Small Characters, Big Characters

Ok, so forewarning: This is going to be a ‘white dude writes about representation’ post, which I know is not high on a lot of people’s wish lists, but here we are needing a blog entry again this week and, well, I did have an interesting conversation this week that did crystallize something I had genuinely not thought about before.

So there I was on the Twitter machine, discussing English classes from years gone by with my Excessively Young Friend, and (for reasons we need not relate), the Dragonlance novels came up, and favourite characters therein. When I was in high school, back in the misty depths of time, most people’s favourite character was Raistlin, which should not be any surprise because if you were setting out to design a character specifically to appeal to teenagers, you could do a lot worse than Raistlin.

However, he was not my favourite character.

It pains me a bit to admit this, but it was Tasselhoff. (I say it pains me because of all the quite legitimate points that have been made about how the Kender are the rather strange result of religious writers to have a ‘thief’ character who isn’t morally problematic, and are – at least as written up in later Dragonlance RPG products, absolutely intolerable) It’s a curious choice in some ways because I am not, as my Excessively Young Friend describes Tas, and agent of absolute chaos.

But the appeal was much more simple than that: Tasselhoff is small, and I was the short, spindly kid, and when you look at Evan’s favourite characters from days of yore, when there was a character available whose defining traits included ‘small’, that was my guy. Heck, my favourite Transformer (yes, yes) was Bumblebee.

Again, there’s no good reason for a kid to pick Bumblebee (well, he’s my favourite colour, I guess), ranked at ‘1’ for Strength on the statistical readout thinger and who doesn’t even come with a cool looking gun. But, despite all these things, and being ‘the little one’ among the Autobots, he is still on the team and gets to have cool adventures.

Perhaps not that hard to understand why a little thin kid who was also no athlete might latch on, once I thought about it. Basically, I liked the characters who were like me, and got to do cool things, because that feels good in various ways.

Now, as a straight white cis dude, I had and have so many characters that are ‘like me’ in various ways that growing up, I got to pick between them and go with the one that was the most like me. But, it obviously meant something significant to me.

How much more so for kids from minority communities and vulnerable communities, who don’t open books or turn on their TVs and find a sea of characters that are like them. How much must those few that they do find mean, to them. I know I don’t get it, not really, and I can’t fully ever get it.

But, I think understanding why Young Evan latched on to all those small characters is a salient reminder for me of why representation is so important. It matters, it matters, it matters, and even if someone like me understands imperfectly, we know that it does.

The clear moral of this story is always to talk about Dragonlance on the Twitter machine.

Thanks for reading.

Story of a Prayer

So I had a birthday recently, and I usually post something on my social media about the fact that I’m getting older, not because I’m worried about it, but because I want to acknowledge that it is happening. Life goes on, and changes happen. I am determined not to be one of those people stridently denying that they will ever grow old. Of course I will. It’s what happens. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just life, playing itself out.

Anyway often I have used a song by B.B. King or Junior Kimbrough, but I wanted to do something different this year and (loving the Middle Ages as I do) I went out looking for a medieval person’s thoughts on getting older. I did not find that, but I came up with something else that I thought ticked the box I was after.

I found an article in the Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics that cited a prayer, attributed to a 17^th century abbess, that had some clever turns of phrase and a kind of self-deprecating humour that I liked, and so I quoted it myself. I also looked up their citation, which led to a website that seems to be a stranded Geocities page (good lord above!) which also provides no source for the prayer aside from the assertion that it was written in the 17^th century.

Now, my academic spidey-senses were tingling at this point and if I had been engaged in anything serious I would either have had to investigate much further or regretfully abandon the prayer as a source, but I was just messing around on the internet so I didn’t worry too much about it. I posted it up, people liked it, and I enjoyed my birthday. However, a couple of people also asked for more information about the prayer and the person who wrote it, and so I did a little bit of digging.

I found a few writers pointing out that the language in the prayer doesn’t seem very 17^th century, but at this stage I wasn’t too concerned because if it had been translated into English from another language, very often the translators will modernize the phrasing and vocabulary, especially if they’re not doing it for academic purposes. So, I, er, noted the cautionary note and went on.

I also found that this prayer is exceedingly widespread, showing up not only all over the internet, but also being quoted in places like the Philippines Senate (in 1987) and as part of the ‘Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency’ in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971. So it’s far from obscure, and (somewhat to my chagrin) appears to be a common touchstone when someone wants something clever to say about the subject of growing older, and has been for longer than I’ve been alive.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything about its origins.

At this point, though, I found a website attributing the prayer to a nun (rather than specifically an abbess), and declaring that it was ‘found in an English church’. Now my spidey-senses were really tingling, because first of all, if it was an English writer, then the translation excuse for the modern language doesn’t work (or at least not so well), but even worse: after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1536, there were none again until 1791. So something is definitely up with at least part of the story of our ‘17^th century’ prayer, and it seems unlikely that the story of its origins hold much water, if it holds any at all.*

At this point I was relieved to discover that several journalists had done investigations much like the once I was engaged in, and happily vultured off their results. One attributed the prayer to a woman in 1950s America, and another pushed it back as far as an appearance in Reader’s Digest in 1922. There things seem to run into the sand, and (to be frank) I ran out of time to spend chasing down this particular rabbit hole.

So where are we? We can of course still imagine nearly any history we want for this prayer on aging and could insist that it really is the work of some anonymous 17^th century nun or abbess. However, on the balance of probability it seems to be much more recent than that, probably a 20^th century creation, but no less intriguing for that, although in different ways.

You would have to evaluate this thing as a successful piece of writing; it features in church decorations around the world as well as being plastered all over the internet, hanging on the wall in people’s houses, and being a part of government discussions. And yet, the author’s name has disappeared.

Was that a deliberate choice, on their part? Did they think their creation would get a better reception coming from a nun from a past century? Or was that a choice the audience made, misattributing the work as often seems to happen with quotations to who ‘should have said it’ or who it ‘sounds like’ rather than the actual speaker? At this point we are unlikely to know, or at least finding out would be a reasonably involved piece of research into what is no more than a curiosity, but I do find things like this interesting.

I usually talk to my history students about the fact that we make up things about the past all the time, or tell stories about the past that are not true, and we think some about the reasons why we might do this. We often cling to those objectively false narratives with great determination, usually because we want the message in them, what they communicate about where we came from or what kind of people we are or were, to be true.

I suppose in a way the ‘Nun’s Prayer’ is much the same kind of thing: it is a pretty cleverly written meditation on the aging process, and it seems like the sort of thing some wise old woman should have said or written. And so, at some point (it seems), someone decided that was what happened, and so it has gone on ever since. Because it makes the right kind of story.

We are great storytellers, we really are. We tell stories about ourselves constantly, some that are true and some that are not, but (as I try to tell my students) even the ones that aren’t true have truth in them, because they communicate something about what we want to believe in, and how we want things to be. And on this micro scale, I guess we want there to be a dryly humourous nun who can give us advice, across the centuries, about how to age with grace.

Thanks for reading.

* – I suppose it’s just about possible to argue that the prayer was written much earlier than the 17^th century and kept in an English church until its discovery, but it is usually described as a ‘17^th century prayer’, so that seems to be a fairly rickety argument about what is already the pretty rickety narrative surrounding this prayer.

Judgement of History

Late again this week due to illness (not that illness though, never fear) and fair warning – this is going to be a strange one.

I was interested this week to see some new work around Richard III and the ‘Princes in the Tower’ mystery that sort of nudges the likely blame back in Richard’s direction. You can read about it here if you like. I’m not current enough with the historiography to know how significant this is, but I would be very surprised if it ends the debate.

(Sometimes people ask what I think re: who the culprit was in the deaths of young Edward V and his brother Richard, and though I haven’t made a special study of it, since I did a comprehensive field in late medieval England I can’t really duck it. For what it’s worth, I have never seen any reason not to conclude that Richard III, who benefited most directly and most obviously, ordered the killings. There are lots of other theories out there, but they fail the plausibility test for me.)

The debate is what’s more interesting to me right now anyway. Although of course Richard was never really tried for the murders, in a lot of ways he has been on trial ever since, for what is now nearly 550 years. It’s still important to people (on both sides of the issue) that they prove it, or resolve it, one way or another.

Sometimes people talk about the judgement of history, or promise that history is going to judge a person or a certain action. Very often the reply is something along the lines of ‘yes but who cares’, because whatever historians and lovers of history eventually decide, it neither helps nor hurts people in the past, it repairs no damage and relieves no harm. ‘The judgement of history’ can be pretty cold comfort.

However, I have also seen the argument (if that’s what you want to call it) made that a person lives as long as there’s anyone left who remembers them. And if you think of it that way, and if a person is remembered, but as a murderer, or a fascist, then what have they become? From at least one way of thinking about it, you are what people remember you as.

Look, I’m not really suggesting that the dead care one way or another what we think of them, and this is teetering on the verge of getting deep into the weeds of what we’re actually doing when we ‘do history’, but: I’m sure if you had told Richard III that (arguably) the main thing that he’s associated with is still his probable role in child murder, he wouldn’t be very happy about it. (Of course, he also wouldn’t have to fret about it for long, either)

Maybe the judgement of history is a heavier hand than we sometimes think.

There, I said it was strange.

Thanks for reading.

Writing, and Writing

I have a couple things I want to touch on this week, which is a switch from those weeks when I was struggling to come up with a good topic at all. Blog topics come not single spies, but in battalions.

However that may be, here we go.

First, I wanted to note and mourn the passing of Michael Clanchy, surely one of the most influential of medieval historians. When he passed away a few days ago the internet was filled with tributes from scholars who said that his work had changed their way of thinking, and I include myself in that number. His foundational book, From Memory to Written Record, remains one of the most remarkable books that I have ever read, and it is not an exaggeration to say that I have thought about a lot of things differently ever since.

From Memory to Written Record is about the change from memorial culture (remembering things, essentially) to writing them down, in European society. Clanchy’s work is essential for understanding why medieval people kept the records that they did and why they kept them the way that they did, and in illuminating a great deal about the way medieval people thought in general. So, as a student of history who spent a great deal of time working on Things in Archives, Clanchy was foundational and I could not have done my work without it.

Even more than that, From Memory to Written Record challenged me to think differently about technology and its effects on society overall, through its discussion of a pre-literate society, and then the semi-literate one that followed it. We live in such a tremendously literate world now, where the ability to read and write is one of the skills that society assumes we have and demands of us, that it’s often very difficult to imagine a society where that not only isn’t the case, but where the difference was not seen as a deficiency.

Put another way, from our hyper-literate perspective, we often find it very difficult to imagine a society where most of the population could not read as anything other than dysfunctional, and that it must have been filled with people feeling terribly deprived. However, neither of these things was true, the status of reading and writing as a very specialist skill that you only learned for particular purposes was absolutely normal.

It’s that challenge to accept a different ‘normal’ than the one that we are used to, and to think about things from that perspective rather than our own, that is one of the most essential tasks of the historian, and Michael Clanchy had a huge part in allowing me to do so. I am therefore both tremendously grateful for his work, and saddened to hear of his passing.

—–

From one kind of writing to another. I have been watching the new season of The Expanse over the past weeks, and first of all there are probably some spoilers ahead so if you’re not caught up on The Expanse perhaps abort mission here for now.

You should get caught up though, because the new season has been quite good and very entertaining, even for someone like me for whom its ‘hard SF’ credentials are not a real selling point. I have also, though, been interested in some of the conversations I have seen around its writing, and my own experience with it.

The show’s writers have proudly stated that their show does not “do a lot of handholding” and indeed they routinely ask and expect the audience to make deductions and inferences about what is shown on the screen to understand elements of plot and character, without being told. I feel like sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

In the episode before this most recent one, without getting too deep into the weeds on plot recap, Naomi was stranded aboard a mostly derelict ship that was also a trap for her friends. We saw extended scenes of her trying to perform … various technical tasks, obviously undergoing considerable physical and mental stress in order to do so, but none of what she was trying to do was explained. (It’s certainly possible that if you had a stronger technical background than I do, that it might have been possible to figure a lot of it out.)

I regret to report that I had no idea what was happening, and what was clearly meant to be a series of moving and harrowing scenes very quickly became boring. The eventual revelation of what Naomi had been working on was neat, but the reveal was also not enough to make me feel much better about those long, (to me) impenetrable scenes.

So in that case, I needed just a little more handholding.

On the other hand, I’ve seen various people complain about the depiction of Earth after having been struck by giant asteroids and that we haven’t seen enough to have a sense of how bad things are. Again, the showrunners have said they have no interest in what they call ‘disaster porn’ and don’t want to depict huge piles of dead bodies in rubble or what have you.

What they did give us was a scene where Amos and Clarissa come upon an abandoned retirement/nursing home, outside of which are a small number of bodies loosely wrapped in tarps. Amos and Clarissa conclude that these are the resident who were unable to be evacuated, who were euthanised by the staff before they left.

Now, to me, if we’re in a state of affairs where no help has come to somewhere like a care facility, and the people there were faced with an absolutely brutal choice like that, I don’t need any further indicators that the situation on Earth is Extremely Bad indeed. So here, I was not in need of further handholding.

I don’t know if what made the difference for me was the difference between a technical scene and one that wasn’t, or what other reason there may have been – maybe it was the tiny bit of dialogue between Amos and Clarissa? The effect of that difference, though, is that one scene worked and was satisfying (if disturbing) and the others did not.

It’s an interesting challenge for writers, because there’s no question that as a reader (or watcher) it feels very satisfying when you put together the pieces and figure something out without being told directly. We do like to solve a puzzle. However, when we’re unable to put those pieces together, it can be deeply frustrating. Unsolvable puzzles are infuriating.

I don’t have ‘the answer’ for this balancing act. It’s something to think about when we’re creating stories, though, and another reason to be grateful for the people who take our stories for a test drive.

That’s what I have for you this week.

Thank you for reading.