Universal Tragedy

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Tragic stories are fall stories. Whether through moral wrong or through some inadvertent hamartia, the tragic hero falls from a high place. Others are engulfed in the tragedy to one extent or another, but not everyone. Those who watch can experience the catharsis of pity and fear by watching rather than experiencing the tragedy. Christianity universalizes tragedy: In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Adam’s sin was catastrophic for everyone. There is no division between player and audience. We are all... Read more

Make Love and War: The Knight’s Tale

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Emily, the lady-love of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” the first of the Canterbury Tales, appears in a garden, and the poet describes her as if where were part of the garden. She is Eve in Eden. But this is no Edenic world. The men who see her are locked out of Eden, locked, indeed, in prison. Even when they are freed, they have to storm Athens to gain Emily. In this world, there is no simple return to innocence. Eden still arouses passions... Read more

Greece in the English Renaissance

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

According to C. S. Lewis (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 27-28), English humanists were most interested in style, but the style was mostly Latin: “Greek was given abundance of ‘mouth honor,’ but only the minor Greek authors (Plutarch, Heliodrous, Chilles Tatius, the Anthology) were really relished. Greek will not take the hard, high polish which was what the humanists principally cared for: it is too supple, sensitive, and intimate. You can hardly be marmoreal in Greek . . .... Read more

Chaucer and the Greeks

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, set some of his poems in ancient Greece. The “Knight’s Tale” takes place in Athens, ruled by the same “Duke” Theseus who rules Athens in Midsummer Nights Dream. Troilus and Cresyde is a Trojan love tragedy. Neither of these works, however, shows much deep knowledge of ancient Greek. That supports Gilbert Highet’s judgment about Chaucer in his The Classical Tradition: “Chaucer was not a very deep or intelligent student of the classics. What he takes from them... Read more

Monster to Music

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In Rune 40 of the Finnish epic, Kalevala, the hero, Wainamoinen, is sailing with his friends to Pohjola, where he intends to recover the Sampo, a talisman of good luck and extraordinary, mysterious power. No one today quite knows what the Sampo was, but many of the episodes of the Kalevala circulate around battles to have and control it. Along the way, the heroes meet a giant pike. Several of Wainamoinen’s companions try to kill it, unsuccessfully, but then Wainamoinon takes... Read more

The Un-Dante

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male lover. His beloved Laura (if she was real) is abstracted, and serves “as foil to the male lover/poet but not as a subject with her own inner life and moral choices.” In... Read more

Imagining Finland

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala, serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes (Imagined Communities, 74-5), “In the eighteenth century the language-of-state in today’s Finland was Swedish. After the territory’s union with Czardom in 1809, the official language became Russian. But an ‘awakening’ interest in Finnish and the Finnish past, first expressed through texts written... Read more

Nations: Grown or Imagined?

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Romantic thinkers, perhaps most especially Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. A nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character.” The connection that people have with their native land is visceral: “Some sensitive people feel so intimately close to their native country, and so much attached to its soil, that they can scarcely live if separated from it.” This is connected... Read more

Battle of the Soul

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, with its militant virtues of holiness, temperance, and chastity. Insofar as modern fiction depicts the soul as a battleground of competing desires (popularly, the shoulder angels and devils in... Read more

Invention of Allegory

Last updated on: April 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

CS. Lewis describes the formation of medieval allegorism in his classic Allegory of Love. He begins by distinguishing between an allegorical and a sacramental or symbolic turn of mind. Allegory begins, he says, with “an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience” and finds ways to express those passions visibly. An invented person, Ira, has a torch contends with another invented person, Patientia (44–45). Symbolism works from the other direction. It assumes that the “material world . . .... Read more