Pirates, Doodles and Sinking Castles - Medieval News Roundup

This week's collection of news and tweets for medievalists.

Armour on Bodies, Divergent Bodies, and what it takes to have a volcano named after you

Our latest medieval news roundup, including a few articles, archaeology news, tweets about upcoming conferences, the next medieval TV show, and catching up on progress at Guédelon Castle:

Medieval News Roundup: The Viking Facebook, drunken archaeologists, competitive jousting in Australia and ranting about Lancelot

The Verge takes a look at some of the interesting work being done by statistical physicists Ralph Kenna and Pádraig Mac Carron on medieval sources. Using their background in understanding connections, they examined works such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge to learn more about the relationships between the characters found in its pages.

What Kenna and Mac Carron found was that the epics fell between the real networks and the fictional ones. The network in The Iliad is relatively realistic, and Beowulf's also has realistic aspects, with the exception of the connections to Beowulf himself. That chimed with the idea from the humanities that he, unlike some others in the story, may not have existed. The Táin's network was more artificial. Interestingly, however, they found that a lot of the Táin's unreality was concentrated in just a few, grotesquely over-connected characters. When they theorized that some of those characters might actually be amalgams — for instance, that some of the times the queen of Connacht is said to speak to someone, it might be a messenger speaking for her instead — the network began to look more realistic. At least from a social network perspective, perhaps the Táin is not as fantastical as its reputation would suggest, the researchers proposed. That doesn't mean the events really happened, or that the people are real. But it raises the question of why the network looks the way it does. 

You can read the article The Viking Facebook here.

In First Things, Dale M. Coulter takes a look at the life and influence of Jacques le Goff, who passed away earlier this year. He notes that:

Le Goff sought to help Europeans recognize themselves as still connected by the cultural fabric of a common medieval civilization. Along with his fellow members of the Annales school, he also strengthened the case for the long Middle Ages, extending them all the way to the mid-nineteenth century. Le Goff’s body of work, then, stands as a challenge to historians who argue for the Italian Renaissance and Reformation as a break that unleashed a series of forces, intended or not, ultimately leading to the current social imaginary.

Click here to read the article The Good Historian Resembles an Ogre

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National network offers a look at the world of competitive jousting at an event taking place just outside Sydney. One of the competitors, L. Dale Walter explains how dangerous this sport can be:

"I broke my back in 2011 jumping off my horse when he was slipping in the mud and falling at the end of a list. We came in, I went to pull him up, it was slippery, he started to fall, and I had two pictures in my head: one him falling across my leg, which would shatter my leg, and more scary to me, him falling with his legs crossed, which would shatter his leg."

You can read the article and listen to their broadcast at Competitive jousters take medieval re-enactment seriously

In an article about the upcoming changes to the comic book character Thor, Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail shows that he knows a few things about medieval literature:

I say the original King Arthur rules, and I have no tolerance for a politically correct “modernization” of the story. Everybody knows there was no Sir Lancelot or Holy Grail in the original King Arthur story, as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae in the early 12th century. Lancelot and the Grail were rudely added by Chrétien de Troyes 50 or 60 years later, around 1180. Are we really going to tolerate some French upstart turning King Arthur from a warrior into some kind of romantic soap-opera star just because it suited the spirit of the times?

You can read the full article - Hero mythbusters have gone too far - here

What else should you also check out:

Five Tips for Sieging your Favourite Medieval Castle - the good people at Battle Castle have the pictorial evidence of what the really watch out for when going castle-hopping!

The first episode of the new podcast Drunk Archaeology:



The medieval band Vagarem has just released their new album "Codex Bricolia". You can hear some of their sounds in this YouTube video:



Please visit their Facebook page for details.

Doomsday Castle: When crazy people build a castle and we get to see it on TV

The National Geographic Channel has come up with a TV show that blends the medieval with the modern world by... having an American family build a castle to protect themselves against a worldwide catastrophe.

The family is headed by Brent, a former soldier who is worried that a zombie apocalypse electromagnet pulse will take the world back to the stone age (actually the nineteenth-century, which was obviously a time of chaos). To protect his family from the hordes of people who will come to pillage food and other essentials,  Brent is building a castle in the hills of Carolina.

A film crew has captured all their exploits for our viewing pleasure (jokes going to be on us when the EMP blast shuts down our TVs). We see them building a castle, having family fun, and preparing to defend it against people that are starving.

Here are some clips from the show:


I hope they realize that many castles were actually captured by mining underneath them. The show began airing last month and I guess they have several episodes. You can learn more from their website and Facebook page.

Ten Fantastic Facts and Legends of Edinburgh Castle, Scotland

1. Edinburgh Castle is built high on an impressive 700 million year old extinct volcano called Castle Rock, in the middle of what is now the city of Edinburgh. People have lived on Castle Rock since the Bronze Age, around 850 BC, and there has been a royal castle on the site since at least the 12th century.

 5. The ‘Stone of Destiny’ or ‘Stone of Scone’ is kept at the castle with the crown jewels of Scotland. The stone is the traditional coronation stone of all Scottish and English Kings and Queens and has been much fought over by England and Scotland over the ages. As legend has it, the real stone was swapped for a fake either in the 13th century or the 1950’s, and to this day the authentic stone is still secretly hidden.

7. The castle is also one of the most haunted places in Scotland, one famous ghost being the Lone Piper. As the story goes, a few hundred years ago secret tunnels were discovered deep underground, running from the castle to other places in the city. A piper boy was sent down to investigate, instructed to constantly play his pipes, so those above could chart his progress through the tunnels. When the playing suddenly stopped, they went and searched for the piper boy but he had vanished. His ghostly pipes can still be heard playing in the castle to this day, as he eternally walks the dark tunnels beneath. 

Click here to read all Ten Fantastic Facts from Tea Time Magazine