bloodygranuaile

In the medium-sized pile of books I claimed when Kyle was cleaning out his bookshelf was one little book of J. R. R. Tolkien’s translations of medieval poems. The collection only has three poems so instead of the collection having its own title, the book is just titled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/Pearl/Sir Orfeo (which are the three poems, if that wasn’t obvious).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is probably the most famous poem here, as the story has been adapted into a variety of easier-to-read (or watch) formats as a common bit of Arthuriana, most recently as a movie starring Dev Patel that I have not watched because I am terrible at watching movies. It takes place around Christmas and New Year’s making it officially Seasonal to read right about now. The very short version is that it involves Sir Gawain getting into some very ridiculous circumstances due to his absolute commitment to doing whatever is knightly and chivalrous, so it also serves as an interesting morality play of what people at the time considered honorable and courtly behavior. This includes exploring some awkward contradictions, like that knights aren’t supposed to refuse requests from high-born ladies but they are also not supposed to commit adultery or cuckold their hosts, leading so a very awkward set of scenes where the lady of the house keeps sneaking in to Gawain’s bedroom and trying to seduce him and he has to keep talking around it in order to refuse without being so offensive as to say no outright. The gender dynamics there are, shall we say, very interesting to watch, and also OH MY GOD LADY BACK OFF. But it all turns out basically for the best because it turns out it was a Test and done with the full knowledge of her husband, who is secretly also the Green Knight that Gawain is involved in his stupid contest with, this doesn’t count as spoilers because the story is 600 years old. Anyway it is a lot of fun if you are a big enough nerd to be able to find reading 100 pages of alliterative verse fun. An especially amusing part is that an alternate version of Gawain’s name is “Wawain” and that gets used any time it would fit the alliteration better.

Pearl is a vision poem from the point of view of a mourning poet who has a dream about a young girl who has died, who is presumably his daughter. It is a very religious poem about grieving and the afterlife and what a great place the dead girl is in now, which is important because otherwise it would probably just be a maudlin ghost story about how much white one ghost can wear. Unsurprisingly, pearls figure very heavily in the poem, both metaphorically and in what people are wearing.

Sir Orfeo is a Britain-based retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, here significantly changed to better match the kind of themes that medieval British poetry likes, like tests of loyalty to one’s king and elaborate descriptions of fancy castles. When King Orfeo’s wife Lady Heurodis is kidnapped by fairies, the King leaves his throne in the hands of his steward, grabs his harp, and runs off into the woods to live as a beggar. From there he makes his way into the fairy kingdom and bargains to get his wife back. There is no test about not looking backwards; Orfeo instead stashes his wife somewhere in the city and goes back to his throne room to pull an Odysseus-esque test of loyalty on his steward, by reporting that he had picked up the harp of a corpse in the woods. The steward is appropriately upset at this news that King Orfeo had died and therefore is allowed to live and is named Orfeo’s heir for whenever he dies for real. Orfeo, Heurodis, the steward, and everybody else then have a big feast, because big feasts are the staple happy ending of medieval British poetry.

In short, they are all good wintery poems, it’s nice to read some real literature once in a while, and translating out of Middle English is a lot harder and more interesting than you might think it’d be.

For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.

I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.

The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.

No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.

I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.

The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.

I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.

Sometime around the publication of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, my constant rereading habits started to drop off. I’ve probably only read this one five times or so? Maybe ten at the outside. At any rate, it’s not one of the ones where I’ve got all the words engraved deep in my memories. But I did remember the most important bits.

This is another one that’s often derided as being a little bit not as masterful as the others, mainly because Harry is annoying as crap throughout it. Everyone in this book is fifteen and has a bad attitude, and the publishers apparently made Rowling squish a bunch of romance into it that you can tell she doesn’t care that much about.

On the other hand, though, Order of the Phoenix does a bang-up job exploring issues of how fascism establishes itself in public institutions. We see the use of denial, of a compromised press, of scapegoating, of the use of crisis as a pretext for tightening government control, of the wrecking of checks and balances of power, and of the difficulties of dealing with people who are mendaciously, stone-cold indifferent to truth.

Although Voldemort returned at the end of Goblet of Fire, he’s really not the main antagonist throughout most of this book. Instead, our main villain is petty, power-mad bureaucrat Dolores Umbridge. This is because the wizarding world has split into three factions: pro-Voldemort, anti-Voldemort, and then the Minstry’s official position, which is that it definitely would be anti-Voldemort if Voldemort were around, but it simply cannot accept that it is so, and its ire is focused predominantly on those who insist upon being all disruptive by saying he is. It is traditional in children’s literature to throw in a character or two to add a minor note of Moral Complexity to the good and evil binary by having someone who is more cowardly or maladaptive than malicious, such as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. In this book, it is that cowardly, head-in-the-sand faction that bears the full brunt of the author’s ire. The cowardly faction actually has two factions within it: the people who will turn out to be anti-Voldemort once they can’t avoid accepting that he’s back, and the people who will happily collaborate knowingly with the Death Eater’s regime once it moves into the open. But for the purpose of this book, they are one faction, and it is as yet unknown who will go which way when the truth comes out.

Dolores Umbridge, as everyone knows, is THE WOOORST. Voldemort may be magic Hitler but Umbridge is the sort of grasping petty abusive condescending bigot that we all personally recognize from somewhere because our society is set up to reward sociopathic assholes. Every time someone does the tiniest thing she dislikes she comes up with sweeping decrees banning it—up to and including banning teachers from speaking to their students about anything not “strictly related” to their subject—and generally makes the North Carolina legislature look like stalwart defenders of decentralized democracy. Fortunately for our heroes, she manages a couple of spectacular own goals that allow both students and faculty to resist her—mostly in quiet and troll-y ways, like Professor Flitwick deliberately refusing to take care of pranks his students pulled because “he didn’t know if he was authorized” and letting Fred and George’s swamp sit around for ages.

But of course, there’s also Dumbledore’s Army.

Though it’s only in play for a chunk of the book in the middle, Dumbledore’s Army is the beating heart of the story. It’s where Harry becomes not just a lone hero, but a leader—and, in keeping with the themes of the book, a teacher. It’s a group of young people coming together in an act of organized resistance, something that is very pertinent to young Americans at this particular point in time AHEM. It shows that loyalty isn’t about waiting for dear leader to save you—sometimes it means you have to fight to save the leaders you’re loyal to. Above all, it shows that fascists can be beaten—not just with magic, which is not at most of the readers’ disposal, but with tenacity, solidarity, noncooperation, telling your stories, and an unwavering commitment to the truth. These are all lessons that may be more pertinent in times of crisis than in times of peace, but they are never unimportant.