In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, England is jointly liberated by the heathen dead and by Arthur's knights.
In both narratives, the older tradition is not cast out but acknowledged and incorporated, as it should be. We in this generation inherit every tradition. We can buy their translated texts in any good bookshop.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we also see the deceased monks of Glastonbury Abbey processing from the ruined chapel on the Tor, singing the "Dies Irae." The spiritual arm acting in concert with the Arthurian secular arm.
Ad astra! Sean
Tho' we have a difference sense of the past and our relation to it than our ancestors did.
The modern sense of change through time is post-Renaissance. Note that when medieval people depicted Julius Caesar or Judah the Maccabee, they showed them as knights in contemporary dress.
Medieval people had a sense of the Incarnation dividing history, and thought that it had an end (Judgment), but apart from that they thought of it as a sort of timeless present, with political fluctuations but no fundamental changes.
They weren't -entirely- wrong; as someone once said, before the Roman Empire Europe was a continent of peasants in thatched huts and ox-drawn plows, during the Roman Empire it was a continent of peasants in thatched huts and ox-drawn plows, and after the fall of the Roman Empire it was a continent of peasants in thatched huts and ox-drawn plows.
It's with the Renaissance that art shows a consciousness that people in the past were -not- just like people in the present.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I mostly agree. And I think the first stirrings of an awareness of change thru time can be traced back to the 13th century, because of the many geniuses and technological innovations happening in that period. Things like the invention of mechanical clocks and the horse collar comes to mind.
Ad astra! Sean
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