Atlántida – or, the converging of modern medievalism and the legend of Atlantis, part 2

This is the second of four blogposts on the comic book story Atlántida by Ricard Ferrándiz, which is a part of the storyworld of El Capitán Trueno. See also the first, the third and the fourth installment.

El Capitán Trueno and Atlantis      

Due to the scarcity of medieval, or perhaps rather medievalist, Atlantis fantasies, I was very excited to find the Capitán Trueno album Atlántida, and I read it eagerly in the course of a dark evening before Christmas. I should note, however, that this album is my first encounter with the comic book series El Capitán Trueno (aside from a parody/homage in the comic book series Mortadelo y Filemón which was what made me aware of the captain’s existence). Consequently, I cannot evaluate the book in light of the history of the series, and in my comments and reflections I will be unable to catch elements that will be obvious to long-time readers. My aim with this text is, instead, to examine the treatment of the Atlantis myth and to see how the author has dealt with certain issues that are standard topoi of stories about Atlantis.  
 

I should first, however, give some brief notes of introduction to readers who are as unfamiliar as I am with the universe of Capitán Trueno. The comic book series was created in 1956 by the author Victor Mora Pujadas and the artist Miguel Ambrosio Zaragoza, and it is centred on the exploits of four protagonists: Capitán Trueno who is a Spanish knight, his girlfriend Sigrid who is the queen of the island Thule in the far north, and their friends Goliath the giant and the young boy Crispín. The temporal setting of the series is the end of the twelfth century, and in the course of the series’ long history the quartet has been brought to many distant geographical locations. El Capitán Trueno has enjoyed immense popularity in Spain, and several other comic book writers and artists have contributed to the growth to the series. The album in focus here is drawn and written by Ricard Ferrándiz. Perhaps needless to say, the following paragraphs will contain several spoilers.    

Atlántida begins in Sigrid’s island kingdom Thule, presumably modelled in part on Iceland – often identified as the classical Thule by several medieval scholars – and in part on Norway, considering that Iceland in the twelfth century was not a kingdom whereas Norway was. The idea of a female ruler of a distant northern island touches on several elements found in medieval depictions of the far north, for instance in Adam of Bremen, but these cannot be addressed here. As the story begins, however, the kingdom is in preparation for the wedding of Sigrid and Capitán Trueno, a wedding that – true to the vagaries of comic book series – has been decades in the making. In order to escape the hubbub of the preparations, Goliath and Crispín go fishing, and Goliath hooks a bottle with a message inside it. This message is what sets the sequence of events unfolding.      
            

The text of the message is in Latin, which is translated by Capitán Trueno, and it is a call for help with a map of the island and a drawing of the constellation Orion. The captain remarks that it is an island not found on any nautical map (which makes perfect sense at the turn of the twelfth century, both considering that the Atlantic south of Spain was for all intents and purposes uncharted territory, and that the portolan charts were to be invented first in the thirteenth century). Due to the mystery of the island’s location and the call for help, Sigrid, the queen of Thule, decides to go in immediate search of the sender of the bottle and let the nuptial ceremonies wait until their return.

After an eventful voyage, during which they encounter a strange ship filled with a dead crew in black cloaks which appear to signal that the island is in the vicinity, they reach their destination, which is cloaked in volcanic fog. The group of four split into two teams and go exploring the island to look for the sender of the message. Suddenly, Trueno and Sigrid are ambushed by a group of humans cloaked in fur and armed with clubs and stone axes, of a broad and strong build reminiscent of the stereotypical stone age man. These men are later called “hombres rojos”, red men, by the narrator of the story, and they abduct Sigrid and bring her to an ancient ruined city where they tie her up for a human sacrifice, barely stopped in time by Trueno and, with timely aid, Crispín and Goliath. The latter two are armed with jars of explosives, which they have been given by the sender of the message whom they have met in the meantime. This man is the last surviving descendant of Atlantis. 

Once the situation has calmed down, the pale and cloaked Atlantean Djad-dze invites them into the subterranean realm which is the last remnant of the once mighty city state. Here, in the laboratory and library, he recounts the history of Atlantis, once so prosperous and advanced, then brought low by a cataclysm interpreted as divine retribution for the struggle and bloodshed that eventually tainted the Atlanteans. He then explains why he has sent for their aid: The volcano is about to erupt, and this will most likely wipe out the entire island and with it all the accumulated knowledge of physics, history, chemistry and other disciplines of Atlantis. It is Djad-dze’s wish that at least some of this is preserved, with the exception of one red-bound volume, whose content the human species is not yet prepared to receive. The four then prepare their departure from the moribound island, and after a brief but violent encounter with another band of red men, they are underway to Thule where they still have problems awaiting – but that is irrelevant to the Atlantis element and also an unnecessary spoiler, so I will say nothing of it here. With this summary of the events in Atlántida pertaining to Atlantis, I hope to have prepared the ground for a reflection on some of the elements in the story and how they fit with the wider cultural history of the Atlantean civilisation, to which I will return in the next blogpost.

Atlántida – or, the converging of modern medievalism and the legend of Atlantis, part 1

The following is an attempt to gather some thoughts on a comic book in the series El Capitán Trueno (Captain Thunder) that deals with the myth of Atlantis. I have a great interest in both the modern reception of the Middle Ages, and also the modern reception of the Atlantis myth, and since these two interests converge in the album Atlántida I have decided to write this piece in order to situate the album loosely within the cultural history of the Atlantis myth, and also to record some reflections on the use of the myth and the application of the myth into the medieval temporal setting of the comic book universe of El Capitán Trueno. This is therefore neither a comprehensive review of the comic book, nor a text with a coherent argument – it is rather a melange of observations and associations brought on by the particular elements that fill my frame of reference. For reasons of length, this rumination is divided into four blogposts (see also the second, third and fourth installment). 

Introduction – the reception of Atlantis in western culture          

The legend of Atlantis is a perennial feature of the cultural history of the modern west, and most people you ask will presumably have an idea about this place, an idea that is founded on the same basic details: That it was an advanced civilisation that flourished several thousand years before the common era, and which sank into the ocean in a cataclysmic event. Some will possibly take it as established history and speculate with varying degrees of earnestness about where the remnants of Atlantis can possibly be found. Others recognise it for what it is, namely a myth, or at best a metaphor formulated by Plato in his dialogues Timaios and Critias and based on material allegedly brought to Greece from Ancient Egypt by Solon. The idea of such an ancient superpower whose technological level has often been depicted as even beyond that of our modern times is unquestionably tantalising. Moreover, the details of the legend – the nature of the civilisation and its social structures, its location, its date, the background for its fall – are all very flexible within the general framework of the story. Because of this flexibility, it is very easy for readers and writers of very different tastes to imagine Atlantis in accordance with their own views and frames of reference. It is perhaps this flexibility, above everything else, that has made the myth of Atlantis so popular.

I myself have a strong interest in the cultural reception of the Atlantis myth, and also in the cultural history of utopian societies in general. However, I am also a medievalist by profession, and it is very rare that I am able to combine my interests in the Middle Ages and the reception of the Atlantis myth. Granted, Plato’s Timaios was translated into Latin with a commentary by the Christian writer Chalcidius already in the fourth century, and Plato was of course well known in the learned world of the medieval Latin West, which is my general area of expertise. Yet despite the undisputed importance of Timaios, the myth of Atlantis did not garner much interest, and I do not know of any medieval text in which an ideal society inspired by the myth was formulated. The reason for this lack of interest is beyond my knowledge, but I feel obliged to emphasise that it is not in any way indicative of a lack of imagination on behalf of the medieval intelligentsia, only that the myth did not strike the necessary chords to engender literary imitations.

This situation changed in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when fantasies of ideal societies became very common on the European literary stage. Such fantasies are of course rooted in the preceding centuries and draw on a complex web of literary forebears, but with the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) we see a text formulating an ideal society along the lines of Plato’s Republic and the thoughts of late medieval humanism. Such literature became a genre of its own, and it is here we find one of the first post-classical in-depth engagements with the myth of Atlantis, namely Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (published 1627) in which an ideal society of exceptionally high technological standing is described. This society is located on the island of Bensalem, which is situated in the East and was converted to Christianity by the apostle Bartholomew (who was historically believed to have operated in India). While this ideal society is not called Atlantis, the title of the book is a marker of the works of Plato to which Bacon’s ideas are indebted.

Since the publication of New Atlantis, a wide range of texts has been written in which this mythical civilisation is touched upon in varying degree of detail. Some of these works make serious claims about the historicity of Atlantis, such as the Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck the elder who published his four-volume work Atlantica in the period 1679-1702, claiming among other things that Plato’s Atlantis was situated in modern-day Sweden. Another, and later, work that seriously claims Atlantis as a historical fact is The Story of Atlantis written by William Scott-Elliot in 1896. Scott-Elliot was a theosophist, and the Atlantis myth formed the kernel of his formulation of a history of mankind that envisioned the disintegration of the Atlantean civilisation and the degeneration of mankind. The theme of degeneration can already be found in the classical Atlantis myth, in which the fall of the civilisation was seen as its punishment for a society that had become corrupt. In his occasionally detailed, but predominantly extremely superficial, sketch of thousands of years of imagined human history, Scott-Elliot describes the emergence of lesser races – yellow-skinned, red-skinned, black-skinned – that brought about the collapse of Atlantis. These can easily be read as the forebears of Asians, Africans and Native Americans, and they point to the hard kernel of racism in much of theosophist thought. The theme of degeneration was something that could easily fit into the zeitgeist of the turn of the nineteenth century, when concerns of miscegenation, degeneration and eugenics were common across the political and moral spectrums.

From Edgar P. Jacobs' Atlantis Mystery

The various fantasies of Atlantis that have emerged in the twentieth century have taken many forms, but in most cases the stories are set in ancient and/or modern times while skipping the Middle Ages. For example, the Mickey Mouse story Topolino e l’Atlantide continente perduto (Mickey and the lost continent of Atlantis) from 1987 (written by Giorgio Pezzin and drawn by Massimo De Vita), is set entirely in ancient times, as it is a story of time travel where Mickey and Goofy witness the destruction of Atlantis by a comet. Other works describe how Atlantis has survived into our own times, for example in a state of reduced, almost wistful splendour as in the case of Pierre Benoit’s classic novel L’Atlantide (1919), or in a thriving utopian society that has regained and perhaps exceeded its former glory, as in the case of Edgar P. Jacobs’ story L’Énigme de l’Atlantide (1955-56) which is part of his comic book series Blake and Mortimer.

The Maracot Deep, Arthur Conan Doyle's Atlantis novel

And yet, there are exceptions. In the fantasy comic book series Thorgal by Jean van Hamme and Grzegorz Rosinski (started in 1977), the eponymous protagonist is brought up among Vikings. It is soon revealed, however, that Thorgal’s parents were part of an expedition of Atlanteans from a distant planet, to where the survivors of Atlantis had escaped following a natural disaster on earth thousands of years earlier. The temporal setting of Thorgal is obscure and appears to have changed somewhat in the course of its running, but it is clearly medieval, and Thorgal is therefore one of very few cases where the engagement with the Atlantis myth is set in the Middle Ages. Another is the episode of Capitán Trueno to which I will turn in the next blogpost.

Welcome to Atlantis

Saint Olaf in Denmark - late medieval examples

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf, patron saint of Norway, who was killed in the Battle of Stiklestad in 1030 in an attempt to regain the title of Norwegian king. Throughout the Middle Ages, Olaf was an important saint in the religious landscape of Scandinavia, and his cult flourished outside the borders of both the Norwegian kingdom and the significantly more extensive Norwegian archdiocese. Due to the extensive contact between Norway and Denmark - through trade and political and religious ties - the cult of Saint Olaf was very strong among the Danes, and several churches, chapels and altars were dedicated to him. Part of the reason why the cult of Saint Olaf gained such popularity in Denmark had to do with him being seen as protector of seafarers, which can be seen in some of the miracles associated with him that have been recorded in the saint-biography now known by the title Passio et Miracula Beati Olavi. Another reason for Olaf's popularity in Denmark had to do with one fundamental feature of the Danish cult of saints. This feature was that the cult of native saints in Denmark - i.e. saints who were either Danish by origin or who had died in Denmark - was very regional. Consequently, there were very few Danish saints whose cults had a significant impact throughout all of Denmark.

Saint Olaf and Saint Knud Rex

The Church of Our Lady, Skive, Northern Jutland, c.1500

The two Danish saints that came closest to a Denmark-wide veneration were Knud Rex (d.1086) and Knud Lavard (d.1131, can.1169), but even though both their cults were propagated by the reigning royal dynasty for a period, this was not sufficient to maintain a long-standing popularity throughout Denmark. The popularity of Knud Rex was revitalised with the establishment of the Kalmar Union, where Knud and Olaf became representatives of two of the three union kingdoms (Saint Erik of Sweden was the third representative). As a consequence, Olaf and Knud, and sometimes also Erik, were increasingly depicted together from the late 1300s onwards. This can be seen in the pictures from Skive Church in Northern Jutland, which were executed around 1500, where Olaf can be seen holding his battle axe (which by this point had become a halberd), and Knud Rex holds his sword. It is tempting to suggest that because of Olaf's popularity in Denmark prior to the Kalmar Union, it was perhaps more natural for Danish patrons to commission Olaf and Knud Rex as part of their pictorial programme, while often leaving Erik of Sweden out of it, because he did not have a strong place in the Danish catalogue of saints prior to 1397.

Saint Olaf and Saint Knud Rex

The Church of Our Lady, Skive, Northern Jutland, c.1500

The interior of the Church of Our Lady, Skive

The Church of Our Lady, Skive, c.1200

Due to the regional nature of the Danish cult of saints, Olaf was more widely venerated in Denmark than any native Danish saint. This can be seen in the higher number of dedications of both churches, chapels and altars when compared with the saints native to Denmark. Moreover, while each of the episcopal centres of medieval Denmark had its own patron saint that bound their region to the divinely ordained history of Christendom - as per the historical understanding of medieval Christians - the veneration of Saint Olaf was present in the episcopal cities as well. For instance, in the bishopric of Odense, where Knud Rex had his cult centre, there were two chapels dedicated to Olaf, while in the city itself there was established a hospital shortly before 1437 by the priest Peder Jensen, which was dedicated to the Holy Ghost, Saint Antony (either of Egypt or of Padua) and Saint Olaf.     

Saint Olaf and the dragon

Roskilde Cathedral, c.1500

Also the episcopal city of Roskilde displays several examples of the cult of Saint Olaf, especially from the turn of the fifteenth century. Two wall-paintings featuring the same motif - Olaf trampling the dragon - can be found, one in the chapel of the three magi (above), and one on a column in the nave (below). The city of Roskilde also had a church dedicated to Saint Olaf, and two more such churches were found in the diocese. Many of these examples of the cult of Saint Olaf in Denmark have survived, but many more have been lost, and we must expect the popularity of the king-saint to have been even more significant than we can establish from surviving evidence.

Bishop flanked by Saint Lucius and Saint Olaf

Roskilde Cathedral, c.1500

Sanctus Olauus

Roskilde Cathedral, c.1500

Santiago Matamoros at San Pedro de Arlanza

Today, July 25, is the feast of the apostle James the Greater. According to legends that accrued in the course of the Middle Ages, James buried in Spain where he became known as Santiago, eventually taking on the role as a saintly knight who aided the Christians against the Muslim Spaniards of al-Andalus, earning him the nickname Matamoros, Moor-killer. The history of his cult is both long and complex, and something that deserves far more depth than I can give it in this present blogpost. But as a nod to the Spanish legend of Santiago, here is a weather-worn statue of Santiago killing an enemy, presumably a Moor, from the monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza in the province of Burgos. The monastery became defunct under the confiscation of its lands in the nineteenth century under the aegis of  Juan Álverez Mendizábal in the period 1836-37, and what remains of it now is a set of impressive and beautiful ruins. The date of the statue is not known to me. It occupies a niche above the main entrance into what was once the great monastery complex, and served as a reminder to the visitors of Santiago's prowess against whoever was considered the enemy.