Again and again kings and queens, pages and peasants, elves, dragons, demons, castles and fortresses… In short, again old enchanted worlds populated by mages and fairies: TV more or less medieval will give birth to two superproductions derived in the coming days. The battle for subscriptions and ratings promises to be worthy of a tournament of knights.
HBO, which has already made television history with its series Game Of Thrones (GoT), unveils this week a pre-episode series called House of Dragons to portray House Targaryen some 200 hundred years before the reclaiming of the Iron Throne. The new production is also inspired by books by the American George RR Martin.
Amazon’s Prime Video service will begin airing its own promising previews two weeks later. The rings of power takes place seven millennia before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but always on Middle-earth with immutable medievalism. The series still draws on the work of the Briton JRR Tolkien (1892-1973), Martin’s predecessor in the creation of a fantastic universe inspired by medieval times.
If it was only that, it would already be a lot. The Middle Ages in fact influenced so many cultural productions that we can speak of an increasingly imposing medieval culture. The IMDB site, a benchmark for the global television industry, lists 85 series inspired by “medieval times”. The Irish-Canadian spinoff Vikings: Valhalla (2022) tops the list of most popular.
The cinema is constantly adding to it. The Green Knight, The Last Duel and The Northman hit theaters during the pandemic. The History of the Medieval World by American professor Susan Wise Bauer has sold two million copies since its release in 2010.
An educational medievalism
Medievalists seem to be in the best position to dissect what really comes from this era in the fictions and illuminate what our own time of crisis may well be looking for in this submerged society.
Carolyne Larrington, professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford, pushed the analysis in this direction until publishing Winter is Coming. The medieval roots of Game of Thrones (Alpha), now translated into several languages, including French.
“I wanted to use the enormous popularity of the books and the series to inform people about medieval times, its literature, its social structures, its imagination, she explains in an interview. I didn’t mean that Martin read and knew all of these elements, but he used them to build his world. »
Its lighting makes it possible, for example, to grasp the socio-cultural constraints that motivate the choices and actions of the characters, especially in the first seasons of fiction. A prince or a king, a woman or a man do not necessarily act in the same way.
Shiloh Carroll specializes squarely in the scholarly study of the Middle Ages in contemporary culture. After her doctorate on medieval fantasy, she developed an expertise on George RR Martin and published Medievalism in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones (2018).
“I think medievalism as a field of study has come a long way in the last ten years or so,” explains the American joined in writing in Tennessee. Popular culture texts are studied for what they say about the Middle Ages, and this perception of the Middle Ages is much less despised than it once was. […] Although there are still academics who think we should all keep quiet about Game Of Thrones, I believe that more and more recognize this work as an educational tool for medieval studies and medievalism. »
A dated Middle Ages?
Still need to know what Middle Ages it is. Our conception of this era has long been filtered by the epic, idealized, spiritualized and aestheticized vision of the 19e century concentrated among the romantics and Wagner. You can see the concrete effects of this in neo-Gothic architecture as far away as Montreal or in contemporary McManoirs in the suburbs. Rationalists, like the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and anticlerical and liberal historians, like Jules Michelet, have instead focused on the Dark Ages and theocratics.
“George RR Martin frequently points to the profound influence on him of historians and writers of historical fiction,” explains Ms.me Carroll citing Joseph and Frances Gies, Lyon Sprague de Camp and Barbara W. Tuchman. Martin himself has often cited as a model The Cursed Kings by Maurice Druon, medieval series dating from the 1950s.
“The fact is that many of these authors are quite dated and he may have retained some erroneous ideas about the time,” adds Ms.me Carroll. She points to a critique by Oxford graduate Professor Kavita Mudan Finn in The Public Medievalist, who unpacked Martin’s dated and bushy (“mix-and-match”) sources and perspectives.
Tolkien is, of course. This pioneer (after William Morritz and Richard Wagner) moreover becomes the one against whom all the other writers of the genre write, says Professor Larrington, adding that Martin himself tries hard not to be Tolkien, while not being able to completely get away from it.
She herself is not especially passionate about films The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. She saw the first trilogy, but only the first part of the second, put off by the endless battle scenes. On the other hand, she watches period films; she wrote a review of The Green Knight for the Times Literary Supplement.
Medieval mediatization allows us to discuss or confront our modern problems from a distance, rather than dealing with them head-on. Medievalism can be and often is used to justify all sorts of excesses such as racism, sexism or homophobia.
“Our contemporary vision rejects the idealized perspective, continues Mr.me Larington. Martin returns to a brutal and violent vision. In addition, it pays for the TV adaptation to amplify this violence, but also to bet on what historians call a gritty medievalism [gritty] populated by dirty, muddy, tortured people, etc. The series focuses in particular on sexual violence, which has been much noticed and criticized. It’s one thing to write about violent sexuality in a book, and another thing to show it on screen, notes M.me Larington.
Shiloh Carroll admits to being at odds with this problem of violence against women in the series. On the one hand, it “becomes fetishistic rather than horrifying,” she says. On the other hand, this medieval violence obscures ours, which is perhaps worse and more frequent. “So I think it takes a very careful balance to recognize the reality of such violence without making it sensational or denying that it’s a modern problem, or denying and ignoring that men can also be victims of sexual violence”, she summarizes.
The Middle Ages and us
Which raises the even more fundamental question concerning the current passion, multifaceted (notably through historical reconstructions) and generalized for a more or less realistic Middle Ages. This… medieval renaissance must also enlighten a part of us, but which part? What does our medievalomania say about our mental state, about our own social crises? Professor Mudan Finn sums up this idea by writing that “historical fiction tells us more about its author and audience than about the time period in which the story is set”.
Professor Larrington distinguishes the passions of the two sides of the North Atlantic. Europe still lives in the midst of this heritage, if only through the ruins and its millennial heritage. “We don’t have to be told what a knight’s tournament is,” she sums up. It’s a familiar world. »
For North Americans, on the other hand, projection seems less natural. The attraction of a conservative, hierarchical, gendered society, enchanted by our world in crisis, nevertheless seems to him undeniable.
Shiloh Carroll instead offers an enchantment explanation. “I think a lot of the passion for the Middle Ages has to do with how magic was primarily regulated in pre-industrial societies,” she says. Lots of analytics [et même de fictions] were written about how magic and modern life don’t seem to mix. We can imagine that dragons existed “back then” more easily than we can now. »
She also notices that the representation of medieval society serves as a screen and an outlet for ours. “Medieval mediatization allows us to discuss or confront our modern problems from a distance, rather than dealing with them head-on,” she says. Medievalism can be and is often used to justify all sorts of excesses like racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. In fact, the Middle Ages were so long and spanned such a vast geographical area that we can find almost anything we want there and make it work…”