"Books - David Eddings - Rivan Codex, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

parliament, so he was able to persuade his jailors to let him visit a
nearby library (under guard, of course). Sir Thomas was quite proud
of his facility in the French language, and he whiled away the hours
of his incarceration translating the endless French romances dealing
with (what else?) King Arthur. The end result was the work we now
know as Le Morte darthur.
A technological break-through along about then ensured a wide
distribution of Malory's work. William Caxton had a printing press,
and he evidently grew tired of grinding out religious pamphlets,
so, sensing a potential market, he took Malory's manuscript and
edited it in preparation for a printing run. I think we underestimate
Caxton's contribution to Le Morte darthur. If we can believe most
scholars, Malory's original manuscript was pretty much a
hodgepodge of disconnected tales, and Caxton organized them into a
coherent whole, giving us a story with a beginning, a middle, and an
end.
Now we jump forward another four hundred years. Queen
Victoria ascended the British throne at the age of seventeen. Queen



INTRODUCTION


Victoria had opinions. Queen Victoria didn't approve of 'naughty
stuff'. Queen Victoria had a resident poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
and he cleaned up Malory for his queen to produce a work he
called Idylls of the King. Idylls of the King is a fairly typical Victorian
bowdlerization that accepted the prevailing attitude of the time
that Le Morte darthur was little more than 'bold bawdry and open
manslaughter'. It glossed over such picky little details as the fact
that Guinevere was an adulteress, that King Arthur did have an
incestuous affair with his half-sister, Morgan le Fay, and other
improprieties.
Another hundred years slip by and we come to Papa Tolkien, who
was probably even prissier than Queen Victoria. Have you ever
noticed that there aren't any girl Hobbits? There are matronly lady
Hobbits and female Hobbit puppies, but no girls. The Victorians
maintained the public fiction that females don't exist below the
neck.
Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and
Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts
for inspiration - and there are a lot of those texts. We have King
Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in
German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish;
Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights
on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage
medieval romance for all we're worth.
Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly
agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The