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.