Chaucer’s Blog and Medievalism
I meant to post this much earlier, a snippet from JJC‘s In the Middle post on Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and reflections from the New Chaucer Society conference earlier this summer.
I earlier mentioned that David Wallace in his presidential address briefly cited Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog , a reference both humorous and deprecating. As Wallace went on to detail some of the “New Chaucer Topographies” he has been mapping, it occurred to me that had he lingered over the Chaucer blog he might have found a cultural artifact as important as any text or performance he did discuss. As Stephanie Trigg well argued in her paper later that day, separating the medieval from medievalism, the scholarly kosher from the fluffily popular, is neither easy nor always desirable. Trigg wondered what is at stake in maintaining such demarcation zealously. Looking at something as unprecedented in scholarly circles as the Chaucer blog, it’s difficult not to agree with Trigg’s assessment. The blog – take my word for it – is not composed by a Langlandian ABD. Its author is a scholar who has thought deeply about what – besides the hawking of extremely clever tee shirts – the forum given by the blog might accomplish in the larger world. [Read more.]
I, of course, couldn’t agree more, both with Cohen on the Chaucer blog and the argument both he and Stephanie Trigg make. After all, in my 2004 MLA paper sponsored by the Old Norse discussion group, I argued that we — I’m wearing my medievalist hat here — need to embrace fantasy literature, and I wasn’t talking Tolkien here (it’s the rare medievalist who would balk at my Tolkien paper “Germanic Ethos and Christian Ethics in The Lord of the Rings” — Tolkien was, after all, an Oxford don and his “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is one of the most important works of Beowulf scholarship there is). No, I was arguing for fantasy of the sword and sorcery variety, and comedic sword and sorcery of Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt at that (The Last Hero and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf, respectively).
Pure fluff. Only it’s not. Pratchett and Holt know their stuff, the humor and the power of those two novels are enriched by a more than superficial knowledge of Northern European medieval literature and culture. While one can enjoy them as parodies of the sword and sorcery genre written by authors who know and love that genre, the experience is all the richer if one recognizes them as acts of medievalism as well. What surprised me as I wrote that paper, however, is that while it was supposed to be about Pratchett and Holt, it really became a paper about Robert E. Howard’s barbarian heroes, especially, but not limited to, Conan. While Howard often seems to toss various “barbarian” cultures, from Native Americans to Vikings to Mongols into a blender, I found more subtly to it. While Howard, and Conan, are most often associated with the Celts (Howard was a celtophile), I found in his letters and his early stories an equally strong interest in and knowledge of medieval Scandinavia, or at least a Victorian understanding of it (for a discussion of the Victorians and the Vikings, see my post “Victorians and Vikings? Huh?“).
In fact, Howard’s first two Conan stories are “The Pheonix and the Sword” and “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” the later set in Howard’s proto-Scandinavia and the former, set at the end of Conan’s career, has Conan telling one of his courtiers that he has much more in common with Æsir than his own Cimmerian kinsmen. Conan may have been a Cimmerian, a proto-Celt, by blood, he was a Æsir, a proto-Scandinavian, in spirit. While Howard didn’t invent the sword and sorcery genre, he popularized it shaped it in the same way that Tolkien popularized and shaped high fantasy. Who was the first sword and sorcery author, you ask? There’s some debate. Some name William Morris, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Rice Burrows, Abraham Merritt, E.R. Eddison, Talbot Mundy, or even Alexander Dumas, but the most likely candidate is H. Rider Haggard with his Viking-age novel written in the Icelandic saga style, Eric Brighteyes, a novel Haggard began on the boat voyage home from Iceland.
But why should medievalists study and even teach this stuff? First, there’s the fact that these authors were serious in their engagement of our subject, and, like the Chaucer blog, their engagement with medieval literature and culture has a much broader impact on our culture, on our students, and on the public at large, than any paper we give or book we publish. They are medievalism — the representation and use of medieval culture in the post-medieval period — and while medieval studies is often considered the realm of arcane and overly bookish, representations and uses of medieval culture are all around us. That we can be a culture awash in medievalism while at the same time a culture that believes that medieval studies is old-fashioned and irrelevant is a serious failing on our part. It’s a paradox that we can’t afford to allow to continue for much longer. And then there’s the fact that fantasy, both of the Tolkienian and Howardian traditions, are a gateway to medieval studies itself. A student who’s going to be drawn into literary studies by Woolf or Eliot or Melville or Joyce is going to find their way to literary studies without our coaxing. But Tolkien and Le Guin and Pratchett and Gaiman and Kerr, and yes, even Howard, can draw in students who didn’t find their high school literature courses speaking to them, and we shouldn’t ignore this.
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[...] The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage,” I mention Conan in a discussion of why medievalists should embrace popular culture such as sword and sorcery fantasy, and in the [...]