The Green Knight and Inherited Narrative

I have a bit of a pet peeve with adaptations. You will almost never find me liking them, particularly ones that attempt to adapt Christian works. So yes, that means I think the LOTR movies are hot freaking garbage, not to mention the new Chronicles of Narnia. I find the points and ethos are completely missing, which is something I demand from an adaptation. How this ties into my roleplaying game Crescendo will be tangential, but important.

So recently I finished Tolkien's adaptation of The Green Knight, and I find myself scratching my head. Folks tell me this is a very difficult story to understand. It's really not. See, there's this funny little thing at the very beginning of the poem:

It is When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy,

and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes,

the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned

was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth—

it was Æneas the noble and his renowned kindred

who then laid under them lands, and lords became

of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.

When royal Romulus to Rome his road had taken,

in great pomp and pride he peopled it first,

and named it with his own name that yet now it bears;

Tirius went to Tuscany and towns founded,

Langaberde in Lombardy uplifted halls,

and far over the French flood Felix Brutus

on many a broad bank and brae Britain established

full fair,

where strange things, strife and sadness,

at whiles in the land did fare,

and each other grief and gladness

oft fast have followed there.

It is an acknowledged fact that pre-modern civilizations believed in a universal history. It is, to the best of my knowledge, a universal idea that we have no inkling of, and therefore scoff at. When folks of differing civilizations met up they compared gods to figure out if they were worshipping the same gods. Names and slight differences in portfolios did not perturb them one bit, as everyone acknowledged that the beings they were talking about were beyond them and if they could learn something new from each other they did. The greatest case that most moderns will accept? Rome's almost whole-sale co-opting of the Greek gods and hell, just Greek culture in general. But the one that we've been taught doesn't exist is Christianity's adoption of practically every mythological framework they've come acrost, assuming the state did not interfere with their efforts. 

Far from cutting out Greco-Roman and Norse mythology Christianity integrated it, forming a fusion. That was normal for the pre-modern world. 

"Nathan, where are you going with this?" You may ask.

Well, I'll tell you.

Turns out comic  book nerds were right: it's all the same story. Pre-moderns assumed their stories fit inside the mythological framework they'd already been given, contradictions and all. So the Green Knight is a sequel to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. It is not a stand-alone story, and was never assumed to be by the anonymous author. By spending two chapters/sections talking about Troy, the founding of Rome and Britain, the author is referencing a specific set of stories and themes.

Paris, with the help of Aphrodite, falls for and steals away Helen, who is then compelled to stay with Paris. The Achaens/Greeks gives chase. Noble Troy, who refuse to abandon their own no matter the consequences, refuse to abandon Paris. They pay for their loyalty with a ten year-long siege and the destruction of their city.

Odysseus, after being waylaid by a goddess for nine years, finally gets back home, only to find that that in his absence his home has been taken over. Helped by his son and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Odysseus finally gets rid of the suitors and gets to have sex with his wife Penelope again. It's an all-day affair. Everyone lives happily ever after.

I've not yet finished the Aeneid, but the Aeneas and Dido come to mind, with Eros forcing Dido to fall in love with Aeneas, the two of them getting married... and then Aeneas being told to leave. 'Cause destiny. 

Did we mention that the Greek gods suck? Do we need to?

So, that's the backdrop. And it gives a lot of  context. Gawain is tested in a matter similar to Paris. Trying to find the Green Chapel Gawain asks for the help of the Virgin Mary... and then immediately finds a castle, with a lord who claims that the Green Chapel is just two miles away! Take a load off! Rest!

Oh, BTWS, Morgan Le Fay is here. This is her castle, pretty much. And the lord is the Green Knight. And he sends his wife to tempt Sir Gawain. Without the backdrop of Homer and Virgil it's a toss-up as to why they're doing this. But with that backdrop? Man, it's obvious. They're trying to find a weakness in Camelot to overthrow it. Morgan Le Fay is attempting to recreate the tragedy of Troy; she's trying to turn Gawain into another Paris, Odysseus, and Aeneas. 

But Sir Gawain is prevented from falling to this trap by the Virgin Mary, explicitly. Rather than having a woman trying to drag him down, Sir Gawain is bolstered by the Blessed Mother, and he is able to pass the test that would have led to the destruction of Camelot.

But even then, divinely aided, Sir Gawain cannot bypass the fear of death. He can only go so far. But would that we all failed as splendidly as Sir Gawain! Would that was the only thing we really had to contend with! The world would be a far better place for it.  The context of Homer and Virgil changes the very meaning of the text.

And now we get to Crescendo. 

One of Crescendo's tenets has been to try and bring the principles from older, pre-modern storytelling into an RPG. Every time I've done a more mythological type game it has benefited me and my players. There's a wholesomeness, a vitality to using the mythological method that I've just not seen before. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight really cemented how much I still have to learn, not to mention how much still needs to be encoded into Crescendo.

One avenue I'm beginning to explore is the role of the GM. One of the things I have in the game already is that the GM sets up a myth that he then builds the culture of his setting into. I'd already intuited that I wanted that done, although I couldn't have told you why at the beginning. I've also always been leery of the idea that the GM is over the other players. I do like the idea of their being a locus point for the story, for someone to be director to the actors/writers that are the other players. But the GM is frequently not a player, but someone who is expected to manage the situation and the game itself.

So what if we recast the the GM into The Archivist, the one who takes the Heroic Player's Beliefs, Traits, and Impulses and contextualizes it? And, by contextualizing it, challenges the the Heroic Player? Like, at that point the Archivist would be the one to interpret the data that is the setting and set that interpretation before the other players. The Archivist does not know everything about the setting, only how to get answers about it. So I suppose at this point I'd be setting up the Archivist to be able to generate histories (and the tomes to find more information in), not to mention sub-mythologies and cultures, very quickly.

Because we're all in a larger story. And the Archivist shouldn't have to just pull things out whole-cloth.

And that's before we get into the question of whether or not there should be a metacurrency for the Archivist.

More as I have it.

The Iliad

 

This is one of the oldest books in the Western Canon. Most of us think we know it: Helen of Greece ran off with Paris of Troy, a war runs for ten years, and eventually the Trojan Horse happens and Troy falls in a rage of fire, pillage, and rape. All of this was because Paris had made the mistake of slighting Hera and Athena, who wanted their revenge against Paris. And apparently nobody thought to ask "Why the hell are we doing this?" Heck, for a lot of people it's a bit of chronological snobbery. "Look at those stupid ancients! Fighting a ten year war over a woman who clearly didn't want to stay with her husband!"

That. Is. Not. The Iliad. At all. 

The Iliad is not the ten year war. It is toward the end of the war. The humans are tired. They want to go home. A lot of people have died. And folks are just wanting it to be over. But the gods are not through. Hera and Athena are bound and determined to destroy Troy, to wreck that whole city to get back at Paris. The gods keep pushing and prodding the humans into greater and greater acts of violence.

And before you start scoffing at the stupid humans reacting to virtual gods.... go check Twitter. I mean, throw up in your mouth if you must, but go check Twitter. And then ask yourself how on earth some of those ragefests could possibly go on as they have?

"But Nathan," you may say. "That's humanity at its worst." And you're right, but that's not what Homer is showing. Homer shows something much worse. These heroes are doing what they're doing because they're at their best. Their virtues of loyalty, pride in country, courage in the face of  danger, are just as prone to being manipulated as their vices. And in so doing Homer makes a more chilling point: our virtues are actually easier to manipulate, because they are stronger. If someone can short-circuit your brain your virtues can keep you going on for a much longer time than your vices.

But even the idea that the gods' influence is inherently evil is... complicated. Because the ultimate "win" of the narrative, Achilles weeping with Priam, only comes about because Zeus tells Achilles to do so. Many of the moments of actual heroism and goodness that occur in The Iliad are because the gods intervened. So the whole "the gods are bad" is.... reductive. The gods are the gods. Whether you think they exist or not the group-think that they are shown to be doing in The Iliad is very real, and Homer's insight into how far and how long  it can be leveraged is nothing short of chilling.

The number one thing I did not expect is just the sheer anguish in The Iliad. People are killed brutally, explicitly, intimately, and cruelly. The pearl-clutching and "only focus on nice things" part of my brain (gotten from people who claim to want to preserver Western Civilization) spent over five hundred pages dying in the face of Homer's brutal onslaught. And Homer enjoys writing these deaths down, do not doubt it; there's a detail to the killings that speaks of obsession, of being unable to get it out of your head, and whether one likes to admit it or not that level of obsession is frequently pleasant.

But then Homer did something I didn't anticipate. He doesn't just kill people brutally; Homer give s a lot of them stories. And not just "Captain of the Guard" sorta stuff, but goes into sometimes long detail about where this particular corpse comes from. And how their family will miss them. And how nobody on the field of battle gives one solitary crap, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and now their tongue is on the other side of their head... along with all their brains. Most of The Iliad is about the ruination of family after family after family as fathers, sons, and husbands are brutally killed and looted. It actually gets numbing, how much death there is. 

And Homer doesn't skimp on the living, either. These are not simple characters, by any stretch. Even douche nozzles like Agamemnon have more than a few moments of sheer badassery and humanity.  I mean, you know someone has sympathy when they can find a good moment for Menelaus! The folks that are generally better human beings (like Odysseus) have more than a few moments of weakness, and everyone comes out... with a lot more nuance than I expected. This is easily one of the deepest and nuanced takes on characters I've ever read, especially considering just how large the core cast is, nevermind all the other stories Homer recounts!

That surprise is chronological snobbery on my part, by the way. I'll admit it, freely! It's so hard to look at the past with any amount of objectivity and appreciation in any day and age, but I can't help but feel the poison of our modern age in a particular way. Our demand for squeaky clean, moral characters, who gets over themselves and becomes more, all on their own, is not only not Western, but it's completely unChristian; all fall short of the glory of God. All. All. ALL. The ancients knew it. They embraced it.

Why don't we to this extent? Cause I guarantee you we don't. It's been mostly lost to us. George R.R. Martin plays at this level of sympathy, but even he comes up short. He's a lot closer to our canon than most people would like to imagine.

So why do conservatives try to sanitize our own heritage? Why do conservatives shy away from what made us great and insist on squeaky clean narratives where everything works out?? 

And call it conservatism? 

What, exactly, are conservatives trying to conserve?

And why do leftists not seem to understand they can't run away from it? No matter how hard they try?

Being Reclaimed by Mythology

I've got a bit of a confession to make: I've not read much mythology lately. I know, I know, I went on an 8 month rant about the benefits of mythology and how Star Wars was a modern mythological marvel, The Last Jedi especially. Yeah, kinda hypocritical of me. Yup. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've been doing as close to daily as possible my Scripture readings, which is an extremely similar process if you take into account St. Maximos' teachings on how Scripture is meant as a decoder for your life, but classical mythology? Nah, I've not. I got really burned out doing the Star Wars posts, and frankly every time I tried to put myself back into "The Story" I'd just be overwhelmed by my own darkness. But something happened that changed that.

A few months of EMDR therapy later (which is essentially becoming a part of the story you didn't want to acknowledge) and I found myself in a bookstore with my family. We were having a great time; the kids had been at the train table for a long time, the in-laws were happily browsing, and my wife had her hot chocolate. But we were getting hungry and needed to go home for food. Life was good.

I became conscious of an interior call, of some sort. I ignored it, at least at first. I mean, we were wrapping up to go, why now? But the pull persisted. It got so bad that I finally decided to heed... whatever the hell it was. Finally I decided to follow it. The call that came from my soul pulled me into the classics section. And from there to the mythology. And from there to Homer. And from Homer to the Iliad. I'd been down this road many times before, reading the first page and then putting the book down. Rolling my eyes, I picked it up, and opened it to the following words (more or less, as I was reading a different translation):

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another.

And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was the son of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent a pestilence upon the host to plague the people, because the son of Atreus had dishonoured Chryses his priest. Now Chryses had come to the ships of the Achaeans to free his daughter, and had brought with him a great ransom: moreover he bore in his hand the sceptre of Apollo wreathed with a suppliant's wreath and he besought the Achaeans, but most of all the two sons of Atreus, who were their chiefs.

"Sons of Atreus," he cried, "and all other Achaeans, may the gods who dwell in Olympus grant you to sack the city of Priam, and to reach your homes in safety; but free my daughter, and accept a ransom for her, in reverence to Apollo, son of Jove."

On this the rest of the Achaeans with one voice were for respecting the priest and taking the ransom that he offered; but not so Agamemnon, who spoke fiercely to him and sent him roughly away. "Old man," said he, "let me not find you tarrying about our ships, nor yet coming hereafter. Your sceptre of the god and your wreath shall profit you nothing. I will not free her. She shall grow old in my house at Argos far from her own home, busying herself with her loom and visiting my couch; so go, and do not provoke me or it shall be the worse for you."

 As I read this passage, which I've read over, and over, and over again, that call became a pit. The myth called upon my rage. It was a terrible thing to be asked for; it was decades old, and slowly fading as its underlying causes were being integrated. But here was the myth, asking for my rage, so that way I could do more than understand Achilles, so that way I could be Achilles. I did not fully understand what it was that I was doing, but I needed to do it. And, right there with my family minding their own business, I became Achilles.

Now, let me explain by what I mean by that. Cause that sounds crazy.

I don't mean that I had a hallucination. I was in a bookstore, the whole time. I could see that I was in a bookstore. I could hear everybody around me and was able to respond to them, albeit it took some concentration from me to respond. I just... inside of me something else was happening, and I felt that something distinctly different but just as important (if not more!) was going on, and it so happened that I felt like a completely different person, seeing the world as they did, feeling as they did, wanting what they wanted.

But I wouldn't say that I wasn't affected by what was going on, out in the physical world. My knees buckled, locked, and stayed that way. I swayed, however slightly. My family didn't notice. But I was no longer there. I was Achilles, killing and yelling. I had purpose. My anger drove me. But it was directed. It was not rage. I knew what I was. The anger had context. It meant something. And I wanted to stay there, I wanted to stay where my anger made sense. I wanted to stay Achilles.

I'm not sure when I stopped being Achilles, but at some point I returned. I know I wanted to go back, or better, bring that back to this world. But in order to do that I have to allow my anger and pain to make sense. Mythology may be practice to do that. It may be more than that. I don't know yet. But there's only one way to find out.