Scott Davis Howard's Blog
August 3, 2020
Release Party
Hey folks,
My newest novel, FARADAY'S MIRROR, is out this week. Hop on over to Facebook and join the release party. There will be a book talk, Q and A, live readings, giveaways, drawings, and group chats. I'd be happy to have you. It's a public event.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Farad...
My newest novel, FARADAY'S MIRROR, is out this week. Hop on over to Facebook and join the release party. There will be a book talk, Q and A, live readings, giveaways, drawings, and group chats. I'd be happy to have you. It's a public event.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Farad...
March 30, 2020
Dorian Gray and Giveaways
As a quarantined English teacher, I've started a read-aloud with analysis of The Picture of Dorain Gray for my homebound students. I'm up to Chapter 7 as of tonight. Anyone who wants to give it a go, here's the link to the playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
I figure with a stay at home order (at least in Virginia) until June 10th, it can't hurt to offer free intellectual stimulation. It's certainly suitable for high school and college students (and all literary nerds everywhere).
Speaking of free material, to help stave off the boredom of being at home, I'll send anyone who messages me a PDF of any one of my short stories. No strings. I'm not a millionaire, but entertainment is something I can offer.
Thanks!
--Scott
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
I figure with a stay at home order (at least in Virginia) until June 10th, it can't hurt to offer free intellectual stimulation. It's certainly suitable for high school and college students (and all literary nerds everywhere).
Speaking of free material, to help stave off the boredom of being at home, I'll send anyone who messages me a PDF of any one of my short stories. No strings. I'm not a millionaire, but entertainment is something I can offer.
Thanks!
--Scott
Dorian Gray and Giveaways
As a quarantined English teacher, I've started a read-aloud with analysis of The Picture of Dorain Gray for my homebound students. I'm up to Chapter 7 as of tonight. Anyone who wants to give it a go, here's the link to the playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
I figure with a stay at home order (at least in Virginia) until June 10th, it can't hurt to offer free lecture material.
Speaking of free material, to help stave off the boredom of being at home, I'll send anyone who messages me a PDF of any one of my short stories. No strings. I'm not a millionaire, but entertainment is something I can do.
Thanks!
--Scott
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
I figure with a stay at home order (at least in Virginia) until June 10th, it can't hurt to offer free lecture material.
Speaking of free material, to help stave off the boredom of being at home, I'll send anyone who messages me a PDF of any one of my short stories. No strings. I'm not a millionaire, but entertainment is something I can do.
Thanks!
--Scott
December 19, 2019
Dark Matters
So, I have a new short story out just in time for Christmas. In fact, it’s in the Piedmont Journal of Poetry and Fiction’s new collection, Holiday Tales and Adventures (now on Kindle and in print). I’m pretty proud of it. If you’re a fan of sci-fi, the TV show Black Mirror, mystery, morality plays, Dante’s Inferno, or Dr. Faustus, this one’s for you.
It’s the first story in the collection, so the Amazon preview will give you a chunk of it for free. In that same spirit, here’s the prologue and first act (first thing I’ve ever written in the 2nd person, enjoy):
Dark Matters
A Morality Play in Three Acts
Scott Davis Howard
You yawn, shiver, and board the commuter hovertrain, sipping your medicated coffee as you search for a reasonably clean seat on which to spend the seventy-nine minutes from Nashua to your law firm in Hartford. Sweeping some bagel crumbs from the Teflon upholstery, you settle into an unobtrusive nook. You’ve been looking forward to the final chapters of the VisualClassic library book that you’ve been watching for weeks: Dante’s Inferno. The immersive imagery has been haunting your dreams every night, but you can’t seem to get enough. The company spared no expense on this production. Yesterday, you left Odysseus burning in torment and met the giant Ephialtes, who would take you and Dante down into the 9th level of perdition--that’s one floor above my cubicle, you chuckle, thinking briefly about the office. You cough. Your coffee tastes like Robitussin.
Just then, the Cerebrocastor Alert buzzes inside your head. The Pharma-Tech node in your cortex flashes an image of a frosted white corpse onto your inner-eye, overlaid with three-dimensional letters, spelling:
F. Baur McClelland Memory-Scan Special in Three Acts--WORLD PREMIER!
It’s followed by three blinking options: ACCEPT, DISMISS, and SNOOZE. You’re annoyed, and you consider cancelling your ad-blocking subscription. You grunt, realizing that this must be one of those premium ads that don’t get blocked. Glancing out the window at the suburban sunrise glinting on the frosted lithium Solaroofs, you consider winking to dismiss the alert or perhaps flicking your eyes to the right to at least snooze it until later. Then an audio track plays in your inner ear:
“How did F. Baur McClelland turn himself into the richest man in the universe? How’d he become the first immortal human being? Experience the story as never before: in the first-person! Today’s compete-memory brainscan, newly authorized by Baur’s only living descendant, is an immersive tell-all exposé, and at a low $339.99, who can pass it up?”
You sigh. He’s right. It’s too much to resist. How in the universe, you wonder, did a 41-year-old maintenance technician on a doomed mission studying Sagittarius-A manage to escape nearly-certain death and zero-in on a 90% pure ionized lithium asteroid floating half a lightyear away? How’d he convert that almost incalculable wealth into a pharmatechnical empire that increased the standard human lifespan by 30%? And to top it all off Baur then invented the first fully-effective cryogenic liquid helium freezing and thawing device? It seemed too much for one man to accomplish in a lifetime. Sure, there’d been plenty about it in history class, at least three immersive movies, two-dozen documentaries, dramas--even a musical--but the opportunity to live it all first-hand through a scan of the man’s own mind?
The blinking options projecting on your inner-eye intensify to the point where they flash painfully and a slight buzz can be heard, thrumming with each change of visual severity. You flick your eyes left, selecting ACCEPT, and wink, beginning the program:
ACT I: December 25th, 2610 CE
The warning claxons blare in your ears as you take a desperate look across the cramped control room and out the viewport at Sagittarius-A’s swirling maw, growing ever-closer. You figure that you’re probably less than a minute from crossing the event-horizon. In the distance, the bodies of the engineer and commander have already passed the threshold, along with the scattered wreckage and debris that’d been blasted from the hydrogen fuel cell they’d been attempting to repair. Their white spacesuits are beginning to darken from the redshift as they fall deeper into the gravity-well, and your degrading high-speed orbit’s dragging them out of your field of vision. They’ve already spaghettified, you know, but that can’t be seen from the outside due to the singularity’s effect on light waves. At least they got to die together, you think, feeling how incredibly alone you are. A very merry Christmas to me, you add, full of ironic self-pity, then shrug: at least the corpse of the pilot is here with you, zipped into a bag in storage.
Returning your focus to the display, your eyes scan across no less than five warning lights. Hull stress has eclipsed safety limits. Fuel reserves read zero. Batteries are below 23%. The explosion rent a small hole in the oxygen tanks, too--O2 levels have already dropped to 52% and continue their precipitous decline. This means that even if you can break free from the gravity and escape, and even if you get into a suit, you’ll be dead of suffocation within thirteen hours. Giving a defeated sigh, you wonder when the maw’s pull will supersede the artificial gravity device and pin you to the wall.
In preparation for the inevitable, you do the only thing you can think of, you smash open the emergency medical case and fumble for the syringe of Triphaetonal. With shaking fingers you remove the plastic cap on the needle, skim across the instructions on the syringe, and pry off the safety-blocker that prevents overdose. You jab it into your thigh, injecting the maximum amount--three times the opiate dose recommended for your body-weight. You flop into your chair, sigh contentedly, and try to focus your suddenly-heavy eyes on the yawning hole in front of you. Your lips form a goofy smile, and the tune of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” starts playing in your mind. You seriously consider singing along.
You blink; it feels like an age passes. When you open your eyes, the ship is spinning--or, you wonder, could it be your vision? The vessel’s titanium skeleton begins to creak and groan around you, like sea-ice, and you casually consider whether you’ll die from g-forces before the ship implodes, or if it will crush you like a mouse in a trash-compactor first. This strikes you as funny, and you giggle. The sound of the claxons begins to warp. Does gravity affect sound waves? you wonder.
“What a time to be alive,” you hear a resonant and aristocratic British accent from the command chair. Turning your head, you’re amazed to see a red-skinned, black-bearded Satan relaxing there, goat-legs crossed, long, black-nailed fingers fidgeting contentedly with a lit cigarillo. The smoke whorls into the air around his pointed horns.
“What the Hell?” you manage.
“Exactly,” he nods.
“What is this? Are you real?”
“As real as you are,” Satan responds, taking a draw and exhaling a smoke ring.
“But why you?”
“You were expecting, perhaps, Santa Claus?” the devil smirks. “That would seem more seasonally appropriate, I suppose. At least he’s my anagram, so, close enough, eh? I’m red, and I do plan to offer you a gift.”
“Am I,” you hesitate, trying to focus your scattered thoughts, “dead?”
Satan chuckles, “We’re all dead. We’re born dead. Time is an illusion.”
“Have I, crossed over, then?”
“The event-horizon?” Satan asks. “Why, yes, I’m afraid so. To anyone outside, you appear to be redshifting right now.”
“No, not into the black hole. Into,” you swallow, “you know, Hell?”
“Oh my, no.” Satan’s reply is blithe. “Not yet, at any rate.”
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Well,” Satan shrugs, “I suppose that you’d call me a manifestation of your subconscious mind as it attempts to deal with the incalculable weight of eternity. But in reality--if there is a reality--I am the physical manifestation of the philosophical concept of eternity. You see, once across the horizon, you become everlasting. Time ceases to have mathematical value. All points, future and past, overlap here. Everything to ever enter a black hole has already entered, from the internal perspective, and since all black holes will eventually swallow everything, including each other, the omniverse is already here--all of it.” He pauses for a heartbeat. “World without end.”
Satan scrapes a nail across one of his teeth and then examines it, running his tongue around his mouth. He clears his throat and continues: “From the external perspective, I suppose, motion still occurs and the gathering of space-time, and of souls, as you humans so quaintly call them, is an ongoing process. That’s what your Bible always gets so wrong, that Hell is a work in progress, that eternity is ongoing--I daresay that is sheer human idiocy. Eternity is and has always been, from the very moment of its conception, complete.” Satan raises a blue-black eyebrow. “Am I boring you?”
“A little,” you admit. “Maybe confusing me, more like.”
“Ah, right,” Satan shrugs, a little disappointed. “You are only a maintenance technician, after all, and you had to forge an intelligence examination score to even get on this mission.” He snorts, “Bad choice, that. Should have stayed in that apartment in Billings and gotten over your divorce instead of running from it. Then you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have made and covered-up the mistake that eventually crippled this ship and killed the rest of the crew.”
“How do you know about. . .?” you trail off.
“My dear fellow,” the devil tests the point of a horn on his finger, “I am Satan, after all.”
“So what is the--”
“The point? The reason I’m here? The why? Ouch!” He draws his finger back from his horn and sucks it briefly. “Why, I’ve already told you: I’m here to offer you a gift.”
“What kind of gift?’ you ask, suspicious.
“Your life, and, oh,” Satan sighs, bored, “anything you want, really.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You expect me to say, ‘no catch,’ but,” he draws out the syllables on the last word, “it is in fact the usual catch: your soul. Eternal torment. Damnation.” He yawns. “Demons, pitchforks, boiling pitch, utter hopelessness, perdition, inferno, you know the drill.” Satan flicks out a forked tongue, licks his index finger and thumb, and then uses them to smooth the mustaches in his goatee.
You glance out the viewport, seeing nothing but black, and feeling, rather than observing, it spiral down into oblivion. Unnoticed to you before, the emergency lights have come on. Everything seems dimmer, and you can actually track the wavelike motion of the light beams.
“What choice do I have?” you ask. “Death?”
“Death,” Satan agrees.
“What can I ask for?”
“Aside from your life?” Satan shrugs his red shoulders. “The usual, I suppose. Wealth, power, knowledge, sex. But you’d better hurry. Your body is about to fail.”
You focus your wandering thoughts and come to a decision. “Okay, I’ll take life--I want wealth though, to be the richest man in the universe; and I want brains, to be a premier genius of mankind like Einstein, Huang, or Hawking--but not crippled like Hawking,” you add, hastily.
“Anything else?” Satan asks, masking another yawn.
“I want love,” you add hastily.
Satan gawks. “Who do you think I am?” he demands. “Love” he says the word with distaste, “is not in my purview.”
“Fine, then, lust--successful completion of any lust I have.”
“Any lust?” Satan asks shaking his head. “You do remember Paris and Helen? It’s an easy way to end up dead. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so greedy with your gifts.”
You nod your head, thinking his comment sensible. “Fine,” you agree, “strike the lust. Money and intelligence seem good enough for me.”
“And--just to be clear--in exchange I get your soul when you die?”
“Agreed,” you nod. “Do I have to sign a parchment or something?”
“Please,” Satan chuckles. “We are in the 27th century.” He pulls a datapad from his waist and holds it out. “You really think I used to ask cavemen to sign a parchment? Heavens no, we spat on our hands and shook in those days. This, you must admit, is more elegant. Your thumbprint, if you will.”
You extend your thumb and scan it into the pad. No sooner does the scan complete than a dreadful, resonant laugh fills the control room. The smell of thick, electrical smoke assails your nostrils, and the laugh fades into the lazy crackle of fire.
***
You cough, sit up, and retch over the side of your chair. The air is cloudy and acrid. An electrical panel sizzles to your left. A lone, forked tongue of flame laps into the air from a node of circuits.
You stand, unsteadily, and pull the extinguisher from the wall, spraying the fire. It’s cold in the ship--everything’s frosted. The emergency lights are so pale that half the command room is bathed in shadow. The batteries must be on their last reserves. Rubbing your temples, you try to remember where you are and why. You recall the explosion, the black hole, the Triphaetonal--and Satan? Was it real? Couldn’t be.
“Why aren’t I dead?” you ask the empty room. No one answers.
You stumble over to the panel with the warning lights. Only three are flashing. Hull stress reads normal. Fuel reserves are at zero. Batteries blink below 6%. The oxygen tank, however, seems to have stabilized somehow: O2 levels have stopped dropping at 19%.
What happened? you wonder and punch up video and sensor records from the computer. Ten minutes of study shows you the gist. As you fell toward the back hole, your centripetal speed increased, and just as you were about to pass the event horizon, the hole spat something large out, which collided with you, connecting at the precise location of the O2 tank and sending you rocketing out into space at an incredible velocity. It was a perfect storm of coincidence, the trillion-to-one lottery. Had your speed been a hair different in either direction, you would have either missed the collision entirely or been pulverized. Unbelievably, the impact sealed the O2 tank.
You look out the viewport at an unfamiliar star formation. You’re stopped, or at least at a slow orbit. You walk to the window and gaze out, looking for a planet. Instead, you find only a jagged silver meteor, surrounded by a cloud of similarly reflective dust and debris--nothing else as far as the eye can see.
According to the computer, you’ve traveled almost half a lightyear in a span of twelve hours and were drawn to a dead stop while passing through the field of a nearby magnetar. Its glow can be seen in the distance, about the size and color of a pearl. The coincidence of it all has passed the point of improbable and reached the level of ludicrous inconceivability.
Yet, here you are. You check the scanners to discover that the asteroid, similar in size to the continent of Australia, is composed almost entirely of lithium, the most valuable metal in the galaxy.
And to crown all, the lithium’s ionized--perhaps because of its proximity to the magnetar star--making it a fully-charged battery of unimaginable proportions. You glance down at the blinking light on your console and smile.
“Eureka,” you intone, followed by a happy whistle, which shortly becomes the opening bars of “I’ll be Home for Christmas.”
***
For the rest, check out the collection: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/ (PRINT)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082S634XP/... (KINDLE)
Published by PJPF in 2016
Scott Davis Howard is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-T.... PJPF’s collection Holiday Tales & Adventures can be purchased at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/
It’s the first story in the collection, so the Amazon preview will give you a chunk of it for free. In that same spirit, here’s the prologue and first act (first thing I’ve ever written in the 2nd person, enjoy):
Dark Matters
A Morality Play in Three Acts
Scott Davis Howard
You yawn, shiver, and board the commuter hovertrain, sipping your medicated coffee as you search for a reasonably clean seat on which to spend the seventy-nine minutes from Nashua to your law firm in Hartford. Sweeping some bagel crumbs from the Teflon upholstery, you settle into an unobtrusive nook. You’ve been looking forward to the final chapters of the VisualClassic library book that you’ve been watching for weeks: Dante’s Inferno. The immersive imagery has been haunting your dreams every night, but you can’t seem to get enough. The company spared no expense on this production. Yesterday, you left Odysseus burning in torment and met the giant Ephialtes, who would take you and Dante down into the 9th level of perdition--that’s one floor above my cubicle, you chuckle, thinking briefly about the office. You cough. Your coffee tastes like Robitussin.
Just then, the Cerebrocastor Alert buzzes inside your head. The Pharma-Tech node in your cortex flashes an image of a frosted white corpse onto your inner-eye, overlaid with three-dimensional letters, spelling:
F. Baur McClelland Memory-Scan Special in Three Acts--WORLD PREMIER!
It’s followed by three blinking options: ACCEPT, DISMISS, and SNOOZE. You’re annoyed, and you consider cancelling your ad-blocking subscription. You grunt, realizing that this must be one of those premium ads that don’t get blocked. Glancing out the window at the suburban sunrise glinting on the frosted lithium Solaroofs, you consider winking to dismiss the alert or perhaps flicking your eyes to the right to at least snooze it until later. Then an audio track plays in your inner ear:
“How did F. Baur McClelland turn himself into the richest man in the universe? How’d he become the first immortal human being? Experience the story as never before: in the first-person! Today’s compete-memory brainscan, newly authorized by Baur’s only living descendant, is an immersive tell-all exposé, and at a low $339.99, who can pass it up?”
You sigh. He’s right. It’s too much to resist. How in the universe, you wonder, did a 41-year-old maintenance technician on a doomed mission studying Sagittarius-A manage to escape nearly-certain death and zero-in on a 90% pure ionized lithium asteroid floating half a lightyear away? How’d he convert that almost incalculable wealth into a pharmatechnical empire that increased the standard human lifespan by 30%? And to top it all off Baur then invented the first fully-effective cryogenic liquid helium freezing and thawing device? It seemed too much for one man to accomplish in a lifetime. Sure, there’d been plenty about it in history class, at least three immersive movies, two-dozen documentaries, dramas--even a musical--but the opportunity to live it all first-hand through a scan of the man’s own mind?
The blinking options projecting on your inner-eye intensify to the point where they flash painfully and a slight buzz can be heard, thrumming with each change of visual severity. You flick your eyes left, selecting ACCEPT, and wink, beginning the program:
ACT I: December 25th, 2610 CE
The warning claxons blare in your ears as you take a desperate look across the cramped control room and out the viewport at Sagittarius-A’s swirling maw, growing ever-closer. You figure that you’re probably less than a minute from crossing the event-horizon. In the distance, the bodies of the engineer and commander have already passed the threshold, along with the scattered wreckage and debris that’d been blasted from the hydrogen fuel cell they’d been attempting to repair. Their white spacesuits are beginning to darken from the redshift as they fall deeper into the gravity-well, and your degrading high-speed orbit’s dragging them out of your field of vision. They’ve already spaghettified, you know, but that can’t be seen from the outside due to the singularity’s effect on light waves. At least they got to die together, you think, feeling how incredibly alone you are. A very merry Christmas to me, you add, full of ironic self-pity, then shrug: at least the corpse of the pilot is here with you, zipped into a bag in storage.
Returning your focus to the display, your eyes scan across no less than five warning lights. Hull stress has eclipsed safety limits. Fuel reserves read zero. Batteries are below 23%. The explosion rent a small hole in the oxygen tanks, too--O2 levels have already dropped to 52% and continue their precipitous decline. This means that even if you can break free from the gravity and escape, and even if you get into a suit, you’ll be dead of suffocation within thirteen hours. Giving a defeated sigh, you wonder when the maw’s pull will supersede the artificial gravity device and pin you to the wall.
In preparation for the inevitable, you do the only thing you can think of, you smash open the emergency medical case and fumble for the syringe of Triphaetonal. With shaking fingers you remove the plastic cap on the needle, skim across the instructions on the syringe, and pry off the safety-blocker that prevents overdose. You jab it into your thigh, injecting the maximum amount--three times the opiate dose recommended for your body-weight. You flop into your chair, sigh contentedly, and try to focus your suddenly-heavy eyes on the yawning hole in front of you. Your lips form a goofy smile, and the tune of “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” starts playing in your mind. You seriously consider singing along.
You blink; it feels like an age passes. When you open your eyes, the ship is spinning--or, you wonder, could it be your vision? The vessel’s titanium skeleton begins to creak and groan around you, like sea-ice, and you casually consider whether you’ll die from g-forces before the ship implodes, or if it will crush you like a mouse in a trash-compactor first. This strikes you as funny, and you giggle. The sound of the claxons begins to warp. Does gravity affect sound waves? you wonder.
“What a time to be alive,” you hear a resonant and aristocratic British accent from the command chair. Turning your head, you’re amazed to see a red-skinned, black-bearded Satan relaxing there, goat-legs crossed, long, black-nailed fingers fidgeting contentedly with a lit cigarillo. The smoke whorls into the air around his pointed horns.
“What the Hell?” you manage.
“Exactly,” he nods.
“What is this? Are you real?”
“As real as you are,” Satan responds, taking a draw and exhaling a smoke ring.
“But why you?”
“You were expecting, perhaps, Santa Claus?” the devil smirks. “That would seem more seasonally appropriate, I suppose. At least he’s my anagram, so, close enough, eh? I’m red, and I do plan to offer you a gift.”
“Am I,” you hesitate, trying to focus your scattered thoughts, “dead?”
Satan chuckles, “We’re all dead. We’re born dead. Time is an illusion.”
“Have I, crossed over, then?”
“The event-horizon?” Satan asks. “Why, yes, I’m afraid so. To anyone outside, you appear to be redshifting right now.”
“No, not into the black hole. Into,” you swallow, “you know, Hell?”
“Oh my, no.” Satan’s reply is blithe. “Not yet, at any rate.”
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Well,” Satan shrugs, “I suppose that you’d call me a manifestation of your subconscious mind as it attempts to deal with the incalculable weight of eternity. But in reality--if there is a reality--I am the physical manifestation of the philosophical concept of eternity. You see, once across the horizon, you become everlasting. Time ceases to have mathematical value. All points, future and past, overlap here. Everything to ever enter a black hole has already entered, from the internal perspective, and since all black holes will eventually swallow everything, including each other, the omniverse is already here--all of it.” He pauses for a heartbeat. “World without end.”
Satan scrapes a nail across one of his teeth and then examines it, running his tongue around his mouth. He clears his throat and continues: “From the external perspective, I suppose, motion still occurs and the gathering of space-time, and of souls, as you humans so quaintly call them, is an ongoing process. That’s what your Bible always gets so wrong, that Hell is a work in progress, that eternity is ongoing--I daresay that is sheer human idiocy. Eternity is and has always been, from the very moment of its conception, complete.” Satan raises a blue-black eyebrow. “Am I boring you?”
“A little,” you admit. “Maybe confusing me, more like.”
“Ah, right,” Satan shrugs, a little disappointed. “You are only a maintenance technician, after all, and you had to forge an intelligence examination score to even get on this mission.” He snorts, “Bad choice, that. Should have stayed in that apartment in Billings and gotten over your divorce instead of running from it. Then you wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t have made and covered-up the mistake that eventually crippled this ship and killed the rest of the crew.”
“How do you know about. . .?” you trail off.
“My dear fellow,” the devil tests the point of a horn on his finger, “I am Satan, after all.”
“So what is the--”
“The point? The reason I’m here? The why? Ouch!” He draws his finger back from his horn and sucks it briefly. “Why, I’ve already told you: I’m here to offer you a gift.”
“What kind of gift?’ you ask, suspicious.
“Your life, and, oh,” Satan sighs, bored, “anything you want, really.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You expect me to say, ‘no catch,’ but,” he draws out the syllables on the last word, “it is in fact the usual catch: your soul. Eternal torment. Damnation.” He yawns. “Demons, pitchforks, boiling pitch, utter hopelessness, perdition, inferno, you know the drill.” Satan flicks out a forked tongue, licks his index finger and thumb, and then uses them to smooth the mustaches in his goatee.
You glance out the viewport, seeing nothing but black, and feeling, rather than observing, it spiral down into oblivion. Unnoticed to you before, the emergency lights have come on. Everything seems dimmer, and you can actually track the wavelike motion of the light beams.
“What choice do I have?” you ask. “Death?”
“Death,” Satan agrees.
“What can I ask for?”
“Aside from your life?” Satan shrugs his red shoulders. “The usual, I suppose. Wealth, power, knowledge, sex. But you’d better hurry. Your body is about to fail.”
You focus your wandering thoughts and come to a decision. “Okay, I’ll take life--I want wealth though, to be the richest man in the universe; and I want brains, to be a premier genius of mankind like Einstein, Huang, or Hawking--but not crippled like Hawking,” you add, hastily.
“Anything else?” Satan asks, masking another yawn.
“I want love,” you add hastily.
Satan gawks. “Who do you think I am?” he demands. “Love” he says the word with distaste, “is not in my purview.”
“Fine, then, lust--successful completion of any lust I have.”
“Any lust?” Satan asks shaking his head. “You do remember Paris and Helen? It’s an easy way to end up dead. Perhaps you shouldn’t be so greedy with your gifts.”
You nod your head, thinking his comment sensible. “Fine,” you agree, “strike the lust. Money and intelligence seem good enough for me.”
“And--just to be clear--in exchange I get your soul when you die?”
“Agreed,” you nod. “Do I have to sign a parchment or something?”
“Please,” Satan chuckles. “We are in the 27th century.” He pulls a datapad from his waist and holds it out. “You really think I used to ask cavemen to sign a parchment? Heavens no, we spat on our hands and shook in those days. This, you must admit, is more elegant. Your thumbprint, if you will.”
You extend your thumb and scan it into the pad. No sooner does the scan complete than a dreadful, resonant laugh fills the control room. The smell of thick, electrical smoke assails your nostrils, and the laugh fades into the lazy crackle of fire.
***
You cough, sit up, and retch over the side of your chair. The air is cloudy and acrid. An electrical panel sizzles to your left. A lone, forked tongue of flame laps into the air from a node of circuits.
You stand, unsteadily, and pull the extinguisher from the wall, spraying the fire. It’s cold in the ship--everything’s frosted. The emergency lights are so pale that half the command room is bathed in shadow. The batteries must be on their last reserves. Rubbing your temples, you try to remember where you are and why. You recall the explosion, the black hole, the Triphaetonal--and Satan? Was it real? Couldn’t be.
“Why aren’t I dead?” you ask the empty room. No one answers.
You stumble over to the panel with the warning lights. Only three are flashing. Hull stress reads normal. Fuel reserves are at zero. Batteries blink below 6%. The oxygen tank, however, seems to have stabilized somehow: O2 levels have stopped dropping at 19%.
What happened? you wonder and punch up video and sensor records from the computer. Ten minutes of study shows you the gist. As you fell toward the back hole, your centripetal speed increased, and just as you were about to pass the event horizon, the hole spat something large out, which collided with you, connecting at the precise location of the O2 tank and sending you rocketing out into space at an incredible velocity. It was a perfect storm of coincidence, the trillion-to-one lottery. Had your speed been a hair different in either direction, you would have either missed the collision entirely or been pulverized. Unbelievably, the impact sealed the O2 tank.
You look out the viewport at an unfamiliar star formation. You’re stopped, or at least at a slow orbit. You walk to the window and gaze out, looking for a planet. Instead, you find only a jagged silver meteor, surrounded by a cloud of similarly reflective dust and debris--nothing else as far as the eye can see.
According to the computer, you’ve traveled almost half a lightyear in a span of twelve hours and were drawn to a dead stop while passing through the field of a nearby magnetar. Its glow can be seen in the distance, about the size and color of a pearl. The coincidence of it all has passed the point of improbable and reached the level of ludicrous inconceivability.
Yet, here you are. You check the scanners to discover that the asteroid, similar in size to the continent of Australia, is composed almost entirely of lithium, the most valuable metal in the galaxy.
And to crown all, the lithium’s ionized--perhaps because of its proximity to the magnetar star--making it a fully-charged battery of unimaginable proportions. You glance down at the blinking light on your console and smile.
“Eureka,” you intone, followed by a happy whistle, which shortly becomes the opening bars of “I’ll be Home for Christmas.”
***
For the rest, check out the collection: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/ (PRINT)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082S634XP/... (KINDLE)
Published by PJPF in 2016
Scott Davis Howard is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-T.... PJPF’s collection Holiday Tales & Adventures can be purchased at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1675935939/
September 14, 2018
Jason's Argonauts and the Siege of Troy
So, I should be doing a lot of other things right now... lesson planning, grading papers, even writing my next novel (it’s in-progress), but instead I find myself down a literary rabbit-hole (again).
I’ve been prepping to teach The Odyssey to my Pre-AP English 9 (PAP9) students, and earlier this year The Iliad was a choice text for my AP Literature and composition students. Like a good teacher, I’ve been reading them, too (well, okay, listening on my commute).
Simultaneously, my PAP9 students have been giving presentations on Greek myths. I was particularly interested in the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, when I heard that a hero by the name of Telamon was an Argonaut and a friend of Hercules. Now, I read Jason and the Argonauts years and years ago, but most of the names were meaningless to me then, and I was just reading for fun with no thought of academic research. Now, though, especially with so much Homer on my mind, I immediately made a connection to “Telamonian Ajax” or the Greater Ajax (a tower of a man and second greatest Greek warrior to Achilles). Long story short, it turns out that his dad was an Argonaut and sailed with Jason.
‘Hold up,’ I thought, ‘are there a lot of Argonaut sons besieging Troy?’ It turns out the answer to that is a resounding YES as well--not just sons, but some of the younger Argonauts themselves are encamped on the “ringing plains of windy Troy” (Tennyson quote). So, here’s a list of Argonauts that show up in The Iliad or The Odyssey (or both). You may recognize some names: Autolycus, Castor and Pollux, Idomeneus, Iphitos, Laertes, Leitus, Nauplias, Nestor, Oileus, Peleus, Peneleos, Philocthetes, Telamon, Theseus (yes, THAT Theseus), and Tydeus. And, so you don’t have to do the work, here are the connections:
Autolycus is the father of a fair daughter named Anticlea. She marries a friend of her father’s, Laertes, and as a result is Odysseus’ mom. Her son talks to her for a while in Hades.
Castor and Pollux (aside from having their names alluded to as characters in The Hunger Games) were twin brothers who fought beside Jason and Hercules. Their twin sisters are (get ready for this) Helen of Sparta and Clytemnestra of Mycenae--yep, the woman whose face launched 1,000 ships, and the wife of King Agamemnon himself. It turns out they married the great kings (themselves descended from Perseus) of Sparta and Mycenae, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Clytemnestra has her own myth in which she and her lover, Aegisthus, kill her husband upon his return.
Idomeneus is the son of Minos of Crete (yep--THAT Minos with the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and Dedealus and Icarus).
Idomeneus sends his sons to Troy with the Greeks, and Odysseus pretends to be one of those sons when he returns to Ithaca as a beggar.
Iphitos sent two sons to Troy to fight alongside Ajax the Greater. Their names were Schedius and Epistrophus and they were both killed by Hector.
Laertes is, in fact, Odysseus’ father. He was an Argonaut, and marrying the daughter of another Argonaut, their child, Odysseus, is basically like Argonaut royalty... which totally makes him a great person to put on a long sea voyage.
Leitus was one of the younger Argonauts and he actually fights in the Trojan war.
Nauplias is an interesting fellow. His son, Palamedes, embarked for Troy. In fact it was Palamedes who outwitted Odysseus, forcing him to honor his promise to fight with Menelaus. In retribution, Odysseus and Diomedes (another son of an Argonaut--see below) framed Palamedes for treason and had him stoned to death. Then, hearing of the outrage, Nauplias (who was really old) sailed to Troy to demand justice. Finding none, he cursed the Greeks’ homeward voyage and left.
Nestor was another young Argonaut in the Jason story. He also fights in the war, alongside two of his sons, Antilochus (a great hero who dies with honor) and Thrasymedes. I believe Nestor’s the only one of the Argo’s original crew to return home from Troy. So, when Odysseus’ son, Telemachus goes to visit Nestor in The Odyssey, it would be like a grandson visiting one of his veteran grandfather’s platoon-mates.
Oeleus was the father of the lesser Ajax, another great hero of the Greeks.
Peleus is an Argonaut, a great friend of Hercules, and (wait for it) Achilles’ father. Yeah. It’s starting to seem like all the big-name Greeks are connected with Argonauts. When he got married, the gods came, but he didn’t invite Eris, the goddess of discord, so she dropped the golden apple that started the whole Trojan war.
Penelos is another Argonaut that fights in the war. He’s just one of the many named Greeks to get laid low by Hector, Aeneas, or Paris.
Philocthetes is an Argonaut who went to Troy. Too old to face traditional combat, he still is an incredible archer and causes many casualties with his bow.
Telamon is the best bud of Peleus (Achilles’ dad). They were inseparable in Jason and the Argonauts. Telamon had two sons (by different women) who went to Troy. Ajax the Greater and Teucer the Archer. These two work together, Ajax holding a great shield and Teucer shooting from behind it. Ajax bests Hector in combat three times.
Theseus is famous in Athens for so many achievements, including slaying the Minotaur and defeating the Amazons, to name only two. It turns out his son, Acamas, was a Greek war-leader who was with Odysseus within the Trojan Horse.
And, finally, we come to the Argonaut Tydeus who was the father of Diomedes. Diomedes, if you’ll recall, was the third best Greek warrior after Achilles and Ajax. At one tense moment during the siege, Diomedes recognized that he was actually fighting against mighty Aries, and instead of yielding, incredibly, he went on to stab the god anyway. He had some guts.
Now, I’ve got to go grade some papers, but before I do, I just want to observe that there is some serious intertextuality going on here. The lines of great heroes seem to flow directly downstream from the Jason myth, through Troy, and into the Odyssey. Jason, too, connects to so may other myths--to Theseus, to Orpheus, Hercules, and Atalanta, to name a few. Oh, and I found most of this informally by surfing an obscene number of Wikipedia pages. Most of the info is linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonauts
More on this later, when I’ve had time to process it all...
I’ve been prepping to teach The Odyssey to my Pre-AP English 9 (PAP9) students, and earlier this year The Iliad was a choice text for my AP Literature and composition students. Like a good teacher, I’ve been reading them, too (well, okay, listening on my commute).
Simultaneously, my PAP9 students have been giving presentations on Greek myths. I was particularly interested in the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, when I heard that a hero by the name of Telamon was an Argonaut and a friend of Hercules. Now, I read Jason and the Argonauts years and years ago, but most of the names were meaningless to me then, and I was just reading for fun with no thought of academic research. Now, though, especially with so much Homer on my mind, I immediately made a connection to “Telamonian Ajax” or the Greater Ajax (a tower of a man and second greatest Greek warrior to Achilles). Long story short, it turns out that his dad was an Argonaut and sailed with Jason.
‘Hold up,’ I thought, ‘are there a lot of Argonaut sons besieging Troy?’ It turns out the answer to that is a resounding YES as well--not just sons, but some of the younger Argonauts themselves are encamped on the “ringing plains of windy Troy” (Tennyson quote). So, here’s a list of Argonauts that show up in The Iliad or The Odyssey (or both). You may recognize some names: Autolycus, Castor and Pollux, Idomeneus, Iphitos, Laertes, Leitus, Nauplias, Nestor, Oileus, Peleus, Peneleos, Philocthetes, Telamon, Theseus (yes, THAT Theseus), and Tydeus. And, so you don’t have to do the work, here are the connections:
Autolycus is the father of a fair daughter named Anticlea. She marries a friend of her father’s, Laertes, and as a result is Odysseus’ mom. Her son talks to her for a while in Hades.
Castor and Pollux (aside from having their names alluded to as characters in The Hunger Games) were twin brothers who fought beside Jason and Hercules. Their twin sisters are (get ready for this) Helen of Sparta and Clytemnestra of Mycenae--yep, the woman whose face launched 1,000 ships, and the wife of King Agamemnon himself. It turns out they married the great kings (themselves descended from Perseus) of Sparta and Mycenae, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Clytemnestra has her own myth in which she and her lover, Aegisthus, kill her husband upon his return.
Idomeneus is the son of Minos of Crete (yep--THAT Minos with the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and Dedealus and Icarus).
Idomeneus sends his sons to Troy with the Greeks, and Odysseus pretends to be one of those sons when he returns to Ithaca as a beggar.
Iphitos sent two sons to Troy to fight alongside Ajax the Greater. Their names were Schedius and Epistrophus and they were both killed by Hector.
Laertes is, in fact, Odysseus’ father. He was an Argonaut, and marrying the daughter of another Argonaut, their child, Odysseus, is basically like Argonaut royalty... which totally makes him a great person to put on a long sea voyage.
Leitus was one of the younger Argonauts and he actually fights in the Trojan war.
Nauplias is an interesting fellow. His son, Palamedes, embarked for Troy. In fact it was Palamedes who outwitted Odysseus, forcing him to honor his promise to fight with Menelaus. In retribution, Odysseus and Diomedes (another son of an Argonaut--see below) framed Palamedes for treason and had him stoned to death. Then, hearing of the outrage, Nauplias (who was really old) sailed to Troy to demand justice. Finding none, he cursed the Greeks’ homeward voyage and left.
Nestor was another young Argonaut in the Jason story. He also fights in the war, alongside two of his sons, Antilochus (a great hero who dies with honor) and Thrasymedes. I believe Nestor’s the only one of the Argo’s original crew to return home from Troy. So, when Odysseus’ son, Telemachus goes to visit Nestor in The Odyssey, it would be like a grandson visiting one of his veteran grandfather’s platoon-mates.
Oeleus was the father of the lesser Ajax, another great hero of the Greeks.
Peleus is an Argonaut, a great friend of Hercules, and (wait for it) Achilles’ father. Yeah. It’s starting to seem like all the big-name Greeks are connected with Argonauts. When he got married, the gods came, but he didn’t invite Eris, the goddess of discord, so she dropped the golden apple that started the whole Trojan war.
Penelos is another Argonaut that fights in the war. He’s just one of the many named Greeks to get laid low by Hector, Aeneas, or Paris.
Philocthetes is an Argonaut who went to Troy. Too old to face traditional combat, he still is an incredible archer and causes many casualties with his bow.
Telamon is the best bud of Peleus (Achilles’ dad). They were inseparable in Jason and the Argonauts. Telamon had two sons (by different women) who went to Troy. Ajax the Greater and Teucer the Archer. These two work together, Ajax holding a great shield and Teucer shooting from behind it. Ajax bests Hector in combat three times.
Theseus is famous in Athens for so many achievements, including slaying the Minotaur and defeating the Amazons, to name only two. It turns out his son, Acamas, was a Greek war-leader who was with Odysseus within the Trojan Horse.
And, finally, we come to the Argonaut Tydeus who was the father of Diomedes. Diomedes, if you’ll recall, was the third best Greek warrior after Achilles and Ajax. At one tense moment during the siege, Diomedes recognized that he was actually fighting against mighty Aries, and instead of yielding, incredibly, he went on to stab the god anyway. He had some guts.
Now, I’ve got to go grade some papers, but before I do, I just want to observe that there is some serious intertextuality going on here. The lines of great heroes seem to flow directly downstream from the Jason myth, through Troy, and into the Odyssey. Jason, too, connects to so may other myths--to Theseus, to Orpheus, Hercules, and Atalanta, to name a few. Oh, and I found most of this informally by surfing an obscene number of Wikipedia pages. Most of the info is linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonauts
More on this later, when I’ve had time to process it all...
April 29, 2018
Sir Gawain, the Gordian Knight
We all remember that Gordian Knot. A horrible, intricate tangle of rope that no one could untie (until Alexander the Great cut it up with his sword). Well, perhaps an equally puzzling and intricately tangled character in Arthurian legend is Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain. Outside of the big two (Arthur and Lancelot), Gawain is probably the most prominent Arthurian character, and he is certainly the most well-used side character in the tales of other knights, traditionally appearing alongside Arthur, Lancelot, Gaheris, Gareth, Agravain, Bors, King Pellinore, and even Mordred. He is also a major player in the Grail-Quest stories (and as an added bonus, he makes a cameo in just about every Arthur movie or novel and features as a recurring ‘frenemy’ in the unending American comic strip “Prince Valiant”). If you’re looking for Gawain as a protagonist, you’ll find him there too. He is the protagonist of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as a number of ballads and lays—and it’s likely that he’s the main character of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well. But what makes Gawain so inscrutable is his incredible variation. In some tales he’s a paragon of virtue and an elite warrior, but in others he’s a weak, womanizing murderer at the mercy of his emotions. Which is he and why? What can we gain from studying and untying his complex character?
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is everything a knight should be. He slays trolls, ogres, and dragons (in such an offhand way, apparently, that the victories show up in a montage in Part 2), doesn’t flinch at the prospect of being decapitated (ok, he flinches, but only once, and only for a second), and resists the charms of a woman “more beautiful than Guinevere” (is that even possible?) on THREE successive mornings. Imagine that you’re a young bachelor and someone hotter than… um, anyone you’ve ever met, cornered you in the guestroom of her house and said the following (Raffel translation):
“Here you are, and we’re alone,
My lord and his men away in the woods,
All men asleep, and my maids too,
Your door shut, and locked with a bolt
—And having in my house a man so loved
I refuse to waste my chance, for as long as it lasts.
Now please us both,
Decide our path.
Your arms are too strong,
I bow to your force.”
Yep, believe it or not, Gawain resisted that, saying: “Lord, how lucky I am, Lady, not to be the knight you speak of” (Uh huh, and you would have said the same, too—keep telling yourself that). In later English stories, Gawain rates a vision of the Holy Grail and is found worthy to quest for it alongside Sir Galahad.
Yet, in many tales, Sir Gawain is less than respectable. He’s cast as a philanderer, a second-rate combatant, he refuses to grant mercy to the vanquished, and in a catastrophic failure of chivalry, he actually beheads a lady. It’s even likely that Gawain is the knight-protagonist of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” True, he’s never mentioned by name, but the plot of Chaucer’s story follows that of other Gawain ballads and “Loathsome Lady” tales. If so, Chaucer takes our knight’s villainy a step father, having him rape a girl by a river, setting up the action—and placing this version of Gawain in irreconcilable contrast to the version in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here are Chaucer’s lines (Coghill translation):
“There was a knight who was a lusty liver.
One day as he was riding from the river
He saw a maiden walking all forlorn
Ahead of him, alone as she was born
[I’m going to assume that this means naked]
And from that maiden, spite of all she said
By very force he took her maidenhead”
In Le Mort d’Arthur, Malory makes Gawain a weaker warrior, at the mercy of his emotions, always bested in combat by Lancelot, often unhorsed and captured by enemies, and frequently in need of rescue. In one of Malory’s stories, Gawain is so enraged at an enemy (for killing his dogs—which I, personally, find a valid motive for fury) that he ignores the man’s pleas for mercy and decides to dispatch him anyway. The problem is that the enemy knight’s lady arrives at the last possible second and throws herself in front of Gawain’s downward-arcing blade, causing her own decapitation (and making Gawain the only Round-Table knight to kill a woman). In addition, Gawain is so consumed by rage and hatred in Malory’s work (because Lancelot killed his brothers while rescuing Guinevere) that he goads Arthur into chasing Lancelot, and thus ensures the downfall of the Round Table.
Gawain is praised and ridiculed, simultaneously a hero and an antihero. In an age of stories full of typecast, formulaic, and melodramatic characters, he’s been everything to everyone. But this, of course begs the question, “Why?”
Here’s this author’s theory: Gawain’s treatment in medieval romance depends almost entirely on the geographic and literary background of the author. Gawain is first and foremost a British Knight. He’s the nephew of King Arthur, the son of King Lot of Orkney, and a member of the original, canonical pantheon of round table knights, dating back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Before that he probably existed as a Welsh folk hero named Gwalchmei. In other words, he’s irreconcilably British. British authors who work from a British tradition treat him well, like the Gawain and the Green Knightpoet, who wrote in a midland dialect and primarily in alliterative verse, the older poetic style favored by English authors. In contrast, French authors like Chretien de Troyes write in rhyme and look down on Gawain, replacing him with Sir Lancelot, the greatest warrior in England, who comes from a place called Benwick in (no surprise here) France. Lancelot, of course, gets to sleep with the English queen, beat all of the English knights in combat, and survive the destruction of the round table (all this while the English king commits incest, can’t satisfy his wife, and falls to his son/nephew). These tales rose to immense popularity during the Hundred Years War. Coincidence? I doubt it.
But what about Chaucer and Malory? They were English, right? Yes, but they were working from French sources and under French influence. Chaucer, for example, was a multilingual scholar who admired and made translations of French works like The Romance of the Rose. He wrote in the continental style, preferring rhyming couplets and openly ridiculing the traditional English alliterative verse. He was (successfully, I might add) bringing the culture of continental Europe to England (in his defense, though, he doesn’t name his knight Gawain, sidestepping the issue to some degree, possibly even out of respect for the British Arthurian tradition). As for Malory, he worked almost exclusively from French sources, compiling his translated and reorganized compendium of tales while imprisoned. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his account of Gawain is one of the most damning.
So, what is there to conclude here? Well, it’s easy to say that Sir Gawain’s internal character was a bit of a battleground between the British and French Arthurian traditions, with the early rounds going to the Brits and the latter to the French, but to me there’s a silver lining here. The varying portrayals of Sir Gawain allow modern readers and writers to connect with the character in a way that they cannot with his morally perfect and idealized peers. It’s exciting to find an Arthurian character (aside from, I suppose, Lancelot and Guinevere) with a complex moral background. He’s a knight who seems contemporary and even believably human. Gawain is dynamic. He’s conflicted. He doesn’t always live up to the example that he hopes to set. He’s capable of great success and great failure. And his moral ambiguity doesn’t have to involve a predictable and overused plotline of a forbidden relationship with the king’s wife.
And that’s the Gawain that I cast in my novel. He’s flawed, but not fatally so. He’s a good warrior, but not invincible, self-righteous, but holds himself to a higher standard than he does others. He’s medieval in his mindset, but able to transcend his own character for the greater good. He’s had successes and failures, and he works to outlive and overcome them. He’s hard to love, yet equally hard to hate. And most importantly, his victory is not assured, any more than is his morality. And maybe, in the long run, that’s all any of us can or should hope to be: a tangle of motives, history, and emotion. Complex. Inscrutable. Gordian. Human.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round TableThe Canterbury Tales
Three Days and Two Knights
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is everything a knight should be. He slays trolls, ogres, and dragons (in such an offhand way, apparently, that the victories show up in a montage in Part 2), doesn’t flinch at the prospect of being decapitated (ok, he flinches, but only once, and only for a second), and resists the charms of a woman “more beautiful than Guinevere” (is that even possible?) on THREE successive mornings. Imagine that you’re a young bachelor and someone hotter than… um, anyone you’ve ever met, cornered you in the guestroom of her house and said the following (Raffel translation):
“Here you are, and we’re alone,
My lord and his men away in the woods,
All men asleep, and my maids too,
Your door shut, and locked with a bolt
—And having in my house a man so loved
I refuse to waste my chance, for as long as it lasts.
Now please us both,
Decide our path.
Your arms are too strong,
I bow to your force.”
Yep, believe it or not, Gawain resisted that, saying: “Lord, how lucky I am, Lady, not to be the knight you speak of” (Uh huh, and you would have said the same, too—keep telling yourself that). In later English stories, Gawain rates a vision of the Holy Grail and is found worthy to quest for it alongside Sir Galahad.
Yet, in many tales, Sir Gawain is less than respectable. He’s cast as a philanderer, a second-rate combatant, he refuses to grant mercy to the vanquished, and in a catastrophic failure of chivalry, he actually beheads a lady. It’s even likely that Gawain is the knight-protagonist of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale.” True, he’s never mentioned by name, but the plot of Chaucer’s story follows that of other Gawain ballads and “Loathsome Lady” tales. If so, Chaucer takes our knight’s villainy a step father, having him rape a girl by a river, setting up the action—and placing this version of Gawain in irreconcilable contrast to the version in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Here are Chaucer’s lines (Coghill translation):
“There was a knight who was a lusty liver.
One day as he was riding from the river
He saw a maiden walking all forlorn
Ahead of him, alone as she was born
[I’m going to assume that this means naked]
And from that maiden, spite of all she said
By very force he took her maidenhead”
In Le Mort d’Arthur, Malory makes Gawain a weaker warrior, at the mercy of his emotions, always bested in combat by Lancelot, often unhorsed and captured by enemies, and frequently in need of rescue. In one of Malory’s stories, Gawain is so enraged at an enemy (for killing his dogs—which I, personally, find a valid motive for fury) that he ignores the man’s pleas for mercy and decides to dispatch him anyway. The problem is that the enemy knight’s lady arrives at the last possible second and throws herself in front of Gawain’s downward-arcing blade, causing her own decapitation (and making Gawain the only Round-Table knight to kill a woman). In addition, Gawain is so consumed by rage and hatred in Malory’s work (because Lancelot killed his brothers while rescuing Guinevere) that he goads Arthur into chasing Lancelot, and thus ensures the downfall of the Round Table.
Gawain is praised and ridiculed, simultaneously a hero and an antihero. In an age of stories full of typecast, formulaic, and melodramatic characters, he’s been everything to everyone. But this, of course begs the question, “Why?”
Here’s this author’s theory: Gawain’s treatment in medieval romance depends almost entirely on the geographic and literary background of the author. Gawain is first and foremost a British Knight. He’s the nephew of King Arthur, the son of King Lot of Orkney, and a member of the original, canonical pantheon of round table knights, dating back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Before that he probably existed as a Welsh folk hero named Gwalchmei. In other words, he’s irreconcilably British. British authors who work from a British tradition treat him well, like the Gawain and the Green Knightpoet, who wrote in a midland dialect and primarily in alliterative verse, the older poetic style favored by English authors. In contrast, French authors like Chretien de Troyes write in rhyme and look down on Gawain, replacing him with Sir Lancelot, the greatest warrior in England, who comes from a place called Benwick in (no surprise here) France. Lancelot, of course, gets to sleep with the English queen, beat all of the English knights in combat, and survive the destruction of the round table (all this while the English king commits incest, can’t satisfy his wife, and falls to his son/nephew). These tales rose to immense popularity during the Hundred Years War. Coincidence? I doubt it.
But what about Chaucer and Malory? They were English, right? Yes, but they were working from French sources and under French influence. Chaucer, for example, was a multilingual scholar who admired and made translations of French works like The Romance of the Rose. He wrote in the continental style, preferring rhyming couplets and openly ridiculing the traditional English alliterative verse. He was (successfully, I might add) bringing the culture of continental Europe to England (in his defense, though, he doesn’t name his knight Gawain, sidestepping the issue to some degree, possibly even out of respect for the British Arthurian tradition). As for Malory, he worked almost exclusively from French sources, compiling his translated and reorganized compendium of tales while imprisoned. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that his account of Gawain is one of the most damning.
So, what is there to conclude here? Well, it’s easy to say that Sir Gawain’s internal character was a bit of a battleground between the British and French Arthurian traditions, with the early rounds going to the Brits and the latter to the French, but to me there’s a silver lining here. The varying portrayals of Sir Gawain allow modern readers and writers to connect with the character in a way that they cannot with his morally perfect and idealized peers. It’s exciting to find an Arthurian character (aside from, I suppose, Lancelot and Guinevere) with a complex moral background. He’s a knight who seems contemporary and even believably human. Gawain is dynamic. He’s conflicted. He doesn’t always live up to the example that he hopes to set. He’s capable of great success and great failure. And his moral ambiguity doesn’t have to involve a predictable and overused plotline of a forbidden relationship with the king’s wife.
And that’s the Gawain that I cast in my novel. He’s flawed, but not fatally so. He’s a good warrior, but not invincible, self-righteous, but holds himself to a higher standard than he does others. He’s medieval in his mindset, but able to transcend his own character for the greater good. He’s had successes and failures, and he works to outlive and overcome them. He’s hard to love, yet equally hard to hate. And most importantly, his victory is not assured, any more than is his morality. And maybe, in the long run, that’s all any of us can or should hope to be: a tangle of motives, history, and emotion. Complex. Inscrutable. Gordian. Human.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round TableThe Canterbury Tales
Three Days and Two Knights
August 26, 2016
On the Pride of Anglo-Saxons, Teenagers, and this Teacher
Well, a new crop of students will arrive on Monday, and that has me perusing my beginning of the year materials again. And, of course, that means Anglo-Saxon poetry and Beowulf. Now, as I read through “The Seafarer,” an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, I come to a line that always, always gives me pause:
“A man must conquer pride, not kill it.”
That line is just sitting there in the middle of a laundry list of things that an Anglo-Saxon must do to get ‘home’--to heaven (a common element of these poems). It’s easy to overlook. But for my money, it’s the best line in the whole poem.
Why?
Well, it’s a very Christian poem, and generally in Christian works pride is associated with Satan and his betrayal. It’s seen as a vice. It comes before a fall (imagine Satan plummeting through the clouds, engulfed in trialing flames, tossed from the omnipotent hand of God, and you take my meaning).
But, in “The Seafarer,” pride is not a vice. According to our poet, pride is an essential part of being human, a valued component, nothing to be ashamed of, not something to be rooted out or annihilated, but conquered. That seems more balanced to me. I mean, I need to take pride in my work--that I do it well, that it has value. And I should take pride in who I am--who I choose to be. Making the right decisions in a consistent manner, whether to eat right, or exercise (I need help with those), or treat people well, or do the right thing when no one’s looking, or how I love my wife and children, all of that is at the core of my being. It’s what makes me proud to be me.
That’s the root of this little line: it’s important to be proud to be me. This Anglo-Saxon poet realized that truth. Pride is what makes a person feel fulfilled, satisfied, and content with life. Without it, wouldn’t life be depressing or empty?
I often think back to my teenage years and remember the angst. I know that it was caused by hormones. Science explains that (and as a high school teacher, I believe it), but maybe it was also caused by a lack of pride. As a teen, I was itching to make a mark, to feel proud of myself and my accomplishments. But, with only 13 or 14 years under my belt, I’d been cared for by my parents. I was a child with ambitions of adulthood. I wasn’t irresponsible, but I did lack any significant responsibility. I simply didn’t have any experiences upon which to hang my hat. What had I overcome? What dreams had I fulfilled? What had I accomplished? I asked these things and the echoing answer was always “nothing.” That was a time without pride. That was a world in which pride was killed, or maybe more properly had never been born.
And as a teacher I try very hard to keep that in mind while relating to my teenage students. It’s why I try to make my class hard (or at least mentally challenging). Because people only value the hard, because overcoming it (physically or emotionally, even--paradoxically--the hardships of defeat or failure) is the only way to earn pride.
So there’s the second part of the line, “A man must conquer pride, not kill it.” Now back to the first. He says that pride must be conquered. So, pride can be bad. The poet seems to suggest that though pride is important, it needs to be broken like a stallion and controlled. If not, it will control a person and trample all that he or she holds dear. Pride, then, should never be a motive for action. I can gain pride for making a right decision or for doing a good job, but I should never take an action because of pride or make a decision motivated by the pride that will be achieved. Pride--meaningful pride at any rate--is then only ever a side-effect of action, never the desired consequence. Perhaps that is an important check on ambition. Perhaps that’s the poet’s real lesson of the line.
Maybe it’s foolish to think so deeply about eight words, interpreted by a translator from an author 1000 years dead. Maybe other elements of that poem are more interesting, more rhetorically powerful, or more critically challenging. Maybe, but this is the line that always speaks to me. It reaches out of the text, grabs me, and gives me pause. Even now, after eight years of teaching the poem and over 40 readings, I have to stop and breathe after that line:
“A man must conquer pride, not kill it.
Words to live by.
Scott Davis Howard
is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-Two...
“A man must conquer pride, not kill it.”
That line is just sitting there in the middle of a laundry list of things that an Anglo-Saxon must do to get ‘home’--to heaven (a common element of these poems). It’s easy to overlook. But for my money, it’s the best line in the whole poem.
Why?
Well, it’s a very Christian poem, and generally in Christian works pride is associated with Satan and his betrayal. It’s seen as a vice. It comes before a fall (imagine Satan plummeting through the clouds, engulfed in trialing flames, tossed from the omnipotent hand of God, and you take my meaning).
But, in “The Seafarer,” pride is not a vice. According to our poet, pride is an essential part of being human, a valued component, nothing to be ashamed of, not something to be rooted out or annihilated, but conquered. That seems more balanced to me. I mean, I need to take pride in my work--that I do it well, that it has value. And I should take pride in who I am--who I choose to be. Making the right decisions in a consistent manner, whether to eat right, or exercise (I need help with those), or treat people well, or do the right thing when no one’s looking, or how I love my wife and children, all of that is at the core of my being. It’s what makes me proud to be me.
That’s the root of this little line: it’s important to be proud to be me. This Anglo-Saxon poet realized that truth. Pride is what makes a person feel fulfilled, satisfied, and content with life. Without it, wouldn’t life be depressing or empty?
I often think back to my teenage years and remember the angst. I know that it was caused by hormones. Science explains that (and as a high school teacher, I believe it), but maybe it was also caused by a lack of pride. As a teen, I was itching to make a mark, to feel proud of myself and my accomplishments. But, with only 13 or 14 years under my belt, I’d been cared for by my parents. I was a child with ambitions of adulthood. I wasn’t irresponsible, but I did lack any significant responsibility. I simply didn’t have any experiences upon which to hang my hat. What had I overcome? What dreams had I fulfilled? What had I accomplished? I asked these things and the echoing answer was always “nothing.” That was a time without pride. That was a world in which pride was killed, or maybe more properly had never been born.
And as a teacher I try very hard to keep that in mind while relating to my teenage students. It’s why I try to make my class hard (or at least mentally challenging). Because people only value the hard, because overcoming it (physically or emotionally, even--paradoxically--the hardships of defeat or failure) is the only way to earn pride.
So there’s the second part of the line, “A man must conquer pride, not kill it.” Now back to the first. He says that pride must be conquered. So, pride can be bad. The poet seems to suggest that though pride is important, it needs to be broken like a stallion and controlled. If not, it will control a person and trample all that he or she holds dear. Pride, then, should never be a motive for action. I can gain pride for making a right decision or for doing a good job, but I should never take an action because of pride or make a decision motivated by the pride that will be achieved. Pride--meaningful pride at any rate--is then only ever a side-effect of action, never the desired consequence. Perhaps that is an important check on ambition. Perhaps that’s the poet’s real lesson of the line.
Maybe it’s foolish to think so deeply about eight words, interpreted by a translator from an author 1000 years dead. Maybe other elements of that poem are more interesting, more rhetorically powerful, or more critically challenging. Maybe, but this is the line that always speaks to me. It reaches out of the text, grabs me, and gives me pause. Even now, after eight years of teaching the poem and over 40 readings, I have to stop and breathe after that line:
“A man must conquer pride, not kill it.
Words to live by.
Scott Davis Howard
is an avid anglophile, a Virginia high school English teacher, a husband, a father of two, and the author of Three Days and Two Knights: An Amusing Arthurian Adventure
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Days-Two...
August 9, 2016
First Review
Three Days and Two Knights (TDTK) just got it's first legitimate review by author Martin C. Wilsey. Martin Wilsey Five Stars! Look it up:
http://wilseymc.blogspot.com/2016/08/...
http://wilseymc.blogspot.com/2016/08/...
August 3, 2016
THREE DAYS AND TWO KNIGHTS Book Club/Classroom Discussion Questions
THREE DAYS AND TWO KNIGHTS
Book Club/Classroom Discussion Questions
1. The footnote on Goblins (p69-71) strays into the topic of human nature. The narrator says, “Many great scholars still debate the balance of the human soul, some claiming human nature is innocent and kind and that exposure to society turns us to evil. . . . Others postulate that human nature is selfish and evil, and that society forces us to be good.” Which view resonates with you? Why? In what ways does Alanbart represent, within himself, both of these philosophies simultaneously?
2. On page 74, Alanbart remembers the story of “Bede’s Sparrow.” It’s an allusion to a medieval Christian parable (feel free to look it up online). In what ways is this short forgotten story still relevant to understanding our own lives today?
3. After Cathbad prophecies a death, Alanbart asks, “Why is it that blind people always think they can see the future?” (p75). In literary history, this statement is true; the Fates and Norns of Greek and Norse myth are blind, as is Tiresias from Oedipus and The Odyssey. What about physical blindness adds to the symbolic value of a prophet? Why?
4. On pages 81-83, Alanbart recounts a conversation between Gawain and Heather. Gawain says, “When I betrayed my chivalric values, I betrayed myself and in so doing, I betrayed you. I ceased to be the man you desired—the man who deserved you—and doomed our love from its very inception.” Here he suggests that personal honor is the most important element of a romantic relationship. To what degree is this statement a paradox? To what degree is it true?
5. In Chapter 10, Gawain and Scot argue back and forth about political ideals, after which Alanbart concludes, “You know, that’s the trouble with humanity—half of the dreamers want to carry us forward, kicking and screaming, into an unrealistic and unattainable future, and the other half want us to fall back into an imaginary ‘simpler time’ when everything was easy” (p94). In what ways can this conversation and Alanbart’s conclusion be seen as symbolic of modern American political conflict?
6. In his discussion with Heather about religion, Alabart says, “If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil” (p119). This logic-based takedown of Christianity is rebutted by Heather’s faith-based response: “Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?” (p120). How is this contrast of attitudes symbolic of modern-day conflicts about religion? In what ways is Alanbart’s philosophy more mature than Heather’s? Heathers more than Alanbart’s?
7. Speaking on the topic of marriage, Heather says, “I do see marriage and children as my future, but I’m not ready to embrace it—not yet. I may sound like our friend Scot (whom you characterize as a fool) but I want to do something of note, some noble deed of heroic tenor that will strengthen my heart with courage in my latter years. I have doubts and fears and sorrows, just like any woman, but sometimes I feel that there is a greatness in me waiting to be let out—needing release. Other times, I feel like it is all just vanity and I am trying to play a part that wasn’t meant for me…” (p122). Discuss: has the struggle that Heather faces changed significantly over the millennium, or does it still seem like an ‘either-or’ choice for women today?
8. After reading Chapter 18, discuss: Outwardly and in their ideologies, Gawain and Scot couldn’t be more different, yet they share many similarities. How are these two warriors the same? How do these similarities keep them apart? How do they draw them together?
9. In Chapter 19, Malestair assesses his life choices with Heather. He says, “Realizing that I would never live up to my ambitions and considering myself in a disinterested way as a whole being, I created a picture of myself and my future: competent mediocrity” (p175). His decision to become a villain stemmed from a combination of three factors: his mental and physical abilities, his lack of leadership capacity, and his ambition. Does this confession make him a more or less sympathetic character? Why or why not?
10. Speaking of her love for Gawain, Heather says, “I fully realize that all men and women who are in love lie to themselves to one degree or another. Love, I’ve found, whitewashes its object. Any blemishes, crevices, or cracks are filled with pure and bright illusion, the root of which is vanity. Only over time does this brightness wear off” (p211). She suggests that we idealize our lovers, overlooking their blemishes and filling the cracks with wishful thinking so that we can feel better about ourselves and the choices we made. Is this true of your experience of love? What amount of this is healthy and normal, and at what point does it become a danger to the relationship?
11. In Chapter 25, the fact that Heather is not a virgin and that Alanbart is becomes evident. Interestingly, lack of virginity is seen as shameful to Heather, just as virginity is seen as shameful to Alanbart. Why does this double-standard exist? What are its effects on men and women and their relationships? Can it these societal notions be changed?
12. Within the footnote on dragons (p253) is the assertion that the definition of ‘monster’ involves combining attributes of “human and creature.” Is this an accurate definition of monstrosity? Why or why not? Apply it to other popular monsters.
13. Chapters 16 and 21 have to do with the nature of bravery. Alanbart sheds his cowardice, but claims that lack of fear isn’t true bravery. His story about Wiglaf from Beowulf suggests that true courage and heroism can be attained only by the weak who step up against impossible odds when they have a chance to flee and face no consequence. Then, in Chapter 29, Alanbart metaphorically becomes Wiglaf, sacrificing his life to a dragon, armed only with a yellow wooden shield and no hope of victory. Does this act make him more brave than Scot, Gawain, or Heather? Why or why not?
14. On page 232 and again on 270, Gawain and then Scot make the assertion that “honor comes before affection,” meaning that personal honor and integrity is a more important element in decision making than emotional attachment. Is this true in the context of the novel? In your life experience?
15. On page 288, Arthur quotes from the parable of the prodigal son from the gospel. How does inclusion of this allusion add to the scene? In what ways is its use ironic?
16. In closing, it may be helpful to discuss hero archetypes. Many are used in this novel. Hero archetypes include: Epic Hero, a person of high social status with superhuman abilities who represents the values of his or her people; Medieval Romantic Hero, a person of high social status who follows the code of chivalry and must undergo a test of love—either to prove his love or fight against forbidden love; Tragic Hero, a person of high social status who has a fatal character flaw or personality trait that, taken to extremes, causes his or her downfall or death; Romantic Hero, an outsider who rejects the rules of conventional society and who is more focused on internal than external conflict; and the Antihero, a protagonist who embodies those characteristics that are more commonly associated with a villain. Do Alanbart, Heather, Gawain, Scot, Arthur, and Mordred fall into these premade categories? How do the categories overlap within some characters? Do any characters transition between categories?
Book Club/Classroom Discussion Questions
1. The footnote on Goblins (p69-71) strays into the topic of human nature. The narrator says, “Many great scholars still debate the balance of the human soul, some claiming human nature is innocent and kind and that exposure to society turns us to evil. . . . Others postulate that human nature is selfish and evil, and that society forces us to be good.” Which view resonates with you? Why? In what ways does Alanbart represent, within himself, both of these philosophies simultaneously?
2. On page 74, Alanbart remembers the story of “Bede’s Sparrow.” It’s an allusion to a medieval Christian parable (feel free to look it up online). In what ways is this short forgotten story still relevant to understanding our own lives today?
3. After Cathbad prophecies a death, Alanbart asks, “Why is it that blind people always think they can see the future?” (p75). In literary history, this statement is true; the Fates and Norns of Greek and Norse myth are blind, as is Tiresias from Oedipus and The Odyssey. What about physical blindness adds to the symbolic value of a prophet? Why?
4. On pages 81-83, Alanbart recounts a conversation between Gawain and Heather. Gawain says, “When I betrayed my chivalric values, I betrayed myself and in so doing, I betrayed you. I ceased to be the man you desired—the man who deserved you—and doomed our love from its very inception.” Here he suggests that personal honor is the most important element of a romantic relationship. To what degree is this statement a paradox? To what degree is it true?
5. In Chapter 10, Gawain and Scot argue back and forth about political ideals, after which Alanbart concludes, “You know, that’s the trouble with humanity—half of the dreamers want to carry us forward, kicking and screaming, into an unrealistic and unattainable future, and the other half want us to fall back into an imaginary ‘simpler time’ when everything was easy” (p94). In what ways can this conversation and Alanbart’s conclusion be seen as symbolic of modern American political conflict?
6. In his discussion with Heather about religion, Alabart says, “If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil” (p119). This logic-based takedown of Christianity is rebutted by Heather’s faith-based response: “Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?” (p120). How is this contrast of attitudes symbolic of modern-day conflicts about religion? In what ways is Alanbart’s philosophy more mature than Heather’s? Heathers more than Alanbart’s?
7. Speaking on the topic of marriage, Heather says, “I do see marriage and children as my future, but I’m not ready to embrace it—not yet. I may sound like our friend Scot (whom you characterize as a fool) but I want to do something of note, some noble deed of heroic tenor that will strengthen my heart with courage in my latter years. I have doubts and fears and sorrows, just like any woman, but sometimes I feel that there is a greatness in me waiting to be let out—needing release. Other times, I feel like it is all just vanity and I am trying to play a part that wasn’t meant for me…” (p122). Discuss: has the struggle that Heather faces changed significantly over the millennium, or does it still seem like an ‘either-or’ choice for women today?
8. After reading Chapter 18, discuss: Outwardly and in their ideologies, Gawain and Scot couldn’t be more different, yet they share many similarities. How are these two warriors the same? How do these similarities keep them apart? How do they draw them together?
9. In Chapter 19, Malestair assesses his life choices with Heather. He says, “Realizing that I would never live up to my ambitions and considering myself in a disinterested way as a whole being, I created a picture of myself and my future: competent mediocrity” (p175). His decision to become a villain stemmed from a combination of three factors: his mental and physical abilities, his lack of leadership capacity, and his ambition. Does this confession make him a more or less sympathetic character? Why or why not?
10. Speaking of her love for Gawain, Heather says, “I fully realize that all men and women who are in love lie to themselves to one degree or another. Love, I’ve found, whitewashes its object. Any blemishes, crevices, or cracks are filled with pure and bright illusion, the root of which is vanity. Only over time does this brightness wear off” (p211). She suggests that we idealize our lovers, overlooking their blemishes and filling the cracks with wishful thinking so that we can feel better about ourselves and the choices we made. Is this true of your experience of love? What amount of this is healthy and normal, and at what point does it become a danger to the relationship?
11. In Chapter 25, the fact that Heather is not a virgin and that Alanbart is becomes evident. Interestingly, lack of virginity is seen as shameful to Heather, just as virginity is seen as shameful to Alanbart. Why does this double-standard exist? What are its effects on men and women and their relationships? Can it these societal notions be changed?
12. Within the footnote on dragons (p253) is the assertion that the definition of ‘monster’ involves combining attributes of “human and creature.” Is this an accurate definition of monstrosity? Why or why not? Apply it to other popular monsters.
13. Chapters 16 and 21 have to do with the nature of bravery. Alanbart sheds his cowardice, but claims that lack of fear isn’t true bravery. His story about Wiglaf from Beowulf suggests that true courage and heroism can be attained only by the weak who step up against impossible odds when they have a chance to flee and face no consequence. Then, in Chapter 29, Alanbart metaphorically becomes Wiglaf, sacrificing his life to a dragon, armed only with a yellow wooden shield and no hope of victory. Does this act make him more brave than Scot, Gawain, or Heather? Why or why not?
14. On page 232 and again on 270, Gawain and then Scot make the assertion that “honor comes before affection,” meaning that personal honor and integrity is a more important element in decision making than emotional attachment. Is this true in the context of the novel? In your life experience?
15. On page 288, Arthur quotes from the parable of the prodigal son from the gospel. How does inclusion of this allusion add to the scene? In what ways is its use ironic?
16. In closing, it may be helpful to discuss hero archetypes. Many are used in this novel. Hero archetypes include: Epic Hero, a person of high social status with superhuman abilities who represents the values of his or her people; Medieval Romantic Hero, a person of high social status who follows the code of chivalry and must undergo a test of love—either to prove his love or fight against forbidden love; Tragic Hero, a person of high social status who has a fatal character flaw or personality trait that, taken to extremes, causes his or her downfall or death; Romantic Hero, an outsider who rejects the rules of conventional society and who is more focused on internal than external conflict; and the Antihero, a protagonist who embodies those characteristics that are more commonly associated with a villain. Do Alanbart, Heather, Gawain, Scot, Arthur, and Mordred fall into these premade categories? How do the categories overlap within some characters? Do any characters transition between categories?
