February book photo challenge, day 25: I love this book.Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur.
I love this book as text and object. It was the first medieval text I discovered, and I spent my pre-teen years puzzling over it, memorizing it, enthralled by it. My father let me take the book itself when I moved into my own apartment.
Your point about how strange it was that Dragons were roaming around 170 years back from the books is interesting. It got me thinking that these histories really illustrate just how quickly and drastically things change. I mean 170 years ago slavery was being practiced in America. It's fantastic that Martin was able to build depth to the past that's just different enough but still feels like it's in the same universe.
That’s an excellent point, and one that’s obscured somewhat by the unnatural cultural/technological continuity present in the world of the novels. Family names have survived, allegedly, for thousands of years! And there’s no real advancement of technology, warfare, weaponry…there’s some tweaking at the margins, but that’s about it. I’ve seen it argued that magical circumstances like the Doom and the long winters may have a leavening effect on progress, and that makes some sense, but it’s not really enough to explain the stasis. The authorial hand, however, does the trick nicely. But yes, that aside, it’s fascinating to contemplate the genuinely major changes to the world that take place nonetheless. The Doom, the Conquest, the extinction of the dragons…these are big things that happened, basically, during a timespan equivalent to colonial America. Things that seem to have lasted forever or happened forever ago didn’t and didn’t.
My personal take on this is that the time scales and indeed the facts of the alleged "histories" are not reliable. While the claim may be made that there was a Stark King in the North for thousands of years before Aegon's conquest, the level of scholarly rigor is questionable. Could that simply mean that there had been Stark kings since before anyone remembered, and the "histories" fade back into legend? If that's the case there may not have been such a stasis, its just that there are no reliable histories of what times were like millenia before. So of course people assume it was like their present day. This is similar to the anachronistic way that 13th century writers wrote about King Arthur. They wrote as if a 5th century British war leader ruled over a country with the political organization and military technology of a 13th century Norman King. Thus they wrote of knights in plate armor with lances and jousting and such, which never happened in the time period they were writing about. Similarly, I think GRRM is creating a flawed internal history that reflects the limited ability of the people in 300AC to understand exact dates and cultural complexity of earlier times.
Has anyone entertained the idea that the Clegane family name was inspired by the medieval Aurthurian romance of Cligès by Chrétien de Troyes?
Cligès was (possibly) written as a response/critique/parody of Tristan and Isolde, and was a complete paragon of chivalry, unlike the romanticized adultery of Tristan. Could it be that the Cleganes are a similar response/critique/deconstruction of chivalry itself? Here are my thoughts on the matter.
