Review of Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages

Arthurian Legends of the Middle Ages by George W. Cox

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I’m not sure how highly to rate this book. If you’re a 14-year-old kid in rural Alberta who loves Arthuriana and whose whole family is involved in the local production of the musical Camelot, this is a 5-star book. I loved it when I was 14 — and it’s definitely pitched at adults.

24 years later, I haven’t reread it.

Nonetheless, I will say this. It gave me a great framework for all the Arthuriana that has come since, and I enjoyed it tremendously. All the major stories are there, so all the famous knights and adventures you have some inkling about. But it takes way less time than actually reading a medieval romance, and it also saves you the angst and bad history of modern novelisations. What this book has provided me over the long term is the references necessary for slipping the romances and modern novels into place, sort of like reading a general history of Rome before moving on to Suetonius or a modern historian like Richard Burgess. Something like this, then, should be on every Arthur reader’s shelf.

But whether this particular volume is the one for anyone else, I have no idea.



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“Allora”, “Welcome” and other ANCIENT MYSTERIES

As you probably don’t know, I have been hired to be a Latin/Greek Fellow for the Ancient Language Institute (ALI), which means I’m back to teaching languages! One of the exciting things about ALI is the fact that they/we use active learning pedagogy, with comprehensible input and only using the target language — like my TESOL training. There are many benefits to this.

When you start having to speak a language, you start finding unexpected habits of mind and speech and/or gaps in knowledge you never worried about before. The Italian word allora comes in the first category for me, and the English word welcome comes in the second.

Allora is a word that means … well, I guess it means “then” or “next”, maybe, depending on the context, “so” — so as it is used by Seamus Heaney to translate Hwaet! in Beowulf‘s opening. “So.” Full stop. We’re done that. Now it’s a new thing. It really depends on context. If I really had to gloss the Italian word allora, I would say it signifies the same res as alors. (Immensely helpful, I know. For my discussion of res and signa, dependent on Augustine of Hippo, look here.)

I have discovered that when I speak in Latin, I want to use this word allora. This isn’t really surprising. Probably the greatest number of times I have heard a person say allora in a single hour was in Italian class — and here I am, working at teaching Latin. Moreover, there is a tendency to say, “Bene!” in both contexts. Finally, Latin and Italian have the same cadence if you learn how to sound out Latin properly with long and short syllables and stress accents in the right places.

Like any good modern, I took to Facebook today to try and determine if anyone had a good Latin word that signifies the same linguistic res as allora. The answer was basically, “Non. Nihil habemus.” The closest lexical answer was tunc. But the best answer, from my PhD supervisor and former boss (but not current boss, so this isn’t sucking up), was an answer (in lingua latina, scilicet) that said that, actually, we should probably not be asking these questions — not even using “bene!” without a verb for it to modify, so that, basically, we can speak more like the ancients did, and try to turn few modern words into Latin.

This is a good point.

It leads me to the second category of things you discover in speaking a language — stuff you never had to know before. I use the example of “welcome” because it is indicative of our attempts to be both polite in a modern European sort of way on the one hand and idiomatic on the other. Most modern European languages have a word that means welcome. Actually, based on signs at airports, most languages of any sort have such a word. Welcome, bienvenue, willkommen, bouzhou, እንኳን ደህና መጣህ, स्वागत हे, benvenuto, receber, Fàilte, 환영하다, and so forth.

It only stands to reason, then, that Latin must have a word that we can use to say “Welcome!”, thereby being polite in our classes. The answer, it seems, is “Bene uenisti!” But is it? I have it on good authority that, in fact, it is not. “Bene uenisti!” is only found in the Vulgate (nothing wrong with that). In the Vulgate, the context is not what you say to someone who has simply walked through the door (or clicked “Play” on your YouTube video), but what you say to someone who has arrived as they should — as in, literally, “You have arrived well!” My authority says, more colloquially, “Looks like you had a good trip!”

I have not read all the Latin there is, but I have yet to meet a Latin signum that points to the English res “Welcome!”

Of course, there are other gaps in one’s linguistic knowledge that can be filled. But part of the difficulty here, I believe, is that we are trying to replicate a one-for-one Latin version of what we would say in our own English idiom. Yet many of our contemporary colloquial and idiomatic phrases may not have an equivalent in Latin; that is, they may not (perhaps cannot, at times) have something that “means” the same thing.

(Another question, I suppose — do Latin uerba actually mean the same thing as the English words we use to translate them?)

In posing these questions, I betray my interests. There are people who want to speak conversational Latin, and so they require means of speaking in an informal manner to their Latin conversation partners. These people will need to think hard about all the idioms and colloquialisms they use anglice so as to speak Latine. I used to think that was a cool goal, and I think it is cool, but not for me. My goal in studying and teaching Latin is accessing Latin literature — that I and my students are able to sit down with Cicero or St Bernard, Claudian or Alan of Lille, Tacitus or Erasmus, Virgil or Ovid or Horace or Leo or Augustine or Pliny or Pliny or any of the thousands of other Latin writers and read it and appreciate them both for their content and for their artistry.

And so, until William Shatner helps us uncover the truth, the ancient mysteries of allora and welcome will remain unsolved. It’s an ignorance I’m willing to live with.

The Return of Arthur in 2021

Growing up, stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were among my favourite things. I remember sitting just inside my bedroom door at night in Grade 3, illuminated by the hall light, reading, reading these stories. In junior high, I read T H White’s The Once and Future King, and my family was involved in the local music and drama society’s production of Camelot a few years later. I have all four issues of the Black Knight miniseries by Marvel Comics.

Eventually, it would come to pass that I wasn’t reading very much Arthurian literature or consuming other King Arthur media, although throughout the years I would still read something here or there.

2021 saw the return of King Arthur.

First, Malcolm Guite began making videos on his YouTube channel wherein he read aloud his new Arthurian ballads. Irresistible. Probably the best things on the internet in 2021. Stop reading my blog and go watch his Arthurian videos. Seriously.

Now.

Then I stumbled upon a copy of The Burning Stone, a prequel to Jack Whyte’s series A Dream of Eagles. A Dream of Eagles is set in late and post-Roman Britain, imagining a plausible series of events that would lead to the rise of Arthur. I read The Burning Stone in the spring, and finally finished off Whyte’s Arthurian novels in the summer, reading the two-part series The Golden Eagle, Clothar the Frank and The Eagle. Clothar represents Lancelot, and the two books are good enough, but I wish I’d read them when I first got them ages ago because I know too much fifth-century Roman history at this point. Timelines are confused, and Whyte seems to think the entire population of Gaul was Frankish (although this was also a bit confused, too).

However, between The Burning Stone and Clothar the Frank, I also read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (trans. JRR Tolkien) and The Quest of the Holy Grail (trans. Pauline Matarasso). I had read both of these before, and in those translations. Sir Gawain was my first piece of medieval literature back in junior high, as part of a Tolkien kick (and an ongoing love of Arthuriana). My brother gave me The Quest of the Holy Grail some years ago, and it’s always worth reading and rereading. I made a YouTube video about its allegorical, spiritual meaning, in fact. And, on further reflection, I also made this YouTube video about King Arthur.

Despite my misgivings about some of his history, Jack Whyte’s The Golden Eagle series was not the most disappointing Arthurian moment of 2021. That would be The Green Knight. I can’t even … The film upends the meaning of the poem by changing the most important elements of the plot and undermining the way the original poem questions chivalry and courtly love. From being a story that questions secular virtues (amongst other things) as well as a coming-of-age story about a young knight, it becomes a travesty that subverts all virtue whatsoever about a sex-hungry fool in a world where there are no heroes. It does not seem to question what a real hero is the way the poem does but, rather predictably, it falls in line with today’s “art” and questions whether heroes are even real.

Nonetheless, the summer was redeemed by the fact that I started reading Lancelot of the Lake (trans. Corin Corley) with a friend. It went in fits and spurts through the Autumn, so I actually finished it in December. This book is part of the Vulgate Cycle that also includes The Quest of the Holy Grail that I read earlier in the year. It sets up the character and prowess of Lancelot, his love of Guinevere, and ultimately those flaws in character that will bar him from achieving the Grail Quest.

For Christmas, my wife gave my Isaac Asimov’s The Complete Robot and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan (trans. A T Hatto). I finished Tristan early in 2022. Gottfried’s version is not technically Arthuriana because he sets it a generation after Arthur — as Hatto notes in his introduction, this actually smoothes out some of the problems involved in making Tristan a knight of the Round Table.

Finally, this year I have also read Stephen R Lawhead’s Pendragon and Grail. I liked Grail more than Pendragon, and not only because of Lawhead’s misconception of who the Vandals are, but because I think my tastes have been shifting away from war stories for a while now.

Overarching all of this has been an insistence from my sons that I tell them King Arthur stories in the car. I did get away with telling bits of Orlando Furioso for a while, and then stories of Odysseus, but the gravitation towards Arthur continues. Roger Lancelyn Green has helped with this! And I’ve made up a couple of stories featuring knights with their names. I also got out Robert D San Souci’s Young Lancelot from the library to help sate their appetite.

That’s it for now, but I will be reading Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain soon, so I’m not finished with the Matter of Britain just yet!

Nothing is lost (when you write a book)

I have written a book, called The Manuscripts of Leo the Great’s Letters: The Transmission and Reception of Papal Documents in the Middle Ages. It is a transformed, expanded, sifted, revised, revised, revised version of that which was once my PhD dissertation. It is over 500 pages of words, including the index that I made for it. Brepols will publish it this year, DV.

In a sense, this book has been eleven years in the making, since I started my PhD in 2011, and now it is 2022. In another sense, it took from 2015 when I graduated until today for this book to be completed, for it to be transformed and revised and made ready for public consumption. I once felt like there was a certain amount of “wasted time” because I wasn’t actively working on this book.

However, that is false. It is true that I had no plans to publish a book based on my dissertation until some time in 2018-19 when I was employed at UBC as an Assistant Professor Without Review in Latin Language and Literature. But those years were not wasted, as far as the book is concerned (they weren’t wasted in other ways, of course).

First, 2015-2016. I was employed as Ralegh Radford Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome. My research program was focussed on a particular selection of manuscripts of early papal letters (some of Leo’s predecessors). I spent months lurking in the Vatican Library and made trips to the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome, and Lucca, Vercelli, Milan. I also analysed a few of the Vatican Library’s Leo manuscripts I hadn’t had time for during the PhD. All of this research informs the book, in fact, even the material not related to Leo because it enables me to better situate Leo and the transmission of his letters in the wider context of papal letter transmission in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

Then 2016-17, a year certainly not lost in the most important areas of life, for my eldest son was born in 2017! This year I was a Teaching Fellow in Late Roman History at the University of Edinburgh. I thought I was on intimate terms with Late Roman History when I finished my PhD. After teaching it for a full year, I definitely was. I revised the chapters on late antique history with great confidence. Moreover, my ongoing research into matters related to Leo and his letters further strengthened the knowledge base when I got around to revising the book.

Then 2017-18, the year I was Barker Priory Library Fellow at Durham University. My research project was a study of the canon law manuscripts of Durham Cathedral Priory Library, particularly from the time of William of St-Calais onwards. This is when my knowledge of medieval canon law really went deep. Manuscripts I viewed that year are in my book precisely because of this opportunity, manuscripts of Collectio Lanfranci and Gratian’s Decretum as well as a few other unique items from Durham Cathedral Priory, and a deeper, richer appreciation for the High Middle Ages.

And then I went to UBC, during which time I began revising the thesis into a book in earnest.

Everything has been useful. All of my teaching and research inform what I do and how I do it and what I know and how I argue and what makes the cut to be included in my final writing.

Nothing has been lost.

Provided by Durham Priory Library Project – a collaboration between Durham University and Durham Cathedral

10 books, no. 3: The Philokalia

My third of ten books (sorry I fell behind on this) was The Philokalia, vol. 1:

The Philokalia is a five-volume anthology of Greek-language (plus a Greek translation of bits of John Cassian) ascetic/mystical texts focussed on the art of prayer, the prayer of the heart, pure prayer — viz., the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

It was compiled in 1782 by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain (that is, Athos) and Makarios of Corinth, drawn from a selection of Athonite manuscripts of Greek-language spiritual masters that were themselves what the compilers thought of as “paterika” — anthologies of the “fathers”. In the Orthodox world, the “fathers” do not end in 749 with the death of John of Damascus (as in western assessments of “patristics”) but potentially extend until today. The “fathers” selected here run from the fourth through fourteenth century.

I call these “Greek-language” texts because simply saying “Greek” will give the wrong idea to a modern reader — the monks herein are from Egypt, Mt Sinai, Judaea-Palestine, and Syria as well as from the “Greek” Mount Athos. They do not provide a vision of the entire Christian life or all of Orthodox spirituality, but simply an approach to pure prayer and the union of the mind with the heart, focussing largely on the Jesus Prayer, as noted above.

A shorter anthology emerged around the same time, and it may not be a shortened Philokalia, according to recent research, but actually an independent text based on the same or similar manuscripts. It is often called the shorter or little Russian Philokalia, and it is the book in the popular anonymous novel The Way of a Pilgrim. Along with the Russian translation of Isaac the Syrian, it was influential on the Optina Fathers and nineteenth-century Russian spiritual masters such as Theophan the Recluse.

Volume 1 is all that I’ve read of The Philokalia. It is entirely ancient, mostly fourth- and fifth-century authors, going possibly up to the later seventh. Not all of the authors are securely dated. It includes: Isaiah the Solitary; Evagrius Ponticus; John Cassian; Mark the Ascetic (or the Monk); Hesychios the Priest; Nilos of Ancyra; Diadochos of Photiki; John of Karpathos, and a pseudonymous text of Antony the Great.

In the first volume, the prayer of the heart and the conditions for it are charted to the emergence of the name of Jesus and the Jesus Prayer in the fifth century. It is a powerful, challenging book of a more than historical interest.

Finally, this translation is a version of The Philokalia in the spirit of Nikodimos and Makarios rather than a translation of The Philokalia as printed in Venice in 1782. The translators translate the same selections from the authors, but they reattribute them where we know better who wrote a text, and they translate them from modern critical editions. Moreover, they also produce their own general introduction to the volume besides introductions to each author and an invaluable glossary at the back.

If you are interested in Eastern Orthodox spirituality or a certain tradition of the ancient Desert, this book is a difficult but worthy place to begin.

Some reasons to read Beowulf

Here are just a few reasons why you might want to read Beowulf. First, it is a famous example of literature from the Early Middle Ages. Second, it represents English-language literature in its infancy. Third, it has had impacted modern literature since its rediscovery.

The Early Middle Ages, although politically fractured and certainly with a lower standard of living than the Later Roman Empire or the High Middle Ages, are a period of great creativity and transformation within western Europe, as the post-Roman world resettles itself into something new. Beowulf is, in many ways, indicative of the Early Middle Ages. Culturally, the Early Middle Ages see the introduction of literacy and Christianity to more and more ‘barbarians’—the English, Irish, Scots, Dutch, various continental Germanic peoples, Danes, and more. As a poem about the pagan past being told from a Christian perspective, Beowulf encapsulates the early medieval world, not simply by showing us aspects of Anglo-Saxon society (the beerhall with the lord bestowing gifts upon his thegns—the world of Sutton Hoo), but of European society more broadly (the transformation of barbarian pagans into literate Christians).

Beowulf is one of the earliest long-form English poems. It shows, in a certain way, the foundations of English literature. This is a lofty claim; Beowulf certainly exerted no direct influence on Chaucer, who certainly had closer English poets as well as French and Latin literature to hand. Nonetheless, Beowulf was written in the English vernacular, composed from the stuff of the oral legends that existed as part of the cultural inheritance the English brought with them from the Continent. Its intrinsic interest, then, is that it is a so-called ‘primary’ epic, such as Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, and The Song of Roland, as opposed to Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, Dante, or Ariosto. It depicts a pre-literate, warrior society, yet is itself cast in a beautiful, lyric form. Beowulf carries with it not just daring adventure and heroism, but also the hope of heaven and high ideals of loyalty and honour. These are ideals that are known to capture the hearts and minds of most people. Reading Beowulf shows us English poetry when England was barely English.

Finally, Beowulf has a strong influence on modern literature and art. Like most, if not all, early medieval vernacular literature, it lay dormant for many years. But nationalism, romanticism, and the rise of vernacular philology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that this Old English epic has found new life, being ushered back into the canon of English-language classics. Immediately, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford’s first Professor of Anglo-Saxon and critic of Beowulf comes to mind—especially since the publication of his translation with notes in 2014. It is widely known that Tolkien was influenced by Beowulf in crafting his fantasies, and The Hobbit in particular. From my own experience, many young people have been ushered into classic literature through the twofold gateway of Tolkien and Lewis. Beowulf also inspired the later portions of Eaters of the Dead (filmed as 1999’s The 13^th Warrior) when Michael Crichton takes the story beyond Ibn Fadlan’s surviving narrative.

Furthermore, modern adaptations have made Beowulf a known entity, but—like the famous Victorian trio of horror stories, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—very little read. It has been unfaithfully adapted multiple times for the cinema, as well as a more faithful animated version with the voice talents of Derek Jacobi and Joseph Fiennes. In print, John Gardner has given us Grendel, telling the tale from the perspective of the monster, and Gareth Hinds produced a vivid and captivating graphic novel. One of my favourite adaptations of Beowulf is the stilt play! There has also been an anthology of short fiction about the character inspired by the epic.

So, if you take C S Lewis’s advice and read an old book after every new book, why not pick up Beowulf next time? I’ve read and recommend the translations of Liuzza, Crossley-Holland, and Tolkien, but I expect Heaney’s is more than worth your time.

The neverending story of Leo’s manuscripts

I recently asked a senior academic who’s been helping me out to order two library catalogues through interlibrary loans for me (working at the uOttawa library gives me some privileges as an alumnus, but not ILLs). I remarked that I keep finding more manuscripts of Leo’s letters.

His response was that it may never end.

My ever-growing list of Leo manuscripts is the result of new catalogues with proper indices being published, new and old databases running well, and me having access to old catalogues. I suspect that those manuscripts necessary for editing the text of Leo’s letters were already identified when I finished my Ph.D. dissertation in 2015.

However, I just discovered another ninth-century codex today, hitherto unknown to me: Vat. Reg. lat. 423. This manuscript contains material from Gallic councils (Gaul = France geographically), the Concordia canonum of Cresconius, and then two of Leo’s letters, Epp. 14 and 7, followed by a letter of Damian of Pavia, then fragments of Priscian the grammarian. It has also, it turns out, been digitised.

For your viewing pleasure, folio 62v where Leo begins:

But the story of transmitting Leo’s letters has never simply been about establishing the text (it has been that, of course). It has also been about discovering who owned, copied, and read the letters, where and when. Maybe sometimes even why. It is about the journey of texts from Leo’s utterance to his notarius to printers in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era.

For example, I am going to have to revisit the Council of Florence, for besides manuscripts belonging to Bessarion, Nicholas of Cusa, Juan de Torquemada, and Domenico Capranica, I have also discovered the copy made for Pope Eugenius IV himself! Vat. lat. 1326, also digitised.

This manuscript is exciting not only because of the ownership but also because it contains a collection of Leo’s letters I did not know about, and there are two more manuscripts of that collection, one of which was made for Angelo Capranica, also a cardinal, brother of Domenico! This is Vat. lat. 1328, another digitised manuscript.

Moreover, more careful examination of library catalogues has ferreted out copies of Leo belonging to Popes Nicholas V (successor to Eugenius IV) and Paul II (a couple popes later). These Renaissance popes at least owned copies of Leo. I imagine Eugenius IV, if not the others about whom I know little, actually read him, based on said pope’s activities.

I have found a few more eleventh-century manuscripts, as well as some homiliaries that contain the Tome (Ep. 28 to Flavian) amongst the homilies.

One final victory was identifying a manuscript whose shelfmark as recorded by the last editors of Leo in 1753 (brothers by the name of Ballerini) seems no longer to exist — Vat. Chig.C.VII.212, a sixteenth-century copy of Leo’s letters with acts of the Council of Chalcedon as compiled and translated by Rusticus a millennium earlier. Despite its late date, this manuscript may be worth investigating because of how few manuscripts of Rusticus exist.

Eventually, I may quit hunting these manuscripts. As I say, most of what I’ve found in the past week or so will not affect my edition. But they affect the story! And I love the story.

The Virgilian tradition

The famous 3rd-century mosaic of Virgil from the Bardo Museum, Tunis, Tunisia

Some time ago, back when I was a Master’s student, I wrote a little piece called You Should Read the Iliad, and then another called simply The Odyssey. I finally wrote my third in the series, Why read the Aeneid of Virgil? in July of 2018. Having written about the Age of Augustus, and how we who study later Rome also know earlier Rome, my mind keeps circling back to the Virgilian tradition, a vast literary heritage that begins as soon as Virgil’s work is produced. Virgil is an instant classic, as seen in Propertius 2.34.59-66:

My pleasure to languish with yesterday’s garlands,
Whom the sure-aiming god touched to the bone;
For Virgil the power to tell of Actium’s shores
In Phoebus’ guard and Caesar’s gallant ships,
Who now wakes to life the arms of Troy’s Aeneas
And walls cast down on Lavinian shores.
Surrender, writers of Rome, surrender, Greeks!
Something greater than the Iliad is born.
-Trans. A. J. Boyle, ‘The Canonic Text: Virgil’s Aeneid’, in his own Roman Epic, p. 79

For Late Antiquity, Virgil is the single most important Latin poet. This is true not only for the obvious writers, such as Servius with his commentary on Virgil, or Macrobius’ Saturnalia, nor only for the poets — Virgilian intertexts are inevitable in Claudian — but even for those men dubbed ‘Fathers of the Church’ — Virgilian quotations and allusions abound in Augustine of Hippo. I’ve not read much Jerome yet, but I suspect the same will prove true. This use of Virgil as a source of wisdom is a Latin parallel of how Greeks treated Homer.

The Virgilian tradition, then, is vast . I have beside me The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years by Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam. It is 1024 pages long, not including the endmatter. Here are some highlights …

The Virgilian Middle Ages

The explicit intertext, signalled in its title, of Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (1182) is the invective of Claudian. Yet here we also find various Virgilian intertexts, not to mention an explicit naming of Virgil.

Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide (1100s), makes use of Dido and Aeneas.

But the most famous medieval reader of Virgil is the Supreme Poet of Italy, Dante Alighieri, whose Inferno has Virgil as guide not only of the character Dante in the poem but of the poet Dante who wrote the poem.

Where else to turn in the 1000-year medieval reception of Virgil? Well, at the very least Petrarch (1304-74), whose works are littered with Virgil, and Chaucer, particularly The House of Fame which draws on Virgil’s own personification of Fama in Aeneid 4.

The Early Modern Virgil

For the early modern era as for the Middle Ages, Virgil was very much a powerful presence, in both Latin and vernacular literature, such as the Portuguese Lusiads by Camões, the Italian Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato, and in English, Milton’s Paradise Lost.

It should come as no great shock that various aspects of the Virgilian tradition are also in Ariosto, Orlando Furioso. Besides his ongoing use of epic similes and set-piece descriptions (ecphrasis in the singular, ecphraseis in the plural), Ariosto has a number of scenes modelled on or inspired by Virgil. Early in the epic, for example, Bradamant is dropped into a cave by a mortal enemy of her family. The cave turns out to be Merlin’s tomb, and a sorceress dwells there, who proceeds to show Bradamant the parade of her descendants — including Ariosto’s patron, whom Ariosto compares to Augustus, saying that he even has his own Virgil! (Quite the boast.)

Virgil Today

Sometimes it may feel like the ancient Classics have fallen on hard times. But new translations of the Aeneid keep appearing, including the potent translation of Book VI by Seamus Heaney. Moreover, epic retellings find their ways onto our shelves, if less often onto our screens — I think particularly of Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterful novel Lavinia.

One potential reception of Virgil that is, in fact, disputed, is Battlestar Galactica, which both Peggy Heller and Charlotte Higgins argue has Virgilian elements. Chris Jones’ arguments against the two are not entirely convincing. Intertextuality is not the same as adaptation; Ronald D. Moore could very well have had some basic Virgilian-Aeneid structures in mind without creating a perfect sci-fi adaptation. I like the idea, that is, of Virgil as intertext, if not as inspiration or source for BSG. It would, in fact, be entirely fitting for the poet whose masterpiece is in many ways the ultimate intertext of both Homeric epics and the Latin epic of Ennius to be used as an intertext for TV shows today.

What I want to see in the Virgilian tradition is a good graphic novel — Roy Thomas gave us The Iliad and Odyssey for Marvel; Gareth Hinds, after a splendid Beowulf, has also given us The Iliad and Odyssey. Could one of them give us the Aeneid as well? Please? (I know nothing about Agrimbau and Sosa’s — is it worthy?)

Study Later Latin!

Codex Amiatinus, portrait of Ezra (Cassiodorus?), folio 5r (c. 700, based on older Italian Bible)

One of the many interesting facts found in Jürgen Leonhardt, Latin: Story of a World Language (read my review), is that about 80% of surviving ancient Latin texts are from the late 200s to the mid-500s. The sheer quantity of texts, then, makes Later Latin literature appealing, doesn’t it?

The other 20% of surviving ancient Latin texts cover about 500 years of literary history — those are the Latin texts we are all most likely to study: Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, Lucan, Suetonius, Tacitus, and others, including those fragmentary poets of the Republic such as Ennius.

When you think about those who study English literature,  not only do these Latin classics not add up to a very large quantity of texts in comparison, they are also among the most studied texts in the world. Everyone who ever studied Latin with seriousness, whether a Ciceronian so harshly criticised by Erasmus, Erasmus himself, or, say, Aelred of Rievaulx, read Cicero.

So we should keep reading Cicero (there’s more to that argument, but that’s for later).

But Cicero has been analysed, edited, commented upon, translated, and so forth a lot.

Leo the Great, on the other hand, has 23 letters that have received no edition since 1753, and I am contemplating writing the first commentary on the whole corpus of letters.

Not only is Later Latin relatively understudied: It’s vast! Here’s but a sample of people as they pass into my mind:

Lactantius, Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Ausonius, Ambrose, Symmachus, Augustine, Prudentius, Sedulius, Leo I, Innocent I, Celestine I, various other popes, Caesarius of Arles, Peter Chrysologus, Quodvultdeus, Prosper of Aquitaine, Ammianus Marcellinus, Hydatius, Priscian, Donatus, Servius, Macrobius, Claudian, Porfyrius, Boethius, the legal work of Justinian

The list could and does go on. We have poetry of multiple genres (including epic and some experimental stuff), history of multiple genres, biography, letters, sermons, speeches, grammar books, commentaries on classical poets, commentaries on the Bible, theological treatises, philosophical texts, autobiography, monastic rules, and more.

If we extend our dates to around 800, as the much anticipated Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature will, then we also get Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, Aldhelm, Bede, some lovely Hiberno-Latin literature, and more!

There’s something for everyone in later Latin literature, and a lot of it remains untranslated, or poorly translated, or only available in expensive translations. So learn some Latin and go read it!

Robert E. Howard and Ariosto

When I was a teenager, I bought a copy of The Essential Conan as a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy book club. This anthology of classic Robert E. Howard Conan stories came complete with a poster of Conan wielding an axe, about to cut off the head of a serpent. Slinking in the background is an almost totally nude woman. Before putting the poster up, I honest-to-goodness cut out a paper dress to put over the mostly naked woman.

So, basically, your average, run-of-the-mill Conan picture.

I was reminded of this poster recently, reading my Oxford World’s Classics edition of Ludovico Ariosto’s Italian Renaissance epic, Orlando Furioso. The cover depicts Ruggiero rescuing Angelica, mounted on a winged steed (bird? hippogriff? I don’t know yet), lancing a dragon from atop his mount. Angelica is nude:

This is, as I have alluded to above, standard Conan cover material: Naked (or mostly naked) woman being rescued from a monster by a hero with weapons. Ingres might paint fewer muscles, but all the essential elements are there for a cover of Savage Sword of Conan (for example).

This led me to start thinking about Howard and Ariosto. Now, I’m not saying that Robert E. Howard ever read Ariosto (or Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato). I do wonder if maybe he read Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne, which is essentially a synopsis of Boiardo and Ariosto from what I can tell. Nonetheless, Ariosto and sword-and-sorcery fantasy are not as far as apart as you may guess.

Magic swords. Magicians from the East. Magical castles built by demons. Magic rings. Ghosts rising up from rivers. Various monsters.

There are men who fall in love with women so powerfully they will literally hunt them to the ends of the earth. There are men of nobility as well as villains amongst all races.

The cast of Orlando is essentially the same as in Conan, it’s just a different time period.

There are important differences between Howard and Ariosto, though. Howard is into what we would call the weird, etymologically speaking. The chilling, spooky, terrifying. There are dark and ancient evils hiding in the deserts of Howard’s imagination. Things without names. He also believes in the power of steel — it is not a magic sword that can save the day, but bravery and strong steel, even in the face of enchantment. His men are rough and violent, thieves, mercenaries, and the like. Conan is barely a hero, although he can rise to the heroic given the opportunity.

Ariosto’s world, a world of woods, castles, Saracens, and Christians, is different. The darkness is less heavy, and if enchantment is involved, you need enchantment to undo it. There is still nameless and faceless evil. But his men are cleaner and more civilised (if you will), living by a code of chivalry regardless of religion or ethnicity. They can also be straight-up wicked, despite their cleanliness and manners, mind you.

I’m sure that if I were reading Ariosto in Italian I would also find subtler differences than these. And if I read beyond Canto 4.

Most importantly for me right now, what they both have in common is that their stories are rip-roaring fun!