 Hello, I'm Dr. Eric Luttrell, English professor at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. This video is the first of two video lectures about the story of Morian, a black African knight from Arthurian literature. Morian has his own story within a much larger compilation of stories called the Dutch Lancelot Compilation. The Dutch Lancelot Compilation was completed around the year 1320 and it combines lots and lots of different texts from Arthurian literature. It's a very large work, it's about the size, or if not larger, than Sir Thomas Mallory's La Mort d'Arture, which is the usual go-to English language, Arthurian text that actually comes over a century later. Despite being called the Lancelot Compilation, this compilation actually has lots of different stories about lots of different Arthurian characters, the quest for the Holy Grail and the fall of Camelot. The story of Morian, even though this is the only surviving text about Morian, the opening lines of the story of Morian refer to a source text. The author or the translator is narrating, telling us that he made some changes to the text from which he got this text. That lets us know that this is part of a much older tradition, even though we don't have that specific text that he uses as a source. Now there are other texts that have a similar character, namely Wolfram von Eschenbach's Long Work Partisval, which is over a hundred years older than the Dutch Lancelot Compilation. I'm going to talk about that at the very end of this lecture, but first I want to talk about some of the modern context and work my way back to the historical time period in which this text was produced. Now I cannot recommend this text highly enough to anyone who just wants some short introduction to Arthurian literature, besides just being about a very interesting character and opening up the text to an audience that might not normally see themselves portrayed in the very large canon of Arthurian literature. Besides that, this text is very much typical of the Night Errant adventure. His teachers, the most famous Knights in all of Arthurian literature besides Arthur himself, that is Sir Gowen, Sir Lancelot, and Sir Percival, and the form of the narrative, the structure, the tropes, the motifs, are very common. The kind of thing you would see in tale after tale after tale of Knights in Mallory's La Mort d'Arthur, although if you read Mallory's work it's much much much longer. I also highly recommend it to literature teachers, even though this wasn't written in English, so it's not part of the English canon the way Mallory's La Mort d'Arthur is or Gowen of the Green Knight might be. It's perfect for a world literature class. And honestly there are reasons to incorporate Arthurian literature that was not written in English into an English class, not the least of which is because Sir Thomas Mallory consistently refers to his French sources when describing his Arthurian tales. Now in this video I'm just going to talk about the historical context of the Morian text within the Dutch Lancelot compilation, but also the historical context of us today. In the next video I will talk about the text itself, including how it fits in with the other grail stories that happened before and after it chronologically within the narrative. In modern representations of medieval Europe, whether it's in movies, books, comics, whatever, whenever a person of color is represented among the native Europeans, it gets people's attention. Sometimes that attention is positive, but not always. Ten years ago when Kenneth Branagh adapted the Thor comic books into the movie Thor for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he cast one of the most popular actors of that time and today, Idris Elba, to play the character of Heimdall, the Guardian of Asgard. And while a lot of people thought he was a great cast for this character, some people expressed their dismay. They thought he was not right, not because of his acting skills, not because of the presence and the gravitas he brought to that role, but simply because he's Afro-British. Elba's mother is from the West African country of Ghana and his father is from Sierra Leone. He's British, he's grown up in Britain, but of course he has the dark skin of a Sub-Saharan African. The British newspaper The Guardian records one person saying, this PC crap has gone too far. North deities are not of African ethnicity. It's the principle of the matter. It's about respecting the integrity of the source material, both the comics and the Norse mythology. Bear in mind that in Marvel comics, the Asir, or not called the Asir, they're called the Asgardians, the people that are from Asgard, which means place of the Asir, which is, in the comic books, another planet. So they're not gods, they're aliens. Thor doesn't have a red beard, even though his epithet is rare bearded Thor throughout Icelandic literature. He's blonde and usually without a beard in the comics and all of the Asgardians speak a language that can best be summarized as a drunk high school actor in a Shakespeare play who forgot his lines and is just making it up. But that's not what people complained about when Idris Elba was cast. They complained about the fact that he was black. The movie's director, Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare actor and director that we'll talk about again when we get to the unit on Shakespeare, pointed out essentially the same thing. If you're going to say the color of his skin matters in a story like this, look at the 50 years of Thor comics to see how many ways the great artists have been alleged rules. Look at the Norse myths to see how they confounded and contradicted themselves. In other words, he's he's describing a phenomenon I've described since the beginning of this class. There is almost never an ur text, an original version that all others are derived from. All the stories we read in literature, at least the literature of the ancient medieval world, were iterations of past versions that were passed down through oral tradition, constantly changing, constantly dividing and recombining. And that is a phenomenon that we see happening in comic books but also in comic book movies. In other movie franchises, we see constant reboots, constant reinterpretations, constant changes made. This particular type of change, changing the ethnicity of a character, seems to get more attention than other types of changes. It's sometimes referred to as a race lift. And whatever the reasons for changing the ethnicity of a character from one iteration to another, it's frequently attributed to political correction. This is what the commenter on Idris Elba's casting referred to as PC Crap, saying this PC Crap has gone too far. TVTropes.org defines politically correct history as when shows, for our purposes, literature or whatever, when shows set in the past, change the past to fit the cultural norms of the time in which the show is filmed or the prejudices of those currently in power. We'll look at some examples of that, but we'll see examples of this not just in the last few decades, but in the last few thousand years. But I appreciate TVTropes.org mentioning in this bottom paragraph that sometimes the politically correct history is the one we think is the real history. And it turns out it was just a version that was adapted to a few decades or a few generations before us. And we are brought up believing that that changed version is actually the original version. And we don't know about the elements of the past that were not represented in past versions. The example they give is the African-American cowboy. There were a lot of African-American cowboys. They just didn't show up in John Wayne movies. Not because they didn't exist, but because directors like John Ford just chose not to focus on them. The casting of Elba specifically as a Norse God put him in the category of the Black Viking. The Black Viking troop goes back at least to the 1978 movie The Norseman starring Lee Majors. And I don't recommend you read the description at the top of that poster. But if you look at the picture and the top right, you can see the obvious historical inaccuracy depicted in this movie. Look close. You see it. If a Viking or anybody else wore horns attached to their helmet, those horns would act as basically as steering wheels. You could break somebody's neck without using a weapon at all. The helmet the person is wearing becomes the weapon. But that's not what people are focusing on. They're focusing on the fact that Deacon Jones, an African-American football player, was cast as one of the Norsemen. More recently, the British broadcasting company BBC Channel 2 presented a multi-part cartoon documentary called The Story of Britain that began in the Middle Stone Age, I believe, and described the history of Britain up to the present. When they described the era of the Roman occupation of Britain, the period from about the first century to the fifth century, they described the typical family living in a Roman city. And the image they accompanied with this description of a typical family was this one. Oh, and the butthurt was immense. That was the conservative influencer and conspiracy theory enthusiast Paul Joseph Watson, who writes for the right-wing media site Infowars, describing his feelings upon seeing this family depicted as the typical Roman British family. This is how they chose to depict a typical family in Roman Britain over 1500 years ago. Yeah, really. I tweeted about it saying it was historically inaccurate to depict Roman Britain as ethnically diverse, making the point that this was obviously the BBC engaging in politically correct tokenism, and that this wasn't what a typical family in Roman Britain would have looked like. Oh, and the butthurt was immense. Verified libtards from every corner of Twitter exploded with rage. The fact that there were a smattering of non-white people in Roman Britain doesn't mean that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse by today's standards to the point where a typical family in Roman Britain would be depicted as black. And this isn't a typical depiction of a family in Roman Britain. Now, he would probably say that he was really focused on that word typical, that this family can't represent the typical family in Roman Britain because of their race. But let's try a little thought experiment to see exactly what we mean by the word typical. Let's take this family, the Andersons, from Terrahod, Indiana. If you asked most people, could this family be the typical American family? Most people would probably tell you, yeah, they could definitely be the typical American family. They're from the Midwest, the Heartland, they have a very recognizable common last name. But let's think again, the surname Anderson is, I believe, the 11th most common name in the United States. But out of 330 million people, U.S. citizens, only 784,000 have that last name. That is 0.238 percent of the total U.S. population. That means, by far, most people in the United States are not named Anderson. Moreover, they live in Terrahod, Indiana, a city of only 60,000 people, out of, again, 330 million. Citizens of Terrahod represent 0.00018 percent of the American population. So with this data, these facts to consider, I'm sorry, Anderson's, but you are not. You are disqualified from being the typical American family. Now this probably seems kind of petty. And it is, that's the point. Does one characteristic about you disqualify you from being typical? If your last name doesn't disqualify you from being typical, if the place you live doesn't disqualify you from being typical, can we really say that your race does qualify you from being typical? In other words, is your race, your ethnicity, your essence? Is that the core characteristic about you that you cannot escape, that will forever define you? Clearly, Watson believes that it is. That's the only reason he could say this African, this family of African descent could not be typical in Roman Britain. And this is an important question to ask, because in the next lecture I'm going to argue that the story of Morian and the Dutch Lancelot compilation represents a very typical Arthurian narrative, a very typical quest that resembles many other Arthurian quests by other knights, even though Morian is the only black African described who is given his own quest in one of the medieval texts. He is a variation on a very recognizable type of Arthurian knight that type is usually referred to as the fair unknown. There are a few minor differences, but there are enough parallels between Morian's narrative and these other narratives that are described as the fair unknown story that I'm going to argue this text is a very good representative of that type of character. It just so happens that this fair unknown is black. Here's Morian Watson's argument and inadvertently he's going to actually make a good case for why representations of people of color are important in representations of the past, past literature and past events. Let's look at some other depictions of Roman Britain. So given that this is how the BBC thinks Roman Britain should accurately be depicted, what kind of racist would depict Roman Britain like this? No black people in that image. Here's another depiction of Roman Britain, Queen Boudica leading a rebellion against the Romans. Yeah, a lot of honkies in that painting. Here's another depiction of Roman Britain, a famous painting called Britain's Deploring Departure of the Last Roman Legion. Yeah, I don't see many black people. Here's the Natural History Museum's illustration of daily life in Roman London. You'll notice a distinct lack of melanin. Here's another famous painting of a family of ancient Britons in Roman Britain. Yeah, a lot of whiteies there. Here's another. Is this a more accurate depiction of a typical family in Roman Britain or is this? So either Roman Britain wasn't ethnically diverse by today's standards and all these depictions of Roman Britain stretching back hundreds of years are consistently accurate in depicting that or every single one of these depictions is wrong and this one BBC depiction from 2017 is accurate. So he's calling back to images that he's been presented with where his assumptions about the past come from and he's presuming that because there are no people of color represented in any of these images that there were no people of color in Roman Britain or at least they uh there weren't enough to matter. There weren't enough that they could be integrated enough in the society to present the typical Roman Britain. So obviously these are not this is not archaeological evidence these aren't images created during Roman Britain in which the people represented themselves or any eyewitness presentation. Even the oldest paintings presented here only go back a little over a hundred years which was more than 1,500 years more than a millennium and a half after the end of Roman Britain. All of these images were created by people imagining what Roman Britain would have been like and their imagination depends on other representations which usually depend on other representations. These aren't direct facts this isn't direct evidence. This is a good example of what the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman calls the wisiati problem or fallacy. Wisiati stands for what you see is all there is. This is an overconfidence in the breadth of our own knowledge assuming that what knowledge we have about something is all we need to know that there's nothing substantive about this issue the subject that I don't already know. Now when I put it that way it sounds really arrogant. I assume that I know everything about this subject well nobody consciously says that but this happens as part of your pre-reflective cognition that is the thinking that takes place before you're aware of your thinking. It's just an automatic assumption that is generated very quickly. That's the kind of thing Kahneman focuses on is the quick cognition we use to just function in the world. We depend on prejudice that is prejudgment. We depend on types stereotypes assumptions that if we look at each specific detail of each person and each event in each situation of course they're all going to be different but we can't function in a society where we don't already know a lot or where we can't assume that we already know a lot. We can't spend all our time parsing the differences between each individual person in each individual situation. All Watson is doing here is making this phenomenon explicit. We don't usually say well I've never heard of this therefore it doesn't exist. Watson is saying that but this is something we all do all the time with all sorts of things. Students frequently ask me about the text that I include in a survey class of world literature or of English literature. They'll say I've never heard of this text and if it's been around all this time why haven't I heard of it? And that's kind of a strange question. I don't go into an organic chemistry class and saying I've never heard of this type of combination of elements therefore prove to me that it exists or that it's relevant. There's a lot you don't know. There's a lot I don't know. There's a lot no one in the world knows. Remember the epic of Gilgamesh which is now considered part of the literary world canon was completely forgotten for centuries. It was rediscovered in the later part of the 1800s but from around 500 AD to around 1890 no one knew anything about the epic of Gilgamesh. So what we see and what we have seen what has formed our presumptions our prejudgements is not all there is. And remember that part of the job of literature and all other art all good art all good literature isn't to just repeat to us the patterns the stereotypes the platitudes the conventional wisdom that we're already familiar with. I mean a lot of literature and tv and movies do that. A lot of art does that. That's not the art people really focus on because it is derivative. It's just a copy of a copy of a copy. There's nothing new about it. There's nothing that makes us think. At the beginning of the semester I mentioned this quotation from the formalist literary critic Viktor Shklavsky who said that our habits become habitual they become automatic our interpretations become automatic our assumptions become generalized but art removes objects from the automatism of perception. In other words what Kahneman calls system one cognition this jumping to conclusions your mind does before you're even consciously reflective of that thinking process. A loose translation of the Russian term that Shklavsky uses defamiliarization. Art makes strange it makes something familiar into something strange so that we look at it really look at it rather than assume we already know everything there is to know about it rather than just assume this new thing is just another version of this thing I already know. I think this is what the BBC was trying to do by choosing a dark-skinned family in their documentary not to say that most people in Roman Britain had dark skin obviously they didn't but that this family who happened to have dark skin because the Roman Empire scattered people all over the place they could have been they could have represented a typical family in a Roman garrison. So that leads to another common concern that is raised when people of color are presented in Europe in the ancient world or middle ages and that is is it historically accurate if art is making something strange does that mean it's just making something up out of whole cloth did this just come out of nowhere is just entirely based on modern fantasies about the past and the answer to that is a very clear no there are plenty of images and works of art depicting people of color in Europe in the middle ages like these and ancient Greece and Rome all these particular images are some I've collected to use in presentations like this one that come from medieval manuscripts created before 1500 you can find these and more like them in collections like this one the image of the black in western art this is a multi-volume set I don't know exactly how many volumes but it starts with the earliest western art that is European art showing pictures paintings sculptures and that sort of thing of Sub-Saharan Africans alongside Europeans. If you want to run out and buy that it's a little cost prohibitive I think each one of these volumes costs about a hundred dollars but I got these through interlibrary loan through the library that might be a good strategy if you're interested in collecting more of these images for research or class presentation or whatever. Now later in this lecture and in the next one I'm going to be using this image in the middle to represent Maureen but it's actually an effigy of Saint Maurice who was an African member of a Roman legion who converted to Christianity and was martyred and he then became the patron saint of the Holy Roman Emperor. If you remember anything about European history the Holy Roman Empire was that empire of Charlemagne that comprised most of modern-day France and Germany so this was you know a figure who was well known in the westernmost part of Europe. This effigy was created sometime between year 1240 and 1250 in the Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany. According to his hagiography the story of his life he was martyred in Switzerland. Unfortunately the manuscript of the Dutch Lancelot compilation that tells the story of Maureen has no pictures so I've adapted this to resemble the image of Maureen as he's described in that text. But I want to emphasize this is not a modern image I am borrowing ancient and medieval images for this presentation. In a previous lecture about the Iliad and the Odyssey I mentioned that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not the only works in ancient Greece about the Trojan War. They were part of what we now know as an epic cycle. That epic cycle included works like the Cypria where we learn about the causes of the Trojan War. It includes works like the Little Iliad, Iliad Micra, and the Ilioparesis. This is where we have the depiction of the Trojan horse. Remember the Trojan horse is not described in the Iliad. But what I want us to remember also is that there was one entire epic called the Ethiopis in which Ethiopians from Sub-Saharan Africa come to Troy to join in the defense of Troy against the Achaeans. They're also joined by the Amazons, an army full of women. These texts are now lost. They're described, they're quoted by other ancient Greek authors as early as the 5th century who were very familiar with them. Even some of this some of these stories make their way into Virgil's Iliad. Apparently there were still some of these around in Virgil's time. We have visual works of art like this Amphora. On one side it depicts Achilles fighting Pentecilia, the queen of the Amazons. On the other side it shows Memnon, the king of Ethiopia, with two of his warriors next to him. Now we can't see Memnon's face but we can see his warrior's faces and these are clearly representing Sub-Saharan Africans. And this was made around the year 535 BCE in Greece which means that people in Greece knew what Sub-Saharan Africans look like. So if we want to be more diverse, show the diversity of the ancient world and the medieval world, we don't have to choose between that and historical accuracy. And when Paul Joseph Watson tweeted out this challenge or this assumption that this depiction could not be historically accurate, he received a response from one of the if not the best known living historian of Roman Britain, that is Professor Mary Beard, a classics professor at Cambridge University. Beard responded simply this is indeed pretty accurate. There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. In a subsequent post she mentioned specifically the Roman governor of Britain at one point, Quintus Lallius Herbicus, who was from Algeria in North Africa. And he has a tomb there that you can visit. There's a lot of archaeological evidence, some of which has been making the news recently, like this woman who's been described as the ivory bangle lady because some of the grave goods that she had with her were these ivory bangles, ivory made from elephant ivory. And her grave says a lot about her, it shows that she was a high status woman. She was a mixed race, which we can tell from her facial structure. Her craniometric analysis matches that of African American women. And this woman buried in Britain between the years 350 and 400 of the common era. Even more recently a woman was buried in Beachy Head in United Kingdom in Britain. That is a rocky outcrop on the southern coast of Britain. She was buried sometime between 200 and 250 AD or of the common era. And she had sub-Saharan African facial structure. Both of these women clearly had ties to Africa. The the ivory bangle lady had grave goods that came from Africa. I don't know about Beachy Head lady, but both of them grew up in Britain. So these were probably not immigrants themselves, but the children, perhaps second, third, fourth generation Britons. But despite evidence like this, Paul Joseph Watson was not alone in his reaction to the BBC documentary or two Mary Beards comments. The popular financial guru Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who we've discussed before in this class for his term the narrative fallacy from his book The Black Swan, despite having written several works on mistakes people make in thinking, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and that sort of thing. Taleb doesn't seem to be any less prone to these types of mistakes than your average person. Clearly something bothered him about Mary Beards comment and about the BBC documentary. He responded to Mary Beards comments about the historical evidence with basically what can only be described as a Twitter tantrum full of name calling and selected decontextualized evidence and claims that really had no basis. He tweeted out a bunch of data about genetic markers in the present day populations of Britain and Africa, as if that proved that 2000 years ago there could not have been any Britain, there could not have been any people of African descent, sub-Saharan African descent in Britain, although that's not how the human genome works. Taking one genetic marker from a genome is like taking a single piece of paper out of an office building that's 30 floors high and saying because of this one piece of paper I took out of this office building I know everything I need to know about this office building. He doesn't ask her what the evidence out there might be, he just assumes that it's quote, bullshit, and he dismisses the entire discipline of history as bullshit. And yeah, people can throw Twitter tantrums and not always be on their best behavior, say things that I might regret later, but he went further to actually write, I wouldn't call it an essay, it's not a very coherent argument again, but on medium.com he writes a longer version of this where he seems to be focusing and getting frustrated by people in the ancient world being represented as either northern European that is like Scandinavian fair skin, light-haired, or sub-Saharan African. There are a lot of different ethnicities and skin complexions between those two extremes. He uses the word meds here by which he means Mediterranean. That is people all around the Mediterranean coast all have a slightly darker complexion than northern European, but a lighter complexion than a sub-Saharan African. And what he's getting at is generally true. In past lectures when we discussed the Iliad Odyssey and the Aeneid, I mentioned that Greece had spread out across the Mediterranean and established colonies all over the place, but so did Phoenicia. Phoenicia is the coastal region near modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. You'll notice the Greek colonies in red on this map and the Phoenician colonies in yellow. The Phoenician colonies include Carthage, but they go all the way to Spain and Morocco on the far western edge of the Mediterranean and even outside the Mediterranean Sea. Conspicuously absent though is Rome. Rome was neither a Greek colony nor a Phoenician colony, but they would have had mariners and immigrants from those other Mediterranean empires trading with them and also settling along the Italian peninsula. Though importantly they would have also had northern Europeans like Sissalpine Celts, that is the Celtic people who lived in what is now northern Italy, and Sub-Saharan Africans in Numidia as well as Arabs and Persians who move into the coastal region of Phoenicia. Nubians who came down the Nile River to the Mediterranean coast, that sort of thing. But he seems to be focusing on representations of North Africans by Sub-Saharan Africans, and that seems to be what he has a problem with. He says, don't make Hannibal a Sub-Saharan. He looked Neapolitan, meaning Greek, Roman, Phoenician, that sort of thing. And you might not be surprised to learn that Taleb himself is from the Mediterranean. He's from Lebanon. That is the modern-day country of Lebanon, which in the ancient world was Phoenicia. So we see the emotional impetus behind his argument. It's not a very good argument, but we see where he's coming from. It has really nothing to do with Mary Beard or with the evidence of the diversity of Roman Britain. It has everything to do with Taleb wanting to see people that looked like him represented as Romans, as Greeks, as Carthaginians, and that sort of thing. And that is a very common impulse. That is something that we will see throughout literature, ancient and modern, and is extremely common in Arthurian literature. I would go so far as to say that the history of Arthurian literature is a history of people trying to adapt past stories to put themselves in it, to put issues that were relevant to them into the past, to add virtues that were anachronistic, that is their own present-day virtues, to project them into the past, as well as projecting themselves. People who looked like them, people who had their beliefs, people who had their technology, pushing them into events that would have taken place around the year 500. So briefly to review from a past lecture, to the extent that there is anything historical about Arthurian literature, it comes from a person who may have been named Arthur, who participated in the Battle of Mount Baden in which a group of Celtic armies from different tribes came together to fight off the Anglo-Saxon invaders who were essentially early versions of the Vikings who were coming over from the Jutland Peninsula, modern-day Denmark. The historian Gildus writes about this in the year 540, but he doesn't use Arthur's name. The first time we have the name Arthur associated with some heroic figure, it is in the Welsh poem Egedothan, but it's clear that Arthur was not a king, he was a battle leader, but from the 6th century to the 12th century, all we have is oral tradition. But this is the germ of Arthurian literature. Before it becomes literature, it's mostly oral tradition, that is, bards, singers go from place to place singing stories about Arthur, and before they were actually knights, I can't say singing stories about Arthur and his knights, because that is a later concept. But he's mentioned again around the year 800 in the Welsh Historia Bretonum, again 950 in the Welsh Annals. Some of the earliest writing from the more complete narratives comes around 1100 with the work Culek and Olwyn, which mentions Arthur and Sargalen, although he's called Gwalchomei. But the text that really created the beginning of the Arthurian literature fandom in the medieval world was in 1135 when the Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote History of the Kings of Britain, which was about a whole bunch of different kings, including other kings like King Lear, the origin of Shakespeare's King Lear. But part of the story was about King Arthur, and Geoffrey really picks up on the Welshness of Arthur. He wants to remind people that Arthur was a Celtic hero. The Welsh, like the Cornish and the Scots, but not the English, were there before the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons became the English, spoke the English language. The word Welsh means foreigner in old English, so the Welsh themselves don't call themselves Welsh, they call themselves Kimru, and the symbol of the Kimru that is not just people who living in modern-day Wales, but all of the people there before the Anglo-Saxons. The symbol of the Welsh flag, especially the red dragon, is used to to represent them, and Geoffrey of Monmouth includes in his History of the Kings of Britain the story about this fight between these two dragons, a red one and a white one. The white one represents the invading Anglo-Saxons, the red one represents the Welsh. Throughout all of these early Welsh, Cornish, Scottish versions of Arthur's stories, Sir Gowen is the primary knight. He's the greatest of all the knights, the strongest, but also the most virtuous. Stories about him have a lot of parallels with the Irish hero Caholan. They're presented, their characters are presented very differently, but there's a lot of parallels that seem a little too coincidental, but it's likely that they both originated with some very very ancient Celtic hero. But all of that Welshness, all of that Celticness of Geoffrey's version of King Arthur is going to be changed significantly when a French Breton, remember the Bretons were people from Britain who fled the Anglo-Saxons and went to Brittany in modern day France, but by this time they are speaking French, they are, you know, part of the French culture, even though genetically they have descended from the earlier Britons. And when the Arthurian literature moves to France, the primary hero who overshadows Sir Gowen and King Arthur is the Frenchman Lancelot, and Lancelot is very clearly defined as French. And it's not just enough for Cretienne Ditois to make Lancelot the greatest knight, he also has to destroy the character of Gowen. He has to make Gowen just the worst in combat, the most ignoble, the most belligerent, the most un-courtly, un-nightly, un-virtuous of all the knights. All of that is new to the French versions. The French don't like Gowen, they love Lancelot. And as if it wasn't enough to overshadow Gowen, he also has to sleep with Arthur's wife. The majority of Lancelot's tale is about his affair with Queen Guinevere, Arthur's Queen. Cretienne also introduces Percival and the Grail. But remember, the Grail at this point is not yet the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus used at the last supper. And Percival may have been based on an older Celtic character named Peridure, who shows up in the Mabinogean and elsewhere. But this encounter between one of Arthur's knights, Percival, and a Grail, we can't tell exactly what the Grail is, but some sort of serving dish, it might be a cup, a chalice, it might be a bowl, the word itself probably comes from the Greek word crater, like which is kind of a bowl, but a bowl you could drink out of. But Percival sees it in a ceremony and he forgets to ask, or he's afraid to ask, what's going on in that ceremony. And if he had asked, it would have healed the wounded Fisher King. All of that is new in Cretienne's version, or at least this is the first time that story makes it into Arthurian literature. But Percival and Lancelot are going to be overshadowed when the next group gets a hold of this. This is during the French Vulgate cycle, which is a compilation of works and different stories, but they were clearly written by Cistercian monks. And the Cistercian order is an order of monks that broke away from the Benedictine monks because they wanted to be more pure, but they chose to wear white robes, which was something that was reserved for hermits. So you know in the Middle Ages, if you come across somebody wearing white robes, it's a Cistercian monk. Well, all of a sudden in the Vulgate cycle, white-robed monks start showing up everywhere. And they don't just show up as background characters, they are there to reveal the mysteries that the knights can't figure out. In fact, the knights as warriors are showing their limitations in the Vulgate cycle. Whereas for Cretienne and past French Arthurian romances, chivalry had been the greatest ideal that a knight could show, as well as courtly love, pursuing usually an already married woman, but being entirely devoted to her. These were considered virtuous or at least what made the knights the best characters to tell a story about. But that all changes in the Vulgate cycle when all the knights essentially become wannabe monks. It's at this time with Robert de Boron, who is a very religious figure, although we don't know if he was clergyman or not. He's the one that takes the Grail and makes it the Holy Grail. He's the one that writes the story that says the Grail originated as Jesus' Cop at the Last Supper. It was brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, all of that. That comes from Robert de Boron. It becomes very religious. Everything has a religious symbolism. And then in the Vulgate cycle, the Cistercian ideals take over. And the character of Sir Galahad is introduced there. Galahad's name comes from the Old Testament, from the city of Gilead. He replaces Percival as the the only knight who's worthy of achieving the Grail. We don't know why, but all of a sudden Percival is no longer that good. Although one of the characteristics where a courtly love was something that made a knight a knight in past texts, now virginity makes you a better knight. Because I don't know, for some reason. So Percival remains a virgin, so he gets to see the Grail. But Galahad remains a virgin who never even lusts after a woman, so he gets to achieve the Grail. Whereas Lancelot, because of his lust for Guinevere, does not get to even see the Grail. He's replaced, overshadowed by his son. He can't achieve the Grail, whereas Galahad not only achieves the Grail, but he's also a better fighter than Lancelot. Because being a virgin makes you a better fighter, I guess. But Lancelot, after his son achieves the Grail, and is basically taken up into heaven, Lancelot, in the end of his days, becomes, guess what, a Cistercian monk. So the Cistercians are basically inserting themselves as the truth-tellers, the sources of wisdom for Arthur's knights. But of course, that wisdom comes from a particular ideology that was enunciated centuries after the historical Arthur. So we have three sort of generations so far of people changing the stories, or adding new stories to the Arthurian canon that projects their own identities and their own beliefs into the past. But I think nothing illustrates visually this phenomenon more than the Winchester Round Table. This giant wooden table was, according to the Dendrokinrology, the tracing the rings in the wood, dates to around the year 1250. That's when it was cut down. It was probably built for King Edward the First, who was a big fan of Arthurian literature, probably for some tournament, like a mock tournament, trying to recreate the tournaments described in Arthurian literature. But it wasn't painted until a few centuries later. And what is painted on it, besides the names of several of the knights of the Round Table, is two roses, a combination of two roses. This is called the Tudor Rose. The ruling family, at the time, were the Tudor family. It combines the white rows of the House of York and the red rows of the House of Lancaster, the two families who had fought against each other for the crown during the Wars of the Roses, because they each chose a different colored rose to symbolize their families. Incidentally, these are the wars that George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones or Song of Ice and Fire is loosely based on York, Stark, Lannister, Lancaster. But the wars were finally ended when Henry VII, who was a Tudor, but his mother was a Lancaster, he married Elizabeth York, and effectively they combined the families, so he combined the two roses into one, and then we know he had this painted on the Round Table because the paint dates to that time, and we know this could not have been painted on the Round Table before that, because that wasn't the symbol of anything before that, but clearly Henry Tudor wanted to project his family insignia back into the past, especially to have it associated with the nobility, the chivalry of the age of King Arthur as represented in literature of his time. In fact, Henry VII was such a fan of King Arthur that he actually named his firstborn son Arthur, so there would have been an actual King Arthur if that son had not died very young, and because he died young, the second son, whose name was also Henry, acceded to the throne, that was Henry VIII. Henry VIII was pretty famous for his ego, but here we can see that ego depicted on the Round Table itself because he had an image of King Arthur painted with a face that looked like his. So what do we learn from all of this? We want to see ourselves, or at least people that look like us, or are like us in some way, in representations of the past, representations of the present, of the future, in fictional worlds. This is a natural human urge. When we can see ourselves in art, that art becomes more interesting for us. So if we're talking about literature that is set in the past, but changes the past to fit the cultural norms of the time in which it was written, ironically this is what is being called politically correct history, although if casting Jimon Honsu in the Guy Ritchie, King Arthur, is politically correct, it is also very Arthurian. It is very much in line with the history of Arthurian literature. Does that mean that, like in the comment made by the person disputing Idris Elba's casting in the Thor movie, does that mean that we're not respecting the integrity of the source material? Well that depends on which source material we're talking about. As I've described in the past three lectures, the canonical ideas about King Arthur, his court, the Quest for the Grail, who the characters were, what happened. This usually comes from Thomas Mallory's The Mortar Thore, but nothing in Mallory's The Mortar Thore is based on anything from history, except maybe the name Arthur. Everything else we can trace its emergence in literature between Geoffrey of Monmouth and 1470 when Mallory wrote Le Mortar Thore. Every time an Arthurian story is written it adapts the cultural norms from the time and place where it is written and the beliefs and identities of the people writing them. So I'm going to divide the history that is relevant to us here between the historical past around the Battle of Mount Baden and the first reference to Arthur in Egidothan between the years 500 to 600. That is the past in which the Arthurian characters are described, but the history that really concerns us is going to be the history when these texts were written. From the beginning of what we can really call the age of Arthurian literature, beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth through 1470 when Thomas Mallory writes Le Mortar Thore, this is what we can call the era of the creation of the Arthurian canon. Of particular interest for us in this lecture and the next one and the reading of Morian are going to be Wolfram von Eschenbach, the German author his work Parseval which is the German version of Perseval and the Dutch Lancelot compilation that contains the story of Morian from the year 1320. We want to let this text de-familiarize not only the assumptions we have about Arthurian literature but also assumptions we have about the people who lived in Europe and the people who lived in the rest of the world and to what extent they interacted with each other. So let's look at the world in the 1300s. We typically have the assumption that before the automobile and airplane or even before the locomotive the world was pretty geographically sectionalized that there's no way anyone could have traveled from Europe to East Asia. That's just too far given the technology of the time there were no highways. People couldn't speak the language of the people just over the mountains much less hundreds of miles away. So there's no way anybody could travel over across a continent except that we know that people did. You've probably heard of Marco Polo maybe they've even seen the show on Netflix. He lived between 1254 and 1324. He was from Venice, Italy and he traveled across the known world and then kept going. Traveled across the Mongolian Empire that ruled China all the way to the east coast of China then down into Southeast Asia then back and back across Persia and he was able to sail around Southeast Asia and the coast of India and make his way back to Europe. Perhaps less well known but very relevant for us here is Ibn Battuta who lived from 1304 to 1369 who was from Tangiers in modern-day Morocco on the tip of Africa just across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain and he also traveled across all of Asia ending up near Beijing on the eastern edge of Asia but he also traveled across the Sahara Desert all the way down to the town of Timbuktu. I say that's important because we typically have this idea that the Sahara Desert was uncrossable. There's just no way anybody living in Sub-Saharan Africa could have made it even to the north coast of Africa. This is why maybe Nassim Nicholas Taleb thinks that nobody in Hannibal's day could have been from Sub-Saharan Africa. Never mind the fact that Hannibal is most remembered for bringing elephants up through Europe across the Pyrenees Mountains and into Italy. Elephants are not from North Africa, they're from Sub-Saharan Africa. If you can get elephants all that way you could probably get people that far. And travel was not as impossible as it seems to us as it may seem to us today looking back. There's the the 23-6-1 rule. If you have a horse it will take you six days to travel by horse the same distance it would take you to travel 23 days on foot. But if you can travel by water then you can go in one day the distance it takes you to go by horse in six days or 23 on foot. And the Sahara Desert not only was crossable it had virtual highways. There were arteries of trade where people would take supplies from Sub-Saharan Africa, travel to the north coast of Africa, trade with people who would come and meet them by ship and then take those materials and people if they wanted to travel to Europe. Then there's the usually unspoken reason that people have for not thinking Sub-Saharan Africans could make their way to Europe. And that is assumptions we have about how people lived at that time. What resources they had, the technology they had, the knowledge they had. There is this Western idea that comes from colonialist text from the 1800s and racist cartoons from the middle of the 20th century that the dark-skinned people of Sub-Saharan Africa just lived in huts and lived in the same village their whole life and hunted with spears and really knew nothing about the rest of the world. But at this time, at the time in which the majority of the Arthurian literature was written, it was almost exactly opposite the case. When you compare Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa, the wealth, the technology, the learning that was there, they at least rivaled each other. The art produced in Sub-Saharan Africa at this time rivaled the sculptures of the Greeks. This terracotta sculpture of a king was created around the year 1300 in the Yoruba city of Ife, which in modern Nigeria, on the west coast of Africa. At the time that the canonical works of Arthurian literature were being produced in Europe, there were several empires that sort of replaced each other in Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Sub-Saharan Africa. As the kingdom of Ghana rose and was eventually replaced by the kingdom of Mali, this region was the intersection of the Sahara trade network, those highways across the Sahara that I show you on a previous map, and the more fertile and more importantly gold-rich regions south of the Sahara. It was around this time while the Arthurian literature was being composed in Europe that the king Sunjata Kitta led the Mali people against the Sosa Empire and essentially replaced the Sosa Empire. And this is the subject matter of the epic, the Sunjata, which I will probably at some point in the future add to this class, the World Literature Survey class. Sunjata founds the Mali Empire. The Mali Empire gives birth to kings like Monsaku, and Monsa means king. Monsaku is famous because he supposedly abdicated his throne in order to sail on an expedition across the Atlantic, reasoning that, well, there's one side to the ocean, so there has to be something on the other side, so he put together a gigantic fleet and sailed west and never returned. Now, is that historically accurate? We don't know. Did he make it to north or south America? We don't know. But what this does show us is these aren't people who are just content to stay in one place, even though this is a very wealthy place to stay. These are not the kind of people who are afraid to travel. Monsaku is replaced by Monsa Musa, and Musa ruled at the time that the Dutch Lancelot compilation was composed. And Musa is known for two things, and we are in the region, we are in the city of Timbuktu. Timbuktu is usually known to us in the west as the sort of name for a place far away. And it was, especially for Europeans at this time. This just probably seemed like the the other side of the world, because it was the other side of the Sahara. But Monsa Musa is known for several things. One of those is that from his time until today, he was the richest man in history. Now that has changed, now that Jeff Bezos has accrued the amount of wealth he's accrued, but when you factor in the wealth that existed in the world and the number of people in the world, Monsa Musa was the richest man in the world from around 1330 to around 2015. And he was that wealthy because there were gold mines across his empire. And we see on the map here that the the gold areas within the kingdom of Mali were obviously his two mine, but also the gold that was mined outside of his kingdom had to cross through his kingdoms, and so he could tax the people that were coming across. If they wanted to get to the Sahara and make use of those trade highways, then they had to go through Musa's kingdom. It's also on the Niger River, which gives easy transportation to the southern end of that part of Africa, and connects trade and travel on the Niger River to trade across the Sahara. Besides being the richest man in history, Musa is also known for making the Hajj across the Sahara. Because they were Muslim, they were required to make the Hajj at least once in their life, or at least it was a gold to make the Hajj to go to Mecca. But Musa did it in style. He brought with him so much gold that every town he went through, including Egypt, which is still a very wealthy area at this time, the bottom dropped out of the gold market. He gave away so much gold in all the cities that he went through as he traveled across the Sahara desert that gold was in such plentiful supply that it was just worthless. It was just so common that it was no big deal anymore. That's how much wealth he distributed as he traveled. So not only was traveling across the Sahara not impossible, it was clearly something you can do in luxury. But one other thing Musa is known for is doing basically the same thing that Alexander the Great did with the library at Alexandria, collecting all the manuscripts or copies of all the texts that he could possibly get his hands on, and creating a library. He built the Sankora Madrasa, remember Madrasa means school. It was a university but also had the largest library in Africa since the library at Alexandria, containing more than 400,000 manuscripts. So if we return to the geographical region of the text back to Europe, we might ask, okay, this is all fine and good. There's a lot of interesting things happening in Sub-Saharan Africa, but is there any way someone writing in Germany or the Netherlands or in Britain or anywhere else in Europe could have known much less being influenced by any of that? Well, that image that I've been using of Mansa Musa actually comes from a map called the Catalan Atlas. It's written in the Catalan language of medieval Spain and this is actually produced on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain by a Jewish Spanish cartographer named Kresge Ibrahim and it didn't take it long before it ended up in the Royal Library of France by the year 1380. So yes, people in Europe knew, at least in broad terms, what was going on in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Now one of the most obvious points of historical context when dealing with the time during which the Arthurian texts were the canon of Arthurian literature was produced, obviously the most important series of events, at least on a continental scale, are the Crusades in which Christian knights, many of them wearing some of the exact same iconography that Arthurian knights are described as wearing, are making their way to try to take political control of Palestine, of the Holy Land, and establish and maintain a kingdom ruled over by Christians. I've mentioned already in previous lectures that Christian Europe at this time is surrounded, at least on two sides, by Muslim cultures. That's not just they're not all the same Muslim culture. The Seljuk Turks are separate, distinct from now more than Berbers and Islamic kingdoms are as diversified and different from each other as the Christian kingdoms were. In the past unit on the song of the Sid, I've discussed how very often these Christian and Muslim kingdoms actually cooperated with each other, sometimes cooperated with each other against other people of the same religion. Neither Christendom nor Islam constitute a monolithic whole. In real life, El-Sid died while defending Valencia from a siege by the Almoravid Berbers, and I mentioned in the El-Sid unit that the Almoravids were a much more militant and fundamentalist group of Muslims that at first were going to war with other more moderate Muslim kingdoms, trying to convert those other moderate Muslim kingdoms to a much more militant and strict and virulent strain of Islam. And while they were taking Valencia from El-Sid in the north, at the southern part of their kingdom, they were extending into the more moderate Muslim territory of the Kingdom of Mali. That is the empire whose capital is at Timbuktu. So even though we don't want to consider all of Islam one unified culture, we can see that there's this sort of unified whole that at its northern end has a foot in Europe and at its southern end has a foot in sub-Saharan Africa. And trade, and they actually dominated these trade networks, the highways across the Sahara, and it would not have been out of the question for this Almoravid empire to be a relatively easy conduit between sub-Saharan Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, of Al-Andalus, modern-day Spain. Medieval Spanish culture from the Song of the Sid to until the Reconquista shows an ongoing intermingling of cultures, communication between cultures, sharing of cultural artifacts, technologies, even habits. In the decades before the composition of the Dutch Lancelot Compilation we have images like this from the chess book or the Book of Games Libro de los Huegos of King Alfonso X of Spain. This was produced in Toledo. Remember this is where El Cid put the Caryons on trial. And the book is focused on compiling different strategies for games like chess and other things. But the illustrations show people of many different complexions interacting with each other, playing against each other in a very friendly manner. You can see the complexions are different. It's not just black and white. You can see the style of clothing is different, some being sub-Saharan Africans, some being North Africans, some being European. The respect that Christians had, at least some Christians had for Muslims, shows up in Arthurian literature, or at least para-Arthurian literature, in the romance of Sir Tristram. Tristram is not technically a night-of-the-round table, but he ends up taking up one-third of Thomas Mallory's LaMorte d'Artour. His story is told in the same romance tradition and has a lot of the same motifs and narrative structures that Arthurian knights have in their independent narratives. But one of the figures that is a major character in the narrative of Sir Tristram is his sort of rival in love, one of his rivals, in love in the pursuit of this woman named Assault. And that is a man named Sir Palamedes. And Palamedes is specifically described as a Muslim. While he is a rival for Tristram, he is not characterized in a negative manner. He and Tristram fight each other frequently. They don't just compete for the love of Assault, but they also engage in combat, not with any religious ideological conflict just as two men who are, you know, in conflict with each other. And this fact becomes all the more obvious when we learn that Sir Palamedes actually becomes one of the knights of the round table, whereas Tristram does not. Palamedes shows up early in Arthurian literature around the year 1230 in the prose Tristram, and in a work almost entirely about him, which is the Palamedes. And that brings us to what might be the original story that contains a quote-unquote black knight and one of the best, most well thought out, most artistic works of the Arthurian canon, although maybe one of the least read of the major works about King Arthur is the work Parseval by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram creates a very different picture of King Arthur's court, his knights, of the grail and what it represents, that is very different from what we're most familiar with if we learn about Arthurian mythology from Thomas Mallory and the movies and later written fiction that is influenced by his version, because Mallory is influenced most of all by the French Vulgate cycle, whereas Wolfram von Eschenbach is actually writing before the Vulgate cycle is written, and so he's not including characters like Sir Gallahad, who hasn't been invented yet. He's not following that Cistercian monastic idea of nightly chastity and religious piety. In fact, it would be very easy to categorize Wolfram's portrayal of heaven and earth and the grail itself as almost heretical. Wolfram is very much focused on the union of opposites, good and evil or juxtaposed with each other, but they're not eternally in conflict. The grail is brought to earth by what he calls the neutral angels, that is the angels who when Lucifer or Satan rebelled against God, some angels sided with God and some angels sided with the devil, but there were angels who were neutral, and those are the ones that are most important in the grail story. His version of the grail is very different than anything else we've seen. It's not any kind of cup or even a dish, it is apparently a stone. He calls it the lapis exilis, which means something kind of like the stone from the sky or the stone of perfection. But most important for our purposes is the fact that Wolfram is very international, at least in his aspirations. He brings in characters from all over the known world, and the known world, the part of the world outside of Europe that is best known to them are the parts with whom Europeans are dealing because of the Crusades. And when I say Crusades, it's this is a good time to point out that the Crusades weren't just Christianity versus Islam. There were also Crusades that the Vatican declared against people who called themselves Christians but who the Catholic Church regarded as heretics. These are people like the Cathars, the Albigensians, people living in places like southern France and even parts of Germany who could trace their theological origins back to the Gnostics, who were some of the first Christians who were writing texts as early as the second century. The sorts of ideas that Wolfram has as themes and motifs within his text, the parts of all, the kinds of things that could have gotten him and had actually gotten other people executed for heresy. The sort of evil and impotent magician Klingsor as a character in his work may have actually been based on the Pope or Pope Innocent III who called people to go to the crusade against not only Muslims but also Christian heretics in Europe. Most important for us though is Wolfram's internationalism. The text of the parts of all features characters from all over the known world at the time. That includes Muslim areas. It even includes areas beyond to the east beyond the known areas of Islam. And one difference with the grail in Wolfram is that it's not just in the possession of one king and his small group of people in Britain but it's somewhere in the east. We can't tell really how east or exactly where but it seems to be in the direction of Palestine. And more importantly there is a grail brotherhood and brotherhood here is not exclusive to men either because there are some very interesting female figures that are part of this brotherhood. But this brotherhood is composed of all different sorts of ethnicities from all parts of the world. Now you can see from the timeline that Wolfram is writing before the Vulgate cycle is written. The Vulgate cycle is being written in France by Cistercian monks. Wolfram is writing in Germany and he seems to have a little bit of a cathar or some sort of Christian heretical point of view. And perhaps because of his latent heresy he's more inclined to sympathize with Muslims and people he describes as quote heathen. Heathen here and elsewhere in the Middle Ages is just sort of a catchall term for anyone who's not Christian. It could mean polytheistic like the ancient Romans are described as heathens. It could also mean Muslims or Jews. And like the author of Song of the Sidd and El Sidd himself Wolfram has some sympathy for Islam and a little bit of contempt for certain types of Christians. In fact Wolfram is writing just three years after Parabot writes the manuscript of the Song of the Sidd. Now a very brief synopsis. Wolfram is writing mostly about the story of Percival, the German name he uses as Parzival. But this is based loosely on Cretien de Troyes' Percival. Remember Cretien de Troyes was the first author to include Percival by that name and especially his connection with the Grail. Now there may have been an older myth or maybe some ballads about a Percival or a parager in Welsh. But Cretien's text is the first one. It's the first one to introduce Percival, the first one to introduce the Grail. But it is unfinished. Percival comes to the Grail Castle. He sees the Grail in a ceremony but he wants to ask about it but he doesn't. And then everything disappears and he finds out only after he's gone that if he'd only asked what was up with this Grail, what was going on with the ceremony, that would have healed the Fisher King and cured the land that had become a wasteland. And he sets off to find the Grail Castle again but the work is unfinished as Cretien de Troyes writes it. Wolfram sets out to complete this narrative but he doesn't say that he's finishing the story on his own. He brags about his abilities as an author and his abilities to represent metaphorically the spiritual truths. But he actually claims to have had a source. There was a poet named Kyot and Kyot may have been Breton or French or maybe German and this was a European poet. But he says that Kyot himself had a source that was a work that was originally composed in Arabic. So Wolfram is taking this Breton Celtic narrative that's been adopted by French singers and authors and he is now making it international not only in its characters, not only its geography within the narrative, but also claiming that he got the story vicariously from an Arabic source. This might be another way of connecting the Grail to this larger idea of the world that includes the Christian Holy Land and the various groups that were coming together there in one way or another either to fight in the Crusades or to exchange ideas. And one of these people that is connected to the Grail and to Percival in ways that he doesn't yet realize is this character named Firafis Angavin. Firafis is actually Percival's brother. They have the same father but they don't know it yet. As well as adding an ending to Cretien de Troyes' Percival, Wolfram also adds a sort of backstory that he includes in the first couple chapters and that is about Percival's father Gamaret. Gamaret is a Christian, a Welshman, but he goes into the service of the King of Baghdad and defends Baghdad against Christians and Muslims. And while serving the King of Baghdad he goes to defend a queen of a realm called Zazamonk. The queen's name is Belcain and Belcain is described as black. Gamaret falls in love with Belcain and she sees what a great warrior this is. She falls in love with him and they have a child together. And the child is named Firafis or Firafis. So again Belcain is queen of a realm called Zazamonk and Zazamonk is not a real place but it seems to be based on India. As I said, Wolfram describes Belcain as black but locates her kingdom in what we now know today as India. This raises that issue that I mentioned earlier that the term black when used to refer to an ethnicity is fraught with all sorts of problems, not the least of which is that it's been used for centuries as a derogatory term. But it's been used by colonial Western Europeans, mostly British, who took colonies in India as well as Africa and describe people in both places as black as if they were the same ethnicity. Now many groups in Southern India do have complexions that are as dark as people in Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a range of skin tones in India. The range of skin tones in India like the range of languages is sort of a microcosm for the range of languages and skin tones in the entire world. But it's not likely that Wolfram knows this. Wolfram is deriving information, what he knows is based on what he's heard. But he has clearly heard a lot. This woman Belcain closely resembles an actual queen. Her name Belcain seems to come from the name Belkana, which means the wife or the widow of Bala. And Bala here is a name used by the Muslim war leader during the Crusades, Nuruddin Balak bin Baram. He fought against the Crusader king Baldwin II, the Christian Crusader king, and took Aleppo back from the Christian Europeans who had occupied it. He then married a princess who was a Seljuk Turk from the modern nation of Turkey, and he was then killed by an arrow. And after she was widowed, this woman described as Balaqana, she and her son were then protected by a Muslim prince named Timurtaj. And Timurtaj in Turkish translates in German to the name Eisenhardt. And Eisenhardt is the name Wolfram gives to the knight who is protecting Belcain. To try to get the city of Aleppo back, the Christian king Baldwin II joined forces with the Seljuk prince. And the two, the Christian and the Muslim armies, both attack Belcana and her kingdom at the same time. All of this very closely resembles things that happened to Belcain as described in Wolfram. This lets us know that Wolfram knows a lot about what's going on very far to the east. Now in the narrative of Parseval, after Parseval goes to see the grail procession but doesn't think to ask or is afraid to ask and then the castle disappears, he goes on a quest to find the grail castle again and he will eventually. But in the meantime, he comes across a knight who is wandering in Europe and we will find out why later. But this knight turns out to be the son of Belcain and Gamaret, which means that they are half-rothers. His name, Fyrofis, means and is translated as the son of varied colors. And Wolfram describes him as being both black and white all over his skin, like a written on leaf of parchment, black and white here and there. He bore a magpie's marks. Magpie is sort of like a small raven or crow, but it has white markings as well as black on it. So in other words, this child of a black mother and a white father is imagined to not have like a middle skin tone but to be pibled, a term that's kind of obsolete but it's closely related to the word magpie. So is this what Wolfram thought a person of mixed race would look like? Well, we don't know. But it seems that Fyrofis is a visual metaphor for a strong theme in Wolfram's work, which is that the opposites are always occurring together. You can never be all good all the time. There's always going to be evil, but evil is something you can recover from. We're always going back and forth. Christians and Muslims are seen side by side and that's a good thing. People from east and west come together. All of these opposites are being united. Remember in Wolfram's text, the neutral angels, the angels that were neither good, siding with God nor evil, siding with Satan, they're the ones who bring the grail to earth. So Fyrofis visually is more of a metaphor. Fyrofis' skin is a visual metaphor for these opposites that are presumed to be incompatible, actually being compatible. Wolfram also describes Fyrofis as a heathen, which is kind of ambiguous, not necessarily Muslim. But heathen is an English approximation. Words like pinem, which comes from the word pagan, which was originally Latin, is sometimes used in the Middle Ages to refer to Muslims, sometimes used to refer to polytheistic people. But it's just sort of a catch-all term for anyone who's not Christian. And if Belkaim corresponds to Balakana, and her kingdom is in the region beyond the Indus River around Delhi, as the corresponding historical queen Balakana was, even though she was Muslim, she was from a Hindu family. Keep in mind at this time in India, it wasn't Muslims versus Christians, it was Muslims versus Hindus. And Hindu, again, is sort of an English catch-all term describing all the religions in modern-day India. India and the name Hindu both come from the Indus River and from the time of Alexander the Great to the British colonial occupation. Westerners just described everything east of the Indus River as India, and having the Indu religion. And so too, Wolfram is kind of vague on exactly what people are like there, but it's clear that there are some correspondences between his characters and actual known historical figures that were living in the generations immediately before the time he wrote, and sometimes contemporary. But fire fees is vaguely polytheistic. It's not clear how much Wolfram knew about Islam, but fire fees describes himself as worshiping gods like Jupiter and Juno. That is Zeus and Hera. These are Greek and Roman gods. Worshiping them would be an absolute heresy for a Muslim. Islam is so very focused on absolute monotheism that they vehemently reject even the Christian notion of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost all being one, three in one. That is considered polytheism by Muslims. So very unlikely that any Muslim ever worshipped any multiple gods like Jupiter and Juno. When Parseval and fire fees meet, they don't know each other, they are at cross purposes, and they end up fighting. And fire fees is accustomed to beating anyone he comes across in single combat. In fact, he's so surprised that he can't quickly beat Parseval that he gets very frustrated, and Wolfram tells us so. The thing is Parseval is also one of the greatest fighters in the world, so they're at an impasse. But they are both so dangerous and they both come so close to seriously wounding each other that Wolfram as the narrator expresses his own fear that they're going to hurt each other, especially these two people who actually have so much in common. And so he says of fire fees that heathen through his sword up high, many a blow of his brought Parseval to his knees. It's easy for anyone to say, thus they fought, if he wants to call them two. But they were both but one person. My brother and I are but one, as is a good man and is good wife. Even before they find out that their brothers, Wolfram is almost this narrator who's too excited to get to this revelation that he can't wait. He has to tell us they're not two people fighting against each other. They are one person divided into two. He says, the Christian and the heathen, I called them one and the same. They too would start to think the same if they were better acquainted with one another. This is one of those places where Wolfram seems to be talking not just about his characters but about people in the actual world that he lives in who, if they only knew each other better, would not be trying to kill each other. But Wolfram also wants to emphasize how intelligent, how courteous, how nightly this quote-unquote heathen is. The heathen was magnanimous. He spoke courteously then in French which he knew out of his pagan mouth. Firefist says, I see clearly, valiant man, that you would fight without a sword. At this point in the fight Firefist has disarmed Parseval but he will not fight an unarmed man. He says, let there be a truce between us but until our limbs have rested somewhat. It's then that they figure out that their brothers, they're both the sons of Gomorrah. And when they find that out they're both overjoyed. Of course they put away their differences. They're done with their fight and Firefist wants to bring Parseval back with him to his kingdom to put him in touch with his birthright in the east. But Parseval also wants to welcome Firefist to the west and bring him to meet King Arthur in the nights of the round table. And during this time as they make their way to Arthur's court, Wolfram is very explicit. It takes every opportunity to show us how courteous, how chivalric Firefist is. He describes him, his virtues in the same terms he describes all the other nights of the round table. He was very intrepid, very courageous. His desire was towards love and to fame's gain. This is the chivalric knight's reason for doing everything he does in the world. He needs to show that he has martial prowess. He can go defend the weak. But usually the reason he does that is to impress a woman with whom his entire being is consumed, whose love he desperately wants. She's usually either married or rejects him and so he's got to go out into the world to perform great feats, become a great hero so that he'll win her love or at least validate her love if he already has it. And that's what Firefist is doing, the exact same thing. His desire was directed toward love and fame's gain. Love conducted high spirits into his manly heart as it still does to the ardent lover today. This is free indirect discourse. This is Wolfram saying, you know, you guys too today, you should be motivated by the same motivations that Firefist is. He was in search of adventure that this man had ridden off alone away from his army into the woodland to exercise his limbs. So he didn't have to travel on his own. He has entire armies awaiting on him, but he wanted to go off on his own to do his own thing, to find his own path, find his own adventure. Just like all of Arthur's knights do. They never, they almost never go off as an entire army. Most of the tales of Arthur's knights are all of them going off individually to find their own adventures. The heathen never worried of love, which was why his heart was great in battle. Notice the connection there. This is before the vulgate cycle and the monastic equation of chastity with martial prowess and courage. Martial prowess and courage is connected with being in love. And in this case, Firefist was in love with a woman named Queen Secundil, who had given him the land of Trebilibot. Now, like Belcane, Secundil seems to be based on an actual historical figure. This one almost contemporary with Wolfram. The name Secundil in German seems to correspond to the Sanskrit name Sanyagita, who was the name of an actual Indian princess who was protected by an actual Muslim prince. His name was Kutub Udun Aibak. And by protecting her he became the Sultan of Delhi, now the capital of India. And keep in mind that at this time India, Baghdad, and as we've seen Sub-Saharan Africa, empires like Mali, these distant kingdoms were usually much wealthier than Europe at the time of Wolfram's writing. At this time Europe was basically this little peninsula. The Muslim world consisted almost entirely of trade routes, so they ended up being much wealthier than any of the kingdoms of Europe. Wolfram reflects this in Firefist as well. He says, if a woman or man ever asked you who had the wealthiest hand of all whoever from any land sat at the round table, you could not give them a better answer than this. It was Firefist Angavan. In fact, the first time we see Firefist before we learn his name he's described as a wealthy stranger. Wolfram tells us that all that served Arthur's hand in Britain and in England would not pay for the stones which, with their noble pure nature, studded the warrior's circuit. In other words, these jewels he has decorating his armor are worth more than everything in Arthur's kingdom. It was costly beyond all deception. Rubies and Calcedonia would fetch a poor price there. Not only that, but he has an enormous army from all over his part of the world, consisting of people of many different ethnicities, many different cultural backgrounds. He had 25 hosts with him, none of which understood the other's speech. In other words, they're all from so far apart from each other that they all speak different languages. As well became his wealth, so many different lands served his noble hands, Moors and other Saracens of this similar aspect. He's bringing up that distinction between the Taleb and others have pointed out between North Africans, people of lighter skin, but Berbers, Arabs, Persians, at this time medieval Europeans are describing them all as Saracens. There was this mythical city of Saras and everybody who had relatively middle-tone skin and dark hair was considered a Saracen if they were Muslim. Moors like Mauryan, we'll see later, comes from the word for black, or at least dark. Moors are usually the ones who are sub-Saharan African or it's difficult to tell here if the word Moor would apply to someone from southern India. Even if they had dark skin, usually Moor is reserved for a black African either Ethiopian in the east or someone from Morocco in the west. But Wolfram's point is they're from all over the place. They look all different, they all have different languages. This is a very international character. The last important point I want to establish about fire fees when we then go to compare him to Mauryan is the fact that he is looking for his father. He has a father who is in Percival's family, Parzavalli's family and he's never known his father. His father left his mother before he was born and now he is set out in search of his father. Fire fees tells King Arthur, they said in my land that there could be no better night whoever bestowed a charger, whoever sat on a horse, than Gomorrah Angavan. It was my desire and also my custom to travel until I might find him. He tells Percival, the wrong done to my father there, back in Zazamank, is as yet avenged by me. His wife, of whom I was born, met with death for love of him when she lost love by him. In other words, when Gomorrah left, Belkain blamed herself, she thought it was something that she did or didn't do that caused him to leave. It was actually that Gomorrah just can't stop and settle down. He's got to continue to go off and you know seek adventure and that sort of thing. That's the real reason he leaves. But Belkain was so distraught, so upset when he left that she died of a broken heart. But this is all the more reason for Fire Feast to find him. He says, I would gladly see that man. I have been informed that there was never a better night. This costly journey of mine is made in search of him. So this text, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Percival, establishes this character that we never see in later literature. He doesn't show up like so many of the characters in Cretchen de Trois and in the Vulgate cycle that later show up in works by Thomas Mallory. But we are going to see another Black Night with a lot of story parallels. When we read the story of Morien from the Dutch Lancelot compilation, we are going to read a story about a member of Percival's family. In the text of Morien it's not Percival's father, it's Percival's brother, Aglavaal, who travels to a distant land, meets a Black Queen, has a child with her, and that son grows up to come seek his father in Arthur's court. Now remember the key difference here. They are both Black Knights whose Black Skin is emphasized by the authors, but Fire Feast is from India. Morien, as we'll see, is African. But when we read the opening lines of Morien's romance, Morien's own narrative, we will see the author specifically say that he is adapting another source and he is changing that source. Now I mentioned that Wolfram attributes his Percival to a poet named Kyot who himself was taking a work from Arabic. Those are probably not real sources. Those are probably sources Wolfram made up in order to validate a story that he was trying to make up but not admit that he's making up. It gives him a little bit more credibility if he pretends that he's actually adapting someone else's story in addition to Kretien's. But the author of the Morien narrative in the Dutch Lancelot compilation specifically says past texts have said that Morien was the son of Percival. But then he, the author, reasons that we couldn't be the son of Percival because Percival died a virgin, because to be a perfect grail knight and the Cisterian monk tradition that would be later after Wolfram would be established by the Cisterian monks, Percival remains a virgin his whole life. Well that's not the case in Wolfram. And Wolfram not only does he get married and have sex, he has two children. He has two young sons and they go off to have their own adventures. But by the time the Dutch Lancelot compilation is put together, we are very much in the Galahad tradition where Percival is not the greatest grail knight. He's the second greatest after Galahad because Galahad is not only a virgin. He's never lusted after a woman at all. But because of that, this author is clearly adapting a text from before that tradition into that tradition. This is one of those seams between two redacted texts, two texts that have taken separately from different sources and are being stitched together. This is one of those indicators that this compilation is a compilation and this text of Morian is coming from somewhere else. But we only have fragments of the text that seems to be the source of this. I'll talk more about this in the next lecture. But if we look at our timeline, we can see that a story about a black knight who is the son of one of King Arthur's knights and a relative somehow Percival, perhaps even Percival himself, is established with Wolfram. And it travels around Europe either through written text or through oral tradition through menacingers and troubadours across France and Germany. And eventually, a version of it ends up in the low country, modern day Belgium and the Netherlands, to be the knight that we are reading about in this class. Now, this is standard for any kind of narrative transition across time. And it's so common that we have this line from another Dutch text from the year 1260, the Roman de Wallewen. There's this great line that says, concerning King Arthur, there is many an adventure that has never yet been written down. So we have two versions of a story that were written down, but we can clearly see that there's been some narrative changes, redactions, adaptations, evolution over across this 110 years from Wolfram's Percival to the Dutch Lancelot compilation. So before the Arthurian canon was set, if we can say it was set with Mallory's Le Morte d'Artur in 1470, the black knight was part of the Arthurian literary tradition. He was left out of that canon, and the last 500 years has been a trend of leaving people out because they didn't fit the stereotypes, the expectations, the social prejudices of that time. That's where the values of the present shape the presentation of the past. Each Arthurian text, of course, uses its own present as a guide when constructing its imagined history. Every single text of Arthurian literature has done this. The only thing we can say might be historical about Arthurian literature is the name Arthur itself, and that itself is speculation. We don't know anything about Arthur, except in that earliest text of Iga Dothan that Walsh Poim mentions Arthur as someone who killed a lot of people in battle. Everything else, Lancelot, the Grail, Merlin, all of these other things were creations of later times. Their presentations, what they look like, what they said, what they believed, how their actions were judged, how their actions were motivated, how they thought, all of these things were shaped by the expectations of the authors in the time they were writing. But if we look back beyond that, we will see that this past has always been inclusive, even if the representations we're familiar with left out that inclusivity.