BOOKS Rambling romances Jeremy Harte
Mediaeval tales of adventures in wondrous places can all become a bit samey, says folklorist
Travels to the Otherworld and other Fantastic Realms
Mediaeval Journeys into the Beyond
Claude and Corinne Lecouteux, eds
Inner Traditions 2020
Hb, 232pp, £25, ISBN 9781620559420
Magnetic mountains, topless fairies, monster frogs of varied colours – what’s not to like in this collection of mediaeval adventure stories? Claude and Corinne Lecouteux have collected tales in languages from Greek to Czech about heroes who step off the edge of ordinary reality and pass through strange worlds. Some are actual journeys out of the map, others venture into an uncanny fairy realm, while the Irish knight Tundal lies motionless between life and death while his soul travels through the afterlife. Bit of a mixed bag, then.
The illustrations are derived from woodcuts and manuscripts over four centuries, and mingle strange worlds with familiar scenery (now equally strange to us). To describe what no one has ever seen gives free rein to the imagination. There’s a good reason why contemporary fantasy uses dragons, castles and other mediaeval props: the mediaevals were there already. Their heroes, whether taken from the classics, like King Alexander, or from German folk tradition like Duke Ernst and Marcolf the Fool, all wander through vast landscapes where mountains can be multiplied without contradiction. Everything foreign is wonderful, including death and what follows, described in the bright colours that must come naturally to a soul no longer clouded by base matter. Of course if you wanted your afterlife vision to be believed, it helped to describe the same heaven as everyone else; but the epic journeys are just as repetitive, even though they were only literature.
Their geography is unreliable. By the time we meet “King Filosofus, who ruled over England or Mesopotamia”, we realise that the authors didn’t give a damn, which is why King Solomon appears with a guard of Knights Templar. Even Dan Brown might have jibbed at that one, and at the splendid anachronisms of the illustrators who portray Tundale (died, temporarily, in 1049) with full 16th-century plate armour. It is possibility, not plausibility, that excites the authors. What now is real was once only imagined – diving-bells, artificial light, lands ruled by women. When Ernst and Count Wenzel arrive in the Land of the Crane-Men, they can tell they are in an enchanted otherworld because it has hot and cold running water. However far we travel, we still find ourselves on arrival. When the Italian knight Guerin ventures into the forbidding caverns of the fairy Alcina, their dialogue reflects the difference between reallife men and women. King Alexander travels to the end of inhabited space to find talking trees that will tell him about the end of time – his own time, for even kings must die. At its most credible, fantasy draws on the strangeness hidden in our own lives and makes it live with unexpected details – but alas, the stories gathered by the Lecouteux duo seldom reach this level. Their wonders are threadbare and rely on easy tricks. Penny-a-line romancers tended to assume that nothing was interesting unless it was studded with gems, made out of unicorn parts or given to supernatural movement.
The strength of this wideranging anthology lies in the unfamiliarity of the texts it gathers, but that is also its weakness: they’re unfamiliar because they aren’t very good. Claude Lecouteux knows the byways of mediaeval literature, but many of these discoveries would have been more interesting as raw material for one of his pathbreaking surveys of the supernatural. If the traveller has no character, then eventually the repetition of “and in another island” will get tiresome. Marcolf is a master of disguise, which in the hands of a more talented author could have commented on the superficiality of a society in which clothes infallibly make the man. As it is, the trick is just used again and again in the absence of any idea of plotting. It’s not as if mediaeval people couldn’t construct a well-planned story. Chaucer knew how to, and so did the old women telling folktales by the fireside. Travels to the Otherworld is rounded off by a couple of 15th-century anecdotes, one a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, and both are well-paced and amusingly told. It’s the romances which ramble.
In the 16th century, when mediaeval Europe discovered the world, people took their bearings from these travel stories. Pity, then, that they are so uncomprehendingly brutal in their treatment of the Other. Alexander slaughters his guides every time something goes wrong – can’t trust these foreigners! Young Bruncvík, hero of a Czech romance, has been welcomed by King Olibrius, who though a monster makes a fuss of him and marries him to the monster princess, but after a while it gets kind of boring, so the hero has a bright idea and makes his escape by decapitating them all. It’s all right because “these folk are heathens”, as Ernst says after having massacred the crane-men with his superior technology. Even fantasy has consequences, especially for other people. ★★★