I get the impression that a great many people find it confusing that anyone would spend their time studying the literature of the past and as a result I feel a need to work this inclination out in prose.
English as a discipline is already in a weird position to modern-minded people. Most folks see science as the way of the future ans wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to spend their time analyzing what they consider simply a glamorized form of escapism (I will save my rant on this particular brand of ignorance for another day). So when I tell people that I study the literature of the middle ages I get smiles and nods that bear the subtext of "why the hell would anyone do that." So, rather than try to convince you WHY it is worthwhile, I think it may be best to take a less defensive stance and simply explain my reasons.
One of my earliest literary memories was watching a pirated (thanks Dad) VHS version of the animated film The Hobbit. In my timeline the film had come first but I very quickly found the tattered copy that my parents owned from before I existed and tore through it. What I found in those old pages was a very different story than I had seen in the film. There was so much more happening in the book than the film apparently had time for. Yet, unlike so many malcontented Twilight and Harry Potter fans (there is another rant in here somewhere) I still loved the movie version. In fact I believe that this may have been what inspire my entire literary career in a weird way. In seeing the comparison of film and book and knowing which had been created first I felt a need to understand "the origins of the myth." Mind you, I was NOT seeking to compare the two and discover which was better (*ahem* Twilight/Potter fans) but to simply comprehend the transmission of a tale from one medium to the next over time.
Only in knowing one's origins can one truly see one's present. It is my belief that this philosophy rings most true with the cultural conception of language and so in college I found myself enthralled with Shakespeare. His language seemed so much older, more formal, more glorified than our boorish, modern American vernacular. Yet even in Shakespeare (who wrote in what we call Early Modern English, NOT Old English) there were echoes of history waiting to be discovered, origins to be traced further back than even The Bard knew in his time. I'm fairly certain that this is why I ended up so focused on medieval literature. The Middle Ages were a time when those who spoke English were only beginning to become aware of the significance of their speech and to record it in ways that established the structure of an entire cultural identity that is still standing today, albeit morphed and mutated into something so very different.
Sometimes I look at the modern world and this fervent gusto for progress and looking toward the future but it concerns me. While so many Americans are still enraptured with the concept of The Frontier and this exaggerated desire to tread the untrodden paths (a mindset that carried us all the way to the Pacific Coast, where we stopped with nowhere else to go but up, into the starts). I, on the other hand, feel myself called to be a curator of the past.
This morning I was looking at photographs of Skara Brae and thinking about the fact that so many people have come and gone through such a place, almost all of which are long dead, but despite the fact that these places were discovered long ago and offer very little to that modern drive for "progress" these are the places I most want to be and truly hope that I am capable of imparting some of this same desire to future generations if for nothing else than to help humanity remember where it came from so that it may better judge where it is going.
