The Midgard serpent on another planet - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 8

 

Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement 

- Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication 

I forget who first made this point, but the monsters of science fiction and stories about space travel are ultimately drawn from the monsters of the classical and medieval imaginations, transposed to a new frontier once the Earth had been mapped and all continents were known to the map-makers. As a consequence, numerous stories set in space contain recognisable elements from medieval narratives. A quick glance at the front pages of science fiction magazines, for instance, will show many variations on the theme of male hero rescues a woman from a monster. This is the typical damsel in distress, which had many configurations throughout the Latin Middle Ages, and the most enduring iconographical depiction came in the pictorial narratives of Saint George rescuing Princess Alexandra from the dragon. In its turn, this particular story also owed much to Perseus rescuing Andromeda, as well as other similar tales. Space medievalism, therefore, is a fruitful topic of study, and one that I hope will see much more focus in the coming years. 

Recently, I was reminded of this transposition of imaginary beings to worlds beyond our own planet. I have been reading the Norwegian comic book Ingeniør Knut Berg (Engineer Knut Berg), which was created in 1941, in the second year of the Nazi occupation of the country. The comic was written by Hallvard Sandnes (whose pen name was Vigleik Vikli) and drawn by Jostein Øvrelid (whose pen name was Ronald Stone). The series recounts the adventures of the eponymous protagonist, his fiancé Aima - princess of the utopian country Kalimanko located in East Central Asia - and their companions. Starting out as an earthbound picaresque narrative with elements of science fiction, the adventures were eventually brought into space. Notable sources of inspiration include Flash Gordon and Lost Horizon. 

The comic was - and still is - written in Nynorsk, a written language more often associated with traditional poetry, hymns, and lyrical descriptions of nature than with technological fantasies. To me - as a writer in Nynorsk - it is delightful to see what are now very old-fashioned words and turns of phrase used alongside robots and spaceships.  

This being a Norwegian comic, its world is necessarily described through the Norwegian cultural frame of references. Perhaps the best example of how this frame of reference affects the interpretation of the new discoveries on distant planets can be found in albums 14 and 15, which were published in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Here, Knut Berg's spaceship approaches the unknown reaches of the planet Uri, where he and his companions suddenly encounter a sea-beast rising its head through the water. In order to express the consternation of the interplanetary travellers, the narrator states that the beast looked like nothing on earth, and the closest would be the legend of the Midgard serpent. According to Norse mythology, this serpent - Jormungand - encircled the world, and would kill, and be killed by, the god Thor at Ragnarok. 

The beast reminiscent of the Midgard serpent is a reminder that the new is typically interpreted or imagined through the old. In order to describe what has hitherto not been seen, it is necessary to fall back on the familiar images and names. It is this mechanism that has brought the names and stories of old worlds into new ones, and the reason why - for instance - there is a Pacific Island nation named the Solomon islands, or the figure of Santiago Matamoros became Santiago Mataindios in Latin America. Space. This kind of transposition - of filtering the information from one world through a frame of reference belonging to a different world - is both common and unexpected. But because it is so common, it is also easily forgotten. Consequently, we easily forget that we understand the new and the unknown imperfectly, because we force it into a framework that was not built for what we are encountering. Studying this mechanism means that we become less arrogant in our meetings with new information, and better disposed to understand that which is new on its own terms. 

Gateway reading - the case of The Silent Rifleman

There is an old truism that children should be encouraged to read comic books because doing so leads to reading other books. While this is typically true, the truism also carries with it an underlying assumption that comic books are inherently and categorically inferior to prose books such as novels. Having read a lot of comic books and a lot of novels and other prose works in the course of my life, I strongly object to such a dichotomy. Good literature is good because of the way it is made, not because of the medium itself. Even so, it is true that comic books tend to be gateway reading, especially because a lot of comic books - like a lot of novels - engage in intertextual play that points the reader to the works that are being referenced or even, as is often the case of comic books, parodied. Last autumn, at the tender age of 38, I happened to read a novel precisely because of such an intertextual reference in a comic book. 

The novel in question is The Silent Rifleman - a tale of the Texan plains by Henry W. Herbert (1807-58). In 1880, it was published as a dime novel - this edition has been digitised here - and was part of the extensive literature that cemented the mythology of the Wild West to its readers east of Mississippi and in later decades. The novel recounts the the adventures of Pierre Delacroix, an army officer turned frontiersman, and his attempt to bring a young officer and his bride to safety during the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.  

Cover of the 1880 edition of The Silent Rifleman

Courtesy of dimenovels.org

As a piece of literature, The Silent Rifleman is not without its merits. There are several quotable passages which convey general truths that transcend chronological particulars. In chapter 11, for instance, we read that "it is circumstance, after all, that makes saints or savages, monsters or martyrs of us all!" And as someone who has researched the cult of saints extensively, this is absolutely true. Similarly, the following quotation from chapter 16 feels especially relevant in today's war-torn reality in which the absurdity of the nation-state has been made painfully clear: "To nations, there is no hereafter; for nations, there is no world to come". There are also various other nuggets, such as some very lovely descriptions of natural scenery, and the use of the word "interlarded" in chapter 10, which is a term I hope to use in future conversations. 

Despite its qualities, The Silent Rifleman is mainly interesting as a historical source. The prose swerves towards the loftier end of the spectrum and shows a decidedly romantic bent, especially in the presentation of the novel's eponymous hero. The descriptions can at times be tedious, and the racist portrayals of Mexicans - even those individuals who are on the side of the protagonist - provide unpleasant reminders of how the racialised Other has been a feature of US culture since its inception. 

I was happy to read this novel, because it provided me with a better sense of a historical period that hovered into my professional consciousness a few years ago, and which I keep meaning to delve into in order to tie together some connections that touch on my own expertise. Granted, it is not that Herbert's novel qualifies as a source to the events of the Mexican-American War, but it does show how that war, and how that part of the US-Mexican frontier, helped to fashion the mythology of the United States, a mythology that is still shaping the unfolding of events. 

I encountered this novel through a comic book gateway, namely Ben il bugiardo, an album in the Italian comic book series Tex, whose title can be translated into English as "Ben the liar". The story was written by Pasquale Ruju and drawn by Stefano Biglia. I read the Norwegian translation, done by Nina Svensrud, the title of which is Skrønemakeren Ben, which is better understood as "Ben, the teller of tall tales" rather than "liar". 

The Norwegian edition of Ben il bugiardo

Translated by Nina Svensrud

The story of Ben il bugiardo is centred on a shop clerk in a typical frontier town of the US west sometime in the late 1800s. Like many long-running comic books, the exact chronological setting of Tex is nebulous, but the stories are mainly set sometime in the 1880s. The title character is famous for his stories, one of which tells of how he helped the legendary Tex Willer, the main protagonist of the comic book franchise. When Tex himself shows up in town, however, Ben is revealed to be a liar. To overcome the subsequent shame and ostracision, he decides to take up the chase when his fiancée is abducted by a group of bandits, following on the trail of Tex. Inexperienced as an outdoorsman and as a tracker, Ben is discovered by one of the bandits and is about to get shot. However, Ben convinces the bandit that he is a famous author who has come to interview the bandit leader for his next novel. As proof, he brandishes his copy of The Silent Rifleman - the cover of which reveals it to be the 1880 Beadle edition - and recounts the novel to the bandit. The ruse works, and things continue from there.  

When I saw the cover image of the dime novel, I got curious. Having read this comic book for close to thirty years, I know that its authors are well versed in the history of nineteenth-century USA, and I suspected that the reference might be to an actual, authentic dime novel. I decided to do some Internet searching, and I eventually encountered the Nickel and Dime library of dimenovels.org. Since this digital repository boasts of more than 13 000 dime novels, Ben il bugiardo proved to be a gateway to more than just the one dime novel I have read so far. I am deligthed to have this resource at my fingertips, especially since popular culture is a crucial element when trying to understand and come close to a historical period. 

As a piece of literature, I would say that Ben il bugiardo is far more entertaining, well-composed and interesting than The Silent Rifleman. The two titles are both composed as popular entertainment and are as such comparable despite the very different historical contexts, and the comic book is, in my view, a much more solid literary work than the novel it references. As such, this case is a good reminder that comic books are gateways to reading for adults as well as children, and that sometimes it is nice to go through that gateway and then back again, simply because the gateway itself proved more valuable.

Secondary medievalism? - the case of Tex, The Demons of the North

 

so now the frickin' Mounties are involved 

- Dr. Bob Kelso, Scrubs S05E23

To study history requires the study of how history is being used in our own time. The basic principles of either the use of history or its reception - two similar yet distinct concepts - are largely the same independent of the period that is being used or received. However, distinct periods - as defined by later generations of scholars - require distinct parameters for researching and understanding how a given period has been represented, misrepresented, used, abused, received, or been conceptualised in later eras. For me, as a medievalist, I am naturally most interested in the reception of the Middle Ages, namely in medievalism. Within medieval studies, medievalism has emerged as a broad and rich subfield, and the last ten years have especially produced a number of important and interesting studies. 

As with all scholarly terms, its definitions are constantly under calibration, and it is necessary that we continue to discuss how to define or delinate the terms we use. The term 'medievalism' itself has been interpreted in different ways, and various sub-subfields have emerged along types of sources, along different postmedieval periods, and different applications. Some particularly valuable resources are the essay collections Medievalisms in a postcolonial world, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (2010), and  Medievalism: Key Critical terms, edited by Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz (2014), and the series 'Studies in Medievalism', currently in its 34th issue. 

My first published foray into medievalism was an article on the concept of 'urban medievalism'. Part of my argument is that we can talk about primary and secondary forms of medievalism, and perhaps also tertiary forms and so on. The difference is that primary medievalism is intentional, and those who use the past are aware that they use a medieval past instead of confusing it with, say, the seventeenth century. Secondary medievalism is incidental and unintentional. It is still the medieval past that is being used or received, but those who do so might not be aware of it. In these cases, the link to the medieval past usually comes through the use of the primary medievalism rather than the Middle Ages. Defining the border between primary and secondary medievalism might not always be straightforward, and discussions might have to be done on a case-by-case basis. In the present blogpost, I want to highlight how tricky it can be to spot secondary medievalisms because sometimes there is nothing medieval about it. 

Tex, Demonene fra nord, Norwegian Tex Willer vol. 548 (April 2011)

Text: Mauro Boselli; art: Giovanni Ticci; translation: Tone Dannevig

My case study is the 600th issue of the Italian Western comic Tex, which was published in October 2010. Tex was created by Gianluigi Bonelli and Aurelio Galeppini in 1948, and is currently one of Italy's most popular comics, or 'fumetti', with one monthly issue and various specials and spin-offs. The series features the eponymous Tex Willer, a Texas ranger and a Navaho chieftain, his son Kit, the ranger Kit Carson (inspired by but not identical with the historical figure), and Tiger Jack, a Navaho. Most of the stories run across two issues, and they are written in different genres, ranging from classic Westerns to the odd science fiction story. The comic is also big in Norway, and I have been collecting the monthly issues since 1998. The Norwegian publication schedule is a bit behind the Italian one, meaning that what was meant to be a special story marking the important milestone of 600 issues, was published as issue 548 in my home country. 

From here on, there will be spoilers. 

The story, 'I demoni del Nord', The Demons from the North, is written by Mauro Boselli and veteran artist Giovanni Ticci. The plot concerns a mysterious cannibalistic attack on a fort in the Northwest Territories in Canada, which turns out to be part of a series of raids targeting various First Nation villages. The perpetrators are the so-called demons of the mist, a tribe described as having retained cannibalistic practices from the Siberian tundra, who dwell in mist-covered mountains and have cannibalistic rites in a cave in a dormant volcano. Since it is a single-issue story, the plot is fast-paced and little time is spent on describing the tribe itself, but some attention has been made to mark the distinction between some of the First Nations that appear in the story, especially the Cree and the Dogrib peoples.  

What, then, does this have to do with the Middle Ages and its reception? The story operates outside the medieval timeframe, and arguably outside of the medieval geographical remit. It is an action story featuring rifles, dynamite, Mounties, and Canadian First Nations, and the desperate defence scenes are more reminiscent of Western films such as The Magnificent Seven. There is nothing medieval to be found. 

Except that the story is an adaptation of The Eaters of the Dead, the 1976 novel by Michael Crichton, which was adapted into the film The Thirteenth Warrior in 1999. Crichton's novel draws on both Ibn Fadlan's travelogue from his mission to the Volga Bulgars in 921, and on the poem Beowulf. The plot concerns thirteen warriors who fight to protect a Norwegian village against attackers that turn out to be relics Neanderthals living in caves in the mountains. The novel is a clear-cut case of medievalism, seeing as it uses several elements from the Middle Ages - a tenth-century Arabic travelogue and a poem  in Old English at least two centuries older - but also incorporating distinctly modern elements such as the idea of relict Neanderthals that reveal that this is medievalism and not medieval cultural product.  

I demoni del Nord is an adaptation of Crichton's novel, and although it is evident that the novel is set in a twentieth-century idea of the Middle Ages, the comic book writer, Mauro Boselli, has sought to adapt it to a Western setting in which the basic plot points are embedded within a different narrative universe. Such adaptations are common in both literature and cinema, and they showcase why genres are defined not just by periods or countries but by narratological features. I demoni del Nord is a Western based on a suspense story set in the Middle Ages, but a story that might also be said to contain features from twentieth-century cinema, where the Western has been one of the defining genres. Mauro Boselli's adaptation of the novel makes the comic book story into a case of secondary medievalism because it is incidental. The medieval setting of The Eaters of the Dead is of no consequence for the comic book, because the story could have been adapted in the same way had the novel been set on Mars or sometime in the deep future. And even though the medieval features of the original novel are completely removed, the story itself is recognisable, and it is possible to see that we are dealing with a work of art set in nineteenth-century Canada based on a work of art set in tenth-century Norway. Consequently, in order to use Crichton's novel to understand how the Middle Ages have been used and received in our own times, we also need to follow the trace onwards to both the film adaptation from 1999 and the comic book adaptation from 2010. Researching history means to understand how historical periods have been used and received in later centuries, and to fully understand this use and this reception, we also need to follow whatever echoes and reverberations that the primary medievalism creates further down the line. 

The non-existent manuscript - a brief note on fictional books and bibliomania

Bibliomania manifests in many different ways. One of those ways is to nurture an intense fondness for books that do not exist, save in some fictional universe. Reading about fictional books is a sheer delight to me, partly because I have a great love of the book as a concept and as a manifestation of humanity's creativity and drive towards beauty, and partly because of what the mere existence of such a book implies about the fictional universe in which it exists. To produce a book requires of human skill, necessitates material resources, and can only be done through some sort of infrastructure by which those resources and the skills are brought together. A fictional book, in other words, adds a greater depth to the complexity of a made-up world, just as a real book adds greater depth to the real world. This depth is especially great and wonderful when done with care, and when it serves as a vehicle for displaying the learning and the knowledge of the author of this double fiction of world and book. 

Fictional books are very common in literature. The conceit of having found a lost manuscript from which your own fiction stems, is a playful way of creating a greater degree of verisimilitude in a story. The wonderful and at times wonderfully absurd toying with, and stretching of, the line between fiction and reality in Don Quijote, for instance, is partly done through the claim that the tale comes a manuscript written by Cide Hamete Benengeli. Similarly, Adso of Melk's account of his experiences together with his master William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco's Name of the rose is given a curious and unstable sheen of realism through the prologue of a found and then lost-again manuscript.  

There are many famous fictional books, and I believe it is no exaggeration to suggest that there are even more fictional books that are known to a much more limited number of readers, or that are known only for a shorter period of time and within specific readerships. Some fictional books do transcend the readerships of the real books in which they appear, perhaps because they are discussed and talked about by readers who also write, and thereby become more famous than the real book - the vehicle, as it were, of the fictional book. For instance, the fictional books of the real library of the abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris included by Rabelais in the first book of Pantagruel, has been mentioned by several authors. These mentions mean that there are likely to be readers who will be familiar with the list, and might even know parts or all of it by heart, without actually having read Rabelais. Such famous fictional books are not rare, but there are probably more fictional books which are likely to remain known to a more limited group of readers, or what we might justly call the fandom of a book or a book series. 

What spurred on these reflections on fictional books and my intense delight in them was a recent issue in one of my favourite comic book series, the Italian Western series Tex Willer, which is very popular in Norway. The issue in question - number 708 in Norway, number 748 in Italy - is written by Moreno Burattini and drawn by Michele Rubini. The story deals with the appearance of a blood-sucking monster in Northern Mexico, a chupacabra, or goat-sucker. The title of the issue is 'La mesa della follia', which in Norwegian has been translated roughly as the crag or mountain of horror ('Redselsberget'). This translation, however, is likely to miss one of the points of the original, as 'follia' means madness - as shown by the in-text Spanish name of the mountain as 'mesa del locura', or the mountain of madness. The title is, in other words, a likely nod to H. P. Lovecraft's famous tale. 

The issue is the first of a two-part story, and the it begins with a bag of bones brought to one of the recurring characters of the series, an Egyptian scientist living in Mexico, who is known by the epithet El Morisco. The search of the animal of these mysterious bones leads the scientist to an old abbey, in which he is shown a manuscript who was brought by a traveller. El Morisco analyzes the book, notes that it is written partly in German and partly in Latin, he recognizes alchemical signs, and dates it to the fifteenth century based on abbreviations in the text which, as he says, are typical of that period. The last page of the manuscript, as seen below, shows a drawing of a horrible cat-like beast, with the subtitle 'bestia quae sanguinem sugit', the beast who sucks blood.           

What delights me about this fictional book is partly how it continues a long and wonderful literary game of verisimilitude through the conceit of the found manuscript, and partly how both author and artist are able to create added verisimilitude through details such as the dating of the manuscript based on abbreviations, and on authentic-looking renditions of alchemical signs. Such attention to detail which strikes a chord in a historian such as myself - having worked on late-medieval manuscripts and codicological puzzles - is perhaps especially delightful when we consider the medium, namely a monthly comic book. This statement is not to be taken as as disparaging commentary about monthly comics, I am myself an avid reader of this particular one. Rather, the point is that monthly comic books are often aimed at a month-long readership who will then move on to the next issue, and then the next. While the publishers no doubt expect collectors, and while we should expect that there are several readers who do re-read these issues several times, a comic like Tex Willer is sold in a short-term market where each issue is relatively swiftly replaced with the next. In such a market, attention to detail is no doubt appreciated by many readers, and might even be what attracts several of those readers, but these details are probably not seen as the defining factor of the success of the series. Instead, the success is more likely attributed to the creation of mystery, the gun fights, the heroism of the protagonists, and the setting, the Old West, which still retains such a forceful grip on the European imagination. Because such attention to detail is not necessary, it becomes all the more delightful. This attention to detail comes from some place of love, whether it is a love of literary games, of verisimilitude, of codicology, of authenticity, of the series itself, of creating such nods that only a part of the readership will recognize. And such acts of love that lies in this attention to detail is in itself a form of bibliomania, which in turn adds even more delight to the matter.       

Achronology as a cultural force, part 1

 

I can see through time           

- Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons S05E13        


As a historian, I am trained to divide history into periods, and I am also trained to deconstruct such periods and critique them. Periodisation is a tool for making sense of large amounts of information, and sorting various narratives and various blocks of information into more comprehensible units. But such tools as periodisation can easily become weapons, which is why so much of the historian’s task is taken up by explaining why terms such as “the Middle Ages”, “Antiquity”, “pre-modern” and “the Enlightenment” are deeply problematic and can be used to promoted racist, nationalist, supremacist agendas. Periodisation can, in such instances, become a cultural force in that it helps create sensations of history moving towards predestined or inherently natural endpoints, which can be used to interpret any major event in history. Such teleological views of history can function as rallying points for groups or organisations, and they also serve to establish an idea of any given group being at the centre of history, whereas all other groups are merely extras or collateral. However, periodisation is not the only understanding of history that can have an impact on how societies and groups approach the past. Another such understanding is what we can call “achronology”, and in this blogpost and the next I will explore some aspects of the achronological view of the past, and what how that view can shape current events.  

Achronology is in a way the opposite of periodisation, because while periodisation rigidly – often too rigidly – divide the past into temporally sequenced blocks, achronology undoes that sequence and puts every part of history into the same block. Since every part of history inhabits the same block, achronology opens up for encounters between historical individuals, phenomena, concepts or objects that could not possibly encounter one another. In this way, achronology is also different from anachronism. Anachronism means that something is in the wrong time period, and we typically see this in works of historical fiction, be it in novels, comics, films, etc. One of my favourite examples is when the eponymous protagonist of the comic strip series Prince Valiant meets Marino, the founder of the independent country San Marino, while also fighting the Huns of Attila. According to legend, Marino operated around 301, while Attila ruled the Huns from the 440s until his death in 455. There is, in other words, no way that Prince Valiant could have encountered both Marino and Attila. What makes Prince Valiant’s impossible encounters anachronistic rather than a case of creative achronology is that the adventures of Prince Valiant are firmly set in the fifth century. Consequently, when later concepts such as crusading ideology or later phenomena such as the Viking raids are brought into Prince Valiant’s world, the boundaries of time are broken and anachronisms are being committed. In achronology, on the other hand, such boundaries cannot be broken because they do not exist in the first place. While periodisation and anachronism predicate chronological differences, achronology obliterates those differences and puts everything into a temporal here-and-now. This also means that time travel stories are not achronological, because such stories depend on the ability to traverse those temporal divides that achronology refuses to acknowledge.        

Like creative anachronism, achronology is also a concept commonly employed in entertainment. Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, for instance, takes place in a London Below that effectively comprises all elements of London’s history in one and the same time-space. The events in Neverwhere are located in a fixed time period, the here-and-now, but that time period encompasses all other periods and can therefore not be considered a case of anachronism. Similarly, Robert Holdstock’s novel Mythago Wood employs achronology by constructing a complex woodland that contains within it corporeal manifestations of the myths of all peoples and cultures that have lived in that part of Britain since the Ice Age. While the novel does operate with the concept of chronological divides, and while this wood is sectioned according to a chronological scheme, those that enter the wood are not subject to the constraints of that chronology. Consequently, Robin Hood, Cú Chulainn and Saxon immigrants all inhabit the same here-and-now.         
       
Achronology is a very fruitful creative tool, just like anachronism, and can be used to very entertaining and also educational ends. I am myself very much in favour of achronology when used in such positive creative ways. But like everything in culture, achronology can also be used as a cultural force, namely something that shapes the culture that receives it. When I call achronology a cultural force I mean this: that the erasure of temporal divides can convey an understanding of the past as a single, unified block whose main defining feature is that it isn’t now, and this understanding can in turn shape how people go about in shaping the present and the future. How achronology impacts contemporary culture depends on where it is received, when it is received, and by whom it is received.   

In some cases, the impact of achronology can take the form of constructing folk-spirits where one feature of a people’s past becomes the defining essence of that people. This essence can then be imagined as a constant to be found in all of the past. Such an idea can lead in two main directions, both of which are sinister and deeply problematic. One direction is to see this spirit or essence is still with us, and that can be used to set a people apart from others and to insist on their primacy in world events, where all of the amorphous, unified past serves as a heavy legitimising weight behind such a claim. The second direction is to fuel fantasies of degradation, where this essence now is lost and must be recovered, which in turn is a way of alienating everyone that does not have a claim to this essence. In Norway, invocations of the Viking spirit – which appears from time to time – is a form of this achronological thinking.      

It is important to emphasise that what I have drawn up here is a scheme of the impact of achronology in its purest form. It is a model of an intellectual construct, and such models rarely map perfectly onto reality. There are very few cases – if any – of pure achronology at work in the cultural discourse, at least when that achronology is not employed for creative ends. But there are elements of achronological thinking at work in society, and these erase or hinder a nuanced understanding of chronological progress. Such achronological thinking might not completely remove any understanding of the past as divided into periods, but the length of those periods and the connection between those periods are obscured, and this obscurity simplifies the past. It is in this simplification that achronology strikes most forcefully.  

While periodisation has its problems, it does help us to comprehend how incrementally history is meted out, and how much human activity and how many human lives go into a year, a decade, or a century. In other words, history is a long process where things can chronologically progress slowly or quickly depending on various factors. (I here use progress not in the qualitative, teleological sense, but just as a way of describing the passing of time from one year to the next.) It is this understanding of history as a complex chain of temporalities that contain numerous known and unknown lives and deeds that prevent us from seeing the past as something simple. Achronology, however, works to simplify the past by erasing or obscuring the temporal divides. One of the most dangerous consequences of that erasure is that people who lose or are prevented from accessing the complex understanding of history are more likely to be receptive to conspiracy theories that stretch back into the very distant past. Ideas about sinister global cabals – typically launched against Jews and still employed in contemporary anti-Semitic discourse to devastating effects – depend on a kind of achronology in which it is possible to maintain large-scale secret society that can pass down its work through generations. Because achronology facilitates a thinking about the past as a single block, it is easier to accept the ludicrous idea that such societies have been in operation across centuries.     

A similar version of such achronological thinking was launched in Norway a few years back, when a freemason suggested that the Freemasons had roots in the Vikings, and as evidence he used a figurine from a third-century burial mound that sported a cloth that the freemason interpreted as the apron that is part of Freemason insignia. What we see here is that the Viking Age – a purely historiographical construct – was extended back in time to the third century, connected to the mythical history of the Freemasons. Because Freemason mythology claims to have roots in the period of the reign of King Solomon, the Norwegian freemason effectively latched his extended Viking period onto the more extensive Freemason period, and managed to connect three dots – the reign of King Solomon, the Viking Age, and eighteenth century – into a unified history. While this kind of historical fantasy does operate with temporal divides, these divides are both closer to one another and more permeable than in reality, and this provides fertile ground for fantasies of continuity, whether those fantasies are used for embellishing one’s institutional identity or fomenting anti-Semitic hatred.          

There are numerous other examples of how achronology works as a cultural force, and this preliminary sketch is just a first attempt to put the fundamental idea into writing. I will emphasise that I don’t disapprove of creative anachronism, I relish it when it is done well, and I also do not think that achronological thinking exist in its purest form. But my point here is by simplifying the past and the slow chronological progress of that past, we can become receptive to fantasies that impact how we view or current time, and how we engage politically in the current time. Belief in the possibility of secret societies sustained across centuries or millennia, or belief in folk-spirits that remain unchanged across centuries or millennia, are both very dangerous because such belief makes the believer receptive to propaganda, manipulation and political programmes designed to alienate or ostracise individuals or entire peoples. Achronology plays a part in the willingness some people have to accept simplistic or conspiracy theory-oriented explanations of the past. And while there also are other factors at play, such as national mythologies or economic pressures, the misunderstanding of the past according to principles of achronology is one of the important factors to facilitate the weaponisation of the past to abuse people in the present.      

In my next blogpost, part 2, I will focus on one specific case which can be said to be fuelled by achronology.        

To take the dragon by the nose - the iconography of dragonslaying by Paolo Uccello and Francisco Ibáñez

 
One of the great joys of being a medievalist is to explore how aspects from the Middle Ages - such as ideas, literary topoi or iconography - continues to work in culture long after the end of the medieval period (even by the most liberal estimate). This longevity of cultural aspect is of course unsurprising given the continuity in cultural transmission, or the occasional rediscovery which brings something back to the cultural consciousness after a period of oblivion. Moreover, this continuity is yet another example of how periodisations are fictions of practicality rather than natural entities, and continuity thus reminds us how cautious we should be in dividing time too neatly into compartments. 

Leaving aside the definition of the Middle Ages, and its problems as a scholarly construct, it is very clear that because there exists an idea of the medieval, that idea can be used aesthetically to connect with the period meant to be covered by that term. This connection can be serious or playful, or a mix of both, and it can serve a number of different purposes, all depending on the combination of author/sender/transmitter and audience.  

One medieval iconographical topos that has had a substantial impact on modern popular culture is that of the dragonslayer, which can be found in a range of media, from commercial fantasy to church art. I have touched on the development of this topos in earlier blogposts (here, here, and here), and I recently came across one scene that reminded me again how this ties into the cultural output of the medieval period. What the scene in question reminded me of was the famous depiction of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello, completed around 1470. In the contemporary imagination, this is perhaps one of the best known and most resonant renditions of the motif, and I was struck by the similarities between this and the scene by which I was reminded of Uccello's painting

Paolo Uccello, Saint George and the dragon (c.1470)
National Gallery, London, NG6294
Courtesy of Wikimedia

The scene in question is part of a dream sequence in the comic book El estropicio meteorológico (The meteorological fracas), which was serially published in 1987. The comic book is an instalment in the classical series Mortadelo y Filemón by Francisco Ibáñez, a series in which several famous works of art and literature have been parodied through the characters of this fictional universe. The similarities between the scene in the dream of Mortadelo and that of Uccello's dragonslaying are notable, especially the lance piercing the dragon's nose. Naturally, I cannot claim that it is Uccello who has provided Ibáñez with the model for the scene in El estropicio meteorológico - the scene might be inspired by any number of Saint George renditions, so we should be cautious in pinpointing influences too exactly. Even if the connection between the painting from c.1470 and the drawing from 1987 might be indirect at best, the scene with Mortadelo as the typical dragonslayer points to the impact of the medieval imagination on the modern, and we are reminded that so much of our modern cultural output is in some way part of a continuity that goes back centuries into the past.   

Francisco Ibáñez, Mortadelo y Filemón no. 17, El estropicio meteorológico (1987)

Down the rabbit hole - or, Adventures in medievalism

 

Oh, historical, so was there a dragon?   
- Nick Miller, New Girl, S05E16

The Vikings probably went to the moon
- David Mitchell, QI, S17E14


Although most of my research is spent on primary sources from the Middle Ages, I have increasingly ventured into various labyrinthine passages of the field of medievalism - the study of the reception of the Middle Ages in the modern period. This topic is one that is close to my heart, as I suspect that it was precisely such playful engagements with modern ideas about the medieval, conveyed through Playmobil, Lego, comic books and cartoons, that subtly prepared the ground for my current work on medieval history. Such a link between the childhood encounters and the very serious grown-up fascination with medieval minutiae are not unique to my trajectory, and I am always delighted when friends and colleagues share the various factors that moved them towards acquiring an expertise in the history of the Middle Ages. It is precisely this awareness of a quietly influencing fascination that works in mysterious ways that makes me interested in medievalism as a field of serious study. In part, it might be explained as a kind of homage to my younger self, a kind of acknowledgement of the hours spent engaging with those cultural expressions that prepared the ground for future decisions that have since brought me such immense intellectual pleasure. In part, it might also be explained as a way of acquiring a better comprehension of why this fascination was allowed to grow, and what nerves and what chords of my historical understanding - indeed, our collective historical understanding - that were touched by the images of knights and princesses, castles, swords and other staples of our Platonic idea of the medieval. In seeking such a comprehension, there is an awareness that the medieval fascinates other than myself, that understanding how we interpret, play with, represent and misrepresent the past actually matters for events that unfold in the present. Just as my future has been shaped by my exposure to the medieval in popular culture, so have other events likewise been shaped by representations of the Middle Ages, and people have been moved to things good or bad by this fascination. Engaging scholarly, critically and seriously with the knowledge of such an impact on real events and the contemporary world is one of the cornerstones of medievalist research. 

Research

Because ideas about the Middle Ages have flourished in so many different ways, and within a vast range of cultural frameworks, it is impossible to gain a complete overview of the phenomenon. Modern polities have their own cultural traditions in which visions of the medieval are conveyed through various forms of art, and these traditions require that the scholar engaging with them is familiar with the culture in question, and familiar with the language. By learning a new language, therefore, a new culture opens up, and a new trove of medievalism can be examined. Such troves easily become veritable rabbit holes from which it is difficult to emerge. 

Recently, as my Spanish has improved sufficiently for me to explore cultural expressions that are less well known outside the Spanish-speaking world, I have encountered a few such expressions that engage with the Middle Ages, and I am looking forward to spending years familiarising myself with this subject and, in doing so, enjoying the fruits of the labour of the numerous scholars already working on it. At the present stage, however, my forays are few, short and amateurish, and they are limited to specific topics that I have worked on within other cultural frameworks. One such topic is the modern fascination with the historical contact between the Norse and the Native Americans. This is a topic that has resulted in a number of cultural expressions, and as I am now preparing a talk on this subject for a conference in April, I am taking a deep dive into its manifold manifestations. 

It was in the course of this research that I remembered one of the Spanish cultural products that engage with the medieval, namely the comic book hero El Capitán Trueno, Captain Thunder, a twelfth-century knight created by writer Victor Mora Pujadas in 1956, and predominantly illustrated by Miguel Ambrosio Zaragoza. I only learned of this comic book series a few years ago, and although I wrote about its engagement with the topos of Atlantis in four blogposts (here, here, here, and here), I can still not claim to be an expert on the subject, far from it. However, since I remembered that Capitán Trueno is a wide-wandered gentleman, I decided to see if he had also travelled to the American landmass. It turned out that he had, and that the results drew me further and further down the rabbit hole. 

I came across a website presenting the covers of the first three hundred bi-weekly comic books, and when scrolling through these I realised that Capitán Trueno had met several Native American cultures, from the Inuit to what appears to be the predecessors of the Aztecs, and even battled dinosaurs - thus connecting the trope of medieval contact with America with the trope of the relict dinosaur inspired by The Lost World. I spent longer than I care to admit, getting a first impression of these stories, solely based on their cover art and their title, and it made me realise that this is something I will eventually have to spend even more time on, and getting further down the rabbit hole for the sake of science. It is thrilling realisation, and it is a good reminder that scholarly research opens up far more passages than can easily be envisioned at the beginning of one's career.     

Capitán Trueno, Acosados, vol. 56, 1957 

(courtesy of rafaelcastillejo.com/trueno.htm)

Capitán Trueno, La voz de Zankú, vol. 86, 1958 

(courtesy of rafaelcastillejo.com/trueno.htm)