[HN Gopher] Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on...
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Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian
Legend
Author : pseudolus
Score : 87 points
Date : 2021-09-22 11:25 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| mathattack wrote:
| Do recall the context... The Arthurian legends are not a story
| with sole authorship, like the Lord of the Rings. These are
| stories twisted and told by many different people. Perhaps the
| modern analogy is Spider-Man. Within Marvel there are many
| different varieties, and then you add on the fan driven
| content...
|
| For those deeply interested in different takes on Arthur,
| Steinbeck [0] took a stab at it too. This sent me down a long
| Arthurian rabbit hole.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Acts_of_King_Arthur_and_...
| bee_rider wrote:
| They also mention Marvel comics in the article. Although, it
| seems a bit less concrete than that. These stories were written
| over the course of hundreds of years, and were often not really
| collaborating at all, right? Like, Lancelot's characterization
| can diverge pretty significantly depending on whether the
| author is English or French, haha...
| jfengel wrote:
| Correct. Marvel has somebody in charge. A more apt parallel
| is fanfic... except that there isn't any "canon". It's _all_
| fanon.
|
| In the Arthurian fanfic verse, a few authors get famous
| enough that they form a kind of accepted canon. You're likely
| to read Malory in school, because the faculty likes the
| Malory version.
|
| Try telling your teacher that you disagree with their
| headcanon.
| fragmede wrote:
| If you think there's trouble to be had when telling your
| professor that you disagree about what's canon for a mythos
| from 1000 years ago, you should not engage with believers
| on what's canon vs not about a story about a Jewish
| carpenter from, oh, about 2021 years ago. Definitely do NOT
| question if that story has somebody in charge.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Some modern fan-driven content:
| https://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/
| samizdis wrote:
| Good grief. I had no idea that Steinbeck had written an
| Arthurian tale - and based on Malory, to boot. I am so looking
| forward to reading that. Thanks for the information.
| sparky_z wrote:
| Just wait until you find out about his werewolf murder
| mystery :)
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1001309335/a-young-john-
| stein...
| handrous wrote:
| Or his WWII propaganda novel featuring not-Nazi occupied
| not-Norway, and resistance fighters trying to commit
| sabotage against the occupying force.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_Down
| neaden wrote:
| It really is very good, but unfortunately unfinished and was
| unpublished in his lifetime.
| heurisko wrote:
| Before abandoning it for Paradise Lost, John Milton was also
| going to theme his epic poem on Arthurian legend.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I'd love to read a murder mystery by Milton
| brightball wrote:
| I wonder if that's why it's so difficult to look up specific
| stories. I vividly recall reading one in my childhood about a
| KotRT who sought out to challenge another who was supposed to
| be unbeatable during daylight, but insisted on waiting to
| challenge him at his best rather than his weakest. Always
| thought it was a great honor story and I can't for the life of
| me find it.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I would suggest asking on reddit if you can't find it here.
| I've actually managed to find some things that I had been
| seeking for over a decade through places like reddit.
| dspillett wrote:
| https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ might also be a good place
| to ask, story identification threads are common and often
| answered quickly if sufficient detail is given (or the
| asker is lucky).
| bct wrote:
| "The Kitchen Knight" has this plot element:
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/590413/the-
| kitchen-k...
|
| In this version it's the Red Knight who is strongest at noon
| (IIRC).
| brightball wrote:
| That's the one!
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Note that this "strength was greatest at noon" was also
| said to be true about Gawaine, and there is a version of
| a combat where after the noon hour his strength waxed and
| he was defeated.
|
| "According to the Vulgate Mort Artu, Gawain had been
| baptised as an infant by a miracle-working holy man, also
| named Gawain, who named the boy after himself, and the
| following day announced that every day at noon, at the
| hour of the baptism, his power and strength will
| increase."
| naufragios wrote:
| IIRC Gawain is the knight who is strongest at noon.
| brightball wrote:
| The details I remember, the one he wanted to challenge was
| the Red Knight (I _think_ ) and the other detail of the
| story that I remember was whoever was going to challenge
| him initially didn't have any armor and kept collecting
| pieces from other knights that he defeated along the way.
|
| I think it might have been Gawain now that you mention it.
| Pretty sure it started with a G so I kept thinking
| Gallahad.
|
| EDIT: Found it! Sir Gareth!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth#Le_Morte_d'Arthur
| groby_b wrote:
| I think that's probably based on the story line about
| Lancelot wounding Gawain with Balin's sword. Somewhere in
| Morte d'Arthur, but I don't recall the "wait to be at his
| best" part.
|
| It sounds like a Hollywood addition to the story, so maybe a
| movie?
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Okay... So former Arthurian publisher here. For folks who are
| semi-familiar with the canon of existing literature, what they
| found corresponds with the well-known "Story of Merlin" from the
| Lancelot-Vulgate Cycle. Like, we already have this story in
| print.
|
| [Look up "Lancelot-Grail: 2. The Story of Merlin: The Old French
| Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation (Lancelot-
| Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in
| Translation"] and get yourself a modern English translated
| paperback version of this "lost" Arthurian story.]
|
| There is nothing particularly new or unique here apart from the
| fact that this is a new _copy_ of what we already know.
|
| The article points out that if anything, this is a slightly
| Bowdlerized version of the already-extant story that took out the
| spicy parts about how the Lady of the Lake cast a spell on her
| lady bits to prevent the horn-dog Merlin from getting at them.
| arbitrage wrote:
| The part of the article that describes the new (old?) twist is
| all the way at the end:
|
| The team found that the account differed from other versions of
| the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin
| and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is "slightly
| toned-down," Tether tells the Guardian.
|
| She adds:
|
| > In most manuscripts of the better known [version], Viviane
| casts a spell whereby three names are written on her groin that
| prevent Merlin from sleeping with her. In several manuscripts of
| the lesser-known version, these names are written on a ring
| instead. In our fragments, this is taken one step further: the
| names are written on a ring, but they also prevent anyone
| speaking to her. So the Bristol Merlin gets rid of unchaste
| connotations by removing reference to both Viviane's groin and
| the idea of Merlin sleeping with her.
|
| Merlin's image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In
| more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise
| advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story,
| however, Campbell says he was a "morally dubious" magical seer or
| even a "creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil."
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there are plenty of folk-tale rewrites that cast "magic" people
| as morally dubious, creepy and yes, servants of the Devil.. who
| wrote those? any agenda detectable?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > any agenda detectable?
|
| Yes. It's a pro-manipulative-psychopath agenda. People with
| great social influence - priests, politicians/nobles, pillars
| of the community - by definition rely on soft power and
| social status. People with inherent power of their own -
| wizards, superheroes, or more mundanely scientists or hackers
| - are able to ignore or at least resist social power, and are
| consequently a threat. To the extent that that threat is seen
| as credible (and magic users _were_ historically seen as
| credible), social power will be deployed to vilify and
| discredit them. (Of course, in practice a lot of it is just
| cultural inertia /established narrative tropes from previous
| cases.)
| exolymph wrote:
| This is just normal.
|
| > In nearly every documented society, people believe that
| some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using
| magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural
| patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain
| them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show
| that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners,
| including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of
| the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and
| words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose
| existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts),
| recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop
| from three cultural selective processes: a selection for
| intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of
| impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths
| that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective
| schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism,
| conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics -- but
| around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and
| feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the
| forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions
| for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions.
| Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are
| intuitively appealing or they serve some believers' agendas.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2021-singh.pdf
| krapp wrote:
| That's syncretism - what happened almost every time
| Christianity began to take over a pagan culture. The former
| gods/spirits, etc. become recast as demonic or malevolent,
| and of course any "occult" practices (which were, formerly,
| simply religious practices) are viewed as Satanic practice
| and witchcraft. This is partly due to attempts by Christian
| authorities to de-legitimize the former religion, but also
| attempts to _preserve_ the former culture and its religious
| practices in a new context.
|
| Norse mythology is a particularly interesting example,
| because all we have of it is post-Christian retellings, and
| many parts of it (like Baldr's death and resurrection) seem
| an awful lot like Christianity with the serial numbers filed
| off.
| Bayart wrote:
| Pagan literature has plenty of creepy magical and divine
| beings. Just look at the Odyssey.
| krapp wrote:
| Of course, "creepy" is relative and contextual. The way we
| interpret the morality of the ancient Greek gods and other
| such beings is not necessarily the way their native
| cultures would have seen them. Zeus being a profligate
| shapeshifting rapist was not a big deal in a society where
| women were granted the same degree of consent as cattle.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| The Norse (and especially Icelandic) sagas also demonstrate
| this pretty starkly, and are from a related tradition to
| the Arthurian legends. In those, people with magical powers
| very clearly tend to be portrayed as creepy weirdos--and
| also, for whatever reason, tend to be from the Hebrides.
| jkestner wrote:
| A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has my canonical
| Merlin. Something of a jealous Rasputin.
| dash2 wrote:
| Big shout out to the Morte d'Arthur. I read it last year and at
| first found it hard to get into. There's tons of repetitive
| tournaments and jousting... the Marvel analogy is not wrong, it's
| a bit like a comic book. But gradually the characters get into
| your head, and the final conflict between Lancelot and Arthur
| really hits hard.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| don't forget A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ;-)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
| bobthechef wrote:
| That was an exercise in anti-Catholic bigotry on the part of
| Twain. "[I]t is to be considered a shameful period piece,
| written at a time when it was acceptable and even laudatory to
| be a Know-Nothing and make up slanders about the Catholic
| Church"[0]. It also exposes Twain's childish faith in
| democracy.
|
| [0] https://gloriaromanorum.blogspot.com/2008/07/connecticut-
| big...
| rsj_hn wrote:
| yes, that's true, but it's a great story and today most
| people don't care about the various social satires in it.
| Just like Dante placed lots of his political and social
| opponents in Hell, but it goes over the heads of most
| readers, who in any case are more interested in the timeless
| qualities of the story than the bickering about long
| forgotten debates.
| 0134340 wrote:
| The author of that article who kept looking for reasons to be
| offended bluntly dismisses the Church's endorsement of
| slavery because it was standard practice at the time while
| also basically calling Twain a bigot because of his southern
| American-based view of Catholicism, which was also standard
| practice at the time.
|
| You and the author both act both bigoted and ignorant towards
| Twain and call him childish in response to perceived bigotry.
| Twain was also not an atheist, he was a deist who attended
| church regularly. Someone can be of a religion and also
| criticize religion, it doesn't mean they're an atheist
| because as we all know, religions aren't perfect. But at
| least to the author's credit, he took a bit higher road than
| you and didn't go as far as calling Twain "childish".
| [deleted]
| all2 wrote:
| This is one of my favorites. Merlin in this always cracks me
| up. Also the protagonists learned knowledge is fascinating to
| me. The guy goes and creates a bunch of stuff from scratch and
| knows all the bits that go into the things. I always wonder if
| my education had been lacking, just because of this story.
| javajosh wrote:
| My sense is that there was a sweet spot in the late 18th to
| mid-20th century when modern(ish) things were still built by
| human hands, mostly using simple tools, so people could learn
| to build (and repair) those things for themselves. That
| accessibility was partly recreated in the 80's with the PC,
| but things have shrunk down and become hermetically sealed
| with fewer ports, switches and physical buttons. And memory
| density has increased to the point where even sophisticated
| users will never understand all the software running on their
| machine. Cars have become far more complex than their
| mid-20th century counterparts, to the point where few people
| even check or change oil.
|
| Americans are born and bred these days to be administrators
| of some kind, where all physical and digital goods and
| services can be purchased on the virtual open market behind
| touch-sensitive glass. If that glass breaks, you call a (low
| status) worker to fix it; if something behind the glass
| breaks, you complain to a (slightly higher status) worker to
| fix it. You yourself don't do or make anything - you allocate
| funds and then, at most, measure progress and outcomes.
|
| Such an admin does not make a usable character like that in
| Twain. In fact, neither would either of the two low status
| workers, since they only "make" at the tip of an enormous
| world-spanning supply chain. You'd need to be a machinist,
| metallurgist or chemist with an interest in low-tech methods.
| Pretty rare.
| handrous wrote:
| High goods prices relative to wages force you to learn to
| fix stuff if you want to, like, have things that work (or,
| at least, they encourage quite a few people to learn how to
| fix stuff, so they can do it for others, for pay).
|
| High wages relative to goods prices means everything's
| disposable. I might try to repair a $300 toaster. I might
| pay someone else to repair a $600 toaster. I'm not going to
| try to repair a $20 toaster, and I'm sure as _shit_ not
| gonna pay someone else to fix it. I 'll just buy a new
| toaster.
|
| [EDIT] incidentally, saying "there's too much waste of X"
| is, in most cases, nearly identical to saying "X is too
| cheap". See: food waste. "Why do we waste _so much_ food?!
| " because it's so cheap relative to labor that it's not
| worth the effort to waste less of it.
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