on history and legend

[bedlamsbard]

I'm currently reading Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800, and by reading, I mean I started it today and am on page 12, but the first twelve pages have been really good.

Me being me, it makes me think of Narnia.

The world of this Charlemagne is flooded with chivalry and perpetual miracles. It is also sheer fantasy, a romanticized medieval kingdom with the sharp edges filed down and painted with dainty fleurs-de-lys.

In reality, eight-century Europe was a vast and dhsowy forest. The stone-and-timber fortresses that supported civilizations had not yet given way to storybook castles, and the trappings of chivalry were still centuries away. Karl was only beginning to build the places where his descendants would pass their winters, reimagine Europe, and tell themselves preposterous tales about their own past.

[...]

To history, Karl's high point was his coronation as emperor, when he unknowingly set Europe on a bold new path. Artists envisioned it, Napoleon admired it, and Adolf Hitler sought to emulate it, as did the architects of the European Union. In the meantime, the real Karl the Great was buried beneath his own reputation, remembered in legend, forgotten in fact.

After Karl's death, Fortune's wheel spun, and the churches and towns of eight-century Europe passed away, sometimes wasted by war, at other times expanded, rebuilt, or re-adorned depending on the whims of each new age. The relics of Karl's era are sadly sparse: a few buildings; some coins, cups, and artwork; and a fair number of archaeological sites -- but also, most usefully, a library of several thousand books. Most of these volumes are copies of older works, cultural treasures that would have been lost if not for the diligence of Karl's monks. These manuscripts preserve the memories of those who made them in the poems, chronicles, and letters that help to tell Karl's story.

Today, the people of Karl's era are remote and ghostly figures. To discover their world in letters and lyrics is to glimpse a vast universe thorugh a half-open door; the view is frustrating and incomplete. Karl and his contemporaries left few truly personal writings, the places they knew are gone, and accurate portraits of them are virtually nonexistent. Time swept away most traces of their lives.

But across a gulf of 1,200 years, they clamor to be heard.

- Sypeck, Jeff. Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.

I also just finished rereading (for, oh, the umpteenth time; I've had these books since I was in fourth or fifth grade and I reread them a couple times a year) Dragonfly in Amber. For those that don't know, Dragonfly in Amber is the second book in the Outlander series, about a time-traveling English doctor from the 1940s (and later, the 1960s) who falls in love with a Scottish Jacobite. Here, she's talking to a modern historian in 1968 about her experiences with the 1945 Jacobite Rising.

"But do you know what's really funny? That poor, silly sot and his greedy, stupid helpers; and the foolish, honorable men who couldn't bring themselves to turn back...they had the one tiny virtue among them; they believed. And the odd thing is, that that's all that's endured of them -- all the silliness, the incompetence, the cowardice and drunken vainglory; that's all gone. All that's left now of Charles Stuart and his men is the glory that they sought for and never found.

"Perhaps Raymond was right," she added in a softer tone; "it's only the essence of a thing that counts. When time strips everything else away, it's only the hardness of the bone that's left."

"I suppose you must feel some bitterness against the historians," Roger ventured. "All the writers who got it wrong -- made him out a hero. I mean, you can't go anywhere in the Highlands without seeing the Bonnie Prince on toffee tins and souvenir tourist mugs."

[...]

"Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind -- for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper."

[...]

"No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. "The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king."

"Are they all liars, then?" Roger asked. [...]

"Liars?" she asked, "or sorcerors? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and reclothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges a fabulous monster?"

It's not a new thing, this knowledge that history is flawed and broken and dangerous, untrue. While it's not a common theme in fiction, it's not particularly rare, either. It makes its way into modern history books, because the more we learn, the more we learn we don't know and can't learn. But it fascinates me, and I thought y'all might be interested in seeing some of what I run across.

What's lost? What's found? What's truth, and what's a pretty lie? Who knows, really?

In conclusion, now I want to write Golden Age history from the Telmarine POV. Unfortunately, I have to do homework.

Comments

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

Okay, the Peter/Edmund's up.

Narnia has to exist with a balance -- the dark and the light, the good and the not so good, etc. Probably the same reason why the wedding ritual is a life -- and a death. (Or, well, the potential for life. Sex and all that.)

Unless they get Peter before the wedding ritual. Because until then he's not linked to Edmund, and his link with Narnia is more or less one way; she can't act without the full ritual. And if they want him young -- and before he gets really scary -- well, then, that would be the time to do it, when Aslan's vanished and Peter's working himself to a bone trying to do a million different things all at once. They've got two or three years.

And on the other hand, I think if they knocked Peter out, they'd gain at least a little time. If Narnia's seeing through Peter's eyes, then he has to be awake for that. (Also, I've already set up stuff that happens to Peter while he's in Narnia, so. *shrugs* Like the time he got kidnapped, and then the other time he got kidnapped. And the ten million assassination attempts.)

Poor Edmund. The dark Narnians and the bright Narnians after him...