’s and Friar’s tales follows on from the Pardoner’s clever
manipulation of religious exempla for his own ends and becomes a moral barometer by which
good and bad behaviour is measured. This group of tales works exceptionally well together
and echoes the different ways in which themes and motifs are reinterpreted throughout Part
One, while anticipating the same concerns in the second half of Part Two in the Clerk’s,
Squire’s, Franklin’s and Manciple’s tales.
Poulton’s decision to let the Summoner answer ‘The Friar’s Tale’ with just his prologue
about friars dwelling in the ‘devil’s arse’ (Poulton, p. 156) provides another example of how
successful the play’s narrative economy is in conveying the key elements of Chaucer’s work.
Exposing the professional and personal rivalry between the two pilgrims in a similar manner
to the literary duel between the Miller and Reeve, the dramatic monologue insults the Friar
with such devastating effect that when the Summoner concludes ‘I will not waste more words
on such a liar’, a physical fight breaks out between them (Poulton, p. 156). Standing proxy for
the Summoner’s tale of Thomas and the Friar, the pilgrims’ onstage brawling conveys their
ongoing conflict in a visceral and dramatically visual way, removing the need for a prolonged
verbal attack in the form of a separate tale. The fight provides an opportune moment to usher
in the interval, while simultaneously exuding a sense that the fictional rivalry continues in our
absence.
When the play resumes, Poulton’s structure provides further narrative coherence. ‘The
Clerk’s Tale’ disproves the Wife of Bath’s assertion that scholars refrain from telling tales
about good women, taking us back into the world of romance, which will dominate the
first four tales of the second half, albeit in various forms (the Clerk’s infusion of elements
56
more suited to legends, the Merchant’s brilliant blending with fabliaux features, the Squire’s
unpolished and unfinished narrative, and the Franklin’s Breton lai). Each of the tales reveals
illusion and fictionality or, in this instance, metatheatre, in a unique way, and it is in this
section that the RSC utilized the play’s variety of performative styles most successfully.
Griselda’s white costume, for example, used colour symbolism to emphasize her purity of
spirit and add an element of allegory to the tale, which was otherwise acted in a realistic way,
while the shadow puppets of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ accentuated the Franklin’s concern with
illusion, magic and storytelling. Watching puppets, one cannot escape the fact that the action
is being performed for two audiences, real and fictional. In this respect the play is successful
in capturing Chaucer’s original fascination with the nature of storytelling and subjectivity and
recasting it in dramatic terms: drama acutely aware of itself as drama.
With equal understated brilliance, Part Two ends with the pilgrims reaching their destination
and carrying candles to the shrine of Thomas Becket at the Canterbury Cathedral, as the Parson
offers his aforementioned ‘Prayer’ and the cast sing ‘Kyrie eleison’. The pilgrimage framework
that has dipped in and out of focus in between the individual tales, bringing coherence and
meaning to the collection as it does in the original text, finds its fullest expression here and
nods to how Chaucer seems to have intended his unfinished work to end. The pilgrims in
The Canterbury Tales are close to Canterbury when the Parson begins his tale, so Poulton’s
termination of Part Two with the voice of the spiritually sound Parson, and a sense of the
journey reaching its conclusion at the shrine of Thomas Becket, makes sense logically as well
as aesthetically. Simple and uplifting, the Kyrie offers a moment of reflection before the play
concludes, a pause in which the audience can recall the myriad of voices that have entertained
them. From the Boethian musings of ‘The Knight’s Tale’ to the dark anti-Semitism of ‘The
Prioress’s Tale’, the play captures all aspects of Chaucer’s narrative range and it does not
shy away from the fact that Chaucer is a medieval writer with attitudes and ideologies that
modern audiences will not always be comfortable with. Although disparate and prone to
collision in terms of register, mode of delivery and treatment of content, each tale and its
teller is a thread in the rich tapestry of the play and, by extension, the fictional world that is
meant to reflect our own past. Human life in all its glory, agony and variety is laid bare. There
may be an abundance of sexual promiscuity and farting, particularly in Part One, but it is
frequently tempered with scenes of suffering and sadness, charitable acts and deep piety. The
play takes time to explore Chaucer’s interest in human compassion, allowing pity, kindness,
patience and poverty to function as ethical touchstones and doorways to salvation within the
tales.
Linked to, but going beyond this, Poulton retains Chaucer’s frequent reflections on the
transience of earthly things and his exploration of what it means to be human in a fallen
world throughout both halves of the play. Whether it’s Theseus’s observation in ‘The Knight’s
Tale’ that ‘all men must die, Low born and dukes – we wend the same way’ (Poulton, p. 32)
or the Wife of Bath’s poignant ‘Old age envenoms pleasure – it doth mine – Bereaving me
my beauty and my pith’ (Poulton, p. 137), we are subtly reminded that time is relentless, that
man is always heading towards death and that rebirth is possible only through Christ. The
audience is encouraged to see connections between the pilgrimage being undertaken by the
fictional pilgrims and pilgrimage as a metaphor for life.
Staging Chaucer 57
In performance, the RSC memorably evoked precisely those elements that make
The Canterbury Tales so distinct as a collection. Just as Chaucer’s text embraces a myriad of
literary genres – estates satire, romance, fabliau, beast fable, penitential tract – the production
employed different theatrical styles to represent the different worlds of the tales. From the
pageantry and spectacle of ‘The Knight’s Tale’, with its jousting on stilt-horses, to the bed-
hopping farce and symphonic flatulence of ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, the hand puppets and shadow
puppets of the Nun’s Priest’s and Franklin’s tales, to the mock opera of ‘The Manciple’s Tale’,
spectators were treated to an array of performative modes. In addition, Adrian Lee’s musical
score provided the perfect accompaniment to the action, breathing life into each dazzling
world with a glut of soundscapes to appeal to every audience member, from medieval lyrics
and plainsong to Caribbean beats and Chaucer’s deliberately awful rap version of ‘The Tale
of Sir Thopas’. The sheer scope of what the audience sees on stage evokes the epic nature of
the journey that Chaucer’s text takes its audience on. This is why Poulton’s play deserves the
accolade of being the most successful stage adaptation of the tales to date.
Notes
1. For a brief history of The Canterbury Tales on stage, see Steve Ellis (2000), Chaucer at Large: The
Poet in the Modern Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 121–40. Also
Kevin J. Harty (2005), ‘Chaucer in Performance’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), An Oxford Guide to Chaucer.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 560–5.
2. Mike Poulton (2005), Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: An Adaptation in Two Parts by Mike
Poulton. London: Nick Hern Books.
3. Poulton (2005), Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, p. 10. All quotations are taken from this edition.
4. Larry D. Benson (ed.) (2008), The Riverside Chaucer. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, p. 34, l. 691.
chapter five
You Can’t Do This to Disney!

Popular Medievalisms
in the Classroom
Meriem Pagès
A long time ago, when I had just embarked on my study of the Middle Ages, I asked a fellow
graduate student what had first awoken his passion for the medieval. Sheepishly, he answered
that it was Dungeons and Dragons (1974–). Tit for tat, I had to tell him that I discovered
my latent interest in Medieval Studies while watching King Arthur riding out to seek the
Grail in Excalibur (1981). Today, as a professor of medieval literature, I hear my students
describe favourite medieval-themed shows and films with just the same enthusiasm I once
felt for Excalibur. As was the case then, commercial films and popular television programmes
set against a medieval background abound, giving students a sense of connection with the
medieval, one that shows they possess a higher level of interest and even familiarity with this
specific period in European history. At first, this might seem to be just another challenge for
the medievalist pedagogue, who finds herself confronted with images about the Middle Ages
stemming primarily from the economic incentives that drive film studios and major television
networks. Yet, this need not be the case; in the following pages, I will argue that such a
popular image of the Middle Ages can turn, if approached properly, into a lasting passion for
Medieval Studies.
Approaches, Methodologies and Assignments

I teach at Keene State College, the only public liberal arts college in the state of New
Hampshire. Since it was founded in 1909, Keene State College has undergone several crucial
You Can’t Do This to Disney! Popular Medievalisms in the Classroom 59
changes: it began its existence as a normal school before becoming Keene Teachers College
on 31 May 1939 and, finally, a liberal arts college on 1 July 1963.1 Despite its public status,
only half of all the matriculated students are native to the state. The rest of our students
come primarily from the states of Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. This grants the
campus economic, if not racial or ethnic, diversity. The students at Keene State College are
also in majority female, a fact that reflects a nation-wide trend.2 In the make-up of its student
population, Keene State College is thus fairly representative of small, non-urban American
public universities.
Like most humanists at these types of institutions, my course offerings cover a wide range –
from general education classes to seminars restricted to English majors and even advanced
seminars for English majors in the last year of their course of study. Despite these differences,
most students come to my classes with the same level of knowledge about the Middle Ages.
They have usually watched one or more shows or films that have made them curious about
the Middle Ages. The challenge facing me is to nurture this fledgling love of the medieval
while introducing my students to a less entertaining vision of the period. With this in mind,
I begin the semester by asking students to discuss the first image or thought that comes to
mind when they hear the words ‘Middle Ages’. This elicits various responses: some allude to
an idealized perception of the medieval by referring to courtly love and chivalry, while others
mention the rigid social hierarchy in place in medieval Europe, and yet others focus on the
dirt and grime showcased in the most recent ‘medieval’ films and series.
Such an exercise does not serve simply as an icebreaker. I try to take notes of the comments
made on that opening day and refer to individual points as they become relevant later on in
the semester. For students, their involvement in this initial discussion helps them to forge a
bond with the medieval material they are studying; they have offered an opinion about the
Middle Ages, and they now have a stake in our conversations about the period. Moreover,
starting with their own words and images makes it easier for them to trace the development
of medieval cultural movements. Someone who identifies love as a concept she associates with
medieval literature, for example, will be more acutely aware of the manner in which love is
defined in different works. Students’ thoughts about the Middle Ages at the beginning of the
semester may further be used to render the differences between medieval and contemporary
society more obvious. For instance, love is as important to us today as it was in the Middle
Ages, but the twelfth-century belief held by Marie de Champagne and others that love
cannot exist within the bounds of marriage only makes sense when examining the patriarchal
underpinnings of medieval society.
On the first day of the class, I also introduce some of the big questions we will be exploring
throughout the semester. I differentiate between those questions I hope students will think
about even if we do not have time to address them directly and those questions that will
recur with each new text. In my general education course on the Arthurian legend, IHENG
220: King Arthur in Literature, Art and Film, I discuss the need to reflect on why the story of
Arthur has remained compelling to this day when so many other medieval meta-narratives –
such as the tales celebrating the exploits of Charlemagne or William of Orange – have been
all but forgotten. I also ask my students to think about what Arthur means to us today and
whether he is presented in the same fashion as he was in the Middle Ages. Lastly, I warn them
60
that I will begin our conversations about each of the works on the syllabus with the same
question: how is Arthur portrayed here? I follow the same method in my advanced survey of
medieval literature, ENG 323: Medieval Literature, requesting that students consider how
medieval works of literature evolve over time as well as the manner in which the figure of the
hero and the concept of romantic love are portrayed in medieval texts.
That we consider issues of representation signals to students that their own particular
approach to the material is merely one of many alternative ways of imagining the Middle
Ages, and I try to further emphasize this point with creative, in-class exercises. For example,
I ask students to put Chaucer on trial for his treatment of women in The Canterbury Tales
or to play the part of a medieval Englishman/woman on the eve of the outbreak of bubonic
plague of 1348.3 These exercises encourage students to think about the varied ways in which
medieval individuals and situations have been represented throughout history; asking them
to adhere to one particular construction of the medieval, even if only for a few minutes,
impresses upon them the power of representation. The portrayal of the Middle Ages becomes
such an important issue for them that, by the middle of the semester, they are the ones
to initiate our conversations on the topic: they no longer see their own perception of the
medieval period as the ‘truth’ but rather as concoctions responding to the particular hopes
and needs of our contemporary society. Likewise, they recognize that there exist a variety
of attempts to imagine the Middle Ages – past and present, scholarly and popular – none of
which can truly re-create the period. Discussing these important themes thus allows students
to assess the role of culture in shaping ideas.
My focus on questions of representation is also reflected in the assignments students
are required to complete for the course. For the first assignment in both King Arthur and
Medieval Literature, I provide students with guidelines and a list of five questions, one of
which they must develop into a three-page paper. The second assignment, a research paper of
six to eight pages, invites students to formulate their own topic. The questions I prepare for
the first assignment offer variations on the big questions we have been examining since the
beginning of the semester. Indeed, many students choose to continue to address these when
working on their longer research paper in the second half of the semester. By that point, those
recurring questions are no longer mine but theirs, and they seek – rather than feel obligated –
to address them.
Popular Medievalisms and How to Use Them

As mentioned earlier, students enrolling in Medieval Studies courses may sometimes feel more
comfortable than they should. Their lifelong exposure to television and film medievalisms
allows them to feel a connection with the medieval where they see the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, as completely alien. While the existence of this bond inspires
enthusiasm and a desire to learn about the Middle Ages, popular medievalisms also influence
students to hold on to certain misconceptions about the period. At the most simplistic level,
the makers of commercial films and television programmes are motivated almost exclusively
with creating a financially successful product. Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
exemplifies this bottom-line mentality. In this film, Balian of Ibelin is given a rags-to-riches
story, a highly principled character, plus the youthful appearance of Orlando Bloom, rather
than being portrayed as the strong, mature and ruthless historical figure on which his character
is supposedly based. Clearly, the information provided about the Middle Ages in medieval-
themed films and shows is not always accurate.
The first step to take in responding to students’ interaction with commercial medievalisms,
then, is to emphasize that such popular products as Kingdom of Heaven are fully contemporary
in their sensibility. The process of convincing students of this important truth takes time,
lasting at least the duration of the course. In my classes, I use two different methods to present
students with an alternative, more academic perception of medieval Europe. First, I begin the
semester with a series of short lectures on medieval culture, history and society. In Medieval
Literature, for example, I open our discussions of each of the first three texts on the syllabus –
Beowulf, The Táin and The Mabinogion – with a brief historical overview of early medieval
England, Ireland and Wales, respectively, not only describing the important events in each
country’s history but also giving students the kind of information that may enable them to
imagine what life was like for these works’ authors and their immediate audiences. Thus, I
emphasize the significance of gift-giving and kin groups as well as that of the Battle of Badon
Hill in early medieval England. Once we reach the middle of the semester, however, I try
not to lecture as much, leaving students free to develop their own ideas and share their own
thoughts about the texts under discussion. In order to continue to introduce new concepts
and additional historical material, I then insert my comments in my responses to students’
remarks, using, for instance, a point about the relationship between men and women in
Chrétien de Troyes’s romances as an opportunity to discuss chivalry and courtly love.
It is perhaps a little too easy to provide students with facts about the Middle Ages.
Students may be bored by lectures on the Norman Conquest, but they are not opposed to
them on principle. Much harder to do is to confront their prejudices about larger aspects
of medieval society, ideas often rooted in our contemporary popular image of the Middle
Ages. At the same time that students often come to Medieval Studies courses with great
excitement because of their exposure to popular medievalisms, they also start the semester
with a deep-seated animosity for the Church and a predisposition to seeing all women – no
matter their degree or wealth – as equally oppressed throughout the medieval period, to name
just two commonly held beliefs about the medieval. As their instructor, my task is to attempt
to foster a more nuanced approach to such topics. In King Arthur, I alternate a discussion
of the role of women in the early Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen with an analysis of the
portrayal of female characters in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.
The juxtaposition of these two texts makes it clear that there existed a wide range of opinions
about women’s place in medieval European society. And there also popular culture lends a
hand, for their experience with a variety of popular images of the Middle Ages means that
students have some tools with which to consider these very different and, in many ways,
alienating medieval works. Popular medievalisms make it possible for them to visualize
medieval characters and stories, thereby allowing them the kind of familiarity with these texts
that renders a sophisticated discussion about the role of women feasible. At the same time,
62
such instances of medievalism allow them to understand the place of the narratives they are
studying in the medieval European imaginary – after all, many of these works were created
at least in part to divert their audiences, just as is the case today with an episode of the HBO
series Game of Thrones (2011–). Contemporary images of the Middle Ages thus provide both
obstacles to learning about medieval Europe and the apparatus necessary to a more profound
understanding of the medieval world.
I would like to end this section on popular medievalisms by returning to my brief comments
on Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and especially to my suggestion that such contemporary
examples of medievalism are particularly unreliable in their portrayal of the medieval period.
Here, I wish to emphasize that such examples of medievalism are no more inaccurate than
any other rendition of the Middle Ages, which could never be replicated even if it were a
simplistic, monolithic entity capable of being ‘known’ and ‘understood’ from our modern
perspective. Films like Kingdom of Heaven are no different from nineteenth-century works of
fiction, such as the novels of Walter Scott, or other kinds of modern artefacts – for example,
the art of the Pre-Raphaelites or scholarly tomes on Anglo-Saxon England – in utilizing the
Middle Ages to further a specific and very much contemporary end. Where modern popular
films and television programmes depart from these other cultural products is in their ability
to teach this lesson to our students by confronting them with the subjectivity of their own
impressions about the medieval past. There is no one authentic Middle Ages, and popular
medieval afterlives – ones that speak their language and that they feel belong to them – allow
them fully to grasp this truth.
Visual Media as Tools

Before turning to a brief discussion of the visual media I use in my medieval courses, I would
like to revisit the need for students to grasp that the popular medievalisms with which they
are most familiar are modern creations reflective of our own socio-political and cultural con-
cerns. It is not enough merely to state this very important fact; students may nod their heads
in assent, but they cannot fully comprehend its implications without my illustrating what I
mean in some way. It is at this point that I resort to the aid of visual media, primarily film.
My selection of visual material is, of course, connected to the texts I hope to discuss with
my students. In most of my medieval courses, I try to strike a balance between introducing
students to canonical medieval works such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and offering them a range of works from which
to sample.4 Thus, I attempt to vary the genre of the texts we will be analysing as well as the
gender of their authors. Film complements our study of these pieces, and my goal is to find
visual materials that are ‘retelling’ or adapting, even if only loosely, the medieval works we
have been discussing. As a result, most of the films I use are modern cinematic renditions of
medieval texts – for example, Tristan  Isolde (2006). I prefer to utilize materials that are
recognizable by, if not contemporary with, the students in the course,5 and I begin with more
recent films so as to stress that projecting a modern sensibility into a medieval background is
not some basic error made by film-makers in decades past and corrected by later generations.
In King Arthur, I show the scene leading up to the climactic battle between Arthur and the
Saxons in the 2004 King Arthur. When we are done watching this 10-minute segment, I ask
students how Arthur is portrayed and what kind of a relationship he enjoys with his men.
After a few minutes spent talking about the stress placed on Arthur’s friendship with his men
in the Bruckheimer/Fuqua confection, students start to make larger inferences about Arthur’s
treatment in the film, noting that this is the legendary King Arthur they were expecting to
encounter in the course, but that the character is not the same as that found in medieval texts.
Some even conclude that this is the right Arthur for a film produced shortly after 9/11: King
Arthur transforms its title character into an unambiguous hero capable of rescuing an entire
nation from invasion practically single-handedly.
King Arthur is not the only course in which I use film to emphasize that popular
medievalisms are contemporary documents. In Medieval Literature, the students and I watch
the opening sequence of Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 Beowulf at the end of our unit on the epic
Anglo-Saxon poem of the same name. In this case, I ask them to think about the depiction
of some of the film’s main players – particularly Hrothgar and Wealthow – so as to show
that the film presents us not with a slightly modified version of the poem’s story but with an
interpretation of it couched as cinematic adaptation. Likewise, I use the scene ‘Chaucer the
Trudger’ in A Knight’s Tale (2001) in my course on The Canterbury Tales to underscore that
director Brian Helgeland chooses to tap into a highly romanticized notion of the artist rather
than use historical records about Chaucer’s life. Later in the semester, we watch and discuss
earlier films, and students realize the extent to which the medieval is transformed for each
new generation of viewers.
In some of the courses I teach, I also screen scenes from classic Disney-animated features.
In King Arthur, for example, I show the scene of Arthur lifting the sword from the stone in
Disney’s The Sword in the Stone (1963). By the time we turn to The Sword in the Stone, the
semester is nearing its end, and my waiting this long to analyse a Disney film in class is far
from accidental. For American students at least, Disney-animated features hold a very special
status: these are the films they watched as children, relics of cherished childhood memories.
Added to this in the case of the Arthurian narrative is the very potent fact that Disney’s Sword
in the Stone constitutes most students’ moment of initiation both to Arthur and to the Middle
Ages. For all of these reasons, the students display some resistance to the idea of discussing
this film. Nevertheless – after having to rebuff a few comments about the impossibility and/
or cruelty of the task at hand – I am usually able to elicit some serious and very important
analysis. Rather than simply addressing the issue of modernization, we can speak to the more
specific process of ‘Disneyfication’, one that leads to conclusions about popularizations made
for children and the topic of children’s education as a whole. Although more difficult to
approach initially, Disney films can thus become assets in teaching undergraduate students
about the Middle Ages and its representation in popular media.
In addition to film, I also use medieval-themed television series as pedagogical aids in my
medieval courses. Despite the inherent similarities between film and television, it is important
to note that television functions differently from film. The divergence in the two types of
visual media lies primarily in the episodic nature of television programming. This implies not
64
only that ‘medieval’ shows must deal with narrativity in a manner that distinguishes them from
their cinematic counterparts but also that viewers form different kinds of relationships with
recurring characters. Because audiences are confronted with their favourite show’s principal
characters once a week, a relationship is forged between viewer and character that does not
necessarily exist in film. Most successful television programmes develop their narrative arc
over the course of a much longer period of time than the approximately 120 minutes allotted
to the standard commercial film, making it possible for even the worst of villains to acquire
some redeeming characteristics. One might argue that, at their best, television programmes
can offer a more complicated and perhaps more realistic portrayal of life, medieval and
modern.
Both film and television programming allow me to explore not only the extent to which
popular medievalisms belong to our own day and age but also the cultural specificity of such
products. To make this point, I juxtapose scenes from Anglophone visual texts with ones from
French films and television series.6 In King Arthur, I do this twice during the semester, asking
students to compare the representation of the Arthurian universe in the 2004 King Arthur
with that of Robert Bresson’s dark Lancelot du Lac and focusing on the introduction of
Arthur in the BBC Merlin (2008–12) and the French series Kaamelott (2005–09). This type of
analysis illuminates the extent to which our perception of Arthur is not only modern but also
informed by national and cultural factors. Once again, this is an important point for students
to consider in terms of their relationship to the popular medievalisms of their own day. Just
as the themes addressed by medieval authors responded to larger movements and tendencies
within their contemporary society, so is our experience of film and television medievalisms
mediated and shaped by our modern society and the issues that matter to us. In that way, we
are perhaps not so different from our medieval forebears.
Conclusions
Those of us teaching medieval courses are very lucky. While many of our colleagues have to
worry about student enrollments dwindling year after year, classes on medieval history and
literature continue to attract students who gained an appreciation for the field from reading
George R. R. Martin’s novels7 or following the television series based on them. Whereas
faculty teaching French, for example, depend on high schools graduating a certain number of
students with enough experience in the language to warrant college-level courses, Medieval
Studies is at present a truly popular discipline.
Of course, relying on popular medievalisms comes at a cost, and it is essential for the
medievalist teacher to highlight that popular shows and films are very much modern creations.
Another problem with using such tools lies in the discrepancy between the ages of the
medievalist instructor and his or her students. Most beginning teachers – some of whom may
be closer in age to their students than their colleagues – have little to no trouble discussing
students’ favourite popular medievalisms. However, as the instructor ages, he or she may
lose sight of what ‘popular’ means to succeeding – and increasingly distant – generations
of students, continuing to share instances of medievalism that have become as archaic and
alien to young people as the medieval works they are meant to translate. In the past few
years, for example, I have personally struggled with the need to shift from a primary focus
on the medievalism of commercial film to that of television programming and video gaming,
especially since television and video games have displaced film as the preferred medium of
the 18–35 demographic. Using popular culture as a productive pedagogical tool thus requires
that we continuously adapt and rethink our methodology. As Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline
have argued in their introduction to Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture:
The strands and interconnections of these texts demand wider frames of reference than
those we are used to, insisting that we accommodate our methodologies to take account
of a nexus of other texts, other consumers, commentators, appropriations. As fast as we
gather the images, sound-clips, and fragmented narratives of medievalisms – many of them
by their very nature already ephemeral – they shape-shift, maybe melt away into cyberspace
or come adrift from their mainstay to arrive at platforms and audiences often better suited
to, or better able to grasp, their complexities than conventional academic forums.8
Popular medievalism is demanding: Medieval Studies’s petulant little sibling, it insists that
we pay attention to it. Why do we respond so readily? Why do we not turn away as popular
medievalism moves from one favourite game to another? Because looking on indulgently
and occasionally joining in the fun is so rewarding. It is exhilarating to engage with popular
medievalism when it allows us to forge a deeper connection with our students, one that often
leads to their revisiting their first impressions of medieval works and learning to appreciate
them on their own terms, and it is also delightfully enjoyable to lose oneself in a fantasy
medieval world.9 But this is not all. Beyond the pleasure they give us personally, beyond the
bonds contemporary medievalisms allow us to form with our students, beyond the ability these
works possess to serve as bridges both between teachers and students and between medieval
and modern texts, there is also the potent fact that these popular, commercial instances of
medievalism will in all likelihood shape the next generation of medievalists. To cite Ashton
and Kline again, ‘We are, perhaps, increasingly uneasy with our constructions of the medieval,
and with good reason. So much depends upon context and so much, too, on perspective. A
middle-aged academic’s Middle Ages is not the same as a graduate student’s, let alone those
sometimes compelled to take our courses.’10 Academic ‘constructions’ of the medieval are no
less flawed, biased and diverse than other representations of the period. In some ways, this
is unnerving: we can never truly appreciate what it meant to live during the Middle Ages;
yet such knowledge can also be deeply invigorating. The different perspectives of which
Ashton and Kline speak are also responsible for the myriad of new sub-disciplines created
within Medieval Studies over the past fifty years or so. In the 1970s, medievalists who had
hitherto taken patriarchal structures and modes of understanding the Middle Ages for granted
suddenly found themselves sharing the table with newly graduated colleagues determined to
unearth the forgotten voices of medieval women and to question the role of heteronormative
sexuality in medieval Europe. Today, we are on the cusp of another momentous shift in the
field, and all we know about the path Medieval Studies will take in the next decade is that its
66
constituent members will have been raised on shows such as the BBC Merlin (2008–12), the
HBO Game of Thrones and countless other popular medievalisms.
Notes
1. James G. Smart (1984), Striving: Keene State College 1909/1984: The History of a Small Public
Institution. Canaan, New Hampshire: Phoenix, pp. 135 and 183.
2. Statistical facts about the student population of Keene State College are taken primarily from the
2012 KSC factbook available at http://www.keene.edu/ir/.
3. In the first instance, I simply divide the class in two, asking one side of the room to support the
claim that Chaucer portrays women negatively while the other half of the group has to argue
that the fourteenth-century poet ultimately conveys a positive message about women in The
Canterbury Tales. The second exercise requires a little more preparation. Here I ask students
to pick one piece of paper from a jar in which I have placed several scenarios. Each scenario
provides some basic information about the ‘part’ the student is to play: gender, status, whether or
not the person gets sick, whether or not s/he lives, and some additional information about their
character – for example, whether a priest is known for his hatred of Lollards or the number of
his children. I then ask students to incorporate as many of these characteristics as possible in their
rendition of the character they have been assigned to role-play.
4. In ‘Studying Audiences off the Grid’, Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid, a special issue of
Pedagogy 13.2 (2013), edited by Gina Brandolino and Nathanial B. Smith, Myra J. Seaman notes
that the medieval canon has remained essentially the same since the nineteenth century and that,
in the case of Middle English literature specifically, ‘Perhaps the biggest change to the Middle
English canon that resulted from the demographically focused challenges to the canon at large
has been the dramatic increase in attention given to two texts by two English women, Julian of
Norwich and Margery Kempe, and to additional texts written, if not by, then for women (214),’
suggesting that there is perhaps very little distance between the canonical and the alternative on
most medieval syllabi.
5. There have also been a few quasi-ideal situations in which students have oriented me towards
a new television programme or film. One student, for instance, once remarked to me that my
overview of the Wars of the Roses reminded her of the HBO series Game of Thrones, leading me
to discover this very important medievalist show for myself.
6. Initially, I chose to use English and French iterations of the legend for personal reasons: my
own research focuses primarily on medieval French and English sources, and these are also the
languages with which I feel most comfortable. However, this particular pairing has proven to be
particularly fruitful both because it replicates our emphasis on French and Anglophone literary
material and because it allows us to explore the competing images of Arthur that exist in England
and France to this day.
7. I am referring, of course, to George R. R. Martin’s famous series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire,
of which the first volume, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996.
8. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline (2012), ‘Introduction: Now and Then’, in Gail Ashton and
Daniel T. Kline (eds), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 9.
9. Ashton and Kline have also commented on the pleasure inherent to experiencing contemporary
popular medievalisms (2012, p. 9).
10. Ashton and Kline 2012, p. 5.
chapter six
Medieval Times: Tournaments

and Jousting in Twenty-First-
Century North America
Elizabeth Emery
From the water jousts of southern France to Dutch ringrijden (tilting at rings) and tournament
re-enactments held in medieval villages, various forms of jousting and tournament pageantry
continue to feature prominently in heritage celebrations throughout Europe. More surprising,
however, is the recent explosion of interest in jousting by North Americans, who have few
medieval traditions of their own (the notable exception being the state of Maryland, where
ring jousting, the official sport since 1962, has been a pastime since it was imported by
English settlers in the seventeenth century). The 2011–12 North American television season
featured not just one, but two prime-time reality series dedicated to jousting: Full Metal
Jousting (History Channel) and The Knights of Mayhem (National Geographic Channel). As
their titles suggest, these series have little to do with nostalgia, pageantry and late medieval
codes of chivalry; rather, they are dedicated to military-style man-on-man combat (the clever
allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s brutal 1987 Vietnam War movie, Full Metal Jacket, is telling in
this regard). The organizers of both shows – Canadian Shane Adams and American Charlie
Andrews, themselves professional jousters – seek to bring jousting back to its combative
origins and to re-create it as an ‘extreme sport’.
Looking at popular forms of jousting and the organizations that support them in twenty-
first-century North America – reality shows, the Ultimate Jousting Championship, the World
Championship Jousting Association, the Maryland Jousting Association, the Tournament of
the Phoenix, Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament, Renaissance Faires and the Society for
Creative Anachronism, among others – reveals a great deal about how medieval practices are
called into the service of modern goals and fantasies. While jousting might, at first glance,
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seem to be fairly straightforward (horses run down the list carrying armour-clad competitors
holding lances), the tensions among these different organizations and the kinds of jousting
they practise reveal a particularly North American fascination with the Middle Ages, marked
by anxieties about class, gender and economics.
‘There’s a warrior class and an artistic-historic class’, explained Shane Adams in an 8
July 2010 interview with the New York Times reporter Dashka Slater. Here, he identifies
the philosophical differences between his vision of jousting as extreme sport and that of
others, such as Californian Jeffrey Hedgecock, who places jousting in the wider context of
medieval tournaments and the skills they showcased (jousting, foot combat, skill at arms).
Hedgecock’s annual Tournament of the Phoenix, in Ramona, California, is linked to groups
with a worldwide presence, such as the International Jousting League. They re-create suits
of armour based on documented fifteenth-century models and follow recorded historical
practices in their events. Hedgecock also works with the Royal Armouries, a group of museums
dedicated to understanding the arms and armours of the past. The web page for his Knight
School (subtitled ‘The Art of Knightly Combat’), gives a good sense of the historical and
literary sensibility informing this organization (the page features a passage from Guillaume de
Lorris’s Romance of the Rose).1
Adams’s expression, ‘artistic-historic class’, while smacking of class resentment, is not an
inaccurate way of describing the work of such organizations. Groups such as AVISTA, the
Society for Creative Anachronism or the team at the Château de Guédelon in France define
their mission in educational terms2; they attempt to understand more fully the technology
and practices of the past by re-creating or re-enacting them.
The ‘warrior class’ jousting advocated by Adams has no such ‘artistic-historic’ mission.
Full Metal Jousting, the reality show programme he developed for the History Channel
(first aired in February 2012), is not subtle about the military analogy, beginning with the
programme’s title and continuing with its website, which multiplies references to danger (‘the
most dangerous collision sport in history’) and brutality (‘a bone-crushing competition’).3
The site selectively characterizes the history of jousting as ‘history’s first extreme sport’, much
more about ‘physical, dangerous exploits’, than about ‘chivalric knights and their adoring
maidens’.4 The courtly context of tournaments is noted, but downplayed.
The directors also downplay jousting’s long history as elaborate spectator sport by giving
the show a narrative arc reminiscent of ‘boot camp’ buddy films like Full Metal Jacket. In Full
Metal Jousting, sixteen recruits leave their home to bunk together in rural Mississippi while
bonding and learning ‘full contact jousting’. Yet, unlike boot camp, where the ultimate goal
is military team building, the ‘red’ and ‘black’ team members in Full Metal Jousting compete
among themselves for a purse of $100,000: ‘The teams are forced to choose who will face off
in the $25,000 Joust. After weeks of pressure and pain only one warrior will survive and be
the first champion of Full Metal Jousting.’5
Furthermore, the show has been edited to resemble the Survivor series (it was, in fact,
produced by the co-executive producer of the Survivor series), featuring an eclectic mix of
rodeo stars, polo players, former Marines, stuntmen, fire fighters, horse trainers, students and
‘theatrical jousters’. As in all reality television programs, which seek to maximize dramatic
tensions among contestants, final participants were selected from a large audition group
Medieval Times 69
(600 men and women), of whom thirty made it to a preliminary jousting camp.6 In the
programme, the sixteen light-skinned male finalists (all from the United States) are regularly
interviewed about their motivations in scenes that seem to be selected to build up the
tensions between the ‘tough guys’ and the more cerebral types (among them a PhD student
of philosophy). While some are in it for the experience, most seem committed because of
the purse. This removes them even further from a chivalric context by painting jousters
as mercenaries, once again emphasizing the military nature of this man-on-man combat.
Episode titles include ‘Charge On’, ‘Go to War’, ‘A Killing Machine’, ‘Blood and Guts’,
‘Death Sticks and a Coffin’. This is a resolutely white male world dominated by metaphors
about combat, viscera and death.
If one puts aside the Survivor-like format, Full Metal Jousting does provide a very good
sense of jousting’s potential as a modern ‘extreme sport’. The interactive elements of the
website lay out the equipment, the field and the scoring techniques.7 The armour may look
like tin cans, even if made from stainless steel and based on sixteenth-century German
models, but its weight (about eighty pounds) makes it both protective and cumbersome, thus
emphasizing the physical prowess necessary for jousting. Journalists like Neil Genzlinger,
who reviewed the show in an 8 February 2012 article for the New York Times, were shocked
by just how heavy and disabling the armour was: ‘I was not expecting quite so tight a fit. Or
the weight. Or the de facto blindness. Or the sensation of being baked alive.’8 The eleven-foot
solid-wood lances test even the most seasoned athletes and can inflict serious bodily harm
(bloody injuries dominate several episodes). Seeing these contestants learn to ride wearing
this armour, to aim a lance while moving at speeds of twenty miles per hour and to take
crushing blows from lances, is an impressive feat that reveals how paltry modern conditioning
is in comparison to that of the Middle Ages. Although it is cloaked in warrior lingo and the
competitive trash talking of reality television, the slow-motion replays, scoring rubrics and
voice-over evaluation of performances in Full Metal Jousting would have been perfectly at
home on a sports channel.
Like its brother programme, the The Knights of Mayhem, which premiered first (November
2011) on the Geography Channel, Full Metal Jousting appeals to viewers looking for violence
and bloodshed. John Gonzalez, the assistant head knight at Medieval Times in Lyndhurst,
New Jersey, put it aptly:
It’s going to be kind of [a] NASCAR [car racing] effect. [Viewers are] going to be looking
for the accident rather than the actual race, looking for that moment of violence and
carnage. And if something goes wrong, it’s gonna go wrong really badly.9
This sentiment was echoed by other reviewers of the two shows, including John Kass, ‘Call
me a naive little baby who’ll believe just about anything if it involves medieval combat on
TV, but I’ve got a feeling that somebody is going to die on National Geographic’s new show,
“Knights of Mayhem.”’10 In effect, both shows featured abundant examples of hard falls,
concussions, knocked-out teeth, groin injuries and broken bones, a level of injury played up
in the advertising materials: ‘Donning 130 pounds of steel armor, they mount 2,000-pound
horses and charge at each other with solid hemlock lances at speeds up to 30-mph, while
70
peering through a quarter-inch eye slot in their helmets. When lance and knight collide, riders
struggle to control their horses and absorb devastating impacts with potential for concussions,
broken bones and far worse.’11
This blood lust is the distinguishing characteristic of full contact jousting, performed
by a ‘warrior class’ that wears its wounds like badges of courage. Like the NASCAR auto
racing popular in middle America, they play up the adrenaline rush and the pure physicality
of the combat in distinction to the quieter showmanship, pageantry and equestrian skills
highlighted by the European-inspired ‘artistic-historic class’, whose participants use
break-away balsa tips in their lances to reduce the risk of injury. The title of the National
Geographic series – The Knights of Mayhem – captures the ethos of a group of performers
who tour North America (video excerpts available on http://www.nationalgeographic.com
and on YouTube) performing in medieval costume for Renaissance Faires, while training
for a full contact West Coast Jousting Championship in California and then the Ultimate
Jousting Championship in Las Vegas. In spite of all the talk of ‘world championships of
jousting’ and ‘defending the title’, most of the championships mentioned on this show are
small American events organized by Andrews and a few associates.
Both television programmes focus on training knights, but where Full Metal Jousting
isolates its members from society, the The Knights of Mayhem is a lifestyle-type reality show
seemingly inspired by Ice Road Truckers or The Deadliest Catch, where audiences follow
quirky characters as they perform dangerous real-life jobs. The Knights of Mayhem features
the trials and tribulations of a troupe of colourful Renaissance Faire knights (‘The Knights of
Mayhem’ is the real name of Andrews’s jousting troupe, just as ‘The Knights of Valour’ is the
title of Shane Adams’s real-life troupe), but it ends up playing more like Jackass, a television
and then movie series where adolescents film themselves doing stupid and dangerous tricks
that often go awry. This is a casual analogy made by Jason Armstrong, one of Andrews’s
troupe members, in the first episode. In many training scenes, Andrews and his team joust
without armour; they do not protect their horses; and they seem oblivious to the necessity
of properly preparing the young recruits. They may just be playing it up for the camera, but
the egos and histrionics of the troupe, their squabbling and their constant efforts at one-
upmanship deflect attention from the jousting they are ostensibly trying to promote. Tom
Conroy mentions this in a negative review of the show, ‘“Knights of Mayhem”, jousting
jerks’: the sport is fascinating, but the petty squabbling of the reality TV format makes it
nearly unwatchable.12
Despite the marked differences between the two programmes, both are part of the same
movement to bring mainstream attention to jousting and to recruit new talent. Unfortunately,
however, both picked up television sponsorship as reality shows, rather than as sporting
competitions. What audiences seemed to have expected, as Gonzalez’s comment above
suggests, was to watch jousting as one might a NASCAR-type event (auto racing, like boxing,
horse racing, steeplechase, snowboarding and skateboarding, is a sport that features a high
ratio of injury to successful execution). This would have been a good tactic since extreme
sports and mixed martial arts are all the rage in North America as adolescents raised on
violent video games and soldiers returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan seek adrenaline-
filled preoccupations.
Medieval Times 71
However, the constant references to toughness, valour, duty, pain and ‘sucking it up’ in
these programmes detract from jousting as a sport, presenting it, instead, as a lifestyle, a self-
annihilating response to twenty-first-century anxieties about the feminization of American
men. Such concerns are summarized by the descriptive titles of William Bray’s 2006 self-
published book The Emasculation of Men in America: 50 Reasons Why Males Are No Longer
Men (iUniverse), Guy Garcia’s more mainstream The Decline of Men: How the American Male
Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future (Harper 2008) and Susan Faludi’s wildly
popular Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (HarperCollins, 1999). This American
‘crisis of manliness’, widely discussed in talk shows and on the internet, blames women,
immigrants and outsourcing (among other things) for twenty-first-century America’s loss of
‘manhood’. By dismissing jousting’s links to ‘chivalry’ as effeminate or ‘artistic-historical’, Full
Metal Jousting and The Knights of Mayhem advance the ‘manliness’ of full contact jousting as
a corrective.
But why jousting? In Chuck Palahnuik’s 1996 novel, The Fight Club (and David Fincher’s
1999 film adaptation), men with ‘good jobs’ pummel one another bloody to resolve their
‘spiritual depression’ (Palahnuik, p. 149) and to compensate for their lack of father figures
(Palahnuik, pp. 52, 114, 186): ‘Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. … Maybe self-
destruction is the answer’ (Palahnuik, p. 49).13 ‘Maybe we have to break everything to make
something better out of ourselves’ (Palahnuik, p. 52). This is the attitude on display in these
two full contact jousting television shows where men settle their scores in an old-fashioned
way – on horseback carrying lances – and then brag about the number of bones they have
broken. Wouldn’t Fight Club–style punching achieve the same results as full contact jousting,
and with less cost and less effort?
Jousting, as we saw above, is physically demanding: not everyone is capable of doing it
(unlike fist fighting). This is what makes full contact jousting such an interesting sport for
the twenty-first century: those who have the stamina to survive and persevere automatically
elevate themselves to an elite group defined not by their socio-economic situation, but by
their physical prowess. This is very much the phenomenon at work in the US Marine Corps
where membership in an elite group comes not from class or economic station, but from
achievement. Its slogan is ‘The Few. The Proud. The Marines.’
The merit-based nature of full contact jousting is important in North America where
chivalry was traditionally appropriated by a white Protestant Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie that
constructed private residences imitating medieval castles and enacted courtly ceremonies as
the means of ennobling Americans.14 The moral virtue and gallantry of the ‘chivalric knights’
sketched by American illustrators such as Howard Pyle reflect this historic American reverence.
Such values trickled into the mainstream through books such as Pyle’s, and also, in the last
decades of the twentieth century, through two forms of entertainment that brought a touch
of chivalry (and live jousting) to the masses: Medieval Times Restaurant and Tournament and
Renaissance Faires.
Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament consists of nine modern castles spread through
the United States and Canada (a single location in Toronto) in which customers purchase
seats to dinner and a theatrically staged tournament. Food is served by ‘wenches’ to
‘Lords and ladies’ decked in paper crowns who eat with their hands. Commercialization
72
surrounds the event: swords, glasses, banners and other objects are constantly proposed
for consumption throughout the day’s or evening’s activities. The company was begun by
Jose Montaner, who created a medieval-style attraction influenced by the film El Cid to
enhance his barbecue restaurant in Majorca. He exported the model to Spain and then to
Kissimmee, Florida (near Disneyworld) in 1983.15 It was absolutely unique for its time and
well-reviewed in newspapers, particularly for the staged tournaments featuring jousting and
equestrian feats performed on beautiful Andalusian horses. It welcomed 183,272 visitors
the first year and 257,350 the following year. In five years the initial number had more than
doubled.16
The original location near Disneyworld is a testament to Medieval Times’s family-oriented
focus. Its website caters to the fantasies of children (the voice-over on the site in 2012 featured
a boy chanting: ‘I dreamed I was a prince, a mighty warrior’, followed by an adult voice: ‘The
fantasy comes alive. Incredible jousting, thrilling combat’) and it offers steep discounts for
children and school groups. The phenomenon is so well known in the United States as to have
been satirized in a recent children’s book (Medieval Days Family Restaurants).17
The narrative arc of the Medieval Times performance changes every few years, but comes
straight from Arthurian romance. The lord welcomes the guests to his castle to celebrate peace
with a tournament (this includes explanation of medieval customs and clothing, demonstrations
of falconry and weapons and other information about medieval life). An interloper arrives
to issue a challenge and a knight must leave the court. He is captured and ransomed. Other
knights must fight for his rescue. The storyline is difficult to follow, particularly since it is
accompanied by booming microphones, swelling Hollywood-style music and light shows,
but it weaves the action sequences into what is a fairly informative and action-packed show
about the Middle Ages in which the audience cheers for the knights representing their section
of the arena. It is an inclusive setting, where all participate in the festivities (eating, cheering,
receiving flowers from the knights). This is a ‘fantasy’ of romance, adventure and combat (as
the voice on the website proposes), but it also features impressive pageantry, from the horses
themselves, to the costumes, banners, staged jousting and horse tricks. Visitor Bill Taylor
summed it up well in a 20 August 1993 Toronto Star article describing the recently opened
site: ‘There’s an element of circus, a touch of rodeo, a huge chunk of all-in wrestling. You
know the fighting is fake from start to finish – of course it is – but you’re still on the edge of
your seat and wincing.’
In fact, if full contact jousters criticize Medieval Times so sharply, it is probably because it
is where many of them got their start (familiarity breeds contempt). Like many other children
who bought into the dream of becoming a knight, Shane Adams became a theatrical jouster
for the company: ‘I thought by working at a dinner show, my childhood dream of being a
knight would be lived. But instead, I realized I wasn’t a true knight in shining armour. I was
only a knight in shining polyester and tinsel.’18 From the outside, Medieval Times seems
shining and magical, but the courtly tournament, like the advertised ‘four-course meal fit for
royalty’ (a greasy chicken leg, fried potatoes, cornbread and cookie) does not live up to the
marketing.
The same criticisms about authenticity are often made of the Renaissance Faires that have
flourished throughout the summertime in North America since 1963. They are ‘partly a craft
Medieval Times 73
fair, partly historical reenactment and partly performance art’, as the national organization’s
website puts it.
People working at Faire dress in costumes (garb) typical of the late Elizabethan period.
Booths sell crafts and food. Parades wind their way through the crowds. Jugglers, musicians,
magicians, and other entertainers perform through the day. Your day is spent wandering
about, examining wares, sampling foods, watching plays and performers, and of course
drinking fyne English Ale.19
‘Some are Renaissance era, some Medieval, but all have a home for Pirates, Elves, Fairies,
Vikings, Klingons and You.’20 None of this is particularly authentic, nor is it particularly
medieval, but Renaissance Faires have become an important part of what Americans envisage
as ‘medieval’: an eclectic amalgam of picturesque costumes, foods and commercial activities
through which one ‘wanders’ in order to forget the present. From Disney’s Epcot Center
to Las Vegas casinos, Americans have long adopted elements of world culture, re-creating
them in miniature according to their own tastes. Excalibur and Luxor Casinos, Medieval
Times and Renaissance Faires all follow in this spirit of appropriation, recreation and family
entertainment, and it is at these venues that one is most likely to experience live jousting in
North America.
In fact, the Knights of Valour and the Knights of Mayhem may criticize the spectacle of
Medieval Times, but both troupes are active on the Renaissance Faire circuit and can be seen
in courtly garb on their websites and Facebook pages. Furthermore, Adams’s troupe can
be hired to provide its own version of the Medieval Times feast: ‘Small event or large, the
Knights of Valour can arrange a full-scale competitive jousting tournament or show complete
with Knights, steeds, and maidens faire. Our troupe encompasses a large variety of performers
including: Court Jesters, Jugglers, Fire-eaters, Magicians, Royalty and Court Retinue, Rabble-
rousers, Falconers, Mounted Knights, Squires, Pages.’21
What the full contact jousters seem most to resent in Medieval Times is its commercial
theatricality (the ‘tinsel’, as Adams put it); these are ventures that place spectacle over combat.
Andrews makes a similar point with regard to the authenticity of his own practices:
There’s Medieval Times and all that kinds [sic] of nonsense. And there’s a few people that
have historical, balsa tipped lances but it’s not the same. What we do is heavy armor, hard
hitting and solid lances. I’d say there are 40 guys in the world that do this. Our style.22
Adams and Andrews both critique the ‘nonsense’ of the commercial spectacle, while catering
to it with their own troupes and television programs. They continue to wear costumes and
participate in Renaissance Faires and television shows because they understand that this
fantasy is precisely what makes jousting popular for many families, who come for the show,
to satisfy the long-standing American fantasy of the Middle Ages as courtly spectacle. The
audience knows it’s fake, but enjoys the jousting just the same.
Adams and Andrews, on the other hand, reject the outward (often commercial) trappings
of historical accuracy (the balsa-tipped lances that appear real) for an experience that may
74
look less historic (biker jackets, duct tape), but that feels more substantial (‘heavy armor, hard
hitting and solid lances’). The physicality of this kind of jousting, the bone-crushing suffering
it entails, is a way to feel more alive, to return to the perceived physicality of the past. The
National Geographic Channel identifies the troupe’s name (Mayhem) as derived from the
fifteenth-century legal term for disabling an opponent, but it is certainly not a coincidence
that in The Fight Club the socially disruptive plans to ‘blast the world free of history’ (Adams
and Andrews, p. 124) was called ‘Project Mayhem’ (Andrews has admitted meeting some of
his troupe members at his own ‘fight club’).23
The violence of full contact jousting and the roots it claims in the military training of
the Middle Ages breaks markedly with upper- and middle-class traditions based largely on
Arthurian romance (the historically accurate costumes and practices of ‘chivalric knights and
their adoring maidens’). Full contact jousting is a white male-dominated working-class extreme
sport marked by bloodthirsty winner-takes-all competition (the first episode of The Knights
of Mayhem was entitled ‘First Blood’). While the former endures and is by far more popular,
the latter is gaining popularity in a twenty-first-century North American culture increasingly
stratified by class, education, economic concerns, and, in the United States, concerns about
military success abroad.
In this context, the gallantry of ‘chivalric knights’ with their European origin, their
perceived obligations to women (‘adoring maidens’) and style (historic re-enactment) is seen
as effeminate, as the fantasy of a wealthy ‘artistic-historic class’ able to afford fifteenth-century
trappings (this argument is less persuasive when one considers the cost of horses and jousting
equipment for anyone who practices the sport). The predominately white ‘warrior class’ that
embraces full contact jousting in these television shows claims no such allegiances to money
or women, wearing its assortment of armour from various historical periods with pride. In
the United States, such class, race and gender divides also reflect what has come to be known
as the ‘red state-blue state rivalry’: predominantly Conservative ‘red’ states in the middle of
the country advocate gun ownership, military service and traditional Christian values and
shun the more liberal values of coastal ‘blue’ states. While resolutely secular, the ‘full contact
jousting’ advocated by Adams and Andrews is also resolutely ‘red state’. It calls for privileging
brawn over brains, working class over élites and home-grown North American combat over
‘Eurotrash’ style. Interestingly, the only visible overseas presence in either show is Full Metal
Jousting’s Australian coach, Rod Walker (Australian men are venerated in North America for
their ‘manliness’).
Such contemporary concerns about class and nation explain jousting’s appeal today,
particularly in the United States, which has been racked by unemployment, domestic terrorism
and devastating military engagements abroad. John Kass described this turn to the past as a
result of globalization: ‘It is as inevitable as the decline of empire, with Americans increasingly
more comfortable seeking mental refuge by looking backward in time rather than forward,
into a bleak, debt-ridden future.’24 Economic instability often correlates with self-confidence,
and tensions among social groups tend to peak during periods of sustained unemployment.25
‘Full contact jousting’ arises from exactly this kind of social tension: Adams and Andrews
define their blend of jousting as an ‘authentic’ working-class alternative to the ‘fake’ ‘artistic-
historic’ jousting practiced by social elites.
Medieval Times 75
Viewers have picked up on the isolationist and anti-intellectual messages of these television
programmes, evident in the comment of a European visitor to a blog post related to the
Knights of Mayhem: ‘Yet again another program featuring inwards looking american [sic]
rednecks proclaiming to be world champions, in a sport they claim to have invented, when
they haven’t even competed outside the USA.’26 Although this comment is harsh, The Knights of
Mayhem and Full Metal Jousting are exclusive and their rejection (whether intentional or not)
of women, people of colour and Europeans is symptomatic of a search to find in the medieval
past antecedents that will authenticate their own values. Not only have they invented a new
variation on an old sport, as this commentator notes, but also they have created a new form of
interaction with the Middle Ages, what could be called working-class American medievalism.
Full contact jousters such as Adams and Andrews do not ignore the other 160 professional
jousters in the world27; they simply do not see them as relevant for their own vision of and
engagement with the Middle Ages. Adams and Andrews have invented full contact jousting as
an intensely personal form of military-type man-to-man combat with origins in the medieval
period. Their exclusion of other forms of jousting as of other kinds of people privileges a
vision of the Middle Ages as military: as a time of Crusading and warfare, of mistrust of the
Other and of self-reliance. This dystopic vision of a male-dominated Middle Ages, spread
through television shows and video games, increasingly dominates previous family-friendly
American fantasies about a fun-loving and inclusive Middle Ages of spectacle and chivalry.
Although this chapter has focused on North America, such re-interpretation of the Middle
Ages is not particularly American; the creation of new ‘Middle Ages’ has taken place time and
again, even within the thousand years we commonly refer to as the ‘Middle Ages’. In fact, this
has always been one of the hallmarks of medievalism: to reinterpret the traditions and arts of
the Middle Ages selectively. In the tradition of Brian Helgeland’s 2001 film, A Knight’s Tale,
in which a peasant triumphs in aristocratic tournaments, Adams and Andrew reclaim jousting
for the masses.
It remains to be seen whether ‘full contact jousting’ will have enough of an audience and
whether the programmes will be renewed for additional television seasons. The sport has
immediate appeal to those with the requisite equestrian skills (horse racers and jumpers,
polo players, rodeo veterans), yet viewers may not appreciate the intensely personal nature
of the combat. Music producer Gustavo Sanchez put it well in an 8 June 2010 article for the
New York Times: ‘This is not what I’m looking for. I need a show. This is not a show – it’s
a competition.’ This distinction between spectacle and sport is capital for the new vision of
jousting put forth by Adams and Andrews. Medieval Times has invested a great deal of money
in its family spectacles, in acquiring horses and equipment and in training its ‘knights’. It does
not intend for them to be wounded in ‘battle’. Not so Full Metal Jousting and The Knights of
Mayhem, which have generated a great deal of internet buzz precisely because of the blood
they have drawn.
Can full contact jousting thrive as an extreme sport? It may be too specialized, too costly
and too dangerous to make money for sponsors. How many Americans ride horses well
enough to joust? How many are brave enough (or carrying enough health insurance) to risk
life and limb? These questions will be resolved in time, but they illustrate the extent to which
76
debates over jousting styles in North America over the last few years say much less about
medieval jousting than about its afterlives: contemporary preoccupations with issues of class,
race, gender and commerce.
Notes
1. http://www.knightschool.co/KnightSchool.co/KnightSchool_-_Home.html, accessed November
2012.
2. http://www.facstaff.uww.edu/henigec/avista/organization.htm, http://www.sca.org, and http://
www.guedelon.fr/en, respectively.
3. http://www.history.com/shows/full-metal-jousting/articles/about-full-metal-jousting (all History
Channel sites, accessed July 2012).
4. http://www.history.com/shows/full-metal-jousting/articles/history-of-jousting.
5. http://www.history.com/shows/full-metal-jousting/episodes.
6. http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/2599152-full-metal-jousting-marks-renaissance-of-
extreme-sport/, accessed July 2012.
7. http://www.history.com/shows/full-metal-jousting/interactives/full-metal-jousting-interactive.
8. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/arts/television/full-metal-jousting-gear-no-its-not-tinfoil.
html?_r=0, accessed July 2012.
9. http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/138995009_Jousters_on_TV_show_go_medieval_
on_each_other_for_shot_at_cash_prize.html.
10. ‘Panning Knights of Mayhem’, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-17/news/ct-met-kass-
1117-20111117_1_knights-spears-mayhem, accessed July 2012.
11. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/knights-of-mayhem/ (all National Geographic
channel sites, accessed July 2012).
12. http://www.medialifemagazine.com:8080/artman2/publish/TV_Reviews_21/-Knights-of-Mayhem-
jousting-jerks-.asp, accessed July 2012.
13. Chuck Palahniuk (2005), Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton.
14. T. J. Jackson Lears (1981), No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon; Wayne Craven (2009), Gilded Mansions:
Grand Architecture and High Society. New York: W. W. Norton.
15. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-06-18/business/9102230919_1_majorca-and-
benidorm-medieval-times-dinner-castle and http://www.transferpricing.com/landmark_files/
MedievalAttraction.pdf.
16. http://www.transferpricing.com/landmark_files/MedievalAttraction.pdf, accessed November 2012.
17. Pseudonymous Bosch (2010), This isn’t What is Looks Like. New York: Little, Brown and
Company.
18. The Toronto Star, 4 April 2012.
19. http://www.renfaire.com/General/faire.html, accessed November 2012.
20. http://www.renfaire.com/Sites/.
21. http://knightsofvalour.ca/events.html, accessed November 2012.
22. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/11/15/knights-of-mayhem/, accessed July 2012.
Medieval Times 77
23. http://www.knightsofmayhem.com/the-knights/jake-the-snake-paul, accessed July 2012.

24. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-17/news/ct-met-kass-1117-20111117_1_knights-
spears-mayhem, accessed July 2012.
25. See, for example, Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds). Globalization
in Historical Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
26. http://klcthebookworm.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-world-championship-of-jousting.html,
accessed July 2012.
27. In Spring of 2012 the History Channel estimated the number of competitive jousters in the world
at 200, http://www.history.com/shows/full-metal-jousting/articles/shane-adams-and-full-contact-
jousting.
78
Part two
To Turn You On: The Pleasures

of Texts – Film, TV, Gaming
80
chapter seven
From Anglo-Saxon
to Angelina: Adapting
Beowulf for Film1
Stewart Brookes
Written around the year 1000, the Old English poem Beowulf is to English, Michael Swanton
has argued, ‘what the Odyssey and the Iliad are to Greek language and literature’.2 In contrast
to the view of literary critics and scholars of Anglo-Saxon literature, however, the popular
perception of Beowulf is that of Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall who cautions, ‘Just
don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf .’ And yet, in recent years, the poem
has been brought out of academe and back into popular culture through film, most visibly
in the form of Robert Zemeckis’s 3-D Beowulf with its computer-generated conjurings of
Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone and Anthony Hopkins (2007). The appearance of films inspired
by Beowulf owes much to the popular fascination with the ‘Dark Ages’, characterized by
tropes of raucous feasting, violent warfare, cruelty and a tension between Christianity and
the Viking gods that are at once exemplified and defined by the Hollywood epic The Vikings
(1958). The legacy of this is to the fore in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001–3)
and television’s The Vikings (2013–) and Game of Thrones (2011–) and is exploited in the
British Museum’s promotional film for its exhibition The Vikings: Life and Legend (2014)
which focuses entirely on screaming Vikings, swords and axes swinging to a backdrop of fire
and lightning and does not feature a single artefact.3 The underlying story of Beowulf chimes
well this vision of the ‘Dark Ages’, featuring an epic struggle of a Viking-like warrior against
monsters and finally a dragon. While almost all of the screen adaptations of Beowulf pitch
themselves in this direction, there is more to them than mere recourse to these formulas. In
this chapter, I examine ways in which the Old English poem has been used by film-makers
as a springboard to explore contemporary sensibilities, and how attempts to make the poem
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resonate for a modern audience have led Beowulf into genres which include horror, action
and science fiction.
Heroes and Demons (1995)

One of the earliest efforts to bring Beowulf to the screen was Heroes and Demons, an episode
of the science fiction series Star Trek: Voyager (1995).4 The incongruity of the setting – a
starship, in the twenty-fourth century – is resolved by situating the action inside a computer-
generated holographic simulation of Beowulf. As the plot unfolds, we learn that the holographic
Grendel has been taken over by a photonic lifeform who abducts members of the crew of
Voyager in retaliation for their having captured others of its kind, albeit inadvertently, while
gathering energy samples from a protostar in a bid to boost the efficiency of the starship’s
power converters (technobabble over). Eventually, the starship’s medical officer, the Doctor,
himself a product of holographic technology, negotiates a hostage exchange with Grendel,
releasing the photonic life forms in return for the missing crew members.
In interview, Naren Shankar, the scriptwriter, comments that what he originally envisaged
was ‘Star Trek with Vikings’.5 His eureka moment came while sketching the plot: ‘We go into
this Viking village, people are disappearing, and everybody’s scared – this is Beowulf!’6 In
line with this, the focus is on Grendel’s attacks; as one character puts it, Beowulf is about a
hero ‘who fights a creature that’s terrorising a kingdom and murdering its subjects. Monsters
and swordplay. That sort of thing’. This vision of the poem is reminiscent of role-playing
games, and we see their influence on the script in the way that conversations and scenarios
are repeated as each member of the Voyager crew enters the holographic simulation. Even the
name of the episode, Heroes and Demons, has echoes of the game Dungeons and Dragons,
sharing the same grammatical structure and syllabic rhythm. A further debt to the fantasy
genre is Shankar’s invention of the ‘shield maiden’ Freya, daughter of King Hrothgar, who
plays a central part in the episode. Dressed in armour and wielding a sword, Freya owes more
to the Valkyries of Dungeons and Dragons or Tolkien’s Éowyn (from whom, perhaps, the term
‘shield maiden’ is borrowed) than any of the women in Beowulf. Discussing his motivation,
Shankar confesses what we knew already: Freya is ‘really there as a romantic interest for the
Doctor. I know that sounds cheap and lame, but ultimately it worked on screen’.7
While Shankar states that there are aspects of Heroes and Demons which would cause
someone who knows the original to exclaim ‘Gee, that’s in the poem’,8 one struggles to
find them. Sure, there is Freya’s ‘It is said that fate often spares a doomed warrior if his
courage can prevail.’ But when Unferth kills Freya, one would have to be restrained indeed
not to mutter ‘Gee, that’s not in the poem.’ Aside from Grendel’s attack on the mead-hall,
the most recognizable set-piece from Beowulf is Unferth’s barbed dismissal of Voyager crew
members Chakotay and Tuvok: ‘Your names mean nothing to me. There are no songs of
your deeds, nor stories of the battles you have fought. Who are you to believe you can slay
Grendel?’ The insinuation against these individuals from the future, with its dramatic irony, is
a rather clever twist on Unferth’s slurs against Beowulf in the poem, sharpened by the Vulcan
character Tuvok’s deadpan reply: ‘We have no intention of slaying anyone. We simply wish
to examine the creature.’ An interesting twist comes when the Grendel-photonic-lifeform
From Anglo-Saxon to Angelina: Adapting Beowulf for Film 83
tears off the arm of the Doctor while he is in the Beowulf role. This reverses our expectations
from the poem and builds on an earlier reversal when Freya hails the holographic Doctor as
their champion because he is one ‘whom weapons cannot hurt’, a statement associated with
Grendel in Beowulf. It needs to be remembered, of course, that Shankar was writing for
the audience of Voyager. The real pleasures of Heroes and Demons are to witness the surly,
introverted, neurotic Doctor being forced to play the hero, banter with Vikings and have his
first romantic liaison when Freya falls for him. ‘You are truly a man of many talents .... Your
people must value you greatly’, Freya purrs. ‘You would think so,’ sulks the Doctor at his
nasal, aggrieved, unheroic best. This is Beowulf, but not as we know it.
Beowulf (1999)
A question faced by all attempts to adapt Beowulf is how to translate the alterity of the Anglo-
Saxon poem for a modern audience. The route taken in Beowulf (1999) is to locate the story
in what the director describes as a ‘techno-feudal future’ in which an assembled horde has
King Rothgar’s castle under siege, executing any of the ‘cursed’ inhabitants who try to escape
the demonic beast (Grendel) that is killing them. While the siege motif is unconvincing in
its execution, it is, like many innovations in this film, a response to a query on the part of
the writers: why don’t the Danes in Beowulf simply abandon their mead-hall when Grendel
attacks? Such questions aside, the tone of the film is unrelentingly that of ‘swords and
monsters’, blended with tropes from horror and soft pornography. This is clear from an
early scene in which we see a scantily clad woman violently assaulted and then struggling
against an executioner who tears her clothes while tying her down beneath a giant cut-throat
razor. At the crucial juncture, a man (who we will later discover to be Beowulf) appears on
horseback, accompanied by Ennio Morricone-esque The Good the Bad and the Ugly sound
effects to make it clear – in case we weren’t paying attention to the conventions – that a hero
has arrived.
What happens next is characteristically preposterous. Beowulf demands the woman’s
release and is then attacked by hundreds of thuggish soldiers, scores of whom fall to his
crossbow, mace, knife and an assortment of other not-quite-medieval weapons. With plati-
num crewcut and full-length leather coat, Beowulf backflips around and kills mechanically
without any injury to himself. Eventually, the leader of the horde of men calls off the attack
and permits Beowulf to take the woman. When it turns out that Beowulf is heading towards
the castle from which she has just escaped, the woman runs back towards her attackers and
is killed while Beowulf rides on. The senselessness of the woman’s death after her elaborate
rescue initiates a thread that runs through the film: characters die and no one seems much to
care. The death toll is unrelenting. In one particularly terrible scene, most of the women and
children take refuge in a supposedly fortified area which Grendel enters with ease, slaughter-
ing every one of them.
While the film is firmly situated in the faux medieval hack ‘n’ slash genre, there are three
major plot twists which respond to the elements of the poem. The first of these concerns a
romantic association between Beowulf and King Rothgar’s daughter, Kyra. What passes for
chemistry between them is Beowulf staring at Kyra’s cleavage for several seconds before he
84
remembers to look up and make eye contact. ‘I’m not like other men’, he informs her flatly,
convincing no one. The exchange of dialogue at their next meeting is delivered without the
spark one might hope for:
Kyra: Do you have family, Beowulf?

Beowulf: I’ve never wanted a family.
Kyra: I thought it only natural to desire home, family.
Beowulf: Then I have no natural desires.
Kyra: Interesting. How so?
Beowulf: Since I have no desire to stay in one place, home would be useless.
And I have no desire for a family since I don’t want to create more like me.
Kyra: So that your ego can rest assured of your own uniqueness?
Beowulf: Exactly.
For all its woodenness, this touches on a question from the Old English Beowulf: why doesn’t
Beowulf have a wife or an heir? At the end of the poem, Beowulf ’s nephew Wiglaf becomes
king in his place and this aspect is left mysterious. The Beowulf of this film, however, eventually
reveals the reason he does not wish to marry or have children: he is the son of Baal, ‘god of
darkness, lord of lies’ and struggles with his sense of himself as a creature of evil.
The second twist is the monstering of Beowulf to create an association with Grendel. This
link is suggested in the Old English poem through the deployment of the term ‘aglæca’ to
describe Beowulf (ll. 1512 and 2592), Grendel (ll. 159, 433, 592, etc.), Grendel’s mother
(l. 1259), the sea monsters that Beowulf fights (l. 556) and the dragon (ll. 2520, 2534, 2905,
etc.). This has troubled modern translators of Beowulf who in general have translated ‘aglæca’
as ‘monster’, ‘demon’ and ‘fiend’ in the context of Beowulf ’s opponents, but ‘warrior’ and
‘hero’ when it refers to Beowulf. The film understands the point that the poet is making,
that there is something monstrous about Beowulf who has the strength of thirty men and
crushes the Frankish champion Dæghrefn to death, and makes this literary ambiguity explicit
in Beowulf ’s declaration to Grendel, ‘I’m like you, one of the damned’, and by introducing
Baal as Beowulf ’s father.
The third plot twist responds to the question of Grendel’s origins. In the poem, these
are left mysterious, with Hrothgar commenting that no one had heard of a father, that
Grendel might be the offspring of ‘dyrnra gasta’ (‘secret spirits’, l. 1357). The film-makers
determine upon a concrete association, creating a plotline in which Rothgar is Grendel’s
father, seduced by Grendel’s mother, reimagined as a blonde siren who caused the death
of Rothgar’s wife. Rothgar is literally haunted by this: Grendel’s mother tortures him
in his sleep with images of his wife’s death while she rubs her semi-naked body over
him, licking his face in a reversal of the trope in horror films in which monsters salivate
on their female victims. During these scenes – featuring a techno-industrial soundtrack,
much lip gloss and a wind machine – Rothgar’s past is revealed in fragmented flashbacks.
This depiction of Grendel’s mother as an insatiable temptress who lures men to their
doom plays on a feeling of male inadequacy which reaches its culmination when Grendel’s
mother transforms into a spider-monster, materializing an incontrovertible vision of female
sexuality as monstrous.
The 13th Warrior (1999)

The old adage about waiting an age for a bus and then two arrive at once turned out to
apply to Beowulf-inspired films in 1999.9 While Beowulf (1999) is set in a claustrophobic,
stagnating atmosphere stalked by demons, The 13th Warrior (1999) is a very different affair,
with sweeping landscapes, a horror that is determinedly non-supernatural, and a focus on
homosocial bonding. The film is largely narrated from the point of view of Ahmed ibn Fahdlan,
a tenth-century Arab ambassador straight out of a sheikh romance who encounters a band
of Viking warriors and gets caught up in a quest to rid other Vikings of the terror destroying
their village (which turns out not to be one Grendel, but the Wendol, hundreds and hundreds
of bear-like people). The plot is as much about ibn Fahdlan (played by Antonio Banderas)
learning to overcome the repulsion he feels for the Vikings as it is about defeating the bear-
people. The film revels in its depiction of his urbane, sophisticated disgust for their foreign
ways. We see the Vikings spitting in turn into the communal face-washing bowl, blowing their
mucous into the water, before passing it to ibn Fahdlan to wash his face and do the same. And
when he gets injured, he has to submit to having a paste made from boiled-down cow urine
dabbed into the wounds on his face. As the film progresses, his repugnance gives way to a gentle
affection for the Viking people, and as we accompany ibn Fahdlan on his cultural journey, we
come to care very much who gets injured and who dies (in marked contrast to the experience
of watching Beowulf [1999]). Indeed, one of the things that sets this film aside from most of
the others based on Beowulf are the subtleties of its humour and an underlying charm: ‘The
Tartars are coming’, yells one character from horseback, parodying the popular perception of
the American revolutionary Paul Revere riding through the countryside shouting ‘The British
are coming’; at another point, a Norse-speaking character who mocks ibn Fahdlan for riding
a manoeuvrable Arabian stallion that seems the size of a dog to them abandons Norse and pats
the horse with a ‘Woof! Woof! Hello boy’.
The film is based on Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead (1976) which was
written in response to a lecture that dismissed Beowulf as one of those works of literature
that were ‘supposed to be crucial to Western civilization but which were, in truth, no longer
read willingly by anyone, because they were so tedious’.10 Aggrieved at this, Crichton took
on the challenge of demonstrating that there was a dramatic story to be found in the poem.
The irony of this is that there is not much that is identifiably Beowulf in the Eaters of the
Dead or, indeed, the film version, The 13th Warrior (into which Crichton had creative input).
It is true that when Buliwyf (as Beowulf is called) states that ‘luck often enough will save a
man if his courage hold’ this is almost a sententia that could have come from the poem. But
the most effective treatment of Beowulf is in the film’s creative reimagining of the narrative.
The most striking example of this is when the dragon from Beowulf is reinvented as a ‘fire
worm’, a long line of torches held by the Wendol as they snake down through the mists
of a mountain to attack, much more terrifying than any CGI incarnation of a dragon. The
Wendol too are a suggestive rethinking. Beowulf ’s name has been seen by scholars as a
kenning for ‘bee wolf ’, in other words, a bear. The bear-like Wendol, who may even think
themselves bears, actualize this. And when Buliwyf dies, it is from the venom in a wound
delivered by the female leader of the Wendol (Grendel’s mother in the film), echoing the
dragon’s venom that kills Beowulf in the poem. The final scenes of the The 13th Warrior
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feature an apparently impossible stand-off against the marauding Wendol that owes much to
The Magnificent Seven, with shades of El Cid thrown in for good measure. The film ends on
a note of stirring heroism which the next film sets out to undermine entirely.
Beowulf and Grendel (2005)

The title of Beowulf and Grendel (2005) prepares us for the idea that the film will pair the
protagonists in equal status, supplanting ‘Beowulf ’ as sole owner of the story. This draws on
the premise that the ‘real’ story of Grendel has been eviscerated in the one-sided Old English
epic, an idea popularized by John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971), which reworks Beowulf
from the perspective of the eponymous monster.11 The film introduces this notion through
the mechanism of a narrator who intones with unintentionally comic sincerity: ‘Some tales
sail, others sink below the waves, but no less true.’ Que? Oh, I get it, the Vikings sailed in
ships and … and … some tales sink? That’s like totally profound. The opening scenes are
more direct in their communication of this idea: we see a young Grendel clinging to a cliff-
face while he witnesses a band of heavily armoured Danes on horseback hunt down and kill
his defenceless father. No explanation is offered, but towards the end of the film Hrothgar, a
participant in the murder, justifies it by saying that Grendel’s father was a troll, pursued for
the ‘crime’ of catching a fish on Danish territory. The crucial twist is that Hrothgar spares the
young Grendel, this act of mercy preparing the way for his own downfall when, years later,
Grendel exacts brutal vengeance for his father’s murder.
From the outset, the film creates empathy for the ‘monster’ of the poem. ‘Grendel is
monstrous without being a monster,’ explains the film’s director, Sturla Gunnarsson. ‘He has
feelings; he has motivation; he has a personality, a sense of humour; and he has an acute sense
of irony when it comes to revenge.’12 Thus, the Grendel he creates is a very-human-looking
‘troll’ whose emotions are always on show and whose suffering is at the fore. In this the film-
makers were clearly influenced by Gardner’s novel Grendel and they borrow directly from the
novel for a confrontation in which Beowulf discovers that Grendel can talk.13
Another theme of the film is to undermine the association between violence and heroism
that the writers detected in the poem. Before exploring this, the film first grounds its audience
in recognizable elements from Beowulf. We see, for instance, a bedraggled Beowulf emerging
from the sea, fresh from the swimming contest with Breca, which is mentioned in the poem;
and connections to the poem are established through language when the film’s narrator recites
a version of the first line of Beowulf – ‘Hwaet! Great are the tales of the Spear-Danes’ – and
through his deployment of alliteration and kennings: ‘No storm waylaid the sword-wolf on
his hard walk home ... coming home he heard the tale: friends to the west slept with slaughter.’
Before he leaves for Denmark to confront Grendel, Beowulf swells with pride as he boasts in
the film’s awkward, semi-archaic dialogue:
this sail holds grim bliss for me. A thing that takes two hundred in arms, is no small thing.
But I will see Valhalla or that thing’s head on a pole, so the Danes might say ‘Geats don’t
wield words where swords speak truer’.
When he arrives, it steadily becomes apparent that something is rotten in the state of Denmark,
and that Grendel’s attacks are a blood feud and not the rampages of a monstrous ‘thing’. ‘My
wits still war with how this all began,’ Beowulf muses to Hrothgar, no longer the once great
king from his childhood but a drunken sot, dishevelled and broken by the knowledge of what
he has brought upon himself. All Hrothgar can offer is angry abuse and swearing, leaving
Beowulf to wrestle with the mystery of why Grendel attacks the Danes but leaves him and
his men unharmed. Before long, the film turns on its head any sense that there is virtue in
Beowulf ’s mission to rescue the Danes from Grendel.
Andrew Berzins commented that he started writing the film during a period of massacres
in Kosovo and this led him to question ‘the assumptions we have about the warrior and
violent resolutions’.14 This interrogation of notions of the heroic is seen early on in the film
when an ageing and down-to-earth fisherman asks Beowulf: ‘What’s it like being a hero?
Quelling things with axes and that sword of yours. In what? A kind of bloody madness?’
Beowulf ’s response makes the fisherman nervous: ‘In truth, I don’t get all that mad,’ he
says, while a flashback sequence shows him killing a string of opponents with practised ease.
Grendel, in contrast, most definitely does get mad, banging rocks against his head to draw
blood before running berserk to ravage the Danes. As we witness his rage and pain, Grendel’s
angry violence appears more human than Beowulf ’s cold efficiency, and the audience shares
with Beowulf the understanding that Grendel is not a monster to be slain lightly. As befits
the mood of the film, Grendel does not die through Beowulf ’s heroism, but precipitates his
own death when a chain gets wrapped around him and he has to hack off his arm to escape.
The film ends with another inversion: whereas the poem’s last lines show Beowulf ’s people
building a burial mound for Beowulf, the film has Beowulf piling up stones as a memorial for
Grendel. ‘Is this your father?’ he asks Grendel’s son (who he spares, re-enacting Hrothgar’s
mercy). ‘Then be proud!’
As the end credits to the film roll by, there is a ‘thank you’ to ‘the unknown poet’ of
Beowulf, a sentiment which might seem a little tongue-in-cheek given the repeated jibes at
epic poets and poetry in the film (another element present in Gardner’s Grendel). We see this
most directly when the poet Thorkell (who is in the process of writing something very much
like the Beowulf poem) is told by an angry Beowulf to stop exaggerating his deeds. The scene,
which seems very postmodern, inverts an intertextual moment in Beowulf in which one of
Hrothgar’s thanes recites a poem to a presumably appreciative Beowulf about his exploits
(ll. 867–73). Most tellingly, the last lines of dialogue in the film serve as a vulgar epitaph to
the ideals of Beowulf:
Thorkell: The mark of Cain came to his brow. Of evil and a sea hag born.
Grendel, grinder of lost men’s bones.
Thorfinn: Cain. What’s that?
Breca: A man who killed his brother in a Christian tale.
Thorfinn: What’s Cain got to do with Grendel? Grendel kill his own brother too?
Breca: No. I think Thorkell is saying that Grendel’s like Cain. A killer.
Thorfinn: We all are. Thorkell’s tale is shit.
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Reality, the Grendel in Gardner’s novel laments, ‘is quintessentially shoddy’.15 This unravelling
of the heroic, the presentation of a ‘shoddy reality’, is in full view here.
Outlander (2008)
Outlander (2008) is another Beowulf-inspired film with a science fiction twist. In the opening
scene a damaged spaceship spirals out of control in the Earth’s atmosphere and crashes
into a Norwegian lake, shattering the idyllic beauty. This initiates the violent clash of two
worlds: Aliens versus Vikings, as the film might as well have been called. Through a series
of flashbacks we discover that the spaceship’s sole human survivor, Kainan, participated in
the genocide of the Moorwen, a race of fire-breathing, lion-like reptiles, and colonized their
planet. This ended in tragedy for Kainan when his wife and young son were killed by a
Moorwen that had survived. Devastated, Kainan left the planet to take his family home for
burial, but the Moorwen was on board his spaceship and killed the crew, causing the crash
into the Norwegian lake. Finding himself stranded, Kainan learns the language of the local
Norsemen through a painful process of having his computer blast this information into his
eye, causing him to vomit and his nose to bleed (a marked contrast to ibn Fahdlan in The 13th
Warrior who has a turn for language acquisition and learns Norse simply by listening to the
conversations around him). Before long, Kainan has lost all of his futuristic techno-gizmos –
including a laser blaster that would have come in rather handy against Iron Age opponents –
and is being roughed up by Vikings who suspect that he is implicated in a murderous attack
on a neighbouring village (that was, in fact, carried out by the Moorwen). The narrative then
settles down into Kainan bonding with the Vikings à la The 13th Warrior, a subplot about a
rival group of merciless Vikings, and Kainan joining with the two bands of Vikings to hunt
down the Moorwen – which Kainan explains away as a dragon – that is attacking them.
As with Heroes and Demons, the invented character Freya, daughter of Hrothgar, plays a
central role as a feisty, independent warrior woman battling against the chauvinistic Viking
milieu and refusing to be married off to cement the peace (as her almost-namesake Freawaru
is in Beowulf). It is no surprise that she neither becomes the love interest for Kainan nor
ends up in damsel-in-distress mode, captured by the Moorwen, escaping only to find herself
trapped on a rockface, a seeming sacrifice to the ‘dragon’, before eventually helping Kainan
to dispatch his foe.
The director and co-writer, Howard McCain, said in an interview that he had loved
Beowulf since high school and had always ‘wanted to make it into a movie’.16 What he brings
to the screen, however, is an opportunity for ‘Dark Age’ violence and a tendency towards
the genre of horror, with gruesome deaths, a cave full of corpses and dismembered body
parts, plus a monster dribbling saliva over Freya who is trapped beneath the bodies of the
dead. There is an attempt to incorporate one of the Beowulf poet’s major themes, that of
exploring the qualities that make for a benevolent and wise ruler, for example, Hrothgar tells
Freya that if she marries Wulfric, she could make him into a ‘good king’ (echoing the poem’s
‘god cyning’, ll. 11, 863, 2,390), and Hrothgar later tells Wulfric ‘It’s not your sword that
will make you king. ... It’s how you rule your own head and heart.’ But, for the most part,
the dialogue goes off on non-Beowulf-ian frolics of its own, offering genre-typical sententiae
that are epitomized by Freya’s ‘If you truly believe that you write the tale of your own life,
then the end is up to you.’ McCain’s notion of Beowulf seems to be limited to the fight with
Grendel, and so the most we see of the poem’s set-pieces are raids at night by a monster and
a descent to an underwater cave to fight the Moorwen (the film’s Grendel) that turns out
to have had a child (thereby making it equivalent to Grendel’s mother). Hrothgar has the
gravitas and presence of the Hrothgar of Beowulf, and there is an Unferth who is greatly
diminished from the Unferth in the poem, but other than that the characters of Beowulf are
not represented. Instead, we get Freya, Bjorn and, in a borrowing from Lord of the Rings,
Boromir – who provides comedy value through his drinking exploits. Most noticeably, there
is no Beowulf. Kainan is the closest thing to a Beowulf figure, but the film turns the poem
on its head because he is responsible for bringing the Moorwen-Grendel and its terror on
the Vikings. Kainan’s part in the genocide of the Moorwen’s race is Outlander’s take on the
‘monstrous’ nature of Beowulf: Kainan is every bit as much a killer as his opponent, and
even his name recalls the references in Beowulf to Grendel being descended from Cain, thus
creating another connection between hero and monster.
There are shades of Gardner’s Grendel also in the Moorwen’s suffering. This is made
overt when the camera gives us the only close-up of the Moorwen’s face in the moments
before Kainan chops off its arm. What we see is the Moorwen’s pain and a kind of imploring.
With its futuristic technologies, and its attempt to recontextualize Grendel as an explicable,
non-supernatural force, Outlander takes us full circle back to Heroes and Demons. ‘Science
fiction,’ McCain, argues, ‘allows a modern audience to believe in something like a monster
and go along with it, to suspend their disbelief.’17
Beowulf (2007)
Beowulf (2007) returns us to the tension identified at the beginning of this chapter between
advocates of the poem’s literary qualities and a popular culture which derides it. The film’s
co-writer, Neil Gaiman, presents Beowulf as ‘a remarkable and powerful story. The oldest
story in the English language’, noting how he fell in love with the narrative as a teenager and
consequently ‘tried to be very faithful to the poem’ and its characters.18 The film’s director,
Robert Zemeckis, however, is unashamedly in the camp of the Woody Allen character,
confessing that ‘Nothing about the original poem ever appealed to me. I remember being
assigned to read it in Junior High School and not being able to understand it ... the poem is
so boring.’19 Gaiman argues for fidelity, saying that even if some of the people who see the
film ‘are compelled to pick up the original and understand what’s going on, I think we’ll
have done our job’.20 In contrast, Zemeckis sells the film as ‘all about eating, drinking, killing
and fornicating’ and nothing to do with ‘the Beowulf you were forced to read’.21 Where
their meeting place occurs is in the notion that the Beowulf poem as we have it has been
tampered with by monks. Zemeckis justifies the wholesale rewriting of the narrative structure
and characterization by explaining that what Gaiman and co-writer Roger Avary ‘thought the
monks had edited [out], they put back in’.22 This allowed for remarkable creative freedom
90
while remaining ‘faithful to the poem’, including such fundamental changes as Hrothgar
being Grendel’s father, Beowulf succeeding Hrothgar as king and Angelina Jolie as a shape-
shifting, seductive Grendel’s mother whose physical monstrosity seems mainly to reside in a
whiplash tail, high heels and a predilection to emerge naked from water. (Those monks and
their editing. What were they thinking?)
More than any other film considered here, Beowulf (2007) demonstrates an alertness
to the popular reception of Beowulf, borrowing from earlier films to offer an intertextual
pastiche of what went before; or, to use Neil Gaiman’s terminology, it recombines ‘story
DNA’ from different retellings.23 For example, when Hondshew’s advances are rejected by
a Danish woman and a fellow-Geat taunts ‘I know your type. Baa! Baa!’ this is borrowed
from Beowulf and Grendel where Hygelac jeers ‘find Hondscioh a wife. Our sheep have had
enough’. Also, from Beowulf and Grendel (and Gardner’s Grendel) comes the scene in which
Beowulf realizes that Grendel can talk, along with Beowulf ’s defeat of Grendel through the
use of a chain to tear off his arm. The sexualized presentation of Grendel’s mother – one
of the most memorable departures of the film – owes much to Beowulf (1999), as does the
scene in which she terrorizes Beowulf in the form of a succubus, followed by the sudden
horror of scores of dead hanging from the ceiling after her attack (and not just the one dead
Dane as in the poem). While the above list of some of the many borrowings and influences
might make the film sound derivative, its strength lies in developing further what it finds. For
example, the plot twist in Beowulf (1999) that has Rothgar as Grendel’s father is here worked
into a narrative arc in which Hrothgar, Beowulf and, possibly Wiglaf, all father monsters.
As befits Zemeckis’s not-so-lofty mission statement, the film revels in stereotypes of belch-
ing, lascivious, drunken Vikings with a puerile sense of humour and a turn for sexual innuen-
do (witness, for example, the drinking song that provokes Grendel’s attack: ‘her mother was
from Iceland, and she was mighty hot, it’ll need a whole damn iceberg to’, well you get the
picture, and if not, YouTube is your friend). Although a moralizing aspect of the story probes
the frailties of male libido in thrall to a monstrous female power, the film draws the viewer
into its voyeurism, exemplified by buxom women leaning over to scrub benches while the
camera lingers on their cleavage and the gold which drips away to reveal Grendel’s mother’s
body. The conflict between the moralizing and the phallocentric viewpoint is nowhere more
apparent than in the scene where Beowulf ’s sword melts suggestively into droplets as Gren-
del’s mother runs her hands up and down it: when boasting to the Danes of his encounter
with an alluring mermaid, Beowulf uses the double-entendre ‘I killed the monster with my
own blade’; here, his blade is about to fail him; he is on the verge of an emasculation as com-
plete as that of Grendel who we are told (not gratuitously, it turns out) had no ‘pintel’.
In essence, what we have in Beowulf (2007) is an interpretive reading of Beowulf, with
material added to smooth over aspects that the writers saw as impediments to storytelling.
Their most effective and dramatic intervention is to have Grendel’s mother seduce Hrothgar
to create Grendel and then Beowulf to create the dragon. This device creates a structural
unity that the poem lacks and allows them to explore their theme of unchecked male desire
engendering a cycle of suffering and betrayal for the promise of power leading to an impotence
that rots all. The film provides a parable about the decline of the hero, a culmination of the
turn to the anti-heroic in many of the other films. For an audience familiar with superhero
angst, it is not unconscionable to see a broken Beowulf troubled by dark dreams, forced to
admit ‘Nothing is as good as it should have been.’ As a young man, Beowulf withstood the
charge from Grendel’s mother that ‘I know that underneath your glamour, you’re as much
a monster as my son, Grendel.’ By the end of his life, the battle-weary Beowulf feels the full
realization of her words, reinventing the Beowulf-poet’s ‘aglæca’: ‘We men are the monsters
now. The time of heroes is dead.’ With this in mind, it seems deeply appropriate that Gaiman
and Avary allow Beowulf atonement only through mirroring the death of Grendel: in order to
defeat (his son) the dragon, he wraps his own arm in a chain and severs it. His final words to
Wealtheow, his estranged wife, are the antithesis of the Old English Beowulf: ‘Keep a memory
of me. Not as a king, or a hero. But as a man ... fallible and flawed.’
Notes
1. With thanks to Ben Sovin, comrade-in-arms through Beowulf films, and Louise Sylvester, for
noticing an ‘actual’ dragon.
2. Michael Swanton (ed. and trans.) (1997), Beowulf, revised edition. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, p. 1. All references to the poem are to this edition.
3. For the British Museum’s promotional film, see http://www.britishmuseum.org/vikings, accessed
29/04/2014.
4. Season 1, Episode 12.
5. The Official Star Trek Voyager Magazine, Issue 4, New York: Starlog Press, October 1994, p. 67.
6. Voyager Magazine, p. 67.
9. This was also the year in which Seamus Heaney’s verse translation of Beowulf was published.
10. Michael Crichton (1976; repr.), Eaters of the Dead. New York: Knopf; London: Arrow Books,
p. 182.
11. Gardner, John (1971; repr. Robin Clark: London, 1991). Grendel, New York: Knopf.
12. Beowulf and Grendel: Production Notes: http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/production-notes/,
accessed 23/04/14.
13. Cf. Unferth’s discovery of this in Gardener, Grendel, p. 72.
14. Beowulf and Grendel: Production Notes: http://www.beowulfandgrendel.com/production-notes/,
accessed 23/04/14.
15. Gardener, Grendel, p. 77.
16. Outlander: DVD Extras.
17. Outlander: DVD Extras.
18. http://www.canmag.com/nw/9584-beowulf-neil-gaiman, accessed 24/03/14.
19. Beowulf 2007: DVD Extras.
20. http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=78536450-af61-481c-ba03-381db3c97e38,
accessed 22/03/14.
92
21. Beowulf 2007: DVD Extras.

22. Beowulf 2007: DVD Extras. For a nuanced discussion of the problems with seeing the Beowulf
manuscript as the ‘authentic’ witness to the poem, see Chris Jones (2010), ‘From Heorot to
Hollywood: Beowulf in its Third Millennium’, in David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (eds), Anglo-
Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination. Brewer: Cambridge, pp. 13–29.
23. Neil Gaiman (2007), ‘Introduction’, in Caitlín R. Kiernan (ed.), Beowulf. London: Bantam, p. viii.
chapter eight
Contemporary Neo-Medieval
Digital Gaming: An Overview
of Genre
Daniel T. Kline
Chances are that if a digital game takes place in a fictional high-fantasy world, it carries the
trappings of the medieval period: knights and ladies, dragons or other beasties, castles and
moors, armour, weapons and tunics. Academics fuss over how to define these fantastical
digital creations, and for scholars of medievalism in particular, Umberto Eco’s ‘Dreaming of
the Middle Ages’ delineates his famous ‘ten little Middle Ages’. Eco notes that ‘the Middle
Ages have always been messed up in order the meet the vital requirements of different
periods,’1 arguing that the current interest in the Middle Ages oscillates ‘between fantastic
neomedievalism and responsible philological examination’ (Eco 1986, p. 63). Perhaps the
most ‘fantastic neomedievalism’, and the most ‘messed up’ Middle Ages of the contemporary
period, is found in digital games. ‘Responsible philological examination’, or traditional
medieval studies, is supposed to allow us to separate the neomedieval from the truly medieval,
but neo-medieval digital games gleefully combine medieval tropes, plots, characters, settings
and situations (often derived from an intermediary like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or Dungeons
& Dragons) into pixilated, interactive gaming environments that no longer seek any mooring
in the actual Middle Ages. Instead, as Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly argue, ‘Neomedieval
works … do not simply seek to describe, reproduce, or otherwise recover the medieval, but
instead employ contemporary techniques and technologies to simulate the medieval; that is, to
produce a version of the medieval that is more medieval than the medieval’ (Kevin Moberly and
Brent Moberly 2010, p. 15).2 With no allegiance to any historical Middle Ages, neo-medieval
gaming incorporates multiple medieval(ish) features into something altogether new or ‘neo’.
94
This chapter will briefly outline the major genres of neo-medieval gaming, uncovering some of
the specific characteristics of contemporary digital gaming that hearken towards the medieval
and articulating the distinctive aspects of game mechanics in these productions. Gaming, like
medieval iconography, has its own interpretive matrix, and like stained glass, has its own
illuminating power.
Initially, gaming theory and criticism generally oscillated between the ‘narratologists’,
who adopted their approach from a study of literary texts, and ‘ludologists’, who saw
gaming as a unique field that required a new language and approach. In 2003, Gonzalo
Frasca wrote, ‘Of course, we need a better understanding of the elements that games do
share with stories, such as characters, settings, and events. Ludology does not disdain this
dimension of video games but claims that they are not held together by narrative structure.’3
The ludologists included Frasca, Jesper Juul and Espen Aarseth, while early narratologists
included Katherine Hayles and Janet Murray. What is agreed upon now, however, is that
gamers actively participate to create their own experiences within digital games rather than
passively receive the action given by a game and that games themselves are more than just
a series of narratives. Since the time of Frasca’s delineation of the narratology/ludology
divide, gaming studies have become increasingly cross- and trans-disciplinary, drawing from
psychology, sociology, ethnography and education; literary, film and cultural studies; and
philosophy, economics and computer science. Gaming scholars have likewise found unique
approaches to their subject matter.4
Like film studies, gaming studies has developed its own vocabulary while remaining a
narrative-heavy medium. Frasca’s observation is still valid: ‘video games are just a particular
way of structuring simulation, just like narrative is a form of structuring representation’
(Frasca 2003, p. 224). Games are mediated by complicated machines, enacted via complex
software and engaged through a physical repertoire of actions. Players physically interact with
games in ways that affect the events and the outcome of a game and in a way that the readers
of books and viewers of films are unable to do. This physical interaction is governed by ‘game
mechanics’, and those mechanics are often unique to the ‘gaming platform’ or the hardware
upon which the game is situated (PC, X-Box, PS3 or other computer). What makes gaming
distinct from narrative arts like literature – what we might call its ‘ludonarrative’ uniqueness –
is the specific mechanics of each game. ‘Ludonarrative’ refers to the parts of gaming narrative
that are player-controlled, and game mechanics include those computer-mediated features
like graphics, interfaces like console controllers or computer keyboards (haptic interfaces),
and kinesthetic requirements such as button-mashing. Unlike film and literature, which put
viewers and readers in essentially passive-consumer roles, gaming uniquely makes the player
a co-creator of the gaming experience. The gamer makes choices within the gameworld as
allowed by the programming to navigate a unique path through the gaming experience. As
described below, different game genres allow for distinctive kinds of experiences within the
game mechanics, and in each of the games that follow, the neo-medieval asserts itself in
characters, plots and settings to create recognizable medieval situations that themselves do
not reach back to an actual medieval reality, but instead are neo-medieval simulations of high-
fantasy universes.
Contemporary Neo-Medieval Digital Gaming 95
Gaming Genres and Neo-medieval Exemplars

Like movies, video games fall into genres that help determine their characteristic game
mechanics. Probably the best-known genre, the Role Playing Game (RPG), especially its big
brother the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), has the player
take on a character or ‘avatar’ and develop that character through gameplay quests and
interactions in the gameworld to build the character’s skills by ‘levelling’; this is designed
to increase character ‘stats’ (statistics) in areas like strength, dexterity, magic and a host of
others, depending upon the game. Strategy games, where the player combats the game’s
internal AI or Artificial Intelligence, or other players, are divided into Real-Time Strategy
(RTS) and Turn-Based Strategy (TBS) games. Strategy games usually involve the player
directing the facets of an entire culture through a series of stages in competition against other
cultures in gathering resources and building armies, seeing who can advance most quickly,
add technologies or other cultural characteristics and defeat the AI or other players in pitched
combat. RTSs see the player and AI acting at the same time, in ‘real time’, while in TBSs the
player responds to other players in turn. The point of view on the action of RTSs and TBSs
is often ‘isometric’, above the action in a ‘God’s eye view’, rather than first or third person,
as in RPGs or MMORPGs. Action-adventure games generally depict the player-character
combating enemies in first or third person, performing deeds of valour, solving puzzles and
overcoming the challenges set by the game mechanics. Action-adventure games are often
‘open world’ or ‘sandbox’ games, in which players can explore the gameworld freely, or ‘on a
rail’ or ‘linear’, in which the gamer moves resolutely towards a game-determined end point.
Action-adventure games often combine the two modes – sandbox and quests – to stimulate the
game’s replayability. Simulation games or ‘sims’ mimic the specific activities or the aspects of
a fictional reality within the gameworld with no predetermined end. Neo-medieval games in
each of these genres are those usually set in a medieval(ish) world, with castles and windblown,
gothic landscapes, populated by knights, soldiers, mages and nightmarish monsters, wearing
medieval armour and using exotic hand-held and ranged weapons from the medieval worlds,
all to create an alternative simulated universe that the player-character navigates.
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing

Games and Role-Playing Games
High-fantasy MMORPGs are the best known and most popular medieval gameworlds. Blizzard
Entertainment’s World of Warcraft dominates the genre, boasting 8.3 million subscribing
players in 2013, down from a high of 12 million paying players in 2010. A chief draw of
MMORPGs is that thousands of players interact online in real time, and the gameworld
continues even when the player is offline, so players can dip into the gameworld at their
leisure and stay as long as they want in the persistent, continuing neo-medieval universe.
Character creation is the first, and perhaps most important, element in playing World of
Warcraft because it determines so much of the subsequent gameplay and because it establishes
the player’s interaction with the gameworld. In World of Warcraft, players craft an avatar by
96
choosing first a ‘faction’ (Alliance or Horde, who are enemies). Within the faction, different
‘races’ are then available (Human, Gnome, Night Elf, Dwarf, Draenei for the Alliance; Orc,
Undead, Tauren (half-human, half-bull), Troll, Blood Elf for the Horde). Races then yield
specific classes (Druid, Mage, Paladin, Priest, Shaman, Warlock for the Alliance; Hunter,
Rogue, Warrior). The Death Knight, a heroic class, is available to both Alliance and Horde
players above level 55. Each character also has skills (armour, class, language, weapon)
and attributes (strength, agility, stamina, intellect, spirit), and can choose character-specific
professions (among them, alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, herbalism, jewel-
crafting, leatherworking, mining, tailoring, skinning, inscription) and reputations (exalted,
revered, honoured, friendly, neutral, unfriendly, hostile or hated). Each character takes on
different forms of armour, uses distinctive arms in battle or carries specific spells to cast, all
of which have the hand-hewn looks of medieval exemplars. These multiple variables allow
players to customize their characters with specific attributes that then create different
advantages in the gameworld.
While the characters in the World of Warcraft (WOW) are recognizably Tolkeinesque and
medievalish, the gameworld likewise carries a neo-medievalist cast in a high-fantasy setting.
Set in the world of Azeroth (made up of three continents: Kalimdor, Northrend, the Eastern
Kingdoms, and later the extra-dimensional world Outland), the WOW gameworld was
reconfigured with the Cataclysm expansion and broadened to include Pandaria in the Mists
of Pandaria expansion. An ‘expansion’ is the term for additional content provided to the
gameworld that players can buy, often adding new features, characters, settings and action.
Each continent in the WOW gameworld has a variety of terrains, including wilderness, forests,
seas and faction- and race-specific cities populated by pre-modern shops, inns, houses, great
halls and cathedrals. Players follow ‘quest-chains’ that are often delivered by NPC (non-
playing characters), who are part of the programmed action, while ‘questing’ or ‘levelling’
their characters to higher stages of achievement, skill and talent – now up to Level 90. The
quest-chains are story-driven, with players following the narrative through their actions in
the gameworld and in relation to other players. Within these diverse settings, players can
undertake three basic types of game play: PvE (Player vs. Environment, which concentrates
on exploration and quests), PvP (Player vs. Player, which focuses upon combat with other
players) and RP (Role-Play, in which players stay in character throughout their activities).
Players also can join ‘guilds’ that share loot and wealth through guild ‘banks’, battle enemies
together in group quests called ‘instances’ and communicate with one another via an online
chat channel – all in the quest to level their characters as high as possible and gain the richest
‘loot’ or specialized items with significant powers. Guilds provide one of the most important
medievally inspired characteristics of WOW, and the game’s neo-medieval world revolves
around the relationships that players develop in guild life.
The reason to spend so much time on the details of WOW is that it is paradigmatic of the
MMORPG genre and a worldwide phenomenon. RPGs tend to be single-player titles, with
the player exploring the gameworld single-handedly and levelling a character against the
computer’s AI. These RPGs are sometimes characterized as ‘dungeon crawls’, where many of
the environments consist of shadowy medieval castles and gloomy gothic dungeons and the
foes are supernatural skeletons, demons and other undead creepy-crawlies. Like WOW, RPGs
often give the player a multitude of character-generation options, choosing among human and
non-human races, each with specific characteristics, while the storylines are often structured
around a high-fantasy rags-to-riches arc. Popular RPG series include Dungeon Siege, Runescape
and Baldur’s Gate, whose storylines often extend over a decade in multiple sequels.
The Dungeon Siege series of three games (Dungeon Siege, 2002; Dungeon Siege II: Broken
World, 2005; Dungeon Siege III: Treasures of the Sun, 2011) begins with the player taking
on the role of a farmer, who then grows into a hero on a quest to save the kingdom of
Ehb, accumulating up to eight comrades to aid his quest. In the sequel, the player-character
and six companions take on the evil Valdis at Zamaroth’s Horns in the land of Aranna, but
Valdis’s magical Sword of Zamaroth is shattered against the Shield of Azunai, and the player-
character overcomes Valdis. The third installment finds the player-character able to choose
between four characters, whose stories alter the gameplay, to re-establish the disgraced 10th
Legion and to fight Jeyne Kassynder for control of Ehb. In Runescape (2001–13), a free
online MMORPG with 200 million registered accounts and about 10 million active players,
players utilize 25 skills as they level their characters, following a non-linear storyline and
ranging freely across the gameworld of Gielinor, combating enemies and other players,
interacting with NPCs and exploring the environment. Unlike WOW, players in Runescape
do not have to choose a character class but take on different abilities by changing their
weapons and armour to create magic, ranged and melee attacks. Notable in that its game
mechanics are based upon Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate (1999–2013) is set in the
vast, high-fantasy, neo-medievalist world of the Forgotten Realms, on the planet Abeir-Toril,
and centred upon the city of Baldur’s Gate. The player-character begins as an orphan raised
in the monastery of Candlekeep and works to discover his foster-father’s killer, all the while
interacting with NPCs, fighting enemies, completing quests and gathering a party of up to
six computer-aided companions to assist him in his adventures. Because of their diverse
gameplay, complex characters, exciting quests, collaborative potential, high-fantasy settings,
immersive capabilities and their neo-medieval elements, RPGs and MMORPGs are some of
the most popular games today. Many players’ first taste of the medieval now comes through
these neo-medieval games.
Strategy Games: Real-Time and Turn-Based

Another gaming genre that often carries a neo-medieval flavouring is the strategy game, both
RTS and TBS. Strategy games most often pit armies or even entire cultures against one another
in a struggle for supremacy. They also require players to balance the gathering of resources,
the fielding of an army and the development of a culture as they battle against other players
(via online play) or against the computer’s AI. These civilization-building strategy games
follow a culture through different stages of development, including a ‘medieval’ period, on
the march from pre-historic civilization to modernity and beyond, presenting a hard-wired
periodization of history. The latest in Sid Meier’s Civilization series is Civilization V, a TBS
game that allows players to pick a smorgasbord of cultural attributes to create their civilization.
Like WOW, Civilization V combines different historical leaders and world cultures to create a
cultural palimpsest, a counterfactual historical amalgam. Civilization V comes with eighteen
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playable civilizations, each headed by a historical figure. Expansions to Civilization V bring

the total to forty-three playable civilizations in which the player starts with a single city
and warrior unit. The player then grows the city with additional population, specialized
units, cultural achievements and economic wealth. For example, the Arabian civilization is
headed by Harun al-Rashid (766–809), and its unique building is the bazaar; the Byzantines
are headed by Theodora I (500–48), and their special unit the Catafract; the Celts are led
by Boudica (c. 60), whose special unit is the Pictish Warrior; and the Danes are captained
by Harald Bluetooth (935–86), with their unique unit, the Berserker. Civilization V’s ‘Tech
Tree’, a schematic charting of technological development through time, gives a taste of the
complexity of the game mechanics. The Tech Tree provides an overview of what the game
designer thought of as ‘medieval’. Theology, the Civil Service, Currency, Engineering and
Metal Casting are the products of the early Middle Ages in Civilization V, while the Compass,
Education, Chivalry, Machinery, Physics and Steel emerge in the later Middle Ages. Sailing
in the Ancient Era yields Optics in the Classical Era, while Optics gives way to the Compass
in the Middle Ages and then Astronomy in the Renaissance. TBSs as well as RTSs operate in
much the same way: the player creates different units in specialized buildings, lassoes groups
of military units (like archers and swordsmen) with the computer’s mouse, and manoeuvres
the units into neighbouring areas of the map – often negotiating rivers, mountains, forests
and other terrain – where the units attack any defensive personnel. By navigating, populating
and conquering a world map, the aim of Civilization V is to achieve one of five winning
conditions: conquest by battle, diplomatic supremacy, building a cultural wonder, winning
the space race or fashioning the most powerful culture after a set number of turns.
In contrast to the turn-based approach of the Civilization series, Microsoft’s Age of Empires
series takes on an RTS approach; that is, rather than the player and computer’s AI (or other
gamers) taking turns as they develop their cultures, players in RTSs operate simultaneously, in
real time, synchronically, creating a very different gaming experience. The third in the series,
Age of Empires II: Age of Kings (Ensemble Studios, Microsoft, 1999), focuses specifically on
the medieval period. Players can get their feet wet by taking on campaigns against historical
leaders like William Wallace, Joan of Arc, Frederick Barbarossa, Genghis Khan and Saladin.
In regular game play, Age of Empires II: Age of Kings provides players thirteen different
civilizations – Britons, Byzantines, Celts, Chinese, Franks, Goths, Japanese, Mongols, Persians,
Saracens, Teutons, Turks and Vikings. Each culture has distinctive advantages and unique
units. The Vikings are granted a special longboat and maritime bonus, while the English
longbowmen exceed other civilizations’ archers. Players advance their chosen civilizations
through four distinctive medieval epochs (the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age
and the Imperial Age) and win the game through military conquest, social advancement or
cultural achievement. Entering each new historical epoch allows the player to access new
technologies, building types and weapons, and players must balance resource-harvesting and
allocation (food, wood and gold) with tactical resources (soldiers and weapons of different
types) for long-term success.
Another historical RTS set specifically in a realistic Middle Ages is Firefly Studios’
Stronghold series (2001–11), which doubles as a castle simulator or ‘sim’, and can be played
in a single player (against the computer) or a multiplayer mode (against other players). Set
in England at the time of the Norman Conquest, a Stronghold (2001) player acts as the lord
of a manor; the primary goal of the game is military conquest (destroying other players’
castles), though economic development is also important. The player takes on the identity of
a Boy as he battles against four enemies (Duc de Puc, the Rat; Duc Beauregard, the Snake;
Duc de Truffe, the Pig; and Duc Volpe, the Wolf), all of whom have betrayed his father. The
player must retake the four treacherous lords’ territories with a variety of fighting units to
avenge his father’s death. Stronghold offers a variety of missions – combat, siege, invasion and
economic campaigns – and the combat campaign illustrates one of the key game mechanics
evident in games of all types: each phase of play has specific objectives for the player to meet,
and by achieving those objectives, the game teaches the player how to advance the action as
gameplay progresses. In other words, most games contain in-game tutorials. For example,
the Stronghold combat campaign begins with ‘Gathering the Lost’, which requires the most
basic skill in an RTS: gathering food and wood. ‘Finishing the Fort’ comes next, requiring
the player to stave off wolf attacks while building a castle. In this sequence of tasks, players
learn to gather resources, build structures and attack enemies, all of which are necessary in
all subsequent phases of the game, and each stage then adds additional skills and objectives.
Stronghold: Crusader (2002), the second in the series, is set in the medieval Middle East during
the first three crusades. Players play as either Richard the Lionheart or Saladin. Gameplay
consists of campaigns that comprise several linked battles and missions, and players can battle
against the computer’s AI in ‘skirmish mode’ or follow the ‘Crusader Trail’ in fifty linked
missions. Stronghold Legends (2006) plays in the realm of medieval legend with the player
taking on King Arthur with his Knights of the Round Table, Count Vlad Dracul or Siegfried of
Germany in the battle against mythological enemies. Rather than playing the game through a
single player-created avatar, RTSs and TBSs generally require players to harness the powers of
a complete civilization in battle against other civilizations, either in a neo-medieval setting or
progressing through a facsimile of the Middle Ages in the course of a manufactured history.
Action-Adventure Games
Another gaming genre that engages the neomedieval is the action-adventure game, often a
‘hack-and-slash’ escapade, and two recent games in particular take on well-known medieval
precedents: Beowulf: The Game and Dante’s Inferno. Based as much on the 2007 companion
movie as the medieval epic, Beowulf: The Game finds the player taking on the title character
in a revision of the classic Anglo-Saxon text. Candace Barrington and Timothy English
identify three types of changes the game makes to the epic story: filling continuity gaps in
the original, exaggerating aspects of the Germanic warrior culture depicted in the text and
creating a greater ‘thematic tension between a flawed, self-centered man and the perfect,
selfless hero’.5
Ostensibly set in eighth-century Denmark, the game begins with Beowulf facing off with
Brecca in the swimming race, and as Beowulf fights the sea monsters, he is rescued by a
mysterious goddess who gives him the power of Carnel Fury – a game mechanic that allows
him added power against enemies but that can also inadvertently injure the thanes whom he
commands. Back in Denmark, Grendel attacks Herot (sic). Beowulf seeks his fortune there,
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and he tears off Grendel’s arm, killing the monster. Grendel’s mother seeks revenge, and
Beowulf is then seduced by her – the same goddess who rescued him as he battled the sea
monsters. Beowulf becomes the king of the Danes, and he fights a demonic wolf at the village
of Ingelthorp and defends the land against Brecca, who has returned to invade Denmark.
Beowulf then ultimately fights the dragon who, it turns out, he sired with the goddess. As in the
2007 Beowulf movie, Grendel’s mother seduces Hrothgar, yielding Grendel, and she likewise
seduces Beowulf, yielding the dragon, and the game is populated with familiar characters like
Wealtheow, Unferth and Wiglaf. Playing as Beowulf, the player can choose between Heroic
and Carnal mode to strengthen his abilities. Heroism increases with additional combat,
particularly with combination attacks, and strengthens the player’s health. Carnal Fury adds
bonus damage, but the player can also kill his allies. Players must therefore balance the Heroic
against the Carnal as they manoeuvre through the game world as the hero Beowulf.
Another medieval classic that gets the gaming treatment is Dante’s Inferno. Rather than
a meditative pilgrim making his way through the underworld with the guidance of Virgil
and the inspiration of Beatrice, Dante’s Inferno presents Dante as a butt-kicking crusading
knight who thunders his way through the nine rings of hell to rescue Beatrice, now figured
as a damsel in distress, from Lucifer. As Dante fights his way through the circles of hell,
recognizable from the medieval poem, he accumulates ‘souls’ from every foe he defeats. The
souls – equivalent to experience points – are used to procure Dante’s Holy and Unholy abilities,
special skills that aid in Dante’s quest through the underworld. Based on the internal settings
that the player selects, Dante passes a judgement on each enemy he encounters. He punishes
an enemy to accumulate more Unholy points, while absolving them awards Holy points.
Holy abilities include Fortitude of Seneca (at level 1), Sacred Quake (level 2) and Martyrdom
(level 5), while Unholy abilities comprise Retribution (level 1), Wisdom of Horace (level 2)
and Diabolical Guillotine (level 4), among many others. In the action-adventure logic of the
game, each enemy that Dante attacks increases his Redemption meter in the lower left of the
screen, until a full meter allows Dante to reach a state of Redemption where his attacks are
more deadly. During his hellish adventure, Dante can also collect Judas Coins (which give
him more souls), encounter Beatrice stones (which automatically absolve damned souls) and
amass relics (which grant special powers). Another prominent feature of Dante’s Inferno’s
game mechanics are special ‘mini-games’ called Quick-Time Events (QTEs), which require the
player to press the controller buttons in sequence with instructions given onscreen, usually to
defeat an enemy. Dante’s Inferno converts some of the Inferno’s memorable characters into
‘bosses’, like King Minos, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, whom the player must defeat often at
the end of a level in a ‘Boss Fight’. After battling his way through the nine rings of hell, Dante
ultimately frees Beatrice from Lucifer’s clutches and is absolved of all the sins he committed
during the crusade.
A third action-adventure game that takes advantage of neo-medieval settings and characters
is the Prince of Persia series. The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) finds the Prince,
son of King Sharaman of Persia, battling against the Maharajah’s evil Vizier with the help of
the beautiful Princess Farah, daughter of the Maharajah. The Prince, who is never named,
comes upon the Sands of Time within a mystical Hourglass in the Maharajah’s palace, and
he also finds the Dagger of Time. The Dagger of Time releases the Sands of Time, which
turn the kingdom’s inhabitants to evil beings and provide the Prince’s battle fodder. One
of the nifty gameplay mechanisms of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the Dagger of
Time, which can slow time down during gameplay or rewind time for several seconds into
the past. In gameplay, this has the effect of rewinding the entire game – sound effects, health
and damage characteristics, the visual field, and battles with enemies – to allow for additional
replay. Unlike the main characters in many other games, the Prince is as much athletic acrobat
as heroic warrior, climbing and wall running, jumping, flipping and swinging off poles and
obstacles during battles before dispatching an evil minion with his Dagger of Time. Each of
these actions requires carefully coordinated button mashing. On the X-Box, the left analog
stick directs the Prince’s movements, while the right analog stick controls the ‘virtual camera’
and how the player views the action:
●● the A-button causes the Prince to jump or somersault,
●● the X-button makes the Prince attack an enemy,
●● the Y-button uses the Dagger of Time to retrieve sand or stab an enemy, and
●● the B-button drops the Prince from ledges or puts his weapons away.
In addition to the main buttons on the controller, the player has a variety of other actions
to undertake with more complicated button sequences. The right bumper enables a number
of the Prince’s special abilities (like wall running or blocking enemy attacks), while the left
bumper rewinds time. A regular sword attack requires the player to direct the left analog stick
in the direction of the enemy and quickly hit the X-button to launch the attack, and a counter-
attack requires the player to hold the right bumper and quickly punch the X-button when an
enemy attacks. The required controls become more complicated as the manoeuvres become
more involved. The player learns to retrieve the Sands of Time from enemies; evade, block
and counter-attack; and launch each of these while leaping, somersaulting or wall-running. It
takes timing, practice, and hand–eye coordination for players to perfect these manoeuvres with
a console control or PC keyboard, and one of the joys of gameplaying is conquering the full
range of commands available to the player’s avatar. This haptic interaction with the game via
the controller is one of the main means by which players become ‘immersed’ in the gameworld:
players have to work harder – that is, take command of increasingly complex sequences of
commands – to dispatch enemies that increase in power as the game progresses.
Conclusion
‘Immersion’ is one of the signal effects of neo-medieval gaming as players enter fantasy
worlds constructed by medieval tropes, narratives, settings and characters. By entering the
neo-medieval gameworld through the player-avatar and then controlling that avatar in the
process of weaving a narrative out of discrete interactions with other characters, monsters
and exotic premodern locales, the players of neo-medieval games simultaneously fashion their
gaming experience – as well as interact with the game’s mechanics – in a dance both freely
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chosen and highly determined: gamers choose a path through the gameworld and negotiate
the narratives, puzzles and battles established by the game creators. More interactive than
reading a book or viewing a movie, gaming allows players to become co-creators of their
gaming experiences, whether the ruler in a strategy game, a hero like the reconceived Dante
or Beowulf, or a knight on a quest in a role-playing game. Players take on the identity of these
neo-medieval figures, making choices in the gameworld and thinking through the gameworld
action according to the needs of these contemporary medieval characters. The immersion
is thus more than digital; it is likewise psychological and behavioural. Gamers become the
characters they create and traverse these neo-medieval worlds sensorially, psychologically,
haptically.
In a companion essay to ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’ entitled ‘Living in the New
Middle Ages’, Eco writes, ‘The Middle Ages preserved in its way the heritage of the past
but not through hibernation, rather through a constant retranslation and reuse; it was
an immense work of bricolage, balanced among nostalgia, hope, and despair’ (Eco 1986,
p. 84). Neomedieval gaming remediates multiple visions of the Middle Ages through
bricolage, melding selected medieval realities, like forms of armour or choices of weapons,
through medievalist intermediaries, like Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkein’s Middle Earth,
to reconstruct immersive neomedieval worlds. Gamers yearn to return to a contemporary
medieval past, fighting the despair that comes with each new defeat but with the hope of
playing the game and of being resurrected – respawned for a new iteration of their chosen
games. Digital gaming continues to grow, and the neomedieval worlds of digital gaming are
becoming the first contact with the medieval world for new generations.
Notes
1. Eco, U. (1986), ‘Dreaming of the middle ages’, in U. Eco (ed.), Travels in Hyperreality. Harcourt,
Brace, and Company: New York, p. 68.
2. Moberly B. and Moberly, K. (2010), ‘Neomedievalism, hyperrealism, and simulation’. Studies in
Medievalism, 19: 15.
3. Frasca, G. (2003), ‘Simulation versus narrative: Introduction to ludology’, in M. J. P. Wolf and
B. Perron (eds), The Video Game Theory Reader. Routledge, NY: Routledge, p. 222.
4. Baker, N. (2010), ‘The rise of digital game studies’. Choice, 48(1): 27–34.
5. Barrington, C. and English, T. (2014), ‘“Best and only bulwark”: How epic narrative redeems
Beowulf: The Game’, in D. Kline (ed.), Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages. London:
Routledge, p. 31.
chapter nine
Survey of Twenty-First
Century ‘Medieval’ Film
Lesley Coote
Tales of Fantasy and Romance

A neo-medieval setting, for a twenty-first-century audience, usually summons up the idea
of fantasy. The far past is a kind of ‘third space’ in which we can ask questions and offer
opinions, which might be considered inappropriate in other, more contemporary, film worlds.
In this culturally recognized setting we can interact with fantastic or miraculous characters
and events, regardless of whether we think that these things could have been possible in the
Middle Ages.
The ‘Middle Ages’ is a setting of choice for fairy tales, whether these are for children
and families, or for adults. The Harry Potter series has been particularly instrumental in the
success of fantasy films with neo-medieval settings, but perhaps a more fluid neo-medieval
world is created in Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders 2012).1 Snow White is
the product of her mother’s wish, on seeing three drops of blood on the snow, for a daughter
with similar attributes. This is an echo of the blood on the snow seen by Perceval in Chrétien
de Troyes’ Conte de Graal, which reminds him of his beloved, Blanchefleur.2 The forest in
which the exiled Snow White lives owes much to the CGI effects of Lord of the Rings,3 and
the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011–2014). It is dark, ever-changing, never to
be trusted. Even the built environment is unstable. In this fantasy, the heroine performs the
type of military and physical feats that a male hero would conventionally perform, and the
contest is not between men, but between women. The deadly apple is a male, not a female,
symbol. The film presents iconic ‘medieval’ settings such as castles, half-timbered houses
and thatched wooden cottages and modern characters, medieval/renaissance costumes, and
contemporary ideologies and dialogue. In the manner of the fairy tale, good exists in tension
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with evil, the sunlit pastoral life of ‘the people’ and the steel-clad, stone-built world of the
(mostly tyrannical) rulers.4
A good example of the fairy tale in a ‘family’ film is Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky
Jenson 2001). The first of this animated series has the castles and pastoral forest life common
to most neo-medieval films. In fact, though, everything is undermined: the lord of the castle is
a coward, a tiny man who wears a full-size suit of armour and is prepared to let an ogre free a
princess to be his bride. The hero is an ogre, the hero’s milk-white steed is displaced by a wise-
cracking donkey and the beautiful princess to be freed from her tower is an ogre by night. In
the end, she elects to make the ogre side of her appearance permanent, not the human one,
in precisely the kind of reversal beloved of medieval fabliaux and other comic tales. (The
later films in the Shrek series employ a neo-medieval pastiche, blending the medieval and the
modern in a self-consciously non-seamless way.)5
This approach valorizes the modern, at the expense of the medieval. A similar playful
approach is used in a more subtle and revealing way in A Knight’s Tale (Brian Helgeland
2001), which manages to laud both modern and medieval values. In Helgeland’s film, a young
man rises from poverty through a mixture of chutzpah, hard work and talent to become a
successful tournament performer, and eventually a knight. The characters include Geoffrey
Chaucer and the Black Prince, but in fictional rather than a ‘historical’ context. The film
creates a ‘postmodern’ pastiche of modern culture steeped in the spirit of the medieval:
tournament as popular sport and vehicle for social advancement, the use of popular music
and innovations in armour design.
Adult versions of the medieval fantasy (films certified 15 years or over) are frequently more
nightmare than dream: the Gothic fantasy of the medieval as brutal, cruel, diseased, savage,
violent and superstitious. Good examples of this type of film are Dark Relic (Lorenzo Sena
2010), Black Death: journey into hell (Christopher Smith 2011) and Anazapta: vengeance
knows no mercy (Alberto Sciamma 2002). The first features a group of returning crusaders,
charged with delivering a portion of the Holy Cross to the Pope.6 When the wood begins to
bleed, their journey rapidly becomes one horror after another. A peasant couple are eaten to
the bone by locusts, a soldier is hung up in the forest with his insides hanging out, a group
of monks turn into demons, a priest is eaten alive by maggots and the group is stalked by a
CGI demon. Ultimately, the hero defeats the demon (with the help of his lover), and destroys
the dangerous relic. The film is a camp delight, similar to Hammer horror films, the dialogue
equally enjoyable for its banality. Were ‘popular’ medieval romances any more believable, or
any less entertaining (for reasons intended and unintended)?
Black Death features disease, witchcraft and ignorant superstition. In his distress when his
lover flees the plague, a novice monk offers to guide a group of soldiers, led by the battle-
hardened Ulrich, into the forest swamps in order to seek out a village whose people are said
to have avoided the Death by renouncing their Christian faith. Ulrich refuses and is torn
apart by horses. After he has killed what he thinks is a revenant, but is really his lover, the
novice is restored to his monastery. He develops a deep hatred of everyone and everything,
and becomes a cruel inquisitor. The film has no spectacular CGI, but still presents a deceptive
world; nature appears benign, with green leaves, sunshine and singing birds, but changes
very quickly to become neutral, or cruel, and threatening. The camerawork includes the kind
Survey of Twenty-First Century ‘Medieval’ Film 105
of shaky, hand-held camera shots familiar from horror films such The Blair Witch Project
(Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez 1999). Nobody is innocent, not even the bleached
earth, stained by the innocent girl’s blood.
In Anazapta, the Middle Ages is sexually depraved as well as violent and superstitious,
although it does have some interesting touches. When Lady Matilda puts on the clothes of
her husband’s dead first wife, she attracts the lust of the local bishop, who lends her money
to save her estates, in exchange for sex if she cannot repay his loan. The idea of being, or
seeming, changed by wearing a specific clothing is a trope found in medieval romances, as
is that of the faithful servant who refuses to do a master’s bidding when told to destroy his
charge: the servant loses his nose rather than kill the master’s errant, and pregnant, wife or
their child.7 The same husband offered money to the village men to rape his unfaithful wife to
death. Nobody is very innocent or very sympathetic in this film, except Matilda, who is used
by the dead woman to kill her husband. The bishop and the villagers meet their deaths when
they choke on the communion wine, become the dead woman’s blood; only Matilda and the
faithful servant are saved.8
Not all ‘dreams’ of the medieval are nightmares. Some are engaging romance fantasies.
Kevin Reynolds’s film adaptation of Tristan & Isolde (Kevin Reynolds 2006) takes a well-
known Arthurian story and reconfigures it in Dark Age Cornwall and Ireland. Amid the
wooden buildings, a nice touch is the way in which King Marke’s civilization is built on
the remains, still visible, left by the Roman Empire. Production values are high, and some
of the camerawork, in particular, the shots of Tristan and Isolde launching a little boat on
a heaving sea, conjure up an epic setting. The wedding scene owes much to Pre-Raphaelite,
rather than to medieval, art, and Marke is a paternal figure, more like King Arthur in First
Knight (Jerry Zucker 1995) than the tyrannical, wife-abusing King Mark of Malory’s epic.
Ridley Scott takes up the theme of the greenwood outlaw in his version of the story of
Robin Hood (2010). As usual, Robin is a war-weary former crusader, returning from Richard
I’s army after the king’s death in France.9 He adopts another man’s identity in order to
return safely to England with evidence of the king’s death. Persuaded to continue with his
deception, Robin foils both the tyrannical tendencies of King John and a French invasion,
then follows the lead of his democratic activist father by starting off the campaign for Magna
Carta. Outlawed by the king, he takes up residence in the greenwood, with his men and his
lover Marian. The story features Robin’s transformation from a soldier to an outlaw, ending
‘at the beginning’ of the legend. The representation of the juvenile Merry Men as ‘Lost Boys’
is interesting, in view of the fact that Peter Pan is always dressed similarly to Robin Hood –
both boys who never grow up?
Other major influences in neo-medieval re-creations are digital gaming, anime and manga
traditions. Both Ironclad (Jonathan English 2011) and Richard the Lionheart (Stefano Mila
2013) have the feel of a digital game world. The latter has little to do with its titular historical
figure. Henry II of England wants his second son to prove that he is worthy of his inheritance,
so he sends Richard to a donjon in France to be tested by cruel and inhuman trials. Richard,
with the aid of a shaven-headed, brown-skinned man and a Saracen warrior (the references to
Gladiator are very obvious), manages to fight his way out, while conversing with well-oiled,
scantily clad women from a prophetic time outside history.10 The film is largely a vehicle for a
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series of violent fight sequences. Ironclad has slightly more plot, but follows a similar format.
In 1215, a returning Templar hero has to defend Rochester Castle, with the aid of its few
inhabitants. Everyone is gradually killed off, except the hero and the castellan’s widow, now
his lover, who survive until the castle is relieved. The special effects (SFX) are much better
than in Richard, utilizing CGI to ‘demolish’ castle walls. The actors have better dialogue, in
which they discuss their situation in relation to national politics and military movements: the
historical setting is maintained throughout, if only as a vague backdrop.
The use of medievalia as pastiche is a feature of some Japanese anime films. The most
interesting of these is the Beserk series.11 Medieval castles, armour and other artefacts provide
a setting for the story of a mercenary hero with a spiky haircut and a broadsword. Kentaro
Miura, creator of the original Beserk manga series, is a collector of varied medievalia. This is
precisely the nature of the anime; the stories feature a varied collection of characters, costumes,
settings and realia, assembled from different historical periods and cultures, from both East and
West. The drawings are Japanese in style, as is the nature of the ‘manga-esque’ violence. Unlike
traditional Western animations, these manga-based animes are not (usually) ‘family’ films.
To travel back to the past, or to have the past ‘visit’ the present, is the ultimate contemporary
neo-medieval fantasy. The Last Templar (Paolo Barzman 2008) returns to the idea of the
mysterious Templar cult and historical conspiracies familiar from the work of Dan Brown.12
Thor (Kenneth Branagh and Joss Whedon 2011), and its sequel Thor: the dark world (Alan
Taylor 2013), conflate the mythology of the Old Norse epic with the modern superhero action
adventure. Retrospective time travel usually results in the modern time-traveller restoring
order to a chaotic past, rationalizing history. In Timeline (Richard Donner 2003), a group of
archaeologists discover a time machine, which takes them back into the past of the site they
are excavating. They battle the (medieval) villain, rescuing sympathetic locals and scientific
integrity in the process. Love conquers history, and lovers remain, happily, in one another’s
historical time.
In Crusade in Jeans (Ben Sombogaart 2006), a young boy uses a time machine to join the
Children’s Crusade in 1212, where he employs the scientific knowledge and technology of the
present in order to help the children and their adult companions to survive. There is a playful
element in the postmodernism of this film, despite its potentially sombre subject. In Black
Knight (Gil Junger 2001), Jamal Walker, a menial worker (of colour) in a medieval theme
park, is transported back to medieval England by means of a magical talisman he finds in the
‘castle’ moat. He saves his damsel and the kingdom with the aid of his ‘street’ skills, rather
than with any intellectual (middle-class) background or knowledge. This lack of privileged
access proves to be his salvation, and everyone else’s. In the tradition of Mark Twain’s
Connecticut Yankee, this film pokes fun, subtly or unsubtly, at how ‘we’ see the medieval – by
comical attempts to teach medieval people modern culture, or the use of erroneous names
from contemporary popular culture as a running joke, for example.
The Return of the Epic

The twenty-first century began with a reinvigoration and reimagining of the epic form.
The director who took the lead in this direction was Ridley Scott, whose neo-Roman epic
Gladiator (2000) was one of the first major cinematic blockbusters of the new century.
Scott reproduced the traditional qualities of epic, enhanced by innovative technological
developments. A major feature of Scott’s work was his innovative use of computer-generated
imagery (CGI), which blended live actors and surviving built environments with CGI
extensions, in order to create a feeling of ‘being in the past’ for a contemporary audience.13
Scott’s epic formula appeared in a neo-medieval form in 2005, with his crusade epic Kingdom
of Heaven. This film’s settings feature a blend of CGI and existing buildings, seamlessly joined
to produce an impression of ‘being in’ twelfth-century Jerusalem. Panoramic widescreen
shots, such as that of the Holy Cross advancing slowly across the desert sand, shimmering
in the heat, or the sight and sound of two mounted armies clashing together at speed, are
masterpieces of cinematic spectacle. The heroine plays the traditional part of the epic ‘leading’
lady, demonstrating and developing the hero’s human qualities by her questioning and her
loyal support. She is exotic and erotic, too, like the Eastern women in medieval romances.14
The film evokes the richness and decadence of the ‘holy’ Crusader state, whose realities are
little understood by the Western nations that, theoretically and militarily, support it. Scott’s
hero Balian, rather than being victorious in combat, is shown creating irrigation systems for
the benefit of his people, defending the weak and engineering (literally) the final defence of
the doomed city of Jerusalem. In the end, the body of this hero is split, metaphorically, into
many parts, as he democratically knights the ‘everymen’ of the city. The traditional end of
epic is victory for the hero, and often his death (as in Gladiator), but here it is the turning of
defeat into a personal victory.15
Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings’s neo-medieval fantasy epics helped set the trend for
future ‘medieval’ films (see note 3). Jackson’s cinematography seeks to create the fantasy
world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination. Live actors and computer-generated avatars mass
in, or move through, spaces of apparently infinite breadth and depth: this is an epic on a
massive scale. The panoramic shots are inter-cut with more intimate encounters between
actual human actors, which take place in real geographical locations, using physical props
and prosthetics. Like Tolkien and Scott, Jackson rejects the powerful heroic body for the
tiny, hairy form of Frodo Baggins, whose heroism, like Balian’s, diffuses into the many. His
battles are personal ones, of skill, courage, endurance and love for others, and in the end he,
like Sir Thomas Malory’s Galahad – having been privileged to glimpse the Sublime, rejects
his own world altogether. Frodo is, however, frequently upstaged by Aragorn: handsome,
rugged, strong and violent, a martial hero who cuts, slices, parries and thrusts his way to
his coronation. In the neo-medieval epic, as in the medieval one, the heroic male body as
spectacle is still (usually) a requirement.
These two characteristics of the fantastic and the real have set the pattern for
most neo-medieval films. A focus on the ‘real’ frequently results from budget constraints,
but a film such as Arn: Knight Templar (Peter Flinth 2007) reveals that this can be a blessing
rather than a curse. Arn covers very similar historical ground to Kingdom of Heaven, but
it sets this against a background of conflict between clans and nations in twelfth-century
Scandinavia. The cinematography is equal to that of Scott’s film: it has to make the most of
traditional combinations of scenery, props and live actors. The film contrasts the settings of
green forest, desert and the convent to which Cecilia is exiled. Cutting between these, using
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music as a sound bridge, reinforces the relationships between the characters and allows three
narrative strains to be followed in parallel without any significant loss of unity. Like Chrétien
de Troyes’s Perceval, Arn is raised to peace but fascinated with weapons, then trained by a
sympathetic older knight and sponsored by his ruler (in this case not King Arthur, but Arn’s
abbot and Templar Grand Master).16 Arn develops a relationship of mutual respect with his
enemy, Saladin, which enables Flinth to question the validity of ‘holy’ war. There are echoes
of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995) in the appearance of Cecilia, taken out of time and place,
before Arn’s final battle in the Holy Land. The woodland in winter through which the Danes
advance is reminiscent of Gladiator and even more of Anthony Mann’s Fall of the Roman
Empire (1964). At the end, falling snowflakes symbolize God’s grace and blessing falling on
the living and the dead. The nation (in this case, Sweden) is unified and created over, and
through, the broken body of the hero.
Political unification is a leitmotif common to many epics, while the hero’s part in this
progression is usually a matter of preordained destiny. Antoine Fuqua attempts to counter
this idea in King Arthur (2005). Arthur is a sub-Roman military leader of mixed race (Celtic
mother, Roman, patrician father), leading a group of conscripted (pagan) Sarmatian knights.
Faced with the revelation of the Empire’s corruption, a barbaric Saxon invasion and the
collapse of his dream of Rome, Arthur surrenders to the seductive reasoning of the barbarian
‘Woad’ Guinevere, and opts to unite with the native people. The invading Saxons are defeated,
and a British nation is founded. This film utilizes the techniques characteristic of Ridley Scott,
‘rebuilding’ a fort on Hadrian’s Wall from a mixture of surviving material, constructed sets
and much CGI, in order to create for the audience the ‘heritage’ idea of ‘bringing history to
life’. The film draws heavily on the work of other epic directors, notably Akiro Kurosawa and
Sergei Eistenstein, creating a wide landscape of epic scope, a CGI-enhanced cast of thousands
and a juxtaposition of natural (native) and built (colonially imposed) environments. Arthur’s
decision, that he is British rather than Roman, unites these environments into a seamless
whole, just as he unites the people – Celtic, Roman, Sarmatian – into one. The film’s story is
based upon the historical romance narrative of Geoffrey of Monmouth, rather than the Morte
d’arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, but the characters have names derived from the later Arthurian
romances (Bors, Tristan, Galahad, Lancelot), and a vestige of the Arthur–Guinevere–Lancelot
love triangle is retained. By rejecting the more widely known Morte Darthur and opting for a
‘historical’ background, the film makers have given themselves a free hand in the composition
of history, just as Geoffrey may have had.17
Also concerned with unification are a series of epics from Eastern Europe.18 All feature
local resistance to brutal Viking/Rus invaders, led by charismatic local leaders. In Iron Lord
(2010), the friendly Viking is a traitor, while in Army of Valhalla (2003) the hero is part-
Viking. Although budgets are relatively low, these films have an epic scope, juxtaposing the
personal and private lives of their heroes with significant events in a nation’s story. The
‘ethnic’ national culture is invariably represented as a green, sunlit pastoral idyll destroyed by
marauding, steel-clad knights.19 The films are rich in ethnic objects and references: the richly
embroidered fabrics of the wealthy, the patterning on the woodwork of houses and furniture,
the coarse wool of peasant clothing. The battles are staged without the aid of CGI, featuring
groups of sturdy soldiers engaged in close, sweaty hand-to-hand fighting; a corrective to the
often over-styled, if bloody, combats in higher-budget films. The contrast between good and
evil, right and wrong, resembles that of the medieval chanson de geste.20
Unification is similarly the subject of films about Genghis Khan; Sergei Rodrov’s Mongol
(2007) and Genghis Khan: to the ends of the earth and sea (Sinichiro Sawai 2008). The latter
is the more interesting of these, made in commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the
proclamation of Temudjin as Genghis Khan. There are no CGI warriors in this film – the
cast of thousands (literally) surges – in the style employed by the great Russian epic director,
Sergei Bondarchuk – across the rolling grasslands of the steppe, in which even large groups
of humans are made to appear as small and vulnerable as the highly colourful yurts in which
they live. Much attention is paid to depicting the varied cultural objects and customs of the
different clans. Considerable prominence is accorded to female characters in this film, which
opens with the abduction of Temudjin’s mother, who provides the narration. Temudjin’s
wife Borte and his female (warrior) lover also play an important part in the representation of
his conquests and rule. It is interesting that the film-makers felt a need, or a desire, to make
the perspective on the action equally male and female; the reaction of women to events is
emphasized throughout. The women link the emperor’s public life to his private life and his
inner struggles with his own – and his son’s – ‘otherness’.
Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan (2009) attempts to present an epic female hero. This film
narrates the (medieval) legend of a woman who was said to have briefly become Vicar of Christ
in the ninth century. The historical epic film is usually centred on the male body, but in this
case the body only appears to be male; gender is a form of clothing, like the different costumes
Joan puts on and takes off. Joan does not fight with physical strength; a woman’s struggles are
different. Her father, the English-born priest of a poor, rural community in Germany, reacts
to his limited intellect and outsider status by adopting violently fundamentalist positions
about religious doctrines, including gender. Joan is an intellectually brilliant girl, who ‘solves’
the problem of her gender by taking her dead brother’s place in university. S/he becomes the
Pope’s primary adviser, and is ultimately elected Pontiff. Torn between God and her lover, she
becomes pregnant, and dies of a haemorrhage (as a result either of miscarriage, or of poison
administered by her rivals – or both). In a final twist, it is revealed that the bishop/narrator
who has been telling her story is him/herself a woman in disguise, a spiritual ‘child’ of Joan.
The social and political tensions of the age are vividly invoked, first opposing, then enabling,
the hero’s rise and fall. The epic’s requirement for a male hero to engage in military action is
not entirely absent, however: her male lover performs these feats on Joan’s behalf. Yet he is as
powerless as she against the malice of Joan’s rivals. The bishop/narrator wonders how many
of his/her fellow clergy might be ‘closet’ women: the answer is almost certainly negative, but
it is a tempting question, in view of the ‘overturning’ of the medieval legend by the film. The
myth was intended to demonstrate the absurdity and demonic chaos caused by women in
authority: Pope Joan reveals moral and ecclesiastic abuse to be the responsibility of men.
Variations on Epic Themes

Some films develop the epic format in interesting and/or different ways. Pathfinder (Marcus
Nispel 2007) also uses CGI to transform and create a new ‘reality’. A Viking boy is rejected
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and abandoned by his people and brought up by Native Americans.21 The indigenous people
are at home in their natural environment, which epic panoramas identify with ‘the land’.
The Vikings are huge figures, more monster than human, following the ‘code’ for screen
barbarians; much body and facial hair, wearing the skins of hairy animals about their bodies.
The grotesque horns on their helmets give them a demonic appearance – goats’ and rams’
horns being a sign of the devil in Western culture. Colour is limited, giving the impression of
monochrome even when this is not strictly so, referencing graphic novel-based films such as
Frank Miller’s 300 (2006), with influence from Lord of the Rings and digital combat games.
The setting is epic; the camera flies over forests and rivers, making the human characters both
insignificant and yet essential to the landscape. After a journey, several adventures – mostly
underground and in the semi-darkness of the forest – and lots of violent combat, the Viking
(now a young man) saves the people and earns the love of the Pathfinder’s daughter, who –
in a twist at the end – becomes the first female Pathfinder and the mother of their mixed-
race children. Pathfinder becomes a modern myth of origins, positing a Native American and
mythical/historical Vinland heritage for modern American audiences. The woman is used as a
means of racial and cultural transference (another medieval idea).
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is the basis for two films, Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf
(2007) and Beowulf and Grendel (Sturla Gunnarson 2005). They contrast the extensive use
of CGI (Zemeckis) with more traditional cinematographic techniques, as evidenced in earlier
‘Viking’ epics such as Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958), by Gunnarson. They differ in
their response to the Old English poem, challenging and transforming its ‘epic-ness’ in the
process.
The art of the animator in Disney/Pixar’s Brave (Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews
2012) conveys the essence of epic well. The heroine, Merida, narrates her own story as
part of the history of medieval Scotland. This is a mythology of national unity, including
a prince who was turned into a terrifying bear (known as Mordu) and of genealogy. Epic
tropes of panoramic landscape revealing tiny human traces, and a shot of Merida herself
standing on a mountain top (like William Wallace in Braveheart), draw all this together in the
film’s establishing sequence. The film has all the qualities of romance; with her independence
threatened by her family’s marriage plans, Merida uses a witch’s spell, inadvertently turning
her mother into a bear. The princess fights a deadly duel with Mordu; she saves her mother,
her family life, the prince (released from the bear’s body), the young people of the clans
(allowed to develop their own identities and to marry for love) and the nation (the clans
are reconciled). The historical epic and the magical romance of personal development are
present in equal quantities, a mix managed in this film more successfully than in many non-
animations.
Another epic character given the animated treatment is Thor, Viking god of thunder, in
Thor: Legend of the Magical Hammer, aka Legends of Valhalla (Óskar Jónasson, Toby Genkel,
Gunnar Karlsson 2011). Thor is the son of a formidable female blacksmith, and Odin, ruler
of the gods. In a trope common to family films with Viking settings, he is an ineffectual
blacksmith, bullied by his mother and is an embarrassment to his female friend, Edda.22
The goddess of the frozen north, Hel, invades the human world with her giants (big, hairy,
stupid), and Edda is kidnapped. Odin sends Thor the hammer Crusher (a shortened version
of Mjolnir with a wise-cracking pommel) to help. With this (not because of it, but because of
his human qualities of love, compassion and good faith) he defeats the giants, saves this world
and Valhalla. Having found his destiny – or his place in the universe – Thor goes off in his
chariot to keep on saving the world.
The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey 2009) is another animation telling the
story of a young person seeking his or her identity/destiny in a world hostile to their dreams.
The political/historical is less visually evident than is usual for epics, but it is continually
threatening. This film uses line drawings to achieve its effects, using the iconic ninth-century
Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58) as its inspiration. A novice monk believes
he is destined to become a great illustrator. Brendan’s aspirations are opposed by his uncle,
the abbot, who instead wants to draw up plans for the monastery’s defences against Viking
marauders. Aided by the elderly refugee Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne, Brendan develops his
talent. Helped by Aisling, the childlike spirit of the (natural) forest, whose alter ego is a white
wolf, he retrieves the Eye of St Columba, a form of magnifying lens, from a demon. Brendan
survives the Vikings’ destruction of Kells, returning later with the finished Book. Aisling now
rejects the adult monk, retaining her wolf persona. The Vikings and adults in the film are
represented as gigantic forms, sometimes as silhouettes, as they might appear to a child.
The spirit Aisling dissolves into line, swirls across the screen, and then metamorphoses from
sprouting artwork, like the penwork of a medieval manuscript border. The abstract designs of
the Book of Kells come to vivid, animated life, and the little characters revealed in his art at the
end of the film reflect the significant encounters of Brendan’s life. This film is concerned with
art and its relationship with the human spirit: it seeks to give a two-dimensional expression to
abstract concepts, and thus defies, crosses and re-crosses, the boundaries of genre.
Endings?
Two films attempt to convey abstract concepts of spirituality. Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision
(2005) narrates the life and work of Hildegard of Bingen through a series of connected
episodes. Hildegard, who entered the cloister as a child and remained there all her life, was
a great scholar, writer and musician/composer, although in medieval times she was most
famous as an apocalyptic prophet. In a seemingly enclosed environment, Hildegard prays
by herself, sings and talks with her nuns, discusses her visions with a male confessor, reads
and writes, tends sick nuns, and engages in the politics of her house and her Order. She
visits the imperial court, although the palace itself is an alien place, by comparison with her
convent. There are panoramic nature shots of the German forest, but the built environment of
Hildegard’s convent and church are not, as is normally the case, presented as being alternative
or different; they seem to grow naturally from the forest and to be at home in it. Linked by
the singing of women and of birds, the conventual buildings, like Hildegard, ‘belong’ to this
land. In interior scenes, the use of sound (including silence, natural sounds and Hildegard’s
own compositions) and light renders the convent walls porous and evanescent, giving a sense
of boundless, universal space. This enclosure is not enclosure at all, but freedom.
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Another film seeking to present abstract, spiritual concepts is Valhalla Rising (Nicolas
Winding Refn 2009). Mist, wind, water, earth and sky, in sight and in sound, are images of a
rough, elemental land, which is the Scandinavian North of Scotland. In harsh monochrome,
two men fight by a post to which one is tethered, for the amusement of their owners. A one-
eyed captive is brought in and tethered to the post, where he defeats all comers with ease,
in silence. He says nothing, not even to the boy who brings food to his cage. He kills his
captors, and escapes with the boy. They go to sea with a group of crusaders trying to find
the Holy Land and land in a ‘new world’ which the Christian leader claims for his God. The
one-eyed man seems to understand everything, even when the survivors begin to kill one
another, be killed by earth-covered natives, go crazy … and he allows a group of natives
to kill him, leaving the boy to escape. Are these men alive, or are they already dead, in the
interstice between the mortal world and the next? Is this just a man with one eye, or is he the
great god Woden, who gave one of his eyes in return for the gift of wisdom? This is a strange,
compelling film, with an overwhelming sense of fate, wyrd in Old English, at once pitiless
and caring, cruel and yet generous, inevitable and yet subject to personal determination. It
is a hard faith, for hard men in a hard world: the audience is invited to feel what it meant to
live and die as a beserker.
The Romance of Astraea and Celadon (Eric Rohmer 2007) was the final major film of the
French master Eric Rohmer. The story of the fifth-century Gallic shepherd Celadon and his
nymph Astrea is a late antique pastoral, full of naïve charm, filmed in ancient woodland,
the sylvan scenes linked by natural birdsong. The setting reminds us that the ‘Middle Ages’
lasted for an entire millennium. Film-makers tend to concentrate on the dramatic and the
traumatic, so their selection of material from this period is extremely limited. There are more
films about the Black Death than the Great Schism, more about witches than about farmers or
craftspeople, more about the Vikings than the Visigoths or even the Anglo-Saxons. Films tend
to concentrate on icons that their audiences regard as quintessentially medieval: the pointed
arch, the dragon, the castle, the armour and distinctive modes of dress. This story is neither
medieval nor modern; it was written by Honoré d’Urfé, a Renaissance writer (1568–1625). It
reflects the gaze of one world, strange and distant to us, on another world, equally strange and
distant. Rohmer never loses this vision; his built environment is a renaissance one, as is the
courtly erotic androgyny of the interaction that takes place there. Our vision of the medieval
world is refracted through the vision of other periods, other cultures. Whether we like it or
not, the Middle Ages is past – we cannot ‘bring history to life’. However, the neo-medievalism
of film can, and does, form new cracks in the fabric of time, through which we may catch
fresh glimpses of what was once there. Rohmer’s film is a reminder of these ‘truths’.
Author note
For the purposes of an encyclopaedic volume, I have listed general works, rather than
comprehensive references throughout the text. All observations made are my own, but they
may be similar – or not – to those given by the authors in volumes listed here: Ashton, G.
and Kline, D. T. (eds) (2012), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan; Bernau, A. and Bildhauer, B. (eds) (2009), Medieval Film. Manchester: Manchester
University Press; Bildhauer, B. (2011), Filming the Middle Ages. London: Reaktion Books;
Clements, P. and Robinson, C. (eds) (2012), Neo-Medievalism in the Media: Essays on Film,
Television, and Electronic Games. New York and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press; Driver, M.
and Ray, S. (2004), The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy.
Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland; Elliot, A. B. R. (2011), Remaking the Middle Ages:
The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World. Jefferson, NC and
London: McFarland; Finke, L. A. and Schichtman, M. B. (2010), Cinematic Illuminations:
The Middle Ages on Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Fulton, H. (ed.) (2009),
A Companion to Arthurian Literature. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 479–542; Harty, K.
(ed.) (2002), Cinema Arthuriana. Rev. ed. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland; Kelly,
K. C. and Pugh, T. (2009), Queer Movie Medievalisms (Queer Interventions). Farnham and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate; Pugh, T. and Weisl, A. J. (2014), ‘Movie Medievalism: Five (or
Six) Ways of Viewing an Anachronism’, in Crocker, H. A. and Smith, D. V. (eds), Medieval
Literature: Criticism and Debates. London and New York: Routledge.
Notes
1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Chris Columbus, 2001); Harry Potter and the Chamber
of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Alzkaban (Alfonso Cuarón,
2004); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005); Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix (David Yates, 2007); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009); Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts One and Two (David Yates, 2010 and 2011).
2. Rohmer depicts this using an animated sequence in Perceval le Gallois.
3. The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001); The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002); The
Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), and his later films The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(2012), The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), The Hobbit: There and Back Again (2014).
4. For the other neo-medieval re-workings of fairytales, see David Lister’s Blood of Beasts (2005),
a film based on the legend of the beauty and the beast. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (Mike
Newell, 2010) is an ‘Arabian Nights’ tale of magic and mystery: a young man from the ‘streets’
saves the world from the dreaded sands of time, defeats an evil villain and wins the heart of a
beautiful princess.
5. Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007), Shrek Forever After (2010), Shrek the Musical (2013).
6. The identification of the wooden block is made easier by INRI (Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews)
spelled out in nails on its surface.
7. The trope of female dress as identity is used in medieval romances, such as Emaré, and The
Canterbury Tales: The Clerk’s Tale (of Griselda) by Geoffrey Chaucer.
8. Other films of this type are The Warrior’s Brother (Pierre Jolivet, 2002), Knight of the Dead (Mark
Atkins, 2012), Season of the Witch (Dominic Sena, 2010), The Reckoning (Paul McGuigan, 2003)
differs slightly, in that it involves a troupe of provincial actors in a ‘detective’ story.
9. As in Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian (1976). The similarity ends there, though. This is about
the beginning of Robin’s outlaw career, not the end of his life. Mike Eschmann’s Tell (2007) has
a different ‘take’ on outlaw heroes: his Wilhelm Tell is an ‘everyday Joe’ immersed in his own
problems, until he stumbles into the hero’s part.
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10. They seem to have escaped from a Tinto Brass film: titles such as Frivolous Lola (1998), Black
Angel (2002) and Private (2003) give a very good idea of the content of this Italian ‘cult’
director’s films. Dress and body shape also resemble the ‘standards’ for the female form in fantasy
art.
11. Berserk: The Golden Age Arc – The Egg of the King (Toshiyuki Kubooka, 2012); Berserk: The
Golden Age Arc 2 – The Battle for Doldrey (Toshiyuki Kubooka, Michael Sinterniklaas, 2012);
Berserk: The Golden Age Arc 3 – Descent (Toshiyuki Kubooka, Michael Sinterniklaas, 2013). It is
not possible to make a comprehensive list of anime here, as distributors tend to get their products
to market very quickly.
12. The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006) and Angels and Demons (Ron Howard, 2009) utilize a
mixture of well-known medieval and renaissance art works and artefacts to create clues that lead
to world-shattering secrets. There is always a conspiracy of the powerful (usually the Church) to
hide the stunning ‘truth’ being sought, and a ‘race’ to find the clues and solve the puzzle.
13. For more on epic cinema and text, and Scott’s methodologies, see Smith, G. A. (1991), Epic
Films. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland; Johns-Putra, A. (2006), The History of the Epic
(Palgrave Histories of Literature). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
14. Poor, S. S. and Schulman, J. K. (2007), Women and the Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre and the
Limits of Epic Masculinity. (The New Middle Ages). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; de Weever,
J. (1998), Sheba’s Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French
Epic (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities). London: Routledge. There is a book of the
film: Friedman, N. and Scott, R. intro. (2005), Kingdom of Heaven: The Ridley Scott Film and the
History behind the Story (Pocket Books). London, Sydney and Toronto: Simon and Schuster.
15. After a decade of US and allied military involvement in the Middle East (and two Gulf Wars),
this film reflects the troubled status of such intervention in both East and West. Similar territory
is explored in Soldier of God (W. D. Hogan, 2005), which deals with the personal aftermath of
crusading for its hero.
16. The best screen representation of this is Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978), based upon the
text of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal: Busby, K. (ed.) (1993), Le roman de Perceval, ou, Le
conte du graal: édition critique d’après tous les manuscrits. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.
17. Thorpe, L. (ed and trans.) (1966), Geoffrey of Monmouth: History of the Kings of Britain.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics; Penguin is still the easiest and most accessible translation of
this work.
18. Army of Valhalla (Jerzy Hoffman, 2003), Alexander: The Warrior Saint (Igor Kalenov, 2008), Iron
Lord (Dmitry Korobkin, 2011).
19. Barbarossa: Siege Lord aka Sword of War (Renzo Martinelli, 2009) has some epic features, but is
really a greenwood outlaw romance, in which the focus is less on the Emperor, as on his young
Italian (outlaw/freedom fighter) opponent.
20. Also with Viking settings: Hammer of the Gods (Farren Blackburn, 2012), in which a young hero
battles against superstition and the gods to find his brother in Viking-age Britain, and Vikingdom
(Yusri Kru, 2013), which seeks to ‘resurrect’ a ‘lost’ (i.e. non-existent) saga, that of the ‘undead’
warrior Eirick.
21. He refuses to kill defenceless little girls, and is therefore considered too ‘soft’. Thus, modern
moralities (as in Fuqua’s King Arthur) are valorized at the expense of assumed ‘medieval’ ones.
22. For non-militaristic Viking boys who end up teaching the adults a lesson, see Vicky the Viking
(Michael Herbig, 2009) and How To Train Your Dragon (Dean De Blois, Chris Sanders, 2010),
How To Train Your Dragon 2 (Dean De Blois, 2014). Another young man’s quest for knighthood
and manhood is Justin and the Knights of Valour (Manuel Silicia, 2013).
chapter ten
‘Camelot must come before

all else’: Fantasy and Family
in the BBC Merlin
Philippa Semper
Stories have circulated around Merlin since the twelfth century, when Geoffrey of Monmouth
ostensibly drew on Welsh legend to write Merlin’s prophecies, his life and his association with
a king named Arthur in a ‘history’ of the kings of Britain. Although many might think of the
prophet-magician as secondary to the great king, literary representations from the medieval
to the twenty-first century demonstrate a fascination with Merlin himself that rivals interest
in Arthur.1 However, there is still the potential for new versions of Merlin to appear, and the
BBC show Merlin, created by Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy of
Shine, offers one that is particularly directed towards twenty-first-century tastes and ideas. In
particular, it was designed to be ‘three generation TV – that’s TV you can watch with your
grandparents and children’.2 The effects this emphasis had upon the story included relocating
it to a fantasy past and removing all its more racy aspects. In the process, however, the
writers created a version devoid not only of historical context, but also of established nuclear
families: the very audience it was designed to entertain.
Merlin ran to five 13-episode series, televised in the UK between October 2008 and
December 2013. It used both medieval and modern sources to shape a story about the famous
wizard growing into adulthood while in Camelot, whose friendships and decisions affect
the future of the whole kingdom. To add to the dramatic tension, Camelot is a place where
magic is forbidden by King Uther (played by Anthony Head), and so the young sorcerer must
hide his magic while using it to aid and protect the oblivious Prince Arthur, to whom he is
manservant. Merlin (Colin Morgan) has an elderly mentor named Gaius (Richard Wilson),
116
who is the court physician; Merlin also receives advice and vague prophecies from the Great
Dragon Kilgharrah, chained up beneath Camelot.
This particular version of Merlin owes much to two modern stories: its creators were
influenced by the US television show about Superman called Smallville, and the quintet
of novels by Mary Stewart.3 Smallville (2001–11) diverged from earlier Superman stories
by showing a young Clark Kent growing up and into his powers, an alternative angle that
appealed to the Merlin writers.4 In Stewart’s first novel, The Crystal Cave (1970), Merlin
also grows up and is taught in the process by an elderly man named Galapas, learning to deal
with his visions in the eponymous cave. The debt of the BBC’s Merlin to Stewart’s books is
acknowledged in episode titles: series 3 episode 5 is named ‘The Crystal Cave’ and shows
Merlin’s visions in a very similar cave, while series 4 episode 3 is called ‘The Wicked Day’,
the name of Stewart’s fourth novel on Arthur (though it covered rather different material).5
Stewart, however, plays down Merlin’s magic, while the BBC’s Merlin makes magic the focus.
Moreover, where Stewart maintains a significant age difference between Merlin and Arthur,
including a pragmatic retelling of Merlin’s role in facilitating Arthur’s conception, the BBC
series makes Merlin and Arthur roughly the same age. Merlin avoids any part in Arthur’s
problematic and contested birth and their education can be aligned; while Merlin learns to
how to use his magic for good, Arthur learns the lessons of justice and humility which will
allow him to be a good king.
The series differed from both Stewart’s books and the medieval tradition in its attitude
towards historical setting and cultural detail. The medieval Arthurian tradition has been used
to locate Arthur and Merlin in various periods: the fifth and sixth centuries when the Britons
were supposedly fighting off incoming Saxons (chosen by Stewart), or the twelfth or fifteenth
centuries which provide the courtly and chivalric aspects of the legend. However, the BBC’s
Merlin draws freely on a range of Arthurian sources and settings regardless of date. Instead,
it privileges the mythic quality of the story, even setting it ‘in a land of myth and a time of
magic’, as the voice-over reminds viewers at the start of every episode. In building a world
in which to set the story, the show borrowed from different medieval periods and cultures,
aiming to create a past that never was. As Julian Murphy explains, ‘we wanted to set it in the
past but in a fantasy period, the world of Narnia, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings’.6
This hybrid fantasy past is presented by means of a complex system of signs, both linguistic
and visual, whose precise operation is undermined by their lack of a coherent historical
context. Hence, while there are occasional references to a possible Celtic context which might
be appropriate to the culture of post-Roman Britain (Arthur’s court celebrates the festival of
Samhain in series 4, episode 1), there is more to indicate that Camelot exists during the
following Anglo-Saxon period. Its inhabitants have dealings with the kingdom of Mercia, one
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and towards the end of the final series Morgana is apparently
fighting alongside ‘Saxons’ against Arthur. Some names fit, but their significance is changed:
King Cenred (episode 4, series 2) has historical counterparts in both Wessex and Mercia, but in
Merlin he rules over a fictional country called Essetir. Old English is spoken during the show,
but only as the ‘old language’ of magic in which spells are cast. The chain mail the knights
wear fits the period, but the added plate armour does not. Knights of any sort are entirely
‘Camelot must come before all else’ 117
anachronistic among Anglo-Saxons in any case, along with tournaments and jousts which
belong to the later Middle Ages. Norman names also appear, and Geoffrey of Monmouth
himself is court genealogist in Camelot, suggesting a twelfth-century context. On Gaius’s wall
hangs the twelfth-century copy of Byrhtferth’s diagram, a compendium of knowledge created
a century earlier.7 By contrast, the set chosen for Camelot is a later medieval French chateau,
largely rebuilt as an idealized fourteenth-century castle in the nineteenth century; it is both
iconic and illusory in its portrayal of the past.
Non-traditional casting and a lack of consistency in accent and costume further portray the
people of this world as detached from any specific historical period. Angel Coulby was selected
to play Gwen, while Bradley James, a blue-eyed blond, took the role of Arthur, demonstrating
that visual markers of race and ethnicity are entirely non-functional.8 Colin Morgan replaced
his Northern Irish accent with estuary English and Alexander Vlahos’s Welsh disappeared for
Mordred, but Katie McGrath (Morgana) and Eoin Macken (Gwaine) kept their Irish accents.
Armies are sometimes made distinguishable from one another by costume (like the headwear
of Cenred’s immortal army or the red cloaks of the knights of Camelot), but there is little
else to identify folk from different realms. Merlin himself is marked out in Camelot by his
neckerchief, but when his village in another kingdom is shown it becomes evident that this
is a personal, not a cultural, quirk. Hence, even within this imaginary world, there is little
systematic coherence in terms of the signs used to mark identity. When compared to The Lord
of the Rings (1954), in which places and cultures are very carefully delineated and explained,
Merlin’s fantasy past can be frustrating; unlike other fantasy worlds it offers glimpses of
cultural referents only to immediately neutralize their function.9 Yet it does create a landscape
in which the central images – kings, knights, castles, battles – can operate without appearing
out of place; in turn, they bring a coherence to an otherwise fractured and partial imagined
world.
In this fantasy past, the show is able to change the details of the Arthurian legend at will,
presenting alternatives that are a better fit for its intended audience as a family show in the
twenty-first century. While the main arc of the story – Arthur ascends to the throne, is assisted
by Merlin, is hindered by Morgana and is eventually brought down by Mordred – is that set
into its most famous English form by Malory in Morte Darthur, numerous changes are made.
Arthur is not brought up as a foster child unaware of his true heritage, but trained in kingship
at court by his father, Uther. His birth was brought about by Nimue’s magic rather than
Merlin’s. His mother died in childbirth, instead of outliving his father. His queen Gwen is not
of high birth; she is a servant and maid to Morgana. Morgana is Arthur’s half-sister through
Uther as a shared parent rather than Igraine, and since Arthur does not sleep with either her or
Morgause, Mordred is a druid boy and not Arthur’s incestuously conceived son. Antagonism
arises between them because magic is outlawed in Camelot, not because of Mordred’s desire
for the throne. Agravaine has become Arthur’s treacherous uncle, as opposed to Mordred’s
brother and Gawain, another brother, has been completely disconnected from the family
and renamed Gwaine. Lancelot is of humble birth, and would not dream of attempting any
relationship with Gwen once Arthur’s feelings for her have become clear; their adulterous
love, so central to Malory, is reduced to a single kiss before the royal couple are even married.
118
Indeed, far from outliving Arthur, Lancelot sacrifices himself in Arthur’s place in episode 2 of
series 4. And while Percival (also low born) does make it to the Round Table in this version,
his fellow knights are unfamiliar: Leon and Elyan.10 Most of the Arthurian knights have been
completely written out; so, too, have the Holy Grail and any trace of Christianity.11
Such changes allow Merlin to prioritize a very different set of ideas to that found in the
medieval tales. The original emphasis on chivalry, quests, courtly behaviour and a particularly
stylized and intense form of love is replaced.12 Instead, the BBC series shows both kings
and magic users growing into their power and establishing their roles within the kingdom
both in connection with and as a substitute for traditional families; in this context, romantic
heterosexual relationships, apparently championed by the storyline, are constantly undermined
or replaced by homosocial bonds and activities. In addition, the key ideas are expressed in
ways that are often contradictory, shifting between hope and aspiration on the one hand and
despair and pessimism on the other without settling on either. Merlin is neither idealistic nor
intentionally ironic, and thus negotiates its fantastical history by avoiding both didacticism
and disapproval.13
The concept of the kingdom as a family is achieved by the connection of kingship with
kinship, a pattern that is repeated throughout all five seasons of Merlin. Uther’s presence
as both father and king to Arthur ensures that this is never forgotten (and Arthur is first
introduced in relation to him: ‘I’m his son. Arthur’). The show’s habitual depiction of the
intimate spaces of royal life – in particular, Arthur’s bedroom – as backdrops for key moments
or events is a constant reminder that the choices and restrictions of the royal family are also
those of the kingdom. Arthur’s relationship with his father is defined by the complexities of
becoming heir and later regent, requiring him to both emulate and supersede Uther, putting
the needs of the kingdom first. When Arthur countermands his father in subversive ways,
it would be easy to read this as a family drama in simplistic Oedipal terms, but the show’s
repudiation of the sexual aspects of its story seems to eradicate this possibility. A supernatural
meeting with his dead mother (a spirit summoned by Morgause in series 2, episode 8) does
lead Arthur to a temporary desire to kill his father, but the impulse does not last. Merlin’s
intervention leads to reconciliation, and Arthur continues to love and respect Uther in his
paternal and royal roles. By the time Arthur finally rejects his father and claims his throne,
Uther is already dead and causing havoc as a vindictive ghost (series 5, episode 3). Arthur
must force Uther back into the spirit world in order to fully succeed him as king, rather than
to usurp him in his mother’s affections or to avenge her death. Before he manages to do so,
Uther reinstates the primacy of kingdom over family: ‘Camelot must come before all else …
even you’.
Uther’s death allows Arthur to assume the kingship and the headship of the family
simultaneously. Once Arthur is king, he can complete the family/kingdom by taking
the wife he desires; significantly, the series did not show a wedding ceremony, but rather
Arthur formally investing Gwen as Camelot’s queen, as if the role were more important
than the relationship. Arthur must then decide how to rule. Uther’s behaviour as king has
been constantly problematic, encompassing extremes: at one moment he is an irrational and
deceitful tyrant who repeatedly kills innocent people, and at another a just king loved by his
people. Even Arthur swings between the opposing poles of arrogant privilege and humble
submission to duty, exemplifying the best and worst of the monarchy. Since Merlin continues
to champion the right of an individual to lead the state, however, these complex interactions
are never allowed to dismantle or devalue the underlying myth of a worthy king leading his
happy people into a golden age: a fantasy of good kingship.
Yet the difficulty inherent in Arthur’s inheritance as son and king is explicitly played out.
‘His Father’s Son’ (series 4, episode 5) has Arthur bring Camelot to the brink of war by dealing
out rough justice to a neighbouring king in an attempt to ape his father’s ‘strength’; peace
is only restored after Arthur offers himself up for his people in single combat. Five episodes
later, it is revealed that in the past Arthur (and not his father) was responsible for a vicious
attack on a druid camp; once again, the only solution is to offer himself up for judgement.
This sacrificial tendency represents the influence of his mother, whose life was forfeit in the
magical bargain struck to bring about Arthur’s birth. Hence, Arthur has to learn to combine
his mother’s sacrifice with his father’s will to rule, defining his kingship as an outcome of his
family’s characteristics and his own choices.
For other characters, especially Merlin, the kingdom acts as a substitute family to replace
what was lost; Merlin has never known his father, and leaves his mother to come to Camelot
where Gaius becomes a father figure to him. He and Arthur discuss the similarities of their
incomplete families in ‘The Sins of the Father’. Like Arthur, he must come to an understanding
of how power can and should be used in relation to the kingdom and to those he cares about;
it often involves self-sacrifice. Merlin remains the underdog whose contribution to Camelot is
concealed from those who benefit from it most. Yet, he is not, as Gaius arguably is, a repressed
and confined servant whose magical ability must be constantly denied in order to serve an
obsessive king. His first action in Camelot is to challenge Arthur’s behaviour to a servant,
and his refusal to be cowed or to conform to the imposition of servanthood, along with his
persistent treatment of the prince as a friend, make it impossible to think of him as anything
less than Arthur’s equal.14 In addition, the continued reference to the extent of his magical
power operates in perfect balance with Arthur’s kingship. In this way, Merlin learns from and
surpasses Gaius as magic user and court advisor. Through Gaius, the show reveals the ways in
which servants may be dispossessed or marginalized in the narratives of monarchy; through
Merlin, it asserts the importance of servants in the operations of the kingdom, and prioritizes
those operations above their family responsibilities.
The loss of the father is a recurring theme; almost all the regular characters experience
their connections with and commitment to Camelot as a substitution for paternal absence in
their real families. The experience of lack is widespread: when Merlin finally meets his father,
he loses him almost immediately to death; Morgana has been brought up as the king’s ward
after the death of her father, and is furious to learn accidentally that she is actually Uther’s
child; Gwen’s father is killed by Uther in the first series; Mordred’s father is killed by Uther
too. It is made clear that Will (episode 10, series 1) and Gwaine (episode 4, series 3) are also
reacting against the deaths of their knightly fathers.15 The repeating pattern of lost fathers
makes it possible to trace the lethal effect that the kingdom has upon the family; conversely,
Camelot matters so much because it offers a replacement for that family. Arthur may consider
his knights as brothers, but as head of the kingdom he is able to command their absolute
obedience and so his relationship with them is inevitably more paternal than fraternal.
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If lost fathers are compensated for by kings, however, mothers are almost entirely absent
from the series. In the medieval sources, both Morgause and Morgana have children and
mothers are central to the life stories of some of the knights. Yet the only mother to appear
in Merlin is Merlin’s mother Hunith.16 She is evidently a woman of character but does not
belong to Camelot, instead living in near poverty in another kingdom. She is thus far removed
from the main axis of family and power. This is not to say that Merlin eradicates female power
in itself; on the contrary, it offers a series of strong women, from the magical like Nimue,
Morgana, Morgause and Finna through to the political: Queen Annis becomes the sole ruler
of Caerlion after her husband’s death and Gwen herself reigns in Camelot alone after Arthur’s
passing. It is rather that their power is political and personal; insofar as they wield magic or
lead kingdoms, they do it as queens and sometimes as wives, but never as mothers: none of
them have children. The family that the kingdom replaces is one predicated on male familial
relationships; at best, women may marry into the family but they do not become a part of it
though shared children. Perhaps, this avoidance of motherhood also represents the show’s
avoidance of Mordred’s incestuous conception writ large; without any evident childbearing,
the sins of the fathers appear not to be sexual ones at any rate.17
The absence of mothers may be linked to a more wide-ranging discomfort with the
portrayal of women as sexual beings who invoke male desire. While the various love interests
of Arthur and his knights are arguably the driving force behind the development of the
legend in its medieval context, they are consistently problematized in Merlin. Rather than
inspiring courageous acts, women tend to be the focus of unpleasantness, uncertainty, deceit
and mistrust, and this seems to go beyond merely avoiding the depiction of sex. Uther’s sole
attempt at love results in his marriage to a troll, a destabilization of the family unit which
inevitably threatens the whole kingdom, and one in which sex appears but is unavoidably cast
as something entirely disgusting.18 Arthur’s early romantic entanglements – with a disguised
person of the Sidhe (a type of fairy taken from Irish mythology) named Sophia, and with
King Olaf ’s daughter Vivian – are the result of enchantment, while his engagement with
Princess Elena is undertaken only out of duty (and she too is possessed by one of the Sidhe).
Even his relationship with Gwen, which is genuine and lasting, is dogged by problems,
including Uther’s accusation that Arthur has been enchanted in this instance too. Gwen’s
honesty and belief in Arthur are a source of strength for him, but her love also proves a
potential point of weakness; Arthur puts himself in danger several times to rescue her after
she has been kidnapped. Morgana uses this to undermine Arthur (when she engineers the
apparently unfaithful kiss with Lancelot) or to attempt to manipulate him, particularly in the
final series. Gwen’s apparent side-switching at this late stage reinstates the sense of doubt that
surrounds female figures; she has to be ‘restored to herself ’ by Merlin disguised as a woman,
inadvertently reiterating the suggestion that women may not be what they seem, a suggestion
only reinforced by the machinations and disguises undertaken by Morgana and Morgause as
well as the plot in which Princess Mithian is forced to lie to Arthur (series 5, episode 4).
Other male characters also encounter the unreliability of women and the instability of their
physical appearances; the objects of male desire are repeatedly shown to be harbouring secrets
and usually have to leave in one way or another once their mysteries are revealed. Merlin’s
sole attempt at love with shape-shifting Freya ends in her death at Arthur’s hands; transformed
into the Lady of the Lake, she makes a brief reappearance to help save the kingdom at a later
point, but by then she is safely removed from the realms of human desire.19 Mordred also
loses his love Kara – a confirmed killer of Arthur’s knights – to Arthur’s justice, and this is a
key factor in his realignment with Morgana and subsequent slaying of Arthur. Gwaine’s love
interest Eira also betrays Camelot to Morgana and is hanged under Gwen’s jurisdiction in the
final series. Even Gaius is deceived by his long-lost love, Alice, who turns out to be subject to
a manticore and attempting to poison Uther. Tristan and Isolde appear happily paired off, but
Isolde subsequently dies while fighting for Camelot, leaving Tristan alone and heartbroken.
The monstrous Lamia who ensnares Leon, Gwaine, Elyon and Percival in episode 8, series 4
shows how the desire for women is not only dangerous and deceptive, but may also cause rifts
between the men of Camelot’s ‘family’.
The tension caused by portraying strong women while problematizing male desire
for women can also be read as an outcome of the show’s primary interest in homosocial
relationships. This is apparent in the display of friendships between the knights, and also in
Morgana’s connection first to Gwen and then to Morgause. Its most obvious outworking
is in the relationship between Merlin and Arthur. They operate as a matched pair, Arthur’s
political power being equalled by Merlin’s magical power, and their partnership is central to
the series. While the relationship is not presented as anything other than platonic, continual
references to them as ‘two sides of the same coin’ by the Great Dragon and some loaded lines
from Merlin’s mother in ‘The Moment of Truth’ give the impression that it is intense:
He must care for you a great deal

He’s here for you. … He likes you.
You belong at Arthur’s side. I’ve seen how much he needs you.
How much you need him.
These homosocial relationships may have been conceived as a safer alternative to sexual
relationships for family viewing, not least because they also mirror (or actually express in the
case of Morgana and Morgause) sibling relationships. However, ironically, they have in many
cases been understood by some viewers as sexualized since series 1, particularly in relation to
Merlin and Arthur. Arthur’s romance with Gwen is stepped up in the remaining four series,
but it continued to be possible to read Arthur/Merlin against the heterosexual grain.20 This
possibility appears to be reinforced by the show’s ending, when a dying Arthur asks Merlin
‘Just hold me … please’.21 In whatever terms the relationship is understood, it is certainly a
story of homosocial love of some kind, as comments from the actors themselves confirm:
‘episode 13, when I read it, was like a sort of platonic love story between two men’.22 Despite
Gwen’s key role, she remains peripheral, unable to be constantly by Arthur’s side in the way
that Merlin is. Perhaps the show’s aspirations towards the idea of unwavering loyalty, the
underlying motivator for all Merlin’s actions, inevitably make love a secondary concern; both
family and kingdom require a devotion to duty that goes beyond any kind of romance.
Thus, in its reimagining of the medieval legend, the BBC Merlin sets the story in a ‘fantasy
past’ which better accommodates its primary concerns. It conflates the political with the
personal, showing how family relationships are subsumed in the demands of royal power;
122
mothers are absent, and fathers die because of the kingdom. Homosocial connections offer
an alternative model of intimacy; in its focus on the struggles of Merlin and Arthur to come
to terms with their power and each other, the show avoids some of the issues that are raised
by the traditional features of the Arthurian legend: incest, adultery and an emphasis on
heterosexual love. Ironically, this enables a potential negation of the family to be packaged as
‘family viewing’, and opens up the narrative to sexualized readings of a different sort. Merlin
attempts to describe a utopian kingdom, yet its relationships are always already subverted. In
this version, the Arthurian fantasy of a model kingdom remains just that: a fantasy.
Notes
1. For an overview see Stephen T. Knight (2009), Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages.
New York: Cornell University Press.
2. Peter Fincham, BBC1 Controller, ‘BBC1 Seeks Magic Touch for Merlin Drama’, http://www.
theguardian.com/media/2006/dec/07/broadcasting.bbc, The Guardian, 7 December 2006, accessed
30 April 2014.
3. ‘Mary Stewart’s books on Merlin I think were inspiration to us. They tell a very different story,
a very different Merlin, but the way they reinvented the legend was an inspiration, definitely’,
Julian Murphy, ‘Co-Creator Julian Murphy on Series Emotional Conclusion’, http://herocomplex.
latimes.com/tv/merlin-co-creator-julian-murphy-on-series-emotional-conclusion/#/0, 6 February
2013, accessed 12 December 2013. Mary Stewart (1970), The Crystal Cave. New York: William
Morrow.
4. ‘Just as in Smallville we wanted to subvert expectations’. Johnny Capps, in Mark Sweeney,
‘Merlin: BBC cues up TV and cinema ads’, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/aug/29/bbc.
television, The Guardian, 29 August 2008, accessed 12 December 2014.
5. Mary Stewart (1983), The Wicked Day. New York: Ballantine.
6. ‘The Making of Merlin’, in Merlin: A New 13-Part Drama Series on BBC One, BBC Press Release,
1 September 2008, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/09_september/01/
merlin2.shtml, accessed 12 December 2013.
7. Oxford, St John’s MS 17, folio 7v, online at http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/ms-17/folio.php?p=7v,
accessed 12 December 2013.
8. This is underlined, possibly ironically, in the decision to name Gwen’s brother, played by
Adetomiwa Edun, as Elyan; his medieval counterpart is Sir Helaine ‘the White’. Malory (1971)
describes him as ‘sir Helayne le Blanke that was son unto sir Bors, for he begate hym upon kynge
Brandygorys doughter’. Malory, Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, p. 666.
9. Compare, for example, the appearance of the ‘Southron’ (archaic for ‘southern men’) in the final
three episodes of series 4, with the use of the same in J. R. R. Tolkien (1999), The Lord of the
Rings: The Two Towers. London: Harper Collins, p. 330.
10. Sir Leon may be a ‘modernized’ version of Sir Lionel, who appears in the Vulgate Lancelot and in
Malory.
11. The Cup of Life (appearing in series 1 episode 13 and season 3, 12 and 13) may be intended as a
version of the Holy Grail, but it is not associated with the Fisher King (whose story is completely
reworked in series 3, episode 8) and it is used in relation to extending/exchanging life rather than
to test piety and holiness. Instead, the knights’ tests are always related to their loyalty in Merlin.
12. Referred to as ‘fin’amour’, or as ‘courtly love’, this offered an idealized model of intense romantic
relationships which were frequently based on a premise of inaccessibility since the beloved
was already married to someone else (as, for example, in the medieval account of Lancelot
and Guinevere). See Jennifer G. Wollock (2011), Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love. Santa
Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
13. In fact, it expresses what has come to be known as the ‘metamodern’; that is, an oscillation
‘between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between
naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation,
purity and ambiguity’ (Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010), ‘Notes on
Metamodernism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, 2, DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677).
14. Despite repeatedly denying that they can be friends given their differing social status, even Arthur
eventually admits to Merlin ‘you’re a loyal friend’ (‘The Wicked Day’, series 4, episode 3).
15. Arthur is not the only one to take up his father’s role: Merlin assumes his father’s powers as a
dragonlord; Gwen continues to use her father’s forge (as does Elyan); Will takes up arms with
Camelot’s knights in the battle for Ealdor; and Gwaine, despite his reservations, eventually gives
up his roving existence to become a knight of Camelot.
16. In Malory, Morgana appears to be the mother of Ywain, as she is elsewhere (p. 5); Morgause not
only conceives Mordred with Arthur but is also mother to ‘Gawayne, Gaheris, Aggravayne and
Gareth’ (p. 27) by her husband, King Lot.
17. Malory, p. 27; it also sidesteps the issue of Oedipal desire for the mother.
18. It is notable that in Beauty and the Beast (Series 2, episodes 5 and 6) Uther only has sex with
Catrina in her troll form, ensuring there is no alternative to the negative connotations that this
portrayal suggests.
19. Freya’s alternative form, a viciously murderous Bastet, is another expression of the ways in which
the show reinforces the message that female appearances are perilously deceptive.
20. Thousands of Merlin/Arthur stories were uploaded to www.fanfiction.net, in addition to other fan
sites dedicated to ‘Merthur’, as the pairing became known. For a popular summary of sexualized
readings of events in the show, see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HoYay/Merlin,
accessed 12 December 2013.
21. Arthur’s death in Merlin’s arms and subsequent ship burial as a mirror of Freya’s death also lent
weight to this reading.
22. ‘I genuinely believe that. I think it was what it was always going to be, two men realizing how
much they meant to each other, and that’s what it turned out to be’. Alexander Vlahos (Mordred),
in Ian McArdell, Alexander Vlahos (‘Merlin’) interview, 16 January 2013, http://www.cultbox.
co.uk/interviews/exclusives/5850-alexander-vlahos-merlin-interview, accessed 12 December 2013.
See also Bradley James’s comments on how Arthur’s bromance with Merlin trumps his romance
with Gwen (‘no contest’) in series 2 at ‘Merlin | Bradley James— Romance or Bromance?’,
10 September 2010, http://youtu.be/_hvItmFQD54 , accessed 12 December 2013.
chapter eleven
Electronic Tolkien:
Characterization in Film
and Video Games
Carol L. Robinson
As Ethan Gilsdorf has rightly observed, ‘Tolkien has spawned a whole international subculture
of escapism and fuelled a boom in science fiction and fantasy that’s now 10 percent of the
total trade-book business.’1 Tolkien’s journeying through medieval scholarship and medieval
fantasy has carried us, to quote Carl Sagan, ‘to worlds that never were’2 and beyond, and
the inhabitants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth have moved beyond the world of this writer’s
imagination, into a wide spectrum of afterlife.3 Such afterlife is typical of medievalism in
general. Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline note that the output of medievalist adaptations
and rewrites, of medievalist tropes, images, emblems and alternative histories, is ‘both huge
and varied’ and rightly observe that many of us located in places influenced by European
imperialism, all over the world, ‘continually create a Middle Ages that we cannot ever retrieve
or fully know but which remains more than a mere palimpsest in the present.’4 There are two
types of electronic Tolkien afterlives under consideration here: (1) the cinematic afterlife and
(2) the video game afterlife, and these two types of media mark a division between two types
of characters: fictional and simulated, as well as marking the degrees of these characters’
Tolkienist purity, particularly as affected by neo-medievalist values.
Using the dragon, such as Tolkien’s Smaug and dragons found in electronic games such
as EverQuest (1999 to present),5 Espen Aarseth provides an argument as to why textual and
cinematic characters, which are fictional, are not the same as video game characters, which
are simulated. Reading or viewing textual or cinematic characters is a passive experience;
these fictional characters are made up ‘solely of signs’ (words or pictures); the reader or
Electronic Tolkien: Characterization in Film and Video Games 125
viewer rarely has a personal experience with fictional characters, at least not beyond the level
of voyeurism. Playing with video game characters, however, is an active experience; these
simulated characters are made up of ‘signs and a dynamic model, that will specify its behaviour
and respond to our input,’ and thus the player has a more direct personal experience with the
simulated character, allowing the player to test limits or strategize to create changes in the
virtual environment: ‘We can’t have our way with fictions, but with games, we may.’6
Logically, one should be able to argue that Tolkien’s characters adapted into cinematic
afterlives are fictional, while his characters adapted into video games are less and less fictional
and increasingly simulated. However, this is not the case. Tolkien’s Smaug is fictional, but
the more that he becomes adapted into a video game as an interactive character, the more
he becomes a fictional character and less a simulation – despite the nature of the media.
Smaug in The Hobbit video game (Sierra Entertainment, Inc., 2003) and Smaug in the more
recently developed video game, LEGO: The Hobbit (TT Games, 2014), are both versions of
this dragon as interactive, as NPCs (non-player characters) who are set against PCs (player
characters). Smaug in the earlier The Hobbit video game, perhaps because it is not a direct
adaptation of Jackson’s movie, is underdeveloped fiction, a purist simulation of Tolkien’s
fictional character. However, Smaug is significantly less pure and more neomedieval, in
LEGO: The Hobbit, with its LEGO-like drawings and other parodies of Jackon’s cinematic
fictional characters, and is thus actually more fictional because it is building directly upon the
established fictional characters created by Tolkien and adapted by Jackson.
Indeed, it is in the video games adapted directly from Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptations
where Tolkien’s fictional development of his characters best come into simulated video game
play, and this might be because Jackson’s fictional film characters appear to be more simulated
(especially in The Hobbit trilogy), signifying the relationships between neomedievalism and
neo-Tolkienism. Neomedievalism is the purposeful, conscious rewriting of the medieval in
which ‘[c]ontemporary values (feminism, gay rights, modern technological warfare tactics,
democracy, capitalism, ...) dominate and rewrite the traditional perceptions of the European
Middle Ages, even infusing other medieval cultures, such as those of Japan’; neomedievalism
also tends to be ‘more playful and in greater denial of reality.’7 Neo-Tolkienism is Tolkien’s
fantasy world as it has come to exist in ‘a broad scale of adaptations: from purist (research-
based) to anti-purist (ill-researched) scholarship and creative activity’.8 Not all works are
only one or the other, moreover; for example, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy,
Jackson’s The Hobbit film trilogy and the videogame adaptations of these trilogies, are (or
will be soon after the publication of this work) both purist and anti-purist. They are purist in
that they are well researched, but they are anti-purist in that several aspects, female characters
in particular, have been further developed from how they are (limitedly portrayed) in the
original novels. The neo-medieval video games have developed a deeper merging between
simulated (player) and fictional (non-player) characters, thus helping simulated characters
(PC or NPC) to be more like fictional characters. Consequently, Peter Jackson’s cinematic
character adaptations of Tolkien’s fictions (particularly the characters in Jackson’s The Hobbit
trilogy) were made possible only by the development of simulated characters in neo-medievalist
videogames, the development of CGI, that pre-date Jackson’s trilogy (particularly
those from the late twentieth century). And, in their turn, the simulated characters of
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neo-Tolkienist video games (particularly those of the early twenty-first century) have been
further influenced by the qualities of Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s
fictional characters (particularly the characters of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy).
It might be easier to see this quasi-chicken-or-the-egg development with a little historical
information. This history is significant because it emphasizes not only Tolkien’s impact upon
science fiction and fantasy video game development, but also the loopy technological path
needed for successful development of his characters into film.
History shows a well-developed fascination with the conversion of Tolkien’s characters
from being fictional (passive) to being simulated (interactive) that originates with tabletop
(paper and dice) games. The first tabletop game, Dungeons & Dragons (Tactical Studies
Rules, Inc., 1974), developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the early 1970s, directly
anticipates the electronic Tolkienist games to come. While Tolkien’s novels were not the only
source for the conception of this game, Gygax explains that nearly all of the original players
‘were huge’ fans of Tolkien’s novels, insisting that Gygax and Arneson ‘put as much Tolkien-
influence material into the game as possible’ and only later (after threat of copyright suit,
most likely) were balrogs, ents and hobbits replaced by balor demons, treants and halflings.9
William Crowther (who helped develop the Advanced Research Project Agency Network,
the forerunner to the World Wide Web), was inspired by this tabletop game, as well as by his
hobby of cave exploration (particularly the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky). Crowther adapted
Dungeons & Dragons into the computer-text game, Adventure (also known as Colossal Cave
and Colossal Cave Adventure, developed 1972–6).10 This early computer game was nothing
like a video game – in the very beginning it was text commands and text responses (graphics
came only later) – and yet because the player could command the avatar (the character) to
go places and perform actions, it could be said that the dawn of the electronic simulated
character had arrived. Moreover, it appears that this Adventure was not much influenced
by Tolkien’s Middle Earth, except as Crowther experienced it in playing a halfling/hobbit
(known as ‘Willie the Thief ’) in Dungeons & Dragons. But that was soon to change.
Crowther shared Adventure freely (in fact, it spread rapidly over the ARPANet), and in
1976, the game found its way to one of the computers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Lab (SAIL, Stanford University). It is perhaps worth noting that SAIL was an ideal location
for a Tolkienist computer game. According to Les Earnest, who worked at SAIL from
1965 to 1980, ‘all rooms in [the] facility were named after places in Middle Earth and had
signs posted on the doors showing their names in both Latin and Elvish alphabets.’11 The
Prancing Pony eventually became the name of the first computerized vending machine: food
and drink (even beer) could be purchased with either cash or credit, and everyone at SAIL
who used the machine had a password. (If someone under-age attempted to purchase beer,
which could only be purchased on credit and thus only with password, the machine would
recognize the password’s user and respond with ‘Sorry, kid’). SAIL also had printers that were
programmed with the option to print in Tolkien’s ‘Elvish’ font.12 Into this Middle- Earth
computer lab, Adventure found its way. In 1976, Don Woods, a graduate student working at
SAIL, attained Crowther’s permission to expand the program with a troll, some elves, and a
volcano reminiscent of Mount Doom. The Rand Corporation then marketed the game as The
Original Adventure in 1981, offering a Certificate of Wizardness to any player who found all
the treasures and earned all the points.
Even though the characters were a hybrid of fictional and simulated qualities, resulting
in shallow character development, the narrative was complex and interactive (rather than
passive as it is for film viewers and book readers); the game was a lot of fun, and it is believed
that many college students failed their classes due to obsessive game playing during that first
year (1981–2).13 Soon after this, as the game industry exploded, Tolkien’s Middle Earth could
be found influencing a fairly long lineage of computer text and computer video games. This
list includes the ever-expanding Warcraft (offline, Blizzard Entertainment, 1994 to present),
the ever-expanding Ultima Online (Electronic Arts, 1997 to present), the ever-expanding
EverQuest (Verant/Sony, 1999 to present), EA Games’ various and continuously re-released
Lord of the Rings games that tie directly to Pater Jackson’s cinematic adaptations (offline,
begun in 2001), the ever-expanding World of Warcraft (online, Blizzard Entertainment, 2004
to present), the ever-expanding Dungeons and Dragons Online (Turbine, Inc., 2006 to present)
and the ever-expanding Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine, Inc., 2007 to present).14 All of
these games continually develop simulated neo-Tolkienist characters – as purist (directly),
anti-purist (indirectly) or a combination thereof.
Direct adaptation or not, the interactivity in these games is still rather clumsy; however,
because of the absurdity of the ‘realism’ in these games, this interactivity is also personal,
rather like between members of a dysfunctional family. Jonathan Corliss shares the story of
game developer Peter Molyneux demonstrating Fable II (Microsoft, 2008) at the 2007 Game
Developers Conference, featuring an avatar (a PC, controlled by the player) and his dog
(an NPC, controlled by the computer): ‘During the demonstration, Molyneux’s virtual dog
was injured, limping toward his on-screen master, but Molyneux directed his avatar to flee,
leaving the crippled dog behind. In response to the gasping audience, the developer remarked,
“Once you care, I have got you.”’15 However, while this active (interactive) experience with
simulated characters may be more intimate, it is not necessarily an intimacy with a deeply
developed character.
In Dungeons and Dragons Online, for example, I (as a player) might create a halfling
character, whom I name Suewise Humblefoot. Suewise will have a somewhat unique set of
physical features that I select (body density, shapes of various facial features, hair colour)
and I can name that character (within the limitations of the ‘laws’ for naming as set forth by
the game). Such a potentially strong female character (of any race) is unlikely to be found in
the original Middle Earth created by Tolkien, so in creating her, it is likely that I am creating
a puppet, an avatar, of a part of my imagined self – giving birth to the animation of part
of my personality (enacted in reality or not). The fictional characters, in other words, be
they textual or cinematic, become simulated characters through interactivity and, ultimately,
through the flexibility of that interactivity. ‘Beyond accessing the preformed images and
narratives of traditional cinema or literature then,’ argues Corliss, ‘with interactive forms,
players are embedded within virtual playscapes, implicated in the worldview of particular
game spaces and incentivized to enact value judgments from “Where should I jump?” to
“What should I exterminate?”’16 This is equally true for gnomes in World of Warcraft and for
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hobbits in Lord of the Rings Online. I might demonstrate character depth, through actions
of the avatar and even text-posted emotions and statements made by the avatar, but, as with
any role-playing, the question arises: Is this avatar exposing my personal character or a
characterization I’ve created, or both?
In Lord of the Rings Online, moreover, Tolkien’s characters, while in the margins of the
central playing, are periodically and seemingly randomly pulled into the player’s quest to
make ties to Tolkien’s original plot and to encourage their ‘friend’ (the player’s avatar) to
move forward. Suddenly, my hobbit avatar, Suewise Humblefoot, is part of the larger world
of the Fellowship of the Ring and even a key character, fighting the good fight, in support of
their quest to destroy the ring. In other words, this alternative reality for the player is also
an alternative reality (alternative fantasy) for Tolkien’s characters, which was what Tolkien’s
entire Middle Earth was for him. ‘Playing with the distinction between author, scholar, and
narrator,’ suggest Kevin Moberly and Brent Moberly, ‘Tolkien offers readers a version of
himself that is genuinely fake, but which nevertheless employs an academic prose that, in
the prologue and appendixes, appears as authentic (and therefore as fictional) as any of the
languages that he composes for the elves or the dwarves.’17
This experience is further emphasized by the serious playfulness of these quest-oriented
games. In his philosophical musings of playful quests through Second Life, Mark Stephen
Meadows initially describes his experiences as ‘a strange migration’ that is ‘marked by massive
automation, promises of wealth, rampant lawlessness, rumors of ruination, emerging cults,
political upheaval, moral lasciviousness, and questions about the impact these things will
create in the coming years.’18 He is describing the freedom to pretend without causing due
harm or drastic life changes. He is describing serious play, something that happens in nearly
all virtual reality games (be they first-person-shooters, role-playing quests or something else).
Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl have recently argued that the ‘the “medieval” world of
videogames offers an obviously engaging but persistent fantasy, a surface that collapses into
the emptiness underneath while nonetheless providing hours upon hours of amusement for
their aficionados.’19 Serious play, be it fantasy role-playing or something else, is especially
difficult for adults to appreciate; indeed, most current dictionaries describe it as wasted time,
intended for children. ‘Our folklore’, writes Carl Yoke, ‘is filled with sayings that underscore
the virtues of work and the frivolity of play, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” “work
hard and save your money,” and “keep your nose to the grindstone.’”20
Certainly more study needs to be made of the therapy of escape into fantasy fiction and
simulated fantasy, and a study of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction and its adaptation into simulated
fantasies might prove to serve as a consistent measurement of such cognitive analysis. ‘By
understanding how people play games’, argues Jonathan Corliss, ‘with a consideration of
factors including interactivity and emergent authorship, we can begin to look at how people
make sense of their world through games (as they do with any other sociocultural media
phenomena); how games are increasingly a feature of culture.’21 Espen Aarseth argues that
such massive multiplayer online (MMO) games – including MMORPGs such as Dungeons
and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft – ‘are not only the future
of gaming, they are huge social experiments that will affect and shape the future of human
communication’.22
In The Road to Middle-earth, Tom Shippey suggests that ‘The Lord of the Rings in particular
is a war-book, also a post-war book, framed by and responding to the crisis of Western
civilisation, 1914-1945 (and beyond)’ and that J. R. R. Tolkien belongs to the group of sci-fi
and fantasy writers (William Golding, T. H. White, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut) who lived
through the First and Second World Wars.23 Writing these books of fiction, then, was perhaps
a sort of therapy? Perhaps, too, for example, war veterans might be playing these computer
games as a sort of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder? Such simulated quests are
certainly in imitation of the intention of Tolkien with his characters. ‘Tolkien’s little hobbits,
Sam and Frodo,’ J. Lenore Wright argues, ‘set their own course as they journey toward self-
knowledge and authentic living.’24 While Frodo and Sam do not set their own course – the
course is set by Tolkien, just as the general course, with all of its computed variations, of
Lord of the Rings Online is set by its game designers – the significance of such a quest, real or
fantasized, still holds cathartic value. ‘Only when we base our beliefs on immediate experience
and innate ideas,’ argues J. Lenore Wright, ‘can we know reality absolutely and with certainty.
Like Descartes, the Ring-bearer and his fellows must break free from their assumptions and
false beliefs if they wish to be transformed by the journey inward.’25
Transformation then, is part of the key distinction between Tolkien’s fictional characters
in a fictional world and the Tolkienist simulated characters in a simulated (virtual) world.
Transformation identifies the effect a fictional character might have upon a reader’s inner
psyche, as well as the lack of effect a simulated character might have upon a player’s inner
psyche. Transformation, too, identifies the effect of adaptation from the limits of print into the
virtuality of computer games and (eventually) motion pictures. ‘To make a Secondary World
inside which the green sun will be credible,’ writes Tolkien, ‘commanding Secondary Belief,
will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of
elvish craft.’26 However, Péter Kristóf Makai argues, ‘No matter how adamant Tolkien was
in wanting to put the treeness of trees in written narrative, only in a virtual reality simulation
can all about trees be said, when every movement of every leaf or branch can be modelled
under all circumstances (whether possible or impossible) if one has the elvish craft in her to
write a program for that.’27 Clearly, then, video game simulations had to come (historically)
before the quality making of Tolkien’s world as motion picture fiction.
Tolkien’s novels have inspired a wide variety of radio, television and film adaptations, the
most recent of which include, in addition to Peter Jackson’s feature-length film adaptations
(The Lord of the Rings, 2001–3 and The Hobbit, 2012–4), a South Park animation parody
‘The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers’ (Comedy Central, 2002),
and a soft-core porn video parody (The Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String,
2003. ‘It’s taken 50 years for The Lord of the Rings to be adapted into a live-action movie,’
Peter Jackson once said. The technology needed for realistic special effects (to not only give
the trees their ‘treeness’ but to give the ents their ‘entness’) only became possible a few years
before the production of the films. CGI was specifically developed for interactive computer
programs, including videogames. However, their use has become vital to the creation of
‘realistic’ special effects, particularly of fantasy characters, in film. Peter Jackon’s Lord
of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy films had to draw upon the technology of simulated
characterization in video games. However, as Peter Jackson’s reincarnation of The Hobbit
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appears to be showing – with its reduced humour, increased battles and unrealistic looking
dwarves – simulation only takes motion picture fiction so far. Indeed, the films seem to almost
make the passive viewer jealous of not being involved in the action, anticipating the market
for Tolkien-adapted videogame sales to rise. As Kristin Thompson has successfully argued, the
creation, marketing and sales of both the video game and cinematic adaptations of Tolkien’s
works ‘has become a small industry in itself ’.28
Yet, Jackson’s adaptation of the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings not only brings more intimacy
through simulated reality (even if it is not interactive), but also through modifications of
characters, particularly deeper development of female characters. As Jack M. Downs recently
observed, ‘Critics and reviewers often hone in on a perceived dearth of female characters
as a failing in Tolkien’s conceptualization of Middle-earth’, and he further acknowledges
that, ‘in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien assigns the bulk of the action to
male characters, and women are primarily present in secondary and background roles.’
His thesis is that ‘careful analysis of Tokien’s entire mythos reveals that women are neither
absent, nor entirely confined to secondary roles within Middle-earth.’29 Such an argument,
however, does not sufficiently discount the fact of the absence of female characters, much
less of their development. It is arguable that many people (not just women) celebrated Peter
Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (not so much of The Hobbit, at least not as
of the completion of this essay, before the third film has been released) for the significantly
further development and empowerment of Tolkien’s marginalized female characters.
Consider, for example, Princess Éowyn, a shieldmaiden of Rohan. In Tolkien’s book,
Princess Éowyn’s words are regally stiff, if not also wordy and antiquated: ‘But no living man
am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and
my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you,
if you touch him.’ When I saw The Return of the King for the first time, in a movie theatre, the
audience cheered, whooped and clapped at Princess Éowyn’s simple but eloquent declaration,
‘I am no man!’ While the film shows that she must join the battle disguised as a warrior, in the
book, the details are much more explicit in the cross dressing: in the film, everyone looks the
same (like a warrior), so gender is less important, but in the book, the need to appear like a
warrior correctly includes actually disguising herself as a man named Dernhelm. In both film
and book, she is celebrated as a strong woman. However, in the book, she is also pitied for her
strength, as a woman who must live as a man in a ‘man’s’ world in order to be the complete
human being she truly is. Moreover, Tolkien soundly closes the door on her life in a man’s
world, having her fall in love with Faramir: ‘Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last
she understood it. … “I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor
take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are
not barren.”’ Jackson, on the other hand, leaves the rest of her life open to interpretation: we
see her standing with Faramir, but can only surmise (if we haven’t read the books) that they
are interested in each other, and there is no suggestion (of any kind) that she will be putting
down her sword any time soon.
Indeed, in The Lord of the Rings Online, she continues to thrive as a shieldmaiden of Rohan
(over and over again), which raises one last observation regarding the differences between
Tolkien’s fictional (reader-passive) characters, Jackson’s fictional-simulated (viewer-passive,

larger-than-life) characters and the simulated (viewer inter-active) characters created in video
games by EA and Turbine. Many have noted the close tie-in between the movies and the video
games; indeed, scenes from the films make up a functional part of the video games (both
online and in console). Without raising the issues of profit, marketing and business ethics, it is
noteworthy that the narrative structuring of the games is enhanced by the narrative structuring
of the films (which are a narrative re-structuring of Tolkien’s books). In other words, just as
the computer technology of simulation fuels the escapist-realism (the fantasy) of the films and
their fictional characters, the film fiction (dialogue, acting, directing, writing) fuels the depth
of both narrative and characterization of the video games’ simulated characters.
J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his editor, ‘I am not now at all sure that the tendency to
treat the whole thing as a kind of vast game is really good, cert. not for me, who find that kind
of thing only too fatally attractive.’30 However, as Carl Sagan once noted, ‘Imagination will
often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.’31 Indeed, many of
us are apparently fascinated by the idea of living in fictional-reality, or at least taking a short
vacation there – what else are medievalist fantasy, science fiction and video games (among
other fictions and fictional play) about if not a denial of the current reality? When a person
plays a character in a Lord of the Rings Online video game, for example, she feels all that
more empowered by both the interactivity and depth of psychological development. It’s as
if Tolkien’s characters have been given shock therapy, and (for the most part), it made them
function better in the ‘real’ world, which is rather (for lack of a better word) fantastically
unbelievable.
Notes
1. Gilsdorf, E. (2003), ‘Lord of the Gold Ring’. The Boston Globe Magazine, p. 16, web http://www.
boston.com/news/globe/ magazine/articles/ 2003/11/16/lord_of_the_gold_ring/
2. ‘Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.’
National Aeronatics and Space Administration. Solar System Exploration. ‘Carl Sagan’, 3 January
2013, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/profile.cfm?Code=SaganC
3. Most of this electronic media adaption of Tolkien’s works that were done before Peter Jackson’s
films (before 2001) have been all but forgotten: an apparent radio broadcast reading (BBC 1956),
animated film adaptations such as The Hobbit (Gene Deitch, 1966), The Hobbit (Jules Bass and
Arthur Rankin, Jr., 1977), The Lord of the Rings (Ralph Bakshi, 1978), and The Return of the
King (Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr., 1980), and ‘The Hobbit’ episode of Jackanory (Roger
Singleton-Turner, 1 October 1979). For an excellent source of all adaptations and transformations
of Tolkien’s world, see Tolkien Gateway, http://tolkiengateway.net/.
4. Ashton, G. and Kline, D. T. (eds) (2012), ‘Introduction: Now and Then’, in Medieval Afterlives in
Popular Culture (New Middle Ages). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 4–5.
5. Everquest (1999-present), Sony Online Entertainment, https://www.everquest.com/home.
6. Aarseth, E. (2007), ‘Doors and Perception: Fiction vs. Simulation in Games’. Intermédialités:
histoire et thérie des arts, des lettres et des techniques/Intermediality: History and Theory of the
Arts, Literature and Technologies, 9: 35–44.
132
7. Robinson, C. (2005), ‘Definitions’. Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization, http://www.

medievalelectronicmultimedia.org.
8. Robinson, C. and Clements, C. (2012), ‘Neo-Tolkienism: Plays upon Playing with Tolkien’s
Playing with Language’, in C. Robinson and C. Clements (eds), Neomedievalism in the Media:
Essays on Film, Television, and Electronic Games. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin
Mellen Press, pp. 339–62.
9. Qtd. in Regina, M. (2000), ‘Interview; Gary Gygax, Creator of Dungeons & Dragons’,
TheOneRing.net. Nexcess.net, 30 May 2000, http://archives.theonering.net/features/interviews/
gary_gygax.html.
10. See Adams, R. (2006), ‘The Crowther and Woods ‘Colossal Cave Adventure’ Game; Here’s
Where It All Began’, Rick Adams’ Little Cornero of Cyber-space: The Colossal Cave Adventure
Page, http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html. See also: Isaac Asimov (1996), ‘Concerning
Tolkien’, in Magic: The Final Fantasy Collection. New York: HarperPrism.
11. Earnest, L. (1999, 2009), ‘Sail Sagas’, 13 December 2009, Stanford University, http://web.
stanford.edu/~learnest/sagas.pdf.
12. Adams, R. (2006), ‘The Crowther and Woods “Colossal Cave Adventure” Game; Here’s Where It
All Began’. Rick Adams’ Little Cornero of Cyber-space: The Colossal Cave Adventure Page, http://
rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html.
13. Adams, ‘The Crowther and Woods ‘Colossal Cave Adventure’ Game; Here’s Where It All Began’,
http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html.
14. Earlier games include: Zork (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, 1977–
9), the ‘Multi-User Dungeon’ computer text game (Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, 1979), The
Hobbit Software Adventure (Beam Software, 1982), Shadowfax (Mike Singleton, 1982), Moria
(Severn Software, 1982), Jewels of Darkness (Firebird Software and Level 9 Computing, 1983),
Adventure Quest (Firebird Software and Level 9 Computing, 1983), Dungeon Adventure (Firebird
Software and Level 9 Computing, 1984), Der kleine Hobbit (Level 9 Computing, 1984), Lord
of the Rings: Game One (Beam Software, 1985), Habitat (LucasArts, 1985), Bored of the Rings
(Delta 4 Software, 1985), The Boggit: Bored Too (Delta 4 Software, 1986), An Everyday Tale of
a Seeker of Gold (Zenobi Software,1986), Bulbo and the Lizard King (Zenobi Software, 1987),
War in Middle Earth (Melbourne House, 1988), The Shadows of Mordor (Beam Software, 1988),
The Bridge of Catzad-Dum (Mark E. Rogers, 1988), Fuddo and Slam (Zenobi Software, 1988),
The Crack of Doom (Beam Software, 1989), The Lord of the Rings: Vol. I (Interplay Productions,
1990), Riders of Rohan (Beam Software, 1990), Lord of the Rings (Interplay Productions, 1990),
Kingdom O’Magic (Interplay Productions, 1996), Meridian 59 (3DO, 1996), Lineage (NCSoft,
1998), Jet Set Willy: Lord of the Rings (Broadsoft, 2000), and Anarchy Online (Funcom, 2001).
15. Corliss, J. (2011), ‘Introduction: The Social Science Study of Video Games’. Games and Culture,
6(1): 3–16.
16. Corliss, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–16.
17. Moberly, B. and Moberly, K. (2010), ‘Neomedievalism, Hyperrealism, and Simulation’, in
K. Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s). Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, pp. 12–24.
18. Meadows, M. S. (2008), I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life.
Berkeley, CA: New Riders.
19. Pugh, T. and Weisl, A. J. (2013), Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. London and
New York: Routledge.
20. Yoke, C. B. (2007), ‘Fogging “Johnny Mneumonic”’, C. B. Yoke and C. L. Robinson (eds), in
The Cultural Influences of William Gibson, the ’Father’ of Cyberpunk Science Fiction; Critical and
Interpretive Essays. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 99–112.
21. Corliss, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–16.
22. Aarseth, E. (2004), ‘Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation’, in N. Wardrip-Fruin
and P. Harrigan (eds), First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge:
MIT Press, pp. 45–55.
23. Shippey, T. (2003), The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology. Rev.
and Expanded edn. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
24. Wright, J. L. (2003), ‘Sam and Frodo’s Excellent Adventure: Tolkien’s Journey Motif ’, in G.
Bassham and E. Bronson (eds), The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All.
Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, pp. 192–203.
25. Wright, ‘Sam and Frodo’s Excellent Adventure’, pp. 192–203.
26. Tolkien, J. R. R. (2008), On Fairy-Stories, eds. V. Flieger and D. A. Anderson. London:
HarperCollins Publishers.
27. Makai, P. K. (2010), ‘Faërian Cyberdrama: When Fantasy becomes Virtual Reality’. Tolkien
Studies, 7: 35–53.
28. Thompson, K. (2007), The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
29. Downs, J. M. (2014), ‘“Radiant and terrible”: Tolkien’s Heroic Women as Correctives to the
Romance and Epic Traditions’, in L. M. Campbell (ed.), In A Quest of Her Own: Essays on the
Female Hero in Modern Fantasy. New York: McFarland. pp. 55–75.
30. Letter to his publisher (1955, qtd. In) Gilsdorf, E. (2003), ‘Lord of the Gold Ring’. The Boston
Globe Magazine, p. 16, web http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2003/11/16/
lord_of_the_gold_ring/.
31. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Solar System Exploration. ‘Carl Sagan’, 3 January
2013, http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/profile.cfm?Code=SaganC.
chapter twelve
The BBC Canterbury

Tales (2003)
Kathleen Coyne Kelly
Chaucer in a (Television) Box

BBC1, in keeping with a long tradition of popularizing Chaucer first on radio and then
on television,1 adapted six of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 2003, putting them into modern
English – and into modern settings and dress.2 They are, in order:
1. ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (John McKay), 11 September 2003.

2. ‘The Wife of Bath’ (Andy DeEmmony), 18 September 2003.
3. ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (Marc Munden), 25 September 2003.
4. ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’ [The Shipman’s Tale] (John McKay), 2 October 2003.
5. ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ (Andy De Emmony), 9 October 2003.
6. ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ (Julian Jarrold), 16 October 2003.3
The BBC Canterbury Tales were critically well received; a few of them won a number of
awards and these many years later, the BBC is still congratulated for its vision in producing
them. The producers intended for Chaucer’s tales, revived on the cusp of the third millennium,
to be enjoyed by people who had never even read a plot summary of the most famous and
influential English literary text of the fourteenth century.4 Executive producer Laura Mackie
expressed it this way: ‘Chaucer held up a mirror to the 14th century and we intend to do the
same to the 21st. The characters in the tales are timeless.’5 While such remarks are certainly
intended to attract viewers, Mackie also deploys two familiar tropes of a privileged humanist
criticism: that literature at its best is a ‘mirror’, an unmediated reflection of real life and
sentiment from which we can learn; and that literature at its best is ‘timeless’, its historical
The BBC Canterbury Tales (2003) 135
context and expression of cultural ideology irrelevant to an appreciation of those selves that
we see reflected in the text. These and other principles of humanist thought are repeatedly
invoked to underwrite most publicly sanctioned – and government-sponsored – cultural
productions in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Those in both the private and public
sectors who seek funding for educational and cultural projects often argue that great works
of literature deserve to be reread, revived, adapted – and resold – because of their didactic
power: the aesthetic artefacts of the past offer (and, in some cases, are thought only to offer)
lessons to us all. Chaucer himself furnishes some support for such prevailing views (medieval
and modern), but in practice, argues against the notion that poetry should be valued for its
power to instruct and persuade rather than for its power to delight. In The Nun’s Priest’s
Tale, Chaucer famously advises his readers to take the moralite – to take the fruyt and leave
the chaf.6 Happily, Chaucer never quite specified which was which (though it could be argued
that he disavows both the fruit and chaff of his labours in his Retraction), thus opening up
a space for contemplating pleasure and delight as important values, or at least outcomes, in
themselves.
The BBC Tales offer plenty of fruit and chaff to meditate on (as well as plenty of moments
in which to debate which is which) with respect to their status as contemporary television
drama, as adaptations, as products of commodity culture – and, perhaps most important, not
as mirrors to be held up to life, but, more accurately, as a set of ideological representations of
their historical and cultural moment: a British now as opposed to then.
The Frame Tale: The BBC

Viewers familiar with Chaucer’s works cannot help but compare Chaucer’s original tales with
their modernized adaptations, paying attention to transformations, elisions and additions.
And for those in the audience who have never read the tales, the BBC takes every opportunity
to remind such viewers that what looks like yet another iteration of socially relevant television
melodrama has revered antecedents. In both instances, viewers engage in a symbiotic relation
(as David Cowart expresses it) to the past itself, a host ‘text’ as much as the six Canterbury
Tales are. However, the BBC Tales do not just echo along a vertical axis, from past to present;
they also have significant horizontal connections, sharing ‘interlives’ with other BBC drama
and comedy series. And these intertextual comminglings, these interlives, significantly shape
the afterlife of the BBC Tales, nested within the ‘overlife’ of the BBC itself.
Reading the BCC adaptation of Chaucer’s Tales synchronically, that is, in the context of
BBC programming in the early 2000s, demonstrates the degree to which the selected Tales,
when compared to the majority of other televised dramas aired during the same period, share
the same production values, tone and effect, and, above all, commitment to examining social
issues of the day. Series Producer Kate Bartlett says that the BBC’s intention was to
explor[e] themes such as the cult of celebrity, bigotry and the obsession with youth. . . .
We wanted writers who saw something in Chaucer’s tale and had a fantastic idea for
modernising it. We spoke to a lot of writers, but we wanted the ones who would grab the
material.7
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Thus, Bartlett describes the ideological agenda behind the Tales. They are indeed intended
to serve as humanistic lessons. Moreover, the producers and screenwriters involved with the
Tales and who ‘grabbed the material’ already had a good deal of experience with successful
teleplays for the BBC: they had proven that they could deliver what the BBC wanted. Their
collaborations on the series resulted in a signature BBC look and sound, plot arc and ethos.
Taken together, the Tales indulge in pathos, bathos and melodrama, as well as in a sly and
often risqué humour, a mixture that is quite characteristic of the BBC (and Chaucer!). Each
adaptation, as in most BBC popular programming, represents people in a range of middle-
class roles in which making a living (or not) shapes the plot, such as shopkeepers and pub
owners in ‘The Miller’s Tale,’ con men in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and
dentists and actors in ‘The Wife of Bath.’ Settings in each tale are ordinary, full of everyday
details: a tobacconist’s shop, Indian take-away food, a featureless flat in estate housing.
Many of the actors in the Tales were already known to British audiences and somewhat
known to mainstream film-goers; thus, when the series premiered in Autumn 2003, BBC
regulars could easily trace the interlives of such actors as Bill Nighy, who plays Beth’s cheating
husband in the ‘The Wife of Bath’. Viewers could move backwards in time to his previous
roles in several BBC series. Today, viewers (and IMDb browsers) can follow Nighy’s career
after, to his role as a rock roué in Love Actually, which premiered two months after the airing
of the episode, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I (2010) and beyond. And
Julie Walters, who plays Beth, went on to Mamma Mia (2008), in which she again plays a
woman experienced, as Chaucer says of his Wife, in the ‘olde daunce’. (Walters also played
the maternal but determined Molly Weasley in the Harry Potter films.) In this respect, each
actor in the BBC Tales is a kind of interstitial figure who exists, as Stanley Cavell says, ‘in
our presence while we are not in his [or hers].’8 The actor is the stable entity that a viewer
can track across various roles in TV and film. By recognizing, for example, Billie Piper as
a real-life pop singer (and Dr Who sidekick) who plays the aspiring pop singer Alison in
‘The Miller’s Tale’ reminds us that it is, after all, only TV, an awareness which encourages
identification with the star along with identification with the character. A viewer who derives
pleasure from recognizing an actor in different roles may well feel like an insider, someone in
the know, a feeling that may promote a certain kind of loyalty to the BBC itself. To interpret
the BBC Tales only diachronically (i.e., over time) elides the effects of interlife on afterlife.
Britain as a postcolonial nation also furnishes a frame for the Tales. The BBC Tales makes
a point of representing England’s minorities in both ancillary and starring roles. Several
characters in the BBC Tales can be plotted on a continuum, from ethnic and racial insularity
to full assimilation (as in the closed South Asian community in ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’) or
absorbed into romantic attachments (as in the mixed-race couples in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’
and ‘The Knight’s Tale’). The diversity of racial and ethnic identity in the Tales, while obvious
to viewers, is never made a subject for comment on the diegetic level – within the world of
the tale. In these retellings, racial difference has been commodified – as has Chaucer’s cultural
‘prestige’ – sometimes gratuitously (the earnest Paul in ‘The Knight’s Tale’), but also brilliantly
(the devout Constance in ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’). Merrie Olde England is reduced to a
ghost, haunting extreme long shots of rolling green hills or glimpsed briefly through the
curtains of a Tudor bed.
‘The Miller’s Tale’

We first meet Nick Zakian (James Nesbitt) as he stands on the village common next to his
red sports car (stolen, it turns out) surveying the small town in Kent that he is about to con.
Nick is floridly handsome, permanently but charmingly leering. He is dressed dapperly in
a dark claret-coloured suit. His red car and clothes suggest that he may be a stand-in for
the devil.9 In fact, screenwriter Bowker may be playing with the name ‘Nick’ as a familiar
term for Satan. By turning Chaucer’s hende (handy, clever) Nicholas into a diabolical con
man, Bowker retells the Miller’s Tale as a cautionary tale: Nick succeeds because his victims
are unable to see beyond their self-delusions. Bowker’s John (Dennis Waterman) is not to
be laughed at, but pitied for his miserable uxoriousness. And while Chaucer’s Alisoun goes
unpunished, nothing is so heartbreaking as seeing Alison (Billie Piper), abandoned by Nick,
in a skirt too short and heels too high, standing shivering in the rain on the side of the
motorway as Nick, already cultivating his next victims, passes her by in the back of a coach.
As Warren Edminster says, the BBC replaces Chaucer’s ‘sense of cosmic justice’ with ‘a deeply
tragic warning’.10
‘The Wife of Bath’

Screenwriter Sally Wainwright exploits the Chaucerian frame tale by setting the Wife of
Bath’s Tale in a television studio: thus, Wainwright also tells a tale about the BBC itself. The
Wife’s Prologue furnishes the content of the frame in which the actors discuss and play their
roles; the Tale furnishes the content for the TV drama in which they star. Wainwright creates
yet another frame-within-a-frame by beginning and ending the episode with an interview in
which the actress Beth (Julie Walters) speaks directly into the camera, a further twist on the
Chaucer’s Wife’s monologue in the Prologue.
Beth, grieving that her dentist-husband has left her (they met when he fixed her ‘gat-tothed’
smile), audaciously insists on revising the storyline in the TV drama so that her character has
an affair with the much-younger Jerome (Paul Nicholls). Jerome’s character has been accused
of rape, and Beth, who plays a minister (surely a wink at medieval misogynist clerics), is his
support and confidant. On the set in bed, Beth and Jerome have real intercourse in front of
the director, technicians and the other actors. It is an astonishing tour de force: we see a close-
up of Bath and Jerome in bed and then, as the camera pulls back, revealing the apparatus of
the studio, we see the shocked faces of those on the set. In this mis-en-abîme, we watch these
‘witnesses’ watch two actors playing actors pretending to have real intercourse in a scene in
which the intercourse is supposed to be mimed, yet the actual performing of it is ‘real’.
In the frame drama, Beth and Jerome fall in love. At their wedding, Beth wears a red strapless
gown – surely a wicked nod to Pasolini’s Wife of Bath, who in I racconti di Canterbury (1972)
is dressed in a voluminous scarlet dress and an impossibly wide-brimmed red hat. At one point
during the festivities, Beth, channelling Chaucer’s Wife, climbs up on the table, champagne
bottle in hand, to regale her guests with references to her ‘chamber of Venus’ and her groom’s
‘long . . . long. . . .’ The relationship is of course doomed, especially after Jerome strikes Beth.
When she and Jerome reconcile after the beating, Jerome gives her what every woman wants:
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sovereignty. Yet it turns out that this is not enough. Beth, who is both Alison in the Prologue
and the hag in Chaucer’s tale, finds youth again in the magic of cosmetic surgery.
How we are to interpret Chaucer’s Wife of Bath continues to be debated. And Wainwright’s
adaptation of Alisoun as Beth deserves a place in this debate. Beth also ought to be read in
the context of contemporary, ‘post-feminist’, mid-backlash debates about women. Are we to
pity her and her neediness for love, as her friends suggest? Or has the radiant-skinned Beth
at the end of the BBC adaptation triumphed, living according to her own desires? Is she all
alone or all on her own?
‘The Knight’s Tale’

Joseph Wittig notes that the BBC ‘Knight’s Tale’ has been stripped of all its pageantry and
pomp.11 There is no court, no gods, no parade of mighty warriors. We behold a harsh, cold
world in which punishment is the major theme. In fact, perhaps the major ‘character’ in
Marchant’s adaptation of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is the colour grey: grey prison walls, grey
lowering skies and grey Stalinesque apartment complexes bordered by grey streets.
Childhood friends Ace (John Simm) and Paul (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are in prison together, and
when Ace is up for parole, he goes to live in an apartment building that is not much different
from the prison that he came from. And Emily (Keeley Hawes) inhabits yet another kind of
prison: she is caught in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. Screenwriter Marchant
transforms Chaucer’s ‘furie’ that starts up from the dust to throw Arcite from his horse into a
spark of fire: Ace, crazy with jealousy and cornered in a storage room, douses Emily, Paul and
himself with gasoline, threatening to incinerate them all. At the final moment, he repents, but
a random cigarette ignites the gas, killing Ace, while Paul and Emily escape.
It is worth noting that Marchant adapted Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (2002) for
the BBC – surely that text looms over this ‘Knight’s Tale’. And perhaps the stark colours of
the BBC production might be the result of the influence of ‘colde’ (malevolent) Saturn? There
is no room for romance in its generic sense in this adaptation; realism is the mode. ‘This
world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo’, Theseus tells us in Chaucer’s tale. One wonders what
happiness Paul and Emily can achieve after Ace’s death in the absence of Theseus’s discursus
on Providence – albeit a speech that consoles only believers. The BBC adaptation offers no
hope at all.
‘The Pardoner’s Tale’

The episode opens with Arty (Jonny Lee Miller) standing in a gothic arch of the cathedral at
Rochester, declaiming lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1595); namely, John of Gaunt’s
encomium to England: ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,’ but also ‘now
bound in with shame.’ Arty’s speechifying resonates in a number of ways: obviously, Arty is
much better-educated than his present circumstances suggest; moreover, he demonstrates his
talent for play-acting, crucial to how he makes a living as a cadger and con man. The gothic
arch at Rochester reminds us that the Pardoner’s Tale is a medieval tale: the setting is itself
a testament to the process of adapting the old for the new, for the cathedral, begun c. 1080,
is a replacement of the seventh-century original, and has been added to and remodelled ever
since.
This ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ is the most disturbing of the BBC adaptations. In Chaucer’s tale,
Death, a ‘privee theef ’ – the Black Death – ‘hath a thousand slayn this pestilence’ (Chaucer,
675, 679). In this updating of the tale, it is suggested that modern society is a sickness and a
madness – a kind of plague on all our houses. Arty, himself shamed and beset, is a psychopath
with delusions of grandeur who rapes and murders two women. He cannot stop himself from
breaking what he loves. No one survives in this tale, not even the innocent.
‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’

Poor naïve Pushpinder (Nitin Ganatra). New to a South Asian enclave in Gravesend, he is
looking for an opportunity to make a living, and sets up a health food store and internet cafe.
To then watch the coldly furious, vengeful Meena (Indira Varma) take a croquet mallet to his
shop is painful indeed. Beautiful, vain, selfish and spoiled, Meena is nevertheless a poignant
figure, clearly unhappy, who solaces herself by making lavish purchases – she is £11,000 in
debt to a jeweller, the reason that she lures Pushpinder into her bed and into lending her
money in the first place. ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’ takes on gender by examining who has
power and who has not, as well as examining what counts as power. By unsettling whiteness
as the assumed locus of power and status, ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’ also interrogates what
constitutes ‘Englishness’.12
‘The Man of Law’s Tale’

In Chaucer’s tale, the Sultan’s mother, excoriated as a ‘welle of vices’, ‘virago’ and ‘serpent
under femynynytee’ (323, 359, 360) is horrified that her son would give up Islam to marry
the Christian Custance. In retaliation, she has everyone murdered at the wedding feast. The
Bad Mother in the BBC adaptation is Leila King (Kika Markham), an Iranian living in England
who nevertheless takes against the woman that her son Alan (Andrew Lincoln) has fallen
in love with, the Nigerian Constance Musa (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Constance, traumatized
after watching her Christian mother and Muslim father murdered in Nigeria, escapes the
country in a boat. Screenwriter Hetreed says: ‘The Man of Law is unashamedly xenophobic
in his assumption of Christian superiority over Islam. My version is not xenophobic, but it
examines the conditions in which xenophobia flourishes. What survives from the original is
the power of that single character who changes everything around her because she is good
without compromise.’13
Susan Yager argues (repurposing T. S. Eliot) that the BBC ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ is
‘faithful to the tradition.’ She says: ‘Acutely sensitive to issues of race and culture, the BBC
version prompts a rereading of the Chaucerian text in a historicist vein; offering a sympathetic
treatment of the tale’s religious aspects, it uncovers, as in a palimpsest, the appeal that is lost
to most modern readers.’14 And for those who don’t know Chaucer’s Tale and for whom
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‘tradition’ may not matter, the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ serves as an urgent post-9/11 parable that
takes on immigration policy and religious intolerance.
Interpretation and Remediation

Chaucer recognized that language changes over time (‘in forme of speche is chaunge’) and
that such changes would affect how future generations read his work. While Chaucer, of
course, could not have anticipated television, his own practices of borrowing, stealing and/or
adapting a myriad of classical and medieval tales and texts would have made him quite aware
that the process of updating his own retold tales, first as screenplays and then as one-hour
BBC dramas – a triple transformation, across language, genre and media – are, above all,
acts of interpretation. And, indeed, the screenwriters involved in the BBC productions of the
Canterbury Tales took as their brief that ‘updating’ necessitates interpretation. For example,
we are told that Bowker, who describes The Miller’s Tale as ‘Chaucer’s best-known romp’,
concluded that the tale is ‘really about the way we want to believe in expertise’.15 Wainwright
says of her modernization: ‘In all the pilgrims’ comments about the Wife of Bath it is clear
they do not approve of her as a much-married woman who is able to support herself, but
what I picked up on in this tale is her inability to function without a man in her life even
though she is very successful economically’.16 And Luthra describes Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale
as ‘lightweight and comic’, yet he still ‘saw the sea captain and his wife as tragic figures in a
story about the hazards of adultery’.17 Finally, Marchant says:
What is Chaucerian in my version [of The Knight’s Tale] is the moral and emotional
complexity of the two prisoners. Chaucer’s point was that in the end their love for this
woman was secondary to their need to assert their territory. In a demonstration of their
maleness, she got forgotten.18
Most Chaucerians would be surprised by these interpretations, idiosyncratic at the very least,
and would surely be amused at the certainty with which they are expressed.
These rather wilful readings (‘creative restorations,’ as Kathleen Forni says)19 are indeed
necessary to the project that the BBC Tales exemplify – namely, what Jay David Bolter and
Richard Grusin call remediation. They use this term (following Marshall McLuhan) to mean
‘the representation of one medium in another’; that is, the process by which new visual
media refashion old media, often quoting the conventions and imitating the aesthetics of
prior media.20 Bolter and Grusin argue that any new medium achieves its cultural significance
through ‘defin[ing] itself in relationship to earlier technologies of representation.’21 By
asserting over and over their commitment to remain ‘true’ to Chaucer’s tales, the producers,
directors, writers and actors make explicit their relationship to earlier media: the privileged
manuscript and the standard printed edition – and perhaps even to a pony (a modern
translation of The Canterbury Tales). Moreover, by making such assertions of fidelity – in
spirit as opposed to the letter – the BBC participates in the fantasy that a universal, timeless
meaning can easily (and profitably) be extracted. Luthra, for example, says: ‘the situation’
of the Shipman, his wife, and Dan John ‘has Chaucer’s signature. No matter how much you
tinker with it, it remains the same. That to me is the genius of it.’22 However, this fantasy of a
Chaucerian indelibility (and others like it) is founded upon the very awareness of adaptation
as a movement from a prior medium to a current medium. We are not yet, and we may never
be, at the point at which visual media replace the book – but we certainly find that cinema,
video and the web compete aggressively for our attention. In fact, the developers of the
BBC Tales appear quite conscious of their location between print media and the medium
of television; for example, each episode begins with a choice quotation from the original
tale (albeit in modern English) that floats across the screen. Just as the pointing hand on
the computer screen has its antecedent in the pointing finger in the margins of the medieval
manuscript, these textual fragments within a visual frame recall the printed text that preceded
them. We are made quite conscious that we are switching media. Moreover, the advance
publicity, the advertising, the reviews and interviews (all canny exploitations of the Web as a
new medium for promotion) foreground the process of remediation through their incessant
references to Chaucer’s ‘original’ text. These particular ‘afterlives’ of Chaucer’s tales clamour
for us to pay attention to them as afterlives.
The Allusion of Realism

What is most distinctive about the BBC Tales is their allusion of realism. I attribute this to the
twin processes of adapting and updating the older print medium to television, especially at
those times when critics and viewers make (sometimes pernicious) comparisons between the
original tales and their remediations, focusing on such values as timeliness and relevance. I
call this practice updaptation to emphasize that we are dealing with two mutually dependent,
inseparable processes: one a shift from one medium or genre to another (whether poem to
novel or painting, book to screen, or screen to video game) and the other a shift from the past
to the present.
First, because of its scale, television invites intimacy, which contributes to verisimilitude.
(Epic scale does not transfer well to the small screen – a point made quite clear if one attempts
to watch, say, Ben Hur on television.) As the directors of soap operas know, a face full of
emotion filling the screen is indeed powerful. In addition, a close-up of a face on television is
often ‘life-size’, corresponding to the size of the viewer’s own head and face. The BBC Tales
depend a good deal on such close-ups.
Second, by grounding Chaucer’s tales in the modern everyday, a viewer may find her or
himself aroused to sympathy and even identification with the refashioned, life-sized characters –
characters who have been invited into the private space of one’s own home, so to speak,
allowing for even more intimacy. A viewer may experience the not-unpleasurable anxiety
that good suspense elicits and hope for a happy resolution precisely because the plight of the
characters is ‘just like’ real life. In the BBC Tales, Chaucer’s characters have been written into
identifiable dilemmas; their motivations and actions are psychologically persuasive as they
contend with twenty-first-century problems.23 No need to make a 630-year-old text ‘relevant’
in itself when one can make it resonate through an updated adaptation – the Middle Ages as
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pretext, as Umberto Eco says. These days, one can participate as an emotional voyeur much
more easily in front of a television screen than in front of a 1,327-page book (the length of
The Riverside Chaucer) in Middle English.
Kevin J. Harty, one of many scholars who have noted that the BBC Tales are far darker
than Chaucer’s original tales, concludes that ‘the world of the BBC tales is far more bleak
than that of Chaucer’s fourteenth century. . . . Deceit, trickery, cunning all seem the rule. . . .
Ethical considerations . . . are in more than a bit of a muddle.’24 Perhaps it is their very
modernity that makes the BBC Tales appear so grim and grittily, existentially, realistic. Except
in the case of the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, religion and religious belief have been stripped from
the dramas. And this makes sense, given that, for the most part, we have lost the context
for understanding the utterly devastating, eternal bleakness of the consequences of sin. We
have lost our fear of hell. However, most modern viewers possess a fine-grained sense of the
immediate and material consequences of transgressing both the law and the ‘law’ of culture.
As we peer into the hearts and minds of the characters, in the BBC Tales, we perceive a fate
worse than hell: despair, fear and loneliness in this life.
The BBC Tales thus fall into the gap between a medievalized Christian sense of moral
behaviour and our own modern sense of right living that puts into question the humanist project
that the BBC Tales are supposed to represent. ‘Go, litel bok,’ said Chaucer, understanding
that once his poem left his hands, he lost control of its reception (T&C V. 1786). There
is no predicting, Chaucer knew, whether readers would derive either, or neither, sentence
(instruction) or solaas, or something else entirely (General Prologue, 798). The same can be
said of the BBC Tales.
Notes
1. For a general discussion of Chaucer on BBC radio and television, see Steve Ellis (2000), Chaucer
at Large. Medieval Cultures 24. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press; also see
Kevin J. Harty (2005), ‘Chaucer in Performance’, in Steve Ellis (ed.), Chaucer: An Oxford Guide.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 560–75. See Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh (eds),
Cinema Chaucerania.
2. On the geography of the BBC Tales: each episode opens with an aerial shot of Kent, thus
locating the action, if not along the route that Chaucer’s original pilgrims took, at least along the
motorway between London and Canterbury. A montage of road signs follow, and we are either told
specifically where (‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ is set in Rochester, ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’ in Gravesend
and ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’ on the Chatham docks), or given clues to guess (‘The Miller’s Tale’ is
set ‘in suburban Kent’ – Southwark, according to a 2003 press release; Beth in ‘The Wife of Bath’
also lives in suburban Kent). ‘Stars line up for modern retelling of The Canterbury Tales for BBC
ONE’. 6 August 2003. Online.
3. I use quotation marks to distinguish the BBC Tales from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, titled without
quotation marks, as is the custom. Descriptions of the BBC episodes can be found on the BBC
website.
4. ‘They had to appeal to those more familiar with Chaucer but also work in their own right as single
films, to an audience unfamiliar with Chaucer, and this was important to all of us.’ Quoted in the
BBC Press release: ‘Stars line up.’
5. Quoted in ‘BBC puts modern pilgrims on the road to Canterbury’, Tom Leonard, The Telegraph,
16 December 2002. Online.
6. Larry Benson (ed.) (1986), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, ll. 3440,
3443. All quotations taken from this edition.
7. Quoted in ‘The Scriptwriters’ Tales’, Stephen Pile, The Telegraph, 30 August 2013. Online.
8. Cavell (1971), ‘From The World Viewed’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds) (2004), Film
Theory and Criticism. Oxford, NY: OUP, pp. 344–54, at p. 346.
9. Warren Edminster, ‘Queynte Karaoke – New Songs in the BBC’s “The Miller’s Tale.”’ Paper
delivered at the Southeastern Medieval Association Conference, 2005. And see Steve Ellis,
‘Canterbury Karaoke: The Ultra-Modernizing of “The Miller’s Tale.”’ Cinema Chaucerania.
10. Edminster, ‘Miller’s.’
11. Joseph Wittig, ‘The Knight’s Tale.’ Paper delivered at the Southeastern Medieval Association
Conference, 2005.
12. For a further discussion of race in ‘The Sea Captain’s Tale’, particularly with reference to the
use of the colour blue throughout the episode, see my ‘The Colour of Money: The BBC’s “Sea
Captain’s Tale.”’Cinema Chaucerania.
13. Quoted in ‘Scriptwriters’ Tales.’
14. Susan Yager (2007), ‘The BBC “Man of Law’s Tale”: Faithful to the Tradition’. Literature and
Belief, 27(1): 55–68, 56.
15. Quoted in ‘Scriptwriters’ Tales’.
19. Kathleen Forni (2013), Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, p. 86.
20. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), Remediation: Understanding New Media.
Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 45.
21. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 8.
23. Forni makes the acute observation that the BBC episodes are ‘dominated by a woman’s point of
view’ (p. 87) – a point worth exploring further.
24. Kevin J. Harty (2007), ‘Chaucer for a New Millennium: The BBC Canterbury Tales’, in David W.
Marshall (ed.), Mass Market Medieval: Essays on the Middle Ages in Popular Culture. Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, pp. 13–27, at p. 25.
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part three
More Than This: Reimaginings

and Reappropriations
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chapter thirteen
Global Chaucers
Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy
Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century literary output has long been considered the foundation
of English literature and Chaucer himself the father of English letters. Although the ‘Father
Chaucer’ epithet has recently been questioned by scholars, the poet’s influence endures. As
the British established colonies on almost every continent, Chaucer’s poetry came along too:
expatriates carried his work in pocket volumes to read at leisure and, more significantly, into
the colonial classrooms where, even after independence, an English curriculum shaped the
literary imagination of British and indigenous children. Elsewhere, the cultural prestige of
English and increased pedagogical emphasis on global diversity have meant Chaucer’s writing
has appeared in non-Anglophone languages, translated and reshaped to reflect vastly different
cultures. Between the classroom and the spillover into general audiences, Chaucer’s readership
has been significant enough for Penguin Books (the publisher of Nevill Coghill’s 1951 Modern
English translation) to enter translation partnerships with regional publishing houses. Whatever
the auspices, Chaucer’s works have been translated into over fifty languages. Simultaneously,
this worldwide exposure has produced a wave of appropriations by artists drawn to Chaucer’s
polyvocality and explorations of travel and displacement. (For links to a growing list of
translations and appropriations, see www.globalchaucers.wordpress.com.) A sense of these
translations and appropriations begins with the longue durée of Danish translations. Then we
examine four translations – Afrikaans, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese – for
both their distinctive features and their common concerns, indicating where these translations
awaken meaning in the source texts. Then, after examining Chaucerian works that blur
distinctions between translation and appropriation, we will examine two clusters of works: one
that delights in creating anew The Canterbury Tales’ multi-voiced, multi-generic storytelling
and another that explores the contours of the African diaspora and other cultures in transit.
Collectively, these global Chaucers allow a deeper engagement with the Tales by initiating a
conversation that illuminates both the Chaucerian originals and their global progeny.
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The history of Denmark’s Chaucerian translations encapsulates the paradoxes inherent

in the waxing and waning of English literature’s cultural prestige. First, these translations
reflect the displacement of the receding German tradition by the ascendant British. Though
the Danes adapted Chaucer’s work as early as the eighteenth century, significant translations
do not appear until the middle third of the twentieth, after English was designated an official
language to be taught in Danish schools and before translations of older English texts were
sidelined once Denmark’s educated class became fully bilingual. During this intermediate
period, English overtook German as the dominant second language and multiple translations
of the Tales appeared, the Danes being the first to produce Chaucer translations after
the Second World War. After this profusion of translations, Chaucer’s visibility in Danish
culture has paradoxically diminished as the English language’s has risen. Since 1960, because
Denmark’s highly educated citizens – Chaucer’s standard audience – are fully literate in
English, older English works, such as Chaucer’s, are seldom retranslated. In schools, Chaucer
is predominately taught either in Middle English or in modern English translations via
extracts found in English literature anthologies. Thus, after a vigorous demand for Danish
translations, there is now no perceived market for them.
Though seldom read by contemporary Danes, these mid-century translations illuminate
the Middle English in ways unavailable to the non-Danish reader. Sometimes it is something
as simple as the domesticating convention of translating place names, wherein the Tabard Inn
becomes the ‘Herolds-Vamsen’ (herald’s coat), helping us remember what ‘Tabard’ would
have evoked for Chaucer’s audiences (Klitgård 2013, p. 120). At other times, it is locating
a Danish word that conveys more fully a Middle English word’s connotations now lost in
present-day English, as when Uffe Birkedal (in 1911) translates the Shipman’s disdain for
‘nyce conscience’ (I.398) with a term that approximates the sense of scrupulous morals that
a professional thief such as the Shipman could ill afford (Klitgård, p. 132). Because Middle
English and modern Danish share a common Germanic ancestor, we can see how some syn-
tactical patterns taken for granted in English are innovations unknown to its distant cousin.
For instance, Otto Jespersen translates Harry Bailey’s description of the Chaucerian persona
as ‘elvyssh’ (VII.703) into Danish ‘as “elleskudt,” meaning hit or shot by the elvish people …
[because] there is no idiomatic adjective correspondence in Danish’ (Klitgård, p. 105),
reminding us that affixing the –ish suffix was somewhat uncommon in Old English and
reappeared as a rather recent strategy for converting nouns into adjectives modelled more on
French than German antecedents. Linguistically proximate to Chaucer’s language, the Danish
translations elucidate its richness.
We begin our four-translation tasting with John Boje’s Afrikaans translation, ’n Keur uit die
Pilgrimsverhale van Geoffrey Chaucer (1989), awarded the translation prize from the Suid-
Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South Africa Academy for Science and Art).
A minority language in a country where English is the main language of government, Afrikaans
represented apartheid South Africa’s conservative politics, requiring that it be guarded against
infringements on its perceived linguistic purity and embodiment of moral rectitude. Along
with circumventing censors bent on preserving this particular vision of Afrikaans, Boje’s
translation had to create a sense of the medieval for a culture that did not have a medieval
past. The Pilgrimsverhale intertwines these two objectives by embracing vocabulary, phrases
Global Chaucers 149
and verse forms from the earliest period of Afrikaans literature and language, thereby
satisfying the cultural gatekeepers while also conveying Chaucer’s antiquity. Ultimately, his
only concession to Afrikaner conservatism was public sensitivity to blasphemy, causing him to
modulate such phrases as ‘But, Lord Crist!’ (V.469) to ‘Oh Lord.’ At the same time, he avoids
validating cultural values antithetical to the Chaucerian text by carefully choosing which
aspects of Afrikaans cultural heritage to appropriate and allowing their placement to be his
commentary on them.
Boje’s first step towards establishing a sense of a distant past begins by translating into
verse rather than prose, tapping into a nineteenth-century Afrikaans tradition of narrative
verse that has long since passed. To gain a rustic feel for The Reeve’s Tale’s dialects, he
uses a stigmatized form of Afrikaans marred by English words; but he does not introduce
that disparaged form until he has already employed pure Afrikaans to lend Symkyn’s social
pretentions in the first half an ironic dignity. He gives The Tale of Melibee a distinctly archaic
feel by emphasizing Prudence’s subservience; whenever Prudence addresses Melibee as
‘My Lord’, Boje uses ‘My man’ (my husband), a form of address to their husbands that
rural Afrikaner women regularly use. By thus Afrikanerizing Prudence, he also invokes
the correspondence between Melibee’s patronizing of his wife and similar South African
chauvinism. Throughout Pilgrimsverhale, the Dutch Reformed Church’s language unseats
prejudices against the Roman Church by highlighting similarities between the strongly
Calvinistic denomination and medieval Catholicism. So, although The Parson’s Tale might
be nothing like what Afrikaners would hear from their local preacher, the parson’s sermon
and its moral didacticism would resonate with Afrikaners. Finally, as with the Danish
translations, this Afrikaans translation adds levels of meaning unavailable to English readers.
The most delightful instance occurs in The Miller’s Tale: Alison is Afrikanerized as ‘Alisoen’,
a combination of alie (arse) and soen (kiss).
Nazmi Ağıl’s 1994 Turkish translation, Canterbury Hikâyeleri, remains in print twenty
years later. Like many Chaucer translators, Ağıl began translating The Canterbury Tales for
pleasure. On a lark, he submitted his translation of The General Prologue’s opening lines to a
contest and won. The jury head, a famous Turkish poet, told Ağıl that his translation captured
Chaucer’s soul. In addition to cash, the prize included a contract to translate the entire Tales.
At this point, Ağıl had been unaware of the Tales’ extent. After working three hours a night
for three years, he completed the Tales’ only full translation into Turkish. Although beginning
with Coghill’s modernization, he soon turned to the Middle English. Ağıl sought primarily to
domesticate Chaucer’s language and text for a Turkish audience, needing to translate medieval
Christianity for a predominately Islamic readership. That meant translating Christian terms
and concepts in ways that would make sense to his Islamic audience but would not weigh
down Chaucer’s verse with embedded explanations or divert the reader to appended glosses.
In domesticating the medieval English text for his modern Turkish readers, Ağıl turned to
Turkish oral folk tales and idioms he heard as a child from his grandfather and on the radio.
He prefaced proverbial sayings with the traditional phrase, ‘now said he’, and found Turkish
counterparts to Chaucer’s proverbs: he translates the Parson’s assertion that a priest must set
a good example for his flock – ‘And same it is, if a prest take keep, / A shiten shepherde and a
clene sheep. / Wel oghte a preest ensample for to give, / By his clennesse, how that his sheep
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sholde lyve’ (I.503–506) – as ‘Güvendiğimiz papazlar şaşırırsa yolu / Sıradan dindarların

pasına hiç şaşmamalı./ Kar beyaz bir sürünün başında atmayın yabana / Ne acıdır rastlamak
pislik içinde bir çobana’ (Ağıl, p. 46), which incorporates language clearly alluding to the
Turkish proverb stating that if the imam farts, the congregations shit. His The Miller’s Tale
highlights the perfidy of Nicholas and Alisoun’s assignation when they have left her husband,
John, stranded in the rafters in order to romp together in the married couple’s bed: ‘Bu arada
süzülüp inen delikanlı ve kadın / Tek kelime etmeden, nefeslerini tuta tuta, / Parmak uçlarında
koşuştular atl kata. / Marangoz’un yatağı yataklık etti o gece / Bambaşka bir cümbüşe ve
başladı eğlence’ (Ağıl, p. 132) (Doun of the laddre stalketh Nicholay, and Alisoun ful softe
adoun she spedde; / Withouten wordes mo they goon to bedde, / Ther as the carpenter is
wont to lye./ Ther was the revel and the melodye [I.3648–3652]); the translation provides
a Turkish pun – yatagı (a bed) and yataklik (to abet a criminal) – to incorporate the latent
gesture towards ‘to abet’ in Chaucer’s Middle English ‘to bedde’ (I.3650).
José Francisco Botelho’s translation into Brazilian Portuguese, Contos da Cantuária (2013),
was published as a joint project between Penguin Books and a major Brazilian publishing
house, Companhia das Letras. To make his translation simultaneously medieval and accessible,
Botelho combines terms from medieval Portuguese with genres, idioms, meter and dialects
associated with the Brazilian rural south. Somewhat foreign to Brazil’s urban, educated classes,
the rural elements both give the Contos a strange feel and contribute to the medieval flavour
otherwise unavailable in Brazilian Portuguese. Spiced with well-known idioms and proverbs,
the translation gives Chaucer the voice of a rural cavalheiro whose old-fashioned ways and
knowing wisdom evoke a long-lost Brazilian sensibility. The traditional Portuguese poetic
form, decassilabo, evokes antique associations, while rima toante (rhyme that matches only
vowels and is not as prestigious as the more literary rima consoante) affiliates Contos with
both popular music and an oral poetry form called repentismo (in northeastern Brazil) and
pajada (in the south). Together, these elements create a new language for conveying Brazil’s
fictional Middle Ages.
A weave of rural idioms conveys the animal lust at the moment in The Merchant’s Tale when
the elderly January looks up into the tree and sees, as the Middle English euphemistically
expresses, that a young clerk had ‘dressed’ the old man’s wife (IV.2361–2362); ‘Vê que outro
está engatando-a de tal jeito’ (Botelho, p. 473) uses ‘engatando’ (with its multiple standard
definitions meaning ‘to clamp or bind’, ‘to hook’ or ‘to hitch up horses’). Because, however,
rural areas use ‘engatando’ for animal mating, the rural idiom conveys the crudity of Damian’s
animal-like thrusts. This mixture also appears in The Franklin’s Tale, translating the cold,
winter landscape (The bittre frostes, with the sleet and reyn, / Destroyed hath the grene in
every yerd; / Janus sit by the fyr, with double berd, / And drynketh of his bugle horn the
wyn [V.1250–1254]) as ‘Geadas e granizos fustigantes / Já mataram as plantas verdejantes; /
Jano, com grande barba bifurcada,/ Em uma longa guampa recurvada / Bebe vinho, sentado
junto ao fogo’ (Botelho, p. 518). Here Botelho evokes a white, wintry scene with ‘geadas’,
ground frost that appears in early winter mornings on the dry southern pampas, and he
identifies Janus’ bugle as a ‘guampa’, the southern term for horn. Later, in an eloquent full
circle, Botelho handles the Host’s reference to ‘brasile’ (VII.3459) by distinguishing between
Global Chaucers 151
its Chaucerian reference to a red dye from India, ‘o rubro oriental’, and the tincture derived
from the pau-brasil, the eponymous tree that grows abundantly in modern Brazil.
Starting in the 1930s, Fang Chong (方重), sometimes identified as Fang Zhong, translated
Troilus and Criseyde and the dream visions into prose, translated the short lyrics into verse
(starting in the 1930s and 1940s) and published a complete prose edition of The Canterbury
Tales in 1955 (reprinted as part of Chaucer’s collected works in 1979, revised in 1983).
A literary scholar, Fang values Chaucer as a serious literary writer; simultaneously, he alerts
readers to the mischievous Chaucer. His final Tales edition includes illustrations based on
the Ellesmere manuscript. The pilgrim portrait associated with Chaucer is given the caption
‘托巴斯先生’ (Sir Tuōbāsī or Sir Thopas), an odd misattribution, since The Tale of Sir Thopas
is not the story told by Sir Thopas, but rather the pilgrim Chaucer’s story about Sir Thopas.
The caption beneath this pilgrim portrait re-contextualizes the iconic Ellesmere image. Rather
than pointing towards the Melibee (as in the Ellesmere), this pilgrim is now associated with
Sir Thopas. The conflation of the tale’s protagonist with this tale’s pilgrim-narrator suggests
that Fang aligns Chaucer with the author’s own ‘bad’ tale, and not his ‘serious’ one, thereby
winking at those readers in the know.
In the opening lines of the General Prologue, Fang’s prose translation closely mimics
Chaucer’s rhythmic dependent clauses with references to spring, birds and pilgrimage, ending
with Beckett’s shrine. To render the text legible to a modern Chinese reader, Fang translates
‘Zephyrus’ as ‘和風’ (gentle breeze or wind), perhaps because a literal term like ‘西風’ (West
Wind) would be too obscure to Chinese readers. Fang’s The Miller’s Tale includes learned
footnotes, but its rustic and bawdy content is somewhat muted as he makes the Middle English
text more accessible to his Chinese audience. Many of Fang’s changes are minor. For instance,
the Middle English ‘knedyng trogh’ or ‘kymelyn’ (I.3548) is approximated by ‘澡盆’ (bathtub)
(Fang, p. 69). Other times, significant wordplay is lost. Chaucer’s punning Middle English
references to Alisoun’s ‘queynte’ (I.3275, 3276, 3605 and 3754) (which can range in meaning
from ‘a trick’ or ‘an ornament’ to ‘sexual intercourse’ or ‘female genitalia’) become references
to ‘她的腰’ (her waist) (Fang, p. 54). Though somewhat toned down, aspects of the original
tale’s sensibility are preserved. For instance, the narrator states that the carpenter John thought
he was like a cuckhold – a ‘cokewold’ (l.3226) – and Fang renders this as ‘很怕做乌龟’ (he very
much feared he’d be a tortoise) (Fang, p. 63) – one of many turtle-related Chinese expressions
for mocking an old husband with an unfaithful wife. Here Fang finds a functionally equivalent
Chinese animal metaphor in order to express a Middle English vernacular idea. Beyond these
semantic adjustments, Fang implements multiple literary registers to document Chaucer’s
poetic skills. John recites a ‘nyght-spel’ to ward off evil spirits from the house: ‘“Jhesu Crist
and Seint Benedight, / Blesse this hous from every wikked wight, / For nyghtes verye, the
white pater-noster! / Where wenestow, Seinte Petres soster?”’ (I.3483–3486). Fang renders
this passage as verse within prose – with verses printed in a typeface typically reserved for
Classical Chinese poetry – to convey the utterance’s performative register. This sensitivity
to diction and shifts in voice suggests a literary strategy that goes beyond a toning down of
Chaucer’s coarser language. Fang mutes overt sexuality to avoid Chinese censorship, and he
also works to align the Tales with long-standing Chinese literary values.
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These translations abjure the notion that a translation can be both literal and faithful.
Unlike academic trots presenting strangely incongruent word-for-word translations into
modern tongues, these artful translations acknowledge the impossibility of carrying over a
Middle English text to modern languages with weak or absent medieval Christian roots. By
looking elsewhere for their archaic vocabulary (in their languages’ earliest manifestations or
in geographically or socially marginal dialects) and elsewhere for aged forms and genres (in
conventions drawn out of a literary past much different from England’s), the translations
create an afterlife for Chaucer in contemporaneous languages with no medieval European
past comparable to England’s, thereby identifying strands of Chaucer’s complex meditation
on medieval English society that is resonant beyond his specific time and place. Such
thoughtful and engaging translations parallel the more experimental adaptations more than
is immediately apparent.
Troubling the already blurred line between translation and adaptation is a Flemish comic
book rendition of The Canterbury Tales entitled Verhalen voor Canterbury (2010, re-released
as an iPad app along with a new English translation from the Flemish, not from the Middle
English) by Luk De Ryck (pen name Lük Bey). Partially funded by the Flemish Literature Fund
(Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren), Verhalen is part of a series to promote Flemish through
adapted ‘world classics’. Lük Bey reconceives The Miller’s Tale as a Flemish text through a
double translation: from Middle English to Flemish, and from verse to comic book. Adopting
a style with quintessentially Flemish roots – the Clean Line style distinguished by bold blocks
of colour, lifelike architectural backgrounds and cartoonish faces for some characters with
more realistic depictions for others – he foregrounds the tale’s comic elements and its darker,
retributive elements. The comic form itself structures this new Miller’s Tale’s compressed
action. After just one frame – in which Alisoun asks ‘What if my husband catches us?’ –
Nicholas barges in announcing ‘DE ZOND-VLOED!’ (THE DELUGE!). Within a few more
frames, the final scene is compressed even more: Alisoun does not put her ‘hole’ out the
window, but Nicholas does fart outside a ‘hole’, while Absolom pokes a flame up inside the
same hole. Nicholas calls for ‘WATER!’ – exactly the same word in Middle English, present-
day English and Flemish – and all comes tumbling down. Since the comic book genre includes
children as readers, much of the sex and violence is mitigated or displaced by scatological
humour. We don’t see Alisoun’s ‘hole’ or ‘queynte’ or ‘nether eye’ (I.3852), nor does the artist
depict the hot coulter making contact with Nicholas’s ‘toute’ (I.3812). Instead, joy of joys,
he extends a lit candle that ignites the flatulent gases, one of many farts erupting throughout
the Flemish tales. The scatological seems to overwhelm the sexual when the opening is
labelled ‘dit afvalgat’ (this waste/garbage hole). Initially, ‘dit afvalgat’ appears to be a means
of disposing kitchen waste and a conveniently disgusting replacement for Chaucer’s bedroom
window. A subsequent frame makes it clear that it is a shit hole with excrement oozing down
the outside wall.
Lük Bey’s Flemish style also emphasizes homosocial relations in Chaucer’s tale. The male
characters are drawn in a similar style, but the female character appears in a different one.
Alisoun speaks only twice, seeming disengaged, sometimes annoyed by the men around
her. Moreover, the narrative focuses on the relationships among the men and their closed
circuit of insults, confirmed by the final frame, where the injured men are shown suffering
Global Chaucers 153
their various insults with Alisoun (wrapped in a sheet) watching from the doorframe. The
Miller, whose mocking mug appears in the final frame, seems much more interested in the
way men abuse and insult one another than in Alisoun herself. Through all these devices,
Lük Bey uses the comic strip idiom to make the Tales more Flemish and foreground the
comic material. With its parallel lives in print and digital media, Lük Bey’s Flemish/English
comic book blurs the distinction between translation and adaptation. Its status as visual
media allows for a range of influences: Middle English literature, Belgian comic book art
and comedic British film.
Other neo-Chaucerian works conjoin translation and adaptation by adding more linguistic
links to the retelling chain. Peter Ackroyd – whose 2003 historical fiction, The Clerkenwell
Tales, is set in fourteenth-century London with chapters named after Chaucerian characters –
later published The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling (2009) in modern English prose. Its title
prepares the reader for the modernizing liberties Ackroyd takes with Chaucer’s style and
diction. The Retelling, in turn, has been rendered into Hebrew by poet and translator Meir
Wieseltier as Sipure K. ant. erberi ( , The Canterbury Tales) (2013). With ‘retelling’
gone from the Hebrew title, Ackroyd’s modernized English rendition becomes a new source
text, and Ackroyd assumes Chaucer’s authorial status.
Other adaptations have moved Chaucer’s tales outside medieval England to new cultural
settings, and they often explore weighty themes of death and renewal. Jean Ray (d. 1964),
who wrote in many genres under different pseudonyms, was born in Ghent and, like Chaucer,
worked for part of his life as a port official. A bicultural Belgian, he wrote in French as Jean
Ray and in Dutch as John Flanders. Ray’s Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (The Last Tales
of Canterbury) (1944) features the spirits of Chaucerian characters telling a second round of
stories before they recede into oblivion; this is an example of the French fantastique – a genre
interweaving fantasy, science fiction and the gothic – that is not very familiar to Anglophone
readers. While the book has not made its way into English, it has been translated into Japanese
by Shinoda Chiwaki (篠田知和基) as Shin Kantaberī Monogatari (新カンタベリー物語, The
New Canterbury Tales) (1986). In this translation, Shinoda not only translates Ray but also
‘reopens’ the storytelling process, replacing the French dernier (last, final) with the Japanese
shin (新, new). In this French-to-Japanese transit, Shinoda does to Ray what Ray did to
Chaucer: performs a posthumous repetition of tales with a difference.
In another post-war story collection, the storytelling conceit’s ‘newness’ assumes other
shades of meaning. Josef Škvorecký (d. 2012) wrote his Czech story collection Nové
canterburské povídky (The New Canterbury Tales) in prose, winning the literary contest
at Charles University in Prague in 1948. The fictive storytelling in this work transpires
as musicians rehearse in a jazz club. Their tales incorporate Jewish life, anticipating later
collections the author would write about the Jewish community’s experiences during and
after the war. ‘Nové’ (new) in this title places the tales against a backdrop of destruction
and renewal, transplants the storytelling from medieval England to post-war Prague and
establishes interests in jazz and improvisation that would inform the author’s later career.
One particularly vibrant subset of Chaucerian adaptation by living authors can be found
in the global African diaspora – a network that links locations as disparate as West Africa,
Britain, Iceland, the Caribbean and Brazil. These poets, performers and playwrights take
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the mixed social environment of Chaucer’s storytelling contest as an opportunity to explore

diverse viewpoints and narrative techniques. With themes of pilgrimage and travel, these
authors attend to how communities form and reshape themselves in transit.
In her rich re-voicing of Chaucerian poetry, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, a poet of Jamaican descent,
fuses English and Creole. ‘The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market’ (2000) turns away
from iambic pentameter couplets to employ its own rhyme and rhythm, a style that conveys
the first-person speaking voice of a fictive black British woman. Deliberately employing
nonstandard spelling and punctuation, Breeze reworks Alisoun of Bath’s opening lines on
experience in marriage: ‘My life is my own bible/wen it come to all de woes/in married life’
(Breeze, p. 60). These lines conspicuously feature Creole ‘d’ sounds where standard British
English would employ ‘th’, suggesting the orality of multiethnic British communities. Patience
Agbabi, a British poet of Nigerian ancestry and 2010 Canterbury Poet Laureate, crafts her
own lyric voice in ‘The Wife of Bafa’, a poem within her reworking of Chaucerian tales called
Telling Tales (2014). ‘Unfinished Business’, an adaptation of Melibee, features a present-day
speaker meditating on violence and revenge, and Agbabi lends the Chaucerian story a new
form. Chaucer’s third-person prose becomes a first-person mirror poem, with the second
half repeating each line of the first but in reverse order. Both Breeze and Agbabi rework
perceived conventions of written form and live performance. Combining the printed word and
performance with the conventions of ‘slam’ or performance poetry, they provoke innovations
in the realm of the written word (visual layout of text) and the sounding, moving body.
One multifaceted adaptation that interweaves verse with an overarching narrative is Marilyn
Nelson’s poetry collection Cachoeira Tales (2005); it synthesizes New World and African
spiritual and musical influences through the story of an African American woman who invites
her extended family on a trip, initially conceived as a ‘return’ journey to Africa: ‘Thinking
of reverse diaspora, / I’d planned a pilgrimage to Africa’ (92). The trip takes a detour to
Brazil (where the woman’s son is attending school), and different voices emerge in the poems
to reveal overlaps and disjunctions between Afro-American and Afro-Brazilian cultures. In
Nelson’s ‘General Prologue’, rhyming couplets integrate English and other languages. As the
speaker charts her travel plans, Nelson pairs English and non-English words into rhymes:
‘My option was to fly to Senegal/and visit L’Abbaye de Keur Moussa./I priced a round trip to
Dakar: Py-ha! (11–12); ‘We would fly down to Bahia, visit him,/and go to A Igreja do Bonfim’
(12). The globetrotting poetry code-switches (transitions in and out of different languages) to
propel verse lines and to convey a sense of perpetual motion.
Similar movements across language and space inform Nigeria-born playwright Ufuoma
Overo-Tarimo’s Wahala Dey O! (2012), a song-and-dance The Miller’s Tale adaptation that
interweaves Nigerian music and storytelling traditions, using Nigerian Pidgin English with
standard British English. The project was conceived in 2006 and completed in Iceland; it debuted
at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the playwright is producing a film adaptation in Nigeria.
Rather than exploring the disjunction of viewpoints within the African diaspora, this work
suggests what people share across linguistic and cultural differences. Adapting the Chaucerian
narrator’s disclaimers before The Miller’s Tale, a character in academic regalia called ‘The
Professor’ asserts the universality of human experience across cultures. His message is encoded
through an embodied sampling of ‘World Englishes’, sound bites of English as spoken across the
Global Chaucers 155
planet: American, Scottish, Nigerian and standard British pronunciation. This final address
to the audience evokes the many shifts in register and style that the Chaucer transmits – but
these varieties are now dispersed across a globalized culture. These samplings from a global
African diaspora show how disparate works draw upon Chaucer to explore high and low
registers of language. These works reveal a world in flux, suggesting languages in collision
and dispersal, and each reroutes Chaucerian narrative through divergent perspectives, forms
and fictive voices.
While such literary experiments are most apparent in poetry and performance, travel
and manifold voicing play key roles even in Chaucerian adaptations in prose. Amy Tan is
primarily known for The Joy Luck Club (1989) and other novels that explore the lives of
Chinese-American women, but one of her works, Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), marks
a departure from these themes: it traces a motley crew of present-day Americans (some but
not all of Chinese ancestry) who take an ill-fated trip to Burma (Myanmar). Voicing and
impersonation are key motifs. The story begins with a preface from the author, presumably a
fictive variation of Tan herself. She relates her encounter with a medium who engages in ‘spirit
writing’ or channelling the voices of the dead as a setup to start the story itself, narrated by
a posthumous first-person narrator named Bibi Chen (the China-born Americanized socialite
who organized the ill-fated Burma trip). The dead narrator’s list of diverse Bay Area characters
recalls the variety of the Canterbury pilgrims: ‘Roger, my FedEx man; Thieu, my Vietnamese
manicurist; Luc, my gay haircolorist; Bobo, my gay Brazilian housekeeper; [and] Najib, the
Lebanese grocer from my corner market on Russian Hill’ (5–6) – and ‘British-born celebrity
dog trainer Harry Bailley’ (xvi). Chen’s first-person interjections even evoke the General
Prologue: ‘By the way, I am not mentioning people in any order of importance. This is simply
how it is coming to me’ (6). The text features a mixed style of writing as well – the first-
person ‘transcript’ of Bibi Chen as dictated through a living spirit-medium, accompanied by
a newspaper article (xvi–xviii) and obituary (1–3). Tan asks readers to question the novelistic
trope of an ‘omniscient’ narrator when the posthumous speaker and disparate characters in
the story reveal that all knowledge is partial.
We end this survey of Chaucerian adaptations with a work that blurs language boundaries
through non-narrative poetry. Norwegian-French language poet Caroline Bergvall was born
in Germany and raised in Switzerland, and her oeuvre includes books, performance art,
audio recordings and art installations. Bergvall has fashioned an intriguingly hybrid ‘Meddle
English’ that occupies a literary zone between languages: a melding of modern English with
traces of Middle English, French and Latin. Bergvall’s ‘Summer Tale (Deus Hic, 1)’ (2011)
translates into Middle English a contemporary 2006 BBC News article about a papal visit,
interweaving this new creation with lines taken verbatim from the Summoner’s Tale: ‘The last
Papa Pope Johannes Paulus Tweye,/ a preest holy and gay, /used to have tubs of his favourite
flavour, marron glacé, /delivered to his summer residence. /Thanked be God, in wele and
habundaunce!’ (7–11). Bergvall’s language deployment differs from the poetry of Breeze or
Agbabi. By imagining what modern English newspaper articles might sound like in Middle
English, Bergvall engages in a kind of speculative linguistics. That is, she is not so much
reviving a dead medieval tongue as imagining an ‘alternate life’ for the language itself, tracing
a different path that the vernacular could have taken along its way to the present. Bergvall’s
156
poetry grants Middle English a ‘second life’ but not in the sense of a resurrection. It is a
‘second life’ of the sort that online gamers adopt when they take up digital avatars.
This obsession with ghosts, posthumous narrators, reviving the dead and channelling spirits
is not incidental in Chaucerian adaptations. These disparate works are collectively finding their
own ways to ask what it means for Chaucer – or an archaic language such as Middle English –
to enjoy an ‘afterlife’ in the present. These global, and ghostly, Chaucers test how well aspects
of a distant medieval culture can live and thrive in the alien environment of the modern era.
If translation suggests the idea of motion or ‘carrying across’ of stories from one place to
another, then adaptation explores how stories inhabit these new environments and possess
different kinds of bodies and experiences. Moreover, these manifold global Chaucers can also
help us revisit Chaucer’s own play with translation-as-adaptation, and we can appreciate how
reshaping older stories revivifies seemingly inert matter. In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer
adapts one of Ovid’s many stories of death and shape-shifting: Morpheus inhabits the corpse
of Ceyx to inform Alcyone of his death. This creepily embodied impersonation of a dead
body is perhaps what occurs in any translation or adaptation – one animating force uncannily
assumes the form or appearance of another. The variety of translation and adaptation strategies
among these global Chaucers shows how any kind of literary retelling performs a sly kind of
impersonation. In some instances, it is an enigmatic and moving resurrection. But in others –
mischievously – it enacts a possession of spirits.
chapter fourteen
Silence in the Library? –

Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out
Gail Ashton
The library
Simon Armitage isn’t even dressed for a London climate. In his Yorkshire-weather parka and
boots, he is about to enter the reading room of the British Library to look over the precious
original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cotton Nero A. x.). And, as ever,
‘when standing before the edifices of the establishment’ those familiar feelings of ‘inadequacy
and unworthiness’ almost halt him in his tracks.1
What makes someone reinvent a medieval tale for a contemporary age? Perhaps it’s as
simple as Armitage’s ‘This is a poem, and I’m a poet. What other permission is needed?’
(Armitage 2006, ‘A Knight’s Tale’). Or more: everyone I cite in this chapter, as well as the
many I don’t,2 is passionate about their source material, their art and the ways in which the
texts and the conventions they co-opt might be revitalized in the reimagining.3 Matthew
Francis is not alone in believing such contemporary reworkings ‘one of the most exciting
things to happen in British poetry for a long time’, or that this chapter’s focus on verse ‘as
a way of telling stories’ feeds into a wider recognition of how medieval narrative structures
might be embedded in a contemporary ‘unconscious’.4 Jane Draycott comments on ‘the way
allegory works ... It is something we are utterly familiar with as modern readers ... it’s about
metaphor’, and how we still ‘hear’ the percussion of ‘alliterative phrasings’.5 Armitage, as
‘a northerner ... recognises ... [and] also detects an echo of his own speech’ in the Gawain-
poet’s work,6 while both Francis and Gwyneth Lewis are compelled by ‘the way everything,
however strange, happens on the same level of plot’ in medieval stories; events follow on
without comment7 which poets like because they don’t ‘have to say this happened,’ only
‘What if this happened?’ (Francis, Interview).
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In many ways, none of the works covered in this chapter are stand-alone texts. Armitage’s
source for The Death of King Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthur (c.1400), has as its bedfellow
a host of recountings of Arthurian legend, as well as the anonymous Gawain-poet, who gives
us, in the end, Jane Drayctt’s Pearl. And if Chaucer belonged to more of an early prototype
of the literary establishment than some of his contemporaries, even he remains inextricably
connected to each and every one of them. So, too, these medieval prose and poetry texts
inhabit versions of both popular (romance, folk tales, saints’ lives) and ‘establishment’
(courtly) cultures.
In this chapter I track these invisible threads through the ‘medieval’ verse of some
contemporary poets: Patience Agbabi, Simon Armitage, Jane Draycott, Matthew Francis,
Lavinia Greenlaw and Gwyneth Lewis. Each of them works through a series of personal and
cultural interfaces which simultaneously intersect the medieval ‘web’ of their source texts and
cross an apparent division between popular and poetic poetry that takes me straight back to
my opening: let me begin (again).
Here is Simon Armitage standing at the doors to the library. His working-class, northern
roots are almost showing – his dislike of Tolkien’s ‘standard’ translation of Sir Gawain (2006
rep.) with its ‘antique diction and syntax ... even older than the original’, his sense of himself
‘as an outsider’. Not for the first time he wonders if he has ‘the stamina, the aptitude, or
even the right to be fiddling around with this ancient text’ (Armitage 2006, ‘The Knight’s
Tale’). Yet, following in the footsteps of Heaney’s Beowulf (2000), Armitage has created a Sir
Gawain with cult appeal.
His emphasis is upon this Gawain’s outlaw status. Armitage reclaims the poem for the north
and, literally, walks the landscape which is the warp and weft of the original. He suggests that
to travel it tells us more about the Gawain-poet’s work than anything we might read, hence
his BBC TV documentary ‘Simon Armitage on the trail of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’;8
‘coaxing Gawain and his poem back into the Pennines’ was crucial to Armitage right from the
start (Armitage 2006, ‘The Knight’s Tale’). He reads his translation in his own northern voice,
and, elsewhere, praises fellow northerner Sir Ian Mckellen’s narration of the poem for BBC
Radio 4’s Afternoon Play (2006). Armitage says ‘academics aren’t always interested in poetry’.9
It is no accident, then, that this translation, unlike Bernard O’Donoghue’s Sir Gawain (2006),
is without academic apparatus – no notes, no double-page spread of Middle and modern
English – and more energetic and inspirational for it.
What does interest Armitage is the ‘noises the poem makes’ (http://www.dailymotion.
com). These ‘noises’ are twofold: the original’s shifts between standard, courtly ‘English’ and
colloquial, ‘English’ dialect, plus the pulse of the alliterative bob-and-wheel which concludes
each of its verse sections (‘fits’). Armitage retains both, conscious that a translation is ‘for
the ear and the voice’ as much as the eye. So, though he stays largely faithful to his source
text, Armitage takes ‘certain liberties’ in order to ‘harmonise with the original rather than to
translate every last word of it’ (Armitage 2006, ‘The Knight’s Tale’). He focuses on stressed
syllables, the repetition of sounds, rather than the stricter alliteration of repeated first letters,
and it is this, together with its living northern dialect phrasing, that makes Sir Gawain sing.10
Armitage’s Sir Gawain is undoubtedly a popular version. Yet, as anti-establishment as he
might be, Armitage is nevertheless, published by Faber, the doyen of British poetry, and fȇted
Silence in the Library? – Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out 159
by TV and other media. And though he subsequently replicates his enterprise in Sir Gawain
in The Death of King Arthur, the latter seems somehow less convincing.
In part, this is a question of narrative. Sir Gawain’s firepower comes from its generic
mash-up as much as its musicality; quite simply, it’s a far better story. In contrast, King Arthur
is a sprawling tale of battle and brutal martial set-pieces, in which, once again, Armitage
foregrounds landscape and poetic sound; he even gives us another BBC TV documentary
‘The Making of King Arthur’.11 Critical reception highlights the very paradoxes Armitage
seeks to collapse. He brings ‘“the matter of Britain” to the man on the street’12 even as he is
castigated for lack of fidelity to his medieval source13 – hence, perhaps, Norton’s 2012 version
which places his King Arthur alongside Larry D. Benson’s 1974 transcription of its Middle
English text.14
Paradise
Here’s the thing: a translation is not a student crib or an ‘academic’ work but an attempt to
carry across,15 to sail a medieval source text into the twenty-first century. Because it is not a
relic, it is profoundly altered on the journey; it will both lose and regain something of itself to
become not-quite like itself. Like Armitage with Sir Gawain, Jane Draycott’s challenge with
its ‘sister’ poem Pearl is the extraordinary technical complexities of a single surviving copy of
this manuscript, held in the British Library (Cotton Nero. A. x).
Draycott approaches Pearl (Carcanet, 2011) from several simultaneous angles: as a poet,
as a ‘modern’ reader and as an academic. Postgraduate research at Oxford led her to a poem
that stayed in the mind for decades. Pearl also resonated on a more personal level with the
deaths both of her father and her younger brother, and it is this ‘oddly precious’ evocation
of grief that continually drew her back to a medieval original that ‘can’t help but touch the
modern reader’. The poem is, says Draycott, a ‘very personal piece of meditation on loss’
and it is this that speaks to a contemporary world even through the medieval sensibilities
of its religious framework and narrative traditions and influences. Ultimately, she thinks we
mediate its ‘difficulties because we still innately grasp the essence’ of its metaphor: that the
girl – Draycott’s innovation is to write ‘my girl’ for the original ‘my pearl’ – is, at once, a
child, a pearl, a mother, the Virgin Mary, Jesus’s bride and an immortal soul.16
As a first-time translator, Draycott was acutely conscious of the conflicted nature of her
project. She comments on the need to be ‘a little in love with what you are translating’ even
as the process comes with an enormous ‘sense of responsibility’, a desire to write something
‘I wouldn’t mind putting my name to’, but which works ‘in the end in its own right’ (Interview).
As with any poem she had ‘to wait for it’ to arrive, but her enterprise was aided by her ‘guide’,
Bernard O’ Donoghue whom Draycott met at Oxford. O’ Donoghue’s support was both
academic, as a professional medievalist, and through his own work as a poet, ‘his poetic ear’.
Draycott describes the translation as a long haul. She wanted to replicate the beauty of the
Gawain-poet’s original Pearl, a piece ‘borne on sound and imagery’ and a tension between
‘the strictures of the form it inhabits, and this very vital imagination at work’ (Interview). Yet
she also feared being ‘completely beguiled’ by its ‘tremendous fix on the ear’. She tells how
because she had to ‘take one step back from it’ she deliberately translated out of sequence in
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order for her poem to be ‘driven by my ear’ (Interview, emphasis mine). She loosened ‘those
stitches,’ that ‘end stop rhythm or a perfect rhyme’ at the end of each line, even as she retained
the four-beat line and allowed lines to run on (Interview). So, too, her Pearl alliterates more
naturally, and the syntax is updated to give us a more contemporary poem. In so doing, she
offers a haunting, elegant elegy to loss.
‘And inward thus’ 17

In a ‘Note in the Text’, Lavinia Greenlaw describes A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde
(2014) as ‘this peculiar work’ which her editor at Faber helped make ‘more itself, rather than
less’. Her version of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde is certainly arresting;
some might even say disconcerting. With its inward perspective, it is, to cite yet more of its
titles, ‘An abbreviation’ (Book 4, p. 141), an exquisite set of elegant miniatures rendered
‘Like an oriental pearl’ (Book 2, p. 81). A glance at the book’s minimalist design echoes
Greenlaw’s project. If Chaucer’s ‘original’ is a complex and conflicted composite of novelistic
proportions, this ‘double sorrow’ is a distillation. With its simple, seven-line verse on each
cream page, and careful spacing, it is in keeping both with Greenlaw’s visual perspective (she
has an MA from the Courtauld Insititute) and her desire to contract Chaucer’s story into a
‘sequence of short and stinging … poems’.18
For one reviewer, the way Greenlaw collapses the medieval Troilus renders a less than
‘cohesive story’.19 Yet Greenlaw’s enterprise, it seems to me, is to find an essence of Chaucer’s
piece, specifically, in her own words to ‘focus’, rather than offer a line-by-line translation
or account, reconfiguring Chaucer’s story – which isn’t really his tale at all – through what
Charlotte Runcie describes as ‘carefully plucked moments, each one magnified and given new
clarity’.20 In this way, then, A Double Sorrow is a palimpsest of Chaucer rather than simply a
modern rendering.
So too there are, I think, enough waymarkers to the ‘original’ stories of Troilus and
Criseyde to offset the need to know the extent of Chaucer’s plot. First, the hardback cover:
gold etchings on midnight blue, a pair of lovers entwined, the citadel of Troy dominating.
Second, Greenlaw’s ‘Introduction’ where she speaks of how the ‘thread of the story runs
above and below these poems through their titles and occasional subtitles … an active and
integral part of a work in which the margins are open and which was conceived overall
as a form of detonation’ – hence the ‘footnoted’ references back to Chaucer, the carefully
placed line numbers. Greenlaw emulates the spirit of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Just as
Chaucer ‘takes hold of this story as if he caught it in the air’ (Greenlaw 2014, Introduction),
taken together the airy gaps of her pages both traverse and elide the long miles of Chaucer’s
poem to beckon us into the spaces Greenlaw’s verse hollows out. Reading A Double Sorrow
is akin to holding the breath. If we want to read more of the story, then we do elsewhere. Or
we can enjoy the silences, tune to what is not said, all those ‘things (that) just don’t add up’
(Greenlaw 2014, Introduction).
Greenlaw is interested in the anachronistic, inconsistent Trojan world Chaucer recreates
which, for her, parallels the untidy transmission of the tale he tells. In an interview she records
how she made A Double Sorrow consciously ‘un – Chaucerian’, wanted to untie it from
its iconic medievalness (Runcie 2014). Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is already mediated
through a scrambling of sources and temporal cultures: from its first brief mention of Troilus
in Homer’s Iliad, through medieval recountings loosely known as The Matter of Troy, the
twelfth-century Roman de Troie by Benoit de Sainte-Maure, to Guido delle Colonne’s 1287
Latin prose version and Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato.
If strictly speaking, none of these are translations, neither is Greenlaw’s text. She insists
that hers is part of a ‘reinvention … a story that’s been taken and built and passed around
and borrowed’ (Runcie 2014). Greenlaw is not interested in epic but in the lovers’ world of
emotions and personal decisions, in the minute details of the affair, the brooch, for instance,
found in the clothing of the dead soldier at the end; elsewhere, her version is little different
from Chaucer’s offering in the Troilus. A Double Sorrow is a remarkable achievement. As a
medieval afterlife it occupies a hallowed rather than a popular space, its cool detached lines
unlikely to transgress a cultural divide: this is poetry published by the elite Faber house,
reviewed in The Times, The Telegraph, read ‘live’ in London at the Southbank Centre, at
Southwark Cathedral (2014). Somewhat like Draycott’s Pearl or Francis’s Mandeville, this
is perhaps a work to be read privately, looked at, admired from afar; and with its interior
world of reflection, emotion, internal debate, is perhaps better suited to a more intimate, even
claustrophobic space. Yet I do like the way this poem slipped off the page in a dramatized
reading with professional actors, music and artistic accompaniments (27 February – 1 March,
Southbank Centre, London. dir. James Runcie), where it was advertised as ‘a moving account
of people arguing themselves and each other in and out of love’ – ultimately, instead, a more
effective ‘translation’ or carrying across than her own book.21
Around the Globe

In ‘Mandeville’s Farewell’, the narrator of Mandeville (Faber, 2008) declares, ‘What I have said
is true, or as good, or once was’ (Mandeville, p. 52). So, too, Matthew Francis’s enterprise in
the poetic sequence Mandeville is ‘as good as’ medieval both in its conception and execution.
Francis comments that his book began with the source material and form of the medieval
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: as with ‘writers of a previous age you can seek out a subject
and write about or adapt it’.22 His melding of history (as we know it) and historiography, its
accurate physical and geographical descriptions, for instance, and fantastic fictions certainly
replicates the original. But Francis also lays ‘claim to the book as my own imaginative effort,
not merely a version of a classic text’ (Interview). In this sense, then, Mandeville is a sequence
of poems drawing on the Travels as a ‘taproot text’.23 The end result is not a translation but
a carrying across of a different kind, prose into verse, medieval travel guide – of sorts – into
a new kind of story.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a popular medieval text. It allegedly recounts the
voyage in 1322 of an eponymous English knight who may or may not have existed. This
Mandeville travels through Africa, India and the Middle East. He describes things he has seen:
pepper, lemons, spices, diamonds, crocodiles, scorpions, elephants, the rhinoceros, giraffes,
162
as well as the Dead Sea, the Pyramids, pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land or the Temple of
Jerusalem. There is more: one-eyed giants, Amazon warrior queens, apes with human souls,
Prester John, island peoples, some of whom are nourished only by the scent of an apple.
This medieval ‘original’ has, says Francis, ‘a strange kind of conflict – between the surreal,
defamiliarized world of his travels, almost a romance, and its chosen form as a reference
book’ (Interview) – and it is this tension which fires his contemporary Mandeville. Francis’s
recreation of this pilgrims’ guide and a knight’s travels, a journey both real and allegorical,
is similarly a composite. Francis takes the Travels as his main source and then extracts, shifts
and reinvents it. Mandeville’s forty poems are a gauze through which we merely glimpse the
original. In this sense, then, Francis’s achievement lies in the subtle shifts and sways of his
own fictional voyage.
The Travels describe ants that dig for gold, a detail which Francis turns into an entire poem
(Of ants that dig for gold). The first poem in the collection, ‘Mandeville’s Departure’, echoes
the opening to the Travels which tells of various routes to the Holy Land, but Francis adds more
specific details, such as a leave-taking from the south coast of England, and deliberately includes
Mandeville’s barnacle geese legend (geese hatch from shellfish) to sign what is to come: the
way ‘fabulous’ might also be real. The ‘original’ Mandeville recounts the tale of someone who
almost circumnavigates the globe, and this becomes the last poem, ‘Of Circumnavigation’ in
Francis’s account. Francis also consciously ‘authenticates’ his work by adding to the original,
with details taken from The Medieval Traveller by Norbert Ohler (1989), to give us a sense of
how Mandeville might have travelled (see http://www.contemporary.com).
In one way, Mandeville apparently offers a more complete or satisfying voyage yet this,
too, is but a game. Francis insists the narrative he mined from the Travels is in Mandeville
still ‘only implied’, just a journey around the world in ‘more or less geographically coherent
order’ (Interview). What matters, it seems to me, are perhaps less the ‘source’ details than
the remarkable voice. The clue is in the change of title: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville to
Mandeville, a declarative that foregrounds the voice of ‘I, Sir John Mandeville’ (Mandeville’s
Farewell, p. 52 and Mandeville’s Departure, p. 3), something Francis feels is a strong presence
in the medieval book (Interview). This voice cannot be heard without the careful attention
to form that Mandeville offers. Here is a beautiful marriage of form, content and poetic
technique: the three-line stanzas, Dante’s medieval terza rima and the ‘longest syllabic line
I could fit comfortably on a page, 13 syllables’ to retain something of the original prose
(Interview), even as, I think, that prose shape-shifts to be crystallized in poetry.
Which takes us, as Mandeville does, to full circle. Medieval thinkers knew that the
world is round and yet believed Jerusalem was at the centre. With his crucial frame ‘Of
Circumnavigation’ and the repetition of Mandeville’s ‘for you must know that the world is
round’ which opens and closes the sequence, Francis takes us right to the heart of a conundrum
that gives Mandeville his haunting voice. He says: ‘I take full advantage of the ambiguous
word you’, which simultaneously directly addresses the reader and ‘conjures a less specific
‘one’ to drive the poem (Interview). So, too, the litany of the titles – ‘Of Circumnavigation’,
‘Of Relics’, ‘Of a Manner of Disposing of the Dead’ – and those spare verses capturing the
‘original’ tone, at once genuine awe and laconic, world-weary resignation. Poetry is all about
the voice, and this is what lingers in Mandeville, its moving poignancy.
Hospital Underworlds
Critics are unanimous in citing Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey (Bloodaxe, 2012) as
a modern epic. She herself remarks that she owes ‘the sweep of the book as a whole to
writers like Vergil’.24 In Lewis’s Odyssey, her protagonist Maris travels through that creaking
institution the British NHS (National Health Service) during the long ‘exile’ of her husband
Hardy’s cancer; in this way Lewis seeks to trace ‘a map of the terrain you enter through
illness, even if it’s not your own’ (Interview). Along the way, she mingles form and an eclectic
range of influences to give this long poem its exuberant impetus.
This contemporary Odyssey is, at once, satire, a modern morality tale, life writing, medieval
romance and pilgrimage whose end point is the Holy Grail of ‘a vision of health which is
not about the success of the body’ (Interview), symbolized by Helen of Troy’s gift of a ring.
Lewis gives us a Dantaesque form – twelve books, five-line stanzas, lovely rhymes, run-on
lines, peppered with direct speech – with the ‘dream-like quality’ of the Welsh Mabinogion
(Interview), the Bible, Anglo-Saxon riddles and classical literature’s descent to the underworld.
We also have Beowulf – the Mother of Cancer and her monstrous dragon son, Orpheus and
Eurydice, Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Troilus (Interview), a medieval danse macabre in the
Microbes Ball, plus a dream-vision ‘dilemma’ – here three gates marked Peace, Love, Death –
and a splash of hagiography with suppurating wounds and redemptive tears.
A ‘life-long Doctor Who fan’, Lewis wanted to ape Russell T. Davies’s use of ‘myth to
examine moral questions’, and to harness popular culture’s energy, its ‘huge revival in
medieval storytelling’, not least ‘because, in extremis, we turn naturally to mythic ways of
describing our lives’ (Interview). So, she consciously collides medieval and contemporary
cultures. Maris’s companions are Wilson, both medieval greyhound and superhero of The
Wizard, and Ludlow, Knight Templar and a doctor, keeper of the sacred body. We have the
passage of souls alongside a carnivalesque virtuoso witnessed, for instance, in the Body
Museum, and influenced by ‘Jill Mann, who taught me medieval literature’ and introduced
her to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World (1984) (Interview), while Lewis’s bravura switch-back
from the prosaic to the lyrical allows her to draw on medical research as much as the codes
and symbols of computer games. These mash-ups reflect Lewis’s cross-generic writings – from
the discourse of oncology in the Odyssey to astrophysics in Zero Gravity (1998), based on
a cousin’s voyage to the Hubble Space Telescope, back to sci-fi and the Welsh Mabinogion
in The Meat Tree (2010). In this sense, then, like other poets in this chapter, Lewis’s work
inhabits a continuum of popular academic writing.
Cathedral
Likewise, Patience Agbabi deliberately mingles form and influence in Telling Tales (Canongate,
2014), ‘most notably music and film – to feed my creativity’.25 Her ‘Tale of Melibee’ is inspired
by film noir even as its form is a specular poem (the second half replicates the first, in reverse).
The ‘Merchant’s Tale’ becomes ‘That Beatin’ Rhythm’ and is written ‘almost entirely from
Northern Soul song titles’ in an attempt to echo the tension of Chaucer’s ‘original’: fabliau
form rendered in the ‘high’ language of courtly love. Agbabi explains further; Northern Soul
164
‘is popular culture that was never popular’ with tunes valued precisely because they did not
hit mainstream culture’. Equally, Agbabi plays with magic realism and Chaucer’s rhyme royal
in the ‘Franklin’s Tale’, which is also, ‘in part inspired by another Christopher Nolan film
Inception’. Above all, though, ‘the idea is everything’ and, so, Agbabi always asks ‘What could
a reader gain by encountering my versions?’ (Interview).
Agbabi’s aim in Telling Tales is ‘to replicate Chaucer’s linguistic playfulness but in my own
style’ (Interview). She often begins with character, then traces the narrative arc in a series of
prose drafts before performing the work in order to hone the voices (Interview). The result is
a tour de force, a virtuoso Canterbury Tales set on a Routemaster bus travelling from London
to Canterbury, remixed and contemporized into a dramatic masterpiece, at once, according to
Canongate’s website, ‘Boisterous, funky, foul-mouthed, sublimely lyrical and bursting at the
seams’.26 Her title, Telling Tales, says it all: present-tense popular culture, an afterlife with a
kick that, nevertheless, is grounded in a ‘medieval’ narrative tradition. So, too, Agbabi’s Tales
is a conjuring trick, a series of metatextual games, ‘translated in the mind of the reader’ by a
polyvocal Oxford-educated, ‘street’ performance poet who never loses sight of her literary
roots.27
Hers is a lifelong love affair with Chaucer, ‘poet, storyteller and master dramatist ... designed
to be both read and heard and that’s what I strive to achieve in my own work’ (Interview).
Agbabi is a former Canterbury Poet Laureate (2009–10). Her Nigerian business woman, the
Wife of Bafa, hugely popular on the performance circuit, intersects both Chaucer’s Wife of
Bath and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s ‘The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market’ (Third World
Girl, 2011). Agbabi says ‘I loved the unfinished nature of the “original”’ (Interview), which
she revisits through a double-bluff fiction, a Telling Tales that is almost The Canterbury Tales,
yet not quite. The ‘Parson’s Tale’ becomes ‘The Gospel Truth’, its lead character Rap, the
Son. The Host is Harry ‘Bells’ Bailey whose ‘Prologue’ and ‘Back Track’, both Grime Mixes,
open and close the show. The ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is transposed into ‘Sharps an Flats’ with Missy
Eglantine listening to her dead son J ‘chattin on a mix made//in Heaven (Telling Tales, 2014,
p. 81). ‘Sir Topas’ and the ‘Melibee’ are allocated to two different speakers with the former ‘a
below-the-belt grime battle between Sir Topaz and Da Elephant’, while Agbabi’s ‘Retraccion’
is ‘a secular apology’ for all those issues, obscene language included, she ‘genuinely grappled
with’ in the making (Interview).
Agbabi’s poems jump off the page, and it is this sense of Telling Tales as alive that gives the
collection its especially compelling energy. From the sleight-of-hand biographies or cast list to
the proposed CDs, DVDs, film clips and teaching pack, from the ebook and poetry slams to
the ‘Roving Mic’ blog and poetry tour, Telling Tales remains always on the move. 28
Shout-Out
Cassell’s Dictionary (2006) speaks of translation as adaption which, in a biological sense, is
strictly a process of modification that enables an organism to survive better in its environment.
In some respects this is what medievalisms is all about; certainly, the poets in this chapter have
translated their texts in myriad ways, the better to collapse temporalities and cultures. I end
here on one such moment of ‘adaption’ and ‘translation’ when worlds suddenly collide.
I am on stage in Southwark Cathedral as part of Poet in the City’s ‘Chaucer: Modern

Echoes’ event.29 I am listening to Agbabi perform, as ever, in character, from memory.30
Outside, it is 2014 and night is falling. Inside, it is a fictional ‘Sharps an Flats’. Seven-year-old
J, ‘cut off by a switchblade’, is rapping to his mum. His shout-out is for Damilola Taylor, the
ten-year old stabbed in real life on his way home from the library in 2000 and left to bleed to
death on a stairwell.31 We are sitting in a place that is over six-hundred-years old. And just as
Agbabi gives us the line about ‘my spar Damilola’ (Telling Tales, p. 82), right on cue, a police
siren wails through the medieval stone walls.
Notes
1. Simon Armitage (2006), ‘The Knight’s Tale’. The Guardian, 16 December, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/poetrysimonarmitage.
2. Caroline Bergvall (Meddle English, 2011), Jean Binta Breeze’s ‘The Wife of Bath Speaks in
Brixton Market’, Julian T. Brolaski (gowanus atropolis, 2011), Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn,
Catherine Fisher, Seamus Heaney, among others.
3. See Armitage, ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and all my interviews (website accompanying this volume
www.bloomsbury.com/medieval-afterlives) on the long gestation of these poems.
4. My interview with Matthew Francis, see website accompanying this volume.
5. My interview with Jane Draycott, see website accompanying this volume.
6. Simon Armitage (2007), Introduction, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. London: Faber and
Faber, p. vii.
7. My interview with Gwyneth Lewis, see website accompanying this volume.
8. See ‘Simon Armitage on the trail of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. BBC3 TV 17 August
2010, and also BBC4, Norman Season, January 2013. See http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=74gl1lg1CQ.
9. See Simon Armitage read SGGK on http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xw7u8i-simon-armitage-
sir-gawain-and-the-green-knight-creation.
10. Nicholas Lezard (2008), ‘There’s life in the green giant yet’. The Guardian, 8 March, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/08/simonarmitage.
11. BBC 4 2013 ‘The Making of King Arthur’. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74gi1).
12. Jeremy Noel-Tod (2014), The Telegraph, 22 May, http://www.thetelegraph.co.uk/culture/books/
bookreviews/9018796/The-Death-of-King-Arthur-by-Simon-Armitage-review-html.
13. Tom Payne (2014), ‘The snawe snitered ful snart’. The Telegraph, 22 May, http://www.
thetelegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3662321/The-snawe-snitered-ful-snart.html.
14. Leah Haught (2013), ‘Armitage: Death of King Arthur’, review in Medievally Speaking, 27 April.
See http://www.medievallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/armitage-death-of-king-arthur.html.
15. From translat meaning ‘carried across’. OED online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com.
16. My interview with Draycott.
17. Lavinia Greenlaw (2014), A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. London: Faber and Faber,
Book 2, p. 90.
18. Interview, Charlotte Runcie and Lavinia Greenlaw (2014), ‘Something borrowed,
something blue’. The Telegraph, 23 February, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/
authorinterviews/10653510/Something-borrowed-something-blue.html.
166
19. Brendan Whitmarsh (2014), Review of A Double Sorrow in Nouse, 3 December, http://www.
nouse.co.uk//2014/03/12/book-review-a-double-sorrow-troilus-and-criseyde/.
20. Runcie (2014), The Telegraph.
21. See http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/lavinia-greenlaw-80532.
22. My Francis interview.
23. Matthew Francis, Mandeville: A Package Tour of The Medieval World, http://www.contemporary.
com/Centre/Seminars-Files/Contempo%20(M%20Francis%20-%20paper)pdf.
24. My interview with Lewis.
25. My interview with Patience Agbabi, see website accompanying this volume.
26. See http://www.cannongate.tv/telling-tales.html.
27. See her interview at http://www.transculturalwriting.com/radiophonics/contents/writersonwriting/
patienceagbabi/thewifeofbafa-analysis/index.html.
28. See my interview for details of Chaucer Teaching Pack; see also ‘Poet Patience Agbabi gives
Chaucer a hip-hop makeover’, 5 September 2011, http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/our-work/
patience-agbabi-roving-mic-canterbury-tales/; see http://www.canongate.tv); see videos of the
Remix: The Prologue and The Remix: The Wife of Bafa at The Poetry Channel – http://www.
thepoetrychannel.org.uk/search/poets/patience-agbabi.
29. See my guest blogs, ‘Poet in the City & Chaucer Modern Echoes’ and ‘Pilgrim out of Town:
Chaucer’s Modern Echoes’ in Archives, April 2014. Go to http://www.globalchaucers.wordpress.
com/2014/04/06/poet-in-the-city-chaucer-modern-echoes/.
See also Aisha Farr, review, ‘Chaucer in the Cathedral’, at http://www.poetinthecity.wordpress.
com/2014/05/15/chaucer-in-the-cathedral.
30. See http://www.transculturalwriting.com.
31. Damilola Taylor was stabbed on his way home from the library on 27 November 2000. He ran to
a stairwell on the North Peckham estate, London, and bled to death before help arrived. It took
another six years before his killers were brought to justice.
chapter fifteen
Coming of Age in the Middle

Ages: The Quest for Identity
in Medieval Novels for
Young Adults
Angela Jane Weisl
In Elizabeth Janet Gray’s foundational example of the genre, Adam of the Road (1942), Adam
Quartermayne, son of a minstrel, discovers that ‘a road’s a kind of holy thing.... It’s open to
the sun and wind and rain. It brings all kinds of people and all parts of England together.’1 As
he searches the country having many adventures, and seeing many possible paths, he learns to
make his own desired choice; when at the end of the novel he is offered a choice of futures,
he is able to say, ‘I am a minstrel,’ and receive his father’s praise: ‘you have done well, son.’2
This journey of discovery is a trope of young adult fiction, which in large part is the
literature of coming of age; the protagonist’s path from uncertainty to a greater knowledge
of himself or herself, and a stronger sense of his or her place is society makes up a sizeable
part of the genre, in whatever period the story is told. Gray’s 1942 novel is one of the
first to set this journey in the Middle Ages, starting a trend in which authors mine the
Middle Ages for a vision of the past, in its history and its literature, as reflective of or
particularly appropriate to a teenager’s experience. Given the various wars, plagues and
sundry unpleasantnesses of the Middle Ages, not to mention a reputation for didacticism,
it may seem an odd choice. However, in adolescent fiction, the Middle Ages emerges as a
valuable place in which to narrate the coming of age process specifically because it offers
alternatives that the contemporary world does not. The extent to which ‘medieval’ has come
to mean ‘fantasy’ may clarify the popularity of this choice; in and of itself, medievalism
168
is a bricolage of fact and fiction from the past and present, and it incorporates both real
medieval history and the various elements that have been attributed to the Middle Ages
since its conclusion. A significant part of this fantasy is the quest, in which a lone figure, or a
group of friends, undertakes a voyage whose goal is both a concrete outcome and his or her
own development. A great deal of medieval literature focuses on the quest of the juvens, or
youth, whose adventures symbolize the passage of childhood to adult responsibility. Marie
de France’s ‘Guigemar’ (along with many of her other lais), Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et
Enide or Yvain, all of the versions of Percival, The Roman de Silence, and many others tell
the story of a young person seeking to find an identity and his or her place in society, making
parallel life’s journey and the physical quests these characters undertake. By travelling from
Camelot to Laudine’s castle, losing his place there because of his failure to fulfil his promises,
and then having to restore himself, his reputation and his prowess to regain that place, Yvain
traverses the path from youth to adulthood while simultaneously travelling all over real and
fictional Britain. These narratives, like their modern progeny, sanitize the filth and plague
often associated with the medieval period from their pages, thus creating a fantasy of the
Middle Ages that continues apace today.
In young adult literature, ‘Medieval’ often constitutes an anachronistic set of inspirations,
although it also allows all kinds of potential; characters in search of themselves can quest
through worlds that seem to have medieval technology and costume, and the magical
possibilities that underlie many medieval romances, while engaging in many un-medieval
practices. They can ride horses, wear mail shirts and cast spells, while simultaneously drinking
tea and eating potatoes; in an essentially medieval landscape, literacy can be widespread and
tolerance can be valued. Because young people are often the heroes of medieval narrative,
they are able take on that role in medievalist fiction as well. Like all medievalism, young adult
fiction set in this particular past may be best identified by its enthusiasm for anachronism; this
is well suited for the explorations of young adult fiction, since most medieval heroic literature
is itself set in a fictional ‘past’ that in many ways looks remarkably like its medieval present.
Therefore, contemporary issues of adolescent development can be comfortably played out in
another time and place; the intersection of past and present becomes a valuable place from
which adolescent identity can emerge.
Perhaps the best known work of literature for young adults set in a fictional Middle Ages
is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1949), but it increasingly finds itself in extensive
company. From classic series like Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (1964–8) and
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (1965–77), to contemporary examples such as Judson
Roberts’s Strongbow Saga (2010–13) and Anne Eliot Crompton’s Gawain and Lady Green
(2010), the Middle Ages has been a popular venue to engage adolescent life and experience,
ranging from the desire for adventure to love, friendship and family relations, as well as the
intersection between these. Young adult novels set in the Middle Ages can engage the same
larger themes as their counterparts set in the present, although they don’t often focus on
the same details that ‘realist’ novels for the same age group do, such as teenage pregnancy,
homelessness, drugs, depression or illness; yet the setting can allow the exploration of
contemporary concerns. The violence in Judson Roberts’ Strongbow Saga may be different
Coming of Age in the Middle Ages 169
from what’s found in a contemporary novel such as S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), but
the pain of loss and threat of danger is no less vital. Medievalist young adult fiction can also
echo its contemporary counterparts in offering a somewhat complex exploration of possible
gender roles, surprisingly often inspired by its real medieval antecedents. Birdy’s expression
of women’s oppression through her journal keeping in Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called
Birdy (1994) or Anne Eliot Crompton’s feminist reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green may
be different from Silence’s, but the impulse to ask questions about women’s identity are the
same; and while the exploration of sexuality in James Erich’s Seidman (2012) in which Kol
wrestles simultaneously with becoming a sorcerer and his attraction to Thorbrand, another boy,
is more contemporary than medieval, explorations of desire are certainly found in medieval
narrative, thus showing the past to be a valuable locus for considering real adolescent issues.
These explorations of adolescent issues take place in worlds both realistic and fantastic.
Much ‘medieval’ literature for young readers follows the assumptions of medieval romance,
in which liminal spaces open up the possibility of magic, of rules and expectations turned
upside down, and the popularity of these elements in young adult fiction can hardly be
denied. However, many novels apply the standards of realism, attempting to set the story in
a detailed and lifelike (if not authentic) past, whose characters inhabit a world where their
feet remain firmly on the ground. Fantasy texts often offer alternative versions of Arthurian
and other medieval romances, although others, like Christopher Paolini’s Eragon (2009–12)
series, John Flannagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice (2006–11) novels or Tamora Pierce’s Song of the
Lioness (1983) adventures offer alternative, imaginative worlds that play by some medieval
rules but not others, but are united in their engagement with magic. Some examples of the
latter include Avi’s Crispin (2010) series or Tim Severin’s Viking: Odinn’s Child (2005). Other
works attempt to combine these two impulses, such as Kathryn Lasky’s Hawksmaid: The
Untold Story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian (2010) which references privies and middens,
while people turn into birds. Either way, the Middle Ages provides an escape from the world
while simultaneously allowing an investigation of its important issues.
In all these texts, the Middle Ages exists as a potent fantasy, whether of a simpler time
of clearer values; a violent, dangerous era of tribal conflict and familial strife; or a place of
potential, where the lack of central authority and traditional restraints on adolescent life, such
as parents and schools, permits various types of exploration, evoking an essentially adolescent
desire for self-testing through adventure. Within this fantasy, adolescents often begin feeling
insignificant yet emerge as vitally important; if they start confined by the world in which
they live, their undertakings allow them to change it for the better. When Rain travels to
Magharna in Julia Golding’s The Glass Swallow (2010), surviving kidnapping, prejudice and
animal attacks, she finds love, discovers a way to practise her glass-making skills and is finally
able to negotiate for her greatest desire, to allow women into the glassmaker’s guild. She is
able to show her people that ‘their attitude was standing in the way of progress’, and her
coming of age is affirmed when the King comments, ‘Good for you Mistress Glassmaker....
You’ve succeeded where I could not’.3 These quests help the medieval setting make sense;
the journey inherent in much adolescent fiction is made external and literal in medievalist
fiction, while the youth’s development also happens internally and metaphorically. Coming-
170
of-age journeys can be played out in Halfdan’s Viking world in the Strongbow Saga, or in the
somewhat simple and gentle manor house in Catherine, Called Birdy, or in the magical realms
of T. A. Barron’s Merlin books, the Farahdin and Halderon of A. J. Cunder’s Silver Talon
(2010) and Destiny’s Map: The Lost Road (2014) or in the Avalon of Stephanie Spinner’s
Damosel (2008).
One feature of the adolescent journey is the need to escape from the confines of real life,
and the Middle Ages can offer that escape to adolescent readers. Catherine Brown points out
that ‘the past can feel like a place as much as it does a time – a foreign place, outside the doors
of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now’, and from this perspective
the Middle Ages is ‘especially beyond the pale’.4 Medieval young adult literature makes this
difference apparent, often stressing the ways in which the details of life are inherently unlike
our own, thus allowing the reader a pathway out of his or her mundane life. The Middle Ages
are always different from now, and the period offers many possibilities, including desires for
a simpler, slower-paced time; an alternative set of values; or a heroic potential drawn from
the medieval literary canon itself. ‘There is no question,’ Brown says, ‘that the Middle Ages
is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace ... beyond our own doors. What are we
doing when we go there? What happens to “here” and “there” when we go? The question
isn’t whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what
we as putative nonmedievals are going to do with the difference.’5 For adolescent literature
set in the Middle Ages, a similar question thus arises: what have young adults to do with the
Middle Ages?
In following the conventions of adolescent literature, medievalist novels offer engaging
protagonists attempting to find themselves in the confusion of the world around them. Thus
Catherine, in Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy, attempts to discover her identity and her
personal strengths while railing against an arranged marriage to an older, brutish man whom
her parents have chosen for her, and Jane, in Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice (1995),
aspires to rise above the serfdom into which she has been born. Justin Roberts’s Halfdan in
the Strongbow Saga attempts to find true brotherhood, to reclaim his heritage and to triumph
over those who would oppose him by gaining experience as a Viking warrior. These themes
are both authentically medieval and authentically contemporary.
One of the strengths of the Middle Ages as a setting is its ability to engage issues of value
to contemporary adolescent readers. This body of work follows much medieval literature
in making young adults the centre of their literary universes and therefore exploring their
potential. In a world in which teenagers often feel disenfranchized and under-valued,
medievalist fiction can change that balance. The medieval texts set a precedent for their
descendants. If the quest to come of age is generally the unifying theme in these narratives,
one particular facet of it – the discovery of one’s place in the social world, particularly in
the world of the family – defines a great deal of the medievalist fiction for young adults
being written today. In medieval literature, parentage and one’s real family is often much
less important than the families one makes; Percival leaving his mother and joining the
Round Table may be one of the most specific articulations of this, but many medieval heroes
and heroines are unbound from their traditional families and allied with various groups. In
the eponymous work, Aucassin and Nicolette escape their parents’ restrictions and find an
alternative community for a time in Torelore; Yde, in Yde et Olive, disguises herself as a boy
and runs away from her father’s attempted incest and joins first a group of robbers and then
the Roman emperor’s army; thus, the comitatus of Old English literature and the Round Table
of the Arthurian material are echoed in their contemporary counterparts. This important
feature of identity, then, is often as much the goal of the quest as any love relationship or
significant object.
In many Young Adult books, Medieval Europe becomes a place to explore how young
adults use their quests to find love and family. If recent attention has been drawn to the
problems of young adults who find themselves on the borders of society, often estranged from
or without home or family, these authors find solutions in a historic past in which children
were often nurtured in outside of the family unit. John Boswell, in the Kindness of Strangers,
famously notes of the Middle Ages:
Parents abandoned their offspring in desperation when they were unable to support them,
due to poverty or disaster; in shame, when they were unwilling to keep them because of
their physical condition or ancestry (e.g. illegitimate or incestuous); in self-interest or the
interest of another child, when inheritance or domestic resources would be compromised
by another mouth; in hope, when they believed someone of greater means or higher
standing might find them and bring them up in better circumstances; in resignation, when
a child was of unwelcome gender or ominous auspices; or in callousness, if they simply
could not be bothered with parenthood.6
Young Adult novels set in the Middle Ages are filled with abandoned orphans and alternative
families. In the Pagan’s Crusade, Youngest Templar and Strongbow Saga series, and in individual
novels like the Midwife’s Apprentice, the protagonists – all orphans – find their meaningful
lives through alternative relationships and families, either apprenticeships or versions of the
comitatus, building the families that they were denied, which in some cases permit them
then to find love, either divine or human, beyond the limits with which they begin their
stories. Caroline Walker Bynum notes the authenticity of these family situations: ‘Medieval
families were extended rather than nuclear, and medieval parents often had little to do with
the rearing of their children’,7 and Barbara Hanawalt points out the similarity between the
medieval and modern, noting, ‘Peter Laslett has suggested that in preindustrial England the
number of children left orphaned was as great as it is in the modern United States, even
when one includes in the recent figure children from broken homes.’8 Therefore, these
novels are authentic in the transposition of this modern phenomenon to the past. Medieval
structures of connection and devotion show contemporary main characters ways of moving
beyond isolation and abjection to full participation in their communities. These extra-familial
relationships are often explored in real medieval literature; if the characters in the novels
seem rather more contemporary in their language, responses or reactions to the world around
them, they remain authentically medieval in the circumstances they land in and the ways they
are able to negotiate them. Thus, these uniquely medieval relationships become methods of
172
coming of age, and they offer a way for outsiders (past and present) to find their way into
family and community.
Karen Cushman’s award-winning Midwife’s Apprentice begins with a child in a dung
heap:
How old she was was hard to say. She was small and pale, with the frightened air of an
ill-used child, but her scrawny, underfed body did give off a hint of a woman, so perhaps
she was twelve or thirteen. No one knew for sure, least of all the girl herself, who knew no
home and no mother and no name but Brat and never had. Someone, she assumed, must
have borne her.9
Rescued from the dung heap by Jane the Midwife, and renamed Beetle, she begins a life of
hard work that ultimately rewards her with a home and a place in the world. Her day becomes
a litany of chores – starting the fire, sweeping the floor, cleaning the dishes, roasting bacon,
dusting the apothecary jars, gathering food and herbs, accompanying Jane in her midwifery
and cleaning the soiled beds and linen after childbirth. When she makes a mistake at the
Miller’s wife’s delivery, ‘for weeks afterward, the Midwife called her not Beetle but Brainless
Brat and Clodpole and Good-for-Nothing, and Beetle worked twice as hard and talked only
half as much, for she feared being turned cold and hungry out of the midwife’s cottage’.10
After a stint of exile, many adventures, working in a tavern and renaming herself Alyce, she
finally is able to claim a place for herself, saying:
Jane Sharp! It is I, Alyce, your apprentice. I have come back. And if you do not let me in,
I will try again and again. I can do what you tell me and take what you give me, and I know
how to try and risk and fail and try again and not give up. I will not go away.11
Difficult a fosterage as it is, in Jane, Alyce finds a replacement mother for the one who
abandoned her, one who will teach her a trade, give her a home (a place to come back to) and
a purpose within her community. Cushman is noted for striving for a kind of authenticity in
her works that makes them perhaps more ‘medieval’ than contemporary; yet she tells a classic
adolescent story. Alyce’s lack of identity at the start of the book – a brat, a dung beetle, but
not a person – is slowly replaced by a meaningful sense of self as she becomes ‘I, Alyce, the
Midwife’s Apprentice.’
The claiming of identity outside the traditional family takes place in many Young Adult
medieval novels, both those which lean towards an authentic presentation of the period
and those which draw their impetus more from medieval literature than life. Let us look at
two recent series, one in each mode, which tell essentially the same story: a young orphan
is raised in a monastery and becomes a squire to the Knights Templar; complications and
adventures ensue. In Catherine Jinks’ Pagan’s Crusade (2003–8) series, which may be called
the ‘authentic’ one, the hero, Pagan Kidrouk, an orphaned and abandoned Arab Christian in
Jerusalem, is raised in a monastery (where he learns to read), escapes its rigid rules only to
live on the streets and ends up apprenticing himself to the Knights Templar to make enough
money to pay off a gambling debt. Barely remembering his mother, and having no knowledge
of his father’s identity (except that he hates him), he must find some community that will
allow him to come of age in a productive way. Made squire to the austere and idealistic
Lord Roland Roucy de Bram, he finds himself first at the Battle of Jerusalem, then in France
during the Cathar Conflict and finally as the Archdeacon of Carcassone during the siege. In
Michael Spradlin’s Youngest Templar (2009–11) series, young Tristan is orphaned and raised
in a monastery (where he learns to read) and ends up squire to Lord Thomas Leux, idealistic
Templar Knight, fighting at the battle of Acre. He is finally charged with carrying the Holy
Grail back to England, with the help of Robard Hode (Robin Hood), and Maid Marion, who
this time is a Saracen Hashshashin called Maryam. Much adventure ensues as Tristan finds
himself at the centre of the Cathar Conflict. (Remarkably, he and Pagan never run into each
other, despite being in the same place at so many of the same times.) In the third volume,
he is finally able to return to England, where he discovers the truth of his parentage (he is
the illegitimate son of Henry II), and delivers the Grail to a safe place. The difference in the
second story is that, repeatedly, Tristan and his friends are saved miraculously by the Grail;
although Spradlin doesn’t get as mystical as many Young Adult authors do, the series suggests
a current of liminal possibility, of a magic operating just below the surface of the story’s real
world. The magic in Spradlin’s story, which functions as a kind of deux ex machina, suggests
a reliance on a particular brand of medieval romance, but ultimately both series come to the
same conclusion – that an adolescent’s development is often fostered by connections and
friendships made along the journey; magic may provide a different coloration and suggest a
different use of the medieval past, but it colours rather than changes the centrality of the quest
and the connections it forges.
In both stories, the protagonists are essentially rescued by their adoptions as squires to
their lords. Both the parental relationships that emerge and the loyalty bonds of the comitatus
created by the Crusades become the ‘families’ in which they are nurtured. Their necessity to
the relationship replaces their abandonment; Pagan ransoms Lord Roland’s life, and Tristan
rescues the Grail when Thomas is killed in battle. As a part of a relationship constructed out
of both rules and emotional attachments, they find the places and social value previously
denied them. Just as the juvens in medieval romance are repeatedly brought to their meaning
and status through surrogate family arrangements and circumstances, so too are Pagan and
Tristan made themselves through adoption; without it, Pagan would be condemned to remain
a street urchin on the far side of the law, unable to use his intellectual talents and sharp
personality for anything but escaping capture, and Tristan would remain in the monastery,
despite his romantic sensibilities that suit him poorly for life as a monk. The medievalness
of these relationships is confirmed by Sarah Kay’s analysis of the medieval family romance
in which ‘paternity’ is ‘represented not only by biological fathers but by stepfathers and
godfathers, not to mention the many figures who act as symbolic fathers (assisting the hero,
making him an heir, giving him land, finding him a bride, raising troops for him)’.12
Pagan’s Jerusalem is a place of bad smells and revolting jokes; confronted in the opening
scene of Pagan’s Crusade (2003) by the Standard-Bearer of the Templars, he notes, ‘Rockhead
smells rich and rare, like a well-matured piece of cheese. No baths for the Templars. Hot
water is for girls and porridge and other soft, wet things’13 and when asked why he left the
Jerusalem garrison, notes ‘It was the jokes sir. In the guardroom.... I don’t like leper jokes.
Or dysentery jokes. Especially when I’m eating.’14 When Rockhead opens his mouth, Pagan
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sees ‘his jagged black fangs underneath. Fangs like the ruins of burned-out sentinel boxes’.15
This earthy context is what gives Pagan a place for his highly sarcastic perceptions; however,
it also shows Pagan to be deeply medieval. For all his exclamations like ‘Jesus Christ in cream-
cheese sauce’, Pagan is fundamentally religious; although he has run away from his monastery
and gets dismissed from a second one in Pagan’s Vows (2004), he operates on an underlying
system of profound belief. Often highly irreverent, willing to criticize the institutional church,
and able to coexist easily with the Cathars in Provençe, he nonetheless remains fully Catholic
and ends up the Archdeacon of Carcassone. Spradlin’s England, France and Outremer are less
graphically described, and his focus on the Holy Grail’s magic creates a more fantastic setting.
But both the Pagan’s Crusade and Youngest Templar series are concerned with this problem
one might call equally medieval and modern – the finding of identity and support outside
the boundaries of the traditional family. It hardly needs saying that for many adolescents, the
search for identity is often about disconnecting from their families and striking out on their
own, an experience for which quest romance is an effective metaphor. Just as for knights
like Percival and the original Tristan, so too for both Pagan and the contemporary Tristan
is the discovery of alternative systems of support essential to their stories. When at the end
of Orphan of Destiny (2011), the final book in the Youngest Templar series, Tristan is finally
reunited with the Master of the Order, Sir Charles apologizes, saying ‘I’m sure he [Sir Thomas]
regretted not being able to send help with you.’ When Tristan, looking at Robard and Maryam,
responds, ‘It’s all right, sire, ... I managed to find help on my own’,16 we recognize that more
important than the actual discovery of familial identity are the friendships he has formed.
As Donald Maddox points out about quest romance, ‘the protagonist of each of these texts
[family romances] is confronted by the narration of his own family background, and that this
narration is a “specular” reflection of the fantasy those texts inscribe’.17 When he discovers he
is the illegitimate son of King Henry II and Rosamond Clifford, hidden to avoid destruction
by an angry Queen Eleanor, he is surprised, but this only serves to cement the status he has
gained by being Thomas’s ‘most loyal servant’,18 chosen to carry the Grail because of his loyalty
and steadfastness. Discussing Parise la Duchesse (c. 1374), Sarah Kay comments, ‘whereas we
might think of biological family as the “original” and surrogate families as secondary, in Parise
it is the other way round’.19 And it’s hardly a unique example; medieval examples abound.
For Spradlin’s Tristan, the discovery of his real parentage is not nearly as important as the
surrogate family he has found for himself; when he is knighted and made ‘a Brother Knight
of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and King Solomon’s Temple’, he comments, ‘It feels
wonderful’ and goes off to France to forge his own family with Celia of Montsegur.20
At the end of each of the books in the Pagan’s Crusade series, we are reminded of the
intense bond between Pagan and Lord Roland, who, despite their enormous differences, have
come to rely upon each other. At the end of the first book, in the face of Roland’s anger at
him for ransoming him from Saladin, Pagan says, ‘My lord, have some mercy. For God’s sake,
think of me. Don’t you understand? You’re all I have left.’21 In the second, a similar scene
takes place; when Roland expresses his desire to leave the fighting life and enter a monastery,
Pagan declares, ‘My Lord, I am safe and happy with you.... Where you go, I’ll go.... If you
become a monk, I can become a monk. Or at least a monastery servant.’22 When the two
are finally compelled to separate at the conclusion of the third book, Pagan calls Roland
‘my mother and father. My friend. My lord.’ And asks, ‘Help me. Please help me to leave
you’ among copious weeping.23 In both series, the world of medieval relationships provides
alternative communities to the family; in the monastery and the comitatus, both are able to
find themselves, to forge their identities that are undefined at the start of the series. For each
orphan, their sense of detachment is replaced by a sense of self within the context of the
relationships and circumstances around them: how they forge loyalties, deal with conflicts
personal and political, how they choose their friends and how they uphold their values in the
face of challenges.
What becomes clear reading these stories is that the Middle Ages is an appropriate fantasy
world in which to act out these modern – or perhaps timeless – issues. If Chrétien would
not use the same language to describe what happens to Yvain or Percival or Erec or Cliges,
he nonetheless engages them in similar quests to find their identities. In reading medieval
literature for young adults, then, it is possible to see that while the material won’t stand in for
a good history class, it can open up an authentically medieval experience. Louise Fradenburg
notes that:
Many versions of historicism have embraced, in one form or another, the belief that the
differences between our ‘modernity’ and the ‘alterity’ of the Middle Ages are much more
important than what they might be said to share; these differences have often become
definitive for the purposes of interpretation, even if a radical discontinuity between past
and present is not explicitly asserted. One result has been the depiction of the Middle Ages
as unchanging and as repudiating change.24
Perhaps Young Adult literature might be an exception to this version of historicism, accepting
both a kind of ‘alterity’ of the Middle Ages and the period as a place that can embrace change
and multiple points of view. What these liminal fantasies provide for young adult readers is
not an authentic view into a historical past, unmediated by contemporary sensibilities, but
a medievalized mode of reading, in which the spaces between past and present collapse and
are bound together. Following medieval example, the past becomes a place to explore the
concerns of the present; Pagan’s Jerusalem and Tristan’s France are simultaneously then and
now, just as Chaucer’s Troy in Troilus and Criseyde is both the classical past and the fourteenth
century. With its emphasis on the journey, the medieval past speaks simultaneously to the
adolescent desire for adventure and its ability to act as a modus for coming of age. So whether
there are spells or dungheaps, whether the story is more inspired by medieval history or more
by medieval fantasy, in their ability to use the past to test out the problems of the present,
these novels are most authentically medieval.25
Notes
1. Elizabeth Janet Gray, Adam of the Road, NY: Puffin Classics, p. 52.
2. Gray, Adam of the Road, pp. 316–7.
3. Julia Golding (2010), The Glass Swallow. London: Oxford University Press, p. 315.
176
4. Catherine Brown (2000), ‘In the Middle’. Journey of Medieval and Early Modern Studies,
30(3): 547–74, at p. 547.
5. Catherine Brown, ‘In the Middle’, p. 548.
6. John Boswell (1998), The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe
from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Vintage, pp. 428–9.
7. Caroline Walker Bynum (1987), Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 225.
8. Barbara Hanwalt (1986), The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. New York:
Oxford University Press, p. 245.
9. Karen Cushman, The Midwife’s Apprentice. New York: HarperTrophy, 1995, p. 2.
10. Cushman, Midwife, p. 24.
11. Cushman, Midwife, pp. 116–7.
12. Sarah Kay (1991), ‘Motherhood: the Case of the Epic Family Romance’, in Karen Pratt and
Elspeth Kennedy (eds), Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Feschrift for Dr. Elspeth
Kennedy. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 23–36, at pp. 23–4.
13. Catherine Jinks (1992), Pagan’s Crusade. Sommerville, MA: Candlewick Press, p. 3.
14. Jinks, Pagan’s Crusade, p. 3.
15. Jinks, Pagan’s Crusade, p. 6.bo
16. Michael P. Spradlin (2010), The Youngest Templar: Orphan of Destiny. New York: Putnam,
p. 240.
17. Donald Maddox (1991), ‘Specular Stories, Family Romance, and the Fictions of Courtly Culture’.
Exemplaria, 3(2): 299–326 at p. 319.
18. Spradlin, Orphan, p. 238.
19. Kay, ‘Motherhood’, p. 33.
20. Spradlin, Orphan, p. 252.
21. Jinks, Pagan’s Crusade, p. 242.
22. Catherine Jinks (1994), Pagan in Exile. Sommerville, MA: Candlewick Press, p. 320.
23. Catherine Jinks (1995), Pagan’s Vows. Sommerville, MA: Candlewick Press, p. 327.
24. Louise Fradenburg (1990), ‘Voice Memorial: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry’.
Exemplaria, 2(1): 169–202, at pp. 172–3.
25. I would like to thank A. J. Cunder, author of The Silver Talon and Destiny’s Map: the Lost Road,
for his thoughtful comments and enormous help with this essay. As so many of the protagonists
of medievalist YA novels discover, our lives are greatly enriched by the friends we make along the
journey.
chapter sixteen
Australian Medievalism: Time

and Paradox
Louise D’Arcens
Medievalism in colonial and former colonial societies is a paradoxical phenomenon. It produces,

sometimes mischievously, sometimes anxiously, the traces of an impossible history. The many
reconstructions and citations of the Middle Ages in Australian literature, architecture and art
capture this double legacy of anxiety and playfulness, recreating an antipodean medieval past
that never was. A revealing early instance of this is the eccentric crenellated ‘Pigeon Tower’
built in the 1830s by Joseph Archer in Burlington, Tasmania. Jenna Mead has described this
‘“fowlhouse” dressed up as a medieval castle’, as both a loving ‘synecdoche of Englishness’
and an appeal to an ‘ancestral sense of humour’ that takes pleasure in the improbability
of this artefact in the Tasmanian landscape.1 The same ambiguity reappears in the artificial
ruins of Sunnymeade, a visitor’s centre north of Melbourne, which evokes the Middle Ages
not just through its name’s cheery purloining of the historic significance of Runnymede, but
through proudly featuring a topiary in the shape of a crumbling monastic cloister. Built for
purely aesthetic purposes, this foliage folly flaunts its picturesque inauthenticity while at the
same time sincerely inviting visitors, in the words of Sunnymeade’s website, to ‘step back in
time’ and repose in its ‘olde world charm’ (website: see reading). One can only marvel at the
topiary’s audacious evocation of the kind of architectural decay normally produced by the
eroding forces of nature and history.
Australian historians have typically highlighted the formative role of Enlightenment
ideals in the development of colonial and modern Australia’s cultural complexion. This is
not surprising, since the year 1788, when the first fleet of convicts and officers arrived in
Sydney Cove, places the British colonization of Australia firmly in an Enlightenment frame.
More recently, however, there has been a growing recognition of the powerful impact of the
Middle Ages in shaping the self-perceptions of Australia’s settler society from the nineteenth
178
century on. In the making of ‘medieval Australia’, the significance of the Middle Ages in the
nineteenth-century cultural imaginary was strongly inflected by Australians’ contradictory
perception of Australia as lacking history yet having an incomprehensibly long past. Measured
against the older Western cultures of Europe and Britain, the trope of settler Australia
having ‘no history’ began early in the colonial period and has persisted into the present. On
the other hand, since the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of amateur archaeology, the
evidence has mounted for Australia’s Indigenous culture being possibly the world’s oldest
living continuous culture, with recent estimates pushing Aboriginal habitation back beyond
65,000 years. The growing awareness among settlers of a deep, and deeply alien, cultural
past was corroborated, moreover, by suspicions of the profoundly ancient nature of the land
itself – suspicions confirmed by the geological research of the past fifty years, which has
led many to pronounce Australia the oldest of the continents. Within this schizophrenic
Westernized perception of Australia as deep with time yet shallow of history, the Middle
Ages has signified potently as a long – but not too long – heritage which is both comfortingly
familiar yet intriguingly strange, antique and improbable. As will be evident in the examples
to follow, the medievalism emerging out of this contradictory relationship to time is full of
its own paradoxes.
One surprising paradox of Australian medievalism is the extent to which it has been
an overt expression of modernity. This has been the case particularly with medievalist
architecture, which had a double valency, seemingly exceptional and foreign and yet also
entirely at home in its modern colonial context. As the work of Brian Andrew has shown
(Andrew 2001), Gothic Revival architecture was the preferred idiom for the display of civic
modernity, fusing nostalgia for pre-industrial splendour with high capitalist élan, and, in the
case of Melbourne, the ambitious display of post-gold-rush wealth. A number of the great
cathedral and university projects of the colonial period were designed by disciples of Gothic
Revival pioneer Augustus Welby Pugin, in some cases using Pugin plans. The superiority of
the Gothic as a form of modern civic architecture was at the heart of the lengthy speech
entitled ‘The Halls of Europe’ delivered by Sir Redmond Barry, chief justice of the colony of
Victoria, on 8 September 1866. In outlining his vision for Melbourne, Barry urges a more
concerted use of Gothic Revival to lend Melbourne an appearance of imposing grandeur and
‘lordliness of style’ befitting its wealth and emerging global civic stature. This extensively
reported speech, far from being backward-looking, in fact envisions medieval streetscapes
as perfect encapsulations of Melbourne’s destiny as a great global city.2 Given the gravitas
of Barry’s medievalist vision, it is an amusing historical irony that today, only an hour from
Melbourne, amid the Ballarat goldfields that provided so much of the city’s immense civic
wealth, can be found Australia’s largest and best-known medieval theme park, Kryal Castle.
Originally opened in 1974 by Keith Ryall, a purveyor of armour, the replica castle, built
in distinctive Victorian bluestone, reopened in 2013 in an extensively redeveloped form,
now offering luxury accommodation and a range of entertainments that includes a dragon
labyrinth, a torture dungeon, jester’s theatre and arena-style jousting and re-enactment shows
(website: see reading). Notwithstanding the greater levity of its medievalist vision, Kryal
stands as a monument to Australian medievalism’s enduring relationship to contemporary
consumer culture. Commerce even dominates in such relatively ‘alternative’ medievalist events
Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox 179
as Ironfest, the sprawling annual weekend-long festival in Lithgow, west of Sydney, where
predominantly medieval re-enactors sell everything from drinking horns to instructional
sword-fighting DVDs alongside a smattering of Napoleonic soldiers and neo-Victorian
steampunks (website: see reading).
The uneasy fusion of nostalgia and modernity in colonial Australia’s public spaces was
intensified in domestic architecture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
in particular the grand homes built by Australia’s emergent mercantile ruling classes. This
architectural medievalism was in part an expression of naïve colonial nostalgia: the architectural
idiom that wealthy colonials fell back on to declare their fortunes was ancestral rather than
modern. But this nostalgia was heavily implicated within nouveau riche aspiration and was,
therefore, absolutely modern. Design historian Andrew Montana’s comment that medievalist
effects in domestic architecture were ‘the hallmarks of status in which both notions of British
ancestral privilege and independent colonial success could be flaunted’3 applies perfectly to
these homes, which bear witness to the ironic and inextricable relationship in Australian
medievalism between the desire for feudal trappings and capitalist success.
Novels by Australian women in the 1890s, in particular those by Ada Cambridge and
Catherine Martin, offer a number of satirical depictions of the medievalist interiors and
‘atmospherics’ created by Australian women in their domestic environments. These interiors
include Liberty- and Morris-style fabrics, wallpapers and carpets, medieval-oriental ceramics
and stylized ‘Gothic’ furniture. For all their gestures towards the simplicity of the past, these
medievalist possessions were in fact, like the buildings housing them, ambiguous symbols
of the triumph of modern conspicuous consumption. As Martin conveys in her novel
An Australian Girl (1891), it was a mark of distinction among the mercantile classes to have
one’s grand residence made over at great expense by one of the increasing number of local
firms specializing in both imported and bespoke Aesthetic furniture and décor. The hugely
wealthy Barr Smith family from Adelaide, who Martin appears to be gently lampooning
in the novel, were one of Morris & Co’s biggest international clients and decorated their
many homes extensively using the firm’s furnishings, wallpapers, carpets and curtains. For
the middle classes who couldn’t afford Morris & Co, more affordable Aesthetic furnishings
could be purchased from the decorative Arts and Crafts Emporia springing up in the
colonial metropolitan centres. These decorative firms were mercilessly satirized in Britain,
especially F. C. Burnand’s 1881 play The Colonel. This trend spread to the colonies, with
local publications mocking Aesthetic ladies and their predilections for the products of the
medievalist Arts and Crafts movement.
One particularly revealing exploration of medievalism’s intersection with Australian
aspirationalism can be found in Rosa Praed’s 1889 novel Romance of a Station. The novel
traces the fortunes of Weeta Wilson, daughter of a Queensland speculator-landowner
and his ambitious wife. Weeta is first described in a highly painterly way that deliberately
evokes the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later, however, we learn
that her highly stylized appearance as a ‘mediaeval angel’ is the result of her mother niche-
marketing this previously unmarriageable red-headed girl as an outback Rossetti muse.
Montana’s statement that ‘[h]ow to look “ancestral” in a new colony became a burgeoning
preoccupation amongst many of [the] nouveau riche’ (Montana 2000, p. 61) is here extended
180
to women as commodities. Disturbingly, Weeta recognizes that she has been drafted into
the service of ‘looking ancestral’, and that her meticulously crafted appearance is of a piece
with decorating the house with Liberty fabrics or leadlight windows, to give her family the
aristocratic appearance that they believe will secure their upward mobility via her marriage.
More tragically, despite her despair and anger at this, she is determined to fulfil her ‘duty’ to
‘raise’ her family from their shameful origins, openly admitting that she ‘think[s] a great deal
of family’ – that is rank – because ‘I haven’t got it.’4 Praed’s unvarnished appraisal of the role
of medievalist aesthetics in the marriage marketplace exposes the aspirational opportunism
underlying the colonial desire for ancient breeding and the paradoxical belief that medieval
patrimony was the ticket to colonial success.
What this unsettling tale also reveals is that despite the satire directed at aspirational
medievalism in Australia, and, moreover, despite the open acknowledgement that the signs of
the medieval in Australia were confected, there nevertheless remained a stubborn desire for
an authentic link to the Middle Ages and a sense that the absence of such a link constituted
a lack. In Weeta’s case, her humble origins indicate a shameful lack of ancient ‘breeding’.
Writers and artists, meanwhile, nursed a remarkably persistent sense that the landscape’s lack
of the physical signs of medieval history endangered Australia’s cultural future, stymieing the
potential for creativity. In 1935, commentator G. H. Cowling lamented Australia’s lack of
‘ancient churches, castles, ruins – the memorials of generations departed’, an absence that he
argued condemned Australia to literary mediocrity: ‘we can never hope to have ... a poetry
which reflects past glories’.5 This echoes author and journalist Marcus Clarke’s firm dismissal
several decades earlier of the possibility of local medievalist verse, in his famous meditation
on the essence of Australian scenery and its impact on poetry. While, says Clarke, even the
mediocre poet is provided with mythic inspiration in ‘historic Europe, where every rood of
ground is hallowed in legend and in song’, Australia offers no such inspiration to its aspiring
poets. In Britain and Europe, the poet ‘lounging at sunset by some ruined chapel’ experiences
a sympathy with the past that makes genres such as historical epic possible: ‘we partake of the
varied moods which belong not so much to ourselves as to the dead men who, in old days,
sung, suffered, or conquered in the scenes which we survey’. Australia, by contrast, Clarke
claims in a statement which is striking today for its Eurocentricity, ‘has no past, no story’ with
which the poet can engage, and hence the poet is drawn away from history and thrown back
upon ‘Nature’s teachings’, or his own soul, for inspiration.6
Luckily for such poets and artists, Australia did occasionally host accidental ruins, which
came into being as a result of catastrophes. In colonial history a number of ruins sprang
instantaneously into being as a result of huge fires which engulfed prominent buildings,
reducing them to rubble in a matter of hours. In the wake of the conflagrations, in some
cases while the embers were still glowing, spectators penned wistful reports in which the
enthusiasm for the evocative beauty of the artificial ruin overwhelmed the acknowledgement
of the tragedy that has brought it into being. Andrew discusses an 1869 description of the
burnt ruins of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney as ‘forcibly remind[ing] the beholder of one of
England’s ruined abbeys … rendering the visitor for a while oblivious of the fact that he is in
Australia’.7 An even more pronounced example can be found in a poem by ‘Veni’ published in
the Sydney Morning Herald on 25 October 1882. Written in response to the destruction by fire
of the Garden Palace, the venue that had housed the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition,
the poem opens with the regretful outburst:
Ruins! Alas! We have been wont to say

With half-regretful tone, that in the grace
And glory of our country’s youthful day
The mystic charm of ruins had no place –
We lack’d the eerie magic of the Past.
The moss-grown battlements, and chronic page –
Did our presumptuous folly think to cast
On form so fair, the rusty garb of age?
As the poem continues, however, it transpires that the colony’s bemoaned lack of ‘the mystic
charm’ and ‘the eerie magic’ of the past has a solution and that solution is disaster, Fate’s dark
offspring. The concluding lines of the stanza ‘Ah Fate, more keen than Time, has shewn us
how / One hour sufficed to trace a wrinkle on [Australia’s] brow!’ suggest that while Australia
lacks authentic medieval presence, her recent experience of Fate’s fiery misfortunes has
accelerated her cultural maturity towards that of more venerable societies (cited in Montana
2000, p. 176). This ‘ruin fetish’, as with other forms of medievalism, became the target of
mockery, this time at the hands of bohemian poet Victor Daley in his 1898 satiric poem
‘Correggio Jones’. In this poem, a talentless colonial painter peevishly blames his lack of
success on the absence of historical inspiration in his environs. He enviously attributes the
success of the ‘Old Masters’ not to talent but to their contact with ‘churches dim, and ruins
grey / And castles on the Rhine’ while he looks out over the outback monotony of ‘Gander
Flat’. The Eurocentric Correggio even dismisses the doomed uprising of miners at the Eureka
Stockade on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854 – the colonies’ major rebellion, iconic in the
mythology of Australian anti-authoritarianism – as having ‘no Romance’.8 Here, Daley is
lampooning those Australian artists who believe that good art must take its inspiration from
the putative historical ‘romance’ expressed in architectural decay, and who thus live in denial
of the historic events taking place around them.
Another widespread practice, which can be described as genealogical medievalism, was
also bound up in the denial of Australian history, in this case of colonial Australia’s origins
in convictism. Historian Paul de Serville has demonstrated how ambitious colonials’ desire
for a link to the medieval past manifested as a ‘craze for honours’, either in the form of hotly
pursued individual knighthoods or in pedigrees linking them to ancient English families and
ancestral lands.9 The colonial pursuit of pedigrees was so relentless that Sir John Bernard
Burke was compelled to extend his genealogical guide Burke’s Peerage, so that in 1891 and
1895, there appeared the two volumes of the compendious Colonial Gentry, which included
many Australian entries. According to de Serville, ‘by the third quarter of the century tastes in
genealogy had reached bloated proportions’ (de Serville 1991, p. 206), with colonists going to
extravagant lengths to trace their families back to illustrious antecedents. Although he argues
that these pedigree hunters sought to raise themselves above the nouveaux riches surrounding
them, the anxieties informing this genealogical obsession were deeper than simple snobbery.
182
For underneath the quest for genealogical distinction lurks a desire to ward off the spectre of
shame. In some cases this stemmed from a strenuous refusal of loss of caste in moving from
Britain to the colonies, and, in other cases, from an effort to overcome the ‘convict taint’
tarnishing some of the colonies’ rising families. Ironically, for some prosperous colonists it
was precisely the money made after regaining their freedom that funded their quests for proof
of a highborn medieval heritage to nullify their embarrassing penal past.
The social denial motivating genealogical medievalism also became the object of comic
exposé. Another female author, ‘Tasma’ (Jessie Couvreur) brilliantly satirized colonial caste
anxiety in her 1892 novel Uncle Piper of Pier’s Hill. In this novel, Mr Cavendish, a disgruntled
blue-blood forced to live in Melbourne with his déclassé brother-in-law (the eponymous
Uncle Piper, a wealthy former butcher), frantically writes to English genealogical societies and
colleges of heraldry in order to discover a medieval genealogy that will ‘throw a veil over the
unfortunate accident of [Uncle Piper’s] birth’ (Tasma 1892, p. 236). The narrative ends with
Mr Cavendish’s snobbish efforts being thwarted by the meritocratic Uncle Piper’s indifference
to genealogical distinctions. Five years earlier, a cartoon by Livingston York Hopkins in
the left-wing newspaper The Bulletin had mocked the 1887 awarding of Queen Victoria’s
Jubilee peerages by depicting a coat-of-arms representing ‘The Order of P.G. (Pinchgut)’,
to be conferred ‘only upon old and true colonial aristocracy’. The cartoon’s attribution of
ancient nobility to the convict inmates of Pinchgut, a notoriously punitive Alcatraz-like prison
island in Sydney Cove (now an upmarket restaurant), humorously exposes the denial at the
base of the colonial yearning for nobility by cleverly reminding readers of the ignoble origins
of Australia’s longest-dwelling Europeans. The cartoon’s central image, a shield containing
devices of Pinchgut and of a convict breaking rocks, divided laterally by the motto ‘(Hard)
Labor Omnia Vincit’, wittily recalls the inhumane conditions of convict transportation and
enforced labour that underpinned the Eastern colonies’ foundation.10
Another vital dimension of Australian society written over by medievalism was its Indigenous
cultures. In a period when the great age and sophistication of these cultures was becoming
more apparent to settlers, and when European antiquarianism and Indigenous ethnology
began to compete as discourses for understanding Australia’s past, the preoccupation with
Australia’s long European heritage expressed unambiguously which cultural ‘infancy’ colonial
Australians believed would best fit their ideal image of cultural maturity. A very telling instance
of this can be seen in the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866, which featured as its pièce de
résistance a Medieval Court in the form of an ‘Old English’ church interior, loosely inspired
by Pugin’s Medieval Court at the London Crystal Palace. Functioning in part as a kind of trade
showroom, displaying the wares of local leadlighters, stonemasons, woodworkers, the court
was nevertheless praised in newspaper reports as a space of dignity and pious contemplation.
In its integrated recreation of a space epitomizing medieval Christianity and Englishness,
it marked the triumph of this cultural lineage over the ‘primitive’ cultures of Australasia
and the Pacific, which were represented in the Exhibition in a desultory and piecemeal
fashion. The scattering of Aboriginal presence throughout several locales in the exhibition
had the cumulative effect of representing Indigenous culture as a dispersed culture, with its
decontextualized artefacts approaching the status of bric-a-brac. While, as Des Cowley has
noted, the exhibition’s Victorian Court contained a large display of ‘aboriginal products’
these were, in a revealing juxtaposition, sandwiched between samples of clothing produced

by convicts and colonial women.11 This fragmentary representation was in stark contrast to
the Mediaeval Court, whose richly intact chamber reflected the intactness of the culture it
embodied and perpetuated into the present.
The decision to commemorate and continue a nostalgically imagined medieval heritage, and
thereby to occlude a more troubling history of colonial dispossession, is evident, moreover,
well into the mid-twentieth century. The Cistercian monastery of Tarrawarra Abbey, founded
in 1954 at Yarra Glen in Victoria, is built on former pastoral settler lands where, according
to Megan Cassidy-Welch, there are also vital traces of pre-contact Aboriginal life as well as
a tree sacred to the Indigenous people of the Yarra Valley. And yet despite the co-presence of
these two intertwined histories, it is ‘the imagined medieval past’ expressed in the Abbey’s
religious practices and monastic spatial layout that dominates, along with ‘the white “pioneer”
past’ embodied in the colonial homestead at the centre of the complex. Together, Cassidy-
Welch argues, these have ‘created at Tarrawarra an Australian identity which is deliberately
uncomplicated by issues of colonization and race’.12 This reflects that even within Australian
medievalist spaces not necessarily dedicated to capitalistic or consumerist pursuits, the Middle
Ages nevertheless continue to offer a symbolic retreat into historical and ideological denial.
There are a small number of isolated instances where an Indigenous presence is admitted
into a medievalist vision of Australia, one being E. J. Brady’s 1910 poem ‘On Keira’. A kind
of inversion of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, it is a semi-allegorical ballad in which
Youth, ‘a callow knight untried, / With golden spurs to win’ rejects the siren call of Love in
order to pursue Gold and Praise. It is hard not to be amused by the risible image of the youth
riding ‘bright in armor’ along the scrubby crest of the Illawarra escarpment south of Sydney;
but most arresting is the bizarre figure of Love, who is part-medieval ‘maiden of old fairy-
land’ and part-Indigenous Spirit of Place, calling her beloved back to the ‘bush infinities’ of
Mount Keira near Wollongong. With its lost-love tale likened to those ‘by primal poets sung’,
and its setting on the ancient peak of Mount Keira, the poem inserts itself into the two seem-
ingly incommensurate timescales of European poesy and primeval nature. The discomfort of
this temporal mismatch emerges when we realize that Love, despite being a Spirit of Place in
a locale known (then and now) for its living Indigenous culture, is ‘whiter than the surf ... /
That breaks those coasts along.’13 Despite its attempt at fusing medieval and Indigenous
mythologies, Brady’s poem, ultimately subsumes the Indigenous into the medieval, thereby
revealing medievalism’s incapacity to render visible an older and non-European past.
Quite recently, however, there has been a depiction of what might be called an ‘Aboriginal
Middle Ages’, in the 2006 film Ten Canoes. This film is the result of a collaboration between
Dutch-born Balanda (non-Indigenous Australian) director Rolf de Heer and members of the
Yolngu community of North-West Arnhem Land, in particular his co-director Peter Djigirr
and the acclaimed actor David Gulpilil. It is in two versions, one with English narrative voice-
over, and the other entirely in Yolngu Matha. Aiming to be a filmic representation of a mythic
tale set in the Indigenous Dreamtime, it depicts a past that its English-language narrator,
voiced by Gulpilil, insists is ‘true’: not factual but true.14 As with other more conventional
medievalist films, especially time-travel films, Ten Canoes faces the challenge of representing
the modern present and distant history, as well as a deep mythic past behind this history. It
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does this by placing the story within three time frames: first we encounter the present-tense
frame of the narrator, who invites us to listen to his tale. The film then moves into an earlier
time frame, which is described in the film’s official accompanying literature as having taken
place ‘a thousand years ago’ – so, in eleventh-century Aboriginal Australia (Press Kit, p. 4). In
this ‘medieval’ time frame, we witness the elder Minygululu telling the young man Dayindi,
who desires Minygululu’s youngest wife, an instructive Dreamtime story that parallels their
own, in which a young ancestor Yeeralparil comes to regret coveting the wife of his elder.
Despite the temptation to draw parallels between this narrative and those of such famous
medieval lovers as Tristan and Isolde or Lancelot and Guinevere, the film’s apparently eleventh-
century setting cannot be called ‘medieval’ in any Western sense: its status as medium aevum
derives, rather, from it falling between the Dreamtime and the modern age of Indigenous–
European contact. The film’s use of oral storytelling moves across the different time frames
in a continuous present tense, creating a seamless continuum between the three eras. By
insisting on the ‘truth’ rather than factuality of its history, the English-narrated version of
this sophisticated film signals its awareness of the impossibility of non-Aboriginal audiences
gaining unmediated access to that past. It is, nevertheless, the closest any popular Australian
text has come to showing Western audiences what an in situ Australian Middle Ages – that is,
a pre-contact Indigenous Middle Ages – might have been.
If settler Australia’s privileging of medieval heritage over the Indigenous past was
unambiguous, the case is more complicated when it came to engaging with Australia’s ancient
and austere landscape. Here, the sense of being haunted by the land’s imposingly deep past was
acknowledged, but via an idiom that interpreted this past in medievalist terms. A number of
colonial authors achieved a complex medievalizing of the antipodean landscape by appealing
to a number of recognizably Gothic tropes when describing it. The most famous example of
this comes from Marcus Clarke, in his oft-quoted passage:
Europe is the home of knightly song, of bright deeds and clear morning thought … in
Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature
learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without
perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on
all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this land of
monstrosities … the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his
heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful riches of Egypt.15
The invocation of the Gothic in Clarke’s description creates an unstable medievalism. On the
surface it seems that the highly charged Gothic scene is presented as the primitive antithesis
of the refined world that inspires ‘knightly song’, with Clarke using the Gothic to evoke
what Andrew McCann has called the ‘spectral alterity’ of the Australian landscape.16 Yet, at
the same time, his memorable use of pathetic fallacy elsewhere in the text (the mountains
are ‘funereal, secret, stern’, the gums are ‘melancholy’, the hills are ‘frowning’) obliquely
medievalizes the Australian natural scene by imputing to it those characteristics of otherworldly
horror, dereliction and engulfing gloom that in the Gothic genre were commonly associated
with medieval castles and baronial halls. This has the secondary effect of domesticating this
apparently alien landscape by rendering it intelligible to readers familiar with the medievalist
architectural tropes of the Gothic. Interestingly, Clarke also, in a gesture that ran counter
to the medievalist denial of convictism, resorted to the darker medievalist language of the
Gothic to describe the barbarity of Australia’s then recently defunct convict system in his
historical romance His Natural Life (serialized 1870–1; book publication 1874). With its
gruesome portrayals of convicts descending into savagery, Clarke’s account of penal servitude
in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), presents a purgatorial world of anguish
and dehumanization. Clarke’s recourse to these Gothic images presents Australia’s convict
history as a ghastly punitive past that echoes the Gothicized medieval past, filled with the
spectral presences of the abused and their tormentors.
Antipodean Gothic is taken further and given arresting physical form by the work of the
Austrian-born colonial landscape artist Eugène von Guérard. For von Guérard the Gothic is
not just an ineffable quality of gloom or threat, but a visible feature of the landscape itself.
This impulse led him to interpret naturally occurring features of the Australian environment
as medieval ruins. This is epitomized in his South End of Tasman’s Island (1867). In this
lithograph we encounter what can be called a ‘geological Gothicism’, in which the image of
the fluted, Jurassic southeast coast of Tasmania is depicted as resembling both the imposing
ruin of a medieval castle and the towering pipes of a vast ecclesiastical organ. Von Guérard’s
image is significant for its use of the Gothic architectural vocabulary that was mobilized
regularly to describe the Australian landscape, and which led to geological formations being
given such names as ‘the Organ Pipes’ at Mount Wellington in Tasmania, ‘Cathedral Rock’
in Tasmania as well as on the south coast of New South Wales and ‘Ruined Castle’ in the
Blue Mountains west of Sydney. Within the Eurocentric historical imaginary of colonial
Australia, the unfamiliar and immeasurably ancient natural environment was revered yet
also contained by its likeness to the familiar and comfortably old cultural monuments of the
European Middle Ages.
In recent years it has become a commonplace to argue that the Gothic has been so potent
in Australian art and literature because the brooding desolation these works depict, often
without complete understanding, is the emptiness of a land whose people have disappeared.
By this argument, the Gothic is implicated in the broader medievalist disavowal of Australia’s
Indigenous past. It is this cultural valency, according to Katrin Althans, that has led a number
of prominent Indigenous artists and writers, including artist Tracy Moffatt in her 1990 film
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, to appropriate the Gothic in a way that fills the ‘black void’17 at
the heart of the Gothic with Aboriginal presence. In this uneasy film, which features the silent,
strained relationship between an Aboriginal woman and her ailing elderly white foster mother,
the tropes of the Gothic are present in the surreally stylized outback setting and the audio
track, which is full of the disturbing sounds of the bush at night; but the ideological amnesia
of settler Gothic is refused. Its Aboriginal character is haunted less by her eerie outback
surroundings than by the legacy of colonization, which has brought with it dispossession,
alienation and melancholy (Moffatt 1990).
Along with Ten Canoes, Moffatt’s film demonstrates it is Indigenous reworkings that
have in recent years energized the Australian medievalist inheritance and taken it in the
most fertile direction, revealing what had been obscured in the cultural quest to make
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Australia over in the image of the medieval. Yet for all their exposure of the ideological and
temporal contradictions underlying Australian medievalism, Aboriginal medievalism is no
less paradoxical or ambivalent than the nineteenth-century inheritance it queries. What it
ultimately reveals, albeit in a different way, is something that is apparent even in the earliest
instances of its usage: that Australian medievalism must always to some degree traffic in
paradox, building monuments to the impossible. Real but not true; or true, but not real.
Medieval, yet not; and Australian, yet not.
Notes
1. Mead, Jenna (2005), ‘Medievalism and memory work: Archer’s folly and the gothic revival pile’,
in Stephanie Trigg (ed.), Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture. Turnhout: Brepols,
pp. 99–118, at pp. 104–6.
2. Barry, Redmond (1866), ‘The halls of Europe’. The Age, 10 September, 2, p. 2.
3. Montana, Andrew (2000), The Art Movement in Australia: Design, Taste and Society 1875–1900.
Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, p. 62.
4. Praed, Rosa (1893), The Romance of a Station: An Australian Story. London: Chatto and Windus,
p. 229.
5. Cowling, G. H. (1935), ‘The future of Australian literature’. The Age, 16 February, p. 6.
6. Clarke, Marcus (1893), ‘Preface’, in Adam Lindsay Gordon (ed.), Poems. London and Melbourne:
Robert A. Thompson, A. H. Massina, pp. v–xiv.
7. Andrew, Brian (2001), Australian Gothic: The Gothic Revival in Australian Architecture from the
1840s to the 1950s. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, p. 4.
8. Daley, Victor J. (1947), in Muir Holburn and Marjorie Pizer (eds), foreword by E. J. Brady,
drawings by Roderick Shaw, Creeve Roe: Poetry by Victor Daley. Sydney: Pinchgut Press, pp. 41–3.
9. de Serville, Paul (1991), Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850–80. Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, p. 206.
10. Hopkins, Livingston York (1887), ‘The Australian Jubilee Peerage’. The Bulletin, 25 June, p. 18.
11. Cowley, Des (2004), ‘Redeeming an obligation: Aboriginal culture at the 1866 exhibition’.
The La Trobe Journal, 73: 112–20.
12. Cassidy-Welch, Megan (2005), ‘“A Place of Horror and Vast Solitude”: Medieval Monasticism
and the Australian Landscape’, in Stephanie Trigg (ed.), Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian
Culture. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 189–204, at pp. 191 and 204.
13. Brady, E. J. (1910), ‘On Kiera’, The Bulletin, 16 June, p. 6.
14. de Heer, Rolf and the People of Ramingining (2006). Ten Canoes. South Australia: Film Finance
Corporation.
15. Clarke, Marcus (1893), ‘Preface’, in Adam Lindsay Gordon (ed.), Poems. London and Melbourne:
Robert A. Thompson, A. H. Massina, pp. v–xiv, at p. ix.
16. McCann, Andrew (2007), ‘Colonial Nature-Inscription: On Haunted Landscapes’, in Helen
Tiffin (ed.), Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire. Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, pp. 71–84, at p. 80.
17. Althans, Katrin (2010), Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and
Film. Gottingen: V & R Unipress/Bonn University Press, p. 156.
chapter seventeen
Julian of Norwich and

Margery Kempe as
Contemporary Cult Figures
Fiona Tolhurst
To the general reader, Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416) and Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after
1438) are established literary figures. Yet neither Julian’s A Revelation of Love nor Margery’s
Book of Margery Kempe would ever have entered the canon of English literature had these
mystics not become cult figures of a sort among academics. Their fan base, particularly
among feminist scholars, was instrumental in gaining Margery a place in the 1986 edition
(Margery, pp. 368–77) and Julian a place in the 1993 edition (Julian, pp. 292–7) of The
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Of course, these women are not cult figures in the
strictest sense of the word, for neither has ever been presented as a saint-candidate within
the Christian Church. Nevertheless, both their afterlives are products of the spiritual focus of
their writings. Julian, who inspires both a cult of personality among academics and intense
veneration among contemporary Christians, has the stronger following whereas Margery
inspires little more than a cult of personality.
Julian of Norwich as Cult Figure

Passionate interest in, and affection for, the woman who took the idea of God’s motherhood
further than any theologian before her has resulted in Julian of Norwich’s writings appearing
in many surveys of English literature as well as in courses in Women’s and Gender Studies.
This cult of personality contributed to the increasing number of publications about Julian
between 1980 and 2010: a subject search of the Modern Language Association Bibliography
(accessed 19 November 2013) yields 60 entries for the 1980s, 70 for the 1990s and 90 for
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the 2000s. Scholarly devotion to Julian has also made her works, life and reception core
topics in the field of medieval studies.1 What divides Julian’s devotees within academe is
whether they view her writings as divinely inspired – as a gospel – or not: while some scholars
translate Julian’s Middle English word ‘shewinges’ as ‘revelations’, others prefer ‘showings’ –
a synonym for visions that does not imply God’s communicating through her to the Christians
of her time.2
Prominent Roman Catholic and Anglican clergy, however, are united in offering to Julian
international recognition as an example of holiness and spiritual wisdom. In a 2010 General
Audience, Pope Benedict XVI noted that she is ‘venerated both in the Catholic Church and in
the Anglican Communion’, not only because she chose to withdraw from the world in order
‘to live in God’s company’ but also because she concludes her theological treatise with the
assertion that ‘all manner of things shall be well’, thereby stating a fundamental tenet of the
Catholic faith: that God can bring good even out of ‘evil and the suffering of innocents’.3 In
a homily presented at the 2006 General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United
States, the then presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori invoked Julian’s spiritual
wisdom. Paraphrasing A Revelation of Love, Bishop Schori encouraged listeners to internalize
the insight into the nature of God that Julian’s book explores: ‘That sweaty, bloody, tear-
stained labor of the cross bears new life. Our mother Jesus gives birth to a new creation –
and you and I are His children.’4 These public statements by church leaders offer Julian
recognition that borders on veneration.
Websites indicate yet more extravagant forms of recognition. A mainstream Roman
Catholic website refers to her as ‘Blessed’ and ‘St Juliana of Norwich’ while an Episcopal/
Anglican blog labels her ‘Saint Julian of Norwich’.5 To a websurfer encountering this mystic’s
afterlife for the first time, Julian appears to have been canonized by the church when, in fact,
she has not. The Roman Catholic Church’s allotting a feast day (13 May) to Julian in its
liturgical calendar, and the Lutheran and Anglican Churches’ allotting her one (8 May) in their
calendars further obscures her lack of official place among the saints of the Western Church.6
Technically speaking, receiving recognition in the calendars of these three denominations
gives Julian of Norwich a status exceeding that of a beatified person, someone commonly
known as a local saint.
Within particular segments of the Christian laity too – and on both sides of the Atlantic –
Julian of Norwich receives veneration as a true cult figure, a fact reflected in the activities
of two groups: the Episcopal Order of Julian of Norwich (OJN), which was founded in
Norwich, Connecticut, and The Friends of Julian of Norwich, an international group based
in Norwich, England, that encourages modern-day pilgrimage to her reconstructed cell at St
Julian’s Church. The OJN fits the dictionary definition of a cult: its members have developed
a system of ‘religious veneration’ of a particular figure, they are a small minority within the
Anglican Communion, and both their idiosyncratic version of Christian religious practice
and their residence in a monastic community that takes Julian’s Revelation of Love as the
‘scriptural’ basis for daily life might well be viewed as ‘strange’ or ‘excessive’ by those outside
the group.7 The OJN’s members live according to a rule based on that of the Benedictines.8
Given Julian’s celebration in her book of both the female and male attributes of God, it is
not surprising that the order named for her integrates women into all aspects of spiritual
Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as Contemporary Cult Figures 189
life – including the celebration of Mass. The members of this community not only pattern
their daily life after Julian’s teachings but also spread her good news through the Order of
Julian website, whose homepage demonstrates reverence for their patron by identifying her
as ‘St Julian’.9
The orderofjulian.org website encourages the continuation of the cult of Julian of
Norwich in two ways: it offers access to products that can enrich spiritual practice, and it
provides a window to both men and women on the benefits of life within this contemplative
monastic order. The site enables visitors to obtain translations of Julian’s Middle English
writings, transcripts of lectures on Julian of Norwich, studies of and commentaries on Julian,
iPublications of liturgical books and rites, aids to prayer and meditation and CDs of sacred
music. The site also encourages website visitors to consider experiencing the community –
whether as a guest or a new member – by providing verbal and visual snapshots of OJN
members’ strict daily schedule of work (contemplative as well as physical) and prayer, as befits
their commitment to the monastic tradition of hospitality.
In contrast to their American monastic counterparts, the primarily English Friends of
Julian function within a lay community inspired by Julian’s writings. This group offers two
types and two levels of membership. For a subscription fee of £12, anyone can become a
Friend entitled to receive the Julian Newsletter twice per year and an invitation to the Annual
Festival.10 Although over three-quarters of its members live in the United Kingdom, the Friends
are surprisingly international with North American enthusiasm for Julian being especially
strong.11 Attending the Julian Festival – an event which includes both the annual lecture and
the Friends’ Annual General Meeting – constitutes what one might call basic participation.
Nevertheless, the Friends engage in a variety of activities intended to ‘encourage interest in
Julian’s life and work’ that require the active participation of a good number of its members.12
According to the Friends’ website, volunteers offer educational programmes for both children
and adults on Julian’s writings, organize a prayer circle, encourage the ongoing veneration
of Julian of Norwich through the Julian Festival they host every May in Norwich and link
tourists and pilgrims with the resources available at The Julian Centre.
But the more active form of membership in the Friends’ community is that of a subgroup
whose intensity of engagement with Julian’s theology merits a different name: the Companions.
The Companions were established in 2009 to provide those Friends who seek ‘a spiritually
deeper way of life inspired by Julian’s insights into the nature of God and the human person’
with a structure within which to achieve that way of life; this structure consists of practices
such as ‘daily prayer, regular study of Julian’s Revelations and sharing in the responsibility for
furthering the educational work of the Julian Centre’.13 According to the centre administrator
Nicole McDonald, the Companions are ‘a unique mixture of ordinary people through to
Priests of all faiths who have an interest [in] and love of Julian’.14 While many Friends serve
the organization through volunteer work, Companions commit to transforming their way
of life so thoroughly that they could be categorized as members of a cult with its centre of
activity in Norwich, England.
The main regularly scheduled event sponsored by the Friends is The Julian Festival, which
merits detailed description because of what it reveals about the Christian followers of Julian
of Norwich. The Festival takes place in the city of Norwich, always on the second Saturday
190
of the month to keep it close to 8 May – the date on which the Church of England celebrates
her life. The Festival is organized by The Friends of Julian of Norwich in consultation with
the rector of the Parish of St John the Baptist, Timberhill, which (as the city’s main Anglican
Church) has both Julian of Norwich’s Shrine and St Julian’s Church ‘in [its] care’.15 The 2013
festival programme included a Mass, an hour-long lecture, a picnic lunch, workshops, the
Annual General Meeting of the Friends and a benediction.16 At previous festivals, attendees
have participated in a vespers service (an evening prayer service that constitutes part of the
daily office of services of the Western Christian Church) before receiving the blessing with
which the event traditionally closes.17
Just as the structure of the festival programme reflects the Friends’ goal of seeking greater
intimacy with God, so does the topic of the annual lecture. In 2013, the speaker considered
how Julian’s example has impacted the children and adults who have visited the shrine
and visitors’ centre; the 2012 lecturer challenged listeners to ‘believe in a God who is all
love’ and to ‘live in the conviction of [their] own loveableness’ and ‘capacity to love with
intensity’; and the 2011 lecturer explored how Julian uses a ‘poetics of femininity’ to present
the metaphorical desert of the anchorhold as a space in which she can move beyond ‘the
conventional discourse of miles Christi with its spears and swords, battles and beatings’ in
order to focus on ‘a maternal, all-loving God’.18 The Julian Festival demonstrates that Julian’s
cult following is strong among academics (some of whom attend this event), but stronger
still among the Christians who set the contemplative tone of this annual celebration of the
mystic’s life.
Pilgrimage to Norwich
I didn’t need the map I had collected at Norwich Station to find the cathedral, for it dominates
the city’s skyline. Following council signposts, I set off on my journey to Julian’s Shrine.
I walk through the elegant shopping district, cross the footbridge, turn right onto Upper King
Street and into the cathedral close. My visit to the cathedral will disappoint both my pilgrim
and medievalist selves.
As I enter the nave on a windy and bitterly cold February day, a cathedral guide greets me.
When I ask her about Julian-related tourism to Norwich, she confesses, ‘Local people tend
not to know who Julian is. It’s the American visitors who know her well.’ My pilgrim’s heart
sinks. When the guide takes me directly to the Julian windows, my medievalist self is equally
disappointed. For these twentieth-century works of art represent Julian as a Benedictine nun,
images which detract from her singularity by focusing on her probable membership in a
holy order. Because some Julian specialists assume that she was a nun who later became an
anchoress while others assume that she was a layperson who rejected the restricted life of a
nun in favour of the independent lifestyle of an anchoress, these images make me feel sad that
Julian must be limited – conceptually enclosed – by visual representations.19
The iconography of the Julian windows does, however, make its own surprisingly strong
claims. The Bauchon Chapel window (by Moira Forsyth 1964) presents Julian as a Benedictine
nun whose figure anchors a set of four lancet windows depicting the history of the Benedictine
order in England. Within this visual context, she is safely orthodox. But the two lines emanating
from the crucifix to which the Julian-figure prays make her holiness visible: these lines seem
to represent beams of holy light that pierce Julian’s heart, signifying the divine origin of the
message of love that Julian records in her writings. The St Saviour’s Chapel window, made
in 1930, also depicts Julian as a Benedictine nun but allots an entire lancet to her to press
its visual claims even harder. Here Julian is a saint (she wears a green halo), one who writes
a gospel: the book she holds has a binding whose cover and clasp liken it to a codex such as
the Lindisfarne Gospels. The St Saviour’s window also includes a visual detail derived from
the Ancrene Wisse’s mention of the fact that an anchoress may have a feline companion in
her anchorhold: this dour-looking ‘Juliana’ is accompanied by a marmalade-coloured tabby
cat.20 I could choose to read this window’s iconography as suggesting that the divine can
enter the everyday world, but for me the cat detracts from Julian’s status as a holy woman by
presenting her as needing companionship other than Christ’s in order to function.
After the guide has shown me these two windows, my pilgrimage takes me to the Cathedral’s
exterior and its shop. Like the stained glass in the chapels, the statue of Julian that occupies
a niche by the west door of the building is modern. Its creator is David Holgate, a Norwich
sculptor and carver. Holgate’s statue suits the occasion for which it was commissioned, the
New Millennium. It presents Julian as a middle-aged, ordinary woman whose headdress might
or might not be that of a nun and whose primary characteristic is that she holds her book –
complete with the title by which it is known outside of academe, Revelations of Divine Love;21
Holgate’s ambivalent representation of her identity pleases me. In the Cathedral Gift Shop is
an array of items that facilitate participation in Julian’s cult: aids to study such as Elizabeth
Spearing’s (1998) and Grace Jantzen’s (2011) editions of the mystic’s works, discussions
of the relevance of Julian’s teachings today such as Sheila Upjohn’s In Search of Julian of
Norwich (1989) and Robert Llewelyn’s Enfolded in Love (2004) and aids to venerating ‘Saint’
Julian – portable icons depicting her with a nun’s habit and saint’s halo.
With time to spare before I am to meet Father Martin Smith (the now retired rector of the
Parish of St John the Baptist, Timberhill) at St Julian’s Church, I retrace my steps in order
to focus on the experience of pilgrimage to the Julian of Norwich Shrine. Naively assuming
that I would find St Julian’s Church without reference to my city map, I return to Norwich
Station before setting off for the church. The station offers warmth, sustenance, comfort; the
path into the medieval heart of the city distresses me. Crossing what would otherwise have
been an attractive footbridge onto Prince of Wales Road, my eyes are drawn to the rubbish
scattered about on either side of the path. It looks as if the city has given up trying to keep this
pedestrian way tidy, a sight that contrasts sharply with the spiffy shops and clean pavement
along Prince of Wales Road. Worse, I cannot find a single arrow on the city signposts to
indicate how to find St Julian’s. I take Norwich Cathedral as my landmark to the north,
knowing that the small church is in the opposite direction, and walk south on King Street.
I blithely walk right past the entrance to St Julian’s Alley, and only when confronted with an
eyesore of a building site that (according to locals) has been in this state for years do I realize
I have gone wrong.
I turn into the brutal Norfolk wind and walk back towards Dragon Hall: this is the fifteenth-
century building whose Tudor façade gives central Norwich much of its character. I soon spot
the sign for St Julian’s Alley – which I had missed because it is not only well above head-height
192
but also well hidden on the side of a building. I wonder how many other latter-day pilgrims
will bypass St Julian’s Church, or even make an effort to find it. In a city whose cathedral
contains three depictions of Julian and devotes a section of its gift shop to this holy woman,
it is odd that St Julian’s Alley remains such a well-kept secret. In 2012, Norwich became
England’s first UNESCO City of Literature, thanks in part to Julian of Norwich’s producing
the first book written in English by a woman.22 Might this honour have inspired some Julian-
ist enthusiasm among members of the local council and gain her some visibility in the city’s
pedestrian zone? Apparently not.
But once I have found St Julian’s Alley, it is impossible to miss the church to which it leads.
Father Smith shows me round before inviting me to chat in his office just off the nave. He
tells me two key facts about the building: that it was originally dedicated to St Julian, Bishop
of Le Mans, and was rededicated to him after its 1950s restoration, although that rebuild
was inspired by the fame of Lady Julian; and that the site welcomes a mixture of tourists and
pilgrims – many of whom come to Norwich when visiting Walsingham. When asked to compare
the two Norfolk pilgrimage sites, the rector praises Norwich’s shrine because it provides ‘a
place of peace’ that contrasts with ‘the showiness of Walsingham’.23 Walsingham draws over
a quarter of a million visitors per year, for it boasts both The Roman Catholic National
Shrine of Our Lady (the site upon which the Blessed Virgin inspired eleventh-century Saxon
noblewoman Richeldis de Faverches to build a replica of the building in Nazareth where Mary
had received the Annunciation) and The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (what
its website calls a ‘recreation’ of the Nazareth house in which the Annunciation happened).24
Father Smith asserts that ‘many Roman Catholics visit St Julian’s Church, but so do
Christians of other denominations’. As a result, St Julian’s regularly welcomes pilgrims
from both inside and outside the United Kingdom. He informs me that several years ago
St Julian’s hosted a group of Presbyterians from the United States for whom the Julian of
Norwich Shrine was ‘the highlight of their tour of England’. These pilgrims found local
accommodation, and they prayed together in the church. Although the shrine at St Julian’s
Church has annual visitor numbers in the hundreds rather than the hundred thousands, its
guestbook for 2012 contains signatures from people all over the world – many of them from
Canada, Australia or the United States. I wonder if this pattern reflects the relatively large
population of Anglicans in Canada and Australia as well as the strong presence of Julian of
Norwich in American university courses. Father Smith blames the city’s leaders, in part, for
the small number of visitors to the Julian of Norwich Shrine. When parish priest, he made
repeated written requests that the city install a few additional arrows on the existing signposts
to create a pilgrim’s way from Norwich Station, past Dragon Hall and up St Julian’s Alley. Yet
the city has refused to invest in its pilgrimage industry despite the low cost of doing so.
Visiting St Julian’s Church and Lady Julian’s cell leaves me with mixed emotions. I grieve
for their destruction. The photos at the back of the nave tell of the church’s decimation during
the Second World War bombings, and Father Smith recounts how Henry VIII vandalized the
cell when he dissolved the nearby priory that owned it. And sitting in this 1950s rebuild
I mourn the havoc that the modern and early modern periods have wreaked on the medieval
past, even as I feel joy at that past’s survival. A fifteenth-century font that has retained its
images of the apostles and other saints (including their heads) despite the iconoclasm of the
Reformation makes me feel a medievalist’s satisfaction at the battered, but insistent, presence
of medieval Christian practice in England. Made around the time of Julian’s death, the font
was not placed at St Julian’s until its original home, All Saints’ Church, closed its doors in
1977. A Romanesque doorway, originally the main door to another local church (St Michael
at Thorn), connects the nave to Julian’s cell and symbolically takes pilgrims like myself back
into history.
The space’s white walls and spare furnishings are appropriate for a reconstructed
anchorhold, but ‘Protestant’ enough in feel to remind me of Henry VIII’s ‘Reformation’.
Nevertheless, two surviving fragments of the cell’s foundations (as Father Smith identifies
them) make Julian’s devotion to the contemplative life visible. The emotional lift that these
fragments of stonework give me is enhanced by the ‘All Shall Be Well’ window (1953), which
provides another link between the cell and the nave. It is ‘Protestant’ glass in its plainness, but
its clear background enabled me to peek into the church just as Julian might have done during
Mass. In contrast to the dour-looking Julian with cat and the haggard-looking Julian in the
cathedral niche, the Julian-figure in the mystic’s rebuilt home is youthful-looking – despite her
Benedictine garb. She also interacts with the Christ-figure on an emotional level: each looks
into the other’s eyes. Julian’s kneeling before a Christ who suffers on a lily crucifix encourages
the pilgrim to pray, while the ‘All shall be well’ scroll floating above Julian’s head encourages
the pilgrim to internalize the joyful message that she received. The use of the lily crucifix
is appropriate not only because this image developed in the European religious art of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but also because medieval Christians associated the lily with
the date 25 March, the day of both the Annunciation and the Crucifixion.25 Thus, the lily’s
presence positions Julian as receiving another annunciation of the profundity of God’s love.
Moving from the inspiring space of Julian’s cell into The Julian Centre is, inevitably, an
anticlimax. The Centre caters to both pilgrims and tourists. For those interested in Julian of
Norwich and her time, there is a bookcase full of materials available for academic research
or individual study as well as books and pamphlets for sale that focus on Julian, in particular,
or explore Christian spirituality in general. Then there are the seemingly inescapable royal
family souvenirs that Father Smith had told me would be there – despite his objections to
the mixing of tacky trinkets with books to aid spiritual growth. My chat with the Friends’
volunteers staffing the shop is illuminating: the Centre receives visitors from Britain, North
America, Australia and Asia, yet barely manages to remain viable. The women on duty the day
of my visit also note how serving refreshments helps the Centre’s bottom line. But if they are
hospitable, the Centre is less welcoming. I wonder whether visitors would stay longer – and
consequently spend more money – if the Centre had well-cushioned wingchairs, rather than
functional furniture, and a more inviting ambience. Or if it were easier to book a room at All
Hallows House next door to the Centre.26
Margery Kempe as Cult Figure

While Julian of Norwich is a true cult figure for certain segments of the contemporary church,
Margery Kempe is a cult figure almost exclusively for academics. The occasional veneration
Margery receives from today’s Christians is insignificant compared to the adoration that the
194
patron ‘saint’ of the OJN and Friends of Julian receives. Perhaps the best way to describe
Margery’s cult is feminist hero worship by a subset of academics. To professors of medieval
English literature, Margery Kempe is ‘our sister, Margery’ who enables them to showcase the
relevance of the Middle Ages to their students. One indication of the veneration she receives
within academe is the reaction of a male colleague to a conference paper I delivered at the
2009 International Congress on Medieval Studies.27 I suggest that Margery Kempe – although
a fascinatingly eccentric figure – was absolutely orthodox in her Christian practice and (as far
as readers of her book can tell) absolutely orthodox in her beliefs. A male colleague warns:
‘Don’t try to take my sister Margery from me.’ If this is an indirect measure of Middle English
literature specialists’ passionate identification with Norfolk’s lay mystic, then the number
of publications recorded in the Modern Language Association Bibliography (accessed 10
December 2013) is a more direct measure of this engagement. A subject search for studies of
Margery Kempe yields 43 entries for the 1980s, 113 for the 1990s and 150 for the 2000s –
306 entries as opposed to the 220 for Julian during the same time span.
Yet Margery Kempe’s extraordinary behaviour (her loud crying fits and wide-ranging
travels) and achronological autobiography receive negative as well as positive interpretation,
as becomes evident from reading academic websites. Many present her as a social radical:
a University of Rochester site that offers access to Lynn Staley’s 1996 TEAMS edition of
The Book of Margery Kempe and a College of the Holy Cross one, supervised by Sarah Stanbury
and Virginia Raguin, that provides the digital resources to illuminate the cultural and social
world connected with the mystic’s book.28 Negative reception of Margery accentuates her
eccentric pilgrimages and somewhat problematic mysticism. So, a student-authored webpage
at King’s College terms her ‘controversial’, ‘hysterical and crazy’, while the ‘Margery Kempe’
profile in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica focuses on the ‘“boystous” crying spells’ that
distinguish Margery from other mystics.29
Despite the fact that no surviving ecclesiastical records corroborate Margery’s claims that
she was accused of and arrested for Lollardy as well as questioned to confirm both her chastity
and her orthodoxy, her autobiography so fascinates medievalists in English departments that
they give her book prominence in courses about medieval England.30 Julian’s lifestyle as an
anchoress and her theologically rich writings distance her from the secularized societies of
today’s Western world; Margery’s life choices render her more accessible, especially for
university students who tend neither to want children in the near future nor to consider
monastic life a reasonable and attractive option. In particular, academics hold up as examples
of feminist heroism Margery’s purchase of freedom from sexual relations with her husband,
John Kempe, that made pursuing her chosen vocation possible, and her reports of speaking
with the confidence of a holy woman to men in positions of authority.31 Margery’s prominence
both in scholarly publications and on course syllabi has turned her into a rare commodity: an
example of an early ‘feminist’ who fits into courses in Women’s and Gender Studies as well as
courses in premodern English literature.
Yet the fame and popularity Margery Kempe enjoys among academics – especially British
and American ones – does not translate into a significant following outside of the academy.
Within the Anglican Communion, Margery receives local and rather reluctant recognition.
By visiting the King’s Lynn Minster (known in Margery’s time as St Margaret’s Church)
and interviewing Canon Christopher Ivory, vicar of the Minster, I come to understand why
Margery’s following among contemporary Christians remains limited.
Pilgrimage to King’s Lynn

I soon discover that the tourist board in charge of marketing Norfolk does not take Margery
Kempe entirely seriously. King’s Lynn Online includes the would-be saint on its list of ‘Famous
People from Around King’s Lynn’ as well as on its ‘1,000 Years of History’ timeline.32 Yet
the King’s Lynn Minster is not among the town’s ‘Places to Visit’, and Margery’s timeline
entry includes an exclamation point that undercuts the status of a miracle she records in her
book: ‘1421–Trinity Guildhall built as a result of fire (Margery Kempe prayed for snow from
St Margaret’s and town as a whole was saved!)’33 The Visit West Norfolk website mentions the
Minster under its ‘Explore’ category as well as a son of Margery’s under its ‘Hanseatic King’s
Lynn’ category, but it fails to associate the church with the town’s medieval mystic.34 In fact,
the West Norfolk site’s only comment about Margery Kempe is that after her son died, ‘she
escorted her daughter-in-law back to Danzig’.35 The tourist board’s lack of enthusiasm for
the King’s Lynn mystic is evident in the 2013 Visitors’ Guide: Where to go and what to see in
Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, which mentions the Minster but neither
Margery nor her book.36 Even when promoting its pilgrimage trail and listing St Margaret’s
Church (now the Minster) as one of the five religious sites on that trail, the town of King’s
Lynn does not invoke its medieval daughter who made pilgrimage the cornerstone of her
Christian practice.37
Good train links make getting to King’s Lynn easy, but pilgrimage to the Minster is a
disappointing experience for Margery fans; she is almost nowhere to be found. For £4 the
official walking tour of King’s (formerly Bishop’s) Lynn tells me much about the fifteenth-
century pilgrimage business as well as about the Student Cross (a present-day Easter pilgrimage
to Walsingham); I hear not a single word about Margery Kempe.38 Her absence from the local
tourism scene is most striking, however, in the brochure I collect from the tourist office.
There is no mention of a female pilgrim here; it is subtitled, ‘Walking in the footsteps of
medieval craftsmen’ and includes King’s Lynn Minster as an attraction along the way notable
only for its medieval brasses.
The Minster itself does give some prominence to Margery Kempe; nevertheless, my self-
guided tour reveals that Margery’s parish church defines her merely as an extraordinary
laywoman who followed God’s call by going on pilgrimage – not as a holy woman. A large
display about Margery’s life complements her prominent coverage on the Minster’s website,39
even as its position at the back of the church reflects her status as a cult figure for a select
few. No works of art (such as a stained glass window) celebrate her gifts of holy tears and
spiritual visions.40 The display – a series of images and pieces of text mounted on a tabletop
bulletin board and adjacent to a display about prayer – seems only temporary. It includes
images contributed by a Canadian university – and, in a typical attempt by Margery’s fans to
legitimize her, links Margery with her widely revered spiritual advisor Julian. The colourful
yet less-than-solid appearance of the poster board is consistent with the passionate interest
this mystic stirs in a tiny number of today’s Christians. Its physical position suggests Margery’s
196
usefulness as an example of lay piety, modelling prayer and pilgrimage, in particular. Overall,
the source of the images jibes with Canon Ivory’s sense that North American and Australian
interest in this mystic is greater than English interest.
Later Canon Ivory informs me that ‘only an occasional visitor’ identifies Margery as the
reason for coming to the Minster; he says ‘perhaps one or two people per year’ come as
pilgrims to the church where she worshipped. He comments that the town’s lack of promotion
of its local mystic is consistent with its relative lack of promotion in general. Yet even a
cursory glance at the tourist placards around town shows that the local community touts its
early modern maritime history. And though the Minster hosts a monthly Julian Meeting for
both Roman Catholics and Anglicans, there is no prayer group encouraging spiritual growth
in Margery’s name.
The canon’s cautious response to Margery Kempe provides an example of Anglicans’
limited interest in the King’s Lynn mystic. He states that he has never preached based on
Margery’s book, only mentioned her in passing in sermons as an extraordinary local person:
widely travelled, with a strong sense of self – not least because her father was mayor of the
town – and with an ego sizeable enough to encourage her to write a book about her life. Canon
Ivory suggests that The Book of Margery Kempe does not have the same relevance to the daily
lives of Christians today as Julian’s writings do, for ‘it is finally about herself, while Julian’s
writings are about theology – and decidedly not about herself ’. Perhaps Margery Kempe is
not a role model for today’s Anglicans because her book presents her visionary experiences
so literally, and expresses her desire for future sainthood so strongly, that Christian readers
cannot reconcile its content with an ideal of saintly humility. Certainly, the Church of England
calendar, which grants to Julian of Norwich the title of ‘Spiritual Writer’ as well as a lesser
festival day but gives to Margery Kempe only the vague title of ‘Mystic’ and the minor honour
of a day of commemoration, reflects Margery’s tenuous and awkward position in relation to
the parishioners of the King’s Lynn Minster and Anglican worshipers today.41
This awkwardness is also evident on the Minster website, where Margery is described as a
laywoman ‘who felt she was called by God to live a life of prayer and contemplation, in the
world’, ‘who liked good food, and fine dresses and hats, and to be seen by her neighbours’.
She was ‘independent, proud, outspoken and boisterous, spoke candidly of her sexual desire
and temptations’ and ‘suffered for most of her life with feeling a failure’. The final sentence
of this portrait reads, ‘Whilst Margery challenges Bishops, and ecclesiastical authorities, it is
they, more than the ordinary people who support her, and indeed encourage her.’ Thus the
Minster website (like the medieval clergy) validates Margery’s vocation as a bride of Christ,
even while mimicking the display at the back of the church building in propping up Margery’s
status as a holy woman by associating her with Julian of Norwich.42
Conclusion
Julian of Norwich is a much more powerful cult figure in today’s world than Margery Kempe,
for the nature of her medieval afterlife is much richer than Margery’s. Julian has a strong
following among academics because the implications of her development of the idea of God
as mother challenge modern as well as medieval versions of Christian theology, and she has
an even stronger following among contemporary Christians because her writings reinforce
the teachings of both Catholic and Protestant denominations, while her life as an anchoress
continues to inspire both monastic and lay imitation. In contrast, Margery has a strong
following among today’s academics because her refusal to remain a stay-at-home wife and
mother makes the Middle Ages both accessible and relevant to students, yet her following
among contemporary Christians is weak to non-existent.
This difference in reception translates into a difference in stature: Julian receives veneration
as a ‘saint’ from clergy and laity alike, while Margery receives qualified praise from Christians
as an example of lay piety along with exaggerated praise from academics as ‘our sister
Margery’. Although Margery gives university professors a colourful and eccentric example of
medieval life, they should keep in mind that the prominence of Margery’s medieval afterlife
in university classrooms is out of step with her marginal position in mainstream religious
life in twenty-first-century England. The relative weakness of Margery’s cult among English
Christians today is best summed up by Sally Grant’s pamphlet Margery Kempe: ‘Mystic’ of
Lynn. The inverted commas around the word mystic indicate non-academics’ scepticism about
this woman’s spiritual significance, while the pamphlet’s content undercuts as well as celebrates
her. It celebrates her as a woman who produced ‘the first example of an autobiography in
English prose’ and made ‘great pilgrimages’, but it defines her final years as ‘full of worldly
sorrow’ in the form of the deaths of her husband and son and describes her vocation as a
bride of Christ as ‘gadd[ing] about from place to place in search of salvation’.43 In contrast to
Margery Kempe’s cult, Julian of Norwich’s is strong because her writings engage academics
and non-academics and clergy and laity with theological issues that Western Christendom has
yet to resolve: the nature of God and the place of women within the human institution of the
Christian Church.
All citations are from Julian of Norwich (2006), The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision
Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, eds. N. Watson and J. Jenkins.
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press and M. Kempe (2000), The Book
of Margery Kempe, ed. B. Windeatt. Harlow, England: Longman.
Notes
1. The prominence of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love in this field is
evident in the publication of not only Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins’s critical edition
of the texts in 2006 but also A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy
(2008). Christopher Abbott’s Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (1999), and Veronica
Mary Rolf ’s Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich (2013),
demonstrate ongoing scholarly interest in her life while the 2009 New Middle Ages volume
devoted to Julian’s legacy demonstrates the intensity of scholarly interest in her post-medieval
reception.
2. In the Modern Language Association Bibliography, the Julian of Norwich as subject entries contain
28 uses of ‘revelation’ (one of them with the Middle English spelling ‘revelacion’) and 21 uses of
‘revelations’ versus 20 uses of ‘showing(s)’.
198
3. Transcript of Pope Benedict XVI’s General Audience, 1 December 2010. Available from http://
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101201_
en.html, accessed 7 November 2013.
4. Transcript of then presiding Bishop-elect Schori’s homily of 21 June 2006. Available from http://
archive.episcopalchurch.org/3577_76300_ENG_HTM.htm, accessed 8 November 2013.
5. http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=4124; May 2008 commentary by Father David
quoting Father John-Julian Swanson, OJN (2009), Stars in a Dark World. Denver: Outskirts
Press, http://www.askthepriest.org/askthepriest/2008/05/feast-day-of-ju.html, both accessed
13 November 2013.
6. https://www.loyolapress.com/saints-stories-for-kids.htm?cId=403520, accessed 11 March 2014.
7. http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cultdefinition&ie=UTF-
8&oe=UTF-8, accessed 6 March 2014.
8. http://www.orderofjulian.org/about_ojn.html, accessed 7 November 2013.
9. http://www.orderofjulian.org/home.html, accessed 7 November 2013.
10. http://www.friendsofjulian.org/front-page-block/become-friend, accessed 10 April 2014.
11. Email from N. McDonald to F. Tolhurst, 13 March 2014.
12. http://www.friendsofjulian.org/, accessed 10 April 2014.
13. http://www.friendsofjulian.org/join-us/become-companion, accessed 10 April 2014.
14. Email from N. McDonald to F. Tolhurst, 13 March 2014.
15. Email from Fr. M. Smith to F. Tolhurst, 17 November 2013.
16. http://www.friendsofjulian.org/julian-festival-saturday-11-may-2013, accessed 10 April 2014.
17. The Julian Festival schedule is described at http://www.julianofnorwich.org/centre.shtml,
accessed 7 November 2013.
18. Announcement of The 33rd Julian Lecture, P. Lovelock (2013), ‘Pilgrims’ Powerful Encounters
within the Sacred Walls of Julian’s Shrine’ at http://www.friendsofjulian.org/previousevents,
accessed 10 April 2014; copy of The 32nd Julian Lecture, B. Thorne (2012), ‘A Love Too Great
to Bear? Julian’s Gauntlet to Humanity’. Norwich: The Friends of Julian of Norwich, pp. 10–11;
copy of The 31st Julian Lecture, L. H. McAvoy (2011), ‘From Soldier of Christ to Motherhood
of God: Julian Rewrites the Language of the Anchorhold’. Norwich: The Friends of Julian of
Norwich, pp. 17, 13 and 19.
19. Watson and Jenkins argue that ‘there is a strong possibility she was a nun at the Benedictine
convent at Carrow’, introduction, Julian of Norwich (2006), op. cit., p. 4 [1–59]; B. Ward (1988)
argues that Julian was a laywoman, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in K. Leech and B. Ward (eds), Julian
Reconsidered. Oxford: SLG Press, pp. 11–35.
20. Anonymous (1993), Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. H. White. London: Penguin,
p. 192.
21. For a reliable modern translation of Julian’s writings, see Julian of Norwich (1998), Revelations of
Divine Love, trans. E. Spearing. London: Penguin.
22. For information about Norwich as an UNESCO City of Literature, see http://www.uea.ac.uk/
mac/comm/media/press/2012/May/norwich-unesco, accessed 13 November 2013; and K. Pim,
‘What does Norwich’s status as England’s first UNESCO City of Literature mean for people in
Norfolk?’, 12 November 2012, http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/what_does_norwich_s_status_as_
england_s_first_unesco_city_of_literature_mean_for_people_in_norfolk_1_1690537, accessed
14 November 2013.
23. Fr. M. Smith. Interviewed by: F. Tolhurst (11 February 2013).

24. http://www.walsingham.org.uk/romancatholic; http://www.walsinghamanglican.org.uk/welcome/
index.htm, both accessed 13 November 2013.
25. R. Harries (2004), The Passion in Art. Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 77.
26. http://www.friendsofjulian.org/visitors/guest-house, accessed 10 April 2014.
27. F. Tolhurst (2009), ‘Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as Feminist Theologians’.
ICMS, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI.
28. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/kempint.htm; http://college.holycross.edu/projects/kempe/
about.htm, both accessed 27 February 2014.
29. http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/margerykempe.html; http://search.eb.com/women/
article-9045057, both accessed 27 February 2014.
30. L. Staley (1994), Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, pp. 173–4; M. Kempe (2000), op. cit., 1.52.4114–17, p. 248; 1.53.4312-
26, p. 258; 1.55.4538-43, p. 268; 1.51.4010-73, pp. 243–6; 1.48.3799-818, pp. 234–5;
1.52.4163-71, p. 250.
31. M. Kempe (2000), op. cit., 1.11.775-99, pp. 89–90; 1.12.800-56, pp. 90–92; 1.16.1141-85,
pp. 109–11; 1.45.3592-610, pp. 224–5; 1.45.3653-60, pp. 227–8; 1.46.3676-94, pp. 228–9;
1.47.3721-47, pp. 231–2; 1.48.3819-46, pp. 235–6; 1.52.4172-267, pp. 250–6.
32. http://www.kingslynnonline.com/history-2/famous-people-from-around-kings-lynn; http://www.
kingslynnonline.com/history-2/1000-years-of-history, both accessed 15 January 2013.
33. http://www.kingslynnonline.com/history-2/1000-years-of-history, op. cit.
34. http://www.visitwestnorfolk.com/explore/kings-lynn, accessed 15 January 2013.
35. http://www.visitwestnorfolk.com/explore/kings-lynn/history/hanseatic-kings-lynn,
accessed 15 January 2013.
36. 2013 Visitors’ Guide: Where to go and what to see in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire and
Cambridgeshire, pp. 11–12.
37. http://www.visitwestnorfolk.com/explore/kings-lynn/history/pilgrimage-trail, accessed
15 January 2013.
38. http://www.studentcross.org.uk/northern/, accessed 27 February 2014.
39. http://www.kingslynnminster.org/history/margery-kempe/, accessed 7 November 2013.
40. Rev. C. Ivory. Interviewed by: F. Tolhurst (5 July 2013).
41. For the Julian and Margery entries in the Anglican calendar, see http://www.churchofengland.org/
prayer-worship/worship/texts/festivals/festivals-calendar.aspx, accessed 25 April 2014.
42. http://www.kingslynnminster.org/history/margery-kempe/margery-kempe-and-julian-of-norwich/,
accessed 15 January 2013.
43. S. Grant (1995; reprint 2005), Margery Kempe, 1373-1440: ‘Mystic’ of Lynn. Dereham, Norfolk:
The Larks Press, pp. 13, 5, 11–13, and 1.
chapter eighteen
Conjuring the Ghosts

of Camelot: Tintagel
and the Medievalism of
Heritage Tourism
Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein
In England, England, Julian Barnes’s 1998 satire of the English heritage industry, entrepreneur
Sir Jack Pittman unveils a plan to gather on the Isle of Wight all of England’s best heritage
attractions, from Stonehenge and Robin Hood to the Battle of Britain and the Windsors.
Buildings, works of art, monuments, gardens and landscapes, manuscripts and even people
(i.e. the royals) are to be detached from their historical or cultural context, bundled together
with other markers of ‘Englishness’ and wrapped in a cocoon of amenities: hotels, restaurants,
parking lots and gift shops. Barnes’s spoof takes aim at the global heritage industry. Many
commentators would applaud this satire, which is in keeping with their argument that
heritage is a marker of national decline: it replaces industry with tourism as the primary
driver of the economy and destroys a nation’s capacity for innovation by promoting a
regressive past over a progressive future. To make matters worse, despite heritage’s claims
to present the authentic remnants of the past, academic critics disparage the industry for
promoting inauthentic histories that amount to little more than fantasies of a past that never
existed, a nostalgia that promotes regressive social values at the same time as it commodifies
national culture.1
This chapter explores medieval heritage as a species of medievalism. Unlike popular literary,
cinematic and artistic reproductions of the Middle Ages that proclaim their fictitiousness,
heritage brings the Middle Ages into the present through its specific claim to offer spectators
Conjuring the Ghosts of Camelot 201
the ‘real’ Middle Ages rather than mere fabrication. Yet heritage’s promise of authenticity
must always be cloaked in an apparatus that marshalls restoration, reproduction and re-
creation in the pursuit of the ‘real’. For this reason, we propose that studying the material
remnants of the Middle Ages from the perspective of the tourist and the tourist industry can
be just as enlightening as examining them through the traditional disciplines of archaeology
and history. By troubling heritage tourism’s claims to authenticity, this chapter pushes beyond
the conventional criticisms of the industry – its historical inaccuracy, commodity fetishism
and regressive values – to interrogate the cultural, political, economic and especially symbolic
practices that bring past and present into pleasurable tension.
Our test case for this chapter is Tintagel, the tiny village on the Cornish coast that Geoffrey
of Monmouth claimed was the birthplace of King Arthur. Tintagel is a peculiar site. Unlike
other medieval heritage sites, such as Stonehenge, York Cathedral or Windsor Castle, there is
no material remnant of the site’s ‘heritage’, nothing authentic to see. Since there was no ‘real’
King Arthur, at least in the way we imagine him, the site contains no historical records, no
physical remains of King Arthur or his court, no Camelot,2 a fact noted, with some dismay, in
a 1907 article in English Illustrated Magazine entitled ‘The Lost Land of King Arthur’. A visit
to Tintagel
results in a certain amount of disillusion. It contains no relic, nothing that can verily be
imagined a relic, of the old, old times when the flower of chivalry ruled. As one walks
down the solitary street and glances around he sees that Tintagel is a cheerful, picturesque
little place … but it is not Arthurian unless we go direct to those parts where Nature is
not and never has been molested. The … great gorges, the weird bays and caves, the rock-
strewn valleys, the imposing waterfalls – from these may be constructed the scenery for the
drama of the warlike king and his adventurous knights.3
What Tintagel claims to offer is ‘the old, old times when the flower of chivalry ruled’. But
there is no relic of this imaginary time at Tintagel that might plausibly claim authenticity.
Lacking such a relic, the visitor must have a substitute; otherwise, why visit? The passage
suggests that the visitor substitute the view, the spectacular seascape, to evoke an imaginative
or spectral revenant of the imaginary days of King Arthur. This substitution shifts the
experience of visiting Tintagel to the realm of the symbolic; the magnificent scenery is not to
be enjoyed as a thing in itself, but as a substitute (a sign or symbol) for the Arthurian that is
missing, the trace that haunts the landscape. Since Tintagel trades on the missing Arthurian,
it makes more apparent a process that is masked at other heritage sites by the presence of
material traces. Roman baths, standing stones, a sixteenth-century kitchen,4 all seem to
ground meaning, allowing viewers to believe they are in the presence of an authentic relic of
the past. Historical presence, authenticity, however, is an illusion. Visitors never encounter
the monuments, buildings, artefacts and attractions that are the ostensible purpose of their
travel as objects in and of themselves. Rather, these sites are constituted as symbols or signs
by a heritage apparatus that marks the attraction off from everyday life, ‘sacralizes’ the site
as worthy of tourists’ attention, manages interactions with it and directs the tourist gaze.
These markers include such things as lines, gates, tickets, brochures, audio guides, videos,
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computer simulations, re-enactments, displays, signposts, tour guides and souvenir shops.
This apparatus structures and channels what John Urry has called the ‘tourist gaze’.5
All heritage sites are attractions precisely because they have become symbols (or signs),
whose referent can never be fully present (hence the need for the symbol). Such symbols are
‘meaning magnets’6 that allow individuals or groups to attach new meanings, create new uses
and new symbols primarily through a process of substitution. Since the Arthurian itself is an
empty symbol waiting to be filled, in a process that is theoretically endless, with whatever
content (adventure, romance, honour, virtue, etc.) is at hand, Tintagel’s history, allows us to
observe this ‘strange and invisible pivot’ (the phrase is Derrida’s) by which the site serves as a
substitute for an absent King Arthur, letting loose what might best be described as a chain of
meanings whose movements cannot be fixed or calculated in advance or controlled, even by
so powerful an authority as authenticity. We will call this process of substitution metonymy,
a figure of speech in which a sign or symbol (which can be a word, but, as in this case, might
also be a relic, a ruin, a building) can be substituted for something else associated – however
arbitrarily – with it. Once entered into this chain of meanings, any object can become a
metonymy, can be detached from any material locus and disseminated along a whole chain of
metonymies, often with unanticipated results; for instance, at Tintagel, flower faeries, gnomes
and green men have joined the more expected castles, swords and Round Tables as symbols
of the Arthurian.
The tourist gaze in Tintagel has been structured by the labour of several individuals who
have felt the need to construct ‘scenery for the drama of the warlike king and his adventurous
knights’ and who have indulged in re-creation as a remedy for the great Arthurian absence.
They have created heritage through a series of objects that take their power and meaning
metonymically from their association (however slim) with the name, the signs of King Arthur
(Arthuricity), making Tintagel the site of several medieval ‘follies’, built to celebrate (and cash
in on) Tintagel’s Arthurian connections. These attractions manufacture the past to re-create
a nostalgic Middle Ages for tourist consumption. Meaning and affective response are not
secured by these new sites’ ‘authenticity’; rather each represents the next step in a series of
linkages along a chain of substitutions, secured only by the fictional name of Arthur, to which
new meanings become attached.
We examine three of these manufactured attractions. The first is the ruin of Tintagel Castle
itself, the village’s premier attraction, which was built during the first half of the thirteenth
century by Richard of Cornwall, brother to King Henry III, and which today is managed by
English Heritage. The second is the Camelot Castle Hotel. Opening in 1899, this massive folly
was designed and built by the Cornish architect Silvanus Trevail. The third is King Arthur’s
Great Hall, built in the 1930s by a custard magnate, Frederick Glasscock, as a headquarters
for the Fellowship of the Round Table, a fraternal organization founded by Glasscock to
promote his version of the chivalric ideals that King Arthur ‘symbolized’. Our analyses of these
attractions both follow the proliferation of symbols and meanings that has created Tintagel as
a heritage site and demonstrate the larger process by which King Arthur becomes a potent but
empty symbol which can be filled with whatever meaning suits the occasion.
The ‘afterlife’ of King Arthur begins, of course, in the Middle Ages; this afterlife provided
Tintagel with the first of its many follies: the ruins of Richard of Cornwall’s castle, which
offer visitors a ‘real’ (or mostly real) thirteenth-century relic, complete with a medieval toilet.
Richard’s attempt to ‘bask in power by association with Arthur’s legend’,7 while medieval,
is in fact no more ‘Arthurian’ than the village’s more obviously manufactured attractions.
While the castle’s ruins provide the village with a ‘heritage’ site, Richard’s thirteenth-century
Arthurian folly functions not as an ‘authentic’ medieval castle, but as part of the village’s chain
of Arthurian metonymies: a ruined castle that, combined with Tintagel’s romantic landscape,
promises the perfect scenery for conjuring up the ghosts of Camelot.
Richard, we presume, was inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of
Britain to create a new connection (a metonymy) between the Plantagenet monarchy and the
imagined imperial glory of the Arthurian past by building a castle on a nearly inaccessible
stretch of the Cornish coast – a place that had no military or economic use. In this case,
Arthur comes to symbolize political legitimacy and power. This extravagant piece of political
mythmaking, however, was quickly abandoned; a 1337 survey describes ‘a castle sufficiently
walled’ with ‘decayed and ruinous’ chambers and by the reign of Richard II the property had
been repurposed as a prison.8 By the time that John Leland recorded his visit to Tintagel in
the sixteenth century, he reads the ruins not in terms of their Arthurian signification, but in
terms of their decay: ‘This Castelle hath been a marvelus strong and notable forteras’, but
‘shepe now fede within the Dungeon. The Residew of the Buildinges of the Castel be sore
wether beten and yn Ruine.’9 Without its metonymic connection to the Arthurian legend,
Tintagel offered nothing but an inaccessible ruin over-run by sheep. As late as the mid-
nineteenth century, Rev. R. Warner contemptuously dismissed the site: ‘The ruins of Tintagel
Castle … claim dominion over unqualified desolation, over one wide and wild scene of
troubled ocean, barren country and horrid rocks … to look at it was enough to give one the
tooth-ache.’10
Clearly, the Rev. Warner did not see in the landscape a scenic background to conjure
Arthurian ghosts. As this passage suggests, there is nothing obviously beautiful or magical
about this piece of the Cornish coast; the connection between the landscape and the romantic
sublime had to be established by the work of metonymy. It was romanticism that transformed
Warner’s ‘unqualified desolation’ into a sublime landscape from which late-Victorian writers
summoned the revenants of Camelot. If Richard of Cornwall created a metonymy between
Arthur and imperial power, the nineteenth-century artists and writers who visited Tintagel
were inspired by what they described as picturesque coast and ruins, to produce Arthurian
works that associated the legend with lofty ideals, high loves and tragic loss, conjuring from
the landscape a nostalgic romance of the chivalric past. These works, particularly Tennyson’s
wildly popular Idylls of the King, created new connections (new metonymies) between
Tintagel, the picturesque and the Arthurian, and tourists ‘flocked to the island, bringing with
them their favourite volumes’. And just in time; the tin and slate mines, which had served as
the economic backbone of the region, were in decline, and Tintagel was in desperate need
of a new economic base. Tourism provided the village with a new way of capitalizing on its
natural resources, and it would subsequently both ‘dominate and dictate the fortunes’ of the
area.11 Tintagel became an Arthurian theme park, ‘King Arthur’s Land’, accessed, courtesy
of the Great Western Railway, in pre-Disney thematic railway cars (Merlin, Lyonesse and
Pendragon).
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The Victorian imagination re-signified and re-mapped the landscape, creating a chain
of Arthurian metonymies connecting Tintagel to a romantic chivalric past. Railway tours
stopped at ‘King Arthur’s Castle’, where Florence Nightingale Richards had taken on the role
of tour guide. While there, tourists could explore the island’s newly renamed geographical
features: King Arthur’s Footprint, King Arthur’s Seat, King Arthur’s Bed. By the early 1900s,
Tintagel Castle’s Arthurian brand had encompassed the cluster of houses and shops at its
base; the village of Trevana metamorphosed into Tintagel.
Now that Tintagel Castle has passed into the hands of English Heritage, its guardians are
more careful to separate fact from fiction, but even as the Castle’s caretakers deny its Arthurian
connections, English Heritage’s marketing department exploits them. Tintagel Castle’s tourist
brochures direct the tourist gaze towards the Arthurian legend much more frequently than
towards any verifiable (but largely unremarkable) historical real the site contains. The castle
may well have ‘a history stretching back as far as the Romans and the ruins of a medieval
castle’, but its marketable appeal lies in the fact it is ‘a place of myth where the legend
of King Arthur was born’.12 As such, the brochure features dramatic photos of coast and
ruins accompanied by text that encourages an imaginative interaction with the legends of
the past, and ‘event photos’ of historical re-enactments. All in all, it makes eleven textual or
photographic references to King Arthur, his legends and the bygone days of chivalry, but none
to the site’s actual history.
Once actually at the site, visitors can view ‘In Search of King Arthur’, an introductory film
that purports to debunk the site’s Arthurian origins (the very same origins English Heritage so
assiduously sells) in favour of its ‘real’ history. However, this film works against its own stated
thesis, as it conjures revenants from the past, fleshing out ‘the skin of a good story’ stretched
over the ‘bones of history’. ‘Across a thousand years,’ the narrator intones, ‘the legend of
King Arthur and Tintagel have become inseparable and it is easy to see why…. We’re about
to see how myths are made and how they lead us back to history.’ But myths overshadow
history in this re-enactment of the development of Arthurian legend, as the technologies of
film allow ghosts from the past to materialize among the ruins: the Romans, Richard and his
wife, Geoffrey and Malory no more substantial than Arthur himself.
So what of the only ‘real’ offered in the midst of this Arthurian absence, the ruins themselves?
They sprawl across two headlands, connected by a narrow wooden bridge, both accessible
only by the steep and daunting stairs installed by English Heritage. There isn’t much to see;
the views of the beach below and the cliffs and coast in the distance are more compelling than
anything at the actual site: the bare foundations of chambers, the famous ‘medieval’ toilet,
a few intact walls and window slits. The most commanding fragment, the arched door and
wall through which the visitor enters the great hall, turns out not to be medieval at all, but
a nineteenth-century re-creation of a medieval original. Even here, however, Arthur frames
visitors’ experiences; the first sign board admits that ‘what is known provides little evidence
for the Arthurian legend’, but immediately asserts the mythical authenticity of the landscape:
‘When the mist comes swirling through Merlin’s cave, it is easy to see how the myth has
survived to this day.’ Only then does Arthur disappear from the site’s limited subsequent
signage as the tourist gaze is directed towards the sites’ ‘authentic’ history with illustrated
boards. Few visitors, however, bother with any of the signs; most are not here for Richard,
or for authenticity, but for an ‘Arthuricity’ that promises access not to origin but to narrative,
in which the ruins function as an Arthurian metonymy, allowing visitors to conjure their own
Arthurian real.
While the ruins of Tintagel Castle promise visitors a romantic setting in which to conjure,
King Arthur’s Castle Hotel (today the Camelot Castle Hotel) massively intrudes upon that
landscape. Designed and built in 1899 by the Cornish architect Silvanus Trevail, the hotel
represents one node in the network of goods and services required to support heritage tourism.
In the shifting chain of symbols and metonymies that constitutes heritage tourism, however,
the Camelot Castle Hotel has become an attraction in its own right – albeit a controversial
one – and an object of the tourist gaze. One internet wag notes: ‘Camelot Castle Hotel’s ...
only historical significance was that it was built just over 100 years ago, flying in the face of
good taste, as it continues to cast its tacky shadow over the 13th century Tintagel Castle,
linked to the legend of King Arthur.’13 In this comment, we can locate the work of metonymy
in the linkages that slide from Arthurian legend to Tintagel Castle to the hotel, where it can
take on new meanings. Trevail certainly took advantage of Tintagel’s ‘great gorges, the weird
bays and caves, the rock-strewn valleys, the imposing waterfalls’ by siting his hotel atop a
breathtaking cliff overlooking the sea, which also has the effect of making the hotel visible
from almost every point in Tintagel. It insinuates itself into the tourist’s field of vision, first
as an unofficial site and then, since becoming a listed building in 1987, a full-fledged folly
supplementing the Arthurian absence in Tintagel, a metonymy of a metonymy.
Travail, a prolific and prominent Cornish architect, was also an entrepreneur who saw
that tourism was the ‘coming thing’, spurred on by the expansion of rail travel. He planned
to build a series of luxury hotels, along the Cornish coast. While this ambitious scheme
eventually fell through because of disagreements with his partners, he did manage to build
a few of these hotels, including King Arthur’s Castle Hotel. The building was financed by a
businessman, Sir Robert Harvey, another Cornishman who invested much of his saltpetre
fortune in the then fledgling tourism industry.
Trevail realized, astutely, that much of the work involved in promoting tourism was
symbolic. Marketing Cornwall required more than spectacular scenery and old ruins.
It required a mythology, which the Arthurian legends supplied: ‘Some of it true, all of it
potent ... in England, Cornwall alone is Celtic. It is Arthur’s kingdom.’14 For Trevail, Arthur
became a symbol of Cornish identity, and he designed his hotel to surround his visitors with
the signs of the Arthurian. Contributing to its nearly superfluous multiplication of Arthurian
copies of copies, the hotel, along with its name and crenellated turrets, also boasts its own
Round Table, as well as a replica of the Winchester Round Table, itself a Tudor re-creation (a
reproduction of a reproduction, yet another metonymy in the chain). A 1909 advertisement
for the hotel from the British National Image Library emphasizes the Arthurian romance of
the edifice alongside its modern conveniences: ‘Standing on the spot where Tennyson received
his inspiration for the “Idylls of the King”. “The most romantic spot in England”. “Hot and
cold sea-water baths. Electric Light. Passenger Lift Excellent Cuisine”.’15
But the expected railroad stop in Tintagel never materialized and the Camelot Castle Hotel
has since had a chequered history. In 1912, the American poet Robinson Jeffers stayed at
the hotel with his mistress and soon-to-be wife, Una. In a letter to her husband, she wrote,
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‘Here high up on the cliffs and solitary is King Arthur’s Castle Hotel a big building standing all
alone against the sky.... The hotel was very empty and quiet and seemed also under a spell.’16
The German anthroposophist Rudolph Steiner, visiting in 1927, stayed at the ‘monstrous
Victorian pile of King Arthur’s Castle Hotel’, of which he is reputed to have remarked: ‘The
only disturbance is from this hideous hotel, in which there even stands the ape of Arthur’s
Table.’17
By the second decade of the twentieth century, King Arthur’s Castle Hotel had ceased
to function in the metonymic chain linking Tintagel to Arthur, and over the next seventy
years, the hotel fell into disrepair. When John Mappin (heir to the Mappin-Webb jewellery
fortune) and his partner Ted Stourton bought the mostly derelict building in 1999, the local
newspaper reported that the hotel ‘was more Agatha Christie than King Arthur’.18 Mappin,
however, envisioned not the backdrop for a cosy mystery, but a reborn Mecca for the
Arthurian. The local press joined in. A spate of interviews conducted in 2000 consistently
employ Arthurian metonymies as they unveil Mappin’s plans for his new property. ‘Master
of Camelot’, reads one headline; another newspaper reports ‘a new young king at the Castle
Hotel’.19 Articles featured pictures of Mappin in Arthurian drag. In one, he stands on the
cliffs in front of the hotel, pulling his replica of the John Boorman film’s replica (like the
hotel’s Round Table, a copy of a copy of a non-existent original) of Excalibur from a stone;
another uses the hotel’s replica of the Winchester Round Table as a backdrop for Mappin
and Excalibur.
In these interviews, Mappin continues the work of metonymic association; on the surface,
he seems to be intent on profit, desiring to bring England’s national mythology ‘into focus’,
where it can be ‘promoted, exploited and capitalized on’.20 Arguing that the locals have failed
to tap into their legendary resources (‘I cannot believe that such fascinating ancient mythology
has been virtually ignored’), he outlines plans to attract advertisers from companies also in
the business of selling legends and fantasy (artists, musicians, jewellery makers).21 However,
even in these early interviews given to the mainstream press, glimmers of Mappin’s more
controversial reading of the site appear. In an attempt to assuage concerns that he has visions
of bringing an Arthurian-themed Disney or Vegas-style attraction to Tintagel, he replies:
‘Why tamper with the real thing?’ In interviews, YouTube videos, press releases and web text,
Mappin vehemently asserts that there is a presence here. Camelot Hotel does not supplement
Arthurian absence; for him, it is not a metonymy, but a manifestation of an ineffable energy:
‘it’s a great portal to the universe of British mythology’; the ‘energy vectors here are amazing’;
there is the ‘truth of the energy that was laid here from centuries ago’; ‘we are able to deliver
a cerebral experience not only in the mind but in the physical universe’.22 Mappin believes
that his is not an act of restoration or reproduction, but of awakening. ‘Already,’ he informs a
local reporter, ‘the myths are starting to work, Camelot will awaken here.’23
Camelot Castle Hotel opened in 2000, promising that ‘for the first time in 1500 years,
visitors to Camelot Castle in Tintagel will be able to stay as guests at Camelot itself ’.24 The
promotional materials tap into both versions of Mappin’s vision. On the one hand, they
market Camelot Castle Hotel as a five-star destination resort, complete with stunning views, a
private beach, gourmet cuisine and luxurious rooms, located at ‘the birthplace of King Arthur,
Camelot and the final resting place of the Holy Grail’ (note that speculation is replaced with
the declarative here).25 On the other hand, they promise not a hotel, not even a castle, but
Camelot itself, invested with new meanings, a primal and transhistorical truth, a ‘centre of
communication’ of enlightenment and creativity.26
Not all guests feel that they had been ‘transported into fairy land’.27 In October 2010,
BBC’s Inside Out South West aired an investigative report in which ex-guests complained that
instead of five-star luxury, they found sub-standard rooms with furniture from the 1950s,
peeling wallpaper and plastic-pod portable bathrooms. Yet, what visitors (and Inside Out)
seemed to be most angry about is the ‘sinister atmosphere’, ‘almost like visiting there, you
step into the Twilight Zone’ and Mappin’s and Stourton’s connection to Scientology; ex-
guests, ex-employees and Tintagel residents all accuse the two men of using the hotel as a
cover for an indoctrination centre.28
What is striking about both the BBC documentary and negative guest reviews is the language
in which they couch their criticisms of the hotel and the owner’s purported proselytizing. Inside
Out brings along ‘a friend’ to help reporters in their investigations – a ghostly knight, who
haunts the programme, a recurrent sign of the process of metonymy we have been describing.
Guests have been promised Arthur and the days of chivalry; instead, ‘the experience of staying
there was far from legendary’.29 The Arthurian absence is a repeated theme in the negative
reviews: ‘Nothing about King Arthur and his knights, the legend, Merlin. NOTHING.’ ‘No
magic of King Arthur anywhere, except [the] lounge round table’; ‘scientology poems etc. all
over the lounge table’.30 Visitors to Tintagel expect Arthur; by displacing Arthur, by making
the metonymic chain point not to Arthur, but to a new (and suspect) mythology, Camelot
Hotel once again feels more Agatha Christie than Arthur.
Like Mappin and Stourton, like Richard Plantagenet, Harvey and Trevail, custard magnate
Frederick T. Glasscock found the ‘magic’ of King Arthur while on holiday in Tintagel, which
inspired him to purchase Trevana House in the early 1920s to serve as the headquarters for
the Arthurian fraternal organization he founded in 1927, the Fellowship of the Knights of the
Round Table, an organization dedicated to the largely Victorian ideals Glasscock imagined
King Arthur symbolized. Over the next several years, he renovated and enlarged the building,
fashioning two gathering places for his Fellowship: ‘King Arthur’s Hall’, and the built-to-order
‘Hall of Chivalry’. When King Arthur’s Great Halls opened in 1933, Glasscock’s Fellowship
was a thriving organization, with a documented international membership of around 17,000
(some newspapers put the membership as high as 250,000). But, by 1936, two years after
Glasscock’s death, it was defunct, the golden ages of fraternalism and medievalism having
passed it by. In 1952, the building was sold to the Freemasons. It remains in their hands today,
serving as both initiation space and tourist attraction.
The Halls promote themselves as a supplement to Tintagel’s ruins, claiming it as ‘the only
intact building in the world dedicated to the Arthurian legend’ in a time when that legend is
‘no longer a subject taught in schools or read as a book at bedtime’.31 A physical manifestation
of the lost Arthurian, King Arthur’s Great Halls promises a real encounter with ‘the memory
of Arthur, King of Britain’.32 Instead, they offer a nearly sublime combination of lofty (if
paternalistic) ideals and sentimental dreck, featuring the dying gasps of two Victorian arts
movements that found inspiration and meaning in the Middle Ages: the pre-Raphaelite and
the Arts and Crafts movement. In King Arthur’s Great Halls, reproduction becomes heritage
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in its own right, as Glasscock’s folly looks nostalgically back not only to the Arthurian Middle
Ages but also to the Victorians’ re-creations of them.
Upon purchase of a ticket, visitors proceed to King Arthur’s Hall, the first and smaller of
two halls, taking a seat on the benches scattered about the hall to view the promised ‘laser
show’. The show features the voice of Merlin (performed by actor Robert Powell), visually
represented by a pulsing laser. Although technologically underwhelming, this use of modern
media tricks supplements Arthurian absence, making Merlin (or at least his ‘voice’) present to
viewers. Merlin’s narrative of the legend is further supplemented by a series of ten paintings
that Glasscock commissioned from the illustrator William Hatherell. These paintings tell
the story of King Arthur in an imitation of the pre-Raphaelites, a nineteenth-century art
movement that looked to the Middle Ages for both style and subject matter. Throughout
the brief show, the visitor’s gaze is strictly controlled by the darkness, the laser light and the
sequential illumination of each painting at the appropriate moment in the story.
At the conclusion of the laser show, tourists are allowed to explore the Great Hall on
their own. In the Great Hall, the tourist gaze may wander freely. This space is replete with
Arthurian metonymies – not just one round table, but three, two wooden and one granite,
at the south end of the hall and an enormous granite throne and a canopy at the north end.
Designed by Glasscock as a stage for his Fellowship’s initiation ceremonies, the Great Hall
remains a place for manifesting the Arthurian, whether as a movie set or a tourist attraction
where visitors can lounge for a photograph on ‘Arthur’s’ throne.
While the laser show is unabashed kitsch and Hatherell’s paintings, which he in all likelihood
did not complete before his death (he signed only two), are hackneyed, sentimental and just
badly painted, the Halls are well worth a visit for the seventy-three stained glass windows that
decorate the Great Hall, illustrating the proliferation and dissemination of Arthurian symbols
and signs. On each side of the hall near the top are nine windows, allegorical illustrations
of chivalric virtues both secular – Strength, Perseverance, Obedience – and spiritual – Purity,
Faith, Love – that Glasscock’s Fellowship Knights agree to uphold, the meanings they attach
to the Arthurian. The galleries contain forty-nine windows depicting the unique shield of each
of the Round Table Knights (symbols of the unique virtues of each knight). At each end of the
Hall are three large narrative windows illustrating scenes from Malory’s Arthurian tales.
These windows, commissioned by Glasscock and designed by Veronica Whall, showcase
not only our argument about the unruliness of the symbolic, but also the narrative, allegorical
and heraldic potentials of stained glass art. They are masterpieces of modern secular stained
glass and of Arthurian legend in the decorative arts. Whall, trained by her father, Christopher
Whall, the most prominent stained glass artist of the Arts and Crafts movement founded by
William Morris in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was a daughter of that movement.
A reaction against machine-produced crafts, Arts and Crafts artists looked to the Middle Ages
for both subject matter and organic principles of design and production. Whall, father and
daughter, for instance, believed a stained glass artist should not simply design the window, but
must be proficient in all stages of production, from design to finished window.
Of her own art, Whall wrote: ‘The three things technically essential to the making of
a stained glass window are glass, lead, and – light ... for light is our medium, and light is
our colour.... We have to mix it with our colours; we have to harness it; to tie it down; to
make it stop where we want it, – or let it pour through; a stupendous, living, ever-changing
force.’33 She uses these materials with considerable skill in the most frequently reproduced of
the windows, the panel depicting Merlin flanked on either side by the Lady of the Lake and
Morgause holding a baby Mordred. Whall is noted for the brilliance of her colours and the
grace of her figures, evident in this window in the jewel-like palette and the pre-Raphaelite
elegance of her figures. There is a beautiful fluidity to the image. The Lady of the Lake is
positively luminous, her gown simply flowing underneath her feet to merge with the water
beneath it, realizing her aquatic origins.
Whall’s stained glass windows, remarkable not only for their nostalgic representation of
Arthurian chivalry, but also for their loving reproduction of nineteenth-century medievalisms
that were old-fashioned by the 1930s, encapsulate the instability of meanings circulating
through heritage tourism. King Arthur’s Great Halls may be unabashedly commercial,
representing the crassest form of heritage tourism, exposing the extent to which commercial
motives structure all heritage tourism. But they do have an Arthurian relic well worth the
£10 entrance fee. Not unsurprisingly, given Tintagel’s determined use of re-creation as a
supplement for Arthurian absence, reproductions (really copies without originals) here
become works of art in their own right.
However, most people who come to King Arthur’s Great Halls do not come to see these
spectacular windows. They come, as they come to Camelot Castle Hotel and the castle ruins,
in search of the ‘real’ King Arthur. However, as Tintagel’s Arthurian follies demonstrate,
‘Arthuricity’ is an illusion, a chain of metonymies, in which the meaning of the Arthurian
slides between political legitimacy, romance, Victorian propriety, new age mysticism and
scientology. As Tintagel welcomes visitors to ‘King Arthur’s Land’, it deploys all of these
meanings in a proliferation of metonymies that make visible the Arthurian in Tintagel,
constructing the tourist gaze, governing and shaping our interactions with the ‘real’ remnants
of the site’s ‘medieval’ past. It offers the pleasures of the interplay between physical fragment
and symbolic excess, between empty landscape and dramatic re-creation, as it conjures the
ghosts of Camelot.
Notes
1. A good representation of this position is Robert Hewison (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in
a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen.
2. We intentionally omit mention of the Artognou stone, a sixth-century stone discovered among the
ruins of Tintagel Castle in 1998 because its connection to anything Arthurian is nothing but the
wildest speculation.
3. J. Cuming Walters (1907), ‘The Lost Land of King Arthur’. English Illustrated Magazine, 38:
81–90.
4. References here are to Bath, Stonehenge and Glastonbury Abbey.
5. John Urry (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage
Publications.
6. The term is Dean MacCannell’s. See The Ethics of Sightseeing (2011). Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 58–9.
210
7. The phrase is from the site’s introductory video, In Search of King Arthur.
8. ‘Tintagel Castle’ (1854), Sharpe’s London Magazine, Vol. 4, 173.
9. John Leland (1907), The Itinerary of John Leland on or about the Years 1535-1543, Vol. 1, ed.
Lucy Toulmin Smith. London: G. Bell and Sons, p. 177.
10. ‘Tintagel Castle’, p. 174.
11. Heulyn Lewis and Ginny Lewis (2009), Tintagel: A Visitor Guide. Cornwall: Cornwall Council, p. 40.
12. English Heritage. Tintagel Castle, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/tintagel-
castle/, accessed 7 January 2014.
13. Camelot Castle Hotel: BBC Investigation, 2010. ‘Why We Protest’. https://whyweprotest.net/
community/threads/camelot-castle-hotel-bbc-investigation.65107/, accessed 5 January 2014.
14. Maurice Smelt (2006), 101 Cornish Lives. Penzance, Cornwall: Allison Hodge Press, p. 235.
15. Image located at ‘British Towns and Villages Network’, http://www.british-towns.net/england/
far-southwestern/cornwall/north-cornwall/tintagel/album/king-arthur’s-castle-hotel, accessed
7 January 2014.
16. Robinson Jeffers (2009), The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: With Selected Letters by Una
Jeffers, Vol. 2, ed James Karman. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 262.
17. A reference to the hotel’s replica of the Winchester Round Table. C. Villeneuve (2004), Rudolf
Steiner in Britain: A Documentation of his Ten Visits, Vol. 11, 1922–1925. Forest Row, UK:
Temple Lodge, p. 1055.
18. Camelot Castle Hotel. Camelot Castle, http://www.camelotcastle.com, accessed 7 January 2014.
19. Camelotcastle.com; Janet King, ‘Castle’s new king and his vision of Camelot’. West Country
News, 21 February 2000, p. 26.
20. King, ‘Castle’s new king and his vision of Camelot’, p. 26.
21. King, ‘Castle’s new king and his vision of Camelot’, p. 26.
22. Dickson, E. Jane. ‘The Master of Camelot’. Newspaper article posted at http://www.camelotcastle.
com/papers2.htm, accessed 7 January 2014.
23. Camelotcastle.com.
26. Accessed on camelotcastle.com.
28. ‘Camelot Castle Hotel’. Inside Out South West. BBC. Television, 15 November 2010.
29. Inside Out.
30. ‘Camelot Castle’. MJs Blog. 29 May 2009, http://mjbest.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/camelot-
castle/#comments, accessed 7 January 2014.
31. Don Hutchinson, (ed.) (n.d.), One Man’s Dream: The Story of King Arthur’s Great Halls,
Tintagel, Cornwall, England. Cornwall: Sword in the Stone Ltd, p. 2 and p. 4.
32. Hutchinson, One Man’s Dream, p. 10.
33. Veronica Whall (1935), ‘Glass, Lead, and – Light’. Stained Glass: Journal of the Stained Glass
Association of America, 22: 10–14.
part four
Avalon: Icons and Artefacts

212
chapter nineteen
Medievalism and Heroism

in Arthurian Literature
for Young People
Ann F. Howey
A boy – too young to fight in a tournament himself – pulls a sword from a stone and becomes
king. A boy – mocked as different by his peers – releases dragons and foretells the destiny of
a kingdom. These are just two iconic images from legends surrounding King Arthur, and they
both suggest the potential appeal of the legends for young people’s literature, in that they
foreground the transition from youthful obscurity to adult roles and recognition. Arthurian
literature for young people uses diverse genres and targets a wide range of ages and reading
abilities, and as a result, its engagement with medievalism also varies, from texts whose
allusions to Arthurian characters demonstrate awareness of a tradition with strong roots
in medieval literature, to texts whose rewriting of that tradition involves (quasi-)medieval
settings. Whatever the genre, target audience, or other themes developed, young people’s
fiction engages with the Arthurian legend to explore what it means to be heroic and the forms
youthful empowerment can take.
Medievalism can be broadly defined, as Tom Shippey says, as ‘any post-medieval attempt
to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle Ages’.1 The scope of the
period being reimagined (roughly 500–1500 AD in Western Europe) means that many, often
contradictory, images circulate as representations of the medieval. The Arthurian legend
itself is subject to such contradictions: medieval texts do not agree on the representations
of particular characters (Kay and Gawain are perhaps the most striking examples), and post-
medieval texts often resolve these contradictions by selective use of sources, and so multiply
214
interpretations of the legend, each with its own claim to medieval ‘authorities’. In addition,
each post-medieval text selects a particular setting for its Arthurian tale, generating across
the body of Arthurian literature multiple representations of the ‘medieval’ as well as of the
‘Arthurian’.
Identifying patterns within this multitude of settings led Raymond H. Thompson, in 1985,
to specify five categories of Arthurian fiction, and although these were not developed for
young people’s versions specifically, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum have observed that
the categories do apply to them as well.2 The first category, retellings, is ‘either translations or
modernizations’ of medieval or nineteenth-century texts,3 usually designed to raise awareness
of the legend – or of a specific textual incarnation of it – as a culturally important narrative.
Some modernizations are complex, such as the still-reprinted King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table (1953) by Roger Lancelyn Green or the more recent Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight (2004) by Michael Morpurgo. Others function as introductions to both the
legend and to reading: Cari Meister’s King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone (2009) and King
Arthur and the Black Knight (2009), for example, are ‘Read it! Readers’ designed to develop
basic skills.
Realistic fiction, Thompson’s second category, introduces Arthurian elements into a
contemporary world (Thompson 1985, p. 4), often through allusion, through characters’
reading of Arthurian texts or by having contemporary characters re-enact Arthurian stories
and relationships. Nicky Singer’s teen novel Knight Crew (2009), for example, transposes the
Arthurian narrative to inner-city gangs, with characters’ roles and names (Art, Lance, Quin,
Mordec, Myrtle) evoking the legend. Historical novels, Thompson’s third category, provide
‘authentic detail’ (Thompson 1985, p. 4) for a setting in our historical past; the events taking
place within that setting may be those of Arthurian characters or those of later generations
dealing with the Arthurian legacy. Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Seeing Stone (2000) and its
sequels, set in twelfth-century Wales, exemplify this sort of Arthurian legacy, but increasingly
popular as well are medieval mysteries for young people, such as Cherith Baldry’s Abbey
Mysteries series (2004–5). The fourth category, science fiction, sets Arthurian events and
characters in the future, constructs parallels between future characters and Arthurian figures
or uses time travel gadgets to allow characters to access the Arthurian past, as in Kathleen
Duey’s Time Soldiers: Arthur (2004). Thompson’s largest category, fantasy, is subdivided into
low, heroic, ironic and mythopoeic (Thompson 1985, p. 5), indicating the popularity of this
genre and its diverse treatments of Arthurian legend. Fantasy novels may adapt Arthurian
narratives, creating medieval worlds filled with supernatural powers, as in Gerald Morris’s
The Squire’s Tales series (1998–2010) or Jane Yolen’s Sword of the Rightful King (2003). They
may also create medieval-like alternate worlds, such as in T. A. Barron’s The Lost Tales of
Merlin series (1996–2000), his Great Tree of Avalon trilogy (2004–6) or his Merlin’s Dragon
trilogy (2008–10).
As with any other generic divisions, Thompson’s categories inevitably blur into one
another, subject to readers’ interpretation of text and genre and to the ingenuity of authors.
Stephens and McCallum, for example, argue that fantasy is ‘a relatively minor domain within
the children’s literature’ (Stephens and McCallum 1998, p. 127), presumably by including
any text in the ‘Malorian tradition’ (Stephens and McCallum, p. 129) as a retelling. However
Medievalism and Heroism in Arthurian Literature for Young People 215
influenced by Malory books such as those by Morris and Yolen might be, they ‘go beyond’ their
sources (Thompson 1985, p. 11) enough to be categorized as fantasy rather than retellings,
making the fantasy category, in my view, significant to young people’s Arthurian literature.
Problematizing categorization further, some authors deliberately play with and across generic
boundaries. Meg Cabot’s novel Avalon High (2006), for example, is a ‘realistic’ teen novel
about high school if the parallels between characters and Arthurian figures are dismissed as
coincidences – an attitude that the narrator, Ellie Harrison, endorses at times; if those twenty-
first-century characters are seen as Arthurian figures reborn to fight an ongoing battle with the
forces of evil – a position taken by some of the adult characters – then it is mythopoeic fantasy,
even if set in a twenty-first-century Annapolis high school. Cabot’s manga sequels to the
novel (2007–9) are more consistently fantastic, in part because Jinky Coronado’s illustrations
often show characters in both contemporary and medieval clothing to emphasize the
reincarnation explanation over mere coincidence. Felicity Pulman’s Shalott (2001) provides
another striking example of generic blurring. Its initial and closing settings of twenty-first-
century Australia code it as ‘realistic’, its characters’ use of advanced computer programming
technology invokes ‘science fiction’, but the central part of the novel, in a medieval Camelot
with traditional Arthurian characters – some of whom have magical powers – code it as
fantasy. These brief examples suggest the ways in which Thompson’s categories provide a
general rubric for thinking about Arthurian fiction. That rubric is useful for understanding
strategies of individual texts and for recognizing larger trends, but Arthurian fiction – like all
storytelling – resists fitting into neat boxes.
If Arthurian literature for young people can be categorized in similar ways as Arthuriana
for older audiences, it also demonstrates some of the same trends. Thompson remarked on the
increasing prevalence of novels in the dissemination of the legend throughout the twentieth
century, and the importance of prose fiction has continued into the twenty-first century. Not
only have more novels continued to be published, but also short fiction on Arthurian subjects
has increased, often published in theme anthologies. Some of these anthologies have been
directed specifically at a young teen audience, such as The Road to Camelot (2002), edited
by Sophie Masson. In the midst of all the prose versions of the legend, occasional poetic
treatments stand out: Lisa Ann Sandell’s Song of the Sparrow (2007), for example, adapts
Elaine of Astolat’s story into forty-four prose poem chapters.
Despite similarities with Arthurian fiction generally, Arthurian young people’s literature is
subject to different demands – the needs (real and perceived) of different reading levels and
age groups – leading to different forms. For example, picture books and illustrated books –
generally assumed to be more interesting for young readers and to help the process of learning
to read – play an important role in introducing Arthurian stories and introducing ideas of the
medieval. Judith Kellogg’s survey of Arthurian picture books reflects on ‘the doubleness of
the storytelling . . ., the words and images telling parallel stories whose complete meaning
is ultimately understood in the interaction between the two media’.4 That doubleness affects
not just the narrative (plot events), but the medievalism of such texts as well, for the books
represent the medieval not just through narrative content and language choices (such as
the register chosen for the narrator and for characters in dialogue), but also through their
images.
216
The style and format of picture books and illustrated books affect the way these texts
position readers to perceive the ‘medieval’, as well as the Arthurian legend. Some books,
such as Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman’s Merlin and the Making of the King
(2004), choose a pseudo-medieval style. Hyman’s use of decorative borders around text and
illustrations creates a framing effect that imitates illuminated manuscripts (Kellogg 2004, p. 54)
and thus a medieval look. Hyman also signifies ‘medieval’ through her inclusion of winged
dragons in the borders of the opening pages (title pages, dedication and table of contents) –
dragons being one of the most common tropes of medievalism according to M. J. Toswell.5
Hyman’s choice of rich colours and greatly detailed illustrations and borders suggests that the
legend’s characters and events exist in the realm of history and art, positioning readers to see
the beauty and heroic seriousness in the Arthurian narrative.
Cartoon-style illustrations communicate different attitudes to the medieval. Marcia
Williams, in King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1996), uses a comic-book style,
where each two-page spread is a separate chapter with a number of frames on each page.
The text runs underneath the frames to tell the story in a fairly straightforward way, but
the illustrations include animals (some of whom comment on the action) and banners with
descriptive titles (such as ‘Merlin’s the name, Magic’s the game’ in the first frame of the story).
The details of these illustrations provide a humorous counterpoint to the traditional narrative
being retold. Williams’s illustrations include swords, armour, castles and many other tropes
of medievalism, but their cartoon-like presentation deflates any potential seriousness: Merlin,
for example, is costumed like a court jester, and Morgan’s skin has a distinctly green shade
that owes more to the realm of Oz than to medieval Arthurian literature. Anne Rooney and
Sholto Walker’s King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (2008) uses its cartoon style
to invite readers to enter an Arthurian world, complete with Camelot guidebook, newspaper,
letters and a board game where players can help a ‘maiden in distress’. Rather than creating
a game, Richard Brassey’s King Arthur (2012) combines cartoon-style illustrations with facts
about the development of the legend and of places associated with it, as well as summaries
of a number of stories of King Arthur and his court. Brassey’s text and others like it provide
evidence of cultural perceptions regarding the key events of the narrative and indicate the
popularity of archaeological and historical theories of the Arthurian legend and the medieval
period. They also re-circulate images that help to define Arthur and other characters, and by
extension the cultural image of king, war hero, queen and racialized or gendered villain (such
as the Saxon, or Morgan le Fay).
Yet other picture books draw on the tradition of Arthurian film and visual arts to provide
illustrations: Anita Ganeri’s King Arthur’s Tale (2012) uses stills from Antoine Fuqua’s film
King Arthur (2004), reproduces nineteenth-century paintings and provides photographs of the
Winchester Round Table and Glastonbury Tor to provide visual interest for its brief summary
of Arthur’s story. That choice of historic reproductions and photographic images suggests
the ‘truth’ of the narrative as history (not fiction) and situates its characters and events in
an accessible, contemporary landscape. Whether pseudo-medieval, cartoon or photographic,
the verbal and visual content of all of these texts teach readers about the legend and about
a (vaguely defined) medieval past; their style and format position readers to interpret that
legend on some continuum between fact and fiction and to approach it reverently, mockingly
or as simple fact.
Whatever its format, Arthurian fiction for young people engages – explicitly or implicitly –
with the cultural definitions of the hero. Margery Hourihan observes that ‘The hero story has
dominated children’s and young adult literature,’6 and as Kellogg argues regarding picture
books and illustrated books, stories ‘that showcase cultural heroes have a special resonance
because they carry the authority of inherited tradition’ (Kellogg 2004, p. 52). Young people’s
fiction often depicts its Arthurian heroes at times of transition – when they come into their
powers – drawing on medieval versions of the legend. Speaking of Sir Thomas Malory’s
fifteenth-century text, Andrew Lynch remarks, ‘With few exceptions the Morte is not much
concerned with its heroes as children, but it returns repeatedly to their transition from youth
to proven knighthood.’7 Other medieval versions have similar stories that can be adapted to
fit a pattern of hero moving from mundane life to discovery and development of powers, to
heroic action that results in recognition, if not reward. The hero story, through this structure,
codes certain behaviours as attributes of ‘greatness’ (Hourihan 1997, p. 4), valued by the
story and by society. Although some examples of Arthurian young people’s fiction endorse
magic or military might and conventional chivalric masculinity as the heroic standard, others
challenge such models through parody and through decentring the male hero.
Tony Bradman’s Young Merlin (2009) is an example of a conventional hero story. It begins
with Merlin isolated in a village, feared as different.8 When King Vortigern’s men take him
to a fortress to use as a sacrifice to make the wall stand, Merlin runs away, discovers the
cavern he has dreamed of all his life and acquires great magical powers (Bradman, p. 39).
As his mother has always told him, he is ‘very special’ (Bradman, p. 3), and as soon as he
acquires his powers, he shows himself to be wiser in warfare than the older, more experienced
Vortigern, whose foolish decisions continue to have consequences, in Merlin and the Ring of
Power (2012), that Merlin must correct. Merlin’s power is magical and connected through the
figure of his dragon ally with nature, but its use is predominantly military. Bradman’s Merlin
is the sole means by which Britain can be saved, and he builds Stonehenge as a weapon that
channels power and literally flattens the Saxon army. As in the traditional hero stories that
Hourihan discusses, in Bradman’s texts heroism and empowerment are firmly located in the
remarkable individual and in his dominance over others and over the environment.
Bradman’s setting is a temporally unspecific but nonetheless ‘medieval’ world, communicated
by the style of clothing, weapons and armour in Nelson Evergreen’s illustrations, but similar
Arthurian coming-to-power stories can be set in different times and worlds. Nils Johnson-
Shelton’s The Invisible Tower (2012), the first book in his Otherworld Chronicles series, is
set in twenty-first-century America, with Artie (a reincarnation of King Arthur) and his foster
sister Kay as champions of a neo-medieval video game called Otherworld. The invisible tower
of the title is a building in Cincinnati where Merlin is imprisoned, and Artie must reacquire
Excalibur and go on physical quests in a quasi-medieval realm (also called Otherworld) in
order to break the spell that holds Merlin. Like Bradman’s Merlin, Johnson-Shelton’s Artie
is designated as ‘special’, destined for great deeds.9 Initially, the skills that mark Artie as
different are virtual: he and Kay are successful gamers. Through his acquisition of the sword,
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battle training and quests to the Otherworld, Artie becomes a more conventional Arthur – a
war leader (albeit of a small group thus far in the series) who transfers the skills learnt in the
Otherworld to physical conflicts in his school. His fight with ‘his so-called nemesis’ Frankie
Finkelstein at the end of the novel (Johnson-Shelton, p. 328) signals his ability to translate his
heroic status from the Otherworld to our world.
There are a number of ways that such conventional heroics may be called into question.
Gerald Morris’s Squire’s Tales series, for example, endorses heroic action that serves the
community, but conventional chivalric posturing or valuing of such actions for their own
sake is deflated through parody. The squire of the series’ title, Terence, serves Gawain, who
becomes a knight of the Round Table by defending an unarmed monk and Terence with
a stewpot.10 In The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf (2000), Gawain’s brother Gareth, the
typical Arthurian knight, is said to be ‘dim’ – a word that he thinks means courageous.11
The focalizing agent of this novel, Lynette, is only briefly charmed by Gareth’s conventional
chivalric masculinity, ultimately choosing to marry Gaheris (of all Gareth’s brothers the one
least skilled with a sword) whose dream is to be the steward over the family lands: a farmer
rather than a knight. Morris’s books portray characters such as Arthur and Gawain as noble,
heroic figures, but only in terms of their selfless service. Martial prowess for its own sake is
represented as irrational, ridiculous and often accompanied by incompetence in day-to-day
matters. The ethos of service that can make martial prowess noble equally ennobles those
whose prowess is not about feats of arms – squires (Terence) or farmers (Gaheris) or healers
(Lynette).
Laura Anne Gilman’s The Camelot Spell (2006) also depicts its youthful protagonists
discovering their powers while it challenges conventional chivalric action as the solution for
all problems. When Morgain’s spell puts all of Camelot’s adults to sleep, three young people
undertake a quest to save the kingdom. Gerard, a squire, attempts to go on the quest alone, as
he thinks a knight should do, but he is accompanied by Newt, a stable-boy, and Ailis, a servant
girl, both of whom insist that they bring necessary skills to the task. The novel emphasizes
the importance of co-operation and suggests that the usual heroic accomplishments of the
individual knight depend on a cast of servants, male and female. Although Gerard’s sword
duel with Morgain at the end is an important part of the success of the team, the novel
demonstrates that heroism crosses class as well as gender boundaries.
Tanya Landman’s Katrina Picket novels – Waking Merlin (2005) and Merlin’s Apprentice
(2006) – also marginalize conventional masculine heroics. The novels feature the intrusion
of the medieval into twenty-first-century England as Katrina wakes first Merlin and then the
rest of the Arthurian court, who bring with them medieval transportation (horses), clothing
(armour) and weapons (swords and lances). In Waking Merlin, Merlin assumes that Arthur
and his knights can do battle for the crown of England so that Arthur will have the authority
to allow Merlin to act on England’s behalf, but Katrina recognizes the problems of a military
solution: guns and other modern weapons would destroy the medieval knights before a fight
even begins.12 Their solution is theatrical. The medieval knights and Guinevere participate in
a celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee, a ritual that includes a momentary restitution of
Arthur’s authority as king. The resolution of Merlin’s Apprentice is also theatrical – a circus
performance – but since the threat Katrina faces is embodied in a human figure (Morgan
le Fay) instead of an inanimate object (a meteorite posed the danger in the first novel), the
final confrontation has more language of conventional battle: ‘Katrina hurled every last scrap
of her magical energy towards Morgan like an invisible spear.’13 Nonetheless, despite the
presence of glamorous Arthurian knights and ladies, the twenty-first-century girl is the hero
who saves the day – a girl whose main magical powers are healing, restoration and the ability
to transform herself into a Jack Russell terrier with pink and turquoise fur.
The juxtaposition of medieval and modern also allows for the explicit questioning of the
gendered nature of heroism in Felicity Pulman’s series. The two Elaine of Astolat / Lady of
Shalott figures in the series – the twins Callie and El – have different attitudes to the Arthurian
legend. Whereas Callie views the legend’s characters and events as historical and grants them
great respect, El is more sceptical. El insists that Callie not be the only one involved in
programming a virtual Camelot, saying, ‘If we leave everything to you, the whole place will be
full of macho knights jousting and showing off their fighting skills while the ladies wring their
hands and swoon in admiration.’14 El’s comments on the era – that the people ‘don’t believe
women are capable of doing anything except flirting and swooning and stupid things like that’
(Shalott, p. 159) – contrast twenty-first-century women’s roles with those of medieval (or
medievalist) romances, and one of the roles at stake is that of the hero.
Female heroism in the series, however, tends to remain traditional. Callie, the character
who most often focalizes the narrative, is the hero whose self-imposed quest is to change the
legend to avoid the tragic ending. In the third novel, she undertakes a different quest – to
save Guinevere and Lancelot’s child. Guinevere hopes that through the child ‘perhaps there
will be a return to the Old Ways, a second coming of Camelot where all may live in dignity
and freedom’,15 and Morgan, a powerful sorceress, also believes that ‘The future lies with
Guinevere’s child in your own world’ (Shalott: The Final Journey, p. 88). The only role that
the child is given in Callie’s world, however, is ancestor of a Lancelot look-alike of Callie’s
own age (Morgan, p. 259), whose romantic availability and immediate connection to Callie
fulfil the terms of her original plan to save Camelot by making Lancelot fall in love with her.
Although described as heroic in her intentions and actions, Callie’s main role is to be the
protagonist of a love story, a traditional narrative role for female characters.
Female characters’ perspectives increasingly direct retellings, as demonstrated in Mary
Hoffman’s Women of Camelot (2000) and Barbara Tepa Lupack’s The Girl’s King Arthur
(2010). Hoffman’s book uses Igrayne, Guinevere, Nimue, Lyonet, Ragnell, Elaine of Corbenic,
and the sisters Morgan, Morgause and Elaine as first-person narrators for the various chapters.
Each chapter provides the narrator’s background, emotions and motivations, expanding upon
the typically brief description of many medieval texts. For example, Igrayne’s story begins
with her girlhood in Wales, providing details of medieval women’s lives in her references to
sewing tapestries or serving guests.16 Tepa Lupack’s text is a more dense prose version, but
like Hoffman, she chooses to tell the story through nine female characters: the Lady of the
Lake narrates a prologue and epilogue, with tales of Guinevere, Elaine of Astolat, Elayne
of Carbonek, La Belle Iseult, Ragnell, Vivien, Lynette and Morgan le Fay in between. Tepa
Lupack emphasizes on emotional needs, particularly Guinevere’s. Arthur’s status in the text
220
thus depends not on heroic battles or kingly judgements, but rather on his ability to be a good
husband.
Both Hoffman and Tepa Lupack make explicit their feminist challenge to the tradition,
yet the image of the chivalric hero is not entirely displaced. Hoffman’s brief introduction
recognizes that the image of ‘knights in shining armor’ is likely most associated with Camelot,
but it declares, ‘you won’t find many of those stories here. Instead, you will read about the
women’, who ‘by one means or another, . . . make things happen’ (Hoffman, p. 8). Similarly,
Tepa Lupack’s subtitle makes clear her focus; these are the ‘Tales of the Women of Camelot’.
Her title itself challenges assumptions about the legend’s focus and audience: The Girl’s King
Arthur reverses Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur (1880, reprinted often since). Although
adapting the legend in this way emphasizes that women have lives before the legend’s male
characters arrive, both of these books still reproduce a set of traditional Arthurian narratives,
which ultimately reinforces that the important story is that of Arthur’s rise to and fall from
power. The women have their own stories, but they are told because they connect to the
Arthurian story, a paradox that Tepa Lupack’s title suggests. These texts do challenge the
gendered assumptions of Arthurian heroic narratives, but that subversion has limits.
Cherith Baldry’s Abbey Mysteries series takes a different approach. These novels feature a
brother and a sister who together solve mysteries in twelfth-century Glastonbury. The series
does include supernatural elements: Arthur’s warriors are seen sleeping within the Tor by
the protagonists Gwyneth and Hereward in The Silent Man (2004), and the sword Excalibur
has an uncanny power over those who hold it in The Drowned Sword (2005). However, the
mysteries themselves have for the most part ordinary explanations, rooted in twelfth-century
political tensions. Gwyneth and Hereward contribute to the solution of these puzzles in part
because accident makes them witnesses to certain events – they are the first on the scene when
the newly discovered bones of Arthur have been stolen, for example, in The Buried Cross
(2004) – and in part because their curiosity and openness to alternate explanations mean that
they keep investigating when authority figures deem certain cases solved. Although their daily
household tasks around their parents’ inn are governed by gender roles of the time – Gwyneth
helps with cooking food, while Hereward works with the horses – they take equal roles in
acting as detectives. This hero team also acts for the good of the community: Glastonbury’s
livelihood and prosperity, the larger region’s peace and principles of justice motivate the two
to recover relics (The Buried Cross), find a missing girl to vindicate her accused abductor (The
Silent Man), solve the suspicious death of a visiting merchant (The Scarlet Spring, 2004) and
uncover a treason plot (The Drowned Sword). The series suggests that ordinary children, with
no supernatural powers, can make a difference to their community.
Empowerment thus takes many forms in Arthurian young people’s fiction. The above
analysis of heroism has referred to only a small sample of the texts that have been published,
for there are innumerable variations on Arthurian heroes of either gender who discover their
gifts for magic, or swordplay, or healing or solving mysteries. Although these patterns of
heroic conventions and subversion of conventions are not limited to Arthurian fiction – they
appear in every genre that employs some form of the hero story (Western, science fiction,
thrillers and so on) – the medievalism of Arthurian versions of the hero story has particular
implications. However tenuous or vague or inaccurate, the connection to or the replication

of the medieval past in Arthurian young people’s fiction universalizes the model of the hero
across historical periods and geographic locations. Medievalism in Arthurian young people’s
fiction situates the empowerment of the protagonists as part of a long history of young people
making a difference to local communities, to the nation and to the world, and that in itself
may be part of the enduring appeal of the Arthurian legend.
The tropes of medievalism so often associated with the legend (castles, dragons, swords and
sorcery and the like) and the possible historical basis of key figures such as Arthur make the
legend malleable – able to fit into numerous genres – and that has certainly helped its survival.
However, the compulsion to write the legend in new ways, generation after generation in
multiple variations, suggests that the legend lends itself not just to appealing forms but to
important issues. What it means to be heroic is, I believe, one of those issues, encompassing as
it does beliefs about masculinity and femininity, and about the relationship of the individual
to society and to nature. Young people’s literature continually rearticulates those identities
and relationships, and Arthur and his court have been a significant vehicle for such imaginings
from medieval times to the present – and if the recent spate of publications is any indication,
into the future as well.
For primary sources see Select Bibliography, Primary Sources.
Notes
1. Tom Shippey (2009), ‘Medievalisms and why they matter’. Studies in Medievalism, XVII: 45–54,
p. 45.
2. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum (1998), Retelling Stories, Framing Culture. New York:
Garland, p. 127.
3. R. H. Thompson (1985), The Return from Avalon: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in Modern
Fiction. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 14. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
p. 4.
4. Judith Kellogg (2004), ‘Text, image, and swords of empowerment in recent Arthurian picture
books’, in B. Tepa Lupack (ed.), Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on
Arthurian Juvenilia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–72, p. 51.
5. M. J. Toswell (2009), ‘The tropes of medievalism’. Studies in Medievalism, XVII: 68–76, p. 70.
6. Margery Hourihan (1997), Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature.
London and New York: Routledge, p. 3.
7. Andrew Lynch (2004), ‘Le Morte Darthur for children: Malory’s third tradition’, in B. Tepa
Lupack (ed.), Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian Juvenilia.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–49, p. 5.
8. Tony Bradman (2009), Young Merlin. Illus. N. Evergreen. Edinburgh: Barrington Stoke, pp. 5–6.
9. Nils Johnson-Shelton (2012), The Invisible Tower. Otherworld Chronicles 1. New York: Harper,
p. 27.
10. G. Morris (1998), The Squire’s Tale. Rpt. (2000). New York: Dell Laurel Leaf, p. 13.
11. G. Morris (2000), The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 104.
222
12. Tanya Landman (2005), Waking Merlin. Illus. T. Taylor. London: Walker Books, p. 85.
13. Tanya Landman (2006), Merlin’s Apprentice. Illus. T. Taylor. London: Walker Books, p. 126.
14. Felicity Pulman (2001), Shalott. Milson’s Point, NSW: Random House Australia, p. 35.
15. Felicity Pulman (2003), Shalott: The Final Journey. Milson’s Point, NSW: Random House
Australia, p. 59.
16. M. Hoffman (2000), Women of Camelot: Queens and Enchantresses at the Court of King Arthur.
Illus. C. Balit. New York: Abbeville Press, p. 9.
chapter twenty
New Age and Neopagan

Medievalisms
Karolyn Kinane
This chapter discusses manifestations of the medieval in two very different but related religious
movements, Neopaganism and the New Age.1 Both movements share roots in nineteenth-
century romanticism and occultism and were shaped by the counter-culture of the 1960s.
However, Neopaganism emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and spread to the
United States, while the New Age movement arose on the US West Coast in the 1960s and
from there spread to Europe. Both movements aim to heal the self and the Earth and privilege
experience over belief, internal over external authority. Both value self-knowledge and engage
in techniques to deepen such knowledge. Because of these similar aims and values, Neopagan
and New Age practitioners adopt and adapt many of the same artefacts from the medieval
past and use them in ways that seem very similar. Medieval texts tend to be used in ways that
demonstrate a harmonious relationship between humans and the earth, that value both the
feminine and masculine and that respect personal intuition or truth.
However, there are significant differences between these two groups. For example,
Neopagans draw upon European pre-Christian traditions from a desire to revive the (perceived)
values of the past and therefore tend to be interested in historical authenticity in their use of
the medieval.2 On the other hand, the New Age uses the medieval as one source among many
to explore universal truths; New Agers borrow freely from Eastern, Western, indigenous,
contemporary and historical traditions in their attempt to transform the present and usher in
the (improved) future.3 Generally, they are more interested in the personal and psychological
significance of medieval characters and ideas than the historical meaning or lineage they
represent. Both of these movements are also extraordinarily eclectic, decentralized and
individualized and so one will always find exceptions to such generalizations. Recent years
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have witnessed increasing overlap in practice between these religious movements as each
becomes more visible and more accepted in mainstream contexts.
Medieval literature, particularly Irish and Welsh tales, Icelandic sagas and Arthurian
romance from all traditions, figures prominently in the beliefs and practices of modern-day
pagans who believe there was a living pagan tradition in medieval times. Groups such as
Druids, Heathens, Wiccans and many non-affiliated Neopagans believe that these Christian-
era texts hold references to and secrets of such practices.4 Therefore, they rely heavily on
medieval literature (rather than history) to reconstruct or revive belief and practice. For
instance, the work of Ross Nichols in the mid- and late-twentieth century popularized the idea
that the writings of medieval Irish and Welsh bards preserved many aspects of oral Druidic
teachings and culture.5 While his version of history has been debunked, his ideas circulated
widely and still impact Neopagan practitioners well beyond the group he founded, The Order
of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Contemporary Druidic practitioners also seek evidence for pre-
Christian traditions in Arthurian romances, as do a wide number of non-affiliated Neopagans
who look not only to medieval Celtic but also to French, British and German Arthurian texts.
Caitlyn and John Matthews have been prolific publishers on the topic of Celtic spirituality
and Arthuriana for contemporary spiritual practice, with particular attention to the Grail,
from its own ‘secret history’ to its archetypal role in helping spiritual seekers in the Aquarian
Age.6 A broad range of very diverse articles by researchers, scholars, independent historians
and enthusiasts demonstrating how Arthurian legends serve as a repository for the secrets of
Druidry, goddess-worship, blood-sacrifice and cauldron- and herb-lore circulate widely on the
internet, bolstering a wide variety of eclectic Neopagan revivals of these traditions. Lectures
by professors such as Roland Rothingham on www.Druidry.org and articles by researchers
such as August Hunt on www.facesofarthur.org.uk shape the less formal contributions by
amateur scholars, bloggers and solitary practitioners who perceive the characters of Merlin,
Morgan and the Lady of the Lake to be Druids, mages and Celtic shamans. Publications such
as Earthsongs, the International Journal of the Society of Celtic Shamans, frequently feature
articles that draw upon medieval Irish and Welsh poetry as well as Arthurian legends to shape
Neopagan contemporary practice. For example, Tira Brandon-Evans, founder and moderator
of the Society of Celtic Shamans, considers how both nineteenth-century scholarship and the
Christian Middle Ages mediate contemporary practitioner’s engagement with a pagan, pre-
Christian past in several of her articles, among them ‘Is Brighid a Faery?’ and ‘The Cauldron
of Bres: Fulcachta Fiadh.’7
Such medievalism is also strong in the Germanic tradition. Modern-day Heathens,
Odinists or Asatruar interpret medieval texts as preservers of pagan lore, drawing upon the
Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, the Saga of the Volsungs and other Norse sources for evidence
of pre-Christian oral traditions. The website for the Odinic Rite, founded in the 1970s to
promote the ‘ancestral religion today called Odinism’, features many articles that explore
the pre-Christian, medieval and contemporary meanings embedded in these texts.8 Here,
one can find articles submitted by practitioners on how personal potential can be realized by
variously interpreting Yggdrasil, or by studying one’s name in runes.9 The Circle of Ostara
contributed an article to the website that considers how the Christianity of author Snorri
New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms 225
Sutluson impacted both his writing and later interpreters of Odinism, analysing how credible
the Eddas are for reconstruction of pagan practice.10
Such a contribution is not common among the more general and less specialized discourses
of Neopaganism where the Middle Ages tend to disappear. The fact that Druidic, Odinic
or other Neopagan or New Age practices and histories come from medieval, Christian-era
texts is more often lost or obscured. For example, an article entitled ‘Cauldron Magic and
Lore’ in the 2013 Llwewllyn Witches’ Datebook intermingles Greek, Babylonian, Celtic and
Norse myth, eliding any sense of specific historical or cultural context and lending a sense of
timelessness to the described symbolism. The section on the ‘tradition’ of the cauldron closes
with the tantalizing claim about Bran, ‘the giant Welsh cauldron god’: ‘Bran’s Cauldron of
Rebirth is believed to be the basis for the Christian legend of the Holy Grail.’11 Here a sense of
time is offered in an authorizing move that asserts the cauldron’s pagan, esoteric symbolism
as older and, therefore, more authentic than Christianity. But the term ‘medieval’ or ‘Middle
Ages’ is difficult to find in such emic (insider) accounts of Neopagan beliefs and practices.
Less-informed or more generalist Neopagan literature occludes or is unaware of the fact that
their beliefs come from medieval texts mined and interpreted by contemporaries to uncover
pre-Christian oral traditions.
When the Middle Ages are visible in this less specialist literature, they are the locus of
oppression, not inspiration. Politically active Neopagan groups will often look to medieval
history to craft their own histories of secret survival, revival and continuing oppression, citing
the devastation of traditional cultures by the coming of Christianity at the early part of the
Middle Ages and witch-hunts at the later end. Contemporary witches, citing such texts as the
Malleus Maleficarum, sometimes refer to the medieval and Renaissance eras as ‘the Burning
Times’. The cyber-community of witches, Druids and pagans at www.summerlands.com
includes a ‘Hall of Remembrance’, a page with historically informed answers to Frequently
Asked Questions about witch hunts, trails for heresy and the general suppression of magic
from the early Middle Ages to today.12
It is important to restate here that generalizations about Neopagans are difficult to
make. Practitioners will engage with medieval literature and history to varying degrees of
historical accuracy and interest according to their own political, philosophical and theological
perspectives. It is, however, safe to say that individually and collectively, Neopagans, much
more so than New Agers, will engage in some degree of historical research to understand
more fully the traditions and practices of the past they seek to revive. For example, on her
personal blog, the spiritual worker Morpheus Ravenna distinguishes Morrigan from Morgan
le Fay by tracing the linguistic roots of their names, demonstrating how late Celtic Iron
Age traditions differ from late medieval British and French mythologies.13 At the level of
international organization, The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids recently demonstrated its
commitment to historical inquiry with the founding of the Haemus award and lecture, named
after the ‘apocryphal Druid grove of Mt. Haemus that was said to have been established near
Oxford in 1245.’14 The first lecture, available as a pdf and an audio file, was given by Ronald
Hutton and critiques founder Nichols’s theories in detail, with particular attention to Druidry
in the medieval era.15
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Some Neopagans and New Agers will eschew both conventional and radical historiography,
relying instead upon their own experiences with and intuitions of divinity to dictate their
theology and practice. Such practitioners also engage in medievalism, but they turn to
medieval literature in very different ways and to different purposes. In these more New Age
contexts, the Grail quest is invoked not for the hidden, pre-Christian knowledge it contains
but for the psychological power it provides the individual practitioner seeking to understand
his or her own destiny. When read with a Jungian perspective, Arthurian romances of all
traditions serve as frameworks for contemporary spiritual seekers navigating both the micro-
and macrocosmic wastelands of the soul and society.16 New Age and Neopagan practitioners
who have a special interest in healing the self and the earth can find archetypes in these stories
that help them uncover and resolve physical, spiritual and psychic wounds: the practitioner
is both the questing knight and the wounded king. He or she is often, in the form of an
idealized Self, the Grail as well. Such medievalism is influenced by modern writers such as
J. R. R. Tolkien and Joseph Campbell who foregrounded the significance of the hero’s journey,
as well as Starhawk, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jean Shinoda Bolen who brought attention
to women’s roles and voices in these traditions. Starhawk’s 1989 The Spiral Dance prompted
many people to seek empowered versions of the feminine from past cultures, including that
of medieval Europe. Bradley’s 1982 The Mists of Avalon and other writings sparked a mini-
industry of their own, inspiring alternative histories to be written and goddess gatherings to
be formed. Jean Shinoda Bolen mainstreamed archetypal readings of mythology for women
in Goddesses in Every Woman and continues to engage in and encourage medievalism through
‘self-help and spirituality’ works such as Crossing into Avalon: A Woman’s Midlife Quest for
the Sacred Feminine (2004). These works, which refer to, draw from and elaborate upon
medieval literary traditions, have been wildly influential in shaping New Age and Neopagan
articulations and understandings of the self, femininity and the goddess in the past and
present.
The widely divergent approaches to and perceptions of the medieval past espoused
among New Age and Neopagan practitioners are illustrated by the varied observance of the
Wheel of the Year, a notion of seasonal festivals marked primarily by the two solstices and
two equinoxes. On the one hand, we have contemporary Druids and Heathens tracing these
and other holidays through medieval Irish, Welsh and Norse texts, making their observance
re-enactments of pagan practice.17 Wiccans and Druids, who draw from Celtic traditions,
adopt holiday names such as Lughnasadh (or Lammas), while Heathens observe Freysblot.
On the other hand, we have unaffiliated New Age and Neopagan practitioners who may
simply have a notion of any pre-Industrial era as more in-tune with the earth’s rhythms and
therefore see the Wheel of the Year as an appealing example of folk wisdom, tied to natural
events such as planting and harvesting. Such practitioners may observe only the four Major
High Days (solstices and equinoxes), if any at all, eschewing cross-quarter holidays and
ancestor anniversaries observed by more text- and tradition-based strains of Neopaganism.
In general, New Agers and Neopagans view the Middle Ages as more holistic and earth-
friendly than contemporary times and draw upon actual or perceived medieval practices to
get more in tune with natural rhythms and cycles of nature, often with the goal of healing.
Practitioners look to the medieval era for guides to astrological diagnosis and healing as well as
gardening and herbal remedies.18 ‘Medieval folk wisdom’ is frequently invoked and described
as more authentic, customizable and nurturing than contemporary Western allopathic
medicine. Despite being practised by (male) monks and scientists in the Middle Ages, herbal
and astrological healing traditions are often cast as ‘women’s wisdom’ or ‘esoteric teachings’
that the Church attempted to squelch. In Gardnerian Wicca, herb-lore in particular is seen
as the heritage of witches. Detailing the history of the word ‘witch’ (omitting the medieval-
ness of the languages he cites), Pete ‘Pathfinder’ Davis states that ‘long ago, before the advent
of male-dominated medicine in the middle ages, [“witch”] referred to the local healers who
used natural medicines, herbs and roots and things from the forest and the garden.’19 On
the other hand, rather than establishing a lineage, New Age practitioners tend to focus upon
the energetic or vibrational healing available through herbs, crystals and stones, looking to
neuroscience to confirm what experience and esoteric tradition suggest.
In addition to such textually oriented, quasi-scholarly medievalism among practices
of Wicca, Odinism and New Age Jungian analysis, one can find a looser medievalism at
work among the hodgepodge of Western Esotericism, itself informed by nineteenth-century
medievalism. Here, medieval astrology, alchemy and symbolism will be invoked alongside
Egyptian mythology, UFO theories and crystal healing. However, when New Age contexts
invoke a ‘traditional practice’ such as alchemy, they focus on metaphorical rather than literal
interpretations. The transmutation of base into precious metal becomes the transformation of
that which is base in the self into that which is transcendent. In New Age contexts, meaning
rests not on a narrative of preserved secret teaching but rather on the individual’s own abilities
to make connections between the past and present, between disparate traditions, to further
self-understanding. For instance, the best-selling New Age author Caroline Myss teaches a
seminar on ‘Spiritual Alchemy’, which can be web-streamed for $35 from her website and is
described thus:
This series focuses on identifying the influences in our lives that keep us from making
changes, and understanding the wisdom that the ancients of the Mystery Schools of the
Middle Ages had ... teaching the insight necessary to begin changing your ‘lead’ issues
to ‘gold’ (changing the ‘bad’ in our lives to ‘good’).Caroline delves into this rich field
of inquiry by describing how you can become a ‘Spiritual Alchemist’ – being able to
change the way you look at yourself and your contract through the ‘eastern mystery
school’ and the Chakra system – universal patterns of consciousness which influence your
psychological spiritual development. She illustrates the alchemical concepts present in the
story of The Wizard of Oz.20 [All punctuation and emphasis is original]
Here, we see a practitioner and teacher drawing from Eastern and Western ‘mystery schools’
as well as popular media to help people ‘alchemize’ their lives. The marketplace of ideas as
well as the marketplace of consumer products proliferates with notions and potions deemed
or termed ‘medieval’.
In addition to rituals, practice manuals and histories that claim to be based on medieval
authorities, myths or folk wisdom, New Age and Neopagan practitioners can find many
medieval-themed products for sale that claim to enhance the spiritual experience or efficacy,
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such as CDs and audio downloads, ritual handbooks, tarot and meditation decks, clothing
and jewellery, stones, gems, candles, cauldrons and other props and accessories.21 While
manufacturers court both kinds of practitioners, Neopagans tend to be more ‘do it yourself ’
(DIY), making their own garb and props from found materials, and will often criticize New
Agers for being too consumerist. Medieval-themed or medieval-inspired clothing, bedding
and decorative household items are offered through secular catalogues and replica websites
but take on a different flavour when appearing in New Age and Neopagan consumer contexts
where they become a means to bring enchantment and magic into everyday life. For example,
a $59.95 bedspread at www.pyramidcollection.com is described thus: ‘Glowing like an
illuminated page from a Medieval Book of Hours, the bountiful Tree of Life shelters your
slumbers as a tapestry- woven Bedspread with contrasting, fringed edges.’22 On the same
website, ‘Goddesses of Celtic legend and lore inspire Laurie Cabot’s majickal design,’ in the
description of the Kells Dress ($89.95).23 An ‘Aromatherapy Celtic Cross Locket’ at www.
Gaiam.com ($30) promises ‘a way to find peace and calm throughout your busy day.’24 Such
catalogues offer more than re-enactment of the medieval past, as descriptions of medieval-
themed wedding attire often do. They suggest a way to transform the present by purchasing
items that promise a lifestyle of enchantment.
While there is much crossover between these two movements, New Agers and Neopagans
differ radically from one another in their relationship to the Christianity of the Middle Ages.
Generally, Neopagans attempt to peer beyond it to a deeper, unrecorded or oral past, sifting
through medieval Christian texts for hidden pagan practices.25 To many New Agers, on
the other hand, the Christianity of any figure or practice is almost incidental to its efficacy:
it doesn’t matter to which tradition a teaching or practice belongs since all paths lead to
the same truth. Practitioners are encouraged to find aspects of traditions that ‘resonate’
personally with them and are invited to divorce devotional praxis from its theology or
historical and cultural contexts. New Agers can ‘take what serves them’ from the Middle
Ages and discard what doesn’t. Additionally, New Agers do not define themselves against
Christianity, as Neopagans do (the broadest notion of ‘paganism’ being non-Judeo-Christian).
This acceptance of Christian influence allows New Age practitioners to adopt medievalisms
not typically shared by Neopagans, such as a reverence for medieval mystics as Ascended
Masters, enlightened prophets or teachers. New Agers will often engage with medieval
Christian mystics by dis-embedding their teachings from their social and historical contexts
and re-embedding them in contemporary, New Age contexts, which are highly individualized
and diverse.26 For example, a practitioner may read a text by or about Theresa of Avila, adopt
vocabularies or concepts from that text and then resituate them in new contexts that could
include shamanism, crystal healing or archetype work, as Caroline Myss does in Entering
the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul.27 This interpretive, re-embedding process
is itself a spiritual act that taps the practitioner’s ability to make patterns and connections
between seemingly disparate traditions. The process can also result in the production of new
movement texts and websites that inspire such reflective and personal re-contextualization to
be practised by other New Agers.28
New Agers who practise techniques of the self in order to transcend the self, achieve
enlightenment, or realize the truth will look to Theresa of Avila as well as Joan of Arc,
John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart as fellow-seekers of divinization

who functioned on the fringes of dogma and creed.29 These historical figures, along with other
Ascended Masters, enlightened historical and legendary figures which include characters from
King Arthur’s court as well as medieval saints and scientists, may be encountered through
traditional texts, meditation decks or through experiences such as channelling.30 The New
Age fascination with the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen in particular seems to
be part of a broader cultural reimagining of the medieval composer and philosopher as ‘’70s-
style New Age feminist and herbal healer.’31 One can find her music, or music inspired by her
compositions, used for meditation and healing as well as translations of her medical works
in New Age shops under ‘stone and herb healing.’ A group called ‘The Hildegard Girls’ has
collected channelled messages they have received from Spirit through Hildegard under the
title The Calistrophe Meditations, available as a free ebook and on their blog, which also
features a posting that connects the work of Edgar Cayce to Joachim of Fiore.32
Thanks to a broadening of both scholarly scope and access to digital media, notions
about medieval women’s experiences, alchemy, astrology, herbal healing, mysticism and
magic, topics in which New Agers and Neopagans have keen interest, can now be widely
disseminated and reinvigorated for contemporary practice, to greater or lesser degrees of
‘authenticity’. Such access and reuse is not always celebrated or welcomed. Neopagans and
New Agers are widely criticized by Christian organizations who object to their theologies and
by scholars who object to their misrepresentation of history.33 For example, Christian groups,
cultural-preservationists and historians alike have all denounced the New Age ‘hijacking’
of Hildegard of Bingen.34 New Agers come under additional fire from a variety of cultural
groups, particularly Native Americans (in the United States) and First Nations (in Canada),
for cultural appropriation.35 The debate about what is appropriate cultural sharing and what
is misappropriation highlights clashes in ideas about reality and knowledge between New
Agers and their criticizers. New Agers believe that no spiritual element belongs to any one
group; they also privilege personal over social ethics and so the broader social impact of
misrepresenting or marketing ‘Native American Spirituality’ is less important to them than
their own personal sense of respect for that group and good intentions. Spiritual tourism
in the form of pilgrimage similarly highlights such clashes in worldview as they are played
out in physical spaces such as Stonehenge and Glastonbury, where Neopagans fire back at
governmental heritage organizations for their appropriation of pagan sites of worship.36
When the past is encountered not through scholarly endeavours but through ritual,
meditation, divination, channelling, intuition, synchronicity and correspondences, as it is
in New Age and Neopagan contexts, then personal ‘resonance’ becomes the hallmark of
value and authenticity. This perspective leads to the great diversity of practices and beliefs
among New Agers and Neopagans. And in that context, medievalism becomes more than
simply an authorizing anchor in the past. It becomes a way to re-imagine and re-enchant
the present, to bring a sense of the sacred to life without the limitations of doctrine, creed,
code or allegiance. It also becomes a way to define the self and community in ways that defy
mainstream, contemporary ideas about time and space. New Age or Neopagan practitioners
may choose aspects of belief or practice that ‘resonate’ with them and dismiss others,
attributing such resonance to the imprint of past lives, channelled messages, or an intuitive,
230
mysterious sense of what is ‘right’ for themselves. As such, New Age and Neopagan texts
and practices identify ‘truth’ in interesting ways that may contradict mainstream, rationalist
approaches. We have already seen how Neopaganism is strongly shaped by fantastical
medieval sagas and romances that form fertile soil for contemporary ritual and spiritual
development.37 Additionally, the New Age movement connects to other kinds of texts that
similarly hover on the borderland between fiction and non-fiction, such as speculative science,
hagiography and spiritual autobiography.38 New Agers and Neopagans then interpret these
texts through their own individual, idiosyncratic experiences and intuitions (rather than seek
external authority to interpret the ‘truth’ for them). When we then consider the impact of
beliefs in past lives, channelling, synchronicity and other temporal ‘anomalies’, contemporary
mainstream categories of fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, completely fall apart. Whether
such notions of ‘truth’ are hallmarks of postmodernism or defences against it is a matter of
current scholarly debate.
In conclusion, Neopagans adopt the rituals and devotional practices of real or imagined
past cultures. They try to learn more about the underlying ‘reality’ of those cultures through
specialist and expert knowledge and will often engage with primary historical texts. New
Agers, on the other hand, may adopt the practices of other cultures but when they want to
learn more, they instead rely on personal experience or contemporary experts who themselves
filter the practices of other cultures through New Age paradigms. Medievalism may serve to
authenticate New Age or Neopagan practices by providing a sense of legacy. It may serve as
a form of escapism from the harsh realities of everyday life. However, like fantasy fiction,
medievalism also provides people with a way to organize and understand experience that
makes daily life more magical or more significant. Each of these religious groups shares the
desire for an enchanted personal life and an enchanted society. Such a desire is not new: we
see it in a variety of medieval texts that valorize the past and denigrate the present, from epics
to romances to sermons. The lament made by New Agers and Neopagans that we’re living in
a disenchanted world cut off from nature sounds a lot like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath mourning
the demystification of a landscape that has become dominated by Friars rather than fairies.39
Medievalism speaks to New Age and Neopagan desires for enchantment as ‘the medieval’ is
imagined as a time that maintained a sense of reverence for the earth. But these practitioners
also fear the oppression and intolerance they see epitomized in the Middle Ages. For these
groups, the medieval past represents both hope and a warning as they look to reform the
present and shape the future.
Notes
1. For a more analytical overview of the topic, see Karolyn Kinane (December 2013), ‘Intuiting the
Past: New Age and Neopagan medievalisms’. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 13(2),
http://www.relegere.org.
2. Ronald Hutton (1999), Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Paul Heelas (1996), The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of
Modernity. Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
4. Ronald Hutton (2003), Witches, Druids, and King Arthur. London; New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
5. Ross Nichols, with John Matthews and Philip Carr-Gromm (1990), The Book of Druidry.
London: Aquarian.
6. ‘Hallowquest: The Official Website for Caitlyn and John Matthews’, http://www.hallowquest.org.uk,
accessed 3 July 2013.
7. These particular articles can be found in the Imbolc 2010 and Beltane 2010 issues of Earthsongs,
respectively, available at http://www.faeryshaman.org.
8. ‘What are the aims of the Odinic Rite?’, The Odinic Rite, 2013, http://www.odinic-rite.org/main/
faq, accessed 12 July 2013.
9. Ulfhethnar Odinsen (2013), ‘Yggrasil: Interconnections and dependency’, The Odinic Rite,
13 March, http://www.odinic-rite.org/main/yggdrasil-interconnections-and-dependency/#sthash.
iH9hGePj.dpuf and Shawn E., ‘Runic Analysis: Living up to your name’, The Odinic Rite,
4 October 2012, http://www.odinic-rite.org/main/runic-name-analysis-living-up-to-your-name,
both accessed 13 July 2013.
10. The Circle of Ostara, ‘The Gods and Goddesses of Odinism’, The Circle of Ostara, 1996, http://
www.odinic-rite.org/main/giants-and-the-reliability-of-received-mythology-from-the-eddas-snorri-
and-saxo/#sthash.9JYURkWK.dpuf, accessed 15 July 2013.
11. James Kambos (2012), ‘Cauldron Magic and Lore’. Llewellyn’s Witches’ Datebook 2013.
Woodbury: MN, p. 16.
12. ‘The Burning Times in the Summerlands’, http://www.summerlands.com/crossroads/remembrance/
burning.htm, accessed 15 July 2013.
13. Morpheus Ravenna (2013), ‘Disambiguating the Queen: #1, Morgan le Fay’, Banshee Arts,
28 February, http://www.bansheearts.com, accessed 15 July 2013.
14. Philip Carr-Gomm, prefatory note to the first Mount Haemus Lecture, given by Ronald Hutton,
cited below.
15. Ronald Hutton (2005), ‘The Origins of Modern Druidry’, First Mount Haemus Lecture, Order
of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, East Essex, England, http://www.druidry.org/sites/default/files/pdf-
uploads/FIRST%20MT%20HAEMUS%20LECTURE.pdf, accessed 15 July 2013.
16. For Arthurian medievalism in tarot and meditation decks, see Melissa Ridley-Elmes (December
2013), ‘From Propaganda to product: King Arthur from political to spiritual tool in contemporary
Tarot decks’. Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 13(2), Special issue on New Age and
Neopagan medievalisms, Karolyn Kinane (ed.), http://www.relegere.org.
17. See, for example, Isaac Bonewits (2005), ‘A Neopagan Druid Calendar 2.4.1’, Cyberhenge 1974,
http://www.neopagan.net/NeoDruidismCalendar.html, accessed 15 July 2013.
18. Rebecca Krug (2013), ‘Planting by the Moon: How Astrological was Medieval Gardening?’
Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception, 13(2) (December), Special issue on New Age and
Neopagan medievalisms, Karolyn Kinane (ed.), http://www.relegere.org. In addition to many
books and websites that promote healing through herbs, astrology and alchemy, one can find
contemporary practitioners of medieval astrology at http://www.lightworker.com/Spectrum.
19. Pete ‘Pathfinder’ Davis, ‘Basic Beliefs and History’, presentation delivered at the
Washington Hospice Association Conference, 4 March 1997 in Issaquah, WA, http://www.
aquariantabernaclechurch.org/basic-beliefs-and-history, accessed 15 July 2013.
20. Caroline Myss, ‘Fundamentals of Spiritual Alchemy’, Caroline Myss Products, 2013, http://www.
myss.com/catalog/fundamentals-of-spiritual-alchemy.htm, accessed 15 July 2013.
232
21. See, in particular, ‘Llwewllyn: New Worlds of Body, Mind and Spirit’, Llewellynn Worldwide, Ltd,
2013, http://www.llewellyn.com. ‘The Pyramid Collection: Myth, Magick, Fantasy and Romance’,
Pyramid Collection 2013, http://www.pyramidcollection.com.
22. ‘Tree of Life Bedspread’, Pyramid Collection, 2013, http://www.pyramidcollection.com/itemdy00.
aspx?T1=P27916%20FL&ref=us, accessed 12 July 2013.
23. ‘Laurie Cabot Kells Dress’, Pyramid Collection, 2013, http://www.pyramidcollection.com/
itemdy00.aspx?T1=P97562%20XS&ref=us, accessed 12 July 2013.
24. ‘Aromatherapy Celtic Cross Locket’, Gaiam, 2013, http://www.gaiam.com/Aromatherapy-Celtic-
Cross-Locket/74-0190,default,pd.html?start=1&q=celtic, accessed 12 July 2013.
25. Again, such generalizations will always have exceptions. For example, there is a branch of
Christian Witchcraft.
26. New Agers will also engage in this devotional process with texts by Hafez, Rumi and mystical
writings from many different traditions.
27. Caroline Myss (2007), Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul. New York: Free
Press.
28. Olav Hammer (2004), Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the
New Age. Leiden: Brill.
29. The popular New Age writer Eckhart Tolle took his name from the German mystic. On New
Age ideas about the self, see Peter Clecak (1983), America’s Quest for the Ideal Self: Dissent and
Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Heelas, The New Age Movement.
On technologies of the self, see Michel Foucault (1992 [1984]), The Use of Pleasure. The History
of Sexuality: Volume Two, trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, pp. 10–11.
30. Heather Kavan (December 2013), ‘Joan of Arc in New Age spirituality’. Relegere: Studies in
Religion and Reception, 13(2). Special issue on New Age and Neopagan medievalisms, Karolyn
Kinane (ed.), http://www.relegere.org. On the relationship between Theosophy and Ascended
Masters, see Pablo D. Sender (Summer 2011), ‘Mahatmas versus Ascended Masters’. Quest,
99: 107–11.
31. Ella Taylor (14 October 2010), discussing Margarethe von Trotta’s 2009 film Vision, ‘Hildegard
von Bingen: A nun with a “Vision”,’ National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=130428949, accessed 15 July 2013. See, for example, Joyce Suellentrop (June/
July 1995), ‘Hildegard of Bingen: Medieval healer of the Rhine’, Mother Earth Living, http://
www.motherearthliving.com/health-and-wellness/hildegard-of-bingen.aspx#axzz2YaBcusSF,
32. The Hildegard Girls, Hildegard Says Hello: Inspirations from Hildegard of Bingen, http://www.
hildegardsayshello.wordpress.com, accessed 15 July 2013.
33. See, for example, ‘The Lighthouse Project: Exposing the Dangers of the New Spirituality’,
Lighthouse Trails Publishing, LLC 2002–2013, http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/index.
html, accessed 15 July 2013.
34. S. Brinkman, ‘The Hijacking of St Hildegard by New Age Enthusiasts’, Women of Grace 25 (blog),
November 2012, http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=17775; Josef Krasenbrink, president
of the Hildegard von Bingen Society, quoted in ‘St Hildegard: From medieval cult to New Age
cool’, The Independent, 8 March 1998, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/saint-hildegard-from-
medieval-cult-to-new-age-cool-1149055.html; Kristine Lerman, 15 February 1995, ‘The Life and
Works of Hildegard von Bingen’, in Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Paul Halsall (ed.), Fordham
University for Medieval Studies, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/hildegarde.asp. Each
35. Johnson, Myke (2002), ‘Wanting to be Indian: When spiritual searching turns into cultural theft’,
in Joanne Pearson (ed.), Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age.
Milton Keynes; Burlington: The Open University; Ashgate, pp. 277–94.
36. See Adrian Ivakiv (2001), Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury
and Sedona. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Andy Worthington (2004), Stonehenge:
Celebration and Subversion. Loughborough: Alternative Albion; Laurie Finke and Martin
Shichtman (2013), ‘Arthur Pendragon, Eco-Warrior’. Arthuriana, 23(1): 3–19.
37. Patricia Rose (2006), ‘The Quest for Identity: Spiritual Feminist Ritual as an Enactment of
Medieval Romance’, in Lynne Hume and Kathleen McPhillips (eds), Popular Spiritualities: The
Politics of Contemporary Enchantment. Hants, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 17–26.
38. Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, p. 38.
39. Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in Larry D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside
Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., l. 864–81.
chapter twenty-one
Twenty-First-Century Templar
Cory James Rushton
In her 2007 popular history of the Templars, Sharan Newman tells the story of her encounter
with a young man whose interest in The Da Vinci Code (2003, film released in 2006) leads
him to ask if the Templars had actually existed: ‘I came to a full stop. That young man had
accepted that the novel was fiction. Therefore, he had assumed that the Templars were also
fiction.’ She concludes that readers of historical fiction are much like readers of science fic-
tion: they are not always in a position to judge the reality of a text’s historical claims any
more than the latter are universally capable of determining what science is and what fiction
is.1 Newman’s story suggests that the Templars exist in the same quasi-historical register as
Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur (the real, the maybe-real, the might-as-well-be-real). How
did they get there? Modern popular culture knows three things about the Templars: they are
associated with the Holy Grail, whatever is meant by that; they are victims of political or
social persecution, possibly because of widespread homosexuality and blasphemy within the
order; and they are the villains, fanatical and warlike, in things like Ridley Scott’s epic film
Kingdom of Heaven (2005). But the Templars are also useful as visual shorthand for warriors
both ancient and secretive. This chapter will explore what the Templars mean in modern cul-
ture, predominantly in historical and speculative fictions (i.e., science fiction and fantasy).
By way of contrast, the Knights of the Hospital (the Hospitallers) sometimes appear in
modern texts, at least once as a foil for the Templars (and in one prominent text they are
replaced by the Templars). The Templars and Hospitallers were only two of a number of
crusading orders created in the aftermath of the First Crusade (1096–99). In fact, the Knights
of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem were founded first, in 1099 (although
it had existed from around 1023 as a non-military order), with the Templars (properly the
poor fellow-soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon) following in 1118. The proper
name of the Templar order came from the belief that their headquarters had been built over
the Temple of Solomon, with lasting implication for their legend: what better place to find
Twenty-First-Century Templar 235
lost religious items than this legendary and holy place? The most important of the other
orders were the Teutonic Knights, who have an afterlife of their own as propaganda during
the Second World War in both Germany and the Soviet Union. Like many of the other orders,
the Teutonic Knights did not operate exclusively in the Middle East (in fact, many orders
never operated there at all, as in the case of numerous groups devoted to reconquering
Spain and Portugal, then in the hands of Islamic rulers). The Templars arguably achieved
their initial prominence in the medieval European imaginary through a combination of their
headquarters – with its mystical association with Solomon – and the work of their early
champion, the prominent Bernard of Clairvaux (who wrote the rule for their order in 1128).
This very prominence proved problematic eventually: the loss of the kingdom of Jerusalem in
1291 was associated with the Templars more than with other orders, and unlike the Teutonic
Knights and the Hospitallers, the Templars did not manage to associate themselves with any
replacement field of military operation. Increasingly wealthy, and powerful as a result of that
wealth, the Templars began to attract the wrong kind of attention. The order was in constant
litigation with other ecclesiastical orders, from whose lands many of their own endowments
had been carved.
Historians have puzzled over how the Templars came to be utterly dismantled when
other orders, military and otherwise, survived scandal and envy; indeed, the fact that the
destruction of the Templars was in some sense inexplicable helps to fuel the various myths
and legends they have attracted. As Norman Cohn has noted, the attack on the Templars
did not come out of nowhere: Philip the Fair had first pushed for a suggestion made by
Ramon Lull, that the Knights of the Temple and the Hospital should amalgamate into a
single crusader army under a single king (Ramon may have meant James II of Aragon; Philip
rather imagined it was himself).2 Pope Clement V, Pope at Avignon, wrote to the heads of
both orders suggesting a merger in 1305. The Templars resisted amalgamation, although
neither order liked the idea very much. The Templars, however, had begun to attract rumours
of blasphemy (including the worship of a mysterious head) and sexual deviance (including
homosexuality). A former Templar, Esquiu de Floyran, was primarily associated with these
accusations. When the Grand Master of the Templars (Jacques de Molay) met with Clement
in 1307, these rumours were among the things they discussed. When Clement asked Philip to
help investigate the charges against the Templars, he moved brutally and quickly. Members of
the order, including the Grand Master, were burnt at the stake that very year, and Clement
dissolved the order entirely in 1312. Among the charges levied against them was that they
worshipped an idol named Baphomet, which most scholars think is a clerical mistake for
Mohammed. The name Baphomet is otherwise difficult to trace, and it is possible that the
first of many pop cultural resonances associated with the Templars is this particular demonic
character, who subsequently appeared in texts as diverse as Aleister Crowley’s magical texts
(particularly The Book of Lies, 1912, and The Book of the Law, 1925), heavy metal albums by
bands like Mötley Crüe (Shout at the Devil, 1983), and the original fantasy role-playing game
Dungeons & Dragons (first appearing in 1974, but ongoing), through the depiction of him as
the Sabbatic goat-god in French occultist Eliphas Levi’s 1861 book Dogmes et Rituels de la
Haute Magie. The rapid and complete fall of the Templars, combined with the sacrilegious and
sexual nature of the charges against them, were the nexus in which their modern legend was
236
born. The legend of the Templars, apparent victims of a historical conspiracy and associated
with the cradle of Judeo-Christian culture, carries with it the idea of conspiracy itself: how
the powerful and the academic – how history itself – lies to us.
The greatest contemporary locus for this idea of an ancient conspiracy involving the
Templars is now The Da Vinci Code, first a novel by Dan Brown (2003) and then a film
by Robert Howard (2006). Brown’s protagonist, the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon,
solemnly assures French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu that the Templar mission in the
Holy Land was a cover for their real mission: to find an artefact lost since the time of Christ
(the Holy Grail). In the world of The Da Vinci Code, not only did the Templars find this lost
treasure, there were so few of them that they could quit the Holy Land as a group and head
to Rome to inform the Pope. The film’s Langdon provides a potted history. The Church
declares them to be of ‘limitless power’, at least until a later Pope declares them too powerful
and destroys them: so not limitless, after all. Langdon describes the Templars as the ‘military
arm’ of the Priory of Sion. The Priory is a fascinating hoax originally perpetrated by Gérard
de Sède (collaborating with Pierre Plantard) in L’Or de Rennes (1967), and popularized by
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln in the pseudo-historical book Holy
Blood, Holy Grail (1982) and its sequel The Messianic Legacy (1986). The Priory is said
to have been founded by Godfrey de Bouillon during the First Crusade and to have as its
primary purpose the restoration of the Merovingian dynasty to the throne of France. The
eschatological function of the Priory is in turn based on the belief that the Merovingians were
descended from King David through Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene and that the bloodline
issuing from Magdalene’s womb is the true ‘Holy Grail’. For scholars, perhaps the most ironic
aspect of the whole Priory saga was the 2006 plagiarism lawsuit against Brown brought by
Baigent and Leigh: it was dismissed partially because Baigent and Leigh had presented their
case as history, and so could not claim that Brown had plagiarized them in a work of fiction.
The Da Vinci Code has spawned a host of imitators, including Julia Navarro’s Brotherhood of
the Shroud (2007) and Paul Christopher’s Sword of the Templars and its sequels (beginning
in 2009) and Nicholas Cage’s National Treasure movies (2004 and 2007). Conspiratorial
Templars are almost their own genre at this point.
The Priory’s association with the Templars, according to the conspiracy theories, is through
the latter group’s alleged connection with the St Clair or Sinclair family, the Earls of Orkney
and the mythologies attracted by their mid-fifteenth-century creation, Rosslyn Chapel (built
by William I, also Earl of Caithness). William’s grandfather, Henry I Sinclair, has long been
associated (erroneously) with the Templars, and is sometimes said to have made a voyage to
North America, landing in either Massachusetts or Nova Scotia. Despite evidence that two
Sinclairs testified against the Templars in 1309, the legend that Henry St Clair helped to hide
Templar treasure from royal French depredations – and eventually brought one piece of that
treasure, the Holy Grail, to North America – has been difficult to put down. For William
Mann, the goal of Henry Sinclair’s voyage was to plant a Merovingian colony in the future
Nova Scotia; this colony became the Acadians, in turn driven out by the British in 1755 (the
historical Acadians actually settled in the region much later than the fourteenth century, of
course). Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this legend is the work it does for colonial
interests: many proponents of the Henry Sinclair/North America theory also argue that he
stands behind various aboriginal myths, notably Glooscap, a culture hero associated with the
Mi’kmaq peoples in the Canadian Maritimes. It is one thing to say Henry Sinclair came to
North America; it is quite another to say he or a member of his crew taught the Mi’kmaq
how to fish.3
The Templar association with European culture’s ultimate lost object, the Holy Grail, was
not as obviously heralded by medieval romance as one might assume: In many non-academic
works on the Grail, the association between the Grail and the Templars is assumed to be so
obvious and so well established that it requires no detailed justification. It may therefore
come as a surprise to those not familiar with the Grail romances themselves that of all the
various versions of the Grail legend, the Templars appear by name ‘in only Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzival and some later works based on it’.4 It is in this role that they appear
in the third Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Jones’s father, an
expert on the Holy Grail, is abducted by Nazis who are hoping to find it. Jones encounters
the Grail’s current guardians, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, who point him the
right direction. The Grail’s final guardian is depicted as an ageing Templar knight, kept alive
by its healing power. The test he imposes on those who would seek the Grail is a visual
one, in which the simple wooden Grail is hidden among a selection of rich artefacts (which
predictably fool the Nazis, but not Indiana Jones). Last Crusade’s Templar character is a
vision of virtue and sacrifice, paradoxically the last of his kind and somehow associated with
a successor order in the Brotherhood. Recent years have seen a number of heroic Templar
narratives, including Jack Whyte’s Templar novel trilogy outlining the history of the order
(2006–9); or Robyn Young’s Brethren novel trilogy (2006–8), in which a young Templar has
to recover a heretical book which turns out to be a Grail romance (and which in turn contains
the secret conspiratorial plans of an order within the order). Last Crusade shares an emphasis
on historical conspiracy and lost objects with these and other texts.
The powerful association between the Templars and legendary objects is so strong that
it once provided its own pop cultural ‘correction’ when they are attached to the twentieth
century’s greatest popular culture MacGuffin: the Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett’s 1929
novel involves a treasure, a gem-encrusted golden statue of a falcon that has bounced around
the world since the 1530s. The corrupt antiquities collector Gutman asks detective Sam
Spade what he knows about the Knights of the Hospital, not the Templars: ‘Not much,’
replies Spade, ‘only what I remember from history in school – Crusaders or something.’
Gutman explains that the Hospitallers, driven from Rhodes by Suleiman, eventually settle
in Malta, Gozo and Tripoli at the behest of the Spanish emperor Charles V. Charles asks for
a nominal annual tribute of a single falcon, but the fabulously rich Hospitallers do him one
better and instead create the Maltese Falcon – ‘not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious
golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers’.5 Gutman
assures us that this wealth is not a matter of careful stewardship or of faith rewarded: ‘For
years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious
metals, silks, ivories – the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know
that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.’6 Gutman
echoes the dominant cultural understanding of the Templars, if not the Hospitallers: it is a
testament to the power of the Templar myth that the best of the filmic adaptations, the 1941
238
Maltese Falcon (directed by John Huston), changes the Hospitallers to the historically

impossible ‘Knights Templar of Malta’.
In Hammett’s novel, both orders hold wealth which comes from an insatiable greed, a
martial ethos which only pretends to sanctity. More importantly, the extent of their wealth is
something nobody can fully know. Shrouds of Turin, Holy Grails: all is possible. Further, the
Maltese Falcon is itself a fake which Gutman and his associates stole from a Russian general
in Constantinople/Istanbul. Whether they are right to guess that the Russian general still has
the original hardly matters: the value of The Maltese Falcon lies in the characters and events
prompted by an item of historical and material value that exists only to motivate them. It is
a true MacGuffin, a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, who defines it as ‘the mechanical
element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace
and in spy stories it is most always the papers’.7 The Templars are the perfect origin story for
a MacGuffin, their inexhaustible treasure trove manifesting on the page as an inexhaustible
source of story motivators. That they appear as themselves, guardians of the Grail, in the
greatest contemporary MacGuffin series – the Indiana Jones films – is almost inevitable.
In Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt’s comic book Western/horror series The Sixth Gun
(beginning 2010), various characters pursue six weapons of ancient origin, currently in the
form of six shooters. These guns not only confer special powers on their owners, to whom they
are bonded, they are the keys to an ancient evil. The most powerful of the guns confers visions
of the past and future, and at one point the young woman who is bonded to it relates, in two
panels, her vision of their past. The second panel hints at an age before language, primitive
humans wielding stone axes (perhaps borrowing from the opening scenes of Kubrick’s film
2001). But the first panel shows Templar knights, their swords hanging at their sides as they
ride through a desert landscape, away from a burning city.8 The panel tells us nothing of the
Templars themselves, except that they are potentially influenced by the same evil as most who
wield the guns in the book’s present. What it does tell us is that the Templars are not only
visual shorthand for the Middle Ages, but for warrior cultures and secret societies: indeed, for
the secret, conspiracy-laden history of the world we increasingly see in popular culture.
The Templars are not always, or even usually, the heroes when they appear in modern
texts, nor is the specific connection with the Grail or any other lost object inevitable. Walter
Scott’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe includes a Templar who is willing to see a Jewish girl executed if
he cannot have her, clearly breaking at least one of the injunctions placed on him as a chaste
warrior (and more injunctions placed on any ordinary Christian). Clare Simmons suggests
that Scott’s Templar is annexed to the novel’s vision of Norman oppression: ‘The Normans in
Ivanhoe are admittedly evil characters. They have no compassion for the subject Saxons, and
their lust for power is supported by the wiles of the Roman Catholic church as represented by
the Hospitallers and Templars – orders supposedly created to defend Christianity but in Scott’s
portrayal a source of corrupt power. Even the Normans’ claimed chivalry becomes a form
of self-parody, particularly as represented by the Templar Brian de Bois-Gilbert’s unrequited
passion for Rebecca.’9 Scott’s Templars act as manifestations of Norman-ness, quite contrary
to their contemporary manifestation as medieval Scots who liked long sea voyages to North
America. They are part of a medievalist ideological system which seeks to explain the origins
of modern democracy through an account of historical threats to freedom.
This sense of Norman-ness plays an unexpected part in one of the most popular modern
engagements with the Templars: their role as the villains in the video game series Assassin’s
Creed (ongoing, 2007–present). Based loosely on Vladimir Bartol’s 1938 anti-fascist Slovene
language novel Alamut, the series follows the efforts of the assassins against the Knights
Templar over centuries and borrows the novel’s maxim: ‘Nothing is true; everything is
permitted.’ The first game takes place during the Third Crusade, while the third game is
set during the American Revolution. Assassin’s Creed III (2012) echoes some of the political
debate of the latter time: the beliefs of many, including Thomas Jefferson, that America was
the natural heir to the free Saxons, who had been conquered by the feudal Normans, leading to
a long conflict between individual liberty and autocratic power (as exemplified by such events
as the signing of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution). It makes sense that the Templars,
with their mythological connections to secret ‘world-ruling’ societies like the Illuminati and
the Free Masons, would sometimes be the villainous defenders of social oppression (even if
it seems less likely that the Ismaili, a branch of Shia Islam, could comfortably play the role of
defenders of freedom in twenty-first-century American popular culture). Complicating this
conflict, in the game series, is the presence of an Earth-based but pre-human civilization that
indirectly influences both factions: religion is replaced by a science fiction origin myth.
The two chief villains of Ridley Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, Guy of Lusignan and
Raynald de Châtillon, are both shown as closely associated with the Templars (in fact, they
wear the red cross). Raynald of Châtillon is also a Templar in Jan Guillou’s Knights Templar
trilogy of novels (1998–2001), sometimes called the Arn trilogy after its protagonist or the
Crusader trilogy (and to distinguish it from Whyte’s trilogy, where Raynald is also a Templar).
The single line in Kingdom’s fight scene in which the Templars attempt to assassinate Balian
is indicative of the film’s major thematic concern, the difference between true spirituality and
bloodthirsty fanaticism: ‘Is that why you came to the Holy Land?’ When the newly crowned
Guy lets Raynald out of a prison cell, where the leper king Baldwin IV put him after an attack
on a Muslim caravan, he asks Raynald to give him a war. ‘That’s what I do’, replies Raynald,
hugging his newly restored sword to his chest before dancing from the room. The next scene
sees him executing the members of another Muslim caravan, including the sister of Saladin, an
event sure to give Guy the war he craves. In a rare move, Scott does provide a compassionate
clerical knight, but he is not a Templar: a character known only as the ‘Hospitaller’ is an early
ally of Balian, although he participates in Raynald’s battles and dies at the Horns of Hattin,
decapitated just as Raynald is. While the film does not develop this distinction, the suggestion
is that the Templars are warriors hungering for a fight, while the Hospitallers fight only when
necessary (or when forced to by circumstances necessitated by the Templars).
Balian is a sceptical protagonist, suspicious of both ecclesiastical and royal power, and
thus well constructed for carrying Scott’s message of individualistic tolerance; he wins the
temporary truce that allows Jerusalem to be evacuated after the Templars have lost Hattin
and fled the Holy Land. An early adventure helps to establish Balian’s vaguely secular or
tolerant credentials: he rescues a follower of Saladin, Imad ad-Din, although he is unaware of
ad-Din’s importance until much later. The motif of a Christian rescuing a Saracen is almost
commonplace: it appears in Walter Scott’s 1825 novel, The Talisman, where the hero saves
Saladin himself. It also appears in a much-altered film version, King Richard and the Crusaders
240
(David Butler 1954), and in an even more altered form in Kevin Costner’s 1991 film, Robin
Hood: Prince of Thieves. The motif is associated directly with the Templars in the second
book of the Arn trilogy, when Arn rescues Saladin from thieves. Whether it is performed by
a Templar or not, writers telling stories of the Crusades are attracted to friendships across
religious lines, but traditionally motivate that friendship through the motif of rescue in battle.
That the motif is more often attached to an ‘independent’ warrior rather than a Templar
speaks to modern society’s scepticism regarding the military orders (and perhaps, increasingly,
of faith itself).
Perhaps the most villainous of Templars are the ones which appear in the very odd ‘Blind
Dead’ series: Tombs of the Blind Dead (Amando de Ossorio 1971) and Return of the Blind
Dead (Amando de Ossorio 1973), The Ghost Galleon (Amando de Ossorio 1974) and
Night of the Seagulls (Amando de Ossorio 1975). The Templars are never named as such
in the films; instead, they are referred to as Knights from the East or the Orient. (To add
to any potential confusion, the film was called Revenge from Planet Ape in America, and
the Templars referred to as apes killed in the last war between themselves and the human
race, in an attempt to pretend the film was a sequel to the Planet of the Apes.) The Templars
are both oppressors and oppressed over the course of the series, appearing in flashbacks as
the victims of intolerance and judicial punishment, but they come back as the undead to
hunt the living. To be fair, the trials they suffer might be justified; in Night of the Seagulls,
a flashback depicts medieval Templars kidnapping and sacrificing a young girl. The undead
Templars hunt by sound because they are blind; although they have been resurrected, their
eyes were eaten by birds as their bodies hung on the gallows or they have been burnt out by
their torturers. Ossorio disliked the word ‘zombie’, arguing that his undead creatures were
closer to mummies: they remembered what they had been. All four films evince a standard
horror movie trope linking youth and sexuality to death, as the undead Templars have a
movie monster tendency towards kidnapping and sacrificing young women. The films adopt
and expand on the medieval accusations which brought down the Templars, and it might be
tempting to link their undead actions with a sceptical modern commentary on the chastity
of the monastic orders (a scepticism that, when the Templars are involved, surely shows the
influence of Ivanhoe). But when these memories of the original accusation are added to the
perverse and exploitative sexuality of the 1970s’ horror film industry, the Templars simply
look like one more ancient evil come back to haunt the living, much as the Nazis have done
in films like The Keep (Michael Mann 1994) and Dead Snow (Anders Banke 2009).
The reputation of the Templars is reversed in the 2011 film Ironclad, but here modern
scepticism concerning the possibility of true chastity plays a pivotal role. Set during a highly
fictionalized 1215 siege of Rochester, a castle held by the rebellious William D’Aubigny
against King John, the film is an uneasy mishmash of history, The Magnificent Seven (John
Sturges 1960), and any given History Channel documentary about sieges. The film’s opening
narration tells us that John was locked into a civil war with his barons for three years, until the
Knights Templar are ‘drawn into this conflict’. How and why is never rehearsed, and the film
is of two minds. Thomas Marshall, the only Templar who survives the film’s opening scene,
is clearly one of cinema’s progressive medieval characters, opposing John for his oppression
of the people; on the other hand, the Pope has sided with John in his efforts to recover from
the indignity of being forced to sign Magna Carta (which the Pope has declared heretical in
any event). Marshall is haunted by unexplained things which have happened to him during
his time in the order, haunted enough that the priest who initially accompanies him and the
Archbishop of Canterbury both suggest that he allow himself to be absolved of his vows. Only
at the end of the film, when he has been successfully seduced by a high-ranking lady, does he
accept a life outside the monastic order. The troubled Thomas Marshall reflects another trend
in the depiction of Templars: the Templar as victim of a personal trauma, imagined not as
necessarily leading to undead shenanigans or a bout of Grail-hiding, but as something which
either motivates joining the order or leaving it.
One of these reasons, not unusually in the Freudian modern era, is sex. While the reasons
for Marshall’s problems are never overtly explained, his attitude to his profession – the
waging of war – is more than ambivalent. He acknowledges the necessity of war, but not
the glory of it, and talks openly to a young squire about the nature of fear: ‘Only the weak
believe that what they do in battle is who they are as men.’ His lover Isabel, the young and
neglected wife of the lord of Rochester (here Baron de Cornhill), has another explanation.
She locates Marshall’s anguish in the vows which prevent him from knowing love, his initial
desire to avoid her manifesting as what she calls a fear of women. By the end of the film, her
somewhat modern scepticism concerning chastity is shown to be at least partially correct.
It is her physical love, combined with the successful if Pyrrhic defence of the castle against
John’s forces, which allows Marshall to leave the order. In a similar vein, Arn Magnusson
(protagonist of Guillou’s trilogy) becomes a Templar only after he impregnates a woman in
a convent (and is accused of having sex with her sister) and is condemned to spend twenty
years fighting in the Holy Land.
The Templars have an influence far beyond whether they appear as heroes or villains in
any given text, and also beyond any association with ancient artefacts. The word ‘Templar’
itself can be evocative without specificity. In the children’s anthropomorphic fantasy series
The Mice Templar (an ongoing Image comic book series beginning in 2007), for example,
the mice wear the traditional pop culture uniform of the Templars but are imagined not as
a religious order, but as a group dedicated to the defence of family and kin: mice against
other animals. It might be worth thinking about another aspect of Templar iconography: not
what the cross means, but that it is actually a uniform, as opposed to traditional heraldry in
which individuals and families bear symbols unique to themselves. Our age is used to seeing
‘orders’ (police, military) as unified by particular regalia, hence the word ‘uniform’ itself. The
iconography of the Templars might be useful as a code for unity, for an ideal combination
of protection and bureaucracy which we take for granted (even if, in many times and places,
we are sceptical about whether we have achieved that ideal). The Templars look more like
a modern army or police force than other medieval armies do, and medieval romance has
taught us to think of secular heraldry as an intensely individual thing. The very existence of
heraldry, of actual people on the battlefield whose job it was to determine who was who,
is unthinkable in a modern Western society. In the same vein, this modern blind spot is the
reason that King Arthur’s knights all wear the same uniform in films like First Knight (Jerry
Zucker 1995) and Quest for Camelot (Frederik du Chau 1998): the appeal to order is woven
formally into appearance. The Templars are ready-made for this purpose.
242
I conclude this survey with a few observations. The Templars are in the same broad
category as the pyramids or the samurai: they evoke a time and a place. The Templars are
uniquely positioned to be both different (a group of men dedicated to chastity and warfare)
and usefully familiar (they wear a uniform and thus appear to be something like a modern
organization, at least visually). More than this, they are now a motif associated with the idea
of history itself, albeit a history that is imagined as hidden and secret, and as the stories we tell
ourselves about the past – and the stories we claim we are not allowed to tell. Their association
with lost holy objects, with the presence of the spiritual in the world of the material, speaks
to a longing for answers and for a grandly conceived ‘truth’.
Notes
1. Sharan Newman (2007), The Real History Behind the Templars, 2nd edn. New York: Berkley Trade,
p. xiii.
2. Norman Cohn (2001), Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval
Christendom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 85–91.
3. Cory James Rushton (2009), ‘Canadian Grail’. Year’s Work in Medievalism, XXIII, pp. 16–25.
4. Helen Nicholson (2001), Love, War, and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights in
Medieval Epic and Romance, 1150–1500. Boston and Leiden: Brill, p. 102.
5. Dashiell Hammett (1992), The Maltese Falcon. New York: Black Lizard.
6. Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, pp. 124–5.
7. Fred R. Shapiro (ed.) (2006), The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press,
pp. 360–1.
8. Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt (2011), The Sixth Gun, Book 1: Cold Dead Fingers. Portland,
Oregan: Oni Press, p. 130.
9. Clare A. Simmons (1990), Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century
British Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 79–80.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Malory’s Afterlives in
Raluca L. Radulescu
Where does one start when surveying Malory’s afterlives in modern culture? One might
as well acknowledge that, at least in Anglophone circles, Malory’s enduring appeal is
pervasive, if nearly always influenced or mediated through nineteenth- and twentieth-
century adaptations, most famously Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), T. H. White’s
The Once and Future King (1958) and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon
(1983). In a broader multi-lingual context, one might argue that Malory’s influence has
also been filtered, alongside received medieval tropes from the French Vulgate cycle of
romances 1 and Arthurian romances in German, Italian and other medieval European
languages, through a variety of modern adaptations. These might include, among other,
twentieth-century media such as film, and cultural landmarks from Guinness adverts
using the Lady of the Lake, to musicals like Spamalot and Arthurian fiction for young
adults2 to graphic novels3 (see chapters in the present volume). It goes without saying
that, from an international perspective, Malory’s afterlives also continue to be sustained
and reinvigorated by (the more traditional) means of translation, adaptation and new
editions. From the 1990s onwards to the present day, his work has reached millions
through new translations into languages as diverse as Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish,
Estonian, Basque, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian,
Serbo-Croatian, Slovakian and Slovenian4 – that is, apart from the expected translations
into languages pertaining to the original European Arthurian tradition (English, French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch).
However, from the point of view of impact on current reception of Malory’s original
work, Malory afterlives in contemporary Anglophone culture are likely to be influenced
244
by two major events: the sell-out staging of Le Morte Darthur by the Royal Shakespeare
Company in summer 2010 (with a script by Mike Poulton and directed by Gregory Dolan)
and Peter Ackroyd’s best-selling retelling of the Morte Darthur (2010).5 In what follows I will
be treating these cultural events from the point of view of the mark they are likely to leave,
and their success in bringing into the public arena some facets of the medieval classic usually
restricted to academic debate. Each will be discussed primarily from a literary point of view
(but, in the case of the RSC production, with reference to some of the director’s choices in
terms of staging), insofar as the script of the play and Ackroyd’s retelling are available in print
and still generate debate. For reasons of both space and focus, this chapter cannot engage
with the theoretical issues of translation and adaptation, or what they could and should do. It
can only highlight areas of further debate in relation to the popular reception of two Malory
afterlives that deliberately set out to present Malory’s text to a new generation of readers and
theatre-goers.
To start with, any reader of Malory’s original lengthy work – whether in its Middle English
original version or a modern translation – is faced with language complexities (vocabulary
and syntax), as well as cultural challenges: that is, the horizon of expectations that a medieval
audience would share with Malory, but which the modern non-academic public or even
the educated public would have no access to. When referring to the challenges posed by
adaptation for a modern audience, Mike Poulton observes, in his introduction to his script:
The social and moral codes of the period are long gone and often incomprehensible. …
The vocabulary is rich but unfamiliar (disperpled, bobaunce, wanhope, wroth). The syntax
seems oddly but pleasantly jangling to the modern ear.6
Making sense of these two types of challenges and also using them to one’s advantage are
certainly not easy tasks. But the Royal Shakespeare Company was the perfect place to display
a historically informed adaptation of the Morte Darthur for the stage, if only a little too
indebted to the aura of Shakespeare’s history plays.7 Among the most inventive innovations
in the script, itself an intelligently crafted piece, which made use of an impressive number
of famous passages from Malory, is the atmosphere. Ignoring the initial stages in Arthur’s
conception, the story starts in medias res, describing Uther Pendragon’s illness and Arthur’s
victory in the contest over the right to rule all England – by virtue of pulling the sword out
of a stone and being unanimously supported by the commons. Here Poulton captures one of
the most innovative aspects of Malory’s retelling of the legend: the combination of magic
(Merlin’s interference in human affairs), predestination (the Archbishop of Canterbury accepts
the sword in the stone trial as a divine sign and later tries to pacify the dissenting barons who
won’t accept Arthur as their king) and pseudo-democratic election by the commoners of
England.
The RSC’s production was, as frequently mentioned in the publicity, the result of more
than a decade of pondering on the best way to stage the great classic.8 Poulton dedicates his
script to John Barton, whose enthusiasm for a ‘quest for a production of Malory’s English
epic’ inspired the current project.9 It becomes evident that work on such a scale (indeed
scaling down the vast narrative Malory produced) could only be the result of collaboration
Malory’s Afterlives in Contemporary Culture 245
between someone well skilled in similar enterprises and a seasoned RSC director. Poulton,
known as the translator and adaptor of many a medieval classic to the stage (e.g. his
Canterbury Tales, which toured the UK: see Peverley, this volume) and Gregory Dolan,
the play’s director, pulled together the ‘impossible project’ (Dolan’s words, replicating
Barton’s),10 so as to tell the ‘story you need to know’ (Dolan’s words; my emphasis). This
translated into a production that included elements Malory does not talk about (the story
of Gawain and the Green Knight), and omitted others that Malory included, but which
are better known in other traditions (the love affair between Tristan and Isolde). Poulton
and Dolan had previously worked on two major projects of a similar scale: the Canterbury
Tales and the Millenium York cycle.11 The experience of previous work shows here both in
the overall concept governing the script and in the way it was set on the stage. Latin chant,
iconography reminiscent of the medieval manuscript page, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings,
but also the pre-Raphaelites (the latter in Elaine of Astolat’s barge progression), all
contribute to the archaizing of the setting, further enhanced by particularities of language.
Poulton also maintains the fabulous flavour of Malory’s first words, without actually using
more than a few, and then collapsing the first few stages in the story: ‘It befell in the days of
Uther Pendragon, when he was High King of all England, that many of his lords and barons
began to murmur against him for he had no son to succeed him’ (Poulton 2010, p. 4). This,
I agree, makes for the Malory a modern audience really needs to know, even if it is not (and
cannot be) an actual dramatization of every aspect a scholar would consider important in
the Morte. The result is a memorable, impressive, grand epic-romance, infused with the
seriousness of high drama but tempered by moments of comic relief.
A quick glance at the other cultural event mentioned in this chapter, Peter Ackroyd’s
retelling, shows a strikingly different tone, characterized by fairy tale and myth-telling: ‘In
the old wild days of the world there was a king of England known as Uther Pendragon; he was
a dragon in wrath as well as in power’ (Ackroyd 2011, p. 5). Ackroyd was arguably guided by
a different approach, making the narrative at once ‘more colloquial and modern’ – a directive
given by the commissioning editor at Penguin, Alexis Kirschbaum,12 – although his editor
did warn against ‘over-familiarizing the language’. One finds Ackroyd guilty of doing exactly
that: over-familiarizing the language – at least in some key instances in the story, where the
impact of the translation is lessened by not using the ‘arcane words’ that Kirschbaum advised
him to retain. See, for example, the death of Arthur, where the king’s final address to his
last surviving knight, Sir Bedevere, include the memorable words ‘for in me there is no trust
to trust in’ (my modernized version), translated by Ackroyd with merely ‘Look not to me,
for I can no longer help you’ (Ackroyd 2011, p. 307). The same is the case with Galahad’s
message to his father Lancelot, which Ackroyd reports in a rather plain sentence: ‘Remind
him that life on earth is very brief ’ (Ackroyd 2011, p. 222). This misses the poetic resonance
and broader meaning of the original phrase: ‘remind him of this world unstable’. Here one
is reminded of the controversy caused by successive modern translations of Beowulf, where
the original first word of the poem (hwæt!) has often been translated into modern English
with ‘Listen!’ – yet in one famous translation, Seamus Heaney’s, with ‘So’.13 How much is
one supposed to scrutinize a modernized retelling, looking for signs that it (and implicitly,
its author) revere the original? From the perspective of a modern audience, who may well
246
be completely unfamiliar with any aspects of medieval storytelling or indeed anything

premodern, the retelling opens a door into the unknown, luring the reader into a world that
can be revealed by further reading. The retelling remains, by definition, a portal to that other
world of the original, mediating, ever so partially, the arcane words and significance of the
story once told centuries ago.
On the other hand, Poulton’s choice to retain the arcane language in places was perhaps
more risky and more adventurous, in a Malorian way. His audiences would find it harder to
follow an old-fashioned vocabulary – but he made sure it is understood in context. Despite
leaving out Arthur’s coronation as Emperor of Rome, Lancelot’s achievement of the Grail
and indeed other passages in the story, Poulton’s abridged version of the Morte Dathur is
poignant in almost all its aspects: it maintains an atmosphere that is at once suffused with
emphasis on chivalric worship – as Malory’s text is – and magic, comical in places but also
spiritually edifying, as the text was in the medieval tradition. Here it is plainly obvious that
the mediating effect of dramatic performance has helped extract the essence of the text for
a modern audience, whose understanding of medieval tropes has to be helped by means of
reference to commonly understood images and sound, be they pre-Raphaelite or medieval in
origin.
By contrast, one section Ackroyd preserves – but which Poulton had to take out, necessarily
driven by time constraints of theatre production – is concerned with the adventures of
Lancelot du Lac, which bring to life not just the consciously crafted comical dimension
embedded in medieval Arthurian romance in general, but also Malory’s contribution to it.
Thus Ackroyd’s readers come across Lancelot taking rest during his wanderings in search of
adventure in a temporarily unoccupied tent, only to find himself embraced and kissed by an
unlikely bedfellow, a knight with a grizzly beard. The comical as well as homoerotic overtones
of the original episode are perhaps lost in large proportion due to the brevity and rather too
even tone employed by Ackroyd. Modern lovers of Arthurian romance will find the lack of
comment on Lancelot’s anger and confusion at the discovery of another knight in his bed
puzzling. Ackroyd does not put the freedom of retellings as a genre to great use here; a big
opportunity to shed light on an episode which might challenge preconceived ideas about
medieval chivalry is missed. Here we see how the potential of a retelling to shape modern
sensitivity to medieval writing can only be exploited if some form of fidelity to the text is
achieved. Nonetheless, while this aspect is sacrificed in the retelling, Ackroyd’s style might
be said to give modern readers a glimpse of that quintessentially Malorian (and Arthurian
romance) feature, the fragmented, episodic nature of the story.
The same can be said about Lancelot’s adventures at the Chapel Perilous, engineered by
the necrophile demoiselle Hallewes the Sorceress. Here the force of the original is lost when
the lady herself tells Lancelot so plainly of her inclinations: she would have him alive or
dead, as she had planned to embalm him and kiss him ‘night and day’ (Lancelot, p. 84).
Malory’s original undercuts the whole issue of chivalric prowess – here Lancelot’s unwavering
commitment to continuing his adventures by pointing out that he is viewed by all, male and
female, as the most sexually desirable Arthurian knight. In the context of this episode, as
of others, the role of the narrator in Morte Darthur – usually characterized, as Elizabeth
Archibald suggests, by being ‘heavily dependent on third-person narrative without a strongly
characterised narratorial voice’14 – is completely undercut by frequent use of dialogue, which

has little in common with Malory’s trademark non-committal recounting of the adventures.
From ‘possibly the first English novelist’,15 whose paratactic style16 typically leaves room for
subtle conjecture on the reader’s part, Ackroyd’s Malory becomes the minstrel of another
era. By this I mean that Ackroyd forges a new sense of rhythm in the story, produced by the
string of brief, truncated episodes, which resembles the knight’s progress across the realm
of adventure, rushing through on his steed, sweeping aside enemies of the chivalric order.
From this point of view Ackroyd works with and for the modern reader, unaccustomed
to the gradual accumulation of detail characteristic of medieval romance, but rather more
understanding of rapid shifts of focus in the sequences of modern film and video games. Yet
Poulton and Ackroyd deliberately set out to recreate Malory’s text, stating as they both do
their commitment to not only the spirit, but also the very nature of the text, language and
style. As authors of modern retellings, both draw attention to their respective enterprise by
stating their intention to keep close to the original. Thus both modern productions – Poulton’s
script and then performance at the RSC and the editorial event of Ackroyd’s retelling – set
their parameters in rather scholarly derived ways, purporting to give the Malory we need to
know, to use Doran’s words again.
Both Poulton and Ackroyd also left out other episodes and sections in Le Morte Darthur.
Yet what is it that would shape a whole generation’s reception of the text and its original
historical context? Indeed the whole issue is whether or not Poulton and Ackroyd kept
to their initial intentions; in other words, the spirit of Malory’s book, if not the language
and style (though arguably Poulton does manage the latter as well). The effect of Malory’s
work, whatever its modern rendition or adaptation, can be argued to be (almost always) as
powerful as his original was in its own time and immediately afterwards, through the vogue
of Arthurian romance in the print era, in (post-medieval) England. What both Poulton and
Ackroyd achieve, however, is much more than the script and text of the retelling, of course.
Once released from an author’s hands, the text takes a new life of its own, travelling through
its original audience to the future.
In this, Poulton and Ackroyd have one aspect in common, the omission of the story of
Arthur’s conquest of Rome and his coronation there as new Roman Emperor. To a modern
audience this is a little-known aspect of the story, despite Simon Armitage’s recent translation
into Modern English of the other great monument of the English Arthurian tradition which
captures it, the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Alliterative Morte Arthure,17 itself a
translation and adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of
Britain. To modern audiences, the story of Arthur’s conquest of Western Europe might appear
to be of little consequence in the tragedy of his death so many years later, but the political
dimensions of Arthur’s European campaign would not have passed unnoticed for Malory’s
audiences. A king’s over-reaching ambition was to be punished with being overthrown, or
falling off the wheel of Fortune. Not so in the narratives Poulton and Ackroyd tell, both of
whom chose to credit Arthur’s downfall to the failure of loyalty and love. Theirs are serious
retellings of the story nonetheless, but without the heavy politicizing of Malory’s latter-day
contemporaries. Is this a drawback, and from what perspective are these two Malorian
afterlives to be judged? The modern retelling can be successful in its own right, especially
248
when one acknowledges that the recreation of the past poses its constraints on both script for
performance and modern storytelling.
It is in this context that the absence, in both Poulton’s script and Ackroyd’s retelling of
Arthur’s war with Rome, should be considered. Malory’s treatment of this section in the
Morte Darthur represents one of his chief innovations to the Arthurian legend. In the insular
(English) chronicle tradition, where the historical Arthur inherited by Malory arguably is
first mentioned, Mordred is Arthur’s nephew, not his bastard son, and there is no Lancelot
– the quintessential French knight invented by French writers. Thus Arthur has to come back
from the war on the Continent (where he is advancing towards Rome, to prove his right to
the crown of the Empire) when he finds out that his nephew Mordred has usurped him, and
Guenevere has shamefully acquiesced in this usurpation by marrying the perpetrator. In the
French tradition the downfall of the Round Table and Arthur’s demise come as a consequence
of Lancelot’s affair with Guenevere; Arthur is on the Continent fighting Lancelot when he
hears news of Mordred’s betrayal – though Guenevere is definitely not an accomplice in
that usurpation. Malory innovated on several hundred years of Arthurian romance, bringing
together the English chronicles and the French romance tradition, by moving the whole
section of the war with the Emperor Lucius to the beginning of Arthur’s reign, making
Arthur victorious and keeping the love story between Lancelot and Guenevere as a catalyst
for the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom at the end of his reign. This innovation would have
resonated with Malory’s contemporaries as they might have seen his Arthur as another Henry
V, the victor at Agincourt or, alternatively, Edward IV, arguably the (temporary) winner of the
Wars of the Roses. It is surprising that Poulton chose to mention only briefly the arrival of
messengers from Rome – without any further reference to the aftermath of Arthur’s glorious,
if bloody, campaign to Rome – when his adaptation was in the spirit of Shakespearean history
plays. It could be argued that the Shakespearean view of the past was just as removed from
historical accuracy as the modern production necessarily is. At the same time, Shakespeare’s
history plays prove their enduring appeal across centuries by means of political concepts and
high dramatic tension that can then be exploited in any number of ways in different languages
and indeed political contexts. Poulton chose to approach Malory’s text in an almost scholarly
fashion, while attuned to the depths and versatility of theatre performance. The potential
of the story to work in a new historical and political context will no doubt be reserved for
the planned expanded version of Poulton’s script, when Malory’s Morte truly becomes a
‘Shakespearian history cycle’. For rather different reasons, it is also surprising Ackroyd too
left out any mention of the Roman section altogether. Yet the military and nationalistic feeling
would have fitted in his retelling just as much as the chivalric values and human emotion.
Another aspect Poulton and Ackroyd left out is the story of Lancelot healing Sir Urry, which
takes place at the end of the section detailing the love of Lancelot and Guenevere, towards
the end of the Morte, before the affair is exposed to the court by Aggravain and Mordred.
The healing episode is brief and perhaps an overly spiritual moment for the modern audience
of an adaptation/retelling. Yet it encapsulates Malory’s vision of Lancelot’s mission in the
Arthurian world. Together with Lancelot’s partial redemption during the Grail quest via a
vision of the object itself, the episode recalls Lancelot’s earlier healing of Sir Meliot. Poulton
leaves out Galahad and Lancelot from the Grail story, which is focused exclusively on Percival.
Ackroyd retells the story of Meliot, but not that of the parallel episode, the healing of Urry.
Healing Urry grants Lancelot a pseudo-saintly status, worthy of the lineage he is reputed to
descend from, of Grail keepers (Ackroyd 2011, p. 197). Yet even the unpalatable spiritual
messages of Malory’s text could translate into the modern world in numerous other ways.
Poulton’s script and Doran’s staging make the most of the spiritual aura of the medieval
text. The performance included a spectacular angel embrace of Percival as a symbol of his
achievement of the Grail, a comical appearance of the damsel/devil in Percival’s temptations
during the Grail quest and a constant reminder of death and the afterlife in the Latin chant
punctuating major events. The essence of the Grail story might be both unpalatable and
baffling to some modern audiences unaccustomed to a world that will appear archaic. But
the very aura of the past that leads to the creation of Malory afterlives and their appeal for
modern audiences is its apparently seamless combination of opposites: magic and Christianity,
fairy-tale and down-to-earth political realism. Poulton and Doran recreate the magnetic pull
of an imposing Morte Darthur, replete with echoes of all of these aspects.
Cultural events – and thus ‘afterlives’ of a canonical text such as Malory’s Morte Darthur
cannot and shouldn’t merely be considered from a comparative perspective. A comparison
cannot do justice to the demands of each of these adaptations; Poulton’s script takes account
of the resonance of words spoken on stage (here by a narrator), while Ackroyd plays with
the evocative tune of storytelling as it might be envisaged by a modern audience. Each in its
own right has already influenced, and will continue to do so, a new generation of lovers of
the Arthurian legend.
Notes
1. The Old French Vulgate cycle is a vast prose cycle of romances which includes the History of the
Holy Grail, Lancelot, The Quest for the Holy Grail, and The Death of Arthur.
2. For a recent survey, see Anne Klaus (2013), ‘The Kids of the Round Table – Arthurian Legends
Adapted for Children and Young Adults’, in Anja Mueller (ed.), Adapting Canonical Texts in
Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 127–42. See, also, Andrew Lynch
(2004), ‘Le Morte Darthur for Children: Malory’s Third Tradition’, in Barbara Tepa Lupack
(ed.). Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 1–49.
3. For an illuminating article on the latter subject, especially modern Arthurian literature inspired by
Malory’s Morte Darthur, see Fiona Tolhurst (2012), ‘Helping Girls to be Heroic? Some Recent
Arthurian Fiction for Young Adults’. Arthuriana, 22(3): 69–90. Tolhurst talks about the fiction
written by Gerald Morris, Philip Reeve, Nancy McKenzie, Pamela Smith Hill, Nancy Springer,
Maryrose Wood, and Debra A. Kemp, all of which were published in the last couple of decades.
An earlier survey is Norris Lacy (2009), ‘Arthurian Texts in Their Historical and Social Context’.
Arthurian Literature, 26: 131–48, where he notes that in the 1990s alone more than 3,000 works
in English were produced retelling the Arthurian story.
4. For a full list, with dates, see Barry Gaines, ‘Translations of Editions and Adaptations of Sir
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur’ (Camelot project, 2004), online resource, accessed May
2014 (http://www.d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/gaines-translations-of-sir-thomas-malorys-le-
morte-darthur).
250
5. See Mike Poulton (2010). Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur: The Legend of King Arthur and
His Knights of the Round Table, adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton, Royal Shakespeare
Company, London: Nick Hern Books, henceforth cited parenthetically by page number, and Peter
Ackroyd (hbk 2010, pbk 2011). The Death of King Arthur: Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,
a Retelling. London: Penguin, the latter is cited parenthetically in this chapter.
6. Poulton, Introduction, p. xiv.
7. See, for example, Elizabeth Archibald’s review of the production, ‘Oh, Kay!’, Times Literary
Supplement, 9 July 2010, pp. 18–19.
8. See the main website at http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/other-writers/morte-darthur.aspx,
consulted May 2014.
9. Poulton’s dedication.
10. See the director’s interview on the RSC website, at http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/other-writers/
morte-darthur/video-director-interview.aspx (consulted May 2014).
11. See http://www.yorkmysteryplays.org/default.asp?idno=204, and known as ‘Illumination: from
Shadow into Light’.
12. Cited here from Samantha Rayner (2013). Review of Ackroyd’s retelling, Arthuriana, 23(1):
73–5, p. 74.
13. See Seamus Heaney (2000), Beowulf: A New Translation. London: Faber and Faber.
14. Archibald, ‘Oh, Kay!’, pp. 18–19.
15. The phrase is Paul Gray’s, from his review of another type of Malory afterlife, the new biography
published by Christina Hardyment (2005), Malory – The Knight Who Became Arthur’s Chronicler.
London: Harper Collins. Grady’s review was published in the Sunday review of The New York
Times, 20 August 2006.
16. The paratactic style is characterized by sequences of statements connected by ‘and’, thus not
using more complex subordination, which leads to explanation and so influences the reader’s
inferences.
17. Simon Armitage (2010), The Death of King Arthur. London: Faber and Faber.
chapter twenty-three
‘We Are Robin Hood’:

The Outlaw Tradition in
Contemporary Popular Culture
Rob Gossedge
I
The Robin Hood tradition is always open to radical rewritings because, essentially, it is a
very simple myth. At its core, the tradition is one based on iconographic motifs rather than
narrative episodes. Its key, instantly recognizable signs of forest, longbow and disguise – even
the tights are optional – is easily appropriated and made relevant to new social meanings.
Whether as the exiled aristocrat of the 1590s’ theatre, the penitent outlaw of the Restoration
or the dissident radical of the post-Napoleonic years, every generation seemingly gets the
Robin Hood legend it deserves.
Since the early 1990s – heralded by the release of two major Hollywood films in 1991 –
the legend has witnessed a sustained period of cultural activity across a diverse range of
forms and genres: comic books, television series, blockbuster films and a plethora of novels,
short stories and online fanfiction. Gender politics and an increased awareness of ethnic
and religious conflict have been the major dynamic forces reshaping the myth. This chapter
analyses how feminist novelists have repeatedly challenged and partially restructured the
patriarchal organization of this most homosocial of legends; and describes how contemporary
films of the legend – still resistant to any challenge to the legend’s heroic masculine vigour –
have reconfigured Robin’s default character as an uneasy avatar for British and American
conflict in the Middle East. But this chapter also argues that despite operating in the sort
of socio-political context of conservative government, extreme economic disparities and
international conflict in which the tradition typically flourishes, the modern myth has ceased
252
to represent anything but the tamest resistance to authority – at least not of the sorts that
the legend traditionally encountered. As the legend increasingly focuses on the politics of
the individuated self, rather than the political or social collective, it has become increasingly
divorced from its typical sociocultural functions; and few literary or filmic treatments have
seemed capable of harnessing the myth’s continual, if elusive, potency.
II
The most notable feature of recent prose fiction has been the large number of retellings
that have restructured the outlaw myth from feminist positions. First to emerge were the
spate of novels appearing in the late 1980s and 1990s that refocused the story on Marian,
beginning with Robin McKinley’s The Outlaws of Sherwood (1988). Here Marian assumes
many of the characteristics typically associated with Robin – including quick-wittedness and
prodigious ability as an archer; while Robin, far more marginalized than in most retellings,
often occupies the ‘more domestic space[s]’ of the novel usually associated with Marian, as
Linda Cahoon has noted.1
While McKinley’s novel ends positively, with Marian and Robin about to be married
before the latter must accompany King Richard on crusade, in order to atone for his crimes
in England, Jennifer Roberson’s The Lady of the Forest (1992) figures the crusades in wholly
negative mode. Robin, again weakened, enters the novel as a traumatized veteran of foreign
wars, haunted particularly by the death of Marian’s father. Marian, meanwhile, is not only
a means of succour, but is also the chief agent of a plot that is effectively organized around
her new position of heroine.2 The Robin of Gayle Feyrer’s The Thief ’s Mistress (1996) also
suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the crusades. But Feyrer’s novel is far
more graphic – in violence and in sexual content – than Roberson’s careful novel. She begins
the novel by murdering the man who ordered the rape of her mother and ends it by killing
the lover (Gisborne) whom she rejects, before enjoying one last highly coloured romp with
Robin.
Works for younger audiences have also been active in establishing strong Marians. In
Kathryn Lasky’s Hawksmaid (2010), Marian has become Matty, a falconer who comes to
speak the language of the birds of prey she tends. After her mother dies and her father
becomes impoverished, she, in the guise of Marian, joins Robin (here ‘Fynn’) and his merry
men in Sherwood. Though Robin still leads the outlaws, it is Marian who plots most of their
adventures. Perhaps the strongest of all the Marian-centred retellings is Theresa Tomlinson’s
young-adult novel The Forestwife (1993), which, like the work of Roberson and Feyrer, uses
the notion on an injured Robin to further develop a strong Marian. Here, however, the two
lead figures coexist in separate fields of social activity: Marian becomes the forestwife of the
novel’s title – a midwife, nurse and doctor to the Sherwood community, while Robin gradually
becomes the principled outlaw of myth. While they enjoy vaguely euphemized and semi-
mystical sexual encounters every now and again, the novel carefully keeps their narratives and
roles distinct. Neither character – nor the value of their social actions – is made subordinate
to the other. Thus The Forestwife renegotiates the gendered viewpoints and structures of the
tradition without sacrificing the myth’s established values and social meanings.
‘We Are Robin Hood’: The Outlaw Tradition in Contemporary Popular Culture 253
Not all feminist retellings have focused on Marian. Rather than rewriting the pre-existing
myth, several authors have produced sequels to the main outlaw legend, which largely replicate
the older story’s action. Works featuring Robin’s daughter as their protagonist have been
common, including Paul Storrie’s Robyn of Sherwood (1998) and Nancy Springer’s Rowan
Hood (2001), though Disney’s 2001 TV movie Princess of Thieves – its title is a half-reference
to the Kevin Costner picture of 1991 – is the best-known example. In the latter, a young Keira
Knightley plays Robin and Marian’s daughter, known curiously as Gwyn (the Disney writers’
confusion over the use of the Welsh male name shows that not all the gender bending in this
film is intentional). The film begins with the death of King Richard and the imprisonment of
Robin, who is thus unable to secure the throne for Richard’s heir (the fictional) Prince Phillip.
Gwyn therefore takes up her father’s traditional role, finding and protecting the young prince,
before freeing her father. The film concludes with two limits on personal happiness: Gwyn
tells Phillip that they cannot be together, despite their mutual attraction; and Robin offers his
daughter a partnership in the band – the only condition that she takes her orders from Robin
alone. Gwyn accepts, and the spirited film ends on a muted tone.3
A further addition to the recent corpus of outlaw texts is the number of American novels
which transform Robin into a young, often troubled woman. In the majority of these, identity
politics (and often lots of sex) replace the usual preoccupations with social justice, outlawry and
freedom. Dana Taylor’s self-published Royal Rebel (2010) is typical. The novel’s protagonist is
Princess Robin, daughter of King Richard and Lady Rosalind. But only a select few are aware
of either her parentage or gender: to the outside world she is the usual male thief of legend.
Despite the original premise, it soon becomes clear that the novel cannot combine its interest in
gender politics with the outlaw myth. It eschews the classic motifs of the tradition – authority
is rarely resisted, and very little robbing takes place – in favour of a digressive plot involving
a quest for the Turin Shroud, which is little more than an opportunity for Robin and her on/
off lover Sir Simon of Loxley to romp a series of highly charged sex scenes, as Robin’s early
androgyny collapses into supplicant, feminine desire. The novel ends with multiple marriages,
as the erotic genre dictates: Robin and Locksley; King Richard; and, unusually, Marian.
More sophisticated, and more deeply invested in the outlaw tradition, is R. M. ArceJaegar’s
Robin: Lady of Legend (2013) which reconfigures Robin and Marian as sisters, both amorously
pursued by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Avoiding the Sheriff ’s advances, Robin flees to
Sherwood at the start of the novel where, disguised as a young man, she soon leads a band
of outlaws in a series of adventures that are skilfully woven together from much of the early
ballad material. For instance, the opening two fitts of the late-fifteenth-century Gest of Robyn
Hode, in which an impoverished knight receives financial aid from the outlaws, is intelligently
adapted so that the incognito Robin provides her father – unable to repay his loans to a local
prior – with the necessary sums. Here and elsewhere, Robin’s re-gendering is well worked: she
proves a capable and democratic leader, gives lessons in archery and operates as both robber
and midwife. There are, however, constraints on the novel’s feminist potential. Despite the
gender-bending necessary to the multiple plots, the novel struggles with the resulting sexual
confusions in the attendant love affairs: the possibility of same-sex desire is strongly rejected
in one scene where Robin (still disguised as a young man) roughly rejects the advances of
an infatuated peasant girl ‘in harrowed disgust’.4 And heteronormative, boy–girl desire and
254
stable gender identity are firmly established at the novel’s close via the marriages of Will
Scarlett to Marian and Little John to Robin.
Scarlet (2012) by A. C. Gaughen presents a further variation on the increasingly familiar
theme; here the Merry Woman is Scarlet, whose secret identity as Lady Marian Fitzwater is
revealed gradually over the course of the novel. Much of the plot revolves around melodramatic
male cruelty: Marian and her sister Hannah are sold to husbands by their avaricious parents;
the Sheriff physically abuses a servant after learning that she is carrying his child; and a larger
plot revolves around the Sheriff ’s marriage to a rich commoner, whom he kills on his wedding
day. Scarlet herself is the subject of a great deal of both cruelty and desire: her diabolical
fiancé Gisborne pursues her from London to Nottingham; she and Little John share several
kisses; and she and Robin (here Rob) share a little more. There is also, like Taylor’s similarly
erotic thriller, another moment of strongly rejected same-sex desire; and despite much cross
dressing, gender norms are insisted upon throughout: from the red ribbons Scarlet ties to her
daggers to the fact that she insists on wearing a dress when attending Mass – after all, you
‘can’t lie to God’, as she tells Rob.5
Each of these romantic thrillers which re-genders the usual outlaw narrative concludes
with the reassertion of heteronormative desire, and with it strictly reinforced gender roles.
The gender and sexual politics of these novels are, essentially, a matter of genre. Equally
conservative is their insistence on the value of nobility. The protagonists of both the female-
Robin novels and the outlaw-daughter narratives are all emphatically noble in birth; while
the Marian-centric retellings all ascribe their heroines’ strength to their aristocratic status
and, frequently, Norman birth. The social values and ethics of nobility are repeated in these
novels’ constructions of the male outlaw, as in Gaughen’s Scarlet, whose female narrator
is attracted to him not only for his ‘big, generous hero smile’ but also for his aristocratic
position:
Rob used to be an earl, if you can believe it. It’s why he feels so particular ‘bout his people,
and why they feel so particular about him. Most still call him Your Grace. He’ll be an earl
again when King Richard comes back for sure.6
In contrast, Robin’s rival, the villainous Gisborne, is rich but notably landless and lowborn.
Class still outs, it seems – particularly in American retellings.
Again, Tomlinson’s novel stands apart. While The Forestwife’s Marian is born Mary de
Holt, of noble, Norman parentage, she rejects her station at the very beginning of the novel
as she flees to Sherwood to avoid an arranged marriage. The rest of the text, as David
Lampe has written, ‘avoids any contact with [the] court and instead follows the lives of
“ordinary” people who are driven by hunger, and often made miserable by the interference
of nobility.… Instead the novel celebrates peasant persistence and rustic celebration’.7 For
the British Tomlinson, Robin remains ‘the People’s Hero’ and ‘the champion of the common
folk’ – his model being, apparently, the 1980s’ pop star and activist Bob Geldof.8 Recent
social context is important too, and Marian’s identity and the novel’s preoccupation with
radical action and social welfare were informed by the activities of miners’ wives during the
British colliery strikes of 1984.9 Thus, while many recent novels have created a greater space
for Marian and her avatars by making new interpersonal dramas and ever-more tangled love
affairs, only Tomlinson’s novel has truly restructured the outlaw narrative while retaining its
links to its typical social meanings – The Forestwife’s identity politics and feminist approach
being firmly located within the wider field of sociocultural activities inherent in the bandit
tradition. As both narrative retelling and feminist reconstruction of the myth, it remains to
be surpassed.
III
Partly by way of response to the feminist retellings of the myth, and partly because they
represent the myth’s default position, there have also been several recent attempts to assert
more overtly masculinist versions of the legend. One of the more accomplished novels is
Michael Cadnum’s In a Dark Wood (2008) which presents a positive account of the Sheriff
of Nottingham grounded in the late-fifteenth-century ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’.
Sympathetically treated, the Sheriff is a keen administrator, beset with multiple social and
personal pressures including ‘women troubles and a difficult wife’.10 Much of the novel focuses
on his attempts to impose order on the county while trying to capture an ethically ambivalent
Robin Hood, but a great deal of the narrative deals with the Sheriff ’s extra-marital affairs and
his gradual rapprochement with his estranged wife, Lady Eleanor.
Authority and domestic pressures similarly inform Michael Morpurgo’s children’s novel
Outlaw (2012; first published as Robin of Sherwood in 1996). In this retelling, Robin
becomes an outlaw as an adolescent, after he and his father are caught poaching deer. After
imprisonment and torture, they are taken in by the outlaws (‘outcasts’ in the 1996 version)
of Sherwood, who, due to physical and, in some cases, mental disorders, have been exiled
from the nearby towns and villages. Will Scarlet describes the outlaws as ‘a motley bunch of
misfits’:
There’s every mutation you could imagine here. There’s me a hunchback…. There’s white-
haired cagots, albinos, call them what you will, like Marion…. There’s simple folk who
talk to the moon in puddles. There’s lepers, there’s one-legged beggars. Blind, deaf and
dumb – we’re all here, all misfits, all Outlaws.11
Despite these gestures, however, the novel contains little exploration, imaginatively or
historically, of medieval or modern attitudes towards disability. Instead, the majority of the
novel is preoccupied with the legend as a vehicle for a male-centric family drama. Unusually,
Robin marries early in the novel and fathers a son named Martin. The Abbess of Kirklees
(here the Sheriff ’s sister) emerges as a major antagonist and kidnaps Martin in an attempt to
lure Robin into a trap. She later kills Robin in revenge for the earlier death of her brother.
But threats to the family are manifested – and violently resisted – in other ways: Robin and
his father begin poaching to avenge the death of Robin’s mother; and the Sheriff is executed,
not by the returning King Richard, but by Much the Miller’s son, in response to the killing
of his own father. At one point, Richard admiringly tells Robin that he would have made a
better king than he did, due to his compassion; but towards the novel’s close, Richard is able
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to encourage the outlaw to abandon his family in pursuit of military glory. Thus Robin dies
far from his family and Sherwood in this bloodthirsty and bleak children’s novel.
Stephen Lawhead, the author of the popular series of Arthurian novels The Pendragon
Cycle, has also taken an adolescent Robin into a violent, vengeful setting. But Lawhead’s
Hood (2006) departs from the usual temporal and geographic settings of the tradition and
resituates the legend along the late-eleventh-century Welsh Marches, during the Norman
invasions of Wales. Here Robin is Bran ap Brychan (later Rhi Bran Hud), dispossessed heir
to the kingdom of Elfael. The novel, interweaving a few strands of Celtic-sounding myth
with a self-consciously gritty historicism, tells of how Bran becomes the outlaw of legend,
while focusing on the politics of the Norman nobles and bordering Saxons. Though the
main characters are all present – often with new Cymraeg names: Little John becomes Iwan;
Marian becomes Mérion (in fact an Old Welsh male name) – few of the social meanings of the
usual myth are translated to the new setting.
More successful in transposing the legend to a new setting is Steven A. McKay’s debut
novel Wolf ’s Head (2013), which relocates the outlaw story to fourteenth-century Barnsdale
during the reign of Edward II. With the early ballads forming the chief literary sources, the
novel interlaces the main outlaw myth with a series of distinct plots – the Second Barons’
War and the machinations of the Despensers – that gradually transform Robin from a local
to a national figure. The novel makes strong use of a variety of outlaw traditions: the first
two fitts of the Gest of Robin Hood are expanded into a major plot concerning the financial
and familial problems of the poor knight, Sir Richard of the Lee, and the development of the
legendary Adam Bell into a major antagonist (a former Templar, he assumes the identity of the
legendary outlaw, before becoming the lackey of the Sheriff of Nottingham) is well worked.
Indeed, much of the novel is thoughtfully constructed – McKay cites Bernard Cornwell as a
major influence. But the novel contains much that is typical of macho historical fiction: the
aristocratic politics quickly becomes tedious; the violence is repetitive and often sadistic; and
the female characters seem to move from one sexual threat to another, particularly Marian,
who is a male fantasy of the worst sort – all handjobs and longing looks.
Masculinist historicism dominates the film tradition as well, despite a few nods to feminism.
Though the publicity material of each new major film promotes a strong Marian, the figure
remains rather limited and contained within the damsel-in-distress trope. Mary Elizabeth
Mastrantonio’s Marian in Prince of Thieves (1991) enters as a capable fighter who almost
overpowers Kevin Costner’s Robin at the start of the film, but quickly returns to simpering
and trembling after this strong opening. Dominic Minghella’s recent television series for
the BBC (2006–9) was more promising. In the first series, Marian occupied two distinct
roles: as charitable daughter to the former, usurped Sheriff of Nottingham, she operated as
a moderating influence on Robin’s trickster activities; but in the guise of the sword-wielding
Nightwatchman, also took on a heroic-outlaw identity to rival Robin’s. Yet by the series’
second season, she had become little more than a cipher of erotic rivalry between Robin and
Guy of Gisborne – an all-too familiar position in both fiction and drama. Despite the gravitas
Cate Blanchett’s reputation brought to Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood of 2010, her presence was
the result of a late (and decidedly unfeminist) casting change after the actress originally chosen
to play Marian – the more lightweight Sienna Miller – made the forty-six-year-old Russell
Crowe look fat. Perhaps Uma Thurman’s sexually aware and sexually dominant Marian in the
1991 Robin Hood remains the strongest portrayal; but that film – never receiving a cinematic
release in America – was dwarfed by the transatlantic success of the contemporary Prince of
Thieves and remains little known and has influenced no later film treatment. Indeed, 1991’s
Robin Hood stood apart from the modern film tradition in several ways – the most important
of which is the film’s lack of interest in the crusades, which has been the defining feature of
the television and cinematic versions of the legend in recent decades.
IV
While contemporary historical fiction has experimented with various settings for the myth,
modern cinematic production has rigidly stuck to the context of the late twelfth century. And
whereas recent fiction has tended to focus on the politics of the self, the greater internationalism
of film, charged with potent recent context of international conflict, has forced the myth into
an increasingly intimate association with the Third Crusade.
While Robin has had loose, if persistent, associations with the Holy Land for centuries,
actually getting the outlaw to Outremer has been an entirely modern phenomenon. Crusading
is of no interest to the early ballads and only obliquely referred to in the later ballad tradition.12
The sixteenth-century playwright Anthony Munday attaches a crusades context to his
Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1597) as part of his elevation of the outlaw legend to
the Renaissance stage – Robin’s tame outlawry is legitimized by being in opposition to corrupt
power at home (headed by Prince John), in the loyal service of true, if absent, authority. Yet
Munday’s Earl Robert himself has no contact with the crusades. The same is not true for the
Robin of the next major outlaw text to make extensive use of the crusades narrative – Scott’s
Ivanhoe of 1819, which includes a yeoman Robin who is full of heroic vigour, nationalist
zeal and radical possibility.13 The text is set in 1197, in the aftermath of the Western defeats
of the Third Crusade; and the novel powerfully depicts a post-war nation beset with civil
unrest (not unlike the Britain in which Scott wrote Ivanhoe). But Robin’s new function as a
national, and racial, figurehead of strong English masculinity is firmly rooted in the domestic,
not in the international. While Richard, Ivanhoe and the Templars are all returned from,
and transformed by, the holy wars, Robin remains hermetically sealed in Sherwood Forest
throughout the novel.
It would take another war – that of 1914–18 – to establish Robin, if still tentatively, as
a crusader. This new formation required both a new national context, which was American
rather than British, and a new form, in Hollywood cinema. A major act of American medievalist
translatio imperii, Douglas Fairbanks’ silent Robin Hood (1922), though by no means the first
US film treatment of the legend, firmly situated the outlaw myth as a mainstream and perennial
Hollywood subject. Fairbanks’ Robin begins the film as the second-in-command of Richard’s
army; however, his crusade remains unfulfilled – unlike the US involvement in the First World
War which forms a potent context for the film. While the army is travelling through France,
he receives a letter from Marian, informing him of Prince John’s villainy at home. And so
he leaves the army long before it reaches the Holy Land and, returning to England, becomes
Robin Hood. Despite the film’s interest in martial pageantry and chivalric prowess, the film’s
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attitude to the crusades is instinctively negative (not unlike Scott’s position, in fact). Stephen
Knight has aligned the film’s politics to America’s isolationism under Woodrow Wilson’s
administration.14 Robin’s cautious proximity to, but never direct involvement in, the crusades
was maintained in subsequent film and television productions: Errol Flynn’s Saxon Robin
of 1938 remains a home-loving hero; Richard Greene’s 1950s’ post-war Robin might have
recently returned from Palestine, but the series never actually depicts him in the Levant; the
aged crusader knight played by Sean Connery in Robin and Marian (1976) is first seen fighting
in France, not Palestine; and Michael Praed’s youthful outlaw in Robin of Sherwood (1984–6)
is briefly seduced by the idea of following his king to war, but he is quickly disabused of his
naivety by his fellow outlaws and quickly returns to the forest.15
It is not until Costner’s Prince of Thieves in 1991 that a film actually depicted Robin in
the Levant. Again international conflict forms the context: in this case the US-led Gulf War
of 1990–1. Robin, the audience is told, is one of the many ‘young English noblemen who
flocked to [Richard’s] banner’ to ‘reclaim the Holy Lands from the Turks’ – clear 1990s’
metonyms for Kuwait and Saddam Hussein’s invading Iraqi forces. Though the movie’s scene
of Eastern contact is brief, it still posits a legend of armed interventionism. At the opening of
the film, Robin, bedraggled and bearded from long imprisonment, is to have his hand cut by a
Turkish jailer after falsely admitting to stealing bread (he hopes to spare his weakened friend,
Marian’s brother). Of course, he fights his way out (‘this is English courage’, says Costner in
a pronounced Californian accent), and though Marian’s brother dies in the escapade, he does
manage to save a Moorish fellow prisoner, Azeem, played by Morgan Freeman. Owing his
life to Robin, Azeem accompanies Robin back to England, where he becomes his second-in-
command over the initially wary, but ultimately welcoming, outlaws.
Once Robin reaches the Middle East it seems that he – like contemporary US and UK
governments – struggles to keep away. The crusades form a backdrop to several feminist prose
retellings (contemporary male novelists, curiously, are less interested in expeditionary war).
More direct treatment is found in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010), whose Robin, played
by Russell Crowe, is a former captain of archers, whose war service in the Levant enables
him to later organize the English defence against the invading French army – and his rhetoric
is nearly enough to persuade King John to sign an early draft version of Magna Carta, here
written by Robin’s dad. The Robin played by Jonas Armstrong in Dominic Minghella’s BBC
series visits the Levant twice: his first contact with the Middle East is as a crusader; but he
returns to Palestine at the end of the series’ second season in order to rescue Marian from the
clutches of Gisborne, though he does leave several of his juvenile Merry Men there in order
to continue the outlaws’ good work, much like gap-year aid workers.
The crusades themselves are treated negatively in each adaptation: the father of Costner’s
Robin calls it ‘a foolish quest’; Russell Crowe’s Robin is put in the stocks after he tells King
Richard that the actions of the crusaders were godless at the massacre at Acre; Roberson’s and
Feyrer’s Robins clearly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder – and something similar
is hinted at in Armstrong’s portrayal in BBC’s Robin Hood. But the crusades themselves
are never focalized as geo-political conflicts, only as a traumatizing background to the male
protagonist’s later heroism, either via the damaged male psyche (Roberson and Feyrer) or
vigorous masculinity (Crowe). Even the strain of liberal politics proves thin, and the racial
politics inconsistent. For all the ethnic and cultural toleration extended to Azeem in Prince of
Thieves, the mercenary Celts are presented as little more than the bestial abject; and Crowe’s
Robin Hood, despite the hero’s misgivings over Acre, is happy enough to replace one ethnic
enemy, the Saracens, with another, the French.
Minghella’s Robin Hood has offered the most frequent engagement with the crusades. In
the first episode, Armstrong’s Robin has returned from the Holy Land bearing his traumatic
experience of the crusades, along with his scimitar and recurved Saracen bow, for all to
see. Written in the midst of the popular opposition to the ongoing occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, this new Robin Hood seemed wholly shaped by unjustifiable wars. Throughout
the first two series, the effects of the Middle Eastern war are apparent: Robin now quotes
the Quran when offering King Richard a moral lesson; war-damaged veterans, suffering from
what the show terms ‘crusaders’ sickness’, or ‘our punishment’, are unable to adjust to post-
war life; and even the show’s usual domestic villains share the language of Britain’s twenty-
first-century leaders – Keith Allen’s Sheriff several times describing his campaign against the
outlaws as a ‘war on terror’, while secretly frustrating any policy of bringing the wars to an
end.16 But sustained political engagement with the crusades and their contemporary context
remained impossible. The show’s conscious unseriousness is one cause – after all this was a
series designed to fill the same Saturday night slot of cheesy one-liners and big explosions
occupied by its BBC stablemates Doctor Who and Merlin. Another cause can be found in the
show’s (and the larger modern tradition’s) increasingly dominant focus on amorous plots and
familial relationships. While the focus on the crusades was always Western-centric, by Robin’s
second visit to Palestine, the Holy Wars now form little more than an exotic location for the
series’ increasingly fraught love triangles and interpersonal melodramas.
More potent has been the emergence over the past thirty years of an Arabic-Muslim
member of Robin’s band. Robin’s Merry Men have never been a stable unit. Some were there
from the start (Little John, Scarlet, Much); others joined later (Friar Tuck and Marian); while
yet more stayed only for the length of a ballad or two (the Pindar of Wakefield, a potter,
the occasional butcher). A major new character, or the redevelopment of an existing band
member, signals a major change in ideological orientation. Marian’s inclusion into the story
in the sixteenth century brought with it a great deal of gender politics and male anxieties;
Little John’s demotion from co-leader in the early ballads to little more than a manservant
in Munday’s Downfall was a result of Robin’s gentrification and a new conservative bias
in the myth. The figure of the Saracen outlaw, under a variety of names, ethnicities and
even genders, seems to have joined the band on a permanent basis. But the effect has been
ideologically ambivalent.
Prince of Thieves’ Azeem is the best-known incarnation: saved by Robin from a Jerusalem
jail, he travels with him to England in order to fulfil his debt and save Robin’s life. He
brings with him medical and scientific knowledge, religious devotion and a critical scepticism
lacking in the superstitious medieval English. Critics have been divided over the figure. The
film’s detractors have seen the character, and the film more generally, as an example of liberal
Hollywood’s apparently unnecessary ‘political correctness’ – part of what the New York Times
reviewer saw as ‘a big, long, joyless reconstruction of the Robin Hood legend that comes
out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom and economic opportunity for all’.17
260
Stephen Knight, more positively, sees ‘a sense of tolerance’ emerging from the film.18 In the
most searching analysis, Kathleen Biddick has read the film in terms of the First Gulf War and
has seen Azeem as symbolizing, from an American viewpoint, the figure of the progressive
Arab, contrasted with Muslim fundamentalists.19
Azeem, however, was not the first Arabic-Muslim member of the band. Richard Carpenter’s
Robin of Sherwood, first shown on ITV in the mid-1980s, had included a Saracen assassin
called Nasir, who in the classic Robin-meets-his-match structure joins the outlaws after an
extended fight with Michael Praed’s Robin. Although it inspired a tradition of ‘oriental’
outlaws, there was no political conviction in the creation of Nasir: Carpenter had intended
to kill Nasir off at the end of the extended pilot, but the cast and crew had taken a liking to
the actor who played him, Mark Ryan, and so he attained a permanent role in the series.20
Subsequent film and television series have included a similar character in the band: Azeem
in Prince of Thieves, Kemal in The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997–8) and Djaq/Saffia
in BBC’s Robin Hood (2006–9). The figure has also been weakly parodied in the rapping of
the quasi-Rastafarian Barrington in BBC’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men written by Tony
Robinson (1989–94) and more directly as Asneeze and Achoo in Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood:
Men in Tights (1993). Only Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood avoided including such a figure –
unsurprisingly, given the fact that, because of the torturous rewrites involved in that film’s
production, very little of the Robin Hood legend is discernible in the final movie.21
Djaq in BBC’s Robin Hood is perhaps the most developed of these more recent figures. The
character first appears halfway through the first series, in an episode which begins with the
colliers of a local mine declaring a strike over unsafe working conditions. The Sheriff, who also
owns the mine, has anticipated this and arranges for Turkish slaves to be brought in to replace
the local workers. The outlaws intervene and aid the slaves’ escape – but not before Little
John is hurt in the rescue attempt. In a familiar trope, only Turkish/Arabic medical knowledge
can save him, and fortunately one of the slaves, Djaq, the child of a physician, possesses such
skills. As with Prince of Thieves, English vigour and liberalism is aided by Eastern ingenuity
and technological skill. But there are further twists: Djaq, apparently a boy, turns out to be
a woman, whose real name (though rarely used in the rest of the series) is Saffia. Thus the
episode indiscriminately collocates its liberal subjects: a plot about industrial exploitation gives
way to an anti-slavery narrative; and the inclusion of Djaq/Saffia into the band brings with it
not only contact with religious and ethnic other, but gender difference as well. This overlaying
of multiple ‘other’ identities in the character of Djaq/Saffia is part of a wider strategy of totemic
racial diversity symbolized by the ‘Other’ outlaw, who possesses no stable name (Nasir, Azeem,
Djaq/Saffia), ethnicity (in terms of character: Saracen, Moor, Turk; and actor: the White-
British Mark Ryan, the African-American Morgan Freeman and the British-Indian Anjali Jay),
nor gender. All that matters is that there is a character ethnically and religiously different from
the outlaws but accepted by them as a symbol of their inclusive liberalism.
V
From its beginning, the Robin Hood tradition, for all its gestures towards personal and
collective freedoms, has soon realized a point beyond which authority cannot be resisted.
Though the modern tradition has expanded upon these freedoms to include religious
liberties, ethnic tolerance and, most recently, freedom from certain socially subscribed
gender restraints, the point of no more resistance is more quickly met than ever before. The
point is illustrated clearly in the opening episode of Minghella’s BBC Robin Hood, which
borrows heavily from the post-war Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–9) starring Richard
Greene. In the older show the plots centred on a veteran Robin returning from the crusades
(metonymically standing for the Second World War), his confidence that social change is
possible being dynamized by the radical liberalism of the show’s American authors, exiled to
Britain due to the McCarthy witch-hunts (the subject of Michael Eaton’s 1991 film Fellow
Traveller). In 2007, in the context of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the politics are
liberal capitalism, rather than radical freedom: here Robin advocates tax relief for the people
to encourage surplus production, which will increase trade in the local markets (profits of
which, as he tells the Sheriff, can be taxed). Though the first episode of the BBC series was
titled ‘Can You Tolerate This?’, the series repeatedly made clear that modern audiences are
expected, in fact, to tolerate quite a lot.
For all the modern tradition’s engagement with contemporary religious and ethnic conflict –
at home and abroad – the overall result is little more than a few pained expressions for
white male heroes, whose liberal façade has been iconographically reinforced by inviting a
few stray Middle Eastern figures into the band. And whether Robin turns out to be a boy or
a girl, his/her struggle remains that of the individuated self, not the larger community. The
hero’s quest for love and family dominates the modern tradition; domestic social problems
and international conflict, though frequently referenced, remain too distanced for any
sustained engagement. Given the freedom with which the modern tradition treats history –
from hoodies to Magna Carta; gunpowder to medieval ninjas – the extent of formal and
ideological containment is remarkable. ‘We are all Robin Hood’, say the mourning members
of the once merry band at the end of the most recent BBC series, believing their hero to be
dead. That is our tragedy.
Notes
1. Lorinda B. Cahoon (September 2007), ‘Transgressive Transformations: Representations of Maid
Marian in Robin Hood Retellings’. The Lion and the Unicorn, 31(3): 209–31, at p. 225.
2. Stephen Knight (2004), Robin Hood; A Mythic Biography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, p. 186.
3. For further discussion of Princess of Thieves, along with Disney’s other Robin Hood productions
see Kevin Harty (2012), ‘Walt in Sherwood, or the Sheriff of Disneyland Disney and the Film
Legend of Robin Hood’, in Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (eds), The Disney Middle Ages: A
Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133–52, at p. 134.
4. R. M. ArceJaeger (2013), Robin: Lady of Legend. Platypus Press, p. 288.
5. A. C. Gaughen (2012), Scarlet. London: Bloomsbury, p. 189.
6. Gaughen, Scarlet, 99, p. 14.
7. David Lampe, ‘The Heirs/Errors of Ivanhoe: Robin Hood in Pre- and Post-Modern Fiction’, in
Tom Hahn (ed.), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, pp. 129–40, at p. 137.
262
8. Theresa Tomlinson (2003), ‘Afterword’, in The Forestwife Trilogy. London: Corgi, p. 469;
Tomlinson, Interviewed by Allen W. Wright, Interviews in Sherwood (25 August 2001), available
at http://www.boldoutlaw.com/robint/tomlinson1.html.
9. Knight, Mythic Biography, p. 191.
10. Michael Cadnum, Interviewed by Allen W. Wright, Interviews in Sherwood (October 2008),
available at www.boldoutlaw.com/robint/cadnum.html.
11. Michael Morpurgo (2012), Outlaw: The Story of Robin Hood. London: HarperCollins, p. 37.
12. A Turkish prince, along with two giant infidels, appear as antagonists in a late pseudo-chivalric
ballad, ‘Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon’; see F. J. Child (1965), The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads. New York: Dover, no. 129.
13. For discussion, see Knight, Mythic Biography, pp. 94–149.
14. Stephen Knight (2006), ‘Robin Hood and the Crusades: When and Why Did the Longbowman of
the People Mount Up Like a Lord?’. Florilegium, 23(1): 201–22, at p. 218.
15. The Adventures of Robin Hood, dir. Micheal Curtiz and William Keighly (Warner Bros., 1938);
The Adventures of Robin Hood, dir. Various (Sapphire Films, 1955–9); Robin and Marian, dir.
Richard Lester (Columbia Pictures, 1976); ‘The King’s Fool’, S01E06, Robin of Sherwood, dir. Ian
Sharp (HTV and Goldcrest, 1984).
16. See, respectively: Series 2, Episode 13; Series 1, Episode 10; Series 1, Episode 3 of Robin Hood
(BBC, 2006–9).
17. Richards, Jeffrey (2001), ‘Robin Hood on Film and Television Since 1945’. Visual Culture in
Great Britain, 2: 65–80, at p. 78; Vincent Canby (14 June 1991), ‘A Polite Robin Hood in a
Legend Recast’, New York Times.
18. Knight, ‘Robin Hood and the Crusades’, p. 219.
19. Kathleen Biddick (1998), The Shock of Medievalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 75.
20. Mark Ryan, Interviewed by Allen W. Wright, Interviews in Sherwood (March 1998), available at
http://www.boldoutlaw.com/robint/ryan1.html.
21. William Martell has most extensively detailed the exhaustive production issues involved in the
making of Robin Hood; see, ‘Robbing from the Poor (Writer)’ available at Sex in a Submarine at
http://www.sex-in-a-sub.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/robbing-from-poor-writer.html.
chapter twenty-four
Harry Potter and Medievalism

Renée Ward
Harry Potter Culture and Medievalism

In the twenty-first century, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series exists as part of a fully
fledged multimedia and material culture, one that participates extensively in medievalism.
Medievalism is a difficult term to define precisely because it denotes a vast array of meanings,
and its polysemic nature is particularly evident when one considers Harry Potter culture.
The books participate in medievalism through their interlacement of plotlines and motifs
drawn from medieval narratives and through their references to medieval people and places,
while the films anachronistically compound the effect of the books, especially through their
selection of medieval historical sites as set locations. These medievalisms then perpetuate in
the media and artefacts related to both the books and films, such as permanent theme parks,
travelling exhibits and sports organizations. Thus, as Harry Potter culture expands, so do the
ways in which it interacts with all things medieval. Such interactions are, I would argue, the
best example of Stephanie Trigg’s claim that ‘Contemporary medievalism can be read as a
kind of convergence culture, bringing together academic, creative, and popular modes of
thinking about medieval culture’ (Stephanie Trigg 2008, p. 99).
To organize the discussion below, I draw loosely on three of the categories Tison Pugh
and Angela Jane Weisl outline in Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present: literary,
movie and experiential medievalisms. I also draw upon Elizabeth Emery’s definitions of
‘creative’ and ‘scholarly’ medievalisms, and, to this list, I add material medievalism, which I
understand as the type of commodity culture associated with the Harry Potter series and its
various incarnations.1 The scope of my chapter, though, is not exhaustive. Rather, it provides
a survey of the more pronounced ways in which Rowling’s creations and their associated
media contribute to the afterlife of the Middle Ages.
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Literary Medievalisms
All seven Harry Potter books engage in a type of creative medievalism in that they ‘may not
engage directly with historical reality, but have been inspired by it to create new aesthetic
products’ (Emery 2013, p. 83). Additionally, Rowling’s deployment of medieval motifs
and figures receives considerable attention from scholars, especially those interested in the
relationship between the series and medieval literature and culture. Her works, then, also
contribute to the field known either as ‘scientific’ or ‘scholarly’ medievalism, ‘the ways in
which specialists (of literature, art, history, music, philosophy, archeology, theology) attempt
to engage seriously with the cultural productions of the period known as the Middle Ages’
(Emery 2013, p. 82). These two fields – creative and scholarly medievalism – are ultimately
symbiotic, feeding into each other as they expand.
Rowling’s medievalism is broad. For instance, she appropriates a variety of medieval
historical figures for the fantastic realm of her wizarding world. When Harry opens his first
Chocolate Frog, he discovers that Dumbledore has connections to another famous wizard,
one known for his work on alchemy (Rowling 1997, p. 77).2 Rowling bases this wizard
upon the historical figure Nicholas Flamel (c. 1330–1418), a Parisian scrivener whose
posthumous reputation identified him as the creator of the Philosopher’s Stone. In fact, the
myth surrounding Flamel and the Philosopher’s Stone shapes the plot of Rowling’s first book.
Harry’s early encounters with Dumbledore likewise connect the Hogwarts Headmaster to
a famous medieval fictional figure. The letter that informs Harry of his acceptance to the
wizard school identifies Dumbledore as a member of the Order of Merlin (Rowling 1997,
p. 42), aligning the Headmaster with the most magical figure of Arthuriana and medieval
romance. Deborah Bice, who provides one of the earliest considerations of the links between
Rowling’s wizarding world and the mythical world of Camelot, also argues that the young
Harry parallels the young Arthur (Rowling 2003, p. 35), as the two youths receive tutelage
crucial to their development from their respective wizened mentors.
Like many other modern fantasy writers, Rowling draws heavily on the ‘patterns, plotlines,
and themes’ (Pugh and Weisl 2013, p. 32) of foundational literary genres such as medieval
romance. The series and its individual volumes follow a departure-adventure-return structure
akin to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth phases that ultimately transform the protagonist of a
story into a hero (or heroine).3 In the first three volumes, this pattern begins with Harry’s
departure to Hogwarts and concludes with his return to the Dursley household, but Rowling
complicates this model in the remaining volumes. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for
instance, Harry and Hermione accompany the Weasley family to the Quidditch World Cup,
and this sequence then segues into the larger pattern of the departure to Hogwarts. Once
at school, Harry undertakes additional sequences as part of the Tri-Wizard Tournament,
most importantly the double-layered departure into the hedge-maze and then apparition
to the graveyard in which he duels Voldemort. Such adventures test the boundaries of
Harry’s character and ambition. In the hedge-maze-graveyard sequence, his decision to help
and to share victory with Cedric Diggory demonstrates a growing sense of compassion
and fairness, while his encounter with the priori incantatem manifestations of his parents
builds his sense of familial belonging (Rowling 2000, pp. 548–9, 579).4 This sequence thus
Harry Potter and Medievalism 265
interlaces motifs key to the romance genre, including the quests for personal identity and
familial communities.
Other prominent elements of medieval romance and medieval culture appear in the series,
such as forests, feasts, confraternities and tournaments. In medieval romance, the protagonist’s
departure from the civilized space of the court to the uncivilized space of the forest typically
signals the beginning of an adventure. As Alessandra Petrina remarks, Rowling’s depiction of
Hogwarts castle and the adjacent Forbidden Forest is replete with ‘complex Arthurianism’
(Rowling 2006, p. 101). Both settings are liminal; they exist as the crossroads between the
magical and the mundane, and they are spaces crucial to the hero’s development and eventual
success. The forest, in particular, is a dangerous space in which Harry meets ‘adventures, or
particularly terrifying animals’ and ‘his true self ’ (Petrina 2006, p. 105). Petrina also suggests
that the ceremony of feasting and the setting of the Great Hall at Hogwarts evoke the high
table and hall arrangement of Camelot, and thus identify Dumbledore and Arthur as kings
in their respective realms. Both leaders occupy a central position at their respective head
tables, in the company of their immediate peers, and oversee the lower-ranking members of
their communities. Similarly, with its double helpings and copious amounts of mains, sides
and puddings, Harry’s first feast at Hogwarts is a gastronomical nirvana that recalls scenes
from medieval Arthurian narratives, such as the Christmas feast that opens Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight.
Heather Arden and Kathryn Lorenz confirm Rowling’s indebtedness to the medieval romance
tradition. More specifically, Arden and Lorenz examine Harry alongside such French medieval
romance heroes as Perceval, from Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the
Grail), and Guigemar, from the eponymous Breton lay by Marie de France. They emphasize
Harry’s orphan status and his lightning-bolt scar, both of which mark him as different and
give him a ‘special status’ that is similar to the outsider status of his medieval predecessors, as
well as the physical challenges he encounters in each volume as he departs from and returns
to society (Arden and Lorenz 2002, p. 430; 2003, p. 63). The outsider status and experiences
of these medieval heroes inform a large subplot within Rowling’s series, as Harry similarly
struggles with conflicting emotions, specifically his despair at being The Chosen One, and his
desire for companionship and acceptance at school and within the wizarding world.
However, Rowling’s repeated placement of Harry within confraternity-like environments
counters this outsider status and continues to build his sense of belonging. Harry participates
in a number of communities, such as Dumbledore’s Army and the Order of the Phoenix, that
evoke medieval confraternities through their shared emphasis on a type of martial activity
(resistance to Voldemort’s regime), and through their membership requirements and structure.
The students who join Dumbledore’s Army, for example, sign an agreement that binds them
to secrecy (Rowling 2003, p. 309).5 This agreement functions as a type of ceremony that
recalls the medieval practice of investiture, during which knights swore to uphold specific
moral and behavioural codes. The varied backgrounds of the members of Dumbledore’s Army
and the Order of the Phoenix contribute to the more egalitarian society these organizations
promote, and contrast especially the strictures of the Ministry of Magic, before and while
under Voldemort’s control. Both organizations parallel Arthur’s Round Table, which renders
its members equals through its non-hierarchical design and are ultimately crucial to Harry’s
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development in the same manner that confraternities are crucial to the development of the
romance hero: they provide him (Harry or the medieval knight) with an opportunity to find
‘identity and support outside the boundaries of the traditional family unit’ (Pugh and Weisl
2013, p. 58).
Other confraternity-like communities emphasize the influence on Rowling’s work of
medieval practices such as tournaments. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry
joins the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and his participation in this community develops his
flying, teamwork and leadership skills, as well as his later success in the Tri-Wizard Tournament,
the series’ most obvious reference to medieval tournaments. During this event, representatives
from the three schools of witchcraft and wizardry come together and compete in tasks that
challenge not only their intellects but also their moral values and physical prowess. Like their
medieval predecessors, who faced possible injury, even death, when they entered a mêlée or a
joust, the Tri-Wizard contestants experience various levels of bodily harm, from dragon burns
to death.
Another medieval literary genre upon which Rowling draws is the bestiary, or book of
beasts, and its companion genre, the aviary, or book of birds. Bestiaries and aviaries evolved
out of the classical Physiologus tradition and draw upon early medieval encyclopaedias such
as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. Popular especially from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries,
bestiaries and aviaries are primarily catalogues of creatures that include ‘interpretive and
moralizing narratives that reflect the human world and simultaneously promote Christian
doctrine’ (Ward 2010, p. 1634). Manuscripts such as the Bodleian Bestiary (MS Bodley 764)
and the Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen MS 24) place within didactic narratives real creatures
such as lions, elephants and wolves, alongside imaginary ones such as dragons, basilisks and
sirens.
Harry encounters many bestiary-derived beings within the wizarding world. He first learns
of his wizarding ancestry from the half-human, half-giant Hagrid, while the students at
Hogwarts study creatures such as unicorns and hippogriffs in their Care of Magical Creatures
class or encounter merpeople and centaurs in the castle’s surrounding environs. They also
read about these beings in assigned texts such as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
and The Monster Book of Monsters. More importantly, relationships with individuals such as
Remus Lupin, a werewolf, and Dobby, a House Elf, shape Harry’s development. Specifically,
his interactions with such figures teach him about social problems prevalent in wizarding
culture (and in our own), from racism to class prejudices, and inform his egalitarian view of
the world (Ward 2006, p. 26). As Gail Orgelfinger suggests, ‘By understanding the symbolism
of the bestiaries,’ readers can ‘better appreciate’ how these figures interact with and contribute
to the protagonist’s ultimate defeat of Voldemort (Orgelfinger 2009, p. 142).
Rowling’s fascination with the bestiary genre extends beyond the series. In 2001, she
participated in a fundraiser for Comic Relief, and wrote, under the pseudonym Newt Scamander,
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The text presents its entries in alphabetical order
and mimics many medieval manuscripts through its inclusion of marginalia and edits. The
most striking connection this volume has to medieval materials, though, is its contemplation
of the status of the different species it describes. Scamander notes that creatures designated
‘beings’ are treated differently from those designated ‘beasts’. That is, those of ‘being’ status
receive both ‘legal rights and a voice in the governance of the magical world’ (Scamander
2001, p. x); those of ‘beast’ status do not. Historically, he points out, distinctions between
the two categories have been based on aspects such as whether or not a species was bipedal or
whether or not it could ‘speak the human tongue’ (Scamander 2001, p. xi). He also explains
that the current understanding, while imperfect, considers a ‘being’ as ‘any creature that has
sufficient intelligence to understand the laws of the magical community and to bear part of
the responsibility in shaping those laws’ (Scamander 2001, p. xii). Scamander’s discussion
of this ontological crisis recalls Augustine of Hippo’s contemplation of monstrous races in
City of God. Augustine suggests that readers should never question the outside appearance of
another individual, even if it seems unusual, because by doing so they might fail to discover
the true nature of that being, especially its rationality and derivation from Adam.6 While
physical deformity may externalize internal sin, it does not, for Augustine, render a being
inhuman.
The material that Rowling plunders is as much a source of interest to modern readers as
the series itself. Unofficial Harry Potter companion texts abound. Like Rowling’s Fantastic
Beasts, these collections mimic the bestiary genre, focusing on mythical and legendary figures
primarily from the classical and medieval periods. One of the earliest companions, Allan
Zola Kronzek and Elizabeth Kronzek’s The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical
World of Harry Potter (2001), provides an alphabetical list of items, ideas and names, ranging
from Amulet and Arithmancy to Werewolf and Zombie; a comprehensive bibliography; and
illustrations, including reproductions of early modern woodcuts depicting a werewolf and
witches. David Colbert’s The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter: A Treasury of Myths, Legends,
and Fascinating Facts (2001) claims to ‘decode’ Rowling’s language, especially her use of
names, in order to reveal the ‘artfully hidden meanings’ of people, places and things within the
series (Colbert, p. 15). Colbert’s second volume, The Hidden Myths in Harry Potter (2005),
includes a large colour map of Britain and Western Europe strewn with images of mythical
and historical figures. Although these companion texts do not conduct critical analyses of
Rowling’s works, and therefore do not qualify as scholarly medievalisms, they are useful
resources: they help readers more fully appreciate the settings, creatures and characters of the
series and introduce them to some of Rowling’s sources.
Movie Medievalisms
With his adaptations of Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,
director Christopher Columbus initiated the trend of employing medieval historical sites as
sets for the Harry Potter film franchise. Columbus selected locations such as the Gloucester
Cathedral Cloisters and Alnwick Castle as the backdrop for Hogwarts and its environs.
The Gloucester Cloisters includes examples of Romanesque and Gothic architecture and is
especially known for its fan-vaulting, decorated capitals and medieval and heraldic stained
glass windows. Audiences can glimpse such features while viewing the films: the East Cloister
becomes a Hogwarts hallway, while the West Slype, the entrance to the West Walk, houses the
doorway to the Gryffindor Common Room; the Cloisters’ courtyard, the Garth, becomes the
garden space in which a tearful Hermione rushes past Harry and Ron, and the North Walk
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Lavatorium transforms into the hallway in which the boys first encounter the troll. Similarly,
the exterior and grounds of Alnwick, a composite construction upon the foundations of a
Norman castle, are the site of the Quidditch lesson in the first film and the site of the Ford
Anglia crash in the second film.
Other medieval sites used in the films include Durham Cathedral, which appears as interior
and exterior shots of Hogwarts and provides the backdrop for Professor McGonagall’s
classroom; the Lacock Abbey Chapter House, which appears in classroom shots in the early
films; and Lacock Village, which operates as the village where, in film six, Dumbledore and
Harry seek Horace Slughorn. Durham Cathedral demonstrates some of the earliest examples
of the architectural developments of the High Middle Ages. Most notably, it provides some
of Britain’s best examples of late-eleventh- and early-twelfth-century Romanesque stonework
and illustrates the transition from groin-vaults and rounded archways to ribbed-vaults and
pointed archways. These developments increased the weight-bearing capacities of buildings
and allowed for greater heights to be reached, thus paving the way for the Gothic style. The
thirteenth-century Lacock Abbey includes various Gothic and Gothic Revival features, such
as fan-vaulting and oriel windows, while the connected medieval village includes architectural
styles ranging from period cottages to half-timbered houses. The most recognizable
architectural reference for Harry Potter fans, though, is likely to be the model for the Great
Hall at Hogwarts: the Great Hall at Christ Church College, Oxford. With its Christ Church-
inspired high, vaulted ceilings and stained glass, the Great Hall at Hogwarts appears repeatedly
in the films and has a variety of functions. It serves as a dining and gathering space; as the
location of the Yule Ball; as overnight accommodations in times of duress; as the location of
the final duel between Harry and Voldemort; and, in the aftermath of the final battle, as a
place of recovery and mourning.
While the films themselves are inherently anachronistic – their sets may have medieval
origins but remain imbued with contemporary trappings – they provide for audiences visual
access to excellent examples of medieval architecture. In short, their anachronistic nature is
not necessarily negative; rather, the directors use these sites, as Pugh and Weisl would say, ‘to
achieve striking aesthetic, narrative, and pleasurable effects’ (Pugh and Weisl 2013, p. 84).
While one can, for instance, tour the Gloucester Cathedral Cloisters searching for all of the
artifices used to disguise modern features such as electrical outlets, this does not detract from
the artistic achievement of the films or their impact on the viewer. The films increase interest
in the medieval period as people research and visit film-related sites. In fact, many of the
organizations that run these sites emphasize their connection to the Harry Potter franchise in
order to increase tourism.
Experiential Medievalisms
A number of historical sites attract tourists by offering a range of interactive activities connected
to the films and books. Much like the experiential medievalism of medieval fairs, which
allow ‘enthusiasts to re-create and participate in the past’ (Pugh and Weisl 2013, p. 122),
these activities allow fans to participate more directly in Harry Potter culture. Gloucester
Cathedral and Christ Church College, for instance, both run tours that highlight film set
locations. The Harry Potter Gloucester Cathedral Tour promises to reveal secrets about how
the religious nature of the buildings, along with their modern amenities, were camouflaged
during film production (Gloucester’s Harry Potter Trail 2003), while the Behind the Scenes
tour at Christ Church teases that its Great Hall has only one moving picture, but that it is
an important one (Visitor Information: Harry Potter 2011). The village of Lacock offers
Harry Potter-inspired seasonal events, including its Witches and Wizards Potion Trail, which
leads people through the Abbey grounds and highlights the ingredients they must collect
in order to concoct their ‘very own pretend “Lacock Potion”’ (What’s On 2013). Alnwick
Castle provides more elaborate ‘Potter-themed activities, from Broomstick Training to magic
shows [that] feature characters inspired by Harry and Hagrid’ (Film and Television at Alnwick
Castle 2013). While such activities provide more of a ‘cultural palimpsest’ (Watson 2001,
p. 242) than an authentic experience, particularly as they focus on the heritage industry’s
reconstructions of the past, they revitalize the medieval sites that feature prominently in
the Harry Potter films. They also create a type of ‘unifying fantasy’ (Pugh and Weisl 2013,
p. 135), as fans from around the globe flock to these sites in order to share in an experience
that builds upon their love of the series.
The attraction of experiential activities is most evident at Universal’s The Wizarding World
of Harry Potter, in Orlando, Florida, and at the Warner Bros. Harry Potter Studio Tour,
in Leavesden, England. Annually, an astounding volume of people travel from around the
globe to these sites. Universal’s addition of the immersive Wizarding World, for example,
boosted the resort’s overall attendance to record-breaking levels (The Wizarding World of
Harry Potter 2013). While on the grounds, fans engage in a variety of activities based on
Harry’s experiences. They attend a wand demonstration at Ollivander’s; drink butterbeer at
The Three Broomsticks; buy Cauldron Cakes from Honeydukes; explore novelty items such
as Sneakoscopes and Extendable Ears at Zonko’s; and travel through the full-scale replica
of Hogwarts while enroute to the main attraction, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.
This ride simulates a Quidditch match and exposes fans to some of the dangers Harry faces
in the series, such as Acromantula, dragons and Dementors. While some of these attractions
demonstrate fidelity to the books and/or films – for instance, the Ollivander’s experience
employs narrative verbatim from The Philosopher’s Stone – a number of them are primarily
amalgamations. Although Universal identifies its Harry Potter village as Hogsmeade, many of
the shops derive from Diagon Alley. Likewise, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is a
composite experience rather than a simulacrum of a specific Quidditch match.
At the time of writing, though, Universal appears to be working towards greater similitude.
In the summer of 2014, a second theme park will open that features Diagon Alley. New shops
and experiences will be available to fans, including Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions
and Quality Quidditch Supplies. For the peckish, a British pub-meal can be acquired at the
Leaky Cauldron, while those with a sweet tooth can seek treats at Florean Fortescue’s Ice-
Cream Parlour. Perhaps the most promising additions, at least for thrill-seekers and those
who desire an immersive experience, are Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, which
Universal describes as a ‘multi-dimensional new thrill ride’ (The Wizarding World 2014), and
the Hogwarts Express, the family-oriented ride that connects the two Harry Potter parks.
The latter option includes an experience of passage from King’s Cross Station to the magical
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Platform 9¾, as well as ‘never before seen’ views of the Black Lake as the train approaches
Hogwarts (Rumor SPOTLIGHT 2014). Riders beware, however. This immersive train ride
will also expose fans to an actual Demontor attack, ‘replete with ice-cold air being pumped
into the cabin’ (Rumor SPOTLIGHT 2014).
Fans who desire an experience with greater fidelity might prefer the Warner Bros.’ Harry
Potter Studio Tour. An exploration of the Leavesden studio, the tour provides considerable
behind-the-scenes information about the creation of sets, costumes, props and special effects,
including those with medieval origins. The tour’s first stop is the Great Hall. Here, fans
explore the medieval-inspired architectural features of Hogwarts, such as its stained glass
windows, ribbed pillars and vaults and decorated capitals and lintels. Next, they examine
a series of scale models and a narrative of the set’s relationship to the Great Hall at Christ
Church College. The potions classroom similarly demonstrates the influence of medieval
architecture, this time through Romanesque features such as those at Durham Cathedral and
Lacock Abbey. Gilded calligraphic lines – primarily of the English and Latin names of potions
ingredients – frame the dungeon’s rounded archways. At the Gryffindor common room, fans
view the full-scale replica of a medieval tapestry and watch a video that discusses the room’s
design inspirations. The video includes information on The Lady and the Unicorn: To My
Only Desire, the fifteenth-century tapestry upon which designers modelled the Gryffindor
wall-hanging.7
The Warner Bros. tour culminates in an experience that borders on reverent and that evokes
the spiritual aspect of medieval pilgrimage. Although fans meander within the two main
studio buildings at leisure, the tour exit requires that they pass through a type of holy space
and pay homage to the on-site relic: the 1:24-scale model of Hogwarts Castle and grounds.
The tour’s final phase starkly contrasts the sensory overload that characterizes many of the
sets. The path out of Diagon Alley takes tour-goers into a pristine and bright space called the
Production Designer room, where black-and-white images and diagrams, along with plans for
sets, animatronics and paintings, paper the walls. The Production Designer room opens into a
similarly lit hallway that features artists’ renderings of characters, sets and costumes, and then
feeds into an ascending switch-back ramp. On display along the ramp are white paper models
of sets, ranging from Hogwarts’ classrooms to the Durmstrang ship. As tour-goers ascend the
ramp, the volume of the Harry Potter soundtrack, which plays in the background, increases.
Intermittent light changes – blue to white and then white to blue – flood the entrance of the
room at the top of the ramp. The displays emphasize the care that went into every item within
the film franchise, while the path builds to the collection’s masterpiece. At the top of the ramp
and around the corner, fans encounter the Hogwarts model, set alternately in day-time and
night-time lighting. The tour’s finale is awe-inspiring.
Fans may also engage in pilgrimage-style travel as they attend Harry Potter-related events
within which creative, scholarly and experiential medievalisms co-mingle. Conferences such
as ACCIO (2005, 2008), Phoenix Rising (2007) and TERMINUS (2008) brought together
fans and scholars at venues in England and the United States, respectively. The papers and
presentations at these events blended popular and academic approaches to the series and
to Harry Potter culture in general. Phoenix Rising, for instance, attracted approximately
one thousand attendees, many of whom were from international destinations, and included
‘multi- or inter-disciplinary’ presentations ranging from
educated speculation on the architecture of Hogwarts to analysis of the books as Gothic

literature, from roundtable discussions for parents to a critique of the books’ economic
issues, and from scientific takes on the genetic heritability of magic to studies of the online
fan community. (Goetz 2008)
At these conferences, talks or presentations also overlap with experiential activities, including
memorabilia workshops, such as ‘Sewing basics: how to make a student robe’ and ‘Create
your own death eater mask!’ (Pommer et al. 2008a, 2008b), medieval-inspired feasts and
Wizard Wrock/Rock concerts. Terminus highlighted a number of events dedicated especially to
fandom, including the wizarding talk show, The North Star Live!, which ‘interview[ed] guests,
showcas[ed] entertainment, and discover[ed] what it is about Harry Potter that captivates
millions’ (The North Star Live!) and the Fan Community Showcase, during which artists
and authors from the online fan community displayed and discussed their works (Artists and
Authors Night).
One of the most popular experiential activities at these conferences is Muggle Quidditch,
an (unfortunately) non-flying adaptation of Rowling’s invented sport. Quidditch is, in fact,
the most widespread experiential aspect of Harry Potter culture that evokes the sportsmanship
of medieval tournaments. As Jacquelyn Mayo, a player from the University of Waterloo
Quidditch, team remarks, ‘being able to play the sport itself is very nostalgic.... It makes
it come to life’ (WLU vs UW Quidditch 2013). What started as a casual fan adaptation of
the game has become a fully blown international organization and sport. Founded in 2005,
the International Quidditch Association (IQA) has helped to develop teams in ‘over 300
universities and high schools throughout North America, Australia, and Europe’ (About the
IQA 2013).8 Fans participate in local and international matches, building confraternity-like
communities through team and league activities that emphasize physical fitness and literacy
for youths through local community involvement.
Travelling attractions such as Harry Potter: the Exhibition, which has visited numerous
international destinations since its launch in Chicago, in 2009, provides an interactive
experience for fans who cannot travel to far-away destinations. The exhibit features over
15,000 square feet of props and costumes from the eight films and opens with an introductory
session during which the Sorting Hat places selected audience members in Hogwarts houses.
As fans move through the exhibit, they encounter artefacts in displays inspired by the actual
film sets or scenes in which they were used and can read or listen to the accompanying
narratives that outline the creation and craftsmanship behind their production. They can also
engage in other activities such as sitting in Hagrid’s oversized chair, throwing about a Quaffle
or pulling a mandrake from its pot. Additionally, fans can participate in question-and-answer
sessions with stars from the films, such as Matthew Lewis (Neville Longbottom) or James
and Oliver Phelps (Fred and George Weasley), who frequently make appearances at exhibit
destinations.
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Online communities similarly bring fans together. Rowling’s Pottermore site, in particular,
provides an interactive and luxuriously illustrated virtual rendition of the wizarding world.
Upon joining the Pottermore community, members are sorted into one of the four Hogwarts
houses. They then shop for school items, including their very first wand, by visiting shops
in Diagon Alley such as Ollivander’s, Flourish and Botts or Potage’s Cauldron Shops. As
individuals explore the online wizarding world, they collect items (from Bertie Bott’s Every
Flavour Beans to potions ingredients such as lacewing flies), many of which earn them badges
or house points. Likewise, they earn house points by participating in the virtual duelling club,
which allows them to test their knowledge of spells, or by brewing potions with the various
ingredients they have collected or bought at the apothecary.
As they explore the online wizarding world, fans unlock what the site calls ‘moments’,
entirely new material written by Rowling that provides background information on characters,
settings and other objects that appear within the books. A number of these moments engage
in medievalism. For instance, ‘Pure-blood’, moment one book two, chapter seven, explains
that many witches and wizards believe in ‘supposed indicators of pure-blood status’, such as
‘early (before aged seven) prowess on a broomstick’ and ‘outstanding physical attractiveness’
(Rowling 2012). These details evoke the prevalent medieval belief in innate nobility that
contributed to the characterization of many romance heroes, especially those of the ‘fair
unknown’ narratives such as Thomas Chestre’s Lybeaus Desconus and Sir Thomas Malory’s
The Tale of Sir Gareth. The extra information on Sir Cadogan, whom Harry, Ron and
Hermione encounter in Prisoner of Azkaban, more specifically recalls medieval romances
through its identification of the portrait knight as ‘one of the famous Knights of the Round
Table, albeit a little-known one’, and mentions that ‘he achieved this position through his
friendship with Merlin’ (Rowling 2013).9 As M. Schneider, a Pottermore member, commented
in personal communication with me, this extra information allows fans to ‘sneak around
behind the scenes as if [they] have the Marauder’s Map’ (21 November 2013). In other
words, as fans explore Pottermore, they emulate Harry’s explorations of Hogwarts and the
wizarding world.
Material Medievalism
As suggested earlier, the types of commodity culture associated with the Harry Potter series
are vast. In fact, some critics suggest that the success of the books themselves derives from the
associated ‘commodity consumption’ (Zipes 2001, p. 172). While commodity consumption
certainly influences the economic success of various branches of Harry Potter culture, it is
worth remembering, as does Edmund M. Kern, that ‘the publishing history of the books
seems to suggest that the stories themselves created reader interest, rather than corporate-
generated hype’ (Kern 2003, p. 140). Such logic extends to the medievalism of the artefacts
themselves: without the books, these items would not exist.
The more medieval items of this commodity culture include sets of Hogwarts school and
house pins, emblazoned with the heraldic imagery of Hogwarts and the individual house
founders: Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Salazar Slytherin and Helga Hufflepuff.
Also available are copies of the Marauder’s Map, which evokes medieval maps such as the
Hereford Mappa Mundi through its design: Hogwarts Castle, like Jerusalem – which appears
at the centre of many medieval maps – appears at the centre of its grounds and environs.
Individuals who wish to explore calligraphy and the world of medieval scribes can order
Hogwarts writing quills, which come with their own ink-wells and sheets of crested, rolled
parchment-like paper. Less medieval-inspired items include replicas of almost every prop and
costume seen in the films, as well as items that adapt objects from the novels. For instance,
fans can purchase miniatures of the Mirror of Erised, autographed photographs of Gilderoy
Lockhart or ready-to-wear versions of Hermione’s Yule Ball gown. They can also buy the
Sword of Godric Gryffindor letter openers and plush toys of various creatures, including
Harry’s owl, Hedwig. Warner Bros. even teamed up with LEGO to produce a Harry Potter line
of construction kits, including kits for the medieval-inspired Hogwarts Castle and Forbidden
Forest. A range of other board games exist, from Scene It!’s Harry Potter: The Complete
Cinematic Journey and Parker Brothers’ Harry Potter Clue to Mattel’s Diagon Alley.
While these consumer items are not medieval themselves, they allow fans to perpetuate
their engagement with the series, and thus with the series’ engagement with the medieval. The
physical nature of such items serves as a tangible reminder of previous experiences, whether
these be the reading of the books, the viewing of the films or visits to exhibits and theme
parks. They also recall and extend the pleasure derived from these readings, viewings or
visits, as well as any types of medievalism associated with the different aspects of Harry Potter
culture. One could say that some of these items even recall the veneration medieval people
held for religious relics, as fans often collect, even fetishize, Harry Potter artefacts. Material
objects become signifiers of one’s membership in the fandom associated with the series, while
they simultaneously become markers for the connections between past and present that
permeate Harry Potter culture. Material medievalism may not necessarily be perfect or exact
in its recreation of medieval objects, but, like other forms of medievalism, it contributes to an
experience that evokes and values the past, as well as to ‘the continued process of imagining
this historical period called “the Middle Ages”’ (Emery 2013, p. 81).
Notes
1. Pugh, T. and Weisl, A. J. (2013), Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. New York:
Routledge; and Emery, E. (2009), ‘Medievalism and the Middle Ages’. Studies in Medievalism,
17: 77–85.
2. Rowling, J. K. (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury.
3. ‘The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero’, Campbell explains, ‘is a
magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which
might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth’ (Campbell 1968, p. 30).
4. Rowling, J. K. (2000), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
5. Rowling, J. K. (2003), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury.
6. In City of God, Augustine writes,
But whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational mortal animal, no matter what unusual
appearance he presents in colour, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power,
part, or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast.
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[Verum quisquis uspiam nascitur homo, id est animal rationale mortale, quamlibet nostris
inusitatam sensibus great corporis formam seu colorem sive motum sive sonum sive qualibet vi,
qualibet parte, qualibet qualitate naturam.] (16.8)
7. The original tapestry, which has six parts or panels, is part of the collection at the Musée National
au Moyen Âge, in Paris, France.
8. At the time of writing, teams around the globe are competing to secure spots in the seventh annual
Quidditch World Cup, which will take place 5–6 April 2014, in North Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina (World Cup VII Date and Location Announced, 2013).
9. Rowling, J. K. (2013), Pottermore, 24 November 2013.
part five
The Space Between:

New Media and Fandom
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chapter twenty-five
Social Networking,
Participatory Culture and the
Fandom World of Harry Potter
Amanda K. Allen
On 7 July 2011, thousands of fans converged in Trafalgar Square for the London premiere
of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. They wore red and gold scarves, clutched
wands and sported lightning bolts and ‘JKR’ on their foreheads. The premiere’s celebrity
interviews included ‘JKR’ herself – J. K. Rowling – whose much-applauded speech ended with
the statement: ‘The stories we love best do live in us forever. So whether you come back by
page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.’1 Rowling
may have been referring to the Harry Potter books and films, but the fandom embraced
her declaration as its call to arms, restating it in Tumblr images, YouTube videos, Twitter
tweets – on whatever online platform was available. This chapter examines the afterlives of
Harry Potter by providing an overview of the dominant social media forms and modes – the
‘texts’ – in which fans engage with their beloved Harry Potter. These texts position fandom
as a kind of participatory culture, one that exists as shared experience and one that ultimately
questions who has the right to control Harry Potter’s afterlives.
Fandom, Participatory Culture

and Contributions That Matter
Fandom is notoriously tricky to define. Cornel Sandvoss identifies it as ‘the regular, emotionally
involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’2 – a phenomenon that is easy to
see within the fan community surrounding Harry Potter. Within fandom, John Tulloch and
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Henry Jenkins carefully distinguish between ‘fans’ and ‘followers’, suggesting that the term
‘fan’ denotes a social identity that ‘follower’ lacks, although ‘the boundary between the two
groups remains fluid and ultimately somewhat arbitrary’.3 While anyone can be a follower of
the Harry Potter book series and films, those who label themselves ‘Potterhead’ (the dominant
name for Harry Potter fans) appear to do so with the recognition that such naming suggests
an aspect of their personal identities.
As a group, Potterheads occupy a fascinating – and powerful – position within a long
history of fandom. While late-twentieth-century fandoms manifested in fan conventions,
zines, newsletters and group cosplay (or costume play), the Harry Potter fandom situates itself
at the juncture of IRL (in real life) fan practices and engagement through social media – the
latter being the focus of this chapter. Like most twenty-first-century fandoms, the Harry Potter
fandom is the product of the intersection between the concepts of ‘participatory culture’
and ‘Web 2.0’. Participatory culture describes a society in which people not only passively
consume content, but also actively create it. Jenkins et al define it as
a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong
support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship
whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.4
Each of these elements is readily apparent within the products of the Harry Potter fandom.
Consider, for example, a fan’s free posting of a Harry Potter-related story on FanFiction.Net
(‘low barriers to artistic expression’), other fans’ comments and criticism of that story (‘strong
support’) and the advice and counselling involved in ‘beta-ing’ – that is, editing – each other’s
stories (‘informal mentorship’). While the connections between participatory culture and
fandom are obvious, Jenkins is careful to note the difference between participatory culture as
a broad movement ‘which takes many different forms across history’ and fandom as a ‘specific
kind of participatory culture with its own history and traditions’ (Jenkins 2012, p. xxii).
The second concept, ‘Web 2.0.’, is an expression that suggests the limitless potential of
an internet that is dynamically developed by its users. While coining the term in her January
1999 article in Print, Darcy DiNucci proposed that the World Wide Web of 1999 was simply
a prototype – a Web 1.0 – compared to the vast potential of what it could become. The
‘openness’ of this potential allows the fandom to participate in the shifting of media power
that is the result of mass internet access. It also enables fans both to contribute to and to
critique Web 2.0 for exploiting their free labour, particularly as they recognize Web 2.0 as ‘a
business model which seeks to capitalize and commodify participatory culture’.5
Although the emphasis of both participatory culture and Web 2.0 is on forms of actively
created culture, Jenkins et al. are careful to include what may be the most important aspect
of the Harry Potter fandom: ‘A participatory culture is also one in which members believe
their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another’
(Jenkins et al. 2006, p. 3). This social connection is readily apparent in fans’ self-descriptions
as ‘Potterheads’; in their passionate posting, commenting and tagging on multiple social
networking sites; and in the subgroup of fans who grew up with the books and who therefore
refer to themselves as the ‘Harry Potter Generation’.
Social Networking, Participatory Culture and Harry Potter 279
Fandom Texts
Fans of the series – whether they self-define as Potterheads, the Harry Potter Generation or
as fans generally – participate in the creation and consumption of a wide variety of fandom
texts. Following Sandvoss, I use ‘text’ broadly, to suggest a creation that ‘is not based on
authorship, but on texts as frames of realizable meanings that span across single or multiple
communicative acts, including visual, sound-based, and written communication’ (Sandvoss
2007, p. 22). Such multiplicity of communicative acts is readily apparent in the numerous
formats and platforms through which Harry Potter fans create and share their texts. This
chapter focuses on five of the dominant modes of fan texts: fanfiction, Wizard Wrock, fanvids,
images and GIFs and role-playing.
Fanfiction
Put very simply, fanfiction refers to texts that are based on other fictional texts, such as
books, television and films. In Daria Pimenova’s terms, ‘fan fiction is what calls itself fan
fiction’.6 Harry Potter fanfiction is by far the largest source of fan-generated texts available
online, with over 673,000 fics available as of February 2014 on FanFiction.Net, the largest
general repository of fanfiction. The number of posted fics becomes staggering when one
contemplates fics posted on smaller fanfiction repositories and personal websites worldwide.
Crossover fics, in which fans integrate Harry Potter characters with the characters or worlds
from other fandoms, provide even more Harry Potter-related stories and poems.
Because of its size, many fans enjoy characterizing Harry Potter fanfiction by ‘ship’ or type
of fiction. A ‘ship’ is a term that suggests the relationship between characters, particularly when
this relationship is romantic or sexual. Popular pairings include Drarry (Draco/Harry), Snarry
(Snape/Harry), Harmony (Harry/Hermione) and Wolfstar (Remus/Sirius). Pairing names
are often portmanteaus of characters’ names, although fans may not always agree on the
forms that these amalgamations take – the Snape/Hermione ship, for example, may be called
Snamione, Sevmione, Snermione or Snanger, depending on the preferences of the fans who
participate in it. Fan use of these portmanteau names – rather than virgule-based names – has
increased in recent years with the rise of fan participation on Tumblr (whose tags do not
support the virgule). The term ‘ship’ itself may be both a noun (‘she sails the H.M.S. Old Scars
ship’ – referring to Harry/Dumbledore fics) or a verb (‘I ship Ron/Luna’). The acronym OTP
(One True Pairing) is used by many fans to emphasize their favourite ships (‘I ship Snarry, but
Snily is my OTP’).
Categorizations of ships can be broken down into eroticized pairings. Some fans use the
term ‘slash’ to refer to the virgule that separates the characters’ names (i.e: James/Lily or
Snape/Lucius), thereby characterizing any romantic or erotic pairing of characters. Often,
however, ‘slash’ refers to same-gendered pairings and to male/male pairings in particular.
‘Femslash’ or ‘femmeslash’ suggests a lesbian relationship between characters, while ‘hetslash’
or ‘het’ denotes a heterosexual relationship.7
Fanfics can be further categorized by specific genres and conventions found within the
fanon. If ‘canon’ refers to professional – usually commodified – source material (Rowling’s
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books), then ‘fanon’ represents its counterpart: the many stories, ideas, images, features,
etc. that fans add or revise, usually outside of a commercial context. Thus while the Ron/
Hermione ship is canonical, because Rowling included a relationship between the characters
in her books, the Minerva/Hermione ship is fanonical, because a romantic or sexualized
relationship between those characters exists only in the minds of fans.
Within the fanon, certain genres and tropes have become standard and are often expressed
in unique vernacular. AU (Alternate Universe) fics disregard specific aspects of the canon.
Any fic in which Snape survives the Battle of Hogwarts may be considered to be an AU
fic.8 A ‘crack’ fic – so-named because it suggests that the writer was on drugs while creating
the story – is usually meant to be humorous and/or nonsensical. A crack fic could include
Dumbledore’s secret realization that he is Buckbeak’s human mother. A ‘Dark’ fanfic or
‘darkfic’ suggests the inclusion of darker, more disturbing themes and elements, including
torture, rape and murder. It can also designate a story in which a character has joined the
‘dark side’. A Voldemort/Ginny fic in which Ginny falls in love with an evil Voldemort who
tortures her, leading to her eventual suicide, could be classified as a darkfic. A ‘Mary Sue’
refers to a fan’s insertion of an original female character who is unrealistically perfect. Ebony
Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, who sports ‘icy blue eyes like limpid tears’ (My Immortal)9
is the protagonist of Tara Gillesbie’s infamous ‘My Immortal’ and is perhaps the best known
Mary Sue in Harry Potter fanfiction. Male Mary Sues may be called ‘Marty Stues’ or ‘Gary
Stues’. They tend to be less recognized (and hated) than their female counterparts – an aspect
of gender inequality that has not gone unnoticed by the fanfiction community.
Further acronyms are used to describe types of characterization and plot. In ‘OOC’ (Out
of Character) fics, characters do not behave as they do within the canonical source texts.
A sweet-tempered Snape is often perceived as OOC. ‘MPreg’ fics feature male characters who
become pregnant (or are capable of becoming pregnant). They often appear in male/male
slash fics. ‘EWE’ (Epilogue-What Epilogue?) fics are similar to some AU stories in that they
ignore the often-disliked epilogue of Rowling’s Deathly Hallows, and instead create their
own future of the Wizarding World. Finally, ‘PWP’ (Plot-What Plot? or Porn Without Plot)
suggests a fic that focuses solely on sexual encounters between characters, with very little
contextualization of those encounters.
The ‘Open’ and ‘Closed’ Fanfiction Community

There are, of course, many more genres, tropes, characterizations and plots that have been
categorized and named by fans. They exist within a fanfiction community that manifests
as simultaneously ‘open’ and ‘closed’. In creating and promoting stories that ‘play’ with
Harry Potter, fans ‘open’ what might otherwise be considered to be a closed canon of texts,
theoretically making the characters, plot or Wizarding World available to everyone. As a
result, fanfiction is often perceived to be a space of authorial freedom. Yet, as Sirpa Leppänen
suggests, fanfiction actually possesses ‘systems for establishing and monitoring shared norms
as well as mechanisms of control that constrain the freedom which writers actually have’,10
that is, a potentially ‘closed’ system. Explicit norms may include guidelines, restrictions,
reader feedback, labels and paratextual warnings (‘fluff ’ suggests a light, romantic story;
‘angst’ implies conflict; ‘lemons’ suggests graphic depictions of sexual acts, etc.). They may
also include rating systems that accompany many fanfiction archives – systems that are similar
to North American age-related film ratings, and which warn readers about graphic sexuality
or violence.
While many fans appreciate these ratings, recent deletions by FanFiction.Net of stories
deemed too mature for its highest rating code led to controversy within the Harry Potter
fanfiction community, particularly when these deletions occurred without warning to either
readers or writers. One such event occurred in June 2012, when FanFiction.Net enforced a
ratings policy that had been in place since 2002. As FanFiction.Net posted
Although Fiction Ratings goes up to Fiction MA, FanFiction.Net since 2002 has not
allowed Fiction MA rated content which can contain adult/explicit content on the site….
Detailed descriptions of physical interaction of sexual or violent nature is considered
Fiction MA.11
The deletions without warning – hailed as ‘purges’ by many fanfic readers and writers –
generated an outcry within the community. A fan named Charlotte Weatherly created
a change.org petition, suggesting that ‘there are better ways to deal with “inappropriate”
content than to remove it altogether’, and ultimately calling ‘for all us readers, writers, and
fans alike.... STOP THE DESTRUCTION OF FF.NET!!!!’12 The online petition gained
44,348 signatures by its close. Similarly, in a Huffington Post (UK) article by Hannah Ellison,
titled ‘The Book Burning That Wasn’t: Thousands of Works of Fiction Destroyed and No
One Pays Attention’, Ellison notes that fans were less upset by FanFiction.Net’s policy than
by how FanFiction.Net enforced it. Ellison suggests – perhaps rightly – that the mass deletions
reveal ‘a cultural hierarchy of taste at play here, one which places fanfiction as lowbrow geek
fodder undeserving of any real attention. Were a library filled with thousands of works of
“legitimate” fiction destroyed, it would make front-page news.’13
The multiple deletions resulted in increased traffic on other fanfiction-hosting sites, as
well as the creation of new ship-specific sites. As Lucy Pearson stated regarding the increased
numbers of users on Archive of Our Own (AO3, another fanfiction-hosting site) following the
FanFiction.Net deletions,
This sudden and dramatic expansion has come about largely as a result of changes on
Fanfiction.net, who have recently introduced more stringent enforcement of their policies
relating to explicit fanworks which have resulted in some fans no longer being able to
host their works there. One of the primary reasons the AO3 was created was in order to
provide a home for fanworks which were at risk of deletion elsewhere, so we’re very keen
to welcome these new users.14
The proliferation of sites such as AO3, which exist because users recognize the ‘risk of deletion
elsewhere’, seems to both support and refute Ellison’s suggestion of ‘a cultural hierarchy of
taste at play here’. While mainstream culture may not care about these works, the fandom’s
propensity to repost ‘lost’ or deleted fanfics ensures that these texts live on and harkens back
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to Jenkins’ assertion that ‘a participatory culture is also one in which members believe their
contributions matter’ (Jenkins et al. 2006, p. 3).
Wizard Wrock
Wizard Wrock (or Rock) is fan-created music that focuses on the themes and narratives of
Rowling’s texts. The first well-known band was Harry and the Potters, performing in 2000,
but numerous bands have developed since, including Draco and the Malfoys, The Whomping
Willows, The Moaning Myrtles and Ginny and the Heartbreakers. As the band names imply,
much of the music is from the point of view of specific characters.
Although Wizard Wrock is specific to the Harry Potter fandom, Rebecca-Anne C.
Do Rozario notes its origins in the practice of ‘filking’: ‘filk is popular or folk music played
with lyrics that elaborate or parody narratives from fan perspectives, or that describe the fan
community itself.’15 Like filk, Wizard Wrock is not defined by musical style, but rather by its
lyrics. Although its name suggests a focus on rock, the music often crosses multiple styles.
Like many fan-created texts, Wizard Wrock plays within fanonical spaces, particularly
when it comes to shipping. Thus the Whomping Willows’ song, ‘In Which Draco and
Harry Secretly Want to Make Out’, suggests a Drarry pairing, while Hogwarts Trainwreck’s
‘Hermione Might Be Hot’ implies a potential Dramione ship through lyrics such as ‘My heart
is Slytherin, but still it’s a witherin’ every time she’s in the room.… I want to let her ride my
broom’ (quoted in Do Rozario 2011, p. 272). As in other fan texts, Wizard Wrock creates a
space in which fans make explicit elements that may be covert (or non-existent) in Rowling’s
texts and, in doing so, make them their own.
Fanvids
Fanvids – or vids – are fan-created videos combining clips and pictures from films or television
with music, often creating a video montage effect. Fan creators are ‘vidders’, and their act of
constructing the videos is ‘vidding’. The aims of the vids themselves are limitless; they can be
character- or ship-specific, spoof aspects of the source text, present a general (and often emo-
tional) overview of a fandom or create a multi-fandom crossover narrative (among others).
In understanding how fanvids work – particularly those that Kim Middleton calls
‘ficvids’,16 – Christian Metz’s film theories regarding optical effects are helpful. Metz notes
that the visual portion of a film – the ‘image track’ – is comprised of three elements: images,
written statements (credits, subtitles, statements such as ‘nineteen years later’) and ‘various
optical effects obtained by the appropriate manipulations, the sum of which constitutes visual,
but not photographic, material’.17 Here, Metz refers to elements such as wipes, fades, blurred
focus or accelerated motion – all elements that are visual, but which are modifications of the
photographs rather than the images themselves. Vidders, who must necessarily appropriate
existing source footage (unless they employ actors), often rely on these optical effects to signal
their interventions into the narrative of the Warner Bros.–produced films, thereby creating their
own narratives. Metz uses the French word ‘trucage’, often translated as ‘trick photography’
or ‘special effects’, to refer to manipulations such as slow, backwards or accelerated motion;
multiple exposures; and superimposition of actors talking to themselves – the same tools that
vidders use to create AU narratives.
An example of a ficvid that uses trucage to create a unique narrative is amchoupiegirl’s ‘Snape
& Hermione | So cold (story)’.18 Vidder amchoupiegirl uses the ‘about’ section of the video to
explain her story, which is, briefly, that Snape and Hermione have a secret son; Dumbledore
does not understand Snape’s tenacity in protecting Hermione; and Hermione decides that she
must run away to protect both Snape and their son. Amchoupiegirl sets the vid against Ben
Cocks’ ‘So Cold’, then uses various manipulations – particularly superimpositions – to create
a new narrative that does not exist in the original images. The viewer then watches as Snape
and Hermione walk, hug and even sleep together – aspects that obviously never occurred
within either Rowling’s texts or the Warner Bros.’ film adaptations.
Since there is no Snape/Hermione child in the source film, amchoupiegirl relies on clips
from outside sources – in this case, video samplings from Hugo (2011), The Boy in the Striped
Pajamas (2008) and Merlin (2008–14), as well as audio clips from other movies featuring
Emma Watson and Alan Rickman. In doing so, amchoupiegirl follows a common fan practice
of sampling, since she must rely on existing – and usually immutable – footage (Middleton
2010, p. 122). Manipulating the original source material can only go so far. Amchoupiegirl
must find and superimpose clips from other sources to create her unique narrative. Watching
fanvids, then, often involves suspending one’s knowledge of a clip’s original context, and
instead positioning it within a different fan-created context.
Images and GIFs

There are, of course, many other types and forms of fan works – far too many to record
here. Such works include visual images posted on sites such as DeviantART and reblogged on
Tumblr, in which fans:
●● manipulate film stills to create new ship-specific images (such as those of Harry and
Draco kissing)
●● produce illustrations that focus on a specific theme or quotation (such as numerous
versions of a ‘Tale of the Three Brothers’ graphic)
●●
design alternative Harry Potter book covers
●● create comics
●● generate subtitled GIFs of film scenes or actor interviews
●● construct fandom crossover images and GIFs (particularly crossovers that feature
elements from other popular fandoms, including Mean Girls, Sherlock and Doctor Who).
Role-playing
Harry Potter role-playing is usually categorized into two forms: live-action role-play
(LARP), which often includes real-life Quidditch games; and internet-based role-play,
which simulates versions of Rowling’s Wizarding World. The simplest version of internet
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role-playing involves players responding to one another over platforms such as Tumblr
and Twitter. Each player assumes the identity of a character either drawn from the Harry
Potter series or a new, alternative character, and the players take turns responding to one
another’s posts. When larger groups are involved, these role-plays are sometimes named
(with titles such as ‘Tyranny and Treason – A Next Generation HP RPG’) and advertised
on Tumblr or YouTube. The games themselves incorporate narrative context, rules, a list of
open characters and a link through which potential players can apply to play. Some groups
also require a writing sample, as well as a minimum word count per post once that player
is accepted.
Fans also role-play through MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games),
in which they interact not just through text-based communication, but within virtual game
worlds. In 2007, for example, fans created The World of Hogwarts, an ‘immersive and
interactive non-profit roleplay game set in the world of Harry Potter, run by fans in virtual
reality program Second Life’.19 The Second Life platform allowed players to create avatars
and to participate in ways not available to text-based role-players.
Like much fan-based participatory culture, online role-playing includes its own terminology.
Some terms are used in other fan texts, including ‘AU’ (Alternate Universe) and ‘OOC’ (Out
of Character). Other terms are specific to the role-playing experience, such as ‘Godmoding’,
in which a player acts without allowing other players to respond, and ‘Metagaming’, in
which players act on information that they, as players, know, but which their characters
could not know (or have not yet learned). Both Godmoding and Metagaming are highly
discouraged.
Fandom as Shared Experience

Of course, there is no real division between the different forms and platforms through which
fans participate in the fandom. Thus many images found on Tumblr are initially posted on
DeviantART, then re-posted through Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Some fanfiction writers
commission fanvid ‘trailers’ and illustrations for their fics. Vidders post vids on Youtube or
Vimeo, then share links to them through Tumblr and Twitter. Role-players use fanart as their
avatar icons. Ultimately, fans choose whether to participate through a single social networking
platform or through an interconnecting web of platforms.
The interconnectedness of these online fandom texts can also appear within the ‘real’ world.
While such moments are easily observable at fan conventions and conferences, perhaps one of
the most obvious large-scale examples occurred during the London premiere of the Deathly
Hallows Part II (2011). When Alan Rickman, who plays Severus Snape, walked onstage to
participate in an interview, the thousands of fans attending the red carpet premiere burst into
a spontaneous chant of ‘Snape, Snape, Severus Snape’, to the point at which Rickman said
‘they’re singing now’ and paused his interview to listen.20 While people unfamiliar with the
video portion of the fandom may have simply recognized fans chanting a character’s name,
the tone and rhythm of the singing suggests that this spontaneous mass performance was
predicated on thousands of fans’ knowledge of ‘The Mysterious Ticking Noise’, a popular
YouTube video by the Harry Potter Puppet Pals, in which puppets based on Harry Potter
characters chant their names in time to a ticking noise.21 Such a moment made obvious and
visible (or hearable) the concept that fandom – including online-based fandom – exists as
shared experience.
Shared Experience, Medievalisms

and Founders Era Texts
This shared experience is similarly apparent in the medievalisms of the fandom texts, particularly
in online role-playing and fanfiction. Fans’ appropriation or adaptation of medieval elements
manifests most obviously in ‘Founders Era’ fan texts. Within Rowling’s canon, the Founders
are the four witches and wizards who established Hogwarts (and its house system). Fans who
focus on the Founders use various spells or devices – particularly the time-turner – to send their
characters back in time, or they simply set their text within the tenth-century Wizarding World.
Since Rowling’s canonical description of the setting and its characters is limited to Professor
Binns’ brief lecture in Chamber of Secrets (1998) and a few background details related to
horcruxes in The Deathly Hallows (2007), the Founders Era is almost entirely fanonical. Fans
create texts that focus on Middle Ages’ European life in relation to, for example, a tempestuous
love affair between Salazar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor. Although the Founders Era is less
popular than other Harry Potter settings (such as the 1970s’ ‘Marauders Era’), it is established
enough to possess its own ‘world’ in FanFiction.Net search filters.
The Founders Era provides opportunities for fans who are interested in crossover Harry
Potter/Medieval role-play. A current role-playing game, called ‘A World Torn Apart: A
Founders Era Harry Potter Roleplaying Site’, purposely advertises itself as ‘Great for LOTR,
Game of Thrones and Medieval Roleplay Fans’.22 That the fans who participate within
these role-plays and who create fan texts bring to them disparate medievalisms (based on
differences in historical knowledge, imaginative fantasies or the conflation of both) suggests
‘neomedievalism’, or, as Harry Brown puts it, ‘the conscious detachment from history and
the consequent distortion of medieval material into something we no longer recognize as
historical’.23 Yet to some of these fans, medievalism itself could be a kind of crossover fandom,
bringing together historical accounts with fantasy narratives. It seems fitting, then, that Carol
L. Robinson and Pamela Clements repeatedly employ a term common to fandom – ‘alternate
universe’ – to define neomedievalism as an ‘alternate universe of medievalisms, a fantasy of
medievalisms, a meta-medievalism’.24 Definitions of neomedievalism that critique it negatively
as ‘the blatantly inauthentic’ (Robinson and Clements 2010, p. 66) and the ‘simulacrum of
the medieval’25 may be accurate, but they may also be limiting, at least when it comes to
the participatory culture of fandom. These afterlife texts of Harry Potter suggest, instead, a
realm of possibility, a space in which interested parties may, to use Gail Ashton’s and Daniel
T. Kline’s words, ‘interrogate the various directions through which medievalism reinterprets
and reconceptualizes the medieval and is compelled to reconstitute a past that is once familiar
and profoundly different’.26 Within the Harry Potter fandom texts, medievalisms themselves
are shared experience.
286
Fandom, Legal Rights, Symbiotic

Relationships and Social Justice
Such shared experience is often celebrated within the fandom, but it can lead to conflicts
between fans and content owners. Generally, fans are respectful of copyright infringement,
if not always knowledgeable regarding its nuances. They will often include disclaimers such
as ‘please don’t sue’ or ‘not mine, no money’. While Rowling has been generally permissive
regarding the Harry Potter afterlives of amateur fan texts, she and other content owners
have suppressed commercially published fanfiction, including the now infamous Harry Potter
Lexicon.27 Still, issues surrounding copyrights and fandom, though complicated, exist within
a symbiotic relationship between content owners and fans. Simply put, the phenomenal
marketing success of the various ‘authorized’ incarnations of Harry Potter (books, movies,
merchandising, etc.) is due at least in part to its internet-driven fandom, with fans maintaining
that their activities increase loyalty to ‘official’ texts.28 While Rowling, Warner Bros. and
similar Harry Potter stakeholders may possess legal rights over Harry Potter, it is not always
in their best economic interest to assert those rights.
This symbiotic relationship also means that there are moments when content owners
become accountable to fans. Such a moment exists in the Harry Potter Alliance’s (HPA) current
campaign against Warner Bros.’ chocolate frogs. The HPA is a non-profit social activist group
encompassing more than 100,000 members in 140 chapters worldwide.29 Its mission is to
‘[take] an outside-of-the-box approach to civic engagement by using parallels from the Harry
Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy,
equality, and human rights’.30 The HPA’s current campaign, ‘Not in Harry’s Name’, takes on
Warner Bros. for that company’s refusal to share the source of the cocoa used in chocolate
frogs.31 In 2010, after the HPA contacted Warner Bros. regarding the frogs, the company
asked its licensee, Universal Orlando Resort, to investigate. While Warner Bros. was satisfied
with the result of the investigation, it refused to share its review. The HPA launched an online
petition asking the company to ‘show us the report’, gaining over 60,000 signatures to date,
with another 115,000 activists signing a similar petition from Walk Free, an organization
advocating the end of modern slavery.
Although the case of a fandom group taking on a content owner is already intriguing,
what is particularly fascinating about the HPA’s campaign is the rhetoric it employs. Andrew
Slack, HPA co-founder, uses themes, plot and even direct quotations to explain the case
against the film company. In his original letter of complaint, Slack wrote (on behalf of the
HPA):
when Hermione Granger discovers that the food at Hogwarts, chocolate included, is being
made by house elves – essentially unpaid, indentured servants – she immediately starts a
campaign to replace exploitation with fairness. Dumbledore echoes Hermione’s efforts
on page 834 of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix…. As an organization that
prides itself on bringing the message of Harry Potter into our world, the Harry Potter
Alliance feels that it is imperative that there is no ‘indifference and neglect’ employed in
the manufacture of chocolate bearing Harry’s name.32
Whether or not the HPA’s campaign affected sales of chocolate frogs at Universal Studios is
unknown, but, in November 2011, the HPA produced 3,000 of their own certified fair trade
chocolate frogs – and sold out. The loss of a potential $30,000 may not have much impact
on Warner Bros. or the Universal Studios’ theme park,33 but it suggests that fans have created
what Henry Jenkins hails as a ‘new form of civic engagement’, one, moreover, that ‘allows
participants to reconcile their activist identities with the pleasurable fantasies that brought the
fan community together in the first place’.34
The HPA’s creative use of Warner Bros.’s property against Warner Bros. – including Harry
Potter characters, quotations and merchandise – suggests a shift in the fan/content owner
dynamic. It is a shift, moreover, that may move past civic engagement towards a struggle for
dominance over Harry Potter’s afterlives. I am reminded of Jenkins’ prophecy that ‘the key
debates of our times will be over who gets to define the terms of our participation’ (Jenkins
2012, p. xxxi). In the historical moment in which ‘powerful content brands stand to fluctuate
in the face of unpredictable market and governmental changes’,35 I suspect that the HPA
is leading Harry Potter fans into a new direction over who has the right – and ability – to
creatively play in (and control) the Harry Potter world.
Harry Potter Afterlives

If the Harry Potter book series incorporates medieval afterlives, then its fandom plays in
the afterlives of the books themselves – afterlives that fans may continue to produce for
many years to come. Perhaps it is not surprising that one of the most-loved words used
within the series – one that is echoed by fans in images and fanvids, songs and tweets and
posters and stories – is ‘always’.36 As this brief overview demonstrates, the online Harry Potter
fandom may result from the synthesis of participatory culture with the potential of Web 2.0.,
but its strength – and, perhaps, permanence – is derived from Potterheads’ sense of shared
experience. This shared experience is obvious in the proliferation of fandom texts across
multiple social networking platforms, in the shared medievalisms – or neomedievalisms – of
these afterlife texts and in the civic engagement through which some fans demonstrate belief
in their fandom. Ultimately, the fandom texts reveal the symbiotic relationship between fans
and content owners and demonstrate an ongoing struggle regarding who has the right to
control the afterlives of Harry Potter. In light of this struggle, perhaps we can amend Rowling’s
famous quotation somewhat: the stories we love best do live in us – and in our fandom –
forever. Whether fans come back by page or by the big screen, by fanfiction or Wizard Wrock
or fanvids or role-play, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome them home.
Notes
1. Rowling, J. K. (2011), ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2’ Red Carpet Premiere.
Warner Bros. Pictures [archived livestream]: YouTube, London, 7 July 2013. Available at http://
youtu.be/IXXX14F_lgo, accessed 19 May 2014.
2. Sandvoss later admits that ‘in its inclusion of both texts and narratives, this definition mirrored
a level of uncertainty. While we all have a sense of who fans are, conceptualizing the textual
288
basis of their fandom seems far more difficult.’ Sandvoss, Cornel, (2007), ‘The Death of the
Reader? Literary Theory and the Study of Texts in Popular Culture’, in Jonathan Gray, Cornel
Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World.
New York: NYU Press, pp. 19–32, at p. 22.
3. Tulloch, J. and Jenkins, H. (1995), Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek.
New York: Routledge, p. 23.
4. Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A. J. and Weigel, M. (2006), Confronting the
Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Eduation for the Twenty-first Century. [pdf] Chicago:
The MacArthur Foundation. Available at http://www.fall2010compositions.pbworks.com/f/
JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.pdf, accessed 20 September 2013, p. 3.
5. Jenkins, H. (ed.) (2012), ‘Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later’, in Textual Poachers: Television
Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. vii–l, at p. xxii.
6. Pimenova, D. (2009), ‘Fan Fiction: Between Text, Conversation, and Game’, in I. Hotz-Davies, A.
Kirchhofer and S. Leppänen (eds), Internet Fictions. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, pp. 44–61, at p. 45.
7. Such forms are by no means the only types of slash used within the fandom. For a more
detailed analysis of specifically Harry Potter slash fiction, see Catherine Tosenberger (2008),
‘Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction’. Children’s Literature, 36:
185–207.
8. In Rowling’s version, Snape dies during the Battle of Hogwarts, on 2 May 1998.
9. ‘My Immortal’, a fanfic in 44 chapters, became notorious within the fandom as ‘the worst
fanfiction ever written,’ due to – among other elements – its spelling and grammar errors,
descriptions of sex acts, and allusions to popular emo bands (such as Evanescence). See: My
Immortal Rehost (2008), Chapters 1 – 22. [online] Available at http://www.myimmortalrehost2.
webs.com/chapters122.htm, accessed 4 November 2013.
10. Leppänen, S. (2009), ‘Playing with and Policing Language Use and Textuality in Fan Fiction’, in
I. Hotz-Davies, A. Kirchhofer and S. Leppänen (eds), Internet Fictions. Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 62–83, at p. 76.
11. The Scrap Pile (2012), FF.net Purge Update. The Scrap Pile. [blog] 4 June. Available at http://
www.thescrappile.tumblr.com/post/24402005937/ff-net-purge-update, accessed 6 November
2013.
12. Weatherly, C. Fanfiction.net: STOP the Destruction of Fanfiction.net! change.org [online] n.d.
Available at http://www.change.org/petitions/fanfiction-net-stop-the-destruction-of-fanfiction-net,
accessed 4 November 2013.
13. Ellison, H. (2012), ‘The Book Burning That Wasn’t: Thousands of Works of Fiction Detroyed
and No One Pays Attention’, The Huffington Post, [online] 14 June. Available at http://www.
huffingtonpost.co.uk/hannah-ellison/fanfiction-the-book-burning-that-was_b_1592689.html,
accessed 25 October 2013.
14. Pearson, L. (2012), Update on AO3 performance issues. Organization for Transformative Works
[online] 11 June. Available at http://www.transformativeworks.org/update-ao3-performance-
issues, accessed 4 November 2013.
15. Do Rozario, R. A. (2011), ‘Wrocking the Collaboration: Wizard Rock and the Work of
J. K. Rowling’. Musicology Australia, 33(2): 265–76, at p. 266.
16. Middleton distinguishes the more general fanvids from the more specific ficvids by suggesting
that ‘both groups demonstrate a facility with the complexities of new editing technologies; but
the former depends on the cut/splice/match aesthetic of montage music video, while ficvidders
deploy the formal components of narrative cinema throughout their work.’ Middleton, K.
(2010), ‘Alternate Universes on Video: Ficvid and the Future of Narrative’, in H. Urbanski (ed.),
Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric. Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, pp. 117–31, at pp. 118–19.
17. Metz, C. (1977), ‘Trucage and the Film’, trans. Francois Meltzer. Critical Enquiry, 3(4): 657–75,
at p. 657.
18. amchoupiegirl (2012), Snape & Hermione | So cold (story). [video online] 23 November.
Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_paOGiyru4, accessed 10 November 2013.
19. World of Hogwarts (2007), Welcome to the World of Hogwarts! World of Hogwarts [online].
Available at http://www.worldofhogwarts.org/intro.htm, accessed 5 November 2013.
20. Rickman, A. (2011), ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2’ Red Carpet Premiere. Warner
Bros. Pictures [archived livestream]: YouTube, London, 7 July 2013. Available at http://youtu.be/
IXXX14F_lgo, accessed 19 May 2014.
21. The YouTube hit count as of November 2013 lists the video has having had over 147 million
views. See: Neil Cicierega (2007), Harry Potter Puppet Pals: The Mysterious Ticking Noise. [video
online] Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1XIm6q4r4, accessed 6 November
2013.
22. Hogwarts – the Beginning, (2012), [online] Available at http://hogwartsthebeginning.proboards.
com/thread/1377, accessed 15 March 2014.
23. Brown, H. (2011), ‘Baphomet Incorporated, A Case Study’, in K. Fugelso (ed.), Studies in
Medievalism XX: Defining Neomedievalism(s) II. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 1–10, at p. 4.
24. See Robinson, C. L. and Clements, P. (2010), ‘Living with Neomedievalism’, in K. Fugelso (ed.),
Studies in Medievalism XIX: Defining Neomedievalism(s). Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 55–75,
at p. 56. Robinson and Clements similarly state, ‘it is the blatantly inauthentic in which we are
currently most interested: the overtly, even celebrated, “new and improved” alternate universe
that we call neomedievalism’ (Robinson and Clements, p. 66).
25. Toswell, M. J. (2010), ‘The Simulacrum of Neomedievalism’, in K. Fugelso (ed.), Studies in
Medievalism XIX, pp. 44–57, at p. 44.
26. Ashton, G. and Kline, D. T. (2012), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, p. 6.
27. The Lexicon was an encyclopaedic fan site that its creator, Steven Vander Ark, attempted to
publish in book form. Legal scholar Aaron Schwabach notes that the Lexicon was not considered
to be ‘fair use’ of Rowling’s material because it copied that material extensively. He also points
out, however, that while most tenets of US ‘fair use’ weighed slightly in Rowling’s favour, Vander
Ark’s application of the material was considered to be transformative (in the sense that it altered
the message of the original). Schwabach thus theorizes that the case ‘may yet point the way to
a world in which most fanfic, so long as it is not commercially published and does not simply
copy stories or text, is fair use.’ Schwabach, A. (2009), ‘The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World
of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright’. University of Pittsburgh Law Review,
70(3): 387–434, at p. 434.
28. Tushnet, R. (2007), ‘Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author’, in J. Gray, C.
Sandvoss and C. L. Harrington (eds), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World.
New York: New York University Press, pp. 60–71, at p. 64.
29. Rabin-Havt, A. (2013), Dumbledore’s Army Marches on Warner Bros. The Nation, [online]
17 September. Available at http://www.thenation.com/article/176209/dumbledores-army-marches-
warner-bros#, accessed 18 September 2013.
290
30. Harry Potter Alliance (2012), What We Do. [online] Available at http://thehpalliance.org/what-we-
do/, accessed 18 September 2013. That mission has been successful: the HPA has staged multiple
activist campaigns, including sending disaster relief funds to Haiti, raising funds to protect
civilians in Darfur and Burma, and canvassing residents of Maine in support of marriage equality.
See Harry Potter Alliance (2012), Success Stories. [online] Available at http://www.thehpalliance.
org/what-we-do/success-stories/, accessed 18 September 2013.
31. Harry Potter Alliance (2012), Not in Harry’s Name. [online] Available at http://www.
thehpalliance.org/action/campaigns/nihn, accessed 18 September 2013.
32. Slack, A. (2010), Letter to Jeffrey L. Bewkes and Jeff Zucker. [online] 1 November. Available
at http://www.thehpalliance.org/downloads/dhc-resources/horcrux1/letter-to-wb.pdf, accessed
18 September 2013.
33. Chocolate frogs cost $9.95 at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
34. Jenkins, H. (2009), Dumbledore’s Army. Confessions of an Aca-Fan. [online] 23 July. Available
at http://www.henryjenkins.org/2009/07/how_dumbledores_army_is_transf.html, accessed
10 November 2013.
35. Murray, Simone (2010), ‘Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media
and the Contested Utility of Fandom’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 18(1):
7–25, at p. 10.
36. ‘Always’ is the word that Snape uses to describe his love for Lily Evans, in Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows.
chapter twenty-six
‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ and

Other Hellish Tales: Comics
Adaptations of Dante
Jason Tondro
There are many adaptations, re-interpretations and appropriations of Dante’s Commedia,

or Divine Comedy, in comic form, and while it may be impossible to conclusively answer
why this is so, there are some clear and likely reasons. The Inferno is an exceptionally visual
text; it is filled with sensational and sadistic forms of torture, vivid images which stimulate
the senses in a way that is perfectly appropriate for a den of sin. With its circles, gates,
bridges and bolgias, it is also highly compartmentalized; it has the picaresque attributes of
a travel narrative and, thus, lends itself to a clear organization of chapter and page. It has
a sympathetic protagonist with a clearly defined but challenging goal, and that character
has a guide who can visually fill the role of a sidekick even if Virgil is, in fact, the more
knowledgeable member of this particular Divine Dynamic Duo. And, finally, the Inferno is
simply extraordinarily well known; when comic creators are looking for inspiration, it is a
natural well to draw from.
The seven adaptations of the Inferno discussed here vary widely in scope, form and genre.
The oldest is from 1949 and two date from the 1980s, but the rest are comparatively recent,
stemming from the last decade. They include a classic American superhero comic, a Vertigo
horror story, a product of Disney’s European branch and a ‘graphic novel’ made up of Doré
illustrations. If we were to speak solely of narrative strength, they are hit-and-miss, but even
the worst of them is instructive to us and illustrative of the attraction Dante’s text has, even
today, on writers and artists compelled to engage with him. Of all the texts to be discussed
292
here, there is only one which truly qualifies as ‘bad comics’. We will investigate it first in order
to put it away.
Dante’s Inferno, the Graphic Novel (2012)

The meaning and origin of the phrase ‘graphic novel’ has been debated and recorded elsewhere1
but it is probably safe to say that, in the twenty-first century, the difference between a comic
and a graphic novel can be summed up as, ‘about $10.’ The ‘graphic novel’ label is now a sell
word, which, like ‘New and Improved’, is used to signify increased quality and to defend a
higher price point. It has a second marketing function: those who would never condescend to
read a ‘comic book’, dismissing such a thing as juvenile, will consent to read a graphic novel.
It is this latter use which is at play in Dante’s Inferno, the Graphic Novel.2
The book’s thirty pages are divided into panels made up of Gustave Doré’s influential
engravings of the Comedy, published in 1866–7 when he was at the height of his fame.
Although the book, in theory, encompasses the entirety of the Pilgrim’s journey, in fact Dante
(as he is named in this book) and Virgil do not emerge from Hell until page 21; the subsequent
purgatorial climb and the flight to God goes by at a blinding pace. Each panel has been lettered
in a very amateurish fashion using captions and awkward speech balloons generated by the
simplest of word processors. Although the book’s indicia cites both Cary’s 1814 translation
and that by Longfellow (the first American to translate Dante, in 1867), both conveniently
public domain, the actual dialogue between Dante and his guide appears to be Lanzara’s own,
lettered in glorious Comic Sans. And this dialogue, in fact, is the most serious deficiency in the
text because, while Doré’s art is as compelling and horrifying as ever, Lanzara appears to have
misunderstood many of the passages of the book. A few examples will illustrate the point. In
Dante’s Inferno, the Graphic Novel, Paolo and Francesca are brother and sister, murdered by
their father when he finds them in the throes of incestuous passion.3 When Dante and Virgil
reach the bottom of the pit, they do not find Satan; in fact, Virgil specifically tells his ward that
‘It would be unwise to proceed further’, because that way lies ‘the abode of Satan himself ’.4
Whatever Virgil and Dante are climbing in this panel, it is not the hairy side of Satan himself.
The triple-headed lord they see chewing Judas Iscariot is, instead, called Beelzebub. There
is nothing to suggest that these changes to Dante’s text are adaptations or revisions. The
intensity of the pilgrimage through Hell is both increased (in Paolo and Francesca’s case) and
softened (in the avoidance of Satan). The simplest explanation for this version of the Comedy
is that Lanzara simply got it wrong.
Dante’s Inferno, the Graphic Novel demonstrates many trends in modern publishing, both
for better and for worse. At its best, it demonstrates the ability of a single author to create
a work of popular culture without an artist, editor or even publisher, and thus outside the
industries of culture production. And because it is accessible through online bookselling sites
like Amazon, it articulates Dante for mass culture. It is, in that sense, an empowering example.
But it also an example of a far older truism: caveat emptor. In an online marketplace, no
one can see inside its pages; if they could, they would see amateur layouts, awful lettering,
inexplicable deviations from the source and a book in which every image without exception
is cropped from Doré.
‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ and Other Hellish Tales 293
Kid Eternity (2006)

The original Kid Eternity was created by Golden Age legends Otto Binder and Sheldon
Moldoff for Quality Comics, the publishers of Captain Marvel. He was a Second World War
youth killed before his time, brought back to life and charged with helping others. In this,
he had the help of whatever dead soul, mythological being or fictional character he chose to
summon. Quality sold its characters to DC Comics in the wake of a lawsuit in which Captain
Marvel was judged too similar to Superman, and the Kid and his colleagues have appeared
sporadically in DC’s stable ever since. In 1991, rising star Grant Morrison (coming off of his
very popular 1989 Batman project Arkham Asylum and deep in the middle of his celebrated
run on Doom Patrol which began in the same year) re-imagined Kit Eternity as a Virgil-like
character who descends into Hell to rescue a trapped soul. He is in the company of Jerry, a
failed stand-up comedian and our Pilgrim.
Kid Eternity is a horror story buttressed by Duncan Fegredo’s dark, sometimes impenetrable,
art and Morrison’s complex, interlacing plot. The book has no shortage of infernal signifiers:
the gate to Hell appears in Kid Eternity and it still bears a famous phrase, but not the one a
scholar might expect. ‘Abandon all hope’ has been replaced with ‘Helter Skelter’, title of a
Beatles song and motto of the American murderer Charles Manson. There is a City of Dis,
a Wood of the Suicides, and a two-page spread that covers the bulk of the physical descent
into the pit. But the moment when Morrison comments most directly on Dante’s text comes
halfway through the book when Jerry finds Putzy, his childhood teddy bear, now abandoned
in Hell.5 This is early in Jerry’s journey and, like the Pilgrim, he is too attached to the people
he meets in Hell, failing to understand that they have been put there for a reason. Jerry’s
sentimental attachment to the token of his youthful innocence is Morrison’s parallel to the
Pilgrim’s sympathy for Francesca or the suicide, and just as Virgil chides the Pilgrim for his
pity, the Kid berates Jerry, ‘In Hell, you can’t look back. Never look back!’6
But most of the book has very little to do with Dante and everything to do with Morrison’s
familiar tropes. In the pages of Kid Eternity, human kind and the world are on the verge of
maturation from adolescence to adulthood, a transformation Morrison would threaten and
ultimately swerve away from in Doom Patrol, but promise and embrace in his masterpiece
All-Star Superman (2005–8). The method of this transformation is occult ritual, a precursor
to both the intricate magic of Morrison’s later Invisibles (1994–2000) and the alchemical
purification of Superman into gold seen in All-Star. And, in Morrison’s Kid Eternity,
agents of Chaos are the secret heroes, while soldiers of Order form an oppressive and
sadistic regime that foreshadows the Outer Church and ‘Darkseid Is’, the nihilistic slogan
of Morrison’s later work in JLA (1997–8). In this sense, Kid Eternity has a historical role
in the development of ideas that Morrison would later develop at greater length, in greater
clarity and with stronger narrative power. In Kid Eternity, much of this comes off as anxiety
over predictability; that is, the reader expects Hell and its inhabitants to be the villains, and
so Morrison must reveal Hell’s unholy trinity to be acting in mankind’s best interest. The
Kid is presumed a servant of righteousness, and so of course Morrison reveals him to be a
naive pawn. But if the primary criticism of Kid Eternity is that its writer was not as confident
as he would later become, that still leaves us with a pretty interesting text, especially for
294
the Morrison scholar looking to trace the development of that particular author’s themes
and tropes.
Stig’s Inferno (1985–6)

With Eternity’s advice in our ears (‘Never look back!’), we move on to Stig’s Inferno, an
independent comic written and drawn by Ty Templeton for seven issues in the mid-1980s.
Five were published by Vortex (1985–6) and two more by Eclipse. All of this would make the
book exceptionally hard to find, except that Templeton has made the entirety of Stig’s Inferno
available on his website for free.7
Stig’s Inferno is an absurd parody of Dante. Stig himself is a hapless but well-meaning
young man who dies when the lid of his grand piano collapses on his head. Although he lands
in Hell, he does not understand where he is and remains in constant denial of his own death,
insisting that the demons he meets are actors in elaborate makeup. Most of his time is spent
in search of pants, because he arrived in Hell bereft of his prized Leonard Nimoy designer
jeans. This was Templeton’s first major comics effort; this places it alongside Kid Eternity as
an example of a comics creator using Dante to find a personal voice. Templeton’s skill with
figures and composition improves dramatically from the first issue to the last as he riffs on
both traditional comics and the independent creators of the time. For example, at a party
thrown by Satan, Hell’s diminutive and fun-loving director, Fin Fang Foom and other Marvel
monsters can be seen in attendance.8 On another page, Templeton duplicates the same panel
art (two demons conversing) six times, replacing only the dialogue, then ends by labelling
the page a ‘Dave Sim Tribute’,9 naming the highly polarizing creator of the independent
comic Cerebus (1977–2004). When Stig falls asleep in the director’s throne, he wakes to
find himself in charge of Hell, since the demons presume that Satan is playing a trick on
them all by pretending to be an unassuming mortal. After Vortex comics ceased publication,
Templeton renewed at Eclipse and began with a recap issue for readers who had missed the
first five issues, but only one more issue materialized and Stig remains forever trapped, king
of the Inferno.
The very fact that Stig is wandering through Hell’s familiar landmarks reveals Dante’s
imprint, but there are also more specific signs of the inspirational poem in Stig’s Inferno –
obvious ones remarked upon by characters within the book. Stig is pursued into Hell by
an officious and brain-dead police detective as well as his girlfriend Beatrice and a gang of
additional crime fighters that include Batman, the Shadow and Keystone Cops; their passage is
blocked by gates of Hell inscribed with Dante’s original Italian verses, but a helpful policeman
provides a translation.10 Charon, Satan, Virgil and Helen of Troy also figure in the story to
varying degrees. It is all very frenetic and largely an excuse for one gag leading into the next,
rather than a consistent attempt to say anything coherent – except, perhaps, that Templeton
has read his Dante, is clearly inspired by it, but does not feel at all tied to it. In this sense, Stig’s
Inferno reveals itself as an extremely personal work, and it has this in common with some
of the other comics we will examine, especially Panter’s tale of Jimbo. It is an independent
comic in all senses of the word, despite its debt to Dante.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Adapted

by Seymour Chwast (2010)
Chwast’s adaptation of the Comedy marks the midpoint of our journey, and it is the most
faithful of all the books on this list. It is, indeed, a fairly useful visual crib for the entire
Comedy. This is the only text on our list that includes every step of Purgatory and Paradise,
and Chwast illustrates complex geography and unusual tortures with helpful maps and
diagrams. Fidelity to the source may be why this adaptation has received more attention from
scholars and critics, including a useful review on the blog Medievally Speaking.11 However,
squeezing the entire Comedy into 127 pages does not come without cost. Even famous and
memorable passages from Dante are reduced to a single panel. Paolo and Francesca, for
example, get two-thirds of a page. The Pilgrim and Virgil walk through the Wood of the
Suicides, but the Pilgrim’s wonderfully tactile moment – in which, at the urging of Virgil, he
breaks off a branch and thus becomes part of the torture, a tool of Divine justice – is missing.
Everything happens with great rapidity and there is little actual storytelling anywhere in this
book. It is, rather, a series of whimsical snapshots with thin continuity between panels, more
like an ‘illustrated story’ than a comic in the traditional sense.
But Chwast has adopted a memorable motif for his interpretation of the text: the Pilgrim,
Virgil and other characters are depicted as gangsters, noir detectives and flappers. The Pilgrim
wears a trench coat, puffs a pipe and labours at a typewriter.12 The battle between the Black
and White Guelphs is a mob war.13 None of this has any impact on the narrative or dialogue,
as Chwast is very loyal to Dante, but it makes the many sinners, tortures and bolgias less
distant and remote for a first-time, twenty-first-century audience, and this might be its best
use. It is our clearest example of a medieval afterlife, a medieval text resurrected for fresh
eyes and fresh sensibilities.
‘Mickey’s Inferno, An Italian Disney

Classic, 1949’ (Trans. 2006)
Labelled as one of the comics ‘You Must Read Before You Die’ by British publisher, curator
and author Paul Gravett,14 ‘Mickey’s Inferno’ earns its brilliance before it is even read, when
the critic or casual fan realizes that, yes, there really is a comic in which Mickey Mouse and
Goofy go to Hell. Appearing in the 666th issue of Walt Disney Comics, it was first published
in 1949 in Italian, which explains much, but which also has some unfortunate consequences.
It is one of the few Dante adaptations which is not currently in print, but used copies can be
found at very affordable prices online, and many public libraries have a copy in their young
reader’s section.
‘Mickey’s Inferno’ is 37 pages long and is framed as a dramatic performance of the Inferno
in which Mickey plays the Pilgrim and Goofy has been cast as Virgil. But the pair fall asleep,
and in the resulting dream-vision they travel through a child’s version of Hell, helpfully
labelled Canto by Canto. Most of the familiar moments from Dante’s poem are gone (the
adultery of Paolo and Francesca would be ill-suited to a children’s story) and the source serves
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instead as inspiration and organizing principle. The terrain, sins and punishments of Hell
have all been transformed to allegory which young people might more easily identify with.
For example, instead of meeting Virtuous Pagans like Ovid and Lucan, Mickey and Goofy
find teachers who are boring in the classroom (a sin which our own freshmen might much
appreciate) and are punished by their students, who inflict hurtful pranks upon them using
everything from slingshots and darts to pliers and steel hammers.15
Bad teachers may come in for punishment, but bad students get it even worse. In Dante,
suicides are transformed into trees and the breaking of any branch is accompanied by pain,
blood and suffering, but in ‘Mickey’s Inferno’ the transformation into wood is reserved for
children who don’t pay attention in class. Over a three-page narration16 by one unfortunate
schoolboy-turned-twig, the lads are turned into trees, which are then painfully chopped
down and re-fashioned into desks, which are in turn placed into a classroom where the
students are all misbehaving donkeys. When the animals quarrel with each other, their antics
break and shatter the desks, inflicting more pain on the sinful children. The broken wood
is turned back into trees in the forest, and the cycle continues until the students repent, an
act which summons the Blue Fairy (who has some experience turning wood back into real
boys). Setting aside for a moment the metamorphosis of the sin itself – the self-violence
of suicide to the intentional ignorance of the rowdy schoolboy – this particular incident
illustrates the softening of ‘Mickey’s Inferno’ and a constant optimism. Quite simply, there is
repentance in this Hell, and forgiveness too, qualities which, when the Pilgrim displays them,
earns him only Virgil’s chastisement.
Unfortunately, ‘Mickey’s Inferno’ has suffered somewhat in translation. While the dialogue
between Mickey, Goofy and the denizens of Hell is generally quite good, even capturing the
particular accents and dialects of the various characters, the entire comic is narrated with
a running series of rhyming captions which, it can only presumed, read much better in the
original Italian. In English, they are truly awful, adding only some exposition and distracting
from the otherwise wonderful pages.
The climax to ‘Mickey’s Inferno’ is a true delight; after walking over the heads of frozen
football referees who have accepted bribes (remember: written by Italians), Mickey and
Goofy find not Satan, but Dante. The lowest circle of Hell is reserved for the greatest of
traitors, and that is judged to be the authors of the comic itself,17 who have betrayed Dante
by creating this debased version of his classic poem. But Mickey pleads for mercy, buttressed
by an audience of cheering children who profess, ‘We love’em!’18 Again, because this is a Hell
with repentance and forgiveness, Dante releases the authors, citing the new audience which
has been exposed to his work, but not without a warning to the comic’s creators that this is
only probation.
Jimbo’s Inferno (2006)

Gary Panter’s Jimbo’s Inferno was created over the years 1995–6 and was originally published
by Zongo Comics in 1999, but when Fantagraphics republished the work in 2006, it became
a monumental ‘10  14’ hardback. It is a bizarre, idiosyncratic and almost impenetrable
piece characteristic of Panter’s style, influenced by the underground comics of the 1960s
and 1970s and his own development as an artist in the influential art magazine RAW. While
certainly informed by Dante, Jimbo’s Inferno has been so transformed by Panter’s personal
artistic vision that it ceases to be a book ‘about Dante’ so much as a book which uses Dante
as a launch platform and outline. Of all the books on this list, it most resembles Stig’s Inferno,
but where that text is essentially approachable and its humour vaudevillian, Jimbo’s Inferno
tasks the reader with the hard chore of interpretation. It is, quite simply, more challenging to
read. Panter himself provides the following brief introduction:
Don’t try to pass a pop quiz on Dante’s hell based on a reading of this comic: it won’t
work. Even though this comic is engorged with Dante’s hell and though Jimbo mouths a
super-condensed version of what happens in the inferno, canto by canto, characters are
fused, action inverted, parodied, subject to mutation by my odd memories and obsessions
and my odd whims, sentences are clipped. Believe me, I know I’m not the first to clumsily
clatter onto the super structure of the Divine Comedy or the last. Fer sure.19
The project is thirty-three pages long; each page is self-contained and inspired by a single
canto, though this relationship is not always clear. Together, they tell the story of one Jimbo
and his journey through ‘Focky Bocky’, a kind of psychedelic shopping mall and temple
to consumerism. His escort, not Virgil, is ‘Valise’, a ‘self appointed parole robot’, which
resembles nothing so much as a ’90s portable stereo system. Jimbo rides it like a motorcycle
and quests for the ‘Soulpinx’, which are, as far as can be ascertained, cute girls.
Focky Bocky is populated by foolish sinners, the deformed souls of the damned and
monsters. The art is ugly and sometimes shocking, such as when three young women buy
drugs despite Jimbo’s warnings, only to snort, vomit and fall over dead in horrible sequence
over the rest of the page.20 Like Dante, Panter uses Hell as a way to critique society. ‘Things
are baleful in Bugfuck’, he tells a flying saucer filling in for Brunetto Latini, ‘A glut of self-
made men have bred excess there and pride.’21 When Jimbo cries to see the terrible tortures
which have been inflicted on the citizens of Focky Bocky (‘They are so bereft of dignity,
boohoo!’), Valise echoes Virgil and reminds Jimbo that this is a divine punishment and to pity
the damned is to lose faith in God.22 But exchanges like these usually end in an absurd and
parodic one-liner which mocks the seriousness that has just been displayed, such as Jimbo’s
observation that ‘Fluke’s nose would make a good butt-plug. Hmm.’23
Jimbo’s Inferno rewards the critic willing to slide back and forth between Dante’s poetry
and Panter’s confident, visionary, but brutal art. Of all the texts discussed here, it is the one
which most demands further analysis.
X-Men Annual 4, ‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ (1980)

The X-Men’s adventure in Hell, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Bob McLeod
and John Romita Jr, begins appropriately enough with a birthday. When one of his gifts places
Nightcrawler in a death-like state, Professor Xavier is forced to summon Dr Strange, Marvel’s
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‘Master of the Mystic Arts’, to serve as a Virgilian guide, escorting Wolverine, Colossus and
Storm to the Inferno where Nightcrawler has been taken. What follows is a tale of heroic
adventure, but it is saturated with characters, geography and moments from Dante’s poem,
recognized, re-mixed and even critiqued by Claremont and the characters themselves. The
result is a surprising and sophisticated appropriation of Dante. ‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ is
35 pages long and is not an especially costly X-Men comic. While Marvel has made thousands
of its comics available online through its digital ‘Marvel Unlimited’ program, X-Men Annual #4
is not, at the time of this writing, one of them.
The X-Men lie prostrate before the gates of Hell (inscribed with the famous stanzas)
on page 11 and the tale moves very rapidly, benefiting from the simple decision to avoid
a methodical and canto-by-canto recap of Dante such as that done by Chwast, Panter and
the creators of ‘Mickey’s Inferno.’ Instead, only a few key settings and scenes are used,
each explored in some length. For example, much time is devoted to Minos, who appears
here as a homage to Joel Grey’s memorable turn as the Master of Ceremonies in the 1972
film adaptation of Cabaret. The scene’s sexual innuendo includes a homoerotic moment
for Nightcrawler, but also a heterosexual one for his female colleague Storm, usefully
illustrating the point that it is lust, not homosexuality, which lands someone in Claremont’s
Hell. From there, Storm is briefly attacked by the harpies of the Wood of the Suicides
before being sentenced to a circle of Hell appropriate to her crimes, and the X-Men ride
to the rescue, eventually finding her among the thieves. (Fans of the character will recall
that Storm spent years as a thief in Cairo in her youth.) This bolgia in Dante’s Inferno is
one of the most terrifying; in it, each damned thief has his own self and humanity stolen by
a serpent, who transforms into the victim while the thief is turned into the serpent. From
there, the thief/serpent must now find his original body and steal it back using the same
evil power the serpent used on him. It is a vicious cycle of existential horror and it is well
chosen by Claremont; each stage of Storm’s punishment, and the psychological effect on
her, is helpfully illustrated.
Throughout the tale, Dr Strange keeps an internal monologue which places him in the
role of a literary critic. He has, of course, read Dante; at each stage he compares the story in
which he finds himself to Dante’s original poem, and at each stage he finds the current tale to
be inferior. When Colossus is able to throw open the doors to the City of Dis, Strange cannot
help but observe:
According to Dante, only one being could open these unholy gates by force – Colossus may
have a pure, noble spirit – but he is still only human. In the true hell, he should not have
been able to smash these gates.24
And this critique continues all the way to the ice fields of Cocytus, where again Colossus’s
superhuman strength is able to free Nightcrawler from the ice, when traditionally only the
power of God himself would do.
All of this concludes with the revelation that the X-Men are not, in fact, in Hell, but
in an adaptation of it created by one of Nightcrawler’s old foes, a woman who considers
the devilish-looking mutant to be a traitor. The confrontation and exposition which follows
is of decreasing interest to the Dante scholar, except to note that Nightcrawler, like the
Pilgrim, has a young woman to speak on his behalf, and that the tale ends not with a brawl
in the traditional superhero manner, but in redemption and forgiveness, appropriate both to
Claremont’s writing style and to the manner of his inspiration.
Conclusions
Exposure to competing artistic visions of Dante invites the critic into conversations on
adaptation, editing and fidelity – not just fidelity to a canon text, but the fidelity of any artist
to the writer’s word.25 When placed side by side and read in parallel, these reinterpretations
of the Comedy show us the many ways in which a particular scene from Dante might be
envisioned.
For my money, the best such single moment comes in Canto XXIV, the den of the thieves.
The basic structure of the story in this scene has already been described in the outline of
‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’, and that book’s use of this Canto is one of the reasons it makes
such a useful choice. Quite frankly, if we’re going to use Claremont’s version, our choice
of comparative moment is already highly restricted, since the X-Men’s adventure in Hell
is limited to the Gates, Charon, Minos, the thieves, the entrance to Dis, Cocytus and Satan
himself.
The body-snatching horror of the thieves is also represented in ‘Mickey’s Inferno’, with
the Big Bad Wolf cast in the role of damned sinner.26 There are no serpents; instead, the wolf,
who has broken into the home of the Three Little Pigs in order to steal their chickens, is
attacked by those same chickens until he is reduced to a monstrous skeleton. In the fight, the
feathers of the carnivorous chickens cling to the wolf ’s skeletal frame and he ends up covered
in feathers, so much so that a farmer thinks he is a giant turkey and shoots him. It is a very
clever sequence which preserves Dante’s idea of theft punished by loss-of-self.
Chwast spends a lavish three pages on the serpents,27 delineating the transformation of
snake-to-man and man-to-snake in almost abstract black and white, and the thieving serpent
is also surprisingly present even in Panter’s tale of Jimbo. Here, however, the hapless victim
appears to be not a thief, but a mere unnamed ‘tourist’, who regrets having ‘checked into this
gloomrock life-style mallscape’, is bitten by the serpent and collapses to dust, only to rise
again from it in flames ‘Like a Phoenix.’28 In Panter’s version, the physical objects of Dante’s
bolgia are retained, but the meaning, bereft of thieves, seems to be entirely changed.
There will doubtless be many more interpretations of Dante in comics as the years
accumulate, but what we already have is enough to demonstrate the debt which popular
culture has to the canon, and also to the great imagination and artistic enthusiasm which has
been brought to bear specifically upon Dante. The Inferno acts as a personal launching point
for comics creators. Its fame creates a window of entry for an audience which might otherwise
never approach the text in the first place, or who would be hopelessly confused. And its status
as high culture lures creators into both capitalizing on it and lampooning it. In the process, a
supposedly ‘dead’ text is kept fresh and alive, and we are lured back to the original verses –
both to appreciate them anew and to understand where contemporary creators have departed
from and transformed them.
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Notes
1. See, for example, W. Eisner’s (1996) claim in the Preface to A Contract with God and Other
Tenement Stories, 1st edn. New York: DC Comics, p. x.
2. Lanzara, Joseph, ‘Dante Alighieri, and Gustave Doré’ (2012), Dante’s Inferno. Belleville, NJ:
New Arts Library.
3. Lanzara, Alighieri, and Doré, Dante’s Inferno, p. 6.
4. Lanzara, Alighieri, and Doré, Dante’s Inferno, p. 21.
5. Morrison, G. and Fegredo, D. (2006). Kid Eternity, 1st edn. New York: DC Comics, pp. 74–5.
6. Morrison and Fegredo, Kid Eternity, p. 76.
7. Templeton, T. (1986), Stig’s Inferno [online], at Templetons.com. Available online at http://www.
templetons.com/ty/stig, accessed 28 December 2013.
8. Templeton, Stig’s Inferno, 4, 18.
11. Fugelso, K. (2011), ‘Film Noir Meets Medieval Monument: Seymour Chwast’s Adaptation of
Dante’s Divine Comedy’ [online], at Medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com. Available at: http://www.
medievallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2011/01/chast-dantes-divine-comedy-graphic.html, accessed
28 December 2013.
12. Chwast, S. and Dante Alighieri (2010), Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1st edn. New York: Bloomsbury,
p. 13.
13. Chwast and Alighieri, Dante’s Divine Comedy, p. 22.
14. Gravett, P. (2012), Mickey’s Inferno [online], at 1001 Comics Mini-Site. Available at: http://www.
paulgravett.com/index.php/1001_comics/1001_detail/mickeys_inferno, accessed 28 December
2013.
15. ‘Mickey’s Inferno: An Italian Classic’ (2006), Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, 666, 19.
16. ‘Mickey’s Inferno: An Italian Classic’ (2006), Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, 666, 34–6.
19. Panter, G. (2006), Jimbo’s Inferno, 1st edn. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, Table of
Contents.
20. Panter, Jimbo’s Inferno, p. 13.
24. Claremont, C., Romita Jr., J. and McLeod, B. (1980), ‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’. X-Men Annual, 4: 24.
25. See, for example, W. Eisner’s highly problematic but wonderfully illustrative re-working of the
‘To be or not to be’ speech, ‘Hamlet on a Rooftop’, in Comics and Sequential Art (1985). 1st edn.
Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press, pp. 112–21.
26. ‘Mickey’s Inferno: An Italian Classic’ (2006), Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, 666, 45–6.
27. Chwast and Alighieri, Dante’s Divine Comedy, pp. 43–6.
chapter twenty-seven
From Camelot to Kaamelott:

The Arthurian Legend
in British, American
and French Comics
Daniel Nastali
Every country has its own comics history and perspective on where this popular art form
fits in its culture. In Great Britain, decades of weekly comic magazines aimed at a juvenile
audience – war and adventure for boys, school stories and light romance for girls – gave
way in the 1970s to comics for a more mature readership, only to see that market fade
at the end of the twentieth century. In the United States, the comic book phenomenon –
which exploded into life in the 1930s and was censored into blandness in the 1950s – also
declined at the end of the century but has survived largely through its connections with other
entertainment and merchandising venues. And in France, where comics have long had the
stature of the Ninth Art, the medium continues to thrive.
Wherever comics are produced, they devour content. Relentless publishing schedules
require writers and artists to generate a stream of satisfying material to capture and retain
a sometimes fickle readership. While originality in stories and characters is often lauded,
from the earliest days of the comics creators also have drawn upon such traditional material
as mythology, history, folklore and, of course, earlier forms of popular culture. Ancient
gods, heroes of every period, noble savages, aliens from other worlds, detectives, cowboys,
vampires, zombies, and on and on have all paraded through the comics. It should not be
surprising, then, that the Arthurian legend – an unruly body of narratives, characters, themes
and symbols from the Middle Ages – helped fill those needs.
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Through countless works of fiction, films, television and a long presence in comics history
itself, the main features of the Arthurian legend have resonated with the public for decades:
the concept of a great divinely chosen leader (and one who would someday return); an exotic
setting in a romantic past; a fellowship of virtuous knights clashing with dangerous villains;
themes of love, sex and betrayal; large doses of miracles and magic; and even the ultimate
quest object. Comics creators can mix and match these elements for their own purposes. They
can retell traditional tales, add characters and invent new story lines. Thanks to Mark Twain
who introduced the concept of time-travel – now a commonplace in sci-fi and other fiction –
in his Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), they can send their own characters
back to Camelot or bring an Arthurian figure into the future. They have artefacts to play with:
swords, grails and enchanted armour. The material they draw on can be edifying, funny, dark,
exhilarating or erotic. It can be made suitable for the youngest readers or reserved for those
more mature. In all cases, comics creators can count on a sense of participating in something
somewhat sanctified by age and tradition.
The term ‘Arthurian legend’ is amorphous, covering a vast and diverse body of material
originating in stories from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with roots in the even dimmer
past. For purposes here, it will refer to the substantive use of any material from those medieval
sources in modern comics, from retellings of traditional stories to the presence of Arthurian
characters and artefacts. It will be seen that Arthurian content in recent British, American and
French comics not only reflects the differences in the popular cultures which produce them
but is also shaped by historical publishing conventions and the markets to which they cater.
One might suppose that as the home of the legend, Great Britain would hold pride of place
in the production of Arthurian comics. Sadly, perhaps, the UK comes in a poor third to the
United States and France in recent years. Not only is it difficult to find Arthurian content in
British comics, it is difficult to find British comics at all. In the past twenty years, the comics
industry in the UK has atrophied, and while the remaining comics shops stock an abundance
of American and Japanese comics – as well as toys, games, books and television and movie
merchandise – only a handful of British comics now represent a market which in the 1950s
and 1960s sold millions of copies each week. Comics historians have attributed the decline to
competition for young readers’ attention from television, computer games, the internet and
other attractions, but other forces have been at work as well.
Although comics in the UK were traditionally aimed at the children’s market, the mid-
1970s saw the emergence of a new generation of British writers and artists who were intent
on reaching a more adult readership. New and slicker publications such as the science fiction-
driven 2000AD and Warrior appeared, offering stories characterized by graphic violence,
hostility towards authority, amorality and very dark humour. Although they found an
enthusiastic audience, it never grew to the extent needed to support more than a few titles.
At the same time, a foreign influence intruded.
Marvel, one of the two major American publishers, which had established a British branch
reprinting material from US comics, began publishing content produced specifically for the
UK audience. Fittingly, its first effort had a strong Arthurian element: the superhero Captain
Britain who owed his powers to an endowment from Merlin, a figure who would reappear
From Camelot to Kaamelott 303
in the series with some frequency. Unfittingly, the series was made in the United States by
writer Chris Claremont and illustrator Herb Trimpe and the protagonist’s typical American
superhero adventures received a mixed response. The weekly Captain Britain magazine lasted
only thirty-nine issues in 1976. Revivals of the character over the next decade by such writers
as Steve Parkhouse and Alan Moore and artists Paul Neary, John Stokes and, especially, Alan
Davis set the good Captain firmly on British soil in stories which incorporated more Arthurian
content: an evil Modred, the Lady of the Lake and the sword Excalibur, a Camelot besieged
by creatures from the Netherworld, even the return of King Arthur.
Although Moore’s version of the hero ended in 1984 in an episode which included the
death of Merlin in The Mighty World of Marvel, Captain Britain has continued to appear in
other comics through the years, notably as a member of the British superhero team Excalibur,
with its obvious Arthurian associations, and most recently in 2008 in the fifteen-issue series
Captain Britain and MI: 13, which incorporated Arthurian material but differed little from
typical American superhero fare. The earlier stories of the hero, with their prominent
Arthurian elements, have been collected in book form in Captain Britain: The Lion and the
Spider (2009) and Captain Britain: The Siege of Camelot (2010).
Marvel UK published an explicitly Arthurian series written by Dan Abnett and John
Tomlinson, The Knights of Pendragon, in 1990–1. Consisting of three six-issue stories which
tied a strong environmental message to modern-day reincarnations of Round Table knights, the
comic book successfully avoided, for the most part, the American stereotypes of superheroes
endlessly bashing supervillains in elaborately choreographed fight scenes. The last story in
the series, however, did revive Arthur himself to return to Avalon to call forth all of the
Pendragons of the past for a final battle to save the natural world. The first nine issues of the
series have been reprinted in book form as The Knights of Pendragon: Once and Future (2010).
A second series of fifteen issues (in which Arthur again appears) was published in 1992–3,
but these were stories in a more standard superhero vein. Most recently, the characters have
been revived in a 2014 comic book written by Rob Williams, Revolutionary War: Knights
Of Pendragon, published by Marvel Worldwide. Here, in a clear attempt to capitalize on a
current pop culture trend, they must face the result of a horrible DNA experiment: Zombie
King Arthur and his Zombie Knights.
Of the comics for older readers which began in the mid-1970s, the most successful – and
one of the few surviving – is 2000AD, the science fiction/fantasy book. In fact, celebrating
its 2,000th issue in the year 2000, the cover featured its most popular character, Judge
Dredd, raising the title flag on a mountain of cancelled British comics. One of the favourite
long-running characters in 2000AD is Sláine, an ancient warrior in the mould of Conan the
Barbarian who travels through time in the service of a Celtic goddess. Created by Pat Mills
and illustrated in sometimes spectacular painted panels by a succession of artists through
the years, Sláine was sent to Arthur’s world in 1996–7 in the storyline ‘The Treasures of
Britain’, written by Mills and illustrated by Dermot Power. Here Sláine’s task, in response
to a summons by Merlin and Morgan La Fee, is to find the objects that will enable Arthur to
return from Avalon and heal the land wasted by the curse of Guinevere’s infidelity. Collected
in a book form in 1997, Sláine: Treasures of Britain was issued again in 2012.
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One reason often cited for the decline of the British comics industry is the loss of the best
comics writers and artists to American publishers. Although such publications as 2000AD,
Warrior and Crisis gave creators the freedom to take comics in new directions (in 1990 Crisis
published a story by Grant Morrison of a young Adolf Hitler’s determination to find the
Holy Grail), their talents were soon recognized by the two major publishers in the United
States, Marvel and DC Comics. As well as providing a large, more adult audience, American
companies offered higher page rates, royalties on reprints and ownership of their art – in
short, riches. They arrived at an opportune time.
If the British comics industry all but collapsed in recent years, its American counterpart
had struggles of its own. Beginning in the early 1990s, the major comic book publishers
generated an inflation in their market by using a host of gimmicks to appeal to collectors
and speculators: creating ‘events’ which crossed an entire line of titles and involved their
characters in multi-issued stories; revising, or even killing, major characters (e.g., the ‘death
of Superman’) in order to gain the attention of other media; creating the illusion of value by
issuing comics with variant or highly decorated covers. Comics specialty stores multiplied and
smaller publishers rushed their own lines of collectibles into print. When the bubble burst in
the late 1990s, sales fell; comics shops closed; one major publisher, Marvel, went bankrupt;
and smaller publishers went out of business altogether. A much diminished industry survived
through corporate mergers and restructuring, and some new approaches to marketing. Comic
book characters were increasingly seen as intellectual property which need not be restricted
to comic books but which could be exploited in films, television, books, games and other
merchandise. Aiming for a more affluent readership as the number of titles shrank, publishers
raised cover prices significantly.
One tactic which proved successful was prominently identifying popular creators with their
products in their advertising – giving them the status of rock stars to their fans. The British
newcomers were a significant element in this approach. American comics historians refer to
the influx of these writers and artists as the ‘British Invasion’, a game-changing incursion
not unlike the impact of the Beatles on American music in the 1960s. The starting point
of the invasion is sometimes identified as the publication of the Watchmen series, a radical
reworking of superhero concepts by Alan Moore and the artist Dave Gibbons in 1986–7. A
case can be made, however, for Camelot 3000, a series published by DC in 1982–5, written
by the American Mike W. Barr but handsomely illustrated by the British artist Brian Bolland.
A science-fiction story of an alien invasion of Britain defeated by the reborn King Arthur and
his knights, the series was a landmark in many ways: as a limited twelve-issue series it became
a model for subsequent publishing ventures; as a product sold only in comics shops, it aimed
at an adult audience in its treatment of sexual matters; and printed on high-quality paper,
the artwork was reproduced with exceptional clarity for a comic book. In collected form,
it remains in print today, and a deluxe hardcover edition was released in 2008.
The past twenty years have seen the publication of some 200 Arthurian stories or series by
American publishers. Some of the most inventive have been by British creators. Neil Gaiman
wrote the four-issue DC series The Books of Magic (1990; book form 1993) in which a young
boy is initiated in his latent powers by various teachers through history. In Book I, illustrated
by the British John Bolton, the boy spends time in the past with a fourteen-year-old Merlin.
In 1990–3, Alan Grant made Merlin the suffering brother of the protagonist in his revival of
Jack Kirby’s 1972 creation, The Demon, with darkly comic stories often set in hell. Another
British writer, Garth Ennis, took over the title in 1994–5 and the tone shifted to one of occult
horror.
Warren Ellis introduced a novel treatment of the mythic Avalon by locating it in Antarctica
in the four-issues of X-Calibre in 1995. Dave Gibbons reworked the origin story of the hero
of Superman: Kal in 1995 by having him arrive on Earth in the Middle Ages where he grew
to be a blacksmith and embedded the famous sword – here composed of spaceship metal –
in the stone. Garth Ennis, in the Preacher, a series featuring themes involving religion, sex
and violence, in 1996 introduced the Grail, an ancient and evil organization committed
to preserving the purity of Christ’s bloodline. And Merlin again appeared in a five-issue
1997 story in Hellblazer. Written by Paul Jenkins with art by Sean Phillips, the adventurer
John Constantine must recover a gift from God which Arthur stole from Merlin in the
distant past.
If the British Invasion introduced broader story possibilities and more mature sensibilities
to American comics, creators still often fell back on stock uses of Arthurian material. One plot
device which has been a staple of the medium since its inception is the motif of the time-travel
of a modern character back to Camelot. Whether by a blow to the head, as in the case of Mark
Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, in a dream state, or by science or by magic, characters ranging
from funny animals to entire teams of superheroes have all made the journey to Arthur’s
realm. The past two decades have seen the device used over two dozen times. In a series
based on an animated television show, a modern football team is transported to Camelot in
King Arthur and the Knights of Justice written by Mike Lackey (1993–4). Donald Duck and
his nephews make the trip in a Don Rosa story, ‘The Once and Future Duck’, in Walt Disney’s
Comics and Stories (1996). Superman joins the Silent Knight in an adventure in the past in
a Mark Waid story in The Brave and the Bold (2008), and Captain America and Thor do the
same in The Mighty Fighting Avengers in a Roger Langridge story (2011). Perhaps the motif
should have been retired after the surrealist Michael Kupperman’s story ‘The Big Party’ in
his Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret (2000). In this two-page piece, a nightclub singer is
hit on the head by a thrown chastity belt and is transported to King Arthur’s court where he
finds a number of twentieth-century people who have suffered ‘time-travel-producing head
injuries.’
Among other common recurring motifs are characters with Arthurian origins. Marvel has
Captain Britain, of course, but also the Black Knight, a superhero who traces his ancestry to a
medieval character of the same name in a 1950s series. DC Comics has Jack Kirby’s Demon
as well as the Shining Knight, a Round Table figure who first appeared in 1941, but who was
transformed into a female by Grant Morrison in 2006, and Madame Xanadu, a heroine with
mystical powers who was given a new identity as Nimue, Merlin’s lover, by the writer Matt
Wagner in 2008. All of the DC characters appeared in the twenty-three-issue series Demon
Knights (2011–13). Merlin is certainly the traditional Arthurian figure who appears most
frequently in modern comics. An informal tally places him in over 50 stories or series since
1990. Arthur’s twisted sister Morgan le Fay (or Morgana, Morgaine or other variations) has
become a recurring villainess in both Marvel and DC comics as well as in the works of smaller
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publishers. She has practised her sorcery in over 30 titles since 1990. And in that same time
frame, the Grail has become the Holy McGuffin in over two dozen stories.
There have been some curious spin-offs of traditional material as well. In 1996, Matt
Hawkins introduced Lady Pendragon, a science-fantasy tale featuring a post-Arthur Guinevere
who leaves her convent to take up Excalibur and the costume of a modern superheroine –
it has been said that the most impressive power of today’s superheroine is the ability to
fit into such outfits. And Sir Lancelot has been transformed into a black artist in present-
day California in Charles Holland’s Butcher Knight (2000). Merlin’s previously unknown
offspring have appeared in Troy Hasbrouck’s Destiny of the Dragon: Daughters of Merlin
(2010) and Robert Napton’s Son of Merlin (2013). But perhaps the oddest manifestation of
Arthur’s contemporaries has been in Brian Fitzgerald’s Knewts of the Round Table (1997) in
which a villain uses magic to turn four of Arthur’s companions into human-size amphibians,
altering them mentally as well as physically. The road from Camelot goes ever on.
Among the strategies employed by publishers to maximize profits from their products is
the repackaging of comic book stories in book form. While older and genuinely rare comics
are collected in ‘archive editions’, it is common to find trade paperback editions of series or
even storylines within a title shortly after the individual comic books complete their run.
Recent Arthurian works include Adam and Christian Beranek’s Dracula vs. King Arthur
(2007), Frank Tieri’s New Excalibur: Last Days of Camelot (2007), and two books from
Bill Willingham’s Fables series in which fairy-tale creatures coexist with humans: Fables: The
Good Prince (2008) and Jack of Fables: The Bad Prince (2008). Mike Mignola’s long-running
Hellboy series ends on an Arthurian note as the demonic hero is revealed to be the last
descendant of Mordred and thus rightful king of Britain. The issues depicting his final battle
with the dark forces of Nimue, here the goddess of war, are gathered in Hellboy: The Wild
Hunt (2010), Hellboy: The Storm (2010) and Hellboy: The Fury (2011). A kinder version of
Nimue is portrayed in Matt Wagner’s Madame Xanadu: Disenchanted (2009) and Madame
Xanadu: Broken House of Cards (2010). And, for sheer novelty, mention should be made of
Sam Sarkar’s Caliber: First Canon of Justice (2008), a recasting of the Arthurian story as a
Western, and Paul Benjamin and Patrick Storck’s Muppet King Arthur (2010), a retelling of
traditional stories with the familiar television characters as Arthurian figures.
The past two decades have seen a huge increase in the number of graphic novels – the
term now commonly used for any book-length narrative in a comics format. There have
been comparatively few original graphic novels on Arthurian subjects, and most of those are
straightforward retellings of traditional material. M. C. Hall’s King Arthur and the Knights
of the Round Table (2007) is a simplified version for children. Jeff Limke has written three
adaptations: King Arthur: Excalibur Unsheathed (2007), Arthur and Lancelot: The Fight for
Camelot (2008) and Tristan and Isolde: The Warrior and the Princess (2008). John Matthews
introduced elements of Celtic myth and modern fantasy to his Sword of Fire and Ice (2009),
but his Le Morte D’Arthur: The Coming of the King (2011) covers more familiar ground.
The most original of these graphic novels is Tony Lee’s Excalibur: The Legend of King Arthur
(2011) which incorporates the world of fairies, an unorthodox love affair and the Green
Knight of beheading fame.
Although the emphasis here has been on comic books rather than newspaper strips, for the
past few years lovers of the strips have been experiencing a bounty of pleasure in the form of
collections of classic daily and Sunday comic strips in handsome, and often expensive, books
from several publishers. Few are more welcome than modern collections of Hal Foster’s
Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur. A series begun by Fantagraphics books in 2009,
each volume reprinting two years of Sunday pages, is the best current American version.
Prince Valiant first appeared in 1937 and Foster wrote and illustrated what is often considered
the first great adventure strip until 1971 when the artwork was turned over to John Cullen
Murphy. Much diminished in size and polish, it continues to be produced by other hands to
this day.
Foster captivated his readers with the story of a Scandinavian prince who becomes a knight
of the Round Table, grows from youth to manhood, wins a bride and raises a family, all
while participating in the great events of the early Middle Ages and often in the company
of traditional Arthurian figures. His narrative technique, which eschewed the convention of
speech balloons in favour of captions at the bottom of panels, paced the story from week
to week with shifting viewpoints, occasional humour and sometimes violent action. His
panoramic battle scenes were as well composed and detailed as those of romantic painters.
He presented his readers a fully realized world, shaping their impression of the Middle
Ages from castle interiors to knights in combat to the appearance of King Arthur himself.
Considered a masterpiece of comic art, Foster’s story was for years given a full page in the
Sunday supplement – a page much larger than today’s comic sections. It has had international
circulation through the years in formats ranging from poorly reproduced comic books to
lavish art editions as well as adaptations in storybooks, films, animated television series, audio
recordings and other pop culture products. Considering its longevity and the extent of its
readership, it can be claimed that Prince Valiant has reached a greater audience than any other
Arthurian work, medieval or modern.
Translated editions of Prince Valiant fit comfortably on the shelves of French comics shops
next to the bande dessinée which represent the high end of comic book culture in the minds
of many. French comics – or more accurately Franco-Belgian comics since the two countries
share production and audience – famously occupy a prominent place in the arts of France,
enjoying government subsidies, a national museum and a branch of the Ministry of Culture.
The city of Angoulême is the focal point, home of the Cité International de la Bande Dessinée
et de l’Image and the site of one of the largest annual comics festivals in the world. The
bande dessinée themselves take the form of large-format hardcover albums of about 50 pages,
most in full colour and often in sets issued over several years. They were preceded in French
comics history by comics magazines as early as Journal de Mickey in 1934 in France and
Spirou in 1938 in Belgium. ‘Prince Vaillant’, translated reprints of Foster’s strip, appeared in
the children’s periodical Hop-là! as early as 1937. Compared to the superhero fare offered
by American comics, French magazines have always featured more variety and catered to an
older audience with more adult content as time went by.
Arthurian stories appeared occasionally in the magazines, but the first significant original
work was Jean Ollivier’s ‘Yves le Loup’, illustrated by René Bastard, which ran in the biweekly
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Vaillant from 1947 to 1966. Inspired by and sometimes borrowing from Prince Valiant, this
is the story of King Arthur’s nephew, raised in the Forest of Brocéliande where he learnt the
speech of animals. Traditional Arthurian figures – Lancelot, Perceval, Gauvain – often appear.
An episode entitled Yves le Loup was published in book form in 1999, and three stories
were combined in a book of the same title in 2004 with the artist Bastard’s name given more
prominence than Ollivier’s. An amazingly prolific writer, Ollivier turned to Arthurian material
again with stories of the knights Perceval (1949), Lancelot (1961) and Yvain (1983).
Adult comics magazines pushed the boundaries of censorship in the 1970s as they indulged
in the stories of more explicit sex and violence, which in turn influenced comics creators in
the United Kingdom and the United States. But by the 1980s, the magazines were folding
at the same time the sales of bande dessinée albums were rapidly escalating. Today, several
thousand titles are published each year and total circulation is in the tens of millions. Although
the Arthurian legend is British, the earliest medieval Arthurian literature was French, and
creators of French comics have done far more with the legend than their British and American
counterparts.
In 1987, Patrick Cothias published the first of his series Les Heros Cavaliers, which
concluded with the sixth volume in 1997. Cothias places his Arthurian stories in a gritty post-
Roman world with Arthur as a barbarian warlord and Merlin a wild man. A primitive setting
with an added fantasy element is also used by Didier Convard in his five-volume series Rogon
le Leu (1996–2003). Set in Dark Age Brittany, these are the adventures of the son of Myrdhin
(Merlin), who sleeps in a hidden grotto in the care of Viviane, the name preferred by French
authors over Nimue. With several sites having Arthurian associations as well as its own Celtic
legends, Brittany serves as the background for many medieval bande dessinée. Ronan LeBreton
places his Légendes de la Table Ronde (three volumes, 2005–6) in the Forest of Brocéliande
where tales from the old romances are merged with Celtic myth. David Chauvel’s sources for
his series Arthur une Épopée Celtique (nine volumes, 1999–2006) are Welsh versions of the
tales. Dark and heroic fantasy pervades two other recent series: Regis Hautière’s two-volume
Pendragon (2005–6) and the three-volume La Quête du Graal (2006–9) by François Debois.
The story of Tristan and Iseult has been affiliated with Arthurian literature since the
thirteenth century when the hero was identified as a Round Table knight in the Prose Tristan.
Two recent writers have brought their own twists to the tragic love story. Sylvain Cordurie
introduces Druids, fairies and water spirits in his Les Seigneurs de Cornwall (three volumes,
2009–14). The writer known as Rodolphe [D. Jacquette] has begun a series of his own,
retelling the adventures of Tristan’s early years in the first volume of Tintagel (2012).
The author who seems intent on creating an Arthuriad all of his own is Jean-Luc Istin,
who also oversees the line of Celtic-themed bande dessinée of the publisher Soleil. Taking
established Arthurian characters as a starting point, Istin also draws on Breton legends, Celtic
mythology and his own developing storylines to fill the several series he has written. Merlin
is his central figure and the protagonist of the Merlin series (ten volumes, 2000–9). It was
followed by a second series of five volumes, Merlin: La Quête de l’Épée (2005–12) and a
third, four volumes of Merlin le Prophète (2012–14). Istin broadened his Arthurian world
with his Lancelot (four volumes, 2008–14) and three volumes to date of Excalibur Chroniques
(2012–14).
Most of the series mentioned above, as well as many other Arthurian bande dessinée, can
be categorized as works of heroic fantasy, often sombre in tone, violent in action and frankly
sexual. They do not represent the whole range of Arthurian comics by any means. Richard
Peyzaret, using the odd pseudonym F’Murrr, in Le Pauvre Chevalier (1991) and Les Aveugles
(1992) recounts the humorous misadventures of a poor fellow who, through a secretarial error,
believes he has been invited to join the Round Table. Interaction with traditional characters
constantly lands him in trouble. Christophe Arleston blends comedy and light fantasy in his
six-volume series Le Chant d’Excalibur (1998–2010) in which the young heroine Gwynned,
the last descendant of Galahad, is chosen by the Lady of the Lake to save the land from a
corrupt church and a tyrannical king. She receives some aid from a reawakened Merlin, here
a scruffy wizard with weakened powers, and the sword Excalibur which she draws from the
stone. Gods and goddesses, Vikings, fairies and the spirits of Brittany figure in her stories.
Joann Sfar wrote the first four volumes of the slapstick adventures of Merlin as a child
with his companions, an ogre and a pig. Jean David Morvan wrote the last two in this series
simply entitled Merlin (1999–2003). Drawn in a classic humorous cartoon style by José-
Luis Munnera, the stories incorporate everything from familiar Arthurian characters to Santa
Claus, the Fisher King and the giant Gargantua as a baby. The popular French television
series Kaamelott featured its creator Alexandre Astier in the role of King Arthur. Astier is
also credited as the writer of seven volumes adapting episodes of the programme into comic
albums (2006–13). The stories are comic send-ups of the Arthurian legend for the most part
and though supposedly set in the fifth century, involve popular culture references among a
host of anachronisms.
The appeal of the Arthurian legend to creators of bande dessinée – the serious if not the
humorous works – seems to be based in the mystery of the distant Celtic past of Britain
and northern France where most of the stories are set. While comic creators in the United
Kingdom and United States most often present Arthur and company as armour-clad knights
of the high Middle Ages, the French prefer Dark Age warriors, atmospheric forests, Druids,
standing stones and beautiful women who unself-consciously shed their garments. There is
also the challenge of casting traditional characters into new extended narratives, all pictured
in detailed and evocatively coloured imagery, and it is not unusual to find stories incorporating
esoteric elements from the medieval literature. More mature than their British and American
counterparts in narrative technique, artwork and overall production values, when it comes to
Arthurian comics, the French win.
chapter twenty-eight
Afterlives of
Medieval Manuscripts
Wendy Scase
From the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, manuscript books (strictly, codices) were the prin-
cipal means by which European written culture was transmitted. From the mid-fifteenth
century, printing gradually replaced handwriting as the default means of reproducing texts
(though, of course, manuscript continued to be used for private and singular purposes as it
still is today). The leaves of most manuscript books were made of animal skin. Paper started
to be used only towards the end of the period. Texts, illustrations and decorations were all
produced by hand.1 Scribes created new books by copying from exemplars and illustrators
used models, but owing to the processes involved in production by hand, every manuscript
book was unique.2 The materials used to produce manuscripts are extremely durable, much
more so than those used for modern printed books, and many survive to this day. We have
no figure for the number of survivals, but it has been estimated that some 600,000–800,000
books are extant in Latin script alone.3 Most today are in the libraries of institutions, though
there are still manuscripts in private ownership. Manuscripts of Western provenance are now
found across the globe. Alongside the important European collections (e.g. The Bayerische
Staatsbibliotek in Munich, with 37,000 Western manuscripts, and the Vatican Library, with
over 80,000 manuscripts) there are significant holdings beyond Europe. Yale University’s
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has over 1,500 manuscripts and New York’s
Pierpont Morgan Library holds 1,300. Europa Inventa lists over 300 manuscript items in
Australian collections (some of them documents rather than codices, however).4
For each manuscript, there is a story to tell about its afterlife, which for present purposes
we might define as its history from the time it ceased to be used for its original purpose or
by its original owners. In many cases, the afterlife story of how and why it arrived at its
current location is fragmentary; indeed, we have incomplete provenances for most surviving
Afterlives of Medieval Manuscripts 311
books. Not surprisingly, both individually and as a class of artefact, manuscripts have often
been subject to huge changes in the ways in which they have been received, used, understood
and valued. In some cases, historical rupture and radical ideological change have featured
decisively in the afterlives of manuscripts. During the Reformation in England, for example,
the manuscript holdings of the monasteries were subject to appropriation and destruction.
Many books came into the possession of collectors and eventually became the basis of the
holdings of today’s great manuscript libraries such as the British Library and the Bodleian
Library.5 But despite ideological and historical change, people with a love of fine books and
a wish to own them are found throughout history from the medieval period to today. Many
fine manuscripts were commissioned by medieval patrons as valuable art objects and many
continue to be objects of bibliophilism. Finely illuminated Books of Hours, for example,
the high-status prayer books originally owned and enjoyed by wealthy medieval persons,
continue to be transmitted from one private owner to the next through sales, auctions and
inheritance. Rather more controversially, there is also a trade in the leaves of dismembered
manuscripts, with those bearing fine illuminations attracting the highest prices.
Some manuscripts are associated with particularly long and eventful afterlives, being
the subject of legends of preservation, curation, longevity and transfer of ownership that
are still unfolding. A particularly rich and suggestive example is a book now known as the
St Cuthbert Gospel (London, British Library, Additional MS 89,000). A scribe has written
on the back of the second leaf: ‘Ewangelium Iohannis quod inuentum fuerat ad capud beati
patris nostri Cuthberti in sepulcro iacens anno translacionis ipsius’ (‘The Gospel according
to John which was found at the head of our father St Cuthbert as he lay in his tomb in the
year of his translation’).6 The St Cuthbert Gospel was made in the seventh century, in north-
east England, probably at the Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery. The story of how the book was
found in St Cuthbert’s tomb started to be told in the early twelfth century, when Cuthbert’s
remains were moved (‘translated’) to Durham Cathedral. In an account in the miracles of
St Cuthbert written c. 1120–30, it is recorded that the Bishop of Durham displayed the
miraculously preserved volume during a sermon he preached on the day of the translation of
the saint’s remains. The book was shown to later visitors to the saint’s tomb as a kind of relic
of the saint, when the new shrine became a site of pilgrimage.7 The scribal note in the volume
about the finding of the book dates from this phase in the manuscript’s afterlife.
This story of the afterlife of the St Cuthbert Gospel as a relic book miraculously preserved
and conferring benefits in a new location has recently been reprised as part of a successful
fund-raising campaign to purchase the codex permanently for the British Library. In materials
issued for this campaign, launched in 2011, the legend of the miraculously preserved relic of
the saint is retold in accounts of the codex as ‘the oldest intact European book’. The story
of the ‘translation’ of the book to a new resting place is echoed in the interpretation of the
permanent acquisition of the codex by the British Library. An exhibition of the manuscript at
the British Library told the story of ‘the many journeys the book has made’ until it was ‘saved
for the nation’ in its new repository.8 The tradition of displaying the book and explaining its
significance continues too. The exhibition and online interpretation marked the beginning of
the British Library’s steps ‘to increase public awareness and understanding’ of the significance
of the codex and its purchase for public ownership.
312
The St Cuthbert Gospel offers a particularly striking example of a manuscript afterlife: one
in which the afterlife itself has become the subject of a myth that continues to be remade even
today. But while exemplifying continuity, the British Library’s plans for the volume arguably
also signal a completely new chapter in the book’s afterlife. For the whole of its previous history,
the manuscript has only been available to small audiences, from the monks of Wearmouth-
Jarrow (and St Cuthbert himself, or at least his corpse), the medieval congregation of Durham
Cathedral, and visitors to the saint’s shrine, to the visitors to the British Library exhibition.
A printed facsimile was produced by the Roxburghe Club in 1969, but the audience for this
too is limited in number as the volume had a short print run and is rare.9 A prominent element
in the British Library’s programme of public engagement with the St Cuthbert Gospel is the
display of the codex in the form of a full facsimile on the British Library Digitised Manuscripts
website.10 As a consequence, for the first time ever in over fourteen centuries, the entire codex
is available for anyone who wishes to see it, provided they have access to a computer with an
internet connection. And the uses to which the images can be put are enormously wide and
can only increase as imaging software develops.
The potential of manuscript digitization is of course not confined to giving this remarkable
seventh-century book a completely new lease of afterlife. The St Cuthbert Gospel digitization
project is a high-profile example of a phenomenon that arguably has the potential to transform
completely the afterlives of many – perhaps eventually all – medieval manuscripts. This
chapter will provide an introduction to what digitization can currently do and will consider
the ways in which it is impacting on the afterlives of manuscripts and its potential for the
future. It will show that the digitization of manuscript heritage is a complex and fast-moving
story whose developments, outcomes and impacts are as yet undecided and where practice is
the subject of considerable debate.
The History of Manuscript Digitization

The digitization of medieval manuscripts is a phenomenon that has developed significantly
only in the last two decades. Since c. 1990, three areas of technological advance have
severally and in combination created this possibility of a completely new lease of afterlife for
manuscript books. Digital scanning permits capture of high-resolution images. High-quality
image files can be as much as 90 megabytes each in size. An exponential increase in capacity
for storage of digital data is therefore another vital development. Even a manuscript with
only 50 folios would generate scans requiring 9,000 megabytes (8.78 gigabytes) of storage if
each page were scanned to this standard. Stored on the 5¼ inch floppy disks of the 1970s’
personal computer, 83,781 disks would have been required – though of course it would have
been impossible to access them in this format as only one or two disks could be read at a time.
Even today’s tiny memory sticks can far exceed this capacity, permitting convenient mobile
personal storage of big manuscript data. The third component of this enabling technology
is of course the World Wide Web, first proposed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee as a ‘universal
linked information system’ for the scientists of CERN that used the recently developed idea
of ‘hypertext’ links.11 The first photographic image was posted on the Web by Berners-Lee
in 1992.12 Within three years a digitized facsimile of the Beowulf manuscript, London, British
Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A. xv, was posted on the Web by the British Library as an outcome
of the Electronic Beowulf project.13 It is not known how many manuscripts are currently
available in digitized form. It must be still a very small percentage of the total, but major
digitization campaigns have been announced to make available some of the major collections.
For example, in 2010 the Vatican announced a plan to digitize its 80,000 manuscripts,14
and E-Codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland proposes to digitize all medieval
manuscripts held in Swiss repositories.15
Transforming Understanding
through Digital Images
How transformative are digital scans? How do they compare with traditional facsimiles and
can they ever measure up to – or surpass – the experience of viewing the original book?
Photographic reproduction of manuscripts began in the 1860s; before that facsimiles had to
be made by hand.16 In the twentieth century, experiments were made to apply technological
solutions to problems associated with reading manuscripts where letters are faded, lost or
have been purposely erased. Badly damaged in the fire that engulfed the Cotton collection
in 1731, the Beowulf manuscript had long been a test case for technological enhancement
of illegible letters and hidden readings on its fragmentary pages. The project to digitize the
Beowulf manuscript followed in this tradition. Aiming to reveal features of the manuscript not
visible to the naked eye, the Beowulf digitization would, it was claimed, ‘provide better access
to parts of the manuscript than studying the manuscript itself ’.17 This hope was vindicated
by the recovery and display in digital images of material previously illegible. Digital imaging
represented a game-changing advance on the previous techniques such as the use of ultra-violet
light to expose marks not visible to the naked eye in daylight. Digital imaging programmes
have permitted the manipulation, enhancement and even melding of images produced with
the aid of photography under such conditions.18
Of course, digital images also have their drawbacks and limitations. Scans can misrepresent
colour and lack the three-dimensional detail available when a book is examined in the flesh.19
In attempts to mitigate these problems, experiments have been made with lighting from
different directions to capture the page’s three-dimensional features such as puckering and
traces of animal hair. An example is the Codex Sinaiticus digitization project (discussed further
below) where the user is given the choice of viewing pages in standard light or raked light.20
Another drawback of digital images is that it can be difficult to get a sense of size and scale
and the computer monitor may be too small to permit entire pages to be viewed in their actual
size. However, navigation tools and zoom functions mitigate somewhat the problem of the
limited size of the computer screen and viewing interfaces often permit zooming in on details
which might be too small to be seen with the naked eye and where close examination with
a magnifying glass might risk damage to the physical manuscript. Other problems are less
easy to solve and may never be amenable to a technological solution. It is very difficult and
in some cases impossible to examine the physical structure of a codex using digital images.
314
Some are concerned that the availability of digital facsimiles will impact on policies regarding
consultation of the original artefacts and lead to greater restrictions on access for readers,
making it even harder in future to study features such as texture and smell that cannot be
replicated digitally.21
Digital manuscript surrogates are of course accessible and manipulable via generic
commercial image programmes, but a range of specialist tools is being developed for the
use of scholars as well as wider audiences. A number of tools facilitate image retrieval,
annotation and comparison. Some, such as Virtual Vellum, can be used both by the individual
scholar and collaboratively: this tool provides an environment for annotation, sharing of
information and so on.22 Virtual Vellum was developed to facilitate manipulation of the
huge corpus of images of French chronicles developed by the Froissart Project, but it is also
adaptable for use with user-defined or user-created image collections. Another example of
this kind of tool is provided in association with the Parker Library on the Web, a resource that
offers a corpus of digital surrogates of 559 manuscripts (most of the collection) of the Parker
Library at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, one of the world’s most important Western
manuscript collections. The site provides high-resolution images and a collaborative viewing
and research tool enriched with manuscript descriptions and bibliography.23
Electronic research environments such as these give users opportunities to reconfigure the
source materials in ways not possible physically and materially and this can lead to a new
quality of access and new understanding. For example, manuscripts that survive as fragments
scattered across different libraries can be digitally reunited. A striking example of the power
of this capability is the virtual reassembly of the Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible copied in the fourth
century, fragments of which are held today in four different libraries: the British Library,
Leipzig University Library, St Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai and the National Library of
Russia in St Petersburg. The virtual reunification of the fragments from these libraries has
permitted the first full codicological and palaeographical study of the manuscript and enhanced
understanding of how the codex was made.24 The digital environment also permits the virtual
reassembly of historic collections of books whose component volumes are now in different
locations. One example is the Europeana Regia project which unites digital surrogates of over
1,000 manuscripts that formerly belonged to three royal libraries.25 It would be possible to
carry out similar projects for medieval libraries of other kinds of institution, for example,
to assemble digitally all of the known surviving books of, say, Worcester Cathedral Priory
or the Benedictine Abbey of St Albans.26 Virtual collections such as these would permit
detailed comparative studies across the collections and resource identification of scribes’
and annotators’ hands, production characteristics and so on. Virtual collections could be
assembled according to other principles also to address other research questions. For example,
all manuscripts containing texts in a given regional dialect could be assembled to resource
research into regional textualities and writing systems. A step in this direction is made by
the online resource Manuscripts of the West Midlands.27 The reception and dissemination of
a given text could be resourced by a virtual collection of its manuscripts. For example, the
Roman de la Rose Digital Library is working towards the display of digital facsimiles of all
of the c. 320 extant manuscripts and fragments of this important thirteenth-century French
allegorical poem.28 The resulting collection of digital surrogates will resource comparative
research across a range of topics, including manuscript illumination, patronage, script and
readers’ engagement with the text.
Some argue that the digital medium can even enable improved understanding of aspects of
medieval readers’ processing of and modes of engagement with manuscripts. It is suggested,
for example, that the flexible, non-linear and multimedia possibilities of digital editions
could be exploited by editors to ‘replicate the medieval reading experience’.29 Given that
our knowledge of medieval reading experiences is currently very limited, this claim might be
seen as overstated. Nonetheless, digital editions could be used to allow readers to experiment
with hypothesized reading processes. The digital medium, it is also claimed, can bring to
life aspects of manuscripts that readers whose practices and processes are shaped by print
culture could fail to see.30 Studies such as these make the claim that manuscript and digital
media are mutually illuminating and this reciprocal relationship can play a key role in the
way we navigate and understand the contemporary transitions from print to digital media.
From this point of view, the afterlife of manuscript culture resonates with and illuminates the
communications revolution we are experiencing today.
Audiences
In theory, digitization can bring manuscripts to larger and more diverse audiences and
present those audiences with higher-quality access and interpretation than ever before. In
the opening section of this chapter, we saw that the British Library’s digitization of the
St Cuthbert Gospel is explicitly associated with an aim ‘to increase public awareness and
understanding’ of the codex. While digital imaging and associated techniques enabled in the
digital environment can in some ways be seen as the foundations for large but ultimately
incremental steps in research, arguably it is by opening up access that digitization has the
greatest claim to be giving medieval manuscripts a completely new lease of afterlife. For
this wide access to manuscript books is unprecedented in human history. Throughout their
history, manuscript books have been accessible only to very small audiences. In the Middle
Ages, they were always objects for an elite. The point is well illustrated by the example of
the Luttrell Psalter (London, British Library, Additional MS 42,130) made for Sir Geoffrey
Luttrell of Lincolnshire in the first half of the fourteenth century. Sir Geoffrey’s book of
psalms is famous for its illustrations of labourers at work in the fields. Commenting on
the iconic picture of the ploughman, Michael Camille observes that the ploughmen who
cultivated Sir Geoffrey Luttrell’s estate would never have had an opportunity to see this
representation of themselves.31 For the production of even the least distinguished little
medieval manuscript books required considerable investment in time and materials. Only
those who were relatively wealthy, therefore, or who had the privilege of access to the library
of an institution (e.g. friars and monks) would normally have had opportunities to use books.
And owing to the limited spread of literacy among medieval populations of all centuries and
societies, the proportion of those who could have read a book for themselves, or for others,
even if they could have got their hands on one, was low. Even after mechanical reproduction
316
of manuscript facsimiles became possible, access remained limited to the few on account of
the expense of editions and limited print-runs, as in the case of the Roxburghe Club facsimile
of the St Cuthbert Gospel mentioned above.
But to what extent will digitization really enlarge and widen audiences for manuscripts?
Reviewing the Electronic Beowulf, William Kilbride laments:
Regrettably, Electronic Beowulf is only for those students of Anglo-Saxon culture already
thoroughly steeped in the written language, not for historians or archaeologists who want
to expand their knowledge. It is certainly not going to enthrall or enlighten the public,
let alone make them better citizens … it is arguable that Electronic Beowulf doesn’t do
much to empower the public or enhance our access to these highly prized assets: it simply
disenfranchises us in a new way.32
Kilbride writes here from the viewpoint of the archaeologist. He makes the point that even
specialists in disciplines cognate to Anglo-Saxon literature such as himself and his readers may
find the digitized Beowulf inaccessible and he adds that in his view the wider public will derive
little benefit from the project for similar reasons. However, recent projects provide evidence
that wider publics can derive huge benefits from manuscripts given a new digital lease of
afterlife. A striking example is provided by the Lindisfarne Gospels Durham project. Lindisfarne
Gospels Durham: One Amazing Book, One Incredible Journey offered an exhibition of British
Library, Cotton MS Nero D. IV, a gospel book made before 721 at Lindisfarne Priory on Holy
Island that is famed for its exceptional decoration. The exhibition of the original book was
enriched by a programme of events and creative initiatives and the provision of interpretative
material. A digital facsimile was provided so that visitors could ‘turn the pages’ virtually and
explore all of its pages rather than being confined to seeing the single opening of the book
that was visible in the display case. A press release issued by one of the organizing institutions
cites the exhibition’s attraction of 100,000 visitors and engagement of 20,000 school children
as evidence of its benefit for regional communities and the economy.33 The manuscript is also
available to wider audiences in the same digitized page-turnable form through the British
Library’s Sacred Texts website, accompanied by an online interpretative exhibition.34 It is also
often on display in the Treasures gallery at the Library and in page-turnable form on a screen
in the Library foyer. Digitization of the Lindisfarne Gospels therefore supports public access
through a variety of channels, ranging from conventional display at its home repository and
in its region of origin to online exhibition. For the immediate future, this use of digitized
surrogates within a multi-channel model of dissemination and interpretation appears to be a
most promising model for enhancing public understanding of and benefit from manuscript
heritage.
Another challenging problem associated with widening audiences for manuscripts through
the creation of digital images is that of resource discovery. The digitization of manuscripts
is carried out for many different purposes by many different agencies and finding out what
is available is not straightforward.35 Searching in search engines via a manuscript shelf-mark
or other name is not unequivocally reliable. A given shelf-mark can be capable of being
reproduced in a number of subtly different ways. For example, should one search for ‘British
Library, Additional MS 37,787’, ‘BL Addit. 37,787’, ‘British Library, Addit. MS 37,787’ or
‘John Northwood’s Miscellany’? Language can add an additional area of uncertainty: should
one try ‘Copenhagen, The Royal Library’ or ‘København, Det Kongelige Bibliotek’? And
the situation is even more difficult if one does not know the shelf-marks and names of the
kind of material one wishes to find. The online Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the University of California
at Los Angeles offers links to 3,129 fully digitized manuscripts at 139 websites in a database
searchable by language, author, title of work and repository. However, compilation ceased
in 2013 and the database is now described by its editors as ‘an increasingly partial subset of
manuscripts that have been digitized’ owing to the rate at which new material is published on
the World Wide Web.36
The manuscript ‘portal’ is another kind of solution which has been applied to the resource
discovery problem. Various models are being explored. The CERL Portal: Manuscripts and
Early Printed Material, developed by the Consortium of European Research Libraries, facilitates
searches across a range of online manuscript catalogues and other resources.37 Searching
is available in eight European languages and use of search terms with variant spellings is
supported by an underlying thesaurus (e.g. someone searching for ‘Wiclif, John’ will be asked
if they also want to search for ‘John Wiclif ’; ‘Wiclif ’; ‘Wyclif, Johannes’; ‘Johannes Wyclif ’;
‘Wyclif ’; ‘Wyclif, John’; ‘John Wyclif ’; ‘Wycliffe, John’; ‘John Wycliffe’; and ‘Wycliffe’).
While the CERL Portal brings together for one-stop searching the catalogues and digitization
projects of some of the major European manuscript libraries, Manuscripts Online, developed
by a consortium of British manuscript digitization projects, federates a range of research
tools such as catalogues, dictionaries, editions and text corpora relevant to ‘Written Culture
1100–1500’ of British provenance.38 The project supports unified searching across disparate
genres of resource by means of automatic indexing supported by natural language processing
techniques that enable automatic identification of personal names, place names, dates and so
on in the source materials.39 Manuscriptorium, based at the Czech National Library in Prague,
brings together digital content from institutions in the Czech Republic and beyond as an
aggregator for the Europeana project.40
How long can the New Lease of Afterlife Last?

In keeping with the brief of this volume, this chapter has largely concentrated on developments
in the last twenty years. I have been arguing that digital technologies have been giving
manuscript heritage an unprecedented new lease of afterlife. These technologies, we have
seen, carry with them problems and not everyone agrees that digitized manuscripts are an
unalloyed good. Nonetheless, whether one is a committed enthusiast or a sceptic, the general
case that we are witnessing a transformation seems undeniable. This story of transformation
would not be complete, however, without acknowledgement that its end, and, crucially its
duration, are very uncertain. The new lease of afterlife for medieval manuscripts that this
chapter has been describing will be short-lived if a number of pressing technical and legal
problems are not solved. Chief among these problems is that of finding ways to preserve digital
data sustainably so that it remains accessible indefinitely. The National Digital Information
318
and Preservation Programme of the United States advises: ‘all digital storage media have a
short life’.41 Likewise the British National Archives warns, ‘No computer storage medium
can be considered archival, irrespective of its physical longevity: technological obsolescence
is inevitable and all media have limited life spans.’42 In a useful literature review of this area,
Heather F. Ball finds problematic conflicts between the ‘access’ agenda and the ‘preservation’
agenda and warns of ‘the challenges that even the most scrupulous digitizers face in balancing
the imperatives of access and preservation’.43 Preservation often entails migration of data from
one format to another, so that as hardware, storage media and software programmes become
obsolete and are upgraded or replaced the data remain accessible and usable. Naturally, this
process of migration involves costs in time, labour and equipment and in order for it to
happen successfully it also entails continued commitment to preservation and accessibility.
Another problem which may prove limiting to the afterlives of digital manuscript resources
is that of copyright law and its application to manuscripts and to the internet. This is a highly
technical area of the law of intellectual property. Provisions as to the copying and reproduction
of manuscript material vary from repository to repository and from country to country.
Restrictions on copyright have the power to frustrate some of the most exciting possibilities
in the digital afterlife of manuscripts. For example, while repositories usually charge a one-
off fee for reproducing an image from a manuscript in a printed book (if they charge at all),
a common model for internet publication is a licence for fixed period. This means, of course,
that unless some arrangement can be made to renew licences relevant to a given resource
indefinitely, digital illustrations have to be taken offline once their licences expire leaving the
resource impoverished or even useless. Fortunately, certain prominent institutions are taking
a lead in alleviating the burden of these restrictions. The British Library, for example, has
recently announced that images published through its Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts
may now be treated as works in the public domain so that users may ‘help [the Library] share
these riches even more widely with the world’.44
The afterlife of medieval manuscripts in the digital age is at once immensely exciting and
very uncertain. With digital technologies our knowledge and understanding of manuscripts
is increasing prodigiously. The number of people in a position to benefit from medieval
manuscript heritage is historically unprecedented. At the same time, problems of discovery,
preservation, sustainability and intellectual property cast shadows over this bright picture.
Given the pace of change in this field over the past two decades, it is certain that the possibilities
and problems associated with manuscript digitization will continue to change rapidly. It is
impossible to predict if and when the new lease of manuscript afterlife will end.
Notes
1. For an introduction to medieval manuscript books, see Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham
(2007), Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2. For an introduction to the crafts of scribes and illuminators, see Christopher de Hamel (1992),
Scribes and Illuminators. London: British Library; and Jonathan J. G. Alexander (1992),
Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work. New Haven: Yale University Press.
3. Eef Overgauuw (Freie Universität and Staatsbibliotek, Berlin), personal communication.
4. Network for Early European Research (n.d.), Europa Inventa, http://www.europa.arts.uwa.edu.

au/manuscripts.
5. N. R. Ker (ed.) (1964), ‘Revised Preface to the First Edition’, in Medieval Libraries of Great
Britain: A List of Surviving Books, 2nd edn. London: Royal Historical Society, pp. x–xv; James P.
Carley (2006), ‘The Dispersal of the Monastic Libraries and the Salvaging of the Spoils’; Julian
Roberts (2006), ‘Extending the Frontiers: Scholar Collectors’; and Timothy Graham (2006),
‘Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts: An Elizabethan Library and its Use’, all in Elisabeth Leedham-
Green and Teresa Webber (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland:
Volume I: To 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 265–91, 292–321, and 322–44.
6. London, British Library, Additional MS 89,000, fol. ii verso. The manuscript was previously
called the Stonyhurst Gospel because it was kept at the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst, Lancashire,
until loaned to the British Library in 1979: Claire Breay (2012), The St Cuthbert Gospel. London:
British Library, http://www.bl.uk/whatson/st_cuthbert_gospel.pdf; R. A. B. Mynors and R. Powell
(1956), ‘The Stonyhurst Gospel’, in C. F. Battiscombe (ed.), The Relics of Saint Cuthbert. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 356–74.
7. See the British Library Digitised Manuscripts catalogue entry, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000.
8. British Library/Julian Harrison (2012), ‘St Cuthbert Gospel Saved for the Nation’, in British
Library Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Blog, London: British Library, 17 April 2012, http://
www.britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/04/st-cuthbert-gospel-saved-for-the-
nation.html.
9. T. Julian Brown with Roger Powell and Peter Waters (eds) (1969), The Stonyhurst Gospel of
St John. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Roxburghe Club.
10. See the British Library Digitised Manuscripts catalogue entry and British Library/Harrison (2012).
11. Tim Berners-Lee (1989, 1990), Information Management: A Proposal. CERN (Conseil Européen
pour la Recherche Nucléaire), http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html.
12. Andrew Hough (2012), ‘How the First Photo was Posted on the Web 20 Years Ago’, The
Telegraph, 11 July 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9391110/How-the-first-
photo-was-posted-on-the-Web-20-years-ago.html.
13. See the British Library Digitised Manuscripts catalogue entry, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/
FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Vitellius_A_XV.
14. Anon. (2012), ‘Avanti col Digitale’, L’Osservatore Romano, 12 April 2012, p. 4.
15. University of Friburg (n.d.), E-Codices: Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland,
http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en.
16. Elizabeth O’Keefe (2008), ‘Medieval Manuscripts on the Internet’. Journal of Religious and
Theological Information, 3(2): 9–47 (p. 10).
17. Cf. the remarks by Kevin S. Kiernan (1994), ‘Digital Preservation, Restoration and Dissemination
of Medieval Manuscripts’, in Ann Okerson and Dru Mogge (eds), Scholarly Publishing on the
Electronic Networks, Proceedings of the Third Symposium: Gateways, Gatekeepers and Roles
in the Information Omniverse. Washington DC: Association of American Research Libraries,
Office of Scientific and Academic Publishing, pp. 37–43.
18. A. H. Smith (1938), ‘The Photography of Manuscripts’. London Medieval Studies, 1: 179–207
discusses early applications of ultra-violet light. For the application of digital imaging processes
to expose writing, sharpen contrasts and meld photographs produced by different techniques, see
Kevin S. Kiernan (1994 [2001]), ‘Old Manuscripts/ New Technologies’, in Mary P. Richards (ed.),
Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings. London: Routledge, pp. 37–54, and for applications to
320
the Beowulf manuscript see Kevin S. Kiernan (1991), ‘Digital Image Processing and the Beowulf
Manuscript’, in Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6: Special Issue on Computers and Medieval
Studies, 20–7.
19. For these and other ways in which digitization may not produce an accurate surrogate, see
Heather F. Ball (2011), ‘Limitations and Ethical Implications of Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts’.
Library Student Journal, http://www.librarystudentjournal.org/index.php/lsj/index.
20. See below, and note 24.
21. Cf. Ball (2011): ‘For all its strengths, a computer cannot accurately delineate the feel or smell
of a manuscript leaf. This may sound trivial to the average researcher, but texture denotes what
kind of medium the text was written on, and what inks could be used. The smell of urine could
indicate the presence of a palimpsest. Even a digital copy with accurate representation of size and
color cannot replace the visceral experience of inspecting a manuscript firsthand’ (n.p.).
22. HRI Digital (2013), Virtual Vellum. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, http://www.hridigital.shef.
ac.uk/virtual-vellum.
23. Anon. (2013), Parker Library on the Web, version 1.6. Cambridge: Corpus Christi College and
Palo Alto: Stanford University, http://www.parkerweb.stanford.edu.
24. Anon. (2009), Codex Sinaiticus. British Library, Leipzig University Library, St Catherine’s
Monastery at Sinai, and the National Library of Russia, http://www.codexsinaiticus.com.
25. http://www.europeanaregia.eu/.
26. Listed in Ker ‘Revised Preface to the First Edition’, pp. 205–15; 164–8.
27. Wendy Scase (ed.) (2006), Manuscripts of the West Midlands: A Catalogue of Vernacular
Manuscript Books of the English West Midlands, c. 1300-c. 1475. Sheffield: University of Sheffield,
http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/mwm/.
28. Anon. (c. 2010), Roman de la Rose Digital Library. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University, http://romandelarose.org.
29. Farkas Gábor Kiss, Eyal Poleg, Lucie Doležalová, and Rafal Wójcik (2013), ‘Old Light on New
Media: Medieval Practices in the Digital Age’. Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures,
2(1): 16–34 (p. 16).
30. Martin K. Foys (2007), Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Virtual Anglo-Saxon
Studies in the Late Age of Print. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
31. Michael Camille (1998), Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of
Medieval England. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 200–9.
32. William Kilbride (2000), ‘Whose Beowulf is it anyway? Review of Electronic Beowulf [CD-Rom]’.
Internet Archaeology, 9, reviewing Kevin Kiernan, with Andrew Prescott, Elizabeth Solopova,
David French, Linda Cantara, Michael Ellis and Cheng Jiun Yuan (eds) (1999), Electronic
Beowulf. London: British Library and the University of Michigan Press. The resource is now in its
third edition: Kevin Kiernan (ed.) (2011), Electronic Beowulf, 3rd edn. London: British Library.
33. Durham University Press Office (2013), Overwhelming Success for Lindisfarne Gospels Durham.
Durham: Durham University Press Office, 1 October 2013, https://www.dur.ac.uk/news/
newsitem/?itemno=18591.
34. British Library (2003), The Lindisfarne Gospels. London: The British Library, http://www.bl.uk/
onlinegallery/features/lindisfarne/home.html.
35. For detailed discussion of this problem, see Elizabeth O’Keefe (2000), ‘Medieval Manuscripts on
the Internet’. Journal of Religious and Theological Information, 3(2): 9–47 (pp. 14–27).
36. Matthew Fisher and Christopher Baswell (2008–11), Catalog of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts.
Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
http://www.manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/index.php.
37. Consortium of European Research Libraries (2006–7), The CERL Portal: Manuscripts and Early
Printed Material. Consortium of European Research Libraries, http://www.cerl.epc.ub.uu.se/
sportal/.
38. Humanities Research Institute (2014), Manuscripts Online, version 1.0. Sheffield: University of
Sheffield, Humanities Research Institute, http://www.manuscriptsonline.org/.
39. Michael Pidd, Orietta Da Rold and Katherine Rogers (c. 2013), ‘Manuscripts Online: Written
Culture from 1000 to 1500, Final Report’, in Humanities Research Institute (2014), n.p.
40. Anon. (n.d.), Manuscriptorium: Building Virtual Research Environment for the Sphere of
Historical Resources, http://www.manuscriptorium.com/.
41. National Digital Information and Preservation Programme (n. d.), ‘How Long will Digital
Storage Media Last?’, in Personal Digital Archiving Series, Washington: Library of Congress,
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/.
42. Adrian Brown (2008), ‘Selecting Storage Media for Long-Term Preservation’, in The National
Archives Digital Preservation Guidance Note 2. Kew: The National Archives, p. 4.
43. Ball, ‘Limitations and Ethical Implications of Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts’.
44. British Library (2012), ‘Exploring our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts’, Medieval
Manuscripts Blog, 23 November 2012, http://www.britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/
digitisedmanuscripts/2012/11/exploring-our-catalogue-of-illuminated-manuscripts.html.
chapter twenty-nine
Medieval Memes1
Maggie M. Williams and Lauren C. Razzore
—Modern pop cultural references and Internet memes make great tapestries.
(http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/49408)
What do Chuck Norris, Keanu Reeves

and the Middle Ages have in common?
The popular HBO series Game of Thrones broadcast a hybrid medieval/modernity onto
screens across the globe. From televisions to laptops to iPads and iPhones, people revelled
in the fantasy of an imagined pseudo-Middle-Ages filled with violence, sex and power.
Regardless of ongoing debates about Game of Thrones’ medievalism, its ubiquity made it ripe
for use in internet memes. In one example, a still image from the show captures two young,
handsome characters against the frozen landscape of the northernmost part of their world,
‘beyond the wall’. A phrase appears above and below the figures, as if an urgent message
were passing between them. The text reads: ‘You Don’t Understand, They’re Going to Make
Memes About It.’
An internet meme consists of a still (or sometimes animated) image with a short piece of
text superimposed over the scene. Meme generator websites allow users to collage together
stock photographs, illustrations and original phrases, sometimes adding animation and even
music. Designers select from a range of images depicting everything from Chuck Norris
wielding two semi-automatic weapons to adorable cuddly kittens. Next, they can choose to
build upon standardized phrases or craft their own messages to accompany the scene.
Cat memes are particularly popular, and we discuss that phenomenon in greater detail
below. Other examples use photos of celebrities, such as Chuck Norris or Keanu Reeves. For
instance, a series of memes called ‘Conspiracy Keanu’ consists of a dishevelled and frightened-
looking Reeves in a still from the 1989 film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As the website
Medieval Memes 323
www.knowyourmeme.com explains, the image is juxtaposed with ‘paranoid conjectures and

absurdly philosophical questions’ such as, ‘What if the CIA invented dinosaurs to discourage
time travel?’
The resulting memes are ubiquitous in contemporary internet culture. In this chapter,
we examine their role as visual phenomena that embody a collaborative method prevalent
in digital media. We are both trained in the history and practice of the visual arts, but we
do not intend to pass aesthetic judgement on the examples below, nor do we wish to draw
parallels between contemporary memes and the role of medieval art in its historical context.
Analogous practices certainly do exist, such as cooperative modes of production and a
willingness to alter existing works (including textual glosses and spolia in medieval settings).
Moreover, debating the artistic value of memes may also have its place. For example, we
might ask what differentiates an internet meme from the work of a modern artist like
Barbara Kruger? Kruger’s feminist collages frequently rely upon meaningful juxtapositions
between borrowed photographs and short graphic texts; memes are very similar, in that
they make meaning by combining existing images with words inserted later by a secondary
viewer/creator. As images that have not been accepted by the institutions of the art world,
however, memes exist in a different realm. Here, we explore the process by which they are
created, distributed and consumed, and we discuss their accessibility, light-heartedness and
collaborative essence.
Ranging from the erudite to the irreverent, medieval memes erupted onto the scene in the
early 2000s. By then, specialists in a variety of areas – feminist scholars, military personnel,
gamers – had already taken advantage of this new means of creative communication. And,
despite the stereotypical notion of the stodgy medievalist, those interested in medieval
culture have begun to participate as well. Some medieval memes are visually compelling
and meticulously designed, while others depend more heavily on words to make their
meaning. All are distributed among both scholarly and general audiences; in fact, they blur
such outmoded social boundaries as they flicker from one user’s screen to another, creating
an online community of medievalists whose professional credentials have become virtually
irrelevant.
We are interested in the democratizing effect of this relatively open conversation, and we
see memes as a visible manifestation of a new kind of dialogue that is bringing academics
into conversation with other interested parties. In some circles, this kind of interaction
between trained scholars and the broader public is known as ‘para-academia’, an alternative
to the traditionally exclusive world of the ivory tower. In other words, with the advent of
digital media, those who have an interest in medieval culture are now able to contribute and
share their ideas, whether they have institutional affiliations or not. Medieval memes are
one component of the collective online discussion about the Middle Ages that is happening
now and will undoubtedly continue in the future. We believe that trained medievalists and
professional artists have a virtual obligation to engage in such open discussions.
Of course, entry into the conversation still depends upon financial or class status, the
availability of technology and access to education, which means that the discussion tends to be
dominated by those in the wealthier nations of the developed world. Given those parameters,
324
however, the use of the internet to make medieval memes does encourage a breadth of
information sharing that is unprecedented in human history. And, just as importantly, medieval
memes make the Middle Ages as fun (and funny) as they ought to be.
In what follows, we discuss the origin of the term meme and the history of the practice of
meme-making. We also offer examples of medieval memes, which we hope will both amuse and
inspire. In the spirit of creativity and contribution that courses through the digital humanities,
we have created a Tumblr site, medievalmemes.tumblr.com, where you can view most of the
images discussed below. While there, you can also link to meme generator websites and create
your own medieval meme.
What is a meme?
The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.2
Dawkins identified the meme as a unit of culture that was able to replicate itself and evolve
via transmission. He defines the meme as follows:
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via
sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to
brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or
reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in
his articles and lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading
from brain to brain.3
This notion of replicating units of culture has garnered very different receptions across
academic disciplines, among general audiences and over time. Many of the initial reviews of
Dawkins’s work – particularly among scientists and anthropologists – were extremely negative,
primarily criticizing the lack of specificity in defining the meme. In The Extended Phenotype
(1982), Dawkins refined his idea, clarifying the distinction between units of information that
inhabit the brain and their products in the world. In a recent application of Dawkins’s theory
to medieval studies, Tom Tyler wrote, ‘Rather than considering the cultural trait or artifact in
its own right, we must now suppose that an individual has been infected by a meme, which
then manifests in a mode of behavior or the production of a concrete object.’4
Once the ‘meme meme’, to borrow Tyler’s playful turn of phrase, infected internet culture,
the word was used to refer to the kind of visual images described in this chapter. Dawkins’s
efforts to identify and define the building blocks of cultural transmission have produced a
fascinating, and presumably unanticipated result: whether or not scholars agree that memes
can be identified as units of culture, they undoubtedly exist in cyberspace. Dawkins’s work
has spawned a new cultural phenomenon that is real and visible in the new millennium.
What is more, that phenomenon has followed an amazing trajectory, originating among a
select group of specialists with expertise in computer programming. Over time, those with
the skills needed to produce an internet meme created new tools called meme generators,
allowing a much broader public to work with the technology. Now, anyone with a basic
Medieval Memes 325
understanding of computers can produce a meme on any topic. In the following section, we
explore the history of meme-making technology, examining the shift from meme generation
as the property of the few to the development and circulation of memes by the many.
Who’s the meme-maker now, Dog?

In internet culture, the word meme is a colloquial term for an image macro, once the domain
of graphic designers and coders with specialized knowledge of web coding languages and
image manipulation tools (e.g. Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint). Static or non-animated
memes are comprised of images with text, usually at least 18 point Impact font in white, all-
capital letters, with a three-point black stroke around them. The font is bold in width and
easy to read when placed in front of almost any type of image, and it is accessible across all
computer platforms.
An animated meme takes a series of related images and composites them together to create
what is known as a GIF. A GIF or Graphic Interchange Format is a type of bitmapped image,
meaning that it can be viewed on a computer display using pixels. GIFs are easily used on the
web because of their small file size, making them internet-ready by virtue of quick load time.
Compositing multiple GIF images together creates a ‘flip book’ type of animation. Users can
interact with the image in a gaming-type scenario when the meme is created through Flash
Actionscript code. Once popular on the web, Flash animation has recently begun to be phased
out online due to its incompatibility with Apple devices. Application and game-based memes
are now created using cross-platform compatible coding languages, replacing the Flash-based
applications but accomplishing much the same result.
Another version of the internet meme comes in the form of sites known as ‘single-serving
sites’ (SSSs). These sites feature only one webpage (instead of a series of pages linked together)
with a tiled image repeating in the background. The text is superimposed over the entire
page and often includes a looping sound that cannot be controlled by the user. These sites
seemingly go against all the rules of internet design, with large intrusive sound files, tiled
images that overtake the page and text that is made unattractive on purpose. The site www.
ytmnd.com, otherwise known as ‘You’re the Man Now Dog’, exemplifies this internet sub-
culture by combining a single-serving site and an image of Sean Connery with the text and
sound clip ‘You’re the man now, Dog’, a line from his movie Finding Forrester (2000). This
site is so popular that the acronym YTMND has become virtually synonymous with SSS.
While there are SSSs all over the internet, www.ytmnd.com represents the use of memes as
single-serving sites.
Due to the technical skills needed to produce early memes, they were very much the
jurisdiction of those with access to certain types of software. Cross-platform and device-
compatible coding languages such as Javascript, PHP, and others replaced much of the Flash
coding, and the meme generator was born. Interestingly, most meme generators hold true to
the original text format, even though the use of a large point Impact font may no longer be
necessary. This seems to be an aesthetic choice on the part of the designers, a kind of stylistic
nod to their programming forebears.
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Meme generator technology circumvents the need for any graphic editing software; the
only technical requirement is access to the internet. Users can simply create a meme by
selecting an image, inserting the text, deciding on the language to use and hitting the generate
button. The generator then offers an easy way to share the image across social media and web
platforms. The click of a share button allows meme designers to circulate their work, which,
of course, is the primary function of internet memes: to be duplicated and passed along.
Creating a meme with medieval content has now become easy for any internet user to
accomplish. This ease of access has opened a creative flow of image and idea sharing between
professional scholars and the broader public. From a graphic design and/or web design point
of view, many medieval memes are less than innovative. They frequently rely on standard
imagery and they rarely use groundbreaking compositional devices or cutting-edge designs.
On the contrary, most memes follow a kind of template that is put in place by the web
designers who create the generator site. Users are limited to images that have been chosen for
them, and their text only appears in a given font type, size, styling and placement. Still, within
those constraints, meme creators have produced a wide variety of examples, some of which
we discuss in the following section.
What is the Bayeux Tapestry Meme?

One of the best-known medieval memes was designed sometime around 2002, by Bjorn
Karnebogen and Gerd Jungbluth, two students at the Kunsthochschule für Medien (Academy
of Media Arts) in Cologne, Germany. They created an interactive Flash application called
The Historic Tale Construction Kit.5 Even though the original generator was eventually
removed from the internet, the site’s popularity inspired a replica that appears here:
http://bayeux.datensalat.net.
The designers expressed an interest in the interactive or participatory nature of their
work, frequently referring to users as ‘authors’ who are ‘essential parts of the whole.’6 The
application allows users to drag and drop figures, animals, architectural structures and other
images into a frame, where they can formulate their ‘own stories’ by dragging ‘images to the
canvas to compose story panels.’ It is also possible to ‘click the canvas to enter text,’ which
appears in a font that closely resembles the design of the embroidered letters in the original
work of art.
The background is rendered using Photoshop to resemble plain linen cloth, worn with
age and sewn together in places. A sandy beige colour, the field initially appears with the
pale red silhouettes of two figures on horseback brandishing shields and spears. A sidebar
at the left explains the activity, with a tool kit for editing your creation and a start button at
the bottom.
When you click the start button, the silhouetted figures disappear, leaving a blank space
available for your work and the tool kit is replaced with a selection of images that resemble
bits of embroidered fabric. Five tabs offer a selection of ‘beasts’, ‘misc’, ‘brave’, ‘folc’ and
‘buildings’. Once you have arranged a scene from these elements, you can mirror, enlarge,
miniaturize or rotate them to create a narrative. Text can also be typed into text boxes at
Medieval Memes 327
any location. By engaging in the creative process in this way, you are reinventing the Bayeux
Tapestry in a new context. Rather than passively receiving the imagery and/or information,
you actively engage with the object, rearranging the composition, adding new text, and
completely altering the meaning and function of the medieval work. Generating such medieval
memes makes the Middle Ages present in the modern world, and it changes the way that
contemporary people interact with medieval art. In fact, it is entirely possible that a visitor to
the Bayeux Tapestry meme site has never encountered the original object before making her
own rendition of it.
Once completed, your design resembles a panel from the eleventh-century embroidery
commonly known as the Bayeux Tapestry. The so-called Bayeux Tapestry is a 220-foot-long
embroidery depicting the Battle of Hastings in 1066, probably made in England shortly
after the historical events.7 A unique and fascinating work of medieval art, the textile has
influenced generations of viewers in astounding ways. As Martin Foys, Karen Overbey and
Dan Terkla put it in the introduction to their recent collection of essays on the subject, the
Bayeux Tapestry has long been a ‘visual and historical magnet, pulling on both the popular
and academic imagination.’8
The Historic Tale Construction Kit allowed users from across the globe to play with
the embroidery in a direct way, creating their own variations on a medieval theme. Many
of the resulting designs are humorous, often incorporating amusing messages in a quasi-
Shakespearian ‘medieval-ese.’ For instance, one user offered a reference to the 2006 Samuel
L. Jackson film, Snakes on a Plane. (http://www.medievalsoap.ytmnd.com/) The image
includes a boat at the centre, with two shields artfully placed to resemble airplane wings.
A photograph of a snake coils itself around one end of the boat, and a figure at the lower
left wields an axe. The text reads, ‘Tis it! I hath had it with these mother trysting serpents
on thine mother trysting flying barge!,’ a medieval translation of Jackson’s line, ‘Enough is
enough! I have had it with these motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane.’ Visually,
the image offers a collage of slick modern imagery in the body of the snake and the richly
textured fabrics of the Bayeux Tapestry; the text plays upon the same odd juxtaposition,
making jokes about both the formality of ‘medieval’ language and the campness of the
contemporary movie.
In fact, many of the Bayeux Tapestry memes mashed the eleventh-century imagery with
modern popular culture. For example, in ‘autobotsrollethout,’ the user arranged a collage of
elements from the Tapestry to create a giant robotic figure intended to recall a transformer, a
popular children’s toy. (http://www.autobotsrollethout.ytmnd.com) Transformers are vehicles
that morph into robots, some of whom are called ‘autobots,’ and ‘roll out’ is a common
command for them. Their memorable slogan – and the song from the related television
show – proclaims that they are ‘robots in disguise.’ The meme’s text reads, ‘Transformers’
across the top of the page, with ‘autobots rolleth out’ and ‘buildings in disguise’ to the left
and right of the figure’s head.
Some designs are animated, such as ‘medievalwry’ in which two figures are fighting. The
ultimate victor pushes the other aside, the screen turns blue for a moment, then the dominant
fighter throws ten knives from each of his fingers into the other character, who falls down to
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the right. After that, a horse falls from above and the word ‘wryyyyyy’ appears across the top
of the panel. ‘Wryyyy’ is a transliteration of the Japanese for useless or futile, often used in
anime, manga and video games when a character overwhelms a weaker enemy with quick and
repeated attacks. Once again, the meme offers users an opportunity to recast certain favourite
elements of contemporary popular culture as medieval fantasies (http://www.medievalwry.
ytmnd.com). It is also no surprise that internet gaming culture plays a role in many memes,
medieval or not.
Another interesting feature of the Bayeux Tapestry meme is the use of sound; in fact, the
creations are technically examples of YTMNDs, as described above. Despite the wide variety
of visual elements, each Bayeux Tapestry meme is set to the same piece of music, Heather
Dales’s recording of a fifteenth-century English Christmas carol, This Endris Night.
Many prominent scholars have discussed the haunting presence of sound in the medieval
work, particularly with regard to the use of the word hic, meaning ‘here’ or ‘in this place.’
As Richard Brilliant writes, ‘throughout its narrative, the textile adjusts its composition to
accommodate a graphic rhetoric of sound amidst its registers of images and inscriptions. The
end result is a visual translation of a dimension of meaning fully present, but unrecognized or
ignored.’9 Brilliant almost invites the creation of the Bayuex Tapestry meme, lamenting the
silence of the medieval embroidery and even referring to the imagery that evokes ‘conversation
and forms of vocal or oral address’ as ‘sound-bites.’ No longer ignored, sound is very much a
part of the Bayeux Tapestry memes.
In many ways, the Bayeux Tapestry has directly touched a much wider audience through its
reanimation as a twenty-first-century internet meme. And, the textile’s effects on subsequent
generations of viewers are multi-layered. As Foys, Overbey and Terkla put it, the embroidery
‘is multimedia … it is a cultural icon (and modern commodity),’ elements that perhaps
make it perfectly suited for replication in internet memes.10 The process of its reincarnation
involved Karnebogen and Jungbluth’s initial appreciation of the embroidery, and their
wonderfully creative interpretation of it as a platform for collaborative, interactive design.
Once they provided the tools in an open-access format, users from across the globe were able
to rearrange, duplicate, and redefine the works’ meanings while preserving much of the same
visual language.
Not all medieval memes function in the same way, however. As we demonstrate in the
following examples, textual references to the European Middle Ages sometimes transform
contemporary visual imagery, while in other cases, very little reference to any aspect of
‘authentic’ medieval culture survives.
What’s Beyond the Bayeux Tapestry Meme?

The Medieval History Ryan Gosling Meme is a cult favourite among medievalists of all
persuasions. Taking a different approach, the Ryan Gosling meme uses modern visuals
with dense verbal references to the history and culture of medieval Europe. Still shots of
Canadian heartthrob Ryan Gosling are paired with humorous statements about medieval
history. Originally, the Ryan Gosling ‘Hey Girl’ series of memes was not particular to the
Middle Ages; the images first appeared on a Tumblr site called ‘Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling,’ and
Medieval Memes 329
the phrases were silly but often straightforward, such as ‘Hey Girl, Paris just isn’t the same
without you.’
The popularity of the series soared, and several single-themed derivatives emerged, such as
Feminist Ryan Gosling, which has since spawned a book, and threads devoted to everything
from typography to biostatistics. Each time, the utterance begins with the phrase ‘Hey Girl,’
Gosling’s come-on line that echoes the Bayeux Tapestry’s hic. Once the image has called out
to the viewer in this way, the language shifts into highly specialized content that is intended
to appeal to audiences with extensive knowledge of a given subject, in this case: medieval
culture.
In some examples, the reference is not too difficult to decode, such as the image of Gosling
on the phone with the accompanying text reading, ‘Hey Girl, Give me a second, I’m calling
the museum to complain about the tour guide we heard use the term “dark ages.”’ (http://
medievalhistorianryangosling.tumblr.com/page/4). Others are far more obtuse, such as the
black-and-white profile shot of Gosling with stubbly facial hair that reads, ‘Hey Girl, Do
I think we should move in together? Hmmm … that’s a toughie because you know at the
moment I’m all about Peter Abelard, so I’m going to have to go with sic et non.’ (http://
medievalhistorianryangosling.tumblr.com/page/5)
The Ryan Gosling meme operates primarily on a verbal level, but without the visual
imagery, the joke would fall flat. Like the Bayeux Tapestry meme, Medieval Ryan Gosling
offers a collage of specialized insider knowledge about the past and broadly accessible tropes
from popular culture, but in this case, the scenario is reversed. With so many dense inside
jokes, the Ryan Gosling meme almost serves the opposite function of the democratizing
Bayeux Tapestry meme. Medieval Ryan Gosling re-creates the ivory towers of academia in
cyberspace, only offering access to those in the know.
Judgemental Medieval Saint (http://www.quickmeme.com/Judgemental-Medieval-Saint)
operates similarly, but with a lesser-known image paired with more accessible language. Using
a photograph of a sixteenth-century reliquary bust, probably depicting a companion of St
Ursula, the meme departs from a relatively obscure visual image. New digital images of the
work appeared on the internet in 2011, when the sculpture was included in the travelling
exhibition, Treasures of Heaven. Once juxtaposed with reproachful statements like, ‘yes, of
course it’s a sin,’ the memes reinvent the emotional impact of the figure. For its original
audiences, the woman’s slightly cocked chin and slanted eyes probably suggested sympathy,
an invitation to intercede in prayer. But, somehow the addition of phrases like ‘You’re going
out looking like that?’ and ‘O Rly?’ transform the same expression into a condescending
semi-snarl.
The same dynamic between image and text can be said to characterize Medieval Gangsta
(http://www.quickmeme.com/Medieval-Gangsta/?upcoming). In this example, a brown-
skinned man stands in a modern office wearing a striped t-shirt and chain mail. He gazes
knowingly at the viewer while throwing a gang sign with his left hand. Behind him, we
can see stark cubicles and the dreaded talkative co-worker approaching. Captions offer such
mash-ups as ‘Sippin on … mead and juice’, a reference to the Snoop Dogg song ‘Gin and
Juice’, and ‘Dr. Tre…Buchet’, a pun on the hip hop mogul Dr Dre and the medieval war
machine, the trebuchet. Here, there is a playful exchange between the man’s undoubtedly
330
medieval attire, and some very familiar references to contemporary culture (e.g. hip-hop).
There is also a sense of shared misery in the banality of the modern workplace. We are clearly
observing a set of office mates goofing off at work, but we are not made to feel unwelcome.
On the contrary, the figure in chain mail makes eye contact with us, perhaps giving us a look
of gentle chastisement, as if we were the practical joker now taking his picture. The whole
tone is irreverent, and both visual and verbal references to the European Middle Ages are
quite understandable. The text complicates matters a bit, but rarely sidesteps into the densely
specialized texts of something like Medieval Ryan Gosling.
The imagery of the chain mail recurs in another significant meme: Medieval Kitty. In the
image, a green-eyed cat gazes off to the left with a chain mail hood photo-shopped over its
head. Users have added any number of tag lines, in English, Spanish, Arabic and a range of other
languages. One of our favourite examples declares: ‘Come at me bro, I would own you.’
This coupling of a cat picture with nonsensical text borders on the meme genre known
as a LOLcat. Beginning with an early example called ‘I Can Has Cheezburger?,’ the LOLcat
phenomenon was instrumental to the development of medieval memes. The original LOLcat
(Laugh/ing-Out-Loud-cat) portrayed a fluffy grey cat with the title phrase emblazoned in
broken English across the top and bottom of the frame. It gained rapid popularity and
remains among the pantheon of early internet memes. Recently, LOLcat memes have even
crossed into the world of ‘high art,’ appearing in a 2012 exhibition at the Framer’s Gallery
in London. The show featured original works by designers, photographers, illustrators, and
other artists, and it was called ‘LOLCAT – TEH EXHIBISHUN.’11
In another interesting case, the popularity of internet cat memes has spawned a renewed
interest in historical imagery of cats (and mice). At first, researchers discovered nineteenth-
century photographs by Harry Whittier Frees that depicted cats in amusing scenarios. Some
were wearing human clothing, others played on see-saws or drank from tea cups at elegantly
set tables. From there, such established historical institutions as the British Library began to
publicize earlier images of cats – particularly those that appear in the margins of medieval
manuscripts. The title of the BL’s blog post? ‘Lolcats of the Middle Ages.’12
What interests us the most about the phenomenon of the medieval meme is its inherent
inclusivity. With the exception of some highly specialized examples (such as the Ryan Gosling
meme), many medieval memes allow professionally trained medievalists and ‘amateurs’ open
access to the same jokes. As the case of the LOLcats demonstrates, scholars, artists, historians
and the general public are presently involved in a genuine dialogue about the links between
past and present visual cultures. Surely, that kind of conversation is invaluable, and we hope
to see it continue and develop in the future. To quote literary historian Carolyn Dinshaw,
such broad interest in medieval culture should make us think about ‘the sources of scholarly
research and knowledge, and the potentials for opening them up’.13
What’s the Future of the Middle Ages?

When we create medieval memes, we are inventing a cyborg Middle Ages for a new generation.
The medieval becomes what we make it – some fact, some fiction, some funny. And, really,
isn’t that all that we have of the ‘real’ Middle Ages? No one can recreate those historical
Medieval Memes 331
moments without error, omissions or embellishment; medieval memes allow us a venue

for imagining the past in creative and humorous ways. They manifest a glorious collision
between the open and collaborative nature of the internet and the relatively closed world of
academia. Participants on all sides have begun to generate images, blog posts and tweets that
expand our understanding of the Middle Ages. Medieval memes allow the general public to
share knowledge and ideas, and at the same time, they offer trained professional historians
the opportunity to communicate with wider audiences. Through humour, they encourage
creative and intellectual collaborations, and make the Middle Ages comfortable, familiar and
interesting to modern audiences.
We’d like to close by urging you to create more medieval memes. Please do visit
medievalmemes.tumblr.com and add your unique vision to the mix.
Notes
1. Maggie Williams would like to thank her husband, Joe Tarlo, for helping to shape the topic of this
chapter.
2. Dawkins, R. (2006), The Selfish Gene (30th Anniversary Edition). Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, p. 16.
3. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 192.
4. Tyler, T. (2012), Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
p. 189.
5. http://www.netzspannung.org/cat/servlet/CatServlet?cmd=document&subCommand=show&for
ward=/netzkollektor/output/project.xml&entryId=84868&lang=en.
6. http://www.netzspannung.org/cat/servlet/CatServlet?cmd=document&subCommand=show&forw
ard=%2fnetzkollektor%2foutput%2fproject.xml&entryId=84868&section=content&lang=en.
7. For an up-to-date bibliography on the Bayeux Tapestry, see Foys, M., Overbey, K., and Terkla, D.
(eds) (2009), The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press. See also
Martin Foys’ The Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition, (New Version, 2013).
8. Foys, M., Overbey, K., and Terkla, D. (eds) (2009), ‘Introduction: Fifty Years of (Re)Producing
the Bayeux Tapestry,’ The Bayeux Tapestry, p. xii.
9. Brilliant, R., ‘Making Sounds Visible in the Bayeux Tapestry’, in M. Foys, K. Overbey, and D.
Terkla (eds), The Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, p. 71.
10. Foys et al., The Bayeux Tapestry, p. xii.
11. The Huffington Post, 11/10/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/11/lolcat-
exhibition_n_1958337.html.
12. http://www.britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/01/lolcats-of-the-middle-ages.
html.
13. Dinshaw, C. (2012), How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of
Time. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, p. xii.
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Notes on Contributors
Amanda K. Allen is assistant professor of Children’s Literature at Eastern Michigan

University. Her primary research focuses on the intersection of mid-century adolescent girl
romance novels, Cold War studies and women’s literary and employment history. She is also
interested in Harry Potter fanfiction, particularly in terms of its potential to queer definitions
of children’s literature.
Susan Aronstein is professor of English and associate director of Honors at the University
of Wyoming. She is the author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics
of Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave, 2005) and the co-editor (with Tison Pugh) of Disney’s
Middle Ages: A Fairy Tale and Fantasy Past (New York: Palgrave, 2012). Her articles on
medieval Arthurian romance, medieval film, medievalism and popular culture have appeared
in numerous books and journals, including Exemplaria, Prose Studies, Assays, Cinema Journal,
Theatre Survey, Women’s Studies and Studies in Medievalism.
Gail Ashton is an independent scholar, formerly at the Universities of Manchester and

Birmingham, and a poet. Her academic books include The Generation of Identity in Late
Medieval Hagiography: speaking the saint (Routledge, 2000), Teaching Chaucer (Palgrave:
2007), co-edited with Louise Sylvester, Chaucer: a reader’s guide (Continuum, 2008), Medieval
Romance in Context (Continuum, 2010) and Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (Palgrave,
Macmillan, 2012), co-edited with Daniel T. Kline. She also wrote Geoffrey Chaucer: a life
(Brief Lives, Hesperus Press, 2011). See www.gailashtonwriting.wordpress.com
Candace Barrington is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. She has
written American Chaucers (2007) and contributed articles to Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist
World (2009), American Literary History (2009), European Journal of English Studies (2011),
Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (2012), Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (2012), Digital
Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages (2013) and Cinema Chauceriana. Currently, she and
334
Jonathan Hsy direct the Global Chaucers project (http://www.globalchaucers.wordpress.

com), an archive of modern translations and appropriations of The Canterbury Tales.
Stewart Brookes first came across Beowulf at the age of seven at his local primary school. It
was a distorted, muddled version (he now realizes), but this early meeting set in motion a
chain of events that led to him teaching the original so that he could progress to watching
distorted, muddled film versions. Currently, he is research associate on DigiPal (digipal.eu),
an Old English palaeography project at King’s College London which uses software to draw
boxes around letter-forms in digitized images of eleventh-century manuscripts (including the
one that contains Beowulf). His seven-year-old self would be pleased to learn that his efforts
to colour inside the lines turned out to be crucial for furthering his career as an academic.
Brian Cogan is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communications at Molloy
College. Together with Jeff Massey, he co-authored Everything I Ever Needed to Know About
_________* I Learned from Monty Python. In addition, Cogan is the author, co-author, and
editor of a ton o’ books, including The Encyclopedia of Punk. He recently released his first
novel, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. He is no one to be trifled with.
Lesley Coote is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Hull, where she
teaches Chaucer, medieval romance literature and culture, historical film (including the epic
and the Hollywood ‘western’), ‘Arthuriana’ and Robin Hood studies. She has written widely
on the prophetic, apocalyptic and romance texts of the Middle Ages, and the depiction of the
Middle Ages (and its literature) in film and digital cultures. She has published Prophecy and
Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/York Medieval
Texts, 2000), and recently produced a revised edition of The Canterbury Tales (Ware:
Wordsworth, 2011).
Louise D’Arcens is professor in the English Literatures Program at the University of

Wollongong. Her publications include Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in
Australian Literature 1840-1910, Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars and
Laughing at the Middle Ages: Comic Medievalism (Boydell and Brewer, 2014). International
Medievalism and Popular Culture also appeared in 2014. She is the author of many published
articles and book chapters on medievalism.
Elizabeth Emery is professor of French at Montclair State University where she teaches
medieval and nineteenth-century French literature and culture. She is the author of books,
articles and essay anthologies related to the reception of medieval art and architecture in
nineteenth-century France and America, most recently, Medievalism: Key Critical Terms,
edited with Richard Utz (Boydell and Brewer, 2014).
Laurie Finke is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Kenyon College. She is the author
of Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing (1992) and Women’s Writing in English: The Middle
Ages (1999), and, with Martin Shichtman, of Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages
on Film (2009) and King Arthur and the Myth of History (2004). She is an editor of the
Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory and co-editor with Shichtman of Medieval Texts
and Contemporary Readers. She has also authored numerous articles on medieval literature,
medievalism, literary theory, feminist theory and film.
Rob Gossedge is lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, where he specializes in

the literature and cultural afterlife of the Middle Ages. He has published numerous articles
on Chaucer, Arthurian myth, outlaw legends, the twentieth-century Catholics Revival and
Welsh fiction in English.
Ann F. Howey, associate professor at Brock University, teaches courses on young people’s
literature, fantasy and science fiction, and the Arthurian legend. She has published Rewriting
the Women of Camelot (Greenwood, 2001) and co-authored, with Stephen R. Reimer,
A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500-2000) (Brewer, 2006), as well as publishing
articles about Arthurian fiction and music, and young people’s literature and film.
Jonathan Hsy is associate professor of English at George Washington University. He is the

author of Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (2013) and
has published articles on travel narrative and language contact in the Early Modern Women
Journal (2010), The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime, Narratives, Identity
and Culture (2011), postmedieval (2013) and The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare
to Alien Tongues (2014). He blogs at In The Middle (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com),
serves on the Editorial Board of the emergent Digital Medieval Disability Glossary and directs
(with Candace Barrington) the Global Chaucers project (http://www.globalchaucers.wordpress.
com), an archive of modern translations and appropriations of The Canterbury Tales.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly is professor of English at Northeastern University. She has published
in such journals as Arthuriana, Exemplaria, Studies in Philology and Year’s Work in Studies in
Medievalism. She is co-editor (with Marina Leslie) of Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, co-editor (with Tison Pugh) of Queer Movie Medievalisms
and author of A.S. Byatt and Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages.
Her new project is an eco-materialist study of literary environments, titled ‘Lost and Invented
Ecologies.’
Karolyn Kinane is associate professor of Medieval and Early Modern Literature in the English
department at Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH. She publishes on medieval saints,
spirituality, mysticism, medievalism and pedagogy. Most recently, she edited a special issue of
Relegere on New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms (December, 2013), co-edited with Michael
A. Ryan on End of Days: Essays on the Apocalypse from Antiquity to Modernity (McFarland
2009) and co-edited with Meriem Pagès Televising the Past: Small Screen Medievalisms
(McFarland, 2015).
336
Daniel T. Kline has chapters in a number of books. He also edited Medieval Children’s Literature
(Routledge, 2003), the Continuum Handbook of Medieval British Literature (Continuum,
2009) and Digital Gaming Re-Imagines the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2014), and co-edited,
with Gail Ashton, Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The
author/webmaster of The Electronic Canterbury Tales (www.kankedort.net), Kline is professor
and chair of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage, United States.
Jeff Massey is professor of English language and literature (medieval-classical-linguistical)

at Molloy College. Together with Brian Cogan, he co-authored Everything I Ever Needed
to Know About _________* I Learned from Monty Python. Elsewise, Massey has published
articles (and comics) on topics ranging from Anglo-Saxon philology to Victorian mimesis
and is the co-editor of Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern
Imagination. He has never read Proust.
Daniel Nastali is an independent scholar living in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written
on the Arthurian legend in historical fiction, children’s literature, popular music and other
topics dealing with literary history. For seven years he served as bibliographer for the North
American Branch of the International Arthurian Society. He is the co-author, with Phillip
Boardman, of The Arthurian Annals: The Tradition in English from 1250 to 2000 (Oxford,
2004).
Meriem Pagès is associate professor of English at Keene State College. She received a
PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2007.
Since then, she has published on the relationship between Latin Christendom and Islam in the
Middle Ages, popular medievalisms and pedagogy.
Sarah Peverley is a medievalist, book historian and BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.
She is professor at the University of Liverpool, where she teaches and researches medieval
literature and history. Her current research focuses on literature produced during the Wars
of the Roses and she is working on a cultural history of the mermaid. She also directs The
Liverpool University Players, a group dedicated to performing early drama for the public and
storytelling in the local community.
Raluca L. Radulescu is a reader in medieval literature at Bangor University and co-director of

the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Bangor and Aberystwyth Universities.
She has published extensively on medieval romance, chronicle and political writing. Her
media work includes a documentary, ‘The Sword in the Stone’, for the National Geographic
TV channel’s series ‘The Ancient X-Files’ (2011) and consultancy on BBC radio programmes
(medieval pilgrimage, Tennyson). She edits the Journal of the International Arthurian Society
(JIAS), a Bibliography of the International Arthurian Society (BIAS) and recently published
Romance and Its Contexts in Fifteenth-century England: Politics, Piety and Penitence
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013)
Lauren C. Razzore is currently an associate professor of Art and Chair of the Department
of Art at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She teaches all forms of Digital and
Interactive Multimedia including web design, graphic design, video production and 2D
animation. Professor Razzore is a frequent exhibitor of her own creative works in web design,
photography and interactive art as well as an active professional designer. (www.lrazzore.
com)
Carol L. Robinson’s most recent works include ‘The Song Remains the Same: Crossing
Intersections to Create an Ethical World via an Adaptation of Everyman for Everyone’ (co-
authored with Daniel-Raymond Nadon, Studies in Medievalism, 2014) and ‘Neomedievalism
Unplugged’ (co-authored with Pamela Clements, Studies in Medievalism, 2012). She co-edited
with Pamela Clements Neomedievalism in the Media: Essays on Film, Television and Electronic
Games (2012). In 2012, she premiered her first full-length documentary film, Listening to
You, Listening to Me, Listening to Every Man, Woman and Child: A Neomedieval, Deaf/
Hearing, Community Theatre Experience (http://www.houndingproductions.org/everyone.
html), which has been revised and published for DVD, along with supplemental materials for
course lessons (2014).
Margaret Rogerson has retired as associate professor at the University of Sydney and is an
honorary associate of the Department of English. Her recent publications include a monograph
on the modern production of the medieval York Plays, Playing a Part in History: The York
Mysteries 1951 to 2006 (2009) and an edited collection The York Mystery Plays: Performance
in the City (2011). She is a patron of the York Guilds’ Mystery Plays (2014).
Cory James Rushton is an associate professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, in
Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the co-editor of A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance
(D. S. Brewer, 2009); The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain and Sexual Culture in
the Literature of Medieval Britain (D. S. Brewer, 2007 and 2014); and editor of Disability and
Medieval Law: History, Literature, Society (CSP, 2013). He has written on medieval romance,
zombies, Malory’s Morte Darthur and medieval sexuality.
Wendy Scase has published widely on Middle English literature and manuscript studies. She
has recently edited The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile Edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011) and The Making of the Vernon Manuscript
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). She is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature
at the University of Birmingham.
Philippa Semper teaches and researches medieval literature and modern fantasy at the
University of Birmingham. She has published on Old English texts, text-image relationships,
medievalism in fantasy literature and also on teaching and learning medieval material. Current
work includes a study of 1920s’ fantasy texts and collaboration with Wolverhampton Art
Gallery in relation to their 2014/2015 exhibition ‘The Making of Mordor’.
338
Robert S. Sturges is professor of English at Arizona State University. He has taught courses
on medieval literature, on critical theory and on opera. His publications include the books
Medieval Interpretation (1990), Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory (2000), Dialogue and
Deviance: Male-Male Desire in the Dialogue Genre (2006), Law and Sovereignty in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance (2011), and an edition and translation of Aucassin and Nicolette
(2015), as well as essays on medieval literature, critical theory, and medievalism. His new
book on medieval drama is forthcoming.
Fiona Tolhurst recently served Acadia University as the 2013–14 Harrison McCain Visiting
Professor of Medieval English, and took up a new post as an associate professor of English
at Florida Gulf Coast University in August 2014. She is the author of two books on Geoffrey
of Monmouth and his early vernacular translators as well as the editor of a special issue of
Arthuriana and co-editor with Bonnie Wheeler of a collection of essays in honour of Maureen
Fries.
Jason Tondro is an assistant professor of English at the College of Coastal Georgia, where he
teaches writing, comics, world literature and cultural studies. He is the author of Superheroes
of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (McFarland
2011) and his articles on Alan Moore’s poetry, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and the comic
Kill Shakespeare have appeared in ImageText and the International Journal of Comic Art. He
blogs at doctorcomics.blogspot.com
Renée Ward is an instructor for Wilfrid Laurier University’s Medieval Studies program.
Her primary areas of research are in medieval literature, monster studies and medievalism,
especially in the romance and young adult fantasy genres. She has published articles on Middle
English romances such as Lybeaus Desconus, Octavian and William of Palerne, as well as on
medievalism in modern Arthuriana and the Harry Potter series.
Angela Jane Weisl is professor of English and director of Graduate Studies at Seton Hall
University. She is the author of Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in
Chaucer’s Romance (1993) and The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in
Contemporary Culture (2003), and the co-author, with Tison Pugh, of Medievalisms: Making
the Past in the Present (2012). With Cindy Carlson, she edited Constructions of Widowhood
and Virginity in the Middle Ages (1999), and with Tison Pugh, MLA Approaches to Teaching
Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems (2005).
Maggie M. Williams recently completed her first monograph publication, Icons of Irishness
from the Middle Ages to the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is
currently an associate professor of Art History at William Paterson University in New Jersey,
where she teaches everything from cave painting to contemporary art, with a few nods to
the Middle Ages here and there. She is also proud to be a founding member of The Material
Collective (www.thematerialcolletive.org).
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Index
Ackroyd, Peter 6, 153, 244–50, 339 chivalry 12, 59, 61, 67, 71, 75, 98, 118, 123, 201,
Action-Adventure Game 99, 100 204, 207, 209, 238, 246
adaptation 5, 28, 35, 48, 57, 63, 71, 105, 125, comics (books) vii, 1, 3, 6, 7, 283, 291–309, 336,
127–31, 135–9, 141, 152–4, 156, 243–4, 338, 341, 342, 344, 345, 348, 349
247–8, 271, 285, 295, 298–300, 337, 342 Corpus Christi 32, 41–2, 45–7, 314, 320, 340,
adaption 131, 164 341, 346
animation 5, 16, 111, 127, 129, 322, 325, 337 Crusaders 104, 112, 237, 239, 258, 259
Arthurian fiction 249, 349 Crusades 99, 252, 257–9, 261
Arthurian legend vii, 6, 17, 24, 59, 117, 122, 158,
203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 213, 214, 216, 219, Dante vii, 4, 6, 7, 24, 28–9, 99–102, 162, 163,
221, 248, 249, 301, 302, 308, 309, 335, 336 179, 291–300, 340, 342
Arthurian romance 14, 108, 224, 226, 243 digital vi, 5, 6, 93–7, 99, 101–2, 105, 110, 122,
Australia 3, 6, 16, 177–86, 192–3, 215, 222, 271, 153, 156, 194, 229, 289, 298, 312, 313–26,
288, 342, 343, 345, 347, 348 329, 331, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 344, 345,
AVISTA 68, 76 346, 347, 348
Disney v, 33, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 73, 110, 203,
Bayeux Tapestry 1, 2, 3, 6, 326, 327–9, 331, 345 206, 253, 261, 291, 295, 300, 305, 333, 344,
Beowulf vi, 5, 28, 61, 62, 63, 81–92, 99–100, 346, 348
102, 110, 113, 158, 163, 245, 250, 313, 316, drama 5, 22, 25, 29, 33, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
320, 334, 341, 344 49, 56, 118, 122, 135, 137, 201, 202, 245,
Broadway iv, 5, 11, 12, 15–21, 345 253, 255, 336, 338, 340, 344, 345, 346, 347
Druids/Druidry 224–6, 231, 308, 309, 346, 348
Camelot vi, vii, 7, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 19, 20,
115–21, 123, 168, 199, 200–3, 205–7, facsimile 99, 312, 313, 316, 337, 343
209–10, 215, 216, 218–20, 222, 241, 249, family vi, 5, 22, 29, 72, 73, 75, 84, 88, 104, 106,
264–5, 301–9, 335, 341, 342, 347 110, 115, 117–22, 127, 154, 168, 170–6,
CGI 85, 103, 104, 106, 107–10, 125, 129, 342, 343 179, 180, 193, 218, 236, 241, 255, 256, 261,
Chaucer, Geoffrey ii, v, 1, 2, 3, 5, 48–57, 60, 63, 264, 266, 269, 307, 347
66, 104, 113, 134–43, 147–56, 158, 160–1, fandom vii, 2, 6, 271, 273, 275, 277–90, 348, 349
163–6, 175, 176, 230, 233, 333–5, 338–42, fan fiction (see also fanvids) 288, 289, 347,
345–7 348, 349

352 Index
fantasy vi, 2, 3, 5, 65, 72–4, 82, 93, 95, 96–7, 101, Kempe, Margery vi, 6, 46, 66, 187, 189, 191,
103–7, 115–33, 140, 141, 153, 167, 168–9, 193–9, 344
174–5, 206, 214–15, 221, 230, 232, 234, King Arthur 6, 12, 16, 21, 23, 58–64, 99, 105, 108,
235, 241, 256, 261, 264, 269, 285, 303, 306, 114, 158, 159, 165, 201–13, 214, 216–20,
308–9, 322, 333, 335, 337, 338, 344, 346, 348 222, 229, 231, 234, 241, 250, 302–9, 335,
fanvids 279, 282–3, 287, 288 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 346
Fight Club 71, 74, 76 Knights Templar 6, 172, 238, 239, 240, 347
film (see also movies) vi, 21, 59, 62, 79, 81, 83,
85, 87, 89, 91, 103, 105–14, 124–7, 129, Lindisfarne Gospels 6, 191, 316, 320
131–3, 143, 186, 261, 262, 269, 289, 300,
335, 337, 342, 344, 346, 348 Malory 6, 14, 17, 105, 107, 108, 117, 122–3,
Full Metal Jousting 2, 67–71, 74–7 204, 208, 215, 217, 221, 243–50, 272, 337,
339, 341, 342, 346, 347
games vi, 3, 5, 7, 14, 29, 65, 70, 75, 82, 93–102, manuscripts vii, 7, 26, 32, 34, 200, 216, 266, 310,
110, 113, 124–33, 163, 164, 247, 273, 321, 330, 334, 346, 348
283–4, 302, 304, 328, 337 Medieval Times v, 3, 67, 69, 71, 72–3, 75
Gothic 95, 96, 104, 138, 153, 178, 179, 184–6, memes vii, 3, 6, 7, 322–31
267–8, 271, 344, 348, 349 Merlin vi, 2, 5, 64, 66, 115–23, 170, 203–9,
graphic novels 243, 306, 349 214–24, 244, 259, 264, 272, 283, 302–9,
Grendel 28, 30, 82–91, 99–100, 110 339, 340, 341, 347
Guinevere viii, 25, 108, 123, 184, 218, 219, metatheatre 12, 14, 17, 19
303, 306 Monty Python 11–21, 334, 336, 345, 347, 350
Morte Darthur 6, 108, 117, 221, 244–9, 250, 337,
Harry Potter vii, 2, 6, 7, 103, 113, 116, 136, 341, 347
263–73, 277–90, 333, 338, 343, 349 movie (see also film) 3, 6, 17, 18, 67, 70, 88,
heraldry 7, 182, 241 99, 100, 102, 113, 125, 129, 130, 208,
heritage vi, viii, 2, 3, 6, 17, 67, 102, 108, 110, 240, 253, 258, 260, 263, 267, 302, 325,
117, 149, 170, 178, 182–4, 200, 204–10, 327, 335
227, 229, 269, 312, 316, 317, 318 Mystery Plays 5, 32, 34–47, 337, 340, 343,
history 1, 3, 6, 14, 20, 22, 28, 40, 43, 44, 57, 345, 349
58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67–8, 74, 76–7, 97, 99,
105, 106–10, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 126, narrative 1, 2, 13, 15, 16, 24, 27, 35, 39, 50, 51,
131, 132, 138, 161, 167, 168, 175–85, 190, 55–6, 63–8, 72, 85, 88–90, 94–6, 101–2,
195–6, 199, 201–5, 216, 221, 224, 225, 227, 108, 122, 127, 129, 131, 149, 152, 154–9,
229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 236–44, 247–9, 162–4, 168–9, 176, 182–4, 205, 208,
261, 264, 272, 278, 285, 301–12, 315, 319, 214–19, 227, 244–6, 251, 254, 268–70, 277,
323, 324–8, 333, 335–6, 337, 338, 341, 344, 282–4, 289, 291, 293–5, 306, 307, 309, 326,
346, 347, 348, 349 328, 335, 338, 344, 345, 348
Holy Grail 11–21, 118, 122, 163, 173, 174, 206, neopagan vii, 223–35, 335, 346, 347
225, 234, 236–7, 249, 304, 344, 347 New Age vii, 6, 209, 223–33, 335, 346, 347
humour viii, 13–19, 85, 86, 90, 130, 136, 152, Norse 85, 88, 106, 224, 225, 226
177, 297, 302, 307, 331
opera v, 5, 7, 14, 24, 31, 57, 338, 339
indigenous 110, 147, 178, 182–5, 223
internet 6, 40, 71, 75, 139, 205, 224, 232, 278, Passion Plays 32–3, 42–4, 47, 344
283, 286, 288, 302, 312, 318, 319, 320, pedagogy 47, 66, 335, 336
322–31, 347, 348 pilgrimage 6, 56, 151, 154, 163, 188, 190, 191–6,
199, 229, 270, 292, 311, 336
jousting v, 2, 57, 67–78, 219 poetry vi, 25, 28, 87, 135, 147, 150, 151, 154–6,
Julian of Norwich vi, 6, 46, 66, 187–99, 339, 341, 157–66, 176, 180, 186, 224, 297, 338, 342,
342, 343, 344 343, 347
Index 353
Poulton, Mike v, 5, 6, 48–57, 244–50, 342 120, 122, 123, 133, 153, 157–7, 160, 171,
Pythonesque 12–20 173–6, 198, 214–21, 226, 238–42, 251,
272, 277–81, 287–90, 300–9, 326, 340,
quests vi, 1, 6, 12, 14, 21, 85, 96–7, 100, 102, 341, 347, 349
114, 128, 129, 132, 133, 167, 168–74, 182,
185, 218–19, 226, 232, 233, 241, 244, 248, television (see also TV) 12, 13, 15, 44, 58, 60,
249, 253, 258, 261, 302, 341, 342, 349 62, 63–71, 73–6, 81, 103, 113, 116, 122,
129, 132, 134–42, 210, 251, 256–8, 260,
Renaissance Faires 3, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73 262, 269, 279, 282, 288, 302–9, 327, 337,
retelling (see also stories) 6, 16, 62, 116, 142, 346, 348
153, 156, 214, 221, 244–50, 255, 306, 308, The Canterbury Tales ii, v, 5, 48, 52, 56–7, 60, 63,
339, 349 66, 113, 140, 142, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153,
Robin Hood vii, 1, 6, 7, 22, 29, 31, 105, 169, 164, 245, 334, 335, 339, 340, 342
181, 200, 240, 251, 253, 255–62, 334, 341, The Da Vinci Code 4, 114, 234, 236, 349
342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348 The Knights of Mayhem 67, 69–71, 73–6
role playing 82, 95, 102, 128, 235, 279, 283, 284, Tintagel vi, 6, 200–10, 308
285 translation 1, 91, 114, 140, 147–61, 164, 198,
Rowling, J. K. 6, 263–7, 271, 272–4, 277, 280, 243–7, 250, 292, 294, 296, 311, 327, 328,
282–9, 343, 345 338, 339, 341, 347
Royal Shakespeare Company/ RSC 5, 7, 6, 48, 49, tumblr 277, 279, 283–4, 288, 324, 328,
52–7, 244–7, 250, 342 329, 331
Ryan Gosling Meme 6, 328–30 TV (see also television) vi, 5, 13, 21, 30, 69, 70,
76, 79, 115, 122, 136, 137, 158, 159, 165,
saints 3, 46, 158, 188, 192, 193, 198, 229, 166, 253, 336
335, 345
simulation 5, 7, 82, 94, 95, 102, 125, 129–33, Warner Bros. 262, 269–70, 273, 282, 283,
345, 348 286–7, 289
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 1, 23, 62, 157, Wizard Wrock 7, 271, 279, 282, 287
158, 165, 214, 265, 339, 342
social networking vii, 6, 277, 278, 279, 281, 283, X-Men 287–300, 340
284, 285, 287, 289
Spamalot v, 5, 11–21, 243 young adult (literature) 6, 167–75, 217,
St Cuthbert Gospel 311–12, 315, 316, 319 252, 338
stories (see also retelling and narrative) 1, 3, 26, YouTube 29, 30, 31, 45, 70, 90, 165, 206, 277,
45, 49, 51, 61, 82, 94, 97, 106, 115, 116, 284, 285, 287, 289
354
355
356
357
358
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Medieval Afterlives in

The Medieval British Literature Handbook, edited by Daniel T. Kline

Edited by Gail Ashton

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2015

© Gail Ashton and Contributors, 2015

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2960-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Introduction: Living Medieval 1

Part 1 True To Life: In the Performance

1 Spamalot: Lovingly Ripping Off/Ripping on the Establishment 11

3 Medieval Religious Plays in England: Afterlives and New Lives

4 Staging Chaucer: Mike Poulton and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s

5 You Can’t Do This to Disney! Popular Medievalisms in the Classroom 58

6 Medieval Times: Tournaments and Jousting in Twenty-First-Century

7 From Anglo-Saxon to Angelina: Adapting Beowulf for Film 81

8 Contemporary Neo-Medieval Digital Gaming: An Overview of Genre 93

9 Survey of Twenty-First Century ‘Medieval’ Film 103

11 Electronic Tolkien: Characterization in Film and Video Games 124

12 The BBC Canterbury Tales (2003) 134

Part 3 More Than This: Reimaginings and Reappropriations

13 Global Chaucers 147

14 Silence in the Library? – Medievalist Poetry Shout-Out 157

16 Australian Medievalism: Time and Paradox 177

17 Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as Contemporary Cult Figures 187

18 Conjuring the Ghosts of Camelot: Tintagel and the Medievalism

Part 4 Avalon: Icons and Artefacts

19 Medievalism and Heroism in Arthurian Literature for Young People 213

20 New Age and Neopagan Medievalisms 223

21 Twenty-First-Century Templar 234

22 Malory’s Afterlives in Contemporary Culture 243

23 ‘We Are Robin Hood’: The Outlaw Tradition in Contemporary

24 Harry Potter and Medievalism 263

Part 5 The Space Between: New Media and Fandom

25 Social Networking, Participatory Culture and the Fandom World

26 ‘Nightcrawler’s Inferno’ and Other Hellish Tales: Comics Adaptations

27 From Camelot to Kaamelott: The Arthurian Legend in British,

28 Afterlives of Medieval Manuscripts 310

29 Medieval Memes 322

Notes on Contributors 333

a few of my favourite things ...

We’re off to see the wizard ...

Go Play Your Video Games

Who Wants to Live Forever?

For the website accompanying this book go to www.bloomsbury.com/medieval-afterlives

ACT ONE: A SILLY PLACE

ACT TWO: MONTY PYTHON AND ‘PYTHONESQUE’

ACT FIVE, er, THREE: THE HOLY GRAIL

ACT FOUR: FROM SCREEN TO STAGE

ACT THREE, er, FIVE: THE MATTER OF SPAMALOT

ACT SIX: METATHEATRICAL BROADWAY MEDIEVALISM

CURTAIN: KEEP ’EM LAUGHING AS YOU GO

because of Messiaen’s influence on subsequent composers. It concerns the post-conversion

cultural practice, manuscript illumination, by means of a modern musical style. He achieves

main/article/vita_nuova_at_alice_tully_hall_new_york; all accessed 6 August 2013. Video excerpts

Medieval Religious Plays in

This chapter is concerned with modern productions of religious plays in England, in

with the medieval tradition of presentation on an important religious occasion. Communities

Figure 2: Lucifer (Francis Tucker) as bookmaker at the Chester Races.

Staging Chaucer: Mike Poulton