When they sound the battle cry, God protect him carefully

I will sing my heart a song, comforting myself alone
So though loss is deep and strong, I won't die here on my own

Cards and Card Games in Europe

Playing cards appear to have originated in China and migrated west via the Near East, but much of their noteworthy history is in Europe. (Cards in China have mostly developed into gaming tiles, the history of which will be the subject of another post sometime.) Beginning in the late 14th century, printed cards have been mass-produced cheaply and used in a large number of games, especially of the trick-taking type. (The form of a standard European deck of cards closely follows this particular function.)

Arthur's Unfaithful Servant

Every telling of the story of King Arthur makes mention of the Round Table and the assemblage of peerless knights who sat around it. Most famous among these, both to us today and to many who have told the tales in the past, is Sir Lancelot du Lac, whose affair with Queen Guinevere would ultimately be the downfall of the entire Round Table. Many readers will therefore be surprised to learn that, in his earliest incarnations, Lancelot was not associated with King Arthur at all.

The Big Bad Wolf

"The worst sort of wolves are hairy on the inside..." - Angela Carter, "The Company of Wolves"

Fairytales, as we know them today, hit their stride as a genre at the French court in the 17th century, coinciding roughly with the Maunder Miminum - a period within the Little Ice Age when sunspot activity pushed European temperatures to the coldest they have been in recorded history. As this is also an era when werewolves are often put on trial in France, and when German superstition holds that charms may be bought to repel wolf attacks, perhaps it is no surprise that one of the most famous and memorable folkloric villains to come out of the fairytale tradition is the Big Bad Wolf.

Gévaudan

The death of a wolf in the French countryside in 1767 put an end to a town's fear that it was a victim of witchcraft, of a lycanthropic sorcerer, or of the depredations of a demon come out of Hell itself. But the three years of vicious attacks which spawned these theories remain a source of speculation and fear to this day. It's also one of the few examples of cryptozoology in the most literal sense - an animal whose true nature remains hidden to scholars.

Werewolves of Early Modern Europe

As Marie de France tells us, a werewolf as traditionally understood is "a savage beast when the fury's on it" - and, if we follow the reading where his wife's powerful fear of angering him is a telling one, her werewolf meets this description as much in his untransformed state as in his transformed one. But part of the point of the folktales typed as AT449 (which includes both Marie's "Bisclavret" and the Arthurian tale of Melion, which it greatly resembles) is the fact that they present the werewolf as victim rather than as monster, whereas Marie's prologue makes it clear this is an unexpected reversal.

What did a medieval audience expect from a werewolf tale?

The Lai of Bisclavret

Since I'm making lais, Bisclavret
Is one I don't want to forget.
In Breton, "Bisclavret"'s the name;
"Garwolf" in Norman means the same.
Long ago you heard the tale told--
And it used to happen, in days of old--
Quite a few men became garwolves,
And set up housekeeping in the woods.
A garwolf is a savage beast,
While the fury's on it, at least:
Eats men, wreaks evil, does no good,
Living and roaming in the deep wood.
Now I'll leave this topic set.
I want to tell you about Bisclavret.

The Twelve Peers Prepare for Battle

When Rollant sees that now must be combat,
More fierce he's found than lion or leopard;
The Franks he calls, and Oliver commands:
"Now say no more, my friends, nor thou, comrade.
That Emperour, who left us Franks on guard,
A thousand score stout men he set apart,
And well he knows, not one will prove coward.
Man for his lord should suffer with good heart,
Of bitter cold and great heat bear the smart,
His blood let drain, and all his flesh be scarred.
Strike with thy lance, and I with Durendal,
With my good sword that was the King's reward.
So, if I die, who has it afterward
Noble vassal's he well may say it was."

Roland and the Death of Heroism

After failing to gain control of the Spanish city of Zaragoza, Charlemagne brought his troops back across the Pyrinees to France. As they crossed through the mountain pass at Roncesvalles, the rearguard was set upon by Basques (who likely mistook the army for an attack on their homeland), and many men died. Among them was Hruodland, prefect of the Breton marches.

This is history. These events are known to have happened. Hruodland died on the 15th of August, 778. The facts known to us from the early ninth century, as they appear in one of the first biographies of the emperor. Nothing else at all is known about Hruodland, and little about the battle in which he was killed (though Islamic sources preserve a great deal of information about why Charlemagne and his army were in Spain at that time in the first place). But the memory of the battle persisted oral lore, so that by the twelfth century it was an especially famous moment in the French national memory.

The Three Matters of Medieval Literature

There are three subjects within the sphere of European history with which every educated High Medieval European reader could be expected to be familiar, for they serve to provide much of the content for a wealth of literature in the period: Classical Antiquity, Arthur's Britain, and Charlemagne's France. In no case was the expected knowledge terribly accurate (in fact it's probable one of the the three matters is a complete fabrication), but it's likely the stories were widely taken as, if not strictly factual, at least rooted in true history. And, tellingly, many of the later literary works dealing with these subjects assume the reader's familiarity with the material. The skill of the Medieval author lies in presenting a story well, with novel details and artful presentation, even more than in telling tales wholly unfamiliar to the audience.

These three subjects were recognized as important literary genres by the poet Jean Bodel (1165-1210), but continue to be prominent in literature up through the Early Modern Period. For example, there is an abundance of material on each subject in the Romancero Viejo tradition, though an even greater selection deals with the history of Spain. In each case, themes prevalent in the literature of the time and space in which the work is produced are introduced into the depiction of the past; much as, today, Robin Hood stories remain popular but the newest presentations of the material have come to be very different in character from the oldest, early modern Spanish presentations of Carolingian material will fairly consistently be spun in such a way as to attach glory to Spanish identity while also often showing a certain battle-weariness, whereas a Middle English retelling of a Classical myth will introduce anachronistic themes of knighthood, chivalry, and courtly love. These stories retained their prominence not because their themes were timeless and universal, but, on the contrary, because they could adapt to present themes that were especially weighty in the minds of their tellers. It takes a talented writer indeed to tell an old story known to the entire audience, while giving it a renewed significance that grants it an impact beyond any it may have had for them previously.

Decentralized Popular Theology in Late Medieval Europe

It's a familiar story: a call to reform is nailed to the door of an important church, specifically objecting to the excesses of the medieval Catholic hierarchy, and it galvanizes a movement that opposes the Church's purported monopoly on salvation.

That specific sequence of events is most famous from Martin Luther's 95 Theses, but it's also precisely the story of an English document penned over a century earlier. Calls for a decentralized Christianity that embraces popular knowledge of theology rather than the governance of a single hierarchy that claims authority on all matters of religion were abundant even before the time when we now recognize the start of the Protestant Reformation.

Fairy Tales, Literary Canon, and Oral Tradition

One of the distinguishing characteristics of folklore is that it is passed from one person to another in toto, rather than by pointing somebody at a canonical form which can be referenced and which is preserved for all to see. But by this standard, some of the best-known and best-loved "traditional" tales today cannot be called folktales at all. I am referring to the fairy tales most familiar from the Brothers Grimm.

Dialogue XXII - Juan Luis Vives on ball games

Juan Luis Vives was a philosopher and humanist in the 16th century whose works include, among other things, a book of Latin dialogues intended as language practice. Sources like this are excellent for examining folk culture, because the dialogue participants are talking about things from everyday life rather than momentous historic occasions or highbrow literature. In dialogue XXII, the characters discuss the game of sphaericulum ("ball"), and how it's really the same game in France as it is in Valencia (an assertion belied by some of the contrasts mentioned). The game in question is recognizably part of the jeu de paume family.

My Latin is terrible, so what follows is mostly taken from modern Castilian Spanish translation. There's also an English translation from 1908, directly from the Latin.