King For A Day

It’s my fault for watching lists on YouTube. I love lists, have loved lists since first reading the epic sweetshop passage in Roald Dahl’s Boy, and now that I am too old to use Dahl as an academic source, I agree with everything Umberto Eco has to say about lists. A few days ago, one of my Recommended For Yous was ‘Top Ten Medieval Films’ and, enticed by the combination of medieval and lists, I apportioned ten minutes of my time to check this out.

On this list (which actually included more than ten films) were classics like The Lion in Winter and The Seventh Seal, questionable guff like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Braveheart, and why-not-just-read-the-book The Name of the Rose. But then there were also the following: Tristan and Isolde (the dodgy one with James Franco), Excalibur, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Sword in the Stone – sadly, the only cartoon on the list – and First Knight.

So if YouTube is any marker of popular opinion, ‘medieval’ is synonymous with Arthurian.

Now, a few days ago, BuzzFeed (almost entirely lists, ergo great) ran something along the lines of Stuff That Is So Far-Fetched That Not Believing In It Sort Of Seems Like Common Sense But, Hey, We’re Going To Quote Some Facts At You Anyway. And on this list was a ground-breaking revelation: King Arthur was not real. The facts quoted involved Nennius and Gildas, so congratulations to whoever googled that, but the inclusion of this gem of wisdom struck a chord with me.

Upon finding out that I research medieval things, an awful lot of people do ask me ‘So, was King Arthur real?’ I suspect this experience is shared by many medievalists. This suggests both that his existence or non-existence is a strangely pressing matter for many people – who perhaps have access neither to an internet nor to a library – and also that, in their conception, any proper medievalist should know and/or care about this controversy in particular.

Whether or not a man called Shakespeare actually wrote a number of plays at the turn of the sixteenth century has exercised conspiracy theorists for centuries: most recently Jim Jarmusch, but also Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, a school English teacher of mine, and Derek Jacobi. James Shapiro beautifully summarised the argument at the core of such conspiracies in his book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, where his closing statement asks the reader to consider basically this: in the creation of literature, do we assume that imagination can only stretch as far as personal experience?

Ceci n’est pas un roi.

The Arthurian ‘controversy’, if it can be called such (it can’t), is in effect about the same thing: does the Arthurian corpus – most particularly, Malory’s Morte Darthur – serve as a chronicle of a long-dead king, or a cohesive set of legends about stock characters? How much history has to exist within a work before it ceases to be read as imaginative literature and is viewed primarily as history?

We talk in concrete terms about Arthurian narratives just as we talk about Greek myths: after Admetus did this, Hercules reacted thus; Guinevere saw this, said this, and caused Sir Lancelot to do this. I feel that this isn’t simply a matter of reference to a single text, but rather that these cycles are so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that, whichever version one has read, these things are recognised as fixed events that happened to real people. Neoptolemus threw Astyanax from the walls of Troy. Dido committed suicide after Aeneas’s departure to Italy. Arthur both fathered and killed Mordred.

A surprisingly high number of people complained to the BBC that the children’s show Merlin featured an ethnically diverse cast. ‘THERE WERE NO BLACK PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND!’ asserted one viewer, whose letter was reproduced at a lecture I attended in Oxford last summer. A) Not true. B) Not even Arthurian: remember the Saracen brother-knights Safer, Segwarides and Palomides. That these viewers were complaining (albeit incorrectly) about historical accuracy confirms that they believe King Arthur to be at least partly historical.

But then the very reason I didn’t watch Merlin was because I couldn’t face the inevitable desecration of Malory’s storyline. It has since been pointed out to me that the show’s finale pretty accurately recounted the Battle of Camlann, but since Jamie Campbell Bower’s farcical Camelot, I just cannot trust anything that claims inspiration from Malory. And yet, unless they declare themselves to be set in a specific year – I’m looking at you, Antoine Fuqua – I would never assume that any Arthurian adaptation ought accurately to reflect ‘the Middle Ages’.

Since there’s no record – from either textual or archaeological sources – that there was a king called Arthur, many people claim that a corruption from dux to rex might indicate that there was a warlord called Arthur. But this historically-minded wriggling really rather misses the point: that Arthur, if such there be, is not this Arthur, the one who sleeps with his sister and drowns thousands of babies and hangs out with a wizard and turns a blind eye when his best friend falls in love with his wife. That Arthur holds the unfulfillable promise of some historical validation. This Arthur has engaged the imaginations of authors and artists for almost a thousand years, and continues to do so. In the words of Terry Pratchett: ‘Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.’

Noggin On Heaven’s Door

Vaguely Medieval Books review’d, no 2.

This weekend I suggested to a friend that my thesis topic was inspired by the HBO series True Blood. Though this may be untrue, I can state categorically that my interest in the medieval, whilst flowing from both Disney and a primary school trip to Arundel Castle when we also got to visit a duck sanctuary, was piqued early on in life by another Northman – namely, Noggin, King of the Nogs. The titular hero of Firmin and Postgate’s Sagas of Noggin the Nog (1965-75; telly series 1959-65) is mild-mannered, benevolent, and an all-round decent chap, but his adventures in the company of his trusted friend Thor Nogson are rather more exciting than such prosaic decency would usually allow.

Noggin comes to the throne after his father Knut dies from falling off his hilltop throne as he surveys the kingdom. In the course of Noggin’s first adventure, detailed in King of the Nogs (1968), he sails north to the Land of the Midnight Sun and brings back Nooka, Princess of the Nooks, to be his wife. Meanwhile, his wicked uncle Nogbad attempts to usurp the throne – something he will do often throughout the series. Other regular characters are Thor Nogson, Captain of the Guard and all-round decent chap; Olaf the Lofty, court inventor and chronic depressive; Graculus, a talking green bird brought from the Land of the Midnight Sun by Nooka; and Groliffe, an ice dragon who is wrongly maligned in the tale The Ice Dragon (1968) and who comes to the rescue in spectacular fashion in The Flying Machine (also 1968).

Let me see your hands in the air.

The adventures are tremendous fun, involving anything and everything from Nogbad’s crows baked in a pie, to clocks that stop the Nogs’ ability to enjoy the day, to oases in the Land of Silver Sand. The books (and the series) boast gorgeous illustrations, and they have an intensely attractive aural quality to them, including one of the simplest, clearest openings of any children’s book I can remember:

In the lands of the north, where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale…

But, returning to them in a serious frame of mind, they comprehensively showcase various medieval ideas about the weird, the foreign, and the monstrous. The appearance of miniature races in The Ice Dragon and The Omruds (1968), for example, speaks to traditions found in texts from The Letter of Prester John to Ralegh’s History of the World, while many of the Sagas’ episodes revolve around creatures taken straight from the milieu of the Carta Marina. Which excuse I use to keep reading them.

But it is clear in the simplistic worldview of the Sagas that certain characteristics are to be associated with goodness, manners and all-round decency, while others must serve as shorthand for badness. This is of course to be expected in a series aimed towards children – and it is worth noting that Alvin the Treacherous in the How To Train Your Dragon series bears close physical resemblance to Nogbad. But certain things are still rather uncomfortable, although not unmedieval.

Nogbad, a Bad Thing.

Nooka, Noggin’s beautiful wife, says and does very little.

Nogbad – for whom nominative determinism ought to have been invented – is thin, swarthy and cruel, sports a pantomime villain’s moustache, and, like many such characters (the Child Catcher or Disney’s Wicked Queen in her beggar guise) has an exaggerated nose. Such visual villainy is still popular today – just think of Snape before he wasn’t a Baddy, or even the dark-haired, slightly jaundiced Loki – but these characteristics are also associated with anti-Semitic representations of both Jews and Saracens in the Middle Ages, as they have been in various periods since. For Nogbad to look bad is one thing, but for that badness to share a visual shorthand with, for example, Judas Iscariot, opens up all sorts of questions about destiny and predestination that a child in the early 60s can’t possibly have cared about.

Yet it is in the Brendan-esque voyage of Noggin, Thor Nogson and Graculus in The Flying Machine that we see the most charming combination of medieval anthropology and childish wonder, throwaway orientalism and Ripping Yarns.

Olaf the Lofty has been building a flying boat. Then a mystery jar appears, which is taken to Noggin’s treasury and out of which emerges a small, dark-skinned man. He transpires to be the ambassador of Ahmed el Ahmed, Ruler of the Land of Silver Sand, and before anyone realises that he is working on Nogbad’s behalf, he steals Noggin’s crown and flies away on a magic carpet. Noggin, Thor Nogson and Graculus follow in the flying boat. After various adventures involving thunderstorms and islands of giant birds, they arrive at the house of the kindly Haroun ibn Daud, who explains that Ahmed el Ahmed is a) a Baddy and b) has kept his nephew from his rightful throne. Haroun is also a seer of some sort, because of course he is. He gives Noggin and Thor Nogson a genie in a bottle, because of course he does. They break into the palace, stage a showdown with the dastardly Ahmed, and when he produces a giant black genie, they summon the ice dragon Groliffe, who freezes the bad genie from the inside. Nogbad and Ahmed escape on the magic carpet.

There is a delightful Mandeville’s Travels quality to the political parallels between Nogbad the Bad and Ahmed el Ahmed, realised when the mild-mannered, benevolent and all-round decent young Sultan returns to mirror Noggin. The people of the Land of Silver Sand wear strange clothes, live in strange houses and eat strange foods – you’ll need to watch the television version to know exactly how strange their sweetmeats sound. The islands between the Nogs and these people are filled with wonders of Shakespearian dimensions, and though unnamed could very easily be Taprobane or Java. But importantly, the Nogs’ incursion into the Land of Silver Sand is both righteous – the small man stole Noggin’s crown, Ahmed el Ahmed usurped his nephew’s throne – and, one might say, intended: why else would Olaf the Lofty build a flying boat, but for exploration?

The Northern marginality of the Land of the Nogs, like the Northern marginality of Britain and Ireland, provides a clear backdrop to the desire of its braver inhabitants to explore the world and encounter its marvels. The East, though wondrous, is largely unwholesome, and it is the recourse to Western things – in this case, Groliffe; in Mandeville’s, Catholic Christianity – that ultimately saves the day. The Flying Machine shows the bumbling King having to interact with the alien world around him, but his faith must ultimately reside in those things which are familiar to him.

I have a tendency to drag on.

I hear you say, but it’s only a children’s book. It is almost exclusively in children’s books that these medieval beings and medieval ideas about them survive: think of the Dufflepuds in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, or the Scythians that fight Robin Wood in The Sword in the Stone. The hard-nosed amongst us might argue that adult rationalism is unknown to the Middle Ages – but I would argue that, in general, such is the dryness of adult rationalism that the highly important medieval notions of wonder and unfamiliarity can now only be experienced by children. In other words, magic.

 

How medieval was it? Ragnar Loðbrók dancing an estampie around Ravenna Cathedral.

Verdict? ‘There’s riches here beyond all my dreams, and it’s mine, all mine.’