Why Teenage Girls Become Medieval Nerds: A Very Long Exposition

Let us now turn to Dr Nokes. This post shall cover, in the following order: * what ticked me off; * the sorts of medieval things a teenage girl might be reading, both history and fiction; * the reasons why she (and her male counterparts) are into medievalism anyway; * where the experiece of teenage girls and boys differs in medievalism; and finally * what history can offer to teenage girls that fantasy fiction doesn’t yet.

In his first post, Dr Nokes has a lot of good things to say about ‘applied medievalism’, how to do it and why to do it, and his final point very much agreed with the one I made in my last post.

That’s the difference between fanboy medievalism and applied medievalism. Fanboy medievalism just says, “Oh my gosh, that sword is so awesome!” Applied medievalism acknowledges the kick-butt awesomeness of the sword, but offers a broader context, like thinking about how the ceremonial swords Marines carry suggest the chivalric virtues they are still expected to continue as part of their warrior ethos. In that way, applied medievalism ideally inspires fanboys to explore further. After all, none of us emerged from the womb fully-developed thinkers about medievalism. We all started as fans, but through our explorations became more.

What gets my goat is the use of the term ‘fanboy‘, a term which he has since explained he uses because ‘fangirl’ carries unwanted connotations of ‘OMG ELIJAH WOOD IS LYKE MY HUSBAND 4EVAR‘. Urbandictionary supports this distinction, so ok, fair enough Dr Nokes. He jokingly suggests that he should use ‘fankind’, but what’s wrong with the words we have- ‘fan’, ‘nerd’, ‘fandom’?

For the purposes of the last post, I’ve used the word nerd, to denote an individual enthusiast of unpopular topics, but I shall now add to it the noun ‘fandom’, as the collective noun for the community of such nerds and the activities in which they engage. Fandom is a term normally applied to enthusiasts of a particular piece of ‘popular’ culture- books, movies, games, comics, TV shows, and to the fanfic, role playing, cosplay, and so forth which they construct around their chosen canon. With my newly invented term ‘medieval fandom’, I’m lumping together all the fandoms associated with medieval fantasy and historical fiction, movies, games, etc; and adding to them medieval history nerds and medieval role players, cosplayers, etc like the SCA who take the historical period as their canon. Are we all clear on that? Yes? Good. Let’s get back to the teenage female constituent of that fandom.

The term ‘fanboy’ aside, something about Dr Nokes’ picture of the medieval nerd bugs me. He didn’t flesh out in great detail the sort of person he pictures as the popular medievalist, so maybe I’m being a bit unfair to that post. However, it comes across as a very male picture of the medieval nerd. All swords and fightin’ and stuff. (Not that I don’t appreciate a good shiny sword… or avidly consume the Woman With Sword subgenre of medieval fantasy…) I pointed that out, and gave some suggestions on the kind of female figures- Joan of Arc, Eleanor d’Aquitaine, Jeanne de Montforte, Marie de France- whose strong characters and general awesomeness are what attracted me to medieval nerdery in the first place. It’s by reading up on these individually interesting characters that I started building a picture of the society they lived in.

Dr Nokes followed through with his next post, in which it turns out I was right. His average medieval nerd *is* an exclusively male figure, and what’s more, he apparently the intelligence of teenage girls is insufficient to be attracted by figures of scholarly study like Eleanor, Heloise and Julian of Norwich.

Still, it started me wondering, who are the female medieval figures that draw fangirls to medievalism? Highly Eccentric mentions Marie de France, Joan d’Arc, and Jeanne de Montfort, Eleanor of Aquitane, and Heloise, but I wonder how many of these a girl is likely to encounter before she takes an interest? I would think the first medievalist figures a fangirl encounters would be Guinevere, Elaine, maybe Joan d’Arc or Boudicca (which may depend on the national heroines of her country), or women fantasy authors.

So, how about it? Ladies, what brought you into fankind? No scholarly answers, either — no 14-year-old girl ever picked up the Shewings of Julian of Norwich and said, “hmmm, I’ll bet this’ll be as interesting as the Baby-sitters Club series” — I’m curious as to what drew your interest back before you even knew you had an interest. Or was it the same kind of Tolkien, D&D stuff that draws fanboys?

Gee, thanks Dr Nokes. Given that BabySitters Club is aimed at the 7-11 set, any 14 year old still counting them as the height of interesting reading is probably not destined for a life of arcane nerdery.

If you’re wondering how teenage girls stumble across figures like Eleanor d’Aquitaine: we READ. If she’s anything like me, the fourteen year old girl in question will have picked up an illustrated children’s guide to the middle ages sometime in primary school, having learnt at about age seven that history books are always more interesting than BabySitter’s Club. She wasn’t looking for anything medieval; she wasn’t looking for strong female characters; she was looking for something interesting to do with her lunch break. She had probably already read The Roman Times for a class project, and picked upThe Medieval Messenger which was lying next to it, because she knew that series is funny. After that, she might have specifically sought out something like The Measly Middle Ages, or perhaps she stumbled across it by accident. There aren’t many medieval fiction books out there aimed at the under-ten set that she might happen across, but I think I read a King Arthur comic book and a three-chapter novella about a young kid transported to King Arthur’s Court.

If she’s like me she’ll start reading Redwall and Tamora Pierce before she finishes primary school. If she’s like K, the Heretical Purple Blur I mentioned in my last post, who’s a little younger than me and was around for some books I missed by virtue of Getting Old, she’s also reading Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur series, and the Royal Diaries (where, Dr Nokes, she might meet Eleanor D’Aquitaine and Isabella of Castille…) By fourteen, she’s probably reading Tolkien and is already a regular posting member on a handful of fantasy fiction fan sites. She will be reading Arthurian fantasy, and the Arthurian canon is leading her outwards into faux-history and pop history. Depending on the state of her local library, she might be reading Sara Douglass’ The Betrayal of Arthur, or T.W. Holleston’s Celtic Mythology. When she gets older, she might beg her parents to buy her the Allan Lee illustrated Mabinogion and the Oxford Classics translation of Malory. Primary source reading will find its way onto her bookshelf as a matter of course, because she’s insatiably curious and irreparably escapist.¹

She sounds much the same as any intelligent, library-lurking fourteen-year old boy, doesn’t she? She’s reading fiction and history together; she’s attracted by exciting characters, different settings and adventurous plots. At fourteen, she’s probably also paying close and curious attention to the kissing scenes- but then, I suspect her male counterpart is too, even if he won’t admit it. Even if she’s only one tenth of the nerd I was, even if (as it seems from the comments) American libraries aren’t near so well stocked in children’s Medieval history books as British and Australian libraries might be… It still shouldn’t be surprising that an intelligent teenager should find medieval history interesting when she stumbles across it!

Nokes asks if girls are attracted to Tolkien and D&D, as the boys are. In fact, as long as I’ve been in it, Tolkien fandom is predominately a female domain. I can count the regular male posters over at ringbearer.org on my fingers. OK, a lot of the female Tolkien fans back when I joined up were the ‘fangirls’ that we (the SRS TOLKIEN READERS) called ‘swooners’ back in the day, but most of the hardcore Tolkienuts were (are) also female. I’ve never tried playing D&D, and I understand it does draw a more male-oriented group.

The problem is, Nokes takes it as given that boys are attracted Tolkien and D&D, without saying why, while wondering what might interest girls in medieval fandom. Well, what are the boys in fandom for? Why should we expect the basic attraction to be any different, although gender may result in some statistical variation as to exact field of interest?

I shall hereby posit three things which attract young people to medieval fandom, and I see no reason why these basic attractive elements are any different for the history side of it as opposed to the fiction and gaming side.

1. Above all, again and again, escapism. There’s something really enthralling about societies and cultures so different to our own that we have to piece them together bit by bit- and then the similarities you find are so much more engaging. If you pick up Bridget Jones, for example, you don’t lose yourself in her world, because her world is yours (or it’s supposed to be… someone shoot me if I’m ever that much of a twit). Tolkien, Raymond E Feist, Gary Gygax’s games, the LOTR films- they take you out of your setting and away.
The thing is, historical non-fiction does the same thing. You can piece together a picture of another world, another society, where cool and exciting things happen, and cool and exciting people live, only with the added bonus of it was all real once and you can never learn ‘all there is to know’ about it.
Reason 1A for being attracted to medieval fandom is ‘characters to identify with’. Really cool people, fictional or historical, are what draws you in to their world, and I think it’s here that there comes up a difference between girls and guys, so Reason 1A will be treated separately.

2. Intellectual stimulation. As per my post yesterday morning, knowing stuff is fun. Knowing stuff few other people know is a double-edged sword: you get your own little universe, but you don’t get any sense of solidarity out of it. A sufficiently intelligent teenager, having discovered that medieval history is pretty cool by just picking up a book off the shelf, will probably continue to pick up books from the shelf because she enjoys learning things; because doing research of her own offers more scope and depth and fun (see escapism, Reason 1) than the simplistic approach of the high school syllabus. For the same reason, she’ll probably thrive on Tolkien- even if it takes her nine months the first time around, as it did me- because Tolkien is so much more demanding on the reader than anything they set you in high school. (Unless you have trouble with Shakespearean language, I guess…)

3. The fandom community. Like Dr Nokes’ typical fanboy, many girls must come to an interest in medieval studies only via their first interest in Tolkien, or Arthurian lit, or the works of Tamora Pierce, having somehow never picked up a copy of ‘The Measly Middle Ages’. Or maybe they did, thought it was kind of cool, and were never afflicted by the obsessive desire to research which afflicts K and I. Regardless of how much you’re reading on your own, a sense of community and people to nerd out with will go a long way to keeping your interest active. I quite liked Tolkien, but my Rabidly Obsessive Phase didn’t come about until I’d been on ringbearer.org long enough to absorb the enthusiasm. RB also gave me a bunch of recs for other good fantasy lit… My guess is that the fanfic side of fandom works the same way, and I wonder: if more people were out there writing historically-informed fic for fantasy lit, if that might arouse interest in the primary texts? (Example: an alliterative Gawain fic by a Proper Medievalist whose name shall not be publicised for the sake of her reputation…) A quick search of the internet reveals that there’s at least one medieval history forum out there, as well as multiplicious fantasy boards.

Having established these three reasons to be into medieval fandom, and that history and fiction are both attractive for these three reasons, let us return to Reason 1A, ‘characters to identify with’.

1A. Having interesting fictional or historical characters makes for a great interest-grabbing hook which sparks your interest in a genre or period. For me, medieval pop history provided something that fantasy fiction didn’t: strong female characters I could really identify with.

Let me clarify that. It’s not that fantasy lit doesn’t have strong female characters. There’s a whole subgenre that I like to call the ‘Women with Swords’ genre- most notably Tamora Pierce, who often says of her work that one of her main aims in writing young people’s fantasy is to provide teenage girls with heroic female role models. I devoured Women-With-Swords books as a teenager, and several concluding books (including ROTK) were violently thrown across the room when I discovered that the Shieldmaiden wasn’t going to get the Main Hero Guy. The problem is that most of the ‘Sheroes’ in fantasy are cast in the same mould: they’re tough, physically strong, assertive characters whose strength is in acting man-like, which almost always means wielding a sword. Every one of Pierce’s Tortall protagonists has a weapon of some kind (discounting magic, which most of them have as well), even Thayet, who is otherwise depicted as powerful by virtue of her royal birth and skill at court politics. The hallmark of a strong female fantasy character is her ability to pass as a man. While that makes for a rollicking story, and I passionately idolised and envied the Shieldmaiden, fact is I know and have always known, I’d never pass for a knight. Zip, zero knightliness here. Nor am I going to dress as a sailor and stow away to sea, or dress as a pirate and take over the ship (Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders), and I’d rather not get involved in any telepathic dragon orgies, really (yes, I once read Ann McCaffrey. We all have our shameful secrets). But at the same time, I find Arwen boring, I find Imrhien’s lovesick wanderings around Erith tedious, and although I now recognise that Faraday is the true tragic hero of the Axis trilogy, as a teenager I found her wilting and dull and wished she’d get around to doing something interesting for once.

Now, there are manifold types of male heroes in medieval literature and medieval fantasy. Big, buff, tough type, ‘most eager for praise’? Beowulf is for you. Fancy yourself as a cunning trouble maker? Loki. You’re the little guy who’d rather not have to play the hero? Frodo. Can you see yourself as a guerrilla, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor? Robin Hood. Are you the poet, the dreamer and the visionary? Stephen R. Lawhead’s Taliesin. You want to alternate your time between studying ancient scrolls and leading your trained scouts into enemy territory? Then you’re a Faramir. The list goes on and on. Point is, no matter what your teenage boys temperament is, now matter how unlikely he is to ever duel someone for his lady’s honour, there’s a role model in medieval fandom that say he could be the hero, given the right circumstances. Medieval literature just doesn’t offer that sort of scope in female characters. Efforts have been made in fantasy to redress the imbalance, witness the popularity of Shieldmaiden protagonists. But more often, I’d like to see a nun as a fantasy hero, or a minor lord’s wife, or a princess who never even asks to pick up a sword, or a queen mother, or a farmer’s daughter.

This is where historians can fill the breach. Because history is about real people, and real people, however narrow their prescribed social roles, come in all shapes and sizes and with all kinds of temperaments. For some reason, although I can’t imagine me ever developing the motor skills to wield a sword, I look at Eleanor of Aquitane and part of me thinks ‘I could do that’. I read about Adela of Blois and I think ‘huh- running the estate while my husband’s on Crusade, nagging him until he returns a second time, and then taking over the headship of the family when he dies? I’m pretty good at nagging.’ Nevermind that I’m tactless and a bad liar, and so would be terrible at politics. Part of me thinks I could learn that, whereas I couldn’t learn to use a crossbow. As a budding author of bad teenage poetry, it didn’t require any effort at all to identify with Marie de France, and she’s remained one of my favourite characters, despite the little I’ve had the time and access to read of her writing.

Medieval history has some awesome characters in it, and among them are some pretty fantastic female characters in every sub-period. Michelle, in her reply to Dr Nokes, said she didn’t think there were any women in Anglo-Saxon England who’d be attractive to noob girls… but what about Æthelflæd, who kicked Danish butt in the early 800s? I can see St Æthelthryth No-Sex-For-YOU of Ely warranting a whole page in ‘The Abominable Anglo-Saxons’, if Terry Deary ever writes such a thing.

So there you go. There’s so much to interest a teenage girl in medieval fandom, I wrote an essay-length post on it in a matter of hours. If only essays were this easy! To summarise:

• Teenage girls come to medieval fandom the same way boys do: they read stuff. The read fiction, they read history books, they read the Intarwebs, and they probably started reading these things before they were out of primary school.
• The reasons teenage girls are attracted to medieval fandom are, at the root of it, the same as those of teenage boys, and fiction and history can be attractive in the same was: as escapism, as intellectual stimulation, and as part of a wider community of fandom.
• There isn’t the same variety of female characters to identify with in medieval fantasy as there is of male characters. This is important, because identifying with a character really creates your escapist alternate world, and it provides a stimulus for further research.
• Historians can fill that gap and make medieval history more interesting to young girls by telling stories of real medieval women, and telling them in an engaging and accessible fashion.

Here endeth the lesson rant for today.

~

1. If she has a father like mine, she’ll have company in her Celtic explorations; she will also have acquired a working knowledge of the First World War and aviation history, not to mention the fall of the Roman Empire, the invention of the motor car and the difference between a Neanderthal and a Homo Sapiens. Because curiosity is better in company.

What Medievalism Can Offer… Part One.

Greetings, O Blogosphere. Some time ago, Matt Gabrielle opened a Bloggers Forum on the relevance of Medieval Studies to the general public, asking:

How about a blog forum about what medieval studies and/ or medievalism has to offer a wider public? But not pitched to other academics? How would you talk about a topic of your choosing to a group of community members in a public library, for example? How do you talk about “relevance” (or the lack thereof) to undergraduates? etc.

There have been several responses to this call, but I shall link you to Jeff Sypeck’s contribution for two reasons: One, that page links to all the previous responses; and Two, Sypeck’s post is what started Dr Nokes thinking.

Now, I want to talk about two things: the weakness¹ of Dr Nokes’ approach to the medieval ‘fan(boy)’, and my own answer to Matt’s question ‘What can Medievalists offer to the general public’. I’m going to address these things in two separate posts: one, as a general answer to Matt’s question, and another coming up in response to Dr Noke’s second post.

Firstly, why is all this important anyway? Why are we fussing over what we can offer and particularly what we can offer to teenagers? Forgive me, but it (not just Dr Nokes, but the entire discussion, regardless of the age of contributors) looks to me like the elderly constituent of the congregation I grew up in, fussing over how to be more ‘relevant’ and more ‘contemporary’ so as to attract more ‘youth’… not out of any inherent concern for the youth of today, but because young bums on seats give the old folks a sense of validation.

It’s a given that we all want more students of medieval studies. I don’t teach, myself, but that hasn’t stopped me ranting and cajoling any potential medievalists I know into taking courses with my favourite teachers. My motivations are multiplicious: I’m a naturally helpful sort of person, the kind of person who likes sharing the things she knows (even if you don’t care), and in this case the thing I knew is how to structure your study so as to take two majors. I’m also very fond of the CMS and I don’t want to see good students lost to the English or History departments. And thirdly, I happen to live with the major recipient of my medieval cajoling, and the more medieval courses she takes, the greater the chances are that when I walk into the dining hall, a purple-and-blonde blur will rush past, muttering as she goes ‘I realised I couldn’t talk about confraternities, so I’m doing heretics instead!’, or similar nerdy comments. It’s good to have someone around who’s more-or-less on the same plane as you.

That third point, I think, is where we can say that academic medievalists really do have something to offer the general public, if by ‘general’ you mean ‘isolated teenage nerds’. What an academic can offer- via blogs or books or public forums or school visits- is firstly a bit of solidarity. Hey, that guy’s an even bigger nerd than I am, and HE’S made a career out of it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is that regardless of whether or not the nerd in question goes on to do any medieval subjects at uni- maybe she discovers her true calling and becomes a stockbroker- is that an intelligent teenager, unless she’s very, very lucky in her schooling, is never being pushed to think as far, as deeply, or as independently as she could. Which is a pity, because knowing stuff is fun, and thinking about it is MORE fun. Whether it’s Dr Nokes’ ‘Big Beowulf Bash’ or Jeff Sypeck’s book ‘Becoming Charlemagne’, a bit of academic medievalism, pitched to her level, might give her a bit of intellectual stimulation she’s not getting from the high school syllabus. I’d say the same thing to scholars of Shogun Japan and to Microbiologists: there are kids out there to whom the opportunity to learn something they’re really passionate about, to whom the encouragement and non-patronising interest of a specialist in that field, to whom simply the chance to use their brain at a higher capacity, would be as precious as gold. No matter what your speciality or it’s immediate usefulness, society can always do with more kids encouraged to think beyond the bounds of the high school classroom.

I always knew I didn’t want to teach your average school student, I wanted to teach people who were smart and engaged. My mother suggested ‘university teaching’ when I was about seven, but from the time I was ten until I was… oooh, fourteen or fifteen, I wanted to be a trained Gifted & Talented upper primary school teacher, just like one Mrs Coffee, who had rescued me from mental stagnation and got me started on reading fantasy fiction, amongst other things. That’s been crossed off my To Do List for Life, but I still care about the education of smart kids. A little broadening of their horizons, a sprinkle of encouragement, the promise that other people out there in the Big World will value their quirky interests and passions, yeah… that’s worth doing.

Don’t do it if you don’t like kids. Don’t do it if you’re going to patronise or talk down. But if you have the time and the resources, do. If not public appearances, then books. There are never enough books out there on which an intelligent youngster can sharpen his brain-teeth. Websites aren’t a bad idea either, but I don’t know that any website, no matter how engaging, could beat a beautifully illustrated book like Kevin Crossley-Holland’s ‘The King Who Was And Will Be’, a wonderful introduction to high medieval culture in bite-sized snippets. It’s thanks to Kevin C-H that I discovered Marie De France, Dr Nokes. Kevin C-H sticks in my mind as the only pop history book I could find that said right out that there probably was no King Arthur, but that didn’t matter. Camelot, he says ‘is in our minds and our hearts’. If you have a nerdy child in your friend or family network, one who appreciates beautifully decorated books and interesting windows into a past society… find a copy of that book and give it to them. From memory, it should be comprehensible to your average ten year old, but I was still enjoying it at fourteen.

Comin’ up: Teenage girls are smart and they read history books! Special Investigation This Evening!

~

1. That’s polite academic-speak for ‘inherant sexism’…

Two interesting things from the blogosphere

Dr Nokes posted this clip, from a most hilarious French TV show, about medieval music:

Giggle. Giggle.

And on an entirely unrelated note, Dr Rundkvist posted, as a side note in his notice about an Antro/Archaeo blog carnival, this fascinating tidbit:

The Rota System, from the Old Church Slavic word for “ladder” or “staircase”, was a system of collateral succession practiced (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus’ and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia, in which the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother (usually to the fourth brother) and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise.

Looks a little like the supposed Pictish succession, from uncle to nephew down the matrilinear line, which, as Michelle has discussed before, may not have been a proper system but an emergency measure.

The Wiki article on the Rota System goes on to say:

The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise, who assigned each of his sons a principality based on seniority. When the Grand Prince died, the next most senior prince moved to Kiev and all others moved to the principality next up the ladder.[1] Only those princes whose fathers had held the throne were eligible for placement in the rota; those whose fathers predeceased their grandfathers were known as izgoi, “excluded” or “orphaned” princes.

Apparently some scholars doubt this was such an organised system at all, as always. If it were, it would create an interesting mix of sibling and cousin rivalries, and loyalties as well. It would behove a king to treat his nephew or brother well, lest said heir’s succession be artificially accelerated. The king’s *son*, meanwhile, who might see his uncle or cousin as a threat, would be well advised to demonstrate his loyalty thereto in order to survive the years between his father’s succession and his own intact. But what of second sons, who would probably not live long enough to inherit? What of these orphan princes?
Your fourth sons wouldn’t be the expendable end of the royal family, as they would be under direct patrilinear succession systems. Instead, they’d be the ones likely to live long enough to take the throne. How very, very interesting.

I wonder, in this system, how the precedence is worked out? Simply by age? Does your father’s age also count?
Let’s say King A dies, and his throne passes first to his son A1, and then to his son A4, A2 and A3 having died in the meantime. When A4 dies, A1’s eldest son, A1.1, inherits. Presumably he is succeeded by one of his brothers, ≥A1.2, in turn. When ≥A1.2 dies, does the throne necessarily pass back to A1.1.1? Or does it pass to A2.1? if A2.1 were older than ≥A1.2, would he have had seniority on the death of A1.1?
What if A1’s first wife had been barren, and A2.1 were older than A1.1? If the position of princes on the ‘ladder’ were based simply on their age, A2.1 would succeed A2. If on the other hand the system were designed to ensure that each branch of the family had their place on the ladder in turn, he wouldn’t.

I wants to know, precious…

Fun in the Fourteenth Century

Executed Today (a most entertaining and grizzly blog) has a fascinating post on the execution of Guillame Cale, leader of the Jaquerie.

I’ve had a poke at this sort of thing on here before: the fourteenth century wasn’t a secure time for anyone, and can’t have been a good time to be a peasant, but the goings-on going on were also inducing considerable angst for the knightly classes. Executed Today tells how the Jaquerie terrorised the local aristocracy (quoting someone contemporary named Froissart):

Thus they gathered together without any other counsel, and without any armour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. … And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein.

Because this post has no actual point, I’m going to use it to make a random fantasy literature recommendation, which is loosely related because it contains the slaughtered knight and his family just mentioned.

Sara Douglass’ ‘The Crucible’ Trilogy, set in a very-nearly-real-world version of 14th century Europe is, as far as I’m concerned, the best modern example of the fact that it takes a medievalist to write good fantasy fiction. (Old examples: Tolkien, Lewis. Another modern (also Australian!) example is the children’s author Catharine Jinks, who studied under JP, and her interests- Crusades, the office of notary, among other things- strongly reflect his.)

Douglass messes around with facts of time and chronological order, so if you’re a stickler for that sort of thing, don’t go there. The Crucible is, as well as an intricate story with a labyrinthine plot, a fascinating rendering of the medieval mind. Her main character, an embittered and warped monk, has internalised all that is ugly about medieval religion, and twisted it around his own unpleasant character. It took me a whole two months to get through the first two books, because she kept successfully convincing me that I was inherently evil by virtue of my gender. Her depiction of the demonic world is terrifying- she knows her Aquinas, that one, and this book is an unpleasant glimpse into what it might feel like to really, truly believe in the demonic world of the middle ages.

On the other hand, she takes the unsettling changes of the fourteenth century, which she depicts as the turning point between the ‘modern’ and the ancient worlds, and draws them in similarly captivating form. Are the uprisings across Europe, the Black Death, the political upheavals, the outbreaks of heresy, all part of a demonic assault on the established order (as no doubt they seemed to some), or are they part of something new, something better, something freer? It would be a criminal generalisation in academic work, but it makes for a brilliant story.

Douglass could’ve written an academic paper about any aspect of fourteenth century social change- and maybe she did, in her past life as an academic. Instead, she drew all this together, made leaps and associations you can’t make in historical study, and rendered it real and captivating in a way that no academic paper ever is. Don’t read it if you’re a stickler for chronological order. But do read it if the fantasy canon ticks you off with its faux-medieval setting and the fact that every fantasy novel out there seems to be set in exactly the same post-Tolkien world.

Oh, and don’t read these books if you get offended at Phillip Pullman. Really, don’t. (Having said that, I liked her depiction of Jesus. But l found Phillip Pullman spiritually inspiring rather than the reverse…)

Don’t Mess with Norse Women

Humourous Hagiography will be late this week- I’ve packed up Skeat in preparation for trundling off to Awesome’s place to cat-sit for a few weeks.

Instead, have a cross-dressing Norse tale, courtesy of the Goblin:

I have read about sorceresses, and shape-shifters. I learned about preterite-present verbs and how to hate them. I have read of women who murder their children in order to avenge their brothers and women who sleep with their brothers in order to avenge their fathers and (other) brothers.

I have learned not to mess with Icelandic women. Hoo boy.

Guðrun Osvifursdottir, the protagonist of Laxdœla saga, is my very favourite example of this. She has four husbands over the course of the narrative, becomes the first nun of Iceland and achieves great literary fame. She is also a stone-cold bitch when she has to be, even if she is not on the same scale as the other figures named Guðrun in Icelandic sagas.³ The story I want to show is that of her second husband, Thord Ingunnarson. Guðrun gained Thord after she divorced her first husband -using Thord’s advice- and he divorced his wife on Guðrun’s. Thord’s wife Aud does not take kindly to losing her husband.⁴

The manner in which this is laid out is very amusing. The story should of course be read in context to be fully appreciated, but we shall start with Guðrun’s first husband, Thorvald. Following rumours that Guðrun is having an affair with Thord, Thorvald slaps Guðrun during a fight. After responding that he has given her what every woman wants- good colouring, Thord arrives. She asks him how to respond to the insulting slap:

Thord smiled and said, “I have a good solution for this. Make him a shirt with such a wide neck opening that by wearing it he gives you grounds for divorcing him.

Cross-dressing was illegal in early Icelandic law, and was grounds for divorce. A wide-opened shirt was for exposing…well. You’ve all seen bad fantasy movies. You get the idea.

Of course, poor Thorvald has to wear a shirt his wife made for him, and winds up divorced. One can’t help but think he is better off; Guðrun might be beautiful, but she never liked him.

Later on, Guðrun opens a conversation with Thord along similar lines:

“Is it true, Thord, that your wife Aud always wears breeches with gores in the crutch, like a man’s, and cross-garters almost down to her shoes?

He said he had not noticed it.

“There can’t be much truth to the story, then,” said Guðrun, “if you hadn’t noticed it. But why, then, is she known as Breeches-Aud?”

We can see where Guðrun is headed here. Soon enough:

One day Thord Ingunnarson asked Guðrun what the penalty was for a woman who always wore breeches like a man’s.

Guðrun replied, “The same penalty applies to women in a case like that as to a man who wears a neck-opening so wide that his nipples are exposed: both are grounds of divorce.”

Oh, Guðrun.

Of course, Thord divorces Aud then and there, and Guðrun and he go off and get married. Their marriage is very happy, apparently.

Aud takes her abandonment…bitterly, singing a brief poem. But she does not sit on her hands, because one does not mess with Icelandic womenfolk. She sends a shepherd boy to find out how many men are at Thord’s farm- upon disovering that it is only Thord and Guðrun’s father Osvif, she goes after her ex-husband:

…a little before sunset Aud mounted her horse, and she was certainly wearing breeches then. The shepherd rode the other horse and could scarcely keep up with her, so furiously did she spur her horse. [...] She went into the living-room and over to the bed-closet in which Thord lay sleeping. [...] She went into the bed-closet; Thord lay on his back, sound asleep. She woke him up, and he turned on his side when he saw that a man had come in; Aud drew a short-sword and lunged at him with it, wounding him severely; the sword caught his right arm and gashed him across both nipples. So fierce was the thrust that the sword stuck fast in the bed boards.

Osvif offers to go after her, as Thord is too weakened by loss of blood. However:

Thord would not hear of it on any account, saying that she had only done what she had to do.

She had only done what she had to do. Thord knew that which we should all learn: do not mess with Icelandic women. They will cut you.===

3: You should all read the poem Atlakviða and the Völsunga saga. Guðrun Gjukadottir is amazing.
4: All quotes are from Laxdœla Saga, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Palsson. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1969. The chapters in question are 34-35, pp. 124-128.

Hum. And now, I shall trundle off to the library at this late hour, to take back overdue interlibrary loans…

Shameless self-promotion

Not really the sort of thing I would normally put on this blog, but if I can link to humourous fictional saint pictures, I can do a little bit of self promotion. I’m just so damn proud of myself- this is the first piece of proper fiction I’ve written for ages. It’s a piece of… fanfic, really, based on the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospel of Nicodemus.

Its rating is Nerd+, it contains no gratuitous violence or sexual content, but several obscure references, and also some dodgy formatting thanks to Livejournal screwing things up. Its pairing, if there is one, is Satan/Hell.

I’m not the only one with strange interests…

WordPress’ tag surfer function is pretty awesome. Today, it directed me to ‘The Illegiterati’, who make a regular feature of Obscure Saint Blogging. Check out the account of St Ethelreda/AEthelthryth/Audrey, which seems to be based on some later sources than AElfric, which are lot more particular about her early life. Also featured are St Simeon, who didn’t quite get his miracles right, St Christina the Astonishing, and St Expeditus, patron saint of procrastinators.

Sorry for the series of linky posts. Procrastination is overwhelming my life, to the extent that I don’t even have time for my regular procrastinatory pursuits. Bless me, St Expeditus.

More early modern than medieval… But oh so entertaining

Scribal Terror reports:

Futility Closet tells the story of a 16th century French attorney who was placed in an unenviable position by the “the authorities in Autun [who] asked him to advocate for the rats, which they put on trial in 1510 for eating the harvest of Burgundy”:

In his defence, Chasseneux showed that the rats had not received formal notice; and, before proceeding with the case, he obtained a decision that all the priests of the afflicted parishes should announce an adjournment, and summon the defendants to appear on a fixed day.

At the adjourned trial, he complained that the delay accorded his clients had been too short to allow of their appearing, in consequence of the roads being infested with cats. Chasseneux made an able defence, and finally obtained a second adjournment. We believe that no verdict was given. — Sabine Baring-Gould*, Curiosities of Olden Times, 1896

Because I haven’t the time or energy to put together any content for you…

Go and contemplate medieval Russia and its claim to be the third Rome. (You have to scroll through- or read, if you wish- updates on bits and bobs of B’s life first, mind.)

A teaser:

The second essay for Karalis’ class on Byzantium, I intend to do on…Russia.

Stop looking at me like that, it makes sense. Everyone knows that the rise of Russia and especially of Moscow is linked with Byzantium. Russia is famously deeply Orthodox. One need but glance at Russian religious artworks to see deep traces of Byzantine influence. Most importantly, there are claims made in Russia that it is the “Third Rome” after the corruption of the first (Latin Christendom) and the fall of the second (Constantinople fell in 1453). It is the Third Rome and there will be no other- prefiguring the End of Days detailed in the visions of John.

I intend to examine that claim in my teeny-tiny (1500 words! so pathetic!); to see how genuine the claim of the Third Rome is, and see Russians implemented it. There are three ways that this could be true: culturally, politically and religiously.

I have nothing to say, so have a silly icon:

Suck you too!

LOL!Manuscripts reflects on the humourous properties of the Long S.

The “Descending” or “Long S” is ubiquitous in Renaissance publications; a holdover from Carolingian minuscule handwriting and black letter print. Usually, it just makes reading original texts a bit more difficult, but on rare occasions, when you least expect it, the EEBO Gods will give you a spectacular typographical gift. Therefore, I give you examples of the “long s” paired with variations of the totally innocent word “suck.” The results — outstanding.

I was going to complement this with a short clip from the Vicar of Dibley 102 ‘Songs of Praise’, but for some reason (unlike every other Vicar episode known to mankind), that episode has been completely removed from YouTube. All I can offer you is the entire thirty minute episode here.

Ye are the falt of the earth, and fainted…

I shall sit on the right hand of the Lord and he shall be my… ‘Succour. And he shall be my succour, thank you Alice!’