Papyrus and popes

Papyrus was considered the only proper writing material in late antiquity in the Mediterranean basin.  It was made from papyrus reeds, especially as grown along the Nile.  The reeds would be slit (they're sticky on the inside), spread out, and pressed together into several different layers.  When dried, they made a good writing surface.  Although parchment (made from animal skin) was known, it was considered inferior.  Saint Augustine apologized in one letter for writing on parchment, because he'd run out of papyrus.  I'm not trying to insult you or anything! (not his exact words, but his meaning).

The difficulty with papyrus is that it has to be kept dry.  If it gets damp, it can disintegrate back into pieces of reed.  This is a problem once you get into Europe's damper climate.  The other problem is access to the papyrus reeds themselves, as of course they won't grow in most of Europe.

The popes of late antiquity/the early Middle Ages wrote on papyrus (see more here on early medieval popes).  They really only became the heads of western Christendom in the sixth century, at least in their own minds (almost no one in Europe would have been able to tell you who was pope at any given time), and they got in a couple of crates of papyrus, to have plenty of writing material on hand.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, their access to Egypt and papyrus reeds was cut off, so it was a good thing they had stockpiled.

Over the next four centuries, through all sorts of upheavals, the Lateran palace in Rome maintained their papyrus stockpile.  There must have been a special room where it could be kept warm and dry, although we have no details.  Slowly they worked through it, writing letters to kings, to bishops, to monasteries.

The problem was that the people they wrote to didn't have nearly as good conditions for storing papyrus.  Charlemagne's grandfather, in the early eighth century, had a special volume drawn up, copying every missive the family had had from the pope copied onto parchment.  Most of the documents were less than fifty years old, but they were already disintegrating.  Bishops and monasteries too felt the need to copy their precious papal documents onto something more permanent than papyrus.

Very few early medieval papyrus documents survive.  We do know that through the seventh century most towns in the old Roman empire had municipal archives, where important documents were stored, but these all disappeared, and probably the fragility of papyrus had a lot to do with it.  A few monasteries managed to keep a handful of papyrus documents, such as Saint-Denis, which scraped off the ink, turned the papyrus over, and forged new and better papal confirmations on the back.  By the eighth century most of Europe switched to parchment.

But not the popes!  They hoarded their papyrus until it finally gave out in the eleventh century.  During this time they also continued to write their documents in what is known as late Roman cursive, big flowing and looping letters that must have been increasingly hard to read by anyone north of Italy.  The rest of Europe switched after the eighth century to what is known as Caroline miniscule, which looks a whole lot like modern printing, for the excellent reason that modern printing is derived from it.  What's this? many a bishop must have thought, getting a piece of papyrus with almost indecipherable writing on it from the pope.

German popes in the mid-eleventh century brought the papacy into European relevance with parchment and Caroline miniscule as well as assertions of being the top of the church hierarchy, but that's another story.  (And of course "papal infallibility" was first proclaimed in the nineteenth century.)

Our modern word paper is derived from the word papyrus.  First Arabs in the thirteenth century and then most of Europe in the fourteenth century figured out that paper, made from cotton, worked a whole lot better than papyrus reeds.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the medieval church and medieval literacy, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Invention of Tradition

 "Invention of tradition" is a great term.  It was originally coined by Eric Hobsbawm, to mean a conscious effort to create a vision of the past that will support whatever you are doing (or want to do) in the present.  "We have always done this," or "These are our traditional values" has enormous weight.  If one isn't quite sure what one has always done, or what one's traditional values might be, a little historical research should do the trick, especially if one has a pretty good idea of what is intended to be found.

Hobsbawm focused primarily on Great Britain, where he noted that the people of Scotland in particular pulled together all sorts of elements to identify Scottish identity during the nineteenth century.  For example, the idea that each clan had a distinctive tartan, and that people with certain last names might belong to a clan with a different name and still be entitled to wear its tartan, is no more than 200 years old, even though it was presented as medieval (and surely connected to Robert the Bruce).  The careful identification of the colors and patterns of each distinctive tartan and their assignment to certain groups was in fact a nineteenth-century project.

A Scotland identified by kilts and bagpipes was also a Scotland of sturdy folks, full of heroism and wholesome country values.  Something similar happened in Switzerland.  In the nineteenth century a country that had been seen as made up of rather backward, dirty and uneducated mountain folks, living snuggled up to their cows, set out to reinvent itself.  In the late Middle Ages, Switzerland had fought to free itself from rule by Austria.  William Tell was one of the legendary war leaders.  William Tell became in the nineteenth century a great national hero, standing strong against Austrian tyranny, worthy of having an opera written about him (older people today still think of that opera's overture as "Lone Ranger" music).  The "shoot an apple off someone's head" story if a bawdlerized version of the legend.

Besides William Tell, the other great hero of nineteenth-century Swiss reinvention was Heidi.  I loved the book Heidi as a child and must have read it a dozen times or more.  I cried when I realized that in the book Heidi had curly black hair, which I do not have (in movie versions she's always blonde).  Little did I realize that the idealized world of life in the Alps that the book portrayed was intended to combat the image of dirty Swiss who were almost cows (or goats) themselves.  Heidi thrives under the care of her goat-keeping and loving grandfather, goes to school to get a good education, and, as her greatest triumph, heals a sickly Austrian girl by bringing her to the pure air and food of the Alps.  (Take that, imperial Austria!)

Switzerland completed its transformation from dirty backwater to highpoint of wholesome country values during the twentieth century, especially with the spread of downhill skiing.  Sure, other countries have mountains, even Alps, but the Swiss led the way with resorts, ski lifts, and the like.  Swiss hotels are aggressively clean, even the simplest.  As a Portuguese restaurant keeper, living and working in Switzerland, once told me, if anyone ever suspected his food was not the purest and freshest, it would be, at once, back to Portugal.

The Middle Ages is often chosen as the source of the tradition that someone wants to invent.  For example, modern white nationalists have seized upon a very poorly understood vision of Anglo-Saxon England as the basis of what they want to do, as I have discussed earlier.  The Middle Ages is a popular choice to base origin myths because it is when Europe's countries first took on something like the borders and languages they have today, and (I fear) because, especially in the US, it is so little studied.

"There were three orders of society! The church told everybody what to think and believe! Kings were absolute! Women had no rights! Everyone lived under feudalism!" This is about what even well educated people may tell you about the Middle Ages (clearly not the people who've been reading this blog, if you still think so, go back and read it again).  "Since we know almost nothing about those thousand years, it can mean whatever we want!"

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on society during the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Kinds of Fantasy

 In the late 1960s - early '70s, fantasy became its own genre.  Now the word "fantasy" had been around for a long time, meaning something not just unusual but unlikely, as in, "I wanted to train my cat to fetch, roll over, and shake hands, but what a fantasy!" or "I have this fantasy of dozens of beautiful young women competing for my attention."  But the genre of fantasy is something different.

At its most basic it is stories with magic, larger-than-life people having wondrous adventures, often imbued with the supernatural.  Some of the oldest stories we have could be called fantasy, starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh and large chunks of the Old Testament.  The modern version is most commonly what one might call medieval-adjacent, being set in something that could remind the reader of medieval society.  This is because it is heavily influenced by medieval myths and legends (like King Arthur or the tales of the gods in Norse mythology) and by the fairy tales that carry on many old legends in a simplified, sanitized way, but keep such medieval aspects as castles and knights and kings.

Medieval fantasy is so influential because of J.R.R. Tolkien, himself a medieval scholar, whose Lord of the Rings launched fantasy as a genre (first published in the UK in the 1950s, only taking off in the US a dozen years later, with the release of a copyright-defying edition).  When the books first came out, people didn't know what to make of them.  A very positive review called them"super science fiction."  Other reviewers called them "fairy tales for grownups."  (Wait, so myths got watered down into fairy tales, and now you're saying that they got watered back up? or something?)

Tolkien wrote what is now called "high" fantasy, a story set in a thoroughly imagined alternate world (although it may bear many resemblances to ours), with a variety of magical creatures (or at least non-human sentients), including (in his case), hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, and dragons.  This remains the most common sort of fantasy, usually provided with a map and a plot involving a brave, mis-matched band of companions off to save the world from evil.

There was no organized religion at all in Lord of the Rings, but there were hints of great gods off in the distance, made more explicit in Tolkien's Silmarillion.  When there are gods (or at least immortal beings) galloping across the landscape as well as the elves and dragons, one often sees the term "epic" fantasy.  The term epic can also be used for any fantasy that covers wide stretches of territory, lots of characters, and a "save the planet" plot.  George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and its sequels are always called epic, even without gods (he does have organized religion, however).

Then there's "low" fantasy, which has magic but less of it, and all the sentient beings are regular humans.  This designation sounds somewhat derogatory.  I remember being quite irritated the first time I saw Count Scar, which I wrote with Robert Bouchard, called "low" fantasy.

Count Scar could also be called "historical" fantasy, in that it is set in what is basically southern France in the thirteenth century, complete with medieval Christianity, although with the addition of magic.  The advantage of historical fantasy as a story-telling medium over historical fiction is that no one is going to get honked off if anachronisms creep in.  (I'm a medievalist.  There are extremely few anachronisms in Scar.  Maybe the forks.)

In recent years fantasy has picked up lots of new varieties.  "Science fantasy" is a real sub-genre, which combines fantasy with science fiction, even though both fantasy authors and SF authors dislike the term.  It has major elements of science fiction, like space ships, alien beings from other planets, hyper-modern technology, and a setting in a future version of our universe, but it also includes magic and/or supernatural beings.  Dune is really science fantasy, although the sub-genre didn't exist when it was first published.  In the SF community, faster-than-light travel is designated as NOT fantasy (because SF would be a lot less interesting if we only bopped around our own galaxy and its uninhabited planets), but other than that science fiction suggests semi-plausibly that one could get there from here.

Another version is "humorous" fantasy, where the author tries to have well developed characters and an actual plot, but there are chuckles on almost every page, as the author mocks many of the conventions of fantasy.  Terry Pratchett was the master of humorous fantasy.  My first published novel, A Bad Spell in Yurt, got panned by some readers as not being funny enough, whereas others felt, What's all this humor doing in a book that also mentions the redemption of souls?  (Fortunately a whole lot of people liked it anyway.)

Maybe Bad Spell is closer to what is termed "cozy" fantasy, where you can have magical beings and fully-realized imagined worlds, but you do not have to have the fate of the planet resting on whether our brave band of adventurers do or do not manage to overcome the Dark Lord.  Cozy fantasy is often recommended for tweens and early teen readers, even if the protagonists are not teenagers themselves (my wizard hero, seen above, is 29).

Then there is "urban" fantasy, set in something like our current world, but with vampires, werewolves, and the like hiding at the edges.  The Twilight series really catapulted urban fantasy into prominence.  Is Harry Potter urban fantasy?  Not really, because urban fantasy tends to be quite dark.

Rather, Harry Potter is YA ("young adult") fantasy, which can take on aspects of all different sorts of fantasy, but is consistent in having young protagonists having to take charge because the adults for some reason have failed (or been killed off or just don't understand).  In the process our young protagonists mature and learn about themselves.  Sometimes they have sex, though that is not required.  The teen years with magic, swords, and capes!  Less school cafeteria, more castles.  Let's do it.

YA fantasy is often set in what I call "fairy tale land," where you've got your princesses and castles and maybe fairy godmothers and witches, but there's little effort to create a whole, consistent world, and the princesses behave pretty much like modern teenage girls.  If they find themselves in a patriarchal, class-based society, they struggle against it.

So what does all this mean?  It means that fantasy is a rich, diverse genre.  If someone says they "don't like fantasy," maybe they just haven't read the right sort (I think I've written most of these versions and know I've read all of them).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024