Learning about fiction

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is.  You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.”

-T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I should frame that somewhere. I guess it's too much to embroider on a pillow. (I couldn't embroider a pillow with as much as a diacritic under my own power anyway.)

Every once in a while a seriously academic nonfiction book grabs my attention and holds it, sometimes to the detriment of other things I should be doing.. Last year that book was Lost Christianities, by Bart Ehrman. This year, so far, it's been Robin Hood, by J.C. Holt. Which is to say that lately I've been enjoying learning about the provenance and evolution of the legend of Robin Hood.

I would wax rhapsodic for at least a little while here about the pleasure of learning something--almost anything--but I decided to let Merlyn do it because he's better at it. What's left for me to say is that while Robin Hood is drier than my usual fare, it kept surprising me and I kept surprising myself by going back to it in preference of very well written fiction that I also happen to be reading.

I took away a number of wait-what-no-really discoveries. The things that are original to the story aren't what you'd think. "Original" is a word I should use advisedly here--by the time anyone wrote any of the Robin Hood stories down (in a copy we still have), they had already spread and evolved. But the first stories already have Little John, Will Scarlett (or something like it), and the Sheriff of Nottingham. They also seem to be pretty emphatic about Robin's devotion to the Virgin Mary--not an aspect we see very often anymore. Go figure.

I'm not really going anywhere with this right now. I thought I would point out that, of all the characters in Robin Hood's band, Friar Tuck is the one with a claim to actually having existed. Also, the legend seems to have spread far and wide in England in connection with church fundraisers in the 15th century--of all things. It seems an actor would dress as Robin Hood and sell pins and liveries; people would buy these to get into his band, and then (one supposes) they would go around town shaking down their neighbors. Come to think of it, I kind of wish my church had done a fundraiser like that.

So, now I know that stuff.