Medieval kings, in their moments of leisure, would pour themselves some wine and delve into fascinating literary works crafted by their court writers. If you think medieval literature was limited to biblical copies and sermons by church fathers, you’re gravely mistaken. Medieval literature is filled with stories about vampires, werewolves, fantastic creatures, and distant lands brimming with all kinds of wonders. Like a true royal highness, I’ve been enduring isolation for some time now by reading medieval fantasy and indulging in wine drinking, albeit in a barbaric manner. I say barbaric because drinking pure, undiluted wine was considered an uncivilized way of consumption in the medieval mind (if the reserves start running low, I might resort to medieval methods of dilution).
In the Middle Ages, there was a saying that an uneducated king was like a crowned donkey. Knowledge was seen as a way to attain “friendship with God,” leading to the perfection of one’s being and ensuring the sincerity and purity of human deeds (according to Hugh of Saint Victor in his philosophical-theological work Didascalicon). Knowledge was thought to restore the original state of the human soul’s perfection, and through it, the soul could ascend to divine likeness, with literature serving as the path to this self-improvement.
How, then, do werewolves, vampires, fairies, lamias, and monstrous people with dog heads fit into this path of self-improvement?
Gervase of Tilbury, a court writer to Henry II Plantagenet, said: “The world contains more than our philosophy.” In other words, we know that we know nothing. The medieval encounter with other lands and cultures brought the realization that their knowledge was far more limited than they thought and that wisdom could only be attained through the imperfect earthly senses: “It seems that man exists to know and to discover, to hear and to see the wondrous workings of this world, until the most glorious God, exalted and great, the creator of the World whom we must praise with commendation and reverence, is known by these means, for he cannot be known otherwise” (my free translation of the introduction to the first encyclopedia in vernacular, vulgarized Latin—Composizione del mondo, Ristoro d’Arezzo, 1282).
In line with the idea that only imperfect senses can bring us closer to God, at a time when even the senses were limited by the physical impossibility of travel, what was inaccessible to the senses became the subject of fantasy. It is no coincidence that precisely at the moment when the failure of the First Crusade sends the Plantagenets home with tails between their legs, their court writers begin a productive literary endeavor, particularly focused on the uncharted realms of worldly wonders and the supernatural. The books in question, De nugis curialium (Courtly Trifles) by Walter Map, Otia imperialia (Imperial Recreation) by Gervase of Tilbury, and Topographia Hibernica (Description of Ireland) by Gerald of Wales, are full of descriptions of monstrous creatures and places. Gerald of Wales, in his Description of Ireland, has a chapter titled “The Advantages of the West Are More Favorable Than the East.” He writes: “What riches does the land of the Orient have in comparison with these? Yes, it possesses raw silk, which is dyed in various colors, precious metals, gleaming jewels, and aromatic spices, but what are all these goods compared to the loss of life or health, or the continuous threat of enemies lurking as close as air among our ranks” (author’s translation). Sour grapes…
The ancestors and roots of many folk tales from various nations are products of medieval fantasy, which draws inspiration from classical literature (one example being the story “You Can’t Please Everyone,” found in Aesop’s works). The story of “The Dark Realm,” recorded by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, is actually an oral interpretation of a military expedition description found in the Serbian version of the popular medieval Romance of Alexander the Great. This romance, also called Alexandria, was one of the favorite texts from which Serbian medieval rulers learned the art of warfare. In the text of Alexandria, Alexander the Great leads his army into the dark realm and orders his soldiers: “…to each take some of the land—wood, stone, leaves—whatever they find, and carry it out with them. Those who obeyed the order carried out much gold, while those who mocked and did not obey greatly regretted it.” Upon exiting the darkness, everything brought from the realm turned into gold, pearls, and precious stones. The moral of the medieval story is that disobeying one’s superior leads to consequences, and the inclusion of a moral lesson within the text is a common feature of medieval literary genres. Vuk’s version is much more intriguing because it includes an additional supernatural element—a voice of unknown origin, which speaks to the army: “Those who take these stones will regret it, and those who do not take them will also regret it.”
The motif of an army wandering into the supernatural realm is very common in medieval fantasy. In Walter Map’s work, there is an exceptionally entertaining and dark story about the Breton king Herla, who receives an invitation to a wedding from the “pygmy king” (a dwarf). Herla, along with his entourage, travels to the pygmy kingdom, located deep in a cave within a high rock, and spends three days at the lavish wedding banquet. Upon returning, he receives a small dog from the pygmy king, with instructions that no one should dismount their horse until the dog chooses to jump from his arms. The army exits the cave and meets a peasant, whom Herla asks about the health of his queen. The bewildered peasant barely understands the question, spoken in Breton, because he is a Saxon. The three days spent in the cave had actually been two hundred years, during which the Saxons had driven the Bretons out. Hearing this, some soldiers, in fear, dismount from their horses, but they turn to dust as soon as they touch the ground. According to Map, Herla still wanders the earth with his army of the undead, as the little dog has yet to decide to jump from his arms.
In medieval fiction, journeys into the supernatural realm always come with gifts, even if they are malevolent in nature, like Herla’s dog. From a psychological standpoint, these stories can be interpreted in various ways. The story from Alexandria, where wandering in the supernatural brings riches, can be linked to the benefits of psychoanalysis, or we can observe that the relativity of time in the story of Herla parallels the dreamer’s experience of time. Since I am not a psychologist and do not want to venture into unfamiliar territory, I recommend James Hillman’s work The Dream and the Underworld, which analyzes mythological stories and fairy tales from the perspective of modern psychology.
Fairy tales that have roots in medieval romances and collections of the supernatural, like the story of “The Dark Realm,” take on different endings depending on the character of the people from various European traditions. Again, I must return to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, whose work is equivalent to the efforts of medieval collectors of fantasy tales. Vuk’s collecting endeavors were not limited to sipping coffee with Serbian peasants who would share their tales and proverbs, but involved systematically visiting monasteries and churches and meticulously copying texts. Vuk also purchased manuscripts, and his rich collection, under financial pressure, was eventually sold. Today, it is scattered across Vienna, Berlin, and Leningrad.
One of the most brilliant stories published by Vuk is The Silent Language (Nemušti jezik). It possesses all the elements of a successful fairy tale—moral virtues, a supernatural element, a journey to the otherworld—seasoned with significant motifs that define it as a Serbian story. Here’s a brief summary of its plot: A peasant takes his sheep to graze and sees a snake trapped by a ring of fire, unable to escape. Feeling pity, he helps the snake by offering a branch for it to climb. The snake speaks to him, thanking him for his help, and expresses a desire to take him to its father, the Snake King, who will offer him riches for his noble deed. It advises him to refuse the treasures and instead ask for the “silent language.” Thus begins the peasant’s journey to the otherworld, guided by the snake to the snake’s kingdom. (Here I must digress to note that in our region, since the earliest history, the snake has been an attribute of chthonic deities, or gods of the underworld. We also find it in the cult of Zeus Zbelturdos, a deity venerated by the local Thracian population. In this tale, the snake takes on the ancient role of psychopomp, a guide of souls through the underworld.)
The snake leads the peasant before its father, and the peasant asks for the “silent language.” After a brief argument due to the Snake King’s hesitation to grant his request, a vivid description follows: the Snake King spits into the peasant’s mouth, giving him the desired gift. The King then drives him out, warning him never to tell anyone about this gift, or he will die on the spot. Upon leaving the snake kingdom, the man realizes he can now understand the language of animals.
The story of the silent language also appears in Italian folk literature, recorded by Italo Calvino, who collected and published fairy tales from all Italian regions in the mid-1950s. The Italian version lacks the detail of the snake’s moist gift, and the peasant uses his newfound gift to become the wisest man in Western European religious culture—the Pope. Our Serbian peasant, however, uses his gift to attain what is most important to the average Serb—wealth and a beautiful wife. Both the Italian and Serbian versions of the silent language story have their roots in older medieval collections of fantasy. The structure of the Serbian story supports this, as it features, like medieval sources, a prohibition on revealing a supernatural encounter, the violation of which brings dire consequences. Like its medieval predecessors, Vuk’s story concludes with a significant moral lesson.
Instead of ending the tale with the peasant’s newfound wealth and happy marriage, Vuk adds a final twist that reveals the full charm of our mentality. One day, the peasant overhears a conversation between a horse and a mare, where it’s revealed that his wife is pregnant. His curious wife asks why he is laughing, and he tells her he cannot reveal it, but the more he resists, the more she insists. When they return home, the peasant orders a coffin and lies down in it, prepared to reveal his supernatural gift. Then, he overhears a conversation between his loyal dog and a rooster. The rooster says, “I have a hundred wives, and I summon them all with a single grain of corn, and when they come, I eat it. If any get angry, I peck them. But my master can’t manage to calm even one.” Hearing this, the man gets up from the coffin, grabs a stick, and calls to his (pregnant) wife, “Come here, woman, so I can tell you why I laughed”—and then beats her with the stick. “That’s why, woman, that’s why!” And so, the wife calms down and never asks him why he laughed again.
A Serbian story with a Serbian moral.
If you think this is an exaggerated conclusion, in the next part, you’ll see what happened to the Serbian fairy Raviojla.
To be continued…
LITERATURE:
AA.VV., La pensée encyclopédique au moyen âge, Neuchâtel, 1966.
AA.VV., L’Enciclopedismo medievale, edited by M. Picone, Ravenna, 1994.
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia – Book III: The Wonders of the World, edited by Fortunata Latella, Carocci Editore, 2010.
Gerald of Wales, At the Farthest Borders of the West, edited by Melita Cataldi, Strenna Utet, 2002.
Dimitrije Bogdanović, History of Old Serbian Literature, Srpska književna zadruga, 1991, p. 6.
Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, Zoran Stojanović Publishing House, Sremski Karlovci, 1999, p. 52.
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, Mondadori Editore, 1985.
Jacqueline Hamesse, The Reading Model in the Age of Scholasticism, in History of Reading in the Western World, ed. C. Cavallo and R. Chartier, Rome, 1995, pp. 91-115.
Michelangelo Picone (ed.), L’Enciclopedismo medievale, Ravenna, 1994.
Rastislav Marić, Ancient Cults in Our Land, Belgrade, 1933, p. 19.
Ristoro D’Arezzo, La Composizione del mondo by R. d’A., edited by E. Narducci, Rome 1859 (Milan 1864).
The Romance of Troy / The Romance of Alexander, edited by Prof. Dr. Radmila Marinković, Prosveta, Belgrade, 1986, p. 129.
Sonia Maura Barillari (ed.), The Afterlife: Masks, Signs, Visible and Invisible Itineraries (Rocca Grimalda, September 27-28, 1997), Edizioni dell’Orso, pp. 104-107.