Once Upon a Time

I'm beginning to notice an interesting trend in this epic recipe: temporal distance. Epics are always "back then," aren't they? I bit my lip at the first lines of Spenser's The Faerie Queene with the realization that we must really be getting into the old stuff, only to realize upon further consideration that Edmund Spenser was a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. All those "welnigh"s and "yclad"s are no more than a bunch of dramatic effect.

Dr. Staub mentioned earlier this week that Spenser used this ridiculous archaic language to evoke images of an earlier age, of knights and jousts and chivalry. That much makes sense to me. My question is, why would he want to?

Of course Spenser is not a unique case. Milton chose to write his epic about the beginnings of man; and while modern epics do not even presume to situate themselves in this world, Tolkien's Middle Earth bears closer resemblance to a medieval society than to his own. We are apparently unable to fathom such depth or grandeur within our limited frame of reference. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser commented not only on such weighty concepts as good and evil, but on the reign of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth; yet even that modern topic he found the need to mask in legends of bygone days. The current reality simply wasn't glorious enough. It never is.

Actually, I first started thinking about these things while researching Early Modern fairy belief for my presentation. According to one of my sources, fairy belief to the educated has always been a thing of the past. It is difficult to pinpoint the lore of a specific time because those who recorded the lore at that time would have called it the remnant of an earlier time. Few can admit to, or even recognize, any personal experience with the supernatural. But that doesn't mean we are ready to give it up.

So I wonder, do we perhaps distance it in order to make it more believable? Of course we do not believe in fairies. Maybe not even angels or demons. Not now, anyway. We know better. But a supernatural story holds no power over us unless there is a trace of truth to it, a faint smidgen of possibility, and fiction is not the same thing as a lie. By relegating the supernatural to an earlier age, "it cannot happen" becomes "it could have happened." It is our method of tricking our disillusionment.

And it works. Why? Because the past itself travels through stories - whether those stories are the pages of a journal or chipped pieces of pottery - and stories are tricksy things to begin with. William Shakespeare was a real historical figure, but I have not seen or heard or felt him, and for all I know he may be an elaborate fraud invented a couple hundred years ago to confound my generation (already we suspect half the plays attributed to him). The past is half unreal as it is, and it is not so large a leap from the actual Shakespeare to the possible Arthur to the impossible fairy queen.

The blissfully ignorant need no such schemes. They may really believe that fairies steal their children or that serpent women hide in caves in uncharted woods, and this fulfills their need for "other." Those of us who know better (most of us nowadays) may grow out of fairy tales, but we cannot grow out of the need for them. So we stick them into the olden days where maybe, just maybe, men really are knights who really are brave and chivalrous, and ladies really are pure and beautiful, and battles are glorious and royal fairies come traipsing into one's life every so often to ensure it has a Purpose. Can't disprove it, right? And we're desperate.

(This whole blog is a tangent, unfortunately. I hope that counts.)