The part of the article that describes the new (old?) twist is all the way at the end:
The team found that the account differed from other versions of the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is “slightly toned-down,” Tether tells the Guardian.
She adds:
> In most manuscripts of the better known [version], Viviane casts a spell whereby three names are written on her groin that prevent Merlin from sleeping with her. In several manuscripts of the lesser-known version, these names are written on a ring instead. In our fragments, this is taken one step further: the names are written on a ring, but they also prevent anyone speaking to her. So the Bristol Merlin gets rid of unchaste connotations by removing reference to both Viviane’s groin and the idea of Merlin sleeping with her.
Merlin’s image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story, however, Campbell says he was a “morally dubious” magical seer or even a “creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil.”
there are plenty of folk-tale rewrites that cast "magic" people as morally dubious, creepy and yes, servants of the Devil.. who wrote those? any agenda detectable?
> In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts), recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop
from three cultural selective processes: a selection for intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics — but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and
feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions. Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or they serve some believers' agendas.
Of course, "creepy" is relative and contextual. The way we interpret the morality of the ancient Greek gods and other such beings is not necessarily the way their native cultures would have seen them. Zeus being a profligate shapeshifting rapist was not a big deal in a society where women were granted the same degree of consent as cattle.
The Norse (and especially Icelandic) sagas also demonstrate this pretty starkly, and are from a related tradition to the Arthurian legends. In those, people with magical powers very clearly tend to be portrayed as creepy weirdos--and also, for whatever reason, tend to be from the Hebrides.
That's syncretism - what happened almost every time Christianity began to take over a pagan culture. The former gods/spirits, etc. become recast as demonic or malevolent, and of course any "occult" practices (which were, formerly, simply religious practices) are viewed as Satanic practice and witchcraft. This is partly due to attempts by Christian authorities to de-legitimize the former religion, but also attempts to preserve the former culture and its religious practices in a new context.
Norse mythology is a particularly interesting example, because all we have of it is post-Christian retellings, and many parts of it (like Baldr's death and resurrection) seem an awful lot like Christianity with the serial numbers filed off.
Yes. It's a pro-manipulative-psychopath agenda. People with great social influence - priests, politicians/nobles, pillars of the community - by definition rely on soft power and social status. People with inherent power of their own - wizards, superheroes, or more mundanely scientists or hackers - are able to ignore or at least resist social power, and are consequently a threat. To the extent that that threat is seen as credible (and magic users were historically seen as credible), social power will be deployed to vilify and discredit them. (Of course, in practice a lot of it is just cultural inertia/established narrative tropes from previous cases.)
Do recall the context… The Arthurian legends are not a story with sole authorship, like the Lord of the Rings. These are stories twisted and told by many different people. Perhaps the modern analogy is Spider-Man. Within Marvel there are many different varieties, and then you add on the fan driven content…
For those deeply interested in different takes on Arthur, Steinbeck [0] took a stab at it too. This sent me down a long Arthurian rabbit hole.
They also mention Marvel comics in the article. Although, it seems a bit less concrete than that. These stories were written over the course of hundreds of years, and were often not really collaborating at all, right? Like, Lancelot's characterization can diverge pretty significantly depending on whether the author is English or French, haha...
Correct. Marvel has somebody in charge. A more apt parallel is fanfic... except that there isn't any "canon". It's all fanon.
In the Arthurian fanfic verse, a few authors get famous enough that they form a kind of accepted canon. You're likely to read Malory in school, because the faculty likes the Malory version.
Try telling your teacher that you disagree with their headcanon.
If you think there's trouble to be had when telling your professor that you disagree about what's canon for a mythos from 1000 years ago, you should not engage with believers on what's canon vs not about a story about a Jewish carpenter from, oh, about 2021 years ago. Definitely do NOT question if that story has somebody in charge.
Good grief. I had no idea that Steinbeck had written an Arthurian tale - and based on Malory, to boot. I am so looking forward to reading that. Thanks for the information.
This is really messing with my head now. We read Steinbeck at school - in the UK - and were in awe at the gravitas, use of English, literary genius. This is like finding out that Thomas Hardy also wrote manga, or something. I would so love to get my hands on Murder at Full Moon.
I've just searched out some news stories about this and, apparently, Steinbeck destroyed some manuscripts he'd written under the Peter Pym pseudonym, but not this one; apparently he had also tried to get it published.
Arrrgh! I so hope that this sees the light of day at some point - or, er, the light of the Moon.
It kinda doesn't feel like a Steinbeck book, really, but it's not a bad read, for what it is.
(someone DV'd my original post, at some point, and I'm not sure if this is why [maybe it was for some other reason entirely] but I intended my use of the term "propaganda" in a descriptive, neutral sense—that's what it is, and what it was intended to be)
Steinbeck's Arthurian tales was spurred on by his childhood in Salinas, California. As a child, he used to play as a knight and he made his little sister play his squire. He dedicated the book to her.
I am generally favorable to a lot of what Steinbeck did with his treatment, other than "vamping up" Morgan le Fey, which seemed a bit too dime store novel of a characterization to me.
Otherwise he does a great job getting into the psychology of the knight characters. The published version also includes a great number of his letters on his process, showing how Steinbeck himself was on a sort of spiritual grail quest in trying to get to an authentic version of the telling.
If you are into the Arthurian literature as it jumped from the medieval to the modern, this is a great book to add to your collection.
Last note: be forwarned that Steinbeck never really finished his book. He spent years doing the research, but never really wrapped the stories with a bow. Just appreciate the tales he does tell, and how he tells them. You already know how the story ends.
I wonder if that’s why it’s so difficult to look up specific stories. I vividly recall reading one in my childhood about a KotRT who sought out to challenge another who was supposed to be unbeatable during daylight, but insisted on waiting to challenge him at his best rather than his weakest. Always thought it was a great honor story and I can’t for the life of me find it.
Note that this "strength was greatest at noon" was also said to be true about Gawaine, and there is a version of a combat where after the noon hour his strength waxed and he was defeated.
"According to the Vulgate Mort Artu, Gawain had been baptised as an infant by a miracle-working holy man, also named Gawain, who named the boy after himself, and the following day announced that every day at noon, at the hour of the baptism, his power and strength will increase."
I think that's probably based on the story line about Lancelot wounding Gawain with Balin's sword. Somewhere in Morte d'Arthur, but I don't recall the "wait to be at his best" part.
It sounds like a Hollywood addition to the story, so maybe a movie?
I would suggest asking on reddit if you can't find it here. I've actually managed to find some things that I had been seeking for over a decade through places like reddit.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ might also be a good place to ask, story identification threads are common and often answered quickly if sufficient detail is given (or the asker is lucky).
The details I remember, the one he wanted to challenge was the Red Knight (I think) and the other detail of the story that I remember was whoever was going to challenge him initially didn't have any armor and kept collecting pieces from other knights that he defeated along the way.
I think it might have been Gawain now that you mention it. Pretty sure it started with a G so I kept thinking Gallahad.
Big shout out to the Morte d'Arthur. I read it last year and at first found it hard to get into. There's tons of repetitive tournaments and jousting... the Marvel analogy is not wrong, it's a bit like a comic book. But gradually the characters get into your head, and the final conflict between Lancelot and Arthur really hits hard.
This is one of my favorites. Merlin in this always cracks me up. Also the protagonists learned knowledge is fascinating to me. The guy goes and creates a bunch of stuff from scratch and knows all the bits that go into the things. I always wonder if my education had been lacking, just because of this story.
My sense is that there was a sweet spot in the late 18th to mid-20th century when modern(ish) things were still built by human hands, mostly using simple tools, so people could learn to build (and repair) those things for themselves. That accessibility was partly recreated in the 80's with the PC, but things have shrunk down and become hermetically sealed with fewer ports, switches and physical buttons. And memory density has increased to the point where even sophisticated users will never understand all the software running on their machine. Cars have become far more complex than their mid-20th century counterparts, to the point where few people even check or change oil.
Americans are born and bred these days to be administrators of some kind, where all physical and digital goods and services can be purchased on the virtual open market behind touch-sensitive glass. If that glass breaks, you call a (low status) worker to fix it; if something behind the glass breaks, you complain to a (slightly higher status) worker to fix it. You yourself don't do or make anything - you allocate funds and then, at most, measure progress and outcomes.
Such an admin does not make a usable character like that in Twain. In fact, neither would either of the two low status workers, since they only "make" at the tip of an enormous world-spanning supply chain. You'd need to be a machinist, metallurgist or chemist with an interest in low-tech methods. Pretty rare.
High goods prices relative to wages force you to learn to fix stuff if you want to, like, have things that work (or, at least, they encourage quite a few people to learn how to fix stuff, so they can do it for others, for pay).
High wages relative to goods prices means everything's disposable. I might try to repair a $300 toaster. I might pay someone else to repair a $600 toaster. I'm not going to try to repair a $20 toaster, and I'm sure as shit not gonna pay someone else to fix it. I'll just buy a new toaster.
[EDIT] incidentally, saying "there's too much waste of X" is, in most cases, nearly identical to saying "X is too cheap". See: food waste. "Why do we waste so much food?!" because it's so cheap relative to labor that it's not worth the effort to waste less of it.
That was an exercise in anti-Catholic bigotry on the part of Twain. "[I]t is to be considered a shameful period piece, written at a time when it was acceptable and even laudatory to be a Know-Nothing and make up slanders about the Catholic Church"[0]. It also exposes Twain's childish faith in democracy.
The author of that article who kept looking for reasons to be offended bluntly dismisses the Church's endorsement of slavery because it was standard practice at the time while also basically calling Twain a bigot because of his southern American-based view of Catholicism, which was also standard practice at the time.
You and the author both act both bigoted and ignorant towards Twain and call him childish in response to perceived bigotry. Twain was also not an atheist, he was a deist who attended church regularly. Someone can be of a religion and also criticize religion, it doesn't mean they're an atheist because as we all know, religions aren't perfect. But at least to the author's credit, he took a bit higher road than you and didn't go as far as calling Twain "childish".
yes, that's true, but it's a great story and today most people don't care about the various social satires in it. Just like Dante placed lots of his political and social opponents in Hell, but it goes over the heads of most readers, who in any case are more interested in the timeless qualities of the story than the bickering about long forgotten debates.
Okay... So former Arthurian publisher here. For folks who are semi-familiar with the canon of existing literature, what they found corresponds with the well-known "Story of Merlin" from the Lancelot-Vulgate Cycle. Like, we already have this story in print.
[Look up "Lancelot-Grail: 2. The Story of Merlin: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation (Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation"] and get yourself a modern English translated paperback version of this "lost" Arthurian story.]
There is nothing particularly new or unique here apart from the fact that this is a new copy of what we already know.
The article points out that if anything, this is a slightly Bowdlerized version of the already-extant story that took out the spicy parts about how the Lady of the Lake cast a spell on her lady bits to prevent the horn-dog Merlin from getting at them.
The team found that the account differed from other versions of the story in several key ways. A sexual encounter between Merlin and Viviane, also known as the Lady of the Lake, is “slightly toned-down,” Tether tells the Guardian.
She adds:
> In most manuscripts of the better known [version], Viviane casts a spell whereby three names are written on her groin that prevent Merlin from sleeping with her. In several manuscripts of the lesser-known version, these names are written on a ring instead. In our fragments, this is taken one step further: the names are written on a ring, but they also prevent anyone speaking to her. So the Bristol Merlin gets rid of unchaste connotations by removing reference to both Viviane’s groin and the idea of Merlin sleeping with her.
Merlin’s image has changed dramatically over the centuries. In more modern versions of the King Arthur legends, he is a wise advisor to the king. In the earliest iterations of the story, however, Campbell says he was a “morally dubious” magical seer or even a “creepy little boy [whose] father is a devil.”