Monday, 14 August 2017

Knights Templar

Poul Anderson contributed a Time Patrol story to an anthology of original stories about the Knights Templar whereas Stieg Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist wrote a book about financial journalism called The Knights Templar.

Thus:

on Earth Real, Tales Of The Knights Templar, the Time Patrol series and Larsson's Millennium Trilogy exist as works of fiction;

on Earth Millennium, Tales... and the Time Patrol exist as fiction and Blomkvist's The Knights Templar exists as non-fiction;

on Earth Time Patrol, Tales Of The Knights Templar, maybe with a non-Time Patrol story by Anderson, and the Millennium Trilogy exist as fiction.

Relationships between parallel Earths are not always straightforward.

"'Besides war, [the Templars] went in for banking, and ended up mainly doing that. The outfit got hog-rich.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Death And The Knight" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 741-765 AT p. 748.

So maybe The Knights Templar is an appropriate title for a book about financial journalism?

5 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And one thing to keep in mind about how the Knights Templar are treated in ROGUE SWORD and the much later "Death And The Knight" is that the former is much more negative about the Templars than the latter story. Apparently, further research about the Templars convinced Anderson that despite having their share of human faults and foolishness, they were not quite as bad as he had thought at the time ROGUE SWORD was written.

But we see a lot more about the Knights Hospitallers in ROGUE SWORD, and in mostly a sympahetic, even admiring way. I would like to have seen another story by Anderson, not necessarily any kind of sequel to ROGUE SWORD, about the Hospitallers. And that order still exists, btw!

And I even found a CONNECTION tying ROGUE SWORD with THE HIGH CRUSADE! And wrote a note discussing that unexpected connection.

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

The Hospitallers had a much better reputation in the period; the Templars were always regarded as greedy and arrogant.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

I TRY to have no illusions about our fallen, corrupt, imperfect human nature, but I have wondered if the Templars were AS bad as their enemies claimed them to be. Yes, in Anderson's ROGUE SWORD the Templars were described as you said, greedy and arrogant.

All the same, the Templars were fellow Catholics of mine, so I hope some of them were good and devout men.

Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Well, their enemies claimed they were evil sorcerers who worshipped devils, and I'm pretty sure they weren't. Also, the knightly Orders existed over long periods of time, so they wouldn't be consistently one thing or another.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

Exactly! I would expect the Templars enemies to tell lies about them or at least put the most damaging possible interpretation on stories about them. And, yes, the quality of the men in the Templars and Hospitallers would vary over different periods of time.

Sean