The Return of Legends

As the stable world seems less stable, remember that it has happened before.
We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.

Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faerie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur.
According to the legends, those were the great times.

6 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I am a bit torn about this. I have been studying the period form about 350-750 throughout Europe quite a bit lately and realise that these best stories likely grew up because the tribes that succeeded the Romans were illiterate and we just don't have good records.

And yet, I do like those stories.

Grim said...

They didn't have good records, but it could be that they had better storytellers.

Or it could be that there were better stories. The age of hardship may have bred strong men.

Ymar Sakar said...

This world needs to burn infire and be transformed anew. Free of disjonesty and lies and self deception. If individuals choose light or darkz the transition will be smooth.

If they fight it out... just look at media fears.

I told people esp here, exactly what the cabal was doing and what pluto in capricorn meant.

They want to unleash a virus or some.bio fun weapon to farm fear?

And they do it when pluto is in capricorn.... good job, that means the divine fate who lives or dies.

Who dies and when is determined mostly by their vedic chart.

And if the square of 1 %of humanity calls for aid from the light... guess where death is heading.

The death of the world elite. Allofthem. Separate chaff from wheat.

It is not that the xreator authorized this. Creator is not against it. Creator blinds itself to it to preserve our free will. We get to decide the story of earth. The source knows the beginning and the end. Scripted interactions.

But the fun is in not k owing the result of choice amongat earth s majority.

David Foster said...

"We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale"...C S Lewis asserts that the classic fairy tale actually starts this way...ordinary, day-to-day stuff morphing into the fantastic.

Grim said...

Yes, that’s right. Chesterton elsewhere makes a point about how similar our world is to the wild ethics of Elfland.

www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html

ymarsakar said...

People might as well call it Ymarland. I love the emotional reactions of conservatives when they start talking about crystal hippies, tree huggers, and Leftists, then I jump in the conversation and start talking about using rocks for healing clients. There's like this dead silence, but I can still pick up their shocked reactions.

Ah conservatives, too polite to react the way fun lovin Leftists react.