The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree,
before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and
of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner
of its unfolding. (J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter to L. W. Forster, December 1960)
This book will not recount the stories of Olaf the Stout’s burnings and murders in
Norway, nor attempt to retell the Saga of King Olaf the Saint any more than is needed to elucidate how the fates of our two heroes from the Vestfirðir,
whose tale we began to narrate quite some time ago, played out in the shadow of greater
events in the world. (Halldór Laxness, Wayward Heroes, 2016 translation of the 1952 novel Gerpla)
J. R. R. Tolkien denied allegorical content in his literary works; he particularly
denied that the “One Ring” was a symbol for nuclear weaponry, although readers sometimes
interpreted it in this
light. Tolkien preferred for his medievalist fiction to be read in the context of
his philological work, rather than the twentieth-century historical events of his
own lifetime. Yet in
The Road to Middle-earth (2003), Tom Shippey argues that both are important; despite its deep foundations
in medieval literature,
The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) is still a wartime work, “framed by and responding to the crisis of Western
civilization, 1914-1945 (and beyond)” (3).
In
J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2001), Shippey further explains that “Tolkien, as a philologist, and also as an
infantry veteran, was deeply conscious of
the strong continuity between that heroic world [i.e. the world of
Beowulf] and the modern one” (xxviii).
Still, Tolkien’s unironic depiction of heroism reflects a traditionalist or religious
attitude that many of his peers rejected, as Kathryn Hume argues:
Tolkien is an outstanding representative of those who have turned their backs squarely
on the void. In his own life, he had Christian doctrinal reasons to do so, so in a
sense he is a throwback to an earlier stage of mythic thinking; but he writes during
and after the horrors of World War II, and is familiar with the idea of meaningless
life preached by many of his contemporaries, so his assertion of medieval values is
not a simple affirming of a culture’s unchallenged ideals. His stance is much closer
to … “I would rather find this true than what I see everyday.”
(47)
Despite Tolkien’s attempt to separate his medievalist literature from modernity, scholars
have produced compelling research examining modern elements in his works (Jackson
44). Perhaps the most famous example is the echo of the tank warfare of the Battle
of the Somme in Tolkien’s early tale, “The Fall of Gondolin” (Garth 220–21). Thus even in the most conservative medievalist works anachronisms occur; to borrow
a line from Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” (1842), in the mirror that connects fantasy and reality, “Shadows of the world appear” (II.12).
Such shadows often darken medievalism with modern traumas. For example, the Russian
novel Трудно быть богом (1964) [Hard to be a God] is set in a medieval world, yet a Hitler-like figure seizes power. The protagonist
is aware of twentieth century history and recognizes the parallels: “Один я на всей
планете вижу страшную тень, наползающую на страну, но как раз я и не
могу понять, чья это тень и зачем” [I’m the only one on this whole planet who’s aware
of the terrible shadow creeping
over the country] (286; 40). The anachronism is clear at the start of this work, which features epigraphs from
Pierre Abelard and Ernest Hemingway.
Aaron Isaac Jackson notes that part of the reason for the clash between Tolkien and
modernist writers was their divergent views on the value of archaic language (44).
Tolkien went so far as to compose works in Old English—and even when inventing his
own languages, he sought to recover the deep past. Jackson notes that critics thus deemed his work reactionary: “Tolkienʼs work contradicts
the received view of literary history, which is that the
First World War finished off the epic in any serious, non-ironic form” (54). Yet the
emulation of archaic language or literary forms need not entail any reactionary
stance, as Halldór Laxness’s Gerpla (1952) shows. It was modeled on its medieval sources as closely as any of Tolkien’s
works, yet it represents a very different response to the northern heritage. Laxness
smuggled a “modern” (or an anti-traditional, in the view of many) message into a medieval-style
work—and
won the Nobel Prize (1955), though his work was criticized as radical or sacrilegious.
Wayward Heroes asserts in its inside jacket that Gerpla is “decidedly unlike any other piece of modern literature.” However, when placed
in an international context Halldór’s “little book” can be seen as part of a wave
of postwar medievalist works whose radical revisionism
represents an under-recognized contribution to both literary medievalism and modern
literature. The comparison between Gerpla and contemporary works will range in every direction, like the Sworn Brothers from
the West Fjords of Iceland themselves: southward to the British Isles (with the English
tetralogy The Once and Future King, 1939–1958), westward across the Atlantic (with the American novel Grendel, 1971), and eastward to Russia (with the Soviet-era novel Hard to be a God, 1964). Although these works have not been discussed in a comparative context before,
each has had its importance recognized within its respective tradition. An account
of history of these works and their authors follows, as cultural ideas of literary
production will be centrally important to interpreting them.
T. H. White (1906-1964) first worked with medieval materials by writing a thesis on
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) at Cambridge. He then spent some years as a teacher, even becoming head of
an English Department, before retreating to write. He wrote The Sword in the Stone (1938) as a prologue to Malory, followed by The Witch in the Wood (1939) and The Ill-Made Knight (1940). He wrote The Candle in the Wind as a play (1940) then adapted it into a novel for the tetralogy (first published
1958), also revising the other novels and retitling the second novel The Queen of Air and Darkness (Grage 33-34). White preferred rustic living; Andrew Hadfield notes that “he spent
much of his life as a semi-hermit” (208). Sylvia Townsend Warner, author of T. H. White: A Biography (1967), describes White’s writing circumstances thus: “The gamekeeper’s cottage stood
among woodlands – a sturdy Victorian structure without
amenities. It was by lamplight that White pulled from a shelf the copy of the Morte d’Arthur he had used for the essay on Malory he submitted for the English tripos” (1977, x). A passionate outdoorsman who found peace fishing in the rain, White had difficulty
relating to people. He was far more comfortable with animals; this is clear in his
works, above all the posthumous The Book of Merlyn (1977). His problems with depression and drinking provide his novel focusing on Lancelot,
The Ill-Made Knight, with an intense psychology of guilt and shame. Indeed the notion of original sin
appears repeatedly throughout the tetralogy, and White was considering converting
to Catholicism while writing it. Although he arrived at a more naturalistic (specifically evolutionary) conception
of human nature, he retained an intense pessimism about humanity, which led to accusations
of misanthropy (Hadfield 211). As Warner explains, “Throughout his life White was
subject to fears. … Notably free from fearing God, he
was basically afraid of the human race” (1977, ix).
White’s tetralogy enjoyed an afterlife in adaptations such as the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963, directed by Wolfgang Reitherman) and the musical Camelot (1960, directed by Moss Hart), later adapted into a film of the same title (1967,
directed by Joshua Logan). White’s provocative vision of facades of chivalric idealism
undermined by ruthless realpolitik clearly struck a chord in the era of Kennedy and
Khrushchev. However, critical recognition took longer. In “T. H. White: The Fantasy
of the Here and Now” (1977) John Grage remarked, “What the modern readership has generally
done to writers of literary fantasy who bother
to write it in this century of fantasies of other sorts is all too graphically portrayed
in the career of T. H. White” (33). Yet White’s reputation grew steadily; Francois
Gallix documented the critical tradition
which subsequently developed in T H. White: An Annotated Bibliography (1986). More recent studies include Kurth Sprague’s special edition of Arthuriana, “T. H. White’s Troubled Heart” (2006) and Critical Essays on T. H. White (2008, edited by Davies, Malcolm, and Simons). The latter considers the place of
White’s Arthurian legendarium within his literary corpus; Linden Peach notes, “White’s
oeuvre includes comic, serious literary, historical and thriller/detective
writing as well as non-fiction” (n.p.). The online resource England Have My Bones (1996-2007) offers many relevant documents, and The Camelot Project (1995-2019) offers a “T. H. White Glossary.” The Once and Future King is now widely considered the gold standard of modern Arthurian fantasy and White’s
work is receiving more attention than ever, often focusing on autobiographical, Freudian,
and environmentalist elements.
The same elements of scholarly engagement with medieval materials, literary experimentation,
the testing of ideals, and mentorship, occur in the career of the American writer
John Gardner (1933–1982). He was perhaps even more prolific, producing an impressive
variety of works, as Barry Silesky explains: “Gardner published twenty-nine books
in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length
epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography” (back cover). One
suspects that a productive comparison could be made between White’s The Sword in the Stone or The Book of Beasts (1954) and works by Gardner such as A Child’s Bestiary (1977). A professor of literature and teacher of writers, Gardner had been teaching
Beowulf for twelve years when he completed Grendel in 1970 (Howell 1993, 61). However unlike White, he tended more toward fearlessness
rather than fear. He was a “man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention,”
as Silesky notes. “Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers”
(back cover). Rather than a “semi-hermit” he was, as the title of Silesky’s 2004 biography
has it, a “Literary Outlaw” who became, in the decade before his tragic death, “larger
than life.” Being a less rustic figure than White, Gardner lived faster, dying on
a motorcycle
rather than on a ship. Silesky writes, “Famous for disregarding his own safety, he
rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred
countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed
as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle
accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding” (n.p.).
Grendel remains Gardner’s most famous novel; it was adapted into the animated film Grendel Grendel Grendel (1981, directed by Alexander Stitt) and proved a source of inspiration in music,
with the progressive rock epic Grendel (1982, by Marillion), the alternative rock anthem Grendel (1994, by Sunny Day Real Estate), and the opera Grendel (2006, directed by Julie Taymor). Gardner’s legacy was consolidated by John M. Howell’s
John Gardner: A Bibliographic Profile (1980) and Robert A. Morace’s John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1984), with a critical tradition represented by works like David Cowart’s Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (1983) and Howell’s Understanding John Gardner (1993). Online resources include The Grendex (2011) and The Arch & The Abyss (2015).
In The Art of Fiction (posthumous 1983), Gardner discusses the novels of two Russian brothers, Arkady Strugatsky
(1925–1991) and Boris Strugatsky (1933–2012), noting that the literary establishment
viewed science fiction with “prejudice or ignorance” (40). The Strugatsky brothers
often set their stories in the future, speculating about
the direction civilization would take; a comparison might be made between their most
famous novel Полдень. XXII век (1961) [Noon: 22nd Century] and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in terms of sweeping themes such as the evolution of civilizations. In Hard to be a God, also set in the future, humans have discovered an unknown planet which, upon closer
inspection, proves to be only at a “medieval” stage of historical development. Thus the “medievalism” of the interpreters becomes a theme in this novel; a secret
and largely non-interventionist
elite of scholars studies the crusades, blunders, and wars of a backwards population
in real time. Interpretations of human history, not to mention the ethics of anthropology,
are crucial to the story. As the native peoples of the planet have not yet achieved
the cultural, economic, and technological capacities that would lift them out of the
medieval stage of history, their societies are nightmarish in both medical and political
terms. Despite his abstract commitment to noninterventionism, the protagonist, when
faced with a civilizational disaster, attempts to intervene—but he does not necessarily
succeed in improving the overall situation.
Both brothers were present at the siege of Leningrad in 1942. Although they began
writing during the post-Stalin “Thaw,” they had significant difficulty with political
censorship. James von Geldern writes,
“If science fiction was a massively popular form of Soviet literature … one that inspired
unease among literary officials and captured a readership much broader than traditional
fiction, it was because it functioned as dissidence of a different sort” (n.p.). Perhaps
inspired by their experience of government interference in cultural matters,
the Strugatsky brothers’ model of authorship proves to be that of the dissident intellectual.
Early in Hard to be a God a characteristic incident occurs: a travelling freethinker is approached by uniformed
men who ask for his papers. He is immediately suspicious: “Хамьe!—стеклянным голосом
произнес Румата.—Вы жe неграмотны, зачем вам подорожная?” [“Boors!” Rumata said icily.
“You’re illiterate, what would you do with them?”] (275; 24). In the novel’s Afterword,
which was written after the fall of the Soviet Union,
Boris Strugatsky explains: “We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture”
(243). Thus, political oppression became a key theme: “The adventure story had to,
was obliged to, become a story about the fate of the intelligentsia,
submerged in the twilight of the Middle Ages” (244).
Soviet literature in translation offered foreigners insight into a closed and censorious
society. Hard to be a God was widely translated and first appeared in English in Wendayne Ackerman’s 1973 translation,
itself based on a German version; the recent (2014) translation by Olena Bormashenko
is the first direct translation from the original Russian. Two years before Arkady’s death the brothers wrote the play Человек с далёкой звезды (1989) [A Man from a Distant Star], which retold Hard to be a God. Peter Fleischmann’s film Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein [Hard to be a God] appeared that year, and a second film adaptation was released in 2013, directed by Aleksei German. The “Noon Universe” novels were also reprinted in the “Worlds of the Strugatsky Brothers”
series with a Tolkienian touch: introductions purportedly written by scholars “within”
those worlds.
The literary career of Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) has been discussed elsewhere in
this volume; suffice it to say here that it rivalled anything herein described in
its scope, ambition, and controversies. The title of Philip Roughton’s translation
of Halldór Guðmundsson’s biography, The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness (2008), captures a key element of the Icelandic writer’s work, life, and career—for
despite his rural roots, Halldór quickly became a world traveller. For him the model
of authorship was the skald, the adventurous poet seeking prestige at a foreign court. He travelled through Europe
and America; he wrote film scripts in Hollywood and travelogues about his journeys
to the Soviet Union. Whereas T. H. White’s search for meaning was characterized by
doubt and hesitation, Halldór committed, first to Catholicism and then to communism.
In the years of his international fame he became an ambassador for Icelandic culture;
his legacy includes saga editions, tales, poems, plays, essays, and memoirs, but the
core of his corpus consists of novels, a growing number of which are available in
translation. The Islander contains an extensive bibliography of Halldór’s works, and online resources such
as Laxness in Translation provide information on new publications.
Whether hermits, outlaws, dissidents, or skalds, these writers brought different cultural
conceptions of authorship to literary medievalism, each with its own implicit relationship
to political authority. The element of medievalism crosses all genre boundaries: it runs through White’s
fantasy, Gardner’s existentialism, the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers, and Laxness’s satire. Examining this
medievalism will show how the “shockwaves” of modern history have affected literature,
as interpreted from multiple cultural/geographical
perspectives. The first important element of iconoclasm in these postwar medievalist
works is narrative framing.
We all know that Arthur, and not Edward, was on the throne in the latter half of the
15th century. … By that deliberate statement of an untruth I make it clear to any
scholar who may read the book that I am writing of an imaginary world imagined in
the 15th century. … I am looking through 1939 at 1489 itself looking backwards. (T. H. White, Letter to Sydney Cockerell, 1939)
Medievalist writers have always had to consider the relationship between their works
and the medieval works to which they are responding. The Romantic tradition in literary
medievalism may have culminated in Tolkien, but a more skeptical strain of satirical
medievalism had occasionally also surfaced in works like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Like Twain’s novel, postwar medievalist works revel in self-conscious anachronism.
White’s narrator, for example, is an authorial persona who demonstrates awareness
of the modern era and addresses readers directly: “It was not really Eton … for the
College of Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440,
but it was a place of the same sort” (4). The narrator even explains where the tetralogy
evolves from prologue to supplement:
“There is no need to give a long description of the tourney. Malory gives it” (1966,
364).
White also includes an author-figure in Merlyn, who displays a metafictional awareness
that extends far beyond the text he inhabits: he knows about not only Thomas Malory,
but also the subsequent literary history of Arthuriana, including Mark Twain (1977,
30) and Lord Tennyson (1966, 332). This awareness is not limited to the “inside” of
the various versions of King Arthur’s story; it crosses the boundary from literature
to history when Merlyn mentions twentieth-century figures including Freud, Einstein,
and Hitler (1966 119, 295, 274). He refers to “the book we are in” (1977, 13); he
even discusses T. H. White: “What an anachronist he was!” (1977, 4). In a key passage,
Merlyn explains that his “second sight” is really memory of the future: “Ordinary
people are born forwards in Time. … But I unfortunately was born at the wrong
end of time, and I have to live backwards from in front” (1966, 29). Gill Davies notes
that Merlyn “shifts seamlessly between the internal narrative and an external omniscience,
enabling
White to postulate on a variety of subjects ranging from falconry to fascism” (2).
Anachronism also occurs in character dialogue, as if the narrator is also a translator. Janet Montefiore assesses White’s narrative as a “double perspective,” which occurs
when medieval and modern situations are described interchangeably, as
when a knight complains about “lollards and communists” (1966, 199). Such examples
emphasize historical parallels, in this case between the English Peasants’ Revolt
and the Russian Revolution. The Strugatsky brothers likewise draw parallels between
peasant revolts and their country’s revolution; the revolutionaries soon become oppressors
themselves. White mentions dictators and concentration camps (1966, 350-51, 365), while Laxness
leaves the parallels between medieval and modern warfare implicit—including forced
marches, starvation in besieged cities, and the burning of settlements. Such parallels show that humanity faces timeless problems, which have only been exacerbated
by the destructive power of modern technology.
Where does the skeptical interrogation of the “double perspective” leave the sources
of medievalist works? Hard to be a God is not a retelling, but The Once and Future King, Gerpla, and Grendel are all “supplementary” retellings; they represent “back-handed tributes” to their
respective medieval legends, as Kim Moreland terms Twain’s retelling (59).
Howell observes of Grendel, “Gardner deconstructs the original epic’s characters and actions and many of its
lines by placing them in an ironic context which implicitly questions the vision of
the
original work while saluting its literary power” (1993, 61–62). A similar comment
might be made about Gerpla; Halldór’s narrator presents himself as a meticulous compiler and mentions his major
sources, even though the book also contains invention and often employs irony.
Intertextuality goes hand in hand with metafiction as the boundaries between history
and fiction become increasingly difficult to detect. The protagonist of Hard to be a God, Rumata, translates Shakespeare into the local language, provoking an awed response. White confusingly deems Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a cultural achievement that could only be enabled by the political achievements of
King Arthur: “Where the raiding parties had once streamed along the highways … now
there were merry
bands of pilgrims telling each other dirty stories on the way to Canterbury” (1966,
445). White’s references to events in both medieval English fiction and history places
his work in a very ambiguous “medieval” setting in “the Old England of the twelfth
century, or whenever it was” (1966, 204). It is as if, for White, “medieval England”
is the sum of medieval English texts, to be idiosyncratically sorted by what he found
most relevant. History and myth alike are brought to bear on present-day problems
as the story self-consciously separates itself from both. For example, Merlyn considers
the successive invasions of the British Isles in order to examine political tribalism.
Like White’s Merlyn, Don Rumata of Hard to be a God sees a medieval world around him, but remembers a modern one. A scientist from earth,
he has come to study a planet at the feudal stage in history. His job title is Progressor,
and his actions are bound by the largely non-interventionist ethics of the institution
that employs him. This notion of a modern man trying to subtly “speed up” medieval
history shows a remarkable similarity to a subgenre of medievalist literature,
the “Time travel” romance (i.e. Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, 1886; Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, 1889). Hard to be a God might aptly be titled A Soviet Anthropologist in King Arthur’s Court: it features similarly anachronistic humour when Progressors go too far, as historians
of the Middle Ages find themselves, like Twain’s Hank Morgan, opposing serfdom and
leading peasant revolts (87-88; 40-41).
The anthropologists in
Hard to be a God possess a cogent big-picture theory of history; yet this does nothing to avert a
crisis at any given point in history, nor does it solve problems deeply rooted in
human nature. Moreover acting out the role of a medieval man in a medieval world,
with only the occasional communication with colleagues from earth, places Rumata in
a condition of cognitive dissonance. He finds his work surreal, as if he has spent
half a decade living inside a costume drama. His audience at the Institute of Experimental
History, he muses, could signal the end of this anachronistic performance at any moment
with a burst of applause (282; 35). One of Rumata’s colleagues fears that scholar
and subject have become inverted:
Я, голубчик, уж и сны про землю видеть перестал. Как-то, роясь в бyмaгax, нaшел фотографию
однoй женщины и долго не мог сообразить, кто же она такая. Инoгдa я вдpyг со страхом
осознаю, что я уже давно не сотрyдник Института, я экспонат музея этого Института,
генеральный судья торговой феодальной респyблики, и есть в музее зал, кyда меня следует
поместитъ. (283)
[I’ve even stopped having dreams about Earth. One day, rummaging through my papers,
I found a picture of a woman and for a long time couldn’t figure out who she was.
I occasionally realize with terror that I’ve long stopped being an employee of the
Institute, that I’m now an exhibit in the Institute’s museum, the chief justice of
a feudal mercantile republic, and that there’s a room in the museum in which I belong.]
(39)
As in Twain’s time travel romance, medieval and modern worldviews involve conflicting
definitions of reality and thus of not only orthodoxy, but even sanity (33). In this
novel, the concept of sanity has become ominously politicized. Michael Atkinson describes
elements in Soviet science fiction that could be considered Orwellian: “[Due to] the
pressures of real-life totalitarianism. … Reality itself was often under
question” (n.p.). In the climax of the story, Rumata is arrested and accused of being
an impostor,
as worlds collide disastrously.
Hard to be a God presents a sort of “historical determinism”: the arc of history overwhelms the actions
of any individual, no matter how powerful
(or godlike), as opposed to the “textual determinism” of Arthurian retellings such
as those of White or Twain, where the plot must eventually
arrive at the same ending as its source. Gardner, however, introduces a scheme of
philosophical determinism. An omniscient dragon explains, “My knowledge of the future does not
cause the future. It merely sees it, exactly as creatures at your low level recall things past. … I do not change
the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning” (63). As this dragon perceives
the entire history of all universes, his vision is exponentially
greater than that of Merlyn; yet knowing the future does not allow either of them
to save themselves, and in all of these deterministic schemes fate seems more a matter
of entropy than destiny.
Such visionary powers, as possessed by these narrators and author-figures, enable
them to warn modern readers who may naively believe that they are “outside of” or “beyond” history itself, and thus condescend toward the earlier
“dark ages.” Gardner’s dragon, for example, actually corrects himself when quipping
at Grendel:
“It’s damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts familiar to a creature
of the Dark Ages. Not that one age is darker than another. Technical jargon from another
dark age” (67). White’s narrator similarly protests the term “Dark Ages” as excluding
the era of Hitler and Stalin: “Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine,
Black Death and Serfdom, were
less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription?”
(1966, 569). Unfortunately, these works observe, political power has manifested itself
in similar
ways in every age.
During decades defined by some of the most notoriously murderous dictatorships in
history, the figure of the usurper became centrally important in medievalist literature.
King Mordred of White’s The Candle in the Wind, King Olaf of Gerpla, and Don Reba of Hard to be a God are all usurpers, conspirators, and destroyers of civilization. These three characters
are informed by the historical figures of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Lavrenti
Beria. Moreover, there appears to be significant cultural overlap in the symbolism
of the malignant usurper. All three feature similar attributes: a dubious past, a
pale and ungainly physique, a deep inferiority complex, an uncanny aptitude for manipulation,
and a love of power for its own sake, which inevitably leads to paranoia, torture,
and murder.
King Olaf the Stout is overweight, beardless, and awkward, so used to life at sea
that he waddles on dry land. His crude concept of royal status reveals his roots as
a raider; he wears more rings than he has fingers, as well as multiple belts and cloaks
(191; 177). Yet beneath his comical exterior lurks an appetite for cruelty; he loves
to torture his enemies, especially to remove eyes and tongues, which he keeps as grisly
trophies (312; 292). Olaf’s “conversion” of Norway is wholly fraudulent: Christianity
was well-established and people lived
in peace whatever their religion, when Olaf realized that he needed an ideology to
justify his desire to conquer (414; 390). Every time he refers to Christianity, it
is in a folkloric sense that shows his very limited understanding (218, 485; 202,
455). His claim to the throne is similarly flimsy: that he is descended from Harald Tanglehair,
the first King of all Norway. Few take this claim seriously; some say that even if
it is true, Harald himself was no better than a tyrant.
White’s Mordred, of course, stakes a claim little better—although he is Arthur’s son,
he is illegitimate (being the result of incest); like Olaf, he seizes the throne unprovoked
and by force, causing a civil war. Like Olaf, he is pale and beardless, drained of
colour except for his strange blue eyes (1966, 454). He begins as a sort of evil dandy,
who smirks and scoffs at chivalric notions of honour (1966, 548-51). As he encourages
the decadence of Camelot, avant-garde fashion replaces chivalric ideals: “Mordred
wore his ridiculous shoes contemptuously; they were a satire on himself. The
court was modern” (1966, 505). Agravaine, his closest ally, suggests publicizing Guenevere’s
infidelity and seizing
power during the ensuing confusion: “If we could make a little merry mischief between
Arthur and Lancelot, because of the
Queen, their power would be split. … Then would be the time for discontented people,
Lollards and Communists and Nationalists and all the riff-raff” (1966, 552). A cynical
opportunist, Mordred at first encourages Camelot’s decadence, and then
becomes the leader of a populist party and condemns it (1966, 458). Stephanie Barczewski
notes that this party is “clearly intended as an analogue to Nazism” (232); Mordred
is even called “a Führer” (1977, 121). Agravaine, who plays Himmler to Mordred’s Hitler,
suggests a term very similar to
“National Socialism”:
You need a national grievance—something to do with politics. … You need to use the
tools which are ready to hand. This man John Ball, for instance, who believes in communism:
he has thousands of followers. Or there are the Saxons. We could say we were in favour
of a national movement. … We could join them together and call it national communism.
It has to be something broad … against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the
Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry. (1966, 549)
William Morris’s “Teutonic Democracy,” as depicted for example in
A Dream Of John Ball (1886), certainly looks rather different once it has been hijacked into a paramilitary
movement. The atrocities committed in the name of various utopian ideologies during the twentieth
century changed medievalism by forcing writers to scrutinize their source materials
for notions of class warfare, cultural struggle, or ethnic-linguistic essentialism,
as all had been revealed as possible pretexts for the deception, dispossession, starvation,
and annihilation of whole populations. Where these themes occurred, they then had
to be confronted in some sense.
Gerpla describes racial dehumanization when the Norse encounter the Inuit (whom they call
skrælingar, meaning savages or trolls): “Kölluðu norrænir menn eigi mannakyn standa að þjóð
þessari og kváðu réttdræpa, sögðu
spott dregið að menskum mönnum er ókindur taka á sig mannslíki með augum og nefi og
öðrum skapnaði sem menn væri” [The Norsemen refused to consider skraelings as human
and declared them unfit to live,
calling it a mockery of human beings for monsters to take on their form, with eyes
and noses and other human features] (346; 324). Similar to the chillingly dehumanizing
perspective of wartime eugenicists, for the
Norse colonists in Gerpla this attitude justifies the extermination of another people in a situation of intended
population replacement. In contrast, Halldór emphasizes the universal humanity of all people with bitter
sarcasm: “Svo er sagt að nafn það er þjóð þessi hefur gefið sjálfri sér haldi sömu
merkíngu
og þá er vér nefnum menn” [It is also said that the name this race has given itself
means the same as our word
for “men”] (362; 340).
The closest parallels to the history of the Nazi Party in Germany, however, occur
with Don Reba of
Hard to be a God. An eerie figure whose sinister nature only becomes clear once he gains power, he
rapidly evolves into a fanatical dictator bent on establishing permanent control.
Like Mordred and Olaf, sadism and
ressentiment lurk within this usurper:
Три года назад он вынырнул из каких-то заплесневелых подвaлов дворцовой канцeлярии,
мелкий, незаметный чиновник, угодливый, бледненький, даже какой-то синеватый. Потом
тогдашний первый министр был вдруг арестован и казнен, погибли под пытками несколько
одуревших от ужаса, ничего не понимающих сановников, и словно на их трупах вырос исполинским
бледным грибом этот цепкий, беспощадный гений посредственности. (317)
[He emerged out of some musty basement of the palace bureaucracy three years ago,
a
petty, insignificant functionary, obsequious and pallid, with an almost bluish tint
to his skin. Soon the then-First Minister was suddenly arrested and executed, a number
of horror-stricken and bewildered officials died during torture, and this tenacious,
ruthless genius of mediocrity grew like a pale fungus on their corpses.] (85)
If Don Rumata is another Marxist equivalent of a messiah-figure, tormented by watching
the suffering of benighted mortals from the vast distance of the right side of history
(as defined by Progressors), Don Reba is the equivalent of the anti-Christ, seeking
to move his society out of the frying pan of feudalism and into the fire of fascism.
In the hands of writers who saw their country invaded by the German war machine, the
sinister Reba’s rise to power closely echoes that of Hitler, including a situation
which seems intended as a direct parallel to the Reichstag fire:
И в том, что украшение города, cвeркающaя бaшня acтрологичecкой обcepвaтоpии, тоpчaлa
тeпepь в cинeм нeбe чepным гнилым зyбом, cпaлeннaя “cлyчaйным пожapoм.” (307)
[The jewel of the city, the gleaming tower of the astrological observatory, now protruded
into the sky like a black rotten tooth, burned down in an “accidental fire.”] (72)
Reba claims to be protecting the king from assassination attempts, while demanding
more power to deal with enemies of the state—and eliminating dissidents through paramilitary
groups whose actions he can wash his hands of, until it is too late for his enemies
to resist. Remembering earth, Rumata recognizes Reba’s tactics as similar to those
of Hitler; thus, he suspects Reba of planning to consolidate a coup by betraying former
allies such as the gray soldiers (so called after the colour of their uniforms):
Ему было известно о тpениях между доном Рэбой и серым руководством. История коричневого
капитана Эрнста Рема готова была повториться. (340)
[He was aware of the tensions between Don Reba and the gray leadership. The story
of
brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm was about to be repeated.] (121)
As Reba’s coup begins, Rumata already suspects a Night of the Long Knives. Yet although the parallels to Hitler are obvious, Reba was originally named Rebia,
an anagram for Beria, the infamous head of Stalin’s secret police. Using a fascist
as the primary villain would be ideologically acceptable, indeed laudable, in the
censorious context of a Soviet novel; yet the Strugatsky brothers included a politically
subversive message by drawing parallels between an authoritarian dictator and a supposed
hero of the Soviet Union. The novel’s Afterword condemns Stalin and Beria and their
“monstrous offspring … up to the elbows in the blood of innocent victims” (239). This
widely successful novel, which seemed to bolster Soviet ideology, actually
undermined it by advocating anti-Stalinist, anti-authoritarian views.
A common feature in all of these works is consideration of the question of war from
many angles, but this is perhaps especially true of T. H. White. His King Arthur is
a tactical innovator who rejects the conventions of war, which he sees as tilted toward
the upper classes (1966, 47). Since they profit from war and rarely get hurt as a
result of their expensive armour and ability to pay ransom, they have no incentive
to stop the violence, while commoners suffer (1966, 307). Yet even in conducting what
he believes to be a just war, King Arthur commits atrocities: “in the effort to impose
a world of peace, he found himself up to the elbows in blood” (1966, 380). Halldór
Laxness’s Vikings similarly pillage the countryside and kill peasants, and
all the while King Æthelred continues to pay them off—with money he gained from taxing
peasants. War is thus simply racketeering. Indeed, when locals organize a militia to defend
themselves, Æthelred makes a deal
with the Vikings, since he “Þótti honum minni ógn standa af erlendum óvinaher en þegnum
sínum” [considered hostile foreign armies less of a threat than his own subjects]
(187; 174) ; and later on, King Olaf proves the same, only worse (393; 371). In
Gerpla, the peasants who suffer the most as a result of the ambitions of great men are perfectly
aware of their unlucky place in the grand and cruel scheme of things; and the same
proves to be the case in
Grendel (114). In the most anachronistic example of peasant class-consciousness since William
Morris, a peasant explains the roots of political oppression thus:
Rewards to the people who fit the system best, you know. King’s immediate thanes,
the thanes’ top servants, and so on till you come to the people who don’t fit at all.
No problem. Drive them to the darkest corners of the kingdom, starve them, throw them
in jail or put them out to war. … Public force is the life and soul of every state:
not merely army and police but prisons, judges, tax collectors. (119)
King Olaf’s last speech in
Gerpla reveals the criminal nature of those usurpers who would be dictators, who use Orwellian
rhetoric and burn villages in order to save them:
Er það mín skipan að þér þyrmið aungu kykvendi er lífsanda dregur í Noregi, og gefið
eigi skepnubarni grið þar til er eg hef feingið alt vald yfir landinu. Og hvar sem
þér sjáð búandmann við hyski sínu á akri eða eingi, á þjóðgötu eða eikjukarfa, þá
gángið þar milli bols og höfuð á; og ef þér sjáið kú, þá leggið hana; og sérhvert
hús, berið eld að, og hlöðu, látið upp gánga; og kvernhús, veltið því um koll; brú,
brjótið hana; brunn, mígið í hann; því að þér eruð frjálsunarmenn Noregs og landvarnarlið.
(486)
[It is my command that you spare no creature that draws breath in Norway, and show
no man mercy until I have once again gained complete control of the land. Wherever
you see a churl with his brood in field or meadow, on the highroad, or in his punt,
cut off his head. If you see a cow, slaughter it. Set each and every house ablaze,
and send barns up in flames. Millhouses—topple them; bridges—break them. Wells—piss
in them. You are the liberators and defenders of Norway.] (456)
Þorgeir Hávarsson, the kind of person inclined to follow the sort of commands just
related, is the terror of farmers in every region of the world he visits. While Þorgeir’s
sworn brother Þormóður praises his prowess, everyone else sees him as a thug whose
character is not at all improved by his delusions of grandeur. Calling upon his sworn
brother on a stormy winter night, at this fateful moment he enters the farm building
with a sinister aspect, i.e. he “var líkari sjókind en manni” [looked more like a
sea-monster than a man] (94; 89). The difference between heroes and monsters involves
both how others see them, and
how they see themselves. In Grendel the hero Beowulf sees himself as ascendant over nature and reality itself when he
boasts of his exploits fighting sea-monsters while swimming in full armour. The passage
is hyperbolic in the original poem, and upon hearing this account Gardner’s Grendel
considers it “preposterous” (161). Everyone in the hall laughs—at first: “Now the
Danes weren’t laughing. The stranger said it all so calmly, so softly, that
it was impossible to laugh. He believed every word he said. I understood at last the
look in his eyes. He was insane” (162). In contrast to Grendel’s existentialism or
the dragon’s nihilism, Beowulf seems
to manifest a kind of postmodern solipsism or weaponized relativism, in which power
conditions all claims and truth disappears amidst competing delusions—a competition
he expects to win. In this Nietzschean nightmare, Beowulf has developed a grandiose
view of himself that justifies both his ruthlessness and his messianistic pretensions,
as he lies creatively and continually enacts fictions that he himself believes to
be adaptive. Abandoning any rational epistemology while embracing strategic self-deception
and making heroic new pronouncements about reality and the destiny of consciousness
from on high, this Beowulf is, in the eyes of Grendel, a “fucking lunatic” (171). Yet Grendel fears
that his time is over and that the age of madness has truly arrived;
thus even he is intimidated by Beowulf’s “childlike yet faintly ironic smile” (154).
For these self-styled heroes, the need for affronts to honour to be avenged justifies
all of their acts of aggression, even though they often create a vicious circle of
violence. Grendel finds their justifications absurd: “I laughed. It was outrageous:
they came, they fell, howling insanity about brothers,
fathers, glorious Hrothgar, and God” (81). Likewise when Þorgeir announces to Butraldi
that he has come to avenge his crimes,
Butraldi responds by snorting like a horse and laughing dementedly (119; 112). When
Þormóður announces his mission to avenge Þorgeir in Greenland, he is similarly received
with mocking laughter (352; 330). In Norway even King Olaf is surprised by how seriously
Þormóður takes heroic ideas; when he announces his resolve to avenge his fallen sworn
brother, Olaf assumes that the Icelander must be a madman (483; 453). The consensus
among these works seems to be that those who most see themselves as heroes are often
acting out precisely those dangerous delusions that are encouraged by the politically
powerful. Grendel deliberately disillusions the would-be hero Unferth by refusing
to fight him, preferring instead to insult him and throw apples at him. No level of
heroic fanaticism will make Unferth’s performance a reality: once his “merry mask”
of heroism is “torn away” he stands “reduced to what he was: a thinking animal stripped
naked of former illusions, stubbornly
living on, ashamed and meaningless, because killing himself would be, like his life,
unheroic” (104). Similarly, Þorgeir’s father Hávar portrays himself as “einn mestur
garpur á Norðurlöndum” [one of the greatest champions in the North] (16; 15) even
though he is merely an arrogant oaf who prefers maiming animals to farming.
He soon picks a fight over less than nothing and gets himself killed. When the seven
year-old Þorgeir finds his father’s body, Halldór describes the sunny murder scene
in gruesome, even shocking, detail (16; 15). As we will see, the “mask” of heroic
identity alters its wearer’s perception in both directions, revealing the
importance of aesthetics even to concepts of sanity.
Þorgeir grows up aspiring to avenge his father and become a great warrior. As fanatical
as Gardner’s Beowulf, he refuses to ever set aside the mask of the hero. He even sleeps
armed: “Var það trúa hans að hetjur svæfi í þessum stellíngum en lægi eigi niður” [It
was his belief that heroes slept in this position, and never lay down] (62; 57). A
peaceable relative takes a dim view of Þorgeir’s heroic aspirations, commenting
that, “er auðfynt að þú ert heimskra manna að faðerni, er þú hyggur þig góðan verða
af manndrápum” [it is obvious that you are descended from fools on your father’s side,
if you believe
that manslaughter makes you more of a man] (47; 44). That Þorgeir thinks this becomes
clear when he brutally attacks a man on the slightest
possible pretext: simply for failing to acknowledge him. The man does not hear Þorgeir;
it is windy and he is carrying a load of wood, but Þorgeir kills him. Þormóður is
also present and if anything he encourages Þorgeir.
Þorgeir then decapitates the man’s corpse:
Vanst furðu seinlega því að vopnið var deigt þótt hugur kappans væri góður; þó varð
laust höfuðið frá bolnum um síðir, og lá maðurinn þar í tvennu lagi á grundinni hjá
hrísbagga sínum og var dauður. (167)
[The task went incredibly slowly due to the dullness of his weapon, despite the champion’s
firm intent. Finally, however, the head came off its trunk, and the man lay there
dead on the ground in two pieces, his bundle of brushwood next to him.] (156)
The Þorgeir of the original saga commits similar killings, but this senseless episode captures the psychology of Halldór’s Þorgeir: a narcissistic
oversensitivity to slights real or perceived, a hunger for domination, and a blockheaded
stubbornness that cannot be reasoned with. He is a disturbed individual who commits
murder repeatedly; yet even
he refrains from throwing infants onto spears, which other Vikings happily do (238;
222). Still others commit further war crimes: “nokkrir heingdu og við belti sér höfuð
kvenna þeirra er þeir höfðu nauðgað þá um daginn” [hanging from the belts of others
were the heads of the women that they had raped that
day] (236; 220). Yet this does not convince him to defend farmers or find another life for himself;
the closest Þorgeir ever comes to critical self-reflection is when he admits that
hins er eigi að dyljast að mjög hafa orustur orðið því ólíkar sem frá segir í fornum
fræðum þeim er eg nam að móður minni og öðrum áætismönnum útá Íslandi. (257)
[it is no secret that the battles we have fought have been most unlike those described
in the stories and lays of old that I learned from my mother and other noble persons
in Iceland.] (241)
In the end, Þorgeir’s king betrays him and he dies in shameful circumstances—thus
denied the heroic death of legendary characters like Beowulf or the outlaws of the
Icelandic sagas.
The worst of knights in White’s tetralogy is Agravaine, similarly a northern warrior
obsessed with avenging perceived slights to his family honour. Like Þorgeir, he can
erupt into brutal violence without warning. Indeed, in a saga-like scene of foreshadowing,
he commits an act of cruelty while young, one which reveals his disturbed nature.
First the young Agravaine recruits an innocent virgin, the kitchen maid Meg, to lure
a unicorn. His brothers, including Gawaine, also accompany him into the woods. The
unicorn duly appears and trustingly lays its head in Meg’s lap. Agravaine then slaughters
it in one of the most brutal scenes in all of medievalism—and one which is particularly
important given White’s hatred of cruelty to animals. Gilles Davies writes: “The reader
of White is frequently confronted by difficult, unpalatable aspects of
his work. I still remember my shock when … I encountered the death of the unicorn.
… It was some time before I could continue with the narrative” (vii). Wanting a trophy from this grisly killing, Agravaine decides, “We must cut its head
off somehow, and carry that” (1966, 269). Like Laxness, White emphasizes the difficult
and disgusting task of beheading a
body: “So they set to work, hating their work, at the horrid business of hacking through
its neck” (1966, 268). This violence is nihilistic and senseless; it stains the souls
of the perpetrators
for the rest of their lives. The scene can be read as an analogy for wartime atrocities;
the unhinged elder brother Agravaine exploits his position to make others, connected
to him by “blood and soil,” complicit in his crimes. What value he places on life
itself becomes clear from the
horrific butchery of this innocent victim, just as Þorgeir beheads the man carrying
wood. Indeed these aspiring heroes sometimes even resemble the monster Grendel, who wallows
in his own monstrosity. As Agravaine butchers the unicorn in a sadistic rage and punctures
its intestines, Grendel admits that the beauty and innocence of others provokes only
hatred and rage in him. Thus when he sees the young queen Wealtheow he plans to rip
her to pieces and “squeeze out her feces between my fists” (109). Such deliberately
revolting scenes would never be found in Tolkien’s literary works,
nor in many medieval ones. In scenes like these, which deliberately dwell on gruesome
violence, readers encounter the aesthetics of nihilism.
The results of this bravado are uniformly hideous. All of these postwar medievalist
writers portray the misery of combat conditions: the mud and the disgusting food,
the injuries and illnesses. Halldór always depicts the physical process of dying from
severe wounds in detail. He describes conditions aboard Viking ships as “seltu og
tjöru, fúka og spýu, lús og ýldu, hrýfi og óþverra, skyrbjúg og kláða” [salt and tar,
rotten seaweed and vomit, lice and decay, rashes and scabs, scurvy and
itching] (273; 256), and mentions lice repeatedly. The Strugatsky brothers novel takes
place in a barbaric
world, in which parasites and diseases have free reign:
На сотни миль—от берегов Пролива и до сайвы Икающего леса—простиралась эта страна,
накрытая одеялом комариныx туч, раздираемая оврагами, затопляемая болотами, пораженная
лихорадками, морами и зловонным насморком. (270)
[This country extended for hundreds of miles—from the shores of the Strait until the
saiva of the Hiccup Forest—blanketed with mosquito clouds, torn apart by ravines,
drowning in swamps, stricken by fevers, plagues, and foul-smelling head colds.] (18)
Boris’s Afterword summarizes the desired atmosphere as “medieval piss and filth” (235),
and bedbugs take the place of the lice in
Gerpla: they are a constant reminder that Nature involves an ongoing transfer of blood,
quite aside from any blood that may be spilled in the course of aestheticized heroics.
White’s references to ants, in contrast, are meant to depict human conflicts in terms
of population dynamics, with political propaganda and much else satirized by comparison
with ant colonies. While such scenes offer a somewhat abstract overview of war, White also dwells on
wartime conditions on the ground: “barns burnt, and dead men’s legs sticking out of
ponds, and horses with swelled bellies
by the roadside, and mills falling down, and money buried” (1966, 234). Gardner observes
the consequences of raids: burned buildings, dead livestock, and
mutilated corpses. Indeed Grendel argues that since human tribes wipe one another
out all the time in raids, wars, and other population-level conflicts, and do so apart
from any of his actions (which were initially motivated not by malice but by hunger
or at most curiosity), he is not an unusually monstrous life form. Through Grendel’s bleak perspective, Kathryn Hume writes, Gardner “supplies something
which we know must logically have been there all the time, but
has been ignored as contrary to heroic decorum,” emphasizing the book’s original publication
context of 1971, during the Vietnam war
(89).
In
Gerpla, the first account readers receive of a Viking raid comes from the slave Kolbakur.
Although he is only a minor character with few lines in
Fóstbræðra saga, Halldór’s Kolbakur shockingly describes how he was enslaved when Vikings raided
his farm in Ireland:
Hetjur og skáld brendu hús mitt, þeir hjöggu föður minn á akri og lögðu afa minn spjóti,
örvasa mann. Þar lá amma mín á knébeð að lofa blessaðan Kólumkilla hollvin sinn, og
rotaði maður hana með öxarskalla; og því græt eg ei. Þá tóku þeir bróður minn ómálgan,
undu af honum reifa og köstuðu honum nöktum milli sín á spjótum, en móður mína og
systur únga drógu þeir brott hljóðandi á skip. (39)
[Heroes and skalds burned down my house. They slew my father in his field and thrust
a spear through my grandfather, just a frail old man. My grandmother was on her knees
praising her beloved friend, the blessed Columbkille, when a man bashed in her skull
with a blow from his ax. That is why I do not cry. Then they took my infant brother,
unwound his swaddling clothes, and tossed him naked between them on their spear points.
My mother and my young sister they dragged away wailing to their ship.] (36)
Kolbakur is, rather understandably, opposed to what he sees as needless violence.
Viking raids are never glorious in
Gerpla—whether in Iceland, Ireland, England, France, Norway, Sweden, or Russia. At one point
the raiders’ accomplishments are summarized as “stolið kúm og brent Evropam í sjö
kynslóðir” [stealing cows and setting fire to Europe for seven generations] (222;
206). Yet the later stories are utterly different from Kolbakur’s account, being shaped
instead by court poets to conform to a heroic aesthetics. W. H. Auden’s
The Shield of Achilles (1955) captures a similar reevaluation of its titular hero. Inverting the traditional
poetic praise of a victory, Auden gives the goddess Thetis a timeless vision in the
divinely forged shield; like White’s Merlyn, Gardner’s dragon, and Don Rumata, this
direct link between different stages in history proves shocking by its juxtapositions.
From her mythologized world, one defined by the ancient aesthetics of heroism, Thetis
is faced with direct sight of the industrial realities of modern warfare, including
vast death camps and the desolation of whole countries:
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
(207)
If kings have become frauds or usurpers, and heroes have become madmen, what can be
said about those who glorify their acts and deeds?
[Sometimes, the dragon tells Grendel, the people] have uneasy feelings that all they
live by is nonsense. … That’s where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of
reality. … Mere tripe, believe me. Mere sleight-of-wits. He knows no more than they
do about total reality—less, if anything: works with the same old clutter of atoms,
the givens of his time and place and tongue. But he spins it all together with harp
runs and hoots, and they think what they think is alive, think Heaven loves them.
It keeps them going—for what that’s worth. (64–65)
Tolkien wrote that “The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and
spiritual, is so staggering
to those who have to endure it,” adding that it “always was (despite the poets) and
always will be (despite the propagandists)” (quoted in Jackson 55). The medievalist
writers discussed here, however, would hardly distinguish between
the two. Kings and heroes never lack a poet to glorify their wars, like the Anglo-Saxon
scop or the Norse skáld. Halldór emphasizes how irresponsible poets have been through Þormóður’s praise of
Þorgeir and Olaf; early on a relative warns him that “ógagn eitt og hamíngjuleysi
hefur jafnan af því leitt er saman kómu vígamenn og skáld” [nothing but harm and misfortune
result when killers and skalds come together] (56; 52). Grendel watches Hrothgar’s
court poet invent the heroic story that will become Beowulf: “The Shaper was singing the glorious deeds of the dead men, praising war. … It was
all lies” (54). Like Halldór’s Skald Þormóður, Gardner’s Shaper aims to benefit directly
from glorifying
his king: “He would sing the glory of Hrothgar’s line and gild his wisdom and stir
up his men
to more daring deeds, for a price” (42). And yet, with all the cynical understanding
that Grendel has, the Shaper’s art still
works on him: “The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled
roots and
had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way—and so did
I” (43). Like Winston Smith, beleaguered by party propaganda in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Grendel worries about his memory being rewritten. Even his narrative style
briefly changes to reflect the Shaper’s manipulation (44). Through aesthetics the
Shaper distorts history; all of his creativity is aimed in the single direction of
increasing the power and glory of his paymaster. When he dies he stops speaking mid-sentence,
still prophesying future victories for his king.
The Strugatsky brothers depict the degradation of literature from art to propaganda
through the figure of Gur the Storyteller, who composes a masterpiece based on the
lives of people he actually knew, but is forced to burn his own books because the
government considers them immoral. Truth is no defense; he is forced to submit to
an Orwellian maxim: “Мне объяснили, что правда … это то, что сeйчас во благо королю
… Все остальное ложь
и преступление” [Truth is what currently benefits the king. Everything else is a lie
and a crime] (350; 135). He soon finds himself reduced to composing abysmal praise
poetry for the court.
In a comic moment he poetically proclaims that the king is so wonderful and powerful
that “И отступипа бесконeчностъ” [Infinity is in retreat] (351; 135) to which the
king responds: “Xвaлю. Можешь кушать” [I commend you. You may eat] (351; 136). All
of this is a damning judgment: poets, it appears, just glorify the nearest violent
madman who offers them status and money, just like certain European intellectuals
during World War II (Wolin xi).
In the poignant conclusion of Gerpla Þormóður finally meets Olaf, the king he has glorified—and finds him truly repugnant.
As Þormóður broods over what the path of the skald has cost him, Olaf asks him to
recite his praise poem, the Lay of Heroes. Refusing to recite the poem, Þormóður basically burns his life’s work: “Nú kem eg
eigi leingur fyrir mig því kvæði” [I can no longer recall that lay] (493; 463). Presumably he also refused to rouse Olaf’s army with the glorious poem on the heroic
Scylding dynasty, the Bjarkamál, the next morning. Halldór’s Þormóður thus achieves the self-recognition that the Shaper, whom Gardner
depicts as an early propagandist of this same dynasty, never did; he chooses to fall
silent in condemnation of his own previous words. In Gerpla the legend that grows after King Olaf’s death legend is thus wrong and illegitimate,
or at least it does not reflect Þormóður’s final understanding of Olaf.
How does such an unpleasant figure as Olaf become a saint? Olaf’s corrupt collaborator,
the bishop Grímkell, bribes the papacy and launches a propaganda campaign: “Og fer
sem jafnan vill verða, að þeir er veita eftirmæli konúngum ráða og sögu þeirrar
æfi sem var, en kjósa ölnum og óbornum dýrlínga” [Now it went as it so often does,
that those who bestow posthumous glory on kings also
rewrite the stories of their lives, and thereby create saints for generations present
and future] (490; 460). Grímkell’s motivation is simply to advance his own power.
Halldór notes that in
this time the power of poets like Þormóður was fading, to be replaced by that of bishops
like Grímkell (467; 439). Unfortunately, bishops prove to be no better than poets
when it comes to justifying violence. When recently baptized Vikings ask a bishop
whether they should burn a church in which their mutual enemies are hiding—along with
numerous innocent people—they receive this reply:
Kristur heldur víst eigi loflegt né rétt af aungum sökum eld að bera að kirkjum og
brenna konúnga inni, ellegar landsmúg, konur og börn og önnur vesalmenni. Á hitt ber
að líta, að þó að Kristur sé mikill fiskimaður, þá verður hann eigi í sjálfs neti
fánginn. (233)
[Assuredly, Christ holds it neither laudable nor just, for any reason whatsoever,
to
set fire to churches and burn kings inside them, or commoners, women and children,
or other wretched folk. Yet it should be kept in mind that although Christ is a great
fisherman, he will not be caught in his own net.] (217)
This ingenious explanation carries on at some length, and in the end entails a justification
for war crimes. In
Grendel clerics likewise use theology to maintain their grip on power; it is merely cynical
sophistry that obscures its circular reasoning with pretentious vocabulary (131).
Thus the torch of propagandist passes from shaper to priest, from poet to churchman.
Halldór Laxness had once believed in Lenin as a Christ-like figure and the Soviet
Union as a “Promised Land” (Guðmundsson 180). Halldór Guðmundsson writes, “One is
inevitably led to ponder how Halldór, a man who truly wished the best for his
countrymen and who interpreted their lives and fates with more sympathy and artistry
than has ever been done since, could have become a defender of Stalin” (191). When
considering the peculiar phenomenon of western intellectuals’ love of foreign
dictators such as Stalin, Orwell writes that many “intelligent and sensitive people”
nevertheless unleash exactly the vindictive emotions associated with tribalism in
relation to whatever intellectual cause upon which they have projected (or in Orwell’s
term “dislocated”) their primal psychological tendencies (n.p.). Orwell notes the
association of ethics and aesthetics in utopian thinking; Halldór
Guðmundsson likewise observes that Laxness himself was first interested in communism
by the appeal of its dreams of ultimate liberation; and he later recognized this very
appeal as dangerous (260). It is well worth noting that the Icelandic Nobel Laureate’s
doubts about communism began with aesthetic ones (336). Gardner’s Grendel likewise
observes that because of the power of aesthetics art shades into religion and holds
within it the power to make men mad (43). This may explain why these postwar medievalists
insist on depicting deliberately hideous and shocking scenes of war.
In many ways, an Orwellian analysis of politics sets the works herein discussed apart
from previous works of literary medievalism. Orwell himself fought in the Spanish Civil War and was severely wounded, which could
certainly be considered heroic; yet he was skeptical enough of heroic literature to
call Thomas Carlyle, author of
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), “one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism” (n.p.). Of the astounding cynicism
and ruthlessness of political leaders, particularly in
times of war, no writer warned more powerfully than Orwell. Yet he reserved particular
scorn for the intellectuals, who “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,”
and who seek “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (1999, n.p.). Using
the term “Transferred Nationalism” to criticize political ideology in general, Orwell argues that by selling their souls
for power, intellectuals become ideological propagandists, all the while remaining
convinced of their own moral superiority:
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable
of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something
bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being in the right. (1999, n.p.)
Like propagandists, ideologues grant themselves a license to deceive others, justifying
their actions in the here and now by appealing to the beauty of the dreams they believe
in, although this sort of thinking amounts to little more than “the ends justifies
the means.” It is exactly this golden haze of idealism, Orwell notes, that motivates
the most
militant ideological fanatics to undertake the most extreme measures: “What remains
constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings
is changeable, and may be imaginary” (1999, n.p.).
Thus Þormóður considers reworking his lay in praise of King Olaf to praise King Cnut,
before finally rejecting the idea of praise poems entirely. The conclusion of Gerpla seems to express skepticism of narrative itself, at least if it is in any way linked
to the exercise of power. White’s tetralogy concludes in a manner which displays striking
parallels to Gerpla. Halldór’s narrative concludes on the eve of a famous battle, one in which readers
already know that both Olaf and Þormóður were killed. Like Laxness, White does not depict his King’s last battle, but instead looks forward
to it (490; 460). The night before his final defeat, White’s King Arthur considers
many theories which might explain war: original sin, human nature, determinism, ambitious
leaders, hateful populations, the “Deep Roots” evolutionary theory, antecedent feuds,
economic inequality, and political geography
(1966, 676). The tetralogy ends on a pessimistic note as Arthur realizes that these
problems are beyond his understanding and he cannot save his kingdom. He knows what
will happen: “Everybody was killed” (1966, 674). Yet whereas Þormóður repudiates his ideals
completely, White’s King Arthur hopes
that someone will keep alive the titular “Candle in the Wind” of his lost idealism;
not any particular belief system or ideological solution, but
simply the idea that humans can still do good and that it is possible to improve or
at least preserve the world. Thus he sends his page Tom (Malory) away to preserve
the dream of Camelot. Stephanie Barczewski points out that by inserting Malory as
a character in the finale of his tetralogy, White crosses boundaries of history and
legend, fact and fiction, authorship and story (232-35). This ending device confers
unreliability on the Morte; the Malory who witnessed these events is a youth, full of just the naïve idealism
that Arthur tries to dispel. Colin N. Manlove notes, “The drive of events seems to
be towards the defeat of any ideal, of any attempt to
make sense of human affairs” (78).
Like Laxness, White provides a conclusion that is both poignant and devastating, perhaps
seeking the antidote to war in a true understanding of humanity’s place in nature:
“I think I can really make a comment on all those futile -isms (communism, fascism,
conservatism etc.) by stepping back—right back—among the other mammals” (1977, xvi).
Similarly, Gardner designed Grendel as a survey of the “Great Ideas of Western Civilization: love, heroism, the artistic
ideal, piety, and
so forth” (Child 113). Yet the Voice of Nature—in the form of the dragon—rejects them all. Gardner’s novel
thus exposes the illusory nature of various “futile -isms,” even while recognizing
that it may be impossible for pattern-seeking primates such
as humans to avoid a certain level of “-ism” in their worldviews. It is interesting
to consider that the strongest belief in the
positive power of narrative, art, and culture to emancipate populations rather than
justify their maltreatment comes from the Strugatsky brothers, whose novel is clearly
an attack on Hitler, Stalin, and Beria alike. Still, the “basis theory of feudalism”
saves no one, and villains like Reba have their own theories of history, which they
use quite adeptly as ideological pretexts to persecute all those who stand in their
way. Whereas Tolkien’s religious perspective entails belief in the validity of narrative
in a deep sense (what Tolkein called Story), that is just what these medievalist schismatics
rejected.
In examining the role of the poet, these postwar medievalist writers close the loop
of metafiction and account for the creation and history of their own sources. Acknowledging
the profound symbolism and aesthetic inspiration of medieval literary masterpieces,
they also reveal the ominous extent to which such things can prove to be a double-edged
sword, especially when the strange gleam of romanticism settles upon them. For T.
H. White, Halldór Laxness, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and John Gardner, medievalism
could not provide a nostalgic escape to a time of honour and nobility. Instead horrible
suspicions about human nature and destiny, borne of the “Midnight of the Twentieth
century,” haunt their works. Rewriting their respective literary traditions from a
bleak point
of view, these works reconsider the nature of narrative itself, especially in the
case of the cultural processes that produce heroic legends. Perhaps for generational
reasons even more than for cultural or biographical ones, each of these writers arrived
at an Orwellian analysis of the interrelated roles of ruler (king), enforcer (hero),
and propagandist (poet); they form a sort of unholy trinity as authoritarianism and
war sweep across the world. Perhaps these are the three figures who glower in Alberto
Giacometti’s sketch on the cover of Wayward Heroes.