The Holy Grail,
another text centered in King Arthur’s Court and which sprouted from
Chretien’s Perceval,
is littered with a bevy of pop-up monks whose primary message is, “What you
saw is not what you think you saw, but…” I open the Chretien Companion with the
same proclamation: the assortment of beasts real and imagined found in Erec and Enide,
Lancelot, and Yvain,
are not simply stags, hawks, or lions, but are instead allegorical
creatures imbued with human traits and morality. Bestiaries, or “books of
beasts,” were catalogs of Animalia generally written for the purpose of
religious or moral education. According to David Badke of The Medieval Bestiary, much of
Christian Europe believed that God had created the natural world in such a
way to provide lessons for people on how to live according to their faith –bestiaries
are the physical manifestation of this belief. These allegorical instructions
can therefore be read as their own genre of literature with its own traditions
and parameters. The traditions of medieval bestiaries are at work in medieval
romance and continue to be at work today, (albeit perhaps in a more subdued
manner) because many modern mediums of literature draw upon medieval romance
for inspiration. The tradition that this project is primarily interested in is
the weaving of human traits and imposition of human morality into the
classification of beasts. For this reason, I have included mythical beasts from
Chretien that would not have normally been included in a bestiary but help us
explore the ambiguity of the beast-human spectrum, especially in the context of
literature that is marked by beasts who have been infused with humanity. The
goal of this project is to place the medieval romances of Chretien de Troyes in
conversation with both contemporary bestiary literature and its probable offshoots
in modern popular culture in order to present a history of how the
representations of certain beasts have followed allegorical traditions that
have imbued the beasts with human morality. I will first give a brief outline
of this project’s procedure and product, followed by analyses of both content
and medium.
My
project is an updated, multimodal bestiary hosted on an online blog and
designed for modern readers. This bestiary catalogs two types of beasts: those
that would be found in a typical medieval bestiary, and beasts that are
featured in the romances of Chretien de Troyes, but would not be found in a
bestiary due to their ambiguous status on the human-beast spectrum. For the former
category, I borrowed heavily from Badke’s website The Medieval Bestiary –all illustrations and excerpts are from this
source, unless otherwise stated. For the latter, I chose descriptive passages
directly from the text. The next medium that this bestiary builds off are
selected passages from the course texts with analysis that seeks to compare and
form connections between the various sources or mediums. The entries of this
project that are based on actual bestiaries are focused on literary traditions
that encircle that particular beast whereas the invented entries still
incorporate these traditions, but primarily focus on expanding the human-beast
spectrum by figuring a particular beast in. The final component of this project
was matching each specific beast with a representation in modern popular
culture. The greater part of these representations were found in the Harry Potter and Game of Thrones series. These are good mediums because they very
obviously draw inspiration from medieval romance, and are popular enough to
have an impact on contemporary culture, and therefore relevant in making a
point about contemporary culture at large. They also happen to be texts that
were reimagined visually as film, television, or videogames which is an
advantage because they are fully fleshed out and full of details/side notes in
a way that only text can be, but are still visual mediums. There were instances
where the best example was found outside of these literatures, such as Chuck
Noland from Cast Away, as a
comparison to Yvain as a wild man.
The
core goal of this project is to present the beasts of Chretien’s romances
alongside their bestiary and modern counterparts in order to show a common
literary thread of beasts being imbued with human traits. This goal was supplemented with an exploration
of the human-beast spectrum, which ended up being a visible theme in most of
the beasts that I surveyed, and not just the more ambiguous creatures. This
project was a success in showing the traditions of allegorical creatures that
prevail throughout history. In fact, it was surprisingly easy to find modern counterparts
that supported these trends. One of my favorite discoveries was a little more
difficult in sourcing; the fur barbiolets are mentioned very marginally in Erec and Enide, which I found referred
to douc langur monkeys. This led to some immensely interesting and somewhat
contradictory findings on medieval perspectives on monkeys. I think that the
entries I made on ambiguously statured creatures are especially noteworthy; the
similarities that arose between the herdsman and Harry Potter’s Hagrid was intriguing and I really enjoyed looking
at how Game of Throne’s Tyrion
subverts medieval thinking on dwarves. If given more time I would have liked to
explore the relationship between beasts and labor, economy, and consumption
since that was a prevalent thread that came up as well. Analysis of the text was also a major
component in this project, which was useful in pulling my findings together in
an academic way that could be related back to the course.
The
findings that came out of my research on beasts and bestiaries are better
suited to a project than a paper because my purpose was to create a visual
medium that would connect texts to image based sources; bestiaries and modern
representation in film or television. This project is concerned with the visual
so it would be remiss not to discuss the experience of reading a bestiary
versus the experience of viewing a CGI reimagining of a beast. The illustrators of bestiaries had to take
into account that part of their audience would be illiterate and so many of the
drawing act as summations of the text that go with it. Also, it is likely that
the illustrator would not have actually seen some of the more exotic beats that
they were charged with drawing, and instead had to rely on secondary sources –they
were not privileged with google culture, where one view practically anything
with the click of a button. In contrast, CGI effects not only increase realism,
but the newness of this technology also has an awe-inspiring effect. The CGI
that the modern representations make use of exceeds the limitations of the ink
and paper that the authors would have had to make do with; modern technology
can add movement, texture, scale, as well as sound. Looking back on my project,
it might have been a good idea to incorporate video to enhance the viewing
experience. Access to bestiaries would have been slightly higher than romances
(which were exclusively about and for the nobility and upper classes) because
they were read in churches as part of a religious education –but still not
especially high considering low literacy rates. My hope is that accessibility to
the bestiary I have created higher, but of course this is still dependent on
access to computers and the internet. Audiences are also something that I had to
take consideration of when interpreting the modern portrayals of beasts. For
example, there are a couple of instances in this class where we have encountered
giants having violent lust for human women (Harpin, the giant from The Alliterative Morte Arthur); there is
also a giant in the Harry Potter series,
but as it is written for an audience of children and young adults, it would be
inappropriate to include this in the giants portrayal and is therefore
purposely omitted. In contrast, Game of
Thrones is a (very) adult television program that often relishes in gratuitous
sexual violence; if this show had chosen to look at giants to a greater degree,
the writers most likely would have included this tradition in representing
giants. As it stands, when researching portrayals of beasts in this medium, I
had to be cautious of the opposite –the addition of salacious elements where
there is no history of such in medieval romance (which of course is fine, but
not suited to this project’s interests.)
This project is a
worthy response to the material covered in this course because it takes one
theme that was briefly touched on during discussion, delved deeper into said theme,
and blew it up to larger proportions to analyze it as its own study. This project
is strong in the information it has compiled and overall presentation, however,
because it takes on a multitude of purposes and mediums, it can lose focus at
times. Beasts and the traditions that surround them are important to medieval
romance because they introduce allegory in a way that deepens the text and
lends it more layered interpretations. Reproducing a bestiary for a modern
reader is valuable because it clues the reader into some of these layers that
are not as pronounced to them as they would have been for the medieval reader,
explains the significance of these layers, and relates them to something that
they can recognize easily. The bestiary I created serves a personal interest in
exploring what it meant to be human to Chretien de Troyes and his
contemporaries; a point I push upon by expanding beyond the traditional
bestiary by including creatures that tend to give us pause and think about
where they fall on the human-beast spectrum. This project extends outside of
this course by introducing modern source material to show how the literary
traditions from medieval romance are present in the media we consume today.
Works Cited
1. Badke, David. "The Medieval Bestiary."
The Medieval Bestiary. N.p., 2002. Web. 09 Dec. 2014.
<http://bestiary.ca/>.
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