Auchterarder, Perthshire, Scotland.  In a small, cottage at the back of Stirling Castle in Sterling, a twenty million pound project to recreate the complete set of the Unicorn Tapestries that once adorned the royal palaces in the castle is underway.  Those that are finished and already hanging capture the brilliance of the originals when they were first created.  Nothing, even imagination, prepares you for the immediacy of them.

Yesterday, Lynn, Robert and I went hawking.  A long afternoon walking rugged fields and some woods with two Goshawks and two master falconers yielded just two rabbits and a partridge.  But I learned and experienced more of the natural world and its order than I have in years.  Since, one important early chapter of my novel is concerned with medieval falconry based on literary sources and much less personal experience years ago, I must admit to not a little trepidation about how I'd feel about the book after.  The good news was that my imagination did good service.  There's very little I would change now.

That said,  I don't know that anyone has ever captured the immediacy and suspense of that experience.

Imagination is always a work in progress.

The Unnamed Knight

Mark Twain blamed Chivalry for the American Civil War.  He thought that southern gentlemanly values had its roots in Sir Walter Scott,

“But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner-- or Southron, according to Sir Walter`s starchier way of phrasing it-- would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.”

Really?  Were Ivanhoe, the Waverly novels and Sir Walter Scott’s fictive conception of Chivalry responsible the socio-economic structure of the south and the religious institutions that rationalized and supported it?

In any case, there can be no doubt that there’s a strong current of anti-chivalric sentiment in English and American letters from the mid-nineteen century onwards.  The lost generation found the sentiment particularly appealing.  The irony, of course, is that American letters, even Twain and later Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Mamet never eschewed chivalry they just portrayed it (unnamed but rightly) as something that can exist independent of class, caste, ethnicity or sex.  (That’s also not new, Thomas Malory portrayed Sir Palomides as an African after all.)  And even Huck Finn as well as Bayard Sartoris were guilty of behavior that can only be called chivalrous.

I bring this up in the context of the horrific murders of the two journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, at the hands of the of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State.”  The black ninja-dressed executioner was of British origin and apparently there are numerous benighted Americans among their ranks as well.  We wonder why.  Perhaps, partly, it is a grotesquely corrupted but natural urge to serve a greater good in the absence of any humane “chivalric” values that could serve to direct that will to power to more virtuous ends.

Picasso loved knights, the symbolism, the ironies, the allusions.

"Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. That is your oath.  Rise a knight."  - William Monahan ("Kingdom of Heaven")

As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields

One of my novels, “As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields,” is seeing the light of day.  I’ll let the words on the back cover speak for it.

"An uncertain sixteen year-old in black armor steels himself to lead the vanguard of his father’s army on a muddy battlefield.  It is a stormy day in August, 1346.  He is Edward Plantagenet, called “the Black Prince.”  The place is “The Valley of the Clerks,” near the town of Crecy, France. 

This is the story of his youth and adulthood as he tells it, from a childhood among lions in the Tower of London to his love for a woman whose life is as wild and exceptional as his own.  She is Joan, called “the Fair Maid of Kent,” renowned for her beauty.

At 26, after years of vast social and economic change and the desolation of the Black Death, Edward returns to France in another desperate gambit to save his father’s kingdom and discover who he truly is.  Before Henry V and Agincourt there was Edward and Crecy and Poitiers.  And Joan.”

If you’re reading this, hopefully you’re wondering whether you would be interested in reading the novel.  Maybe you’re wondering why I wrote it.

When I was fourteen and first starting to write a lot I wanted to write the kind of books I liked to read.  They were the books of adolescence, the books you live inside, the books for which you grieve when they end, sometimes to the point of tears.  And I devoured them.  I remember reading The Lord of the Rings over two rainy summer days mostly outside.  The snow-tipped mountains visible from our backyard never looked so green.

Later, in graduate school, I wondered if that was sentimentality.

Now, much later, I perceive that response as proportional and proper for anyone at that time and place in life.  The books were creating whom I aspired to be, who I was and who I am now.  They merit tears.  I never would have been able to love and live in War and Peace that first time through if it hadn’t been for reading J. R. R. Tolkien four years before.

What were the books?  I’ve already mentioned Tolkien, (who 41 years after his death amazed me with his translation of Beowulf beautifully assembled by his son Christopher.)  There was T. H. White who may been one of the first since Chaucer and Thomas Mallory to portray the medieval world as intimate, which it was.  There was Mary Renault, whose novels of ancient Greece, particularly the Theseus and Alexander novels, imagined and portrayed sexuality and gender with the breadth and nuance that had escaped even the more literal members of the lost generation.  Then there was Dumas, Hemingway, Faulkner and, surprisingly late at 18, Shakespeare, the greatest love of my literary life.

Quite simply I’ve tried to write a book I would have wanted to read then and would read now.

I have no illusions about belonging in that great company mentioned above but their influence is evident and might be a clue as to whether you’d want read my book.

It concerns the Hundred Years War, the same hundred years of devastation that inspired George R. R. Martin’s “Fire and Ice” fantasy books and the HBO “Game of Thrones” series.  That period of European history has its vast share of dramatic and fictional treatments, from Shakespeare to Bernard Cornwell.  But, to my knowledge there are few, if any, that attempt to imagine the personal experience of the Black Prince, which must have been amazing.

That's why I wrote it.  If you're interested in a review, you can find one on the Kirkus Reviews website:  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thomas-w-jensen/as-a-black-prince-on-bloody-fields/

The wicked cool cover was designed by Carolina Fiandri, CirceCorp Design.  You can purchase the paperback and the Kindle eBook directly from Amazon now.

Fencing Idea

My two favorite sports in the Olympics that just finished were fencing and archery. I fence and have for several years. What I know about archery I learned from Errol Flynn’s “Robin Hood:” I’ve never pulled a bow in my life. These Olympics were by far the best in memory simply because of the diversity of sports available to watch. It was also interesting to learn that watching the events as they were streamed was much more immediate and compelling than the occasional truncated and theatrically commentated versions that showed up on one of the television stations later.

The simple reason was that the streamed versions usually had less comment provided by more focused and knowledgeable commentators. I found the streamed events more dramatic, more involving and they made me want to watch more.

The disparity in coverage set me to wondering what would make fencing more interesting to a general audience, a topic of obvious interest to the sport’s national and international governing bodies, the USFA and the FIE. Here’s a thought. Perhaps fencing needs some events liberated from the conventional strip. Modern sport fencing evolved from dueling. But swords were used in many other contexts and situations. Epee is the most obvious candidate for such an extension because it isn’t encumbered with the complexity of right of way.

Still, developing such a sport , whatever it would be, would be far from trivial. Nevertheless, it’s worth some formal experimentation. And it will need a fanatical champion whatever it is. But, there’s precedent: consider the relatively new diversity of biking and skiing events.

1895

When I was in graduate school I developed a method for solving particularly difficult mathematical problems of the kind that sometimes took days. The strategy was to keep the problem “lightly” in mind all the time. By lightly I mean, focusing continually on the problem and the pertinent details and related deductions while avoiding obsessing about any particular strategy for solving it. The longer I’d go, the more difficult it would become to preserve the state of willed obsession and yet the solution would finally come, often emerging spontaneously, proving that sometimes the deepest reasoning the mind does is subconscious.

January felt like that. I’ve been thinking about how to restructure my fencing training and competition in order to become a better fencer. As part of another project I’ve been reading some archaeological research, in particular Stein et al’s “Revisiting Downtown Chaco” and George Pepper’s 1905 paper “Ceremonial Objects and Ornaments from Pueblo Bonito.” As an adolescent I imagined that science and knowledge developed linearly. Later, I learned that even in something as rigorous as mathematics, the development of knowledge is much more like the development of a theme in musical composition. Important knowledge is reasoned, or discovered, then lost and rediscovered sometimes simultaneously. In the light of Lekson’s revolutionary history of the ancient southwest it might be a good time to review Pepper’s work chronicling the finds of the Hyde/Putnam excavations. If Lynn were reading this over my shoulder she’d no doubt bring up “The Glass Bead Game,” and rightly, too.

In January I also had a bout with the flu as has she. The flu sucks. In “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” T.E. Lawrence describes how he developed his famous strategy for the Arab insurgency while suffering a severe illness. Unfortunately, I have to report that my own recent illness led to no such astonishing insights, at least that I’d recognize as such.

There was a compensation, however. We’ve just seen the BBC production “Sherlock Series 2,” the second installment of the modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. The first series of three feature length films was a perfect delight. And yet, the second series surpasses it. It was by far the best drama I’ve seen in the last year and notably puts to shame every American film we’ve seen since “Michael Clayton.” They are literate, witty and filled with original dramatic riffs built from modern technological culture.

They are also allusive. Dr. Watson’s blog happens to latch at 1895, which was also was the original Holmes’ annus mirabulis, the year of some of his greatest mysteries. I’m inclined to think that 2011, was Moffat and Gatiss’s 1895.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

So Christopher Hitchens is gone. He died in harness having just published feisty rebuttal to Nietzche aphorism that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Like a lot of people, I often found I disagreed with him, particularly during the early years of the Bush administration. But I consistently admired his will to reason and particularly the way in which he bravely followed the consequences of his reasoning. He was a journalist with a philosopher’s aspiration to truth and honesty which is rare these days, even among philosophers.
Vanity Fair and the Guardian each have a fine memoriam and Vanity Fair has a nice collection of his rejoinders on video.

The Tolkien Mystery

I’ve been a mostly consistent reader of the New Yorker for more than forty years, since I discovered it, very improbably, in an elementary school library. I’ve read the magazine during the long sunset of William Shawn’s editorship, through Gotlieb’s, through Tina Brown’s revolution and have been delighted by David Remnick’s elevation of the magazine even as he’s broadened it to have a strong web presence and character. I’ve grown particularly fond of several of the staff such as Steve Coll, George Packer and Adam Gopnik. Gopnik’s recent personal essay, in particular, relating his experience as an art historian learning to draw was both delightful and revelatory as only the best personal essays can be. Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself reading the magazine cover to cover most weeks.

All of which is pertinent because I found Gopnik’s most recent article “The Dragon’s Egg” about fantasy literature so deeply disappointing and provocative at the same time. The subtitle of the article is “High Fantasy for Young Adults,” which gives a lot away. It was as if I’d stepped back in time to the 1970’s when there existed, more or less, a coherent literary establishment which pronounced judgment on fantasy as not serious and suitable only for young adults. Gopnik’s more than reductive set of examples includes Paolini, Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer with nods to Terry Brooks J. K. Rowling and T. H. White. Gopnik admit’s to a sneaking admiration for the intensity of emotion of Meyer’s characters but at best damns the rather curious collection of authors with faint praise while making time to suggest that for the most part fantasy fiction has the same plot that Tolkien revived from the Nibelungenlied.

I don’t read that much fantasy but even in my limited experience that criticism rings particularly hollow and ironic especially when George R. R. Martin’s highly sexed and discordant series has entered popular cultural via a very successful HBO mini-series.

I wouldn’t take time to comment except that Gopnik’s piece is provocative in an entirely different way. Midway through he attempts to identify what makes Tolkien’s fiction compelling. He writes,

"This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy. It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”—big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied."

Now this is interesting. But it’s just a start, and the same start others have made, in trying to understand what makes Tolkien's fiction important, compelling and lasting. I recall a rather dismissive article the late John Gardner wrote in which he described rereading Tolkien and found so many reasons to dismiss it even as he himself was attempting to legitimize fantasy with his dark fictions such as Grendel. The truth is I’ve never read any criticism that provides anything like a comprehensive exegesis of the strength of Tolkien’s work. My sense is that that is still a mystery hidden in the plain sight of popular culture.