Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian Legend

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rediscovered-medieval-manuscript-offers-new-twist-on-arthurian-legend-180978705/

by pseudolus • 5 years ago

96 43 5 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

arbitrage• 5 years ago

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.”

mistrial92• 5 years ago

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?

Bayart• 5 years ago

Pagan literature has plenty of creepy magical and divine beings. Just look at the Odyssey.

exolymph• 5 years ago

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

a1369209993• 5 years ago

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.)

krapp2• 5 years ago

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.

jkestner• 5 years ago

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court has my canonical Merlin. Something of a jealous Rasputin.

mathattack• 5 years ago

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_...

thaumasiotes• 5 years ago

Some modern fan-driven content: https://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com/

samizdis3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Just wait until you find out about his werewolf murder mystery :)

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1001309335/a-young-john-stein...

neaden• 5 years ago

It really is very good, but unfortunately unfinished and was unpublished in his lifetime.

heurisko• 5 years ago

Before abandoning it for Paradise Lost, John Milton was also going to theme his epic poem on Arthurian legend.

PeterCorless3• 5 years ago

Steinbeck's Arthurian tales was spurred on by his childhood in Salinas, California. As a child, he used to play as a knight and he made his little sister play his squire. He dedicated the book to her.

I am generally favorable to a lot of what Steinbeck did with his treatment, other than "vamping up" Morgan le Fey, which seemed a bit too dime store novel of a characterization to me.

Otherwise he does a great job getting into the psychology of the knight characters. The published version also includes a great number of his letters on his process, showing how Steinbeck himself was on a sort of spiritual grail quest in trying to get to an authentic version of the telling.

If you are into the Arthurian literature as it jumped from the medieval to the modern, this is a great book to add to your collection.

Last note: be forwarned that Steinbeck never really finished his book. He spent years doing the research, but never really wrapped the stories with a bow. Just appreciate the tales he does tell, and how he tells them. You already know how the story ends.

brightball3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

naufragios• 5 years ago

IIRC Gawain is the knight who is strongest at noon.

groby_b• 5 years ago

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?

bct• 5 years ago

"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).

bee_rider• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

dash2• 5 years ago

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.

mistrial92• 5 years ago

don't forget A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...

all2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

bobthechef• 5 years ago

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_hn2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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".

PeterCorless3• 5 years ago

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.

Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian Legend

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