Racialized Medievalisms & Rings of Power: The Rise of the 'Diverse' Fantasy Prequel

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Welcome all to this episode of the Multicultural Middle Ages podcast.
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I'm one of today's co-hosts, Kirstie Francis, a UCLA medievalist joining Boston University
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Society of Fellows this fall.
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My research interests include magic, sexuality, and all things medievalism.
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Thank you, Kirstie.
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I am Misho Ishikawa, today's co-host alongside Kirstie.
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I'm also a UCLA medievalist and I will be joining New York University as an assistant
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professor this fall.
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My work primarily focuses on the Mongol Yuan dynasty in China, and I'm particularly interested
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in how the senses appear as world-building mechanisms for Mongol imperialism across European
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and Chinese sources.
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Today's conversation is going to be a little bit of a mishmash of our different interests.
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So we're really going to be tackling the topics of medievalism.
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We're talking about medievalism and race, and we're talking about medievalism, race,
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and representation in the epic fantasy series, Lord of the Rings, particularly in light of
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the new season of Rings of Power.
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Our guest today joining us is Dr. Chris Chisholm, professor of English at UCLA and incidentally,
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someone who's taught us quite a bit about medievalism.
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Chris Chisholm teaches a long-running and very popular undergraduate seminar on medievalisms,
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where students tackle the Lord of the Rings book trilogy alongside medieval texts that
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inspired it, as well as more recent cultural medievalisms.
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For instance, when Misho and I spent a quarter TAing for this class, we lectured on subjects
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ranging from the gendered cinematography of Game of Thrones to the medievalism and orientalism
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of Harry Potter.
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And as with that class, today's episode is going to really be tackling a central question.
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How does our use of medieval reflect our current cultural moment?
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Are shifting definitions of what's counted as the Middle Ages mirrored in the public
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media we consume?
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And how does fantasy allow us to imagine new possibilities for racially diverse and globally
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interconnected, quasi-medieval worlds?
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Lord of the Rings gives us a really interesting lens to consider these questions through.
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At once completely imaginary, yet the product of a professional medievalist, the world of
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Lord of the Rings is shaped by a particular vision of the historical past, a kind of default
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white middle ages, wherein cultural contact with outsiders is a threat, rather than the
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norm.
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The Lord of the Rings screen adaptations, as well as those of the Hobbit, embrace this
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homogenous view.
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Though there are a bunch of different races in Middle-earth, the story centers in each
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on a multi-member fellowship made up of dwarves, hobbits, and others, and yet everyone on these
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fellowships is still white.
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The Return of the King drives us home in the final film when it depicts Sauron's advancing
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army as a multi-ethnic alliance of men from the south, and they're marked by orientalists,
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all the fans, their garb, and by multiracial casting.
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This is the first obvious time in the film series that there are actors of color who
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are hired to play villains.
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It's not a great look for Peter Jackson.
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This is not even touching on the anti-Semitism of the dwarves or the racialized blackness
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of the orcs in Lord of the Rings.
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And as we mentioned just a little bit earlier, we are going to be talking about Rings of
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Power today, so that's the new series that's hosted by Amazon Studios, and it's set in
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the Lord of the Rings world, but it's a little bit of an interesting entry into the Lord
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of the Rings universe because it is at once absolutely, I would say, playing to fans.
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This is a really high budget show.
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It's incredibly expensive, and it's clearly being positioned by Amazon as one of its standout
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touch points for its streaming platform.
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So at the same time, it is trying to reimagine or at least attempt to address some of the
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criticisms about Peter Jackson's other representations of the Lord of the Rings universe and do so
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by diversifying its cast a little bit more.
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Prince Doran's wife, the dwarven Princess Disa, is portrayed by a black British actress,
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Sofia Nombede, and the show introduces a new character unattested to the Simovillian, the
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Sylvan elf Erendir, portrayed by the black Puerto Rican actor Ismael Cruz Cordova.
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This has led to, unfortunately, an online outpouring of racism couched in textual analysis
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and respecting the history of the source material, often citing the whiteness of the medieval
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past, or at least the imagined whiteness of the medieval past, as support for Middle-earth
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as a white world, ignoring, I guess, the fact that elves, dwarves, and angelic wizards aren't
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actually found in the Middle Ages, and that this show is still mostly a show about white
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people.
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Yeah, I do not recommend Googling, you know, like, why are there people of color in rings
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of power, because the Quora answers are gross.
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We'll link in the episode description to some of the kind of media coverage of Rings
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of Power, but it really seems like the media narrative surrounding this show kind of boiled
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onto diversity and fantasy.
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Too much or a good thing.
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As a fan of the Lord of the Rings, I did appreciate the Amazon series for telling me to fix what
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I always thought kind of jarring about the film adaptations.
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The Middle-earth of Rings of Power reflected more of the world as I know it, as well as
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the reality of the Middle Ages as a period of global interconnected trade, cultural exchange,
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and conquest.
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Yet, at the end of the day, this series is, like you mentioned, Misho, a calculated effort
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by one of the largest corporations in the world to ultimately make more money.
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Did they add characters of color simply as a marketing acknowledgement of the shift in
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the media landscape between 2003 and 2023?
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And overall, how much do these efforts as diversifying the source material even matter?
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When I was watching the pilot, I kept wondering, why do we need this series?
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This is basically the exact same story as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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We have Galadriel as hero, we have Sauron as the villain, we've got the rings.
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It's really very familiar, and perhaps that's the point.
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But there's so much else in the simile, really, and so why are we retelling this particular
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story?
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We're excited to get some answers to these questions and more by talking with Dr. Chris
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Chisholm.
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Dr. Chris Chisholm is the author of alliterative revivals and is professor of English at UCLA.
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Between 2003 and 2005, she was the recipient of a New Directions Mellon Fellowship to learn
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Arabic and study Islamic culture.
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Since completing her first book on late medieval alliterative romance, she's been working on
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several book projects.
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The first, Mortal Friends, The Politics of Friendship in Medieval England, explores a
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social force of friendship as it is tested in the range of late medieval texts.
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The second book project, Strange Knowledge, Translation and Cultural Transmission in the
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Arabic and English Middle Ages, illuminates the complex interdependent processes by which
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both medieval Islamic and medieval Christian writers come to remake their visions of the
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world.
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She's also a huge fan of Lord of the Rings.
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Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.
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It's a great honor to be here and part of this conversation that you're creating.
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Oh, we're so excited.
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You know, we've talked, the three of us, outside of this formal space about Lord of
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the Rings and our various, you know, thoughts and theories about it.
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But maybe you could kick off our conversation today by telling us a bit of how you first
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fell in love with Lord of the Rings and why you think it matters for us as medievalists
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and fantasy fans today.
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Okay, I became a medievalist probably because of Lord of the Rings, along with a bunch of
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other fantasy and texts that were sort of geared as child-friendly at the beginning
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and then child-tolerant as time went on.
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I read it just after my family moved to Saudi Arabia.
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So basically that was a pretty big disruption in my life, and I lost my friends, and I lost
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my school, and I lost the wet, damp climate of the Pacific Northwest, which is kind of
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like that of the Shire.
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And I gained a very strange world with new friends and new relationships and a new kind
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of sense of range of identities that I could be in.
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I think Lord of the Rings really helped me ease that transition.
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I started with Narnia when I was eight and went on to The Hobbit when I was nine.
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School librarian gave me that book, and it was one of the best gifts I'd ever gotten.
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I still have it.
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But I couldn't start The Lord of the Rings because it starts out as social satire, and
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I hated Thackeray.
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And I never got past the sort of silly party stuff in Hobbiton.
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It just went on a little bit too long.
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But after we moved to Saudi Arabia, I took it out again, and I started reading it mostly
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at night with a flashlight, which wasn't comfortable because the minute the Black Riders showed
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up, I was terrified.
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I would literally read between, oh, I don't know, three and five in the morning.
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And then when the sun began to come up, I would take the book out of my bedroom and
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go downstairs and hide it in the family laundry basket because only the family dirty clothes
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could actually quell the Black Riders and their evil influence.
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I was highly impressionable.
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So I was obsessed with it for two years, and I've never quite gotten over that obsession.
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But being trained as a medievalist, one is told that that is kind of not a good thing
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to confess to.
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And in fact, I've kind of got a theory that either you're a Tolkien fan that came to
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medievalists sort of through fantasy literature, and I've got colleagues who are coming into
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it through, say, Susan Cooper, other people were attracted through T.H.
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White.
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In other words, versions of medieval texts that they could read at an earlier age than
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they could read actual medieval texts in.
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And so there's a bunch of us that are like this.
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We're just sort of closet fantasy fiends.
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And coming out about Tolkien was a very fun moment in the late 90s and the early aughts.
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There's the other kind that really came to medievalism as a serious historical kind of
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enterprise in its own right.
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And they have the paleographic and Latinate training that, frankly, I don't have.
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And they don't get Tolkien.
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My favorite advisor and the kindest person in the universe to me as a scholar was Larry
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Scanlon.
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And he basically saw Lord of the Rings as this kind of self-indulgent, nostalgic fantasy
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of the British Empire.
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And I got that.
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I really did understand that.
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I saw the classism that was in it.
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I could see the sort of no bless oblige lost.
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What a terrifying tragedy.
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So I got that point of view.
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But it's never ceased to amaze me.
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When I go to conferences, are you one of us?
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Are you not one of us?
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And that all has been complicated by the fact that it's been increasingly recognized that
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Tolkien and us are our products and determined largely within a very, very, very white supremacist
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history.
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Well, that leads us really beautifully to our next question.
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I was just wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how race and ethnicity
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works in Lord of the Rings.
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When you teach these books, what do you emphasize to your students?
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That's a great question.
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I think what has appealed to me most recently in my approaches to it is the sense that it
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is a war novel.
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It is the product of colonization and apartheid.
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Tolkien was literally born in South Africa.
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He spent his life decrying a lot of these systems, but he spent a lot of his writings
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kind of reflecting a lot of the systems.
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It's recently come out that he rejected Stuart Hall as a PhD candidate in medieval at Oxford.
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He did some damage, institutionally speaking, to any kind of social justice.
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But he also kind of grew and changed.
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And so seeing the Lord of the Rings as a dynamic process, as traumatized, as something that
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have absorbed trauma and have tried to define ways of getting out from and making new social
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ties across racial lines, across religious lines, across species lines, across flora
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and fauna lines, across any kind of lines of difference except for orcs.
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The orcs are where the buck stops has been something that I wanted to emphasize.
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But I think the war, the sort of post-war nature of the Lord of the Rings really marks
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it for me and puts it next to a bunch of other 20th century books.
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Tom Shippey actually discusses these in his really fabulous The Road to Middle Earth.
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And I would add to his list.
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So T.H.
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White was also traumatized by World War II.
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Tolkien was traumatized by World War I.
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You could see Susan Cooper, who wrote a very little read children's fantasy called Dawn
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of Fear, as very traumatized and marked by sort of the world-shaking, world-transforming
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force of these world wars in the beginning and middle of the 20th century.
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And then finally, surprise, Watership Down, which came out in the 70s, is all about rabbits
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as a soldier organization, a kind of army organization that's using its social organization.
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They have a rabbit police, the Efrith and Oslo, but every Warren has an Oslo.
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All of this kind of mark these texts as just absorbing the social organization created
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by war and the intense relationships that are within war.
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So I do see it as part of colonialism, but I do very much see it as part of global warfare.
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Yeah, I think that's so interesting.
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And I'm just wondering a little bit about what happens then when Tolkien is adapted
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for film or for television and kind of working off of the idea that anytime war is depicted
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on screen, it sort of glamorizes war at the same time.
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And I think a lot of the criticisms about Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy
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is about how the war is really used to kind of divide people by very clear racial groups,
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right?
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The orcs as being racialized is kind of predominantly obvious in the Lord of the Rings movies.
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So I'm just wondering if you could maybe speak to, either you or Christy, could speak to
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that a little bit about what do you think happens when it is portrayed on screen?
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Is Tolkien's sort of trauma of war lost or is it being kind of transmuted into a kind
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of nostalgia for war?
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That is a wonderful question.
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And that gets very much at the genre of epic.
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And I do tend to see a lot of these things as bounded by genres.
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And face it, American audiences love these big epic moments in 300.
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This is Sparta!
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The act of finally just booting the threatening black guy who comes from Persia down a well
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is a high point of that and has become meme-worthy.
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And so our culture kind of loves that gesture of forceful disavowal, to put it kindly, obliteration
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genocide to put it less kindly.
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And it works cinematographically because it's hard, it's harder to exist, I think, in a
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complex world where you realize that you are not any one thing.
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Western culture has never been just Western.
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It's always been perforated.
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It's a historical phenomena.
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It is not a stable entity.
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It came into being through force and violence.
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And it continues to exist through force and violence.
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But the terms of the violence and the people who are receiving that Spartan kick are continually
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changing.
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It's just like almost a role-playing game, a really sick one, but one that scripts itself
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very beautifully in terms of forms of nationalism.
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So if you believe in a nationalist outset, that's an epic kind of gesture that's really,
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really going to sell and really going to appeal to you.
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And I think that's why we're getting, I mean, other than Tolkien is a dead author and J.K.
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Rowling is a living author, I think that's why we're getting sort of continued re-envisionings
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and revisitations by the Tolkien estate or allowed by the Tolkien estate to these particular
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stories.
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And the Second Age is really, really epic.
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The First Age is even more epic.
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Just for context, can you tell our listeners the Second Age refers to...
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The Second Age is where rings of power takes place.
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And this is where my stupid fan-like devouring of the entire, what is it, 15-volume prehistory
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of Middle Earth and all of Tolkien's drafts sort of makes me assume that people know too
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much.
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So the Second Age is after the world was reshaped and the Silmarils were kind of taken out of
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the world and the big wars of the Elves with the outer enemy, Morgoth, ended.
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And so we're now into the Second Age where, as one of my favorite YouTube bloggers, Verily
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Bitchy calls it, where Morgoth's squeeze, Sauron, is the main big bad.
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And the things that happen in the Second Age, along with what, 3,000 years of Middle-Earthian
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history, are that the rings of power get created.
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Sauron kind of becomes the disembodied Dark Lord Eye, but starts out as a kind of very
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seductive guy who can make people listen to him.
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And he helps engineer the corruption of the Elven Rings and the fall of Numenor.
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Cool.
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And that ends up being the plot of Spoiler Alert, kind of that's a story that we're
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starting to get in Rings of Power.
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And I think that what you were just talking about, Chris, you were talking about this
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long prehistory.
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So if you guys are maybe just fans of the movies or if you are not familiar with Lord
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of the Rings at all.
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So in addition to, you have The Hobbit, which is written more for a younger audience, and
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you have The Lord of the Rings, which consists of The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers,
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The Return of the King.
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Then you also have this legendarium, The Simarillion, which is kind of the pre, it's telling the
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history of everything that kind of leads up to Lord of the Rings.
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It also creates kind of a mythological history of basically the creation of Middle-Earth
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and all of the kind of divine beings that have populated it.
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So when we're talking about these large fantasy epics, you know, one thing that I keep coming
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back to, right, is the kind of question that Misha brought up, you know, is like, okay,
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but what do we do with the orcs, because I totally buy that this is, you know, about
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war trauma.
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And I see that, you know, I can, if I'm like being a generous person to Tolkien, I'm like,
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okay, I can see how the orcs are meant to embody the horrors of war by being kind of
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a, you know, they're non-human creations, like, how can you fight against something
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that's so unnatural, etc.
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But it seems also like it's a similar move of dehumanization that happens in texts like
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medieval romances when we talk about quote unquote Saracens, right, and we paint with
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this large brush as kind of like scary figure.
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So it's like instead of talking about the nuances of the enemy or whatever, we're really
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just going to kind of homogenize them and with regards to the orcs, right, in a way
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that's like, you look at them, they all look the same, they all have black skin, and that's
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what marks them as separate from the fair skinned people of kind of the larger world.
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And when we're talking about the fan backlash to Rings of Power recently, a lot of times
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that backlash is based upon folks drawing from like a historical text or an authoritative
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text like the Silmarillion to say, well, the text says this, so we can't have this version
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of elves or this version of dwarves or whatever.
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Weirdly, when I first encountered the elves of Lord of the Rings, it was in an illustrated
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hobbit from like the 60s before any of the animations that come up.
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So Elrond in that version was a really small, wise and green man wearing all leaves and
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nothing else.
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And so when I was shocked to see Hugo weaving in Fellowship of the Rings when I watched
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it for the first time, because I was like, wait, in my mind, Elrond is this tiny little
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green elf.
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And so because so many of these debates seem to hinge on fidelity to some master source,
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how do you think Chris' fantasy complicates this?
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I mean, Lord of the Rings is a work of fantasy, but it is also the work of a kind of a carefully
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historicized medievalism.
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So how do we grapple with kind of that dissonance between fantasy as a imagined space and how
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it deals with the very real politics of the moment?
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Again, really great question.
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So what I like about fantasy is it's sort of like medieval allegory.
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In medieval allegory, you can basically say it was all a dream, but look at a wacko, psychological,
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psychoanalytic, projective things that can happen in this dream.
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We can bring together a beloved object with her sense of resistance to you and make them
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two different characters, as happens in the Romane de la Rose.
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We can basically have a colloquy with our much mourned dead child, as happens in Pearl.
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The sky's the limit in terms of what you can bring together to speak to each other.
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And Piers Plowman, with its never-ending conversation, is a great instance of this.
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So fantasy isn't quite as open-ended as medieval allegory because it also, like allegory, has
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many different types and schemas, but it's been ossified into particular expectations
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by the publishing industry and capitalism.
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So fantasy is many things.
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It can be the genre fiction.
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It can be the section of the bookstore that you used to be able to physically walk into
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or the tag that you put on when you're searching for books online.
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But either way, it kind of suggests that it's a made-up world, and to some extent, there's
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a little bit of free play with how it signifies.
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And you can have very by rote fantasies and very formulaic fantasies, and you can have
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very speculative thought experimental fantasies.
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So I think when Tolkien first envisioned race in The Lord of the Rings, he wasn't thinking
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about race.
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He was thinking of species.
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And he was using the kind of fantasy genre or medieval allegory genre.
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He kept on saying he hated allegory.
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He was incessantly influenced by less formulaic forms of medieval allegory.
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There's nothing he wrote that isn't, in some sense, an allegory.
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And if you haven't read Smith and Wooden Major, you haven't seen him really doing this, where
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he gets allegorical about his own work and his own life, or Leaf by Niggle.
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I mean, there's just nothing he did that is a short story that isn't in some way allegorical.
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And if you think about his obsession with creativity, fantasy can get meta about creativity.
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You can think hard about sort of different creative modes.
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You can racialize them.
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So the dwarves in Tolkien, yes, they're absolutely drawing on anti-Semitic stereotypes that he
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got from Wagner, that he got from German legends, whatever, that he got from the Nibelungen
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lead.
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But yeah, and he started out pretty much in key with those particular legends.
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He hadn't thought hard about them.
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But to him, I think, creatively, dwarves were about creating life from inert matter, putting
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your life into things.
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So that's why dwarves love crafting things and make them live.
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That's why they can take inert caves and make living galleries out of them, kind of like
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the Entish forests, whole kingdoms to wander in.
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That's why they were made out of clay, Frankenstein-like.
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And Aulé, one of the big angelic Valar presences in the creation story for Middle-earth, in
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the Silmarillion, breathes life into them illicitly.
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And then he's granted a side, OK, I'll let your artistic creations go by the head-high
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all-father god, the ultimate creator, who really kind of stays outside things.
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Elves I think Tolkien was thinking about the immortality of art itself, how beauty survives,
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how it doesn't seem to change.
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So he made a race that was obsessed with that unchanging beauty, but non-adaptiveness.
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I mean, the elves in Tolkien are, in fact, also a class, nostalgic, passing of the noble
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classes' fantasy.
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But they are also thinking hard about the immortality of art.
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So you've got these politics and these aesthetics holding hand in hand in most of the thought
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experiment that you get in The Lord of the Rings.
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I don't think you get the same thoughtfulness in the Peter Jackson movies, much as I love
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it.
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If you go back to Tolkien's looks, there aren't, in fact, all black orcs.
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There's the white orcs of the Misty Mountains and the black orcs of Mordor.
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If you look at Hobbits, there's the pale, what are they?
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I forget what they are, the pharaoh hides, or phallohides.
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And then there's the dark-skinned Harfoots.
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When I was teaching Tolkien to a class of UCLA students, one of them came up and did
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this whole paper on the mixed-race portions of Hobbiton and how Peter Jackson had basically
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betrayed that because he didn't portray the same diversity in the books, in the film.
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And it's the film that seems to have set the keynote for Rings of Power.
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I had a lot of thoughts as you were talking, Chris.
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The thing that sort of came to mind first about fantasy as a genre, at least I think
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in the Anglophone tradition, what I find really fascinating about fantasy is the way that
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it suspends a kind of teleological narrative about Western history.
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There is no moment of modernity on the horizon in fantasy.
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And I think oftentimes magic sort of takes the place of technology.
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There is no need for an industrial revolution when you have magic to kind of fill in those
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gaps.
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And I find that really interesting in terms of denaturalizing what has been naturalized
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through a kind of teleological understanding of Western history, that this is all sort
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of a movement or a push toward progress.
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I think the promise of fantasy is divorcing ideologies like that from our understandings
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of the world and our understandings of our relationship with history and in our own current
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moment.
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So I think that is exciting about fantasy.
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I think there is a kind of echo of that in allegory, too, medieval allegory.
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I'm thinking sort of like the suspended time of encountering the pearl maiden in a poem
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like Pearl or the suspended time at the end of Everyman where there's this kind of moment
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of thought and a kind of processing, but it's outside of human temporality.
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And I think that is generative, potentially generative, but it could also be used regressively
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at the same time.
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So that is kind of like the promise and then also often, I think, the pitfall of fantasy
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genre.
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Because I could see both of those at play in Lord of the Rings.
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On the one hand, Lord of the Rings, thinking here of the book series, kind of pessimistic,
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right?
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And then you see the Industrial Revolution basically through Saruman and Saruman's forces.
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And it's like, oh, this is really bad.
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And so as Chris has kind of said many times, it really does read as a nostalgia for a time
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when the nobility was in charge, aka elves, the age of elves, right?
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Is what they call it in the series.
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And then at the conclusion of the series, it transitions to the age of man, right?
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It's kind of a time of the elves and the elves get out of Middle Earth.
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They're all sailing towards the great havens, et cetera.
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And so I've always been ambivalent on if we're supposed to see that shift, this kind of,
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as Chris was saying, a species shift from elves to humans as in control.
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Are we supposed to see that as positive?
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You know, is that supposed to be like a hopeful future or is that a future where it's like
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the best days of Middle Earth are behind it because the elves and the magic people are
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gone and now we're left with men in charge and their fallibility that we've seen a bajillion
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times.
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But also Aragorn is a really good dude.
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So we're supposed to be excited that he's king.
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Just this question of temporality that I think you bring up is a really good one in this
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kind of how are we thinking about how these fantasies exist within a larger history or
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not.
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And that connects to one of your other questions that you pre-circulated to me, which is why
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prequels, why prequels now?
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Because one of the things I hate about prequels is they seem to aim at a predestined future.
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I don't know if any of you have read the ballad of songbirds and snakes, which is the prequel
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to The Hunger Games.
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Have you started it?
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No, but it's on my to read list, but then it's as close as I've gotten.
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Okay.
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So I started it and I did not want to continue it because basically it's President Snow as
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a kid and you see how he becomes the tyrannical, I don't even have a word for what he becomes,
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the tyrannical.
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Despot.
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Despot, self-warped anyways.
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Yeah.
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He wants to keep his world the way it is and we see how as a boy he's inculcated in that
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mindset.
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And reading it is like very much like talk, feeling the jaws of a bear trap kind of close
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around you in slow motion.
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And I just talked to one of our recent recruits at UCLA, Madeleine Werner, who did a term
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paper on this as an undergraduate.
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And she finds all kinds of like glimmers of hope.
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The future is not written in that book.
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I need to go back now and read it for those glimmers.
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I think you can do prequels in a way that doesn't sort of pre-exhaust or take up all
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those beautiful gaps that help readers to want to participate.
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If something online or in media or in a book looks like it's not complete, that things
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are missing, then fan fiction.
445
00:30:12,000 --> 00:30:17,480
I mean, that's a place for readers to really kind of take power and find their own ways
446
00:30:17,480 --> 00:30:23,200
of connecting the dots that are created across those gaps and fill in the blanks.
447
00:30:23,200 --> 00:30:26,640
And I think that's the impulse to do prequels.
448
00:30:26,640 --> 00:30:33,080
But there's ways of doing it speculatively that open out futures even for the main franchise.
449
00:30:33,080 --> 00:30:36,360
And there's ways of doing it that just deplete everything.
450
00:30:36,360 --> 00:30:38,440
I think that's one reason why in Star Wars...
451
00:30:38,440 --> 00:30:39,440
That's what I was going to say.
452
00:30:39,440 --> 00:30:40,440
Go, go, go, go, go.
453
00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:44,960
I was going to say, I think exactly what you said, the depletion versus kind of the generation.
454
00:30:44,960 --> 00:30:49,640
I was trying to think what prequels are successful.
455
00:30:49,640 --> 00:30:53,600
Star Wars prequels come to mind as both, yeah, they made a lot of money.
456
00:30:53,600 --> 00:30:57,680
And I mean, as a teen growing up with the prequels, I have a special place in my heart
457
00:30:57,680 --> 00:30:58,680
for them.
458
00:30:58,680 --> 00:31:01,120
But they also...
459
00:31:01,120 --> 00:31:04,460
People were disgusted with them because what you were saying, Chris, they foreclosed a
460
00:31:04,460 --> 00:31:10,320
lot of the imaginative possibilities that were hinted at in the original Star Wars trilogy.
461
00:31:10,320 --> 00:31:14,160
You introduce midi-chlorians and suddenly it's like, oh wait, this kind of fantastic
462
00:31:14,160 --> 00:31:18,600
thing about the Jedi has now been turned into a medical diagnosis type of thing.
463
00:31:18,600 --> 00:31:21,280
Or you know, oh, what were the Clone Wars?
464
00:31:21,280 --> 00:31:26,040
Well, turns out they're based on a trade battle, so let's get into the politics of trade, right?
465
00:31:26,040 --> 00:31:28,280
Or it's all about Darth Vader.
466
00:31:28,280 --> 00:31:29,280
Darth fucking Vader.
467
00:31:29,280 --> 00:31:31,440
No, it's not about Darth Vader.
468
00:31:31,440 --> 00:31:33,160
It's about all kinds of people.
469
00:31:33,160 --> 00:31:34,160
Exactly.
470
00:31:34,160 --> 00:31:36,080
So kind of the promise or not of a prequel.
471
00:31:36,080 --> 00:31:41,960
So I'm thinking another very popular kind of prequel request, I think.
472
00:31:41,960 --> 00:31:44,200
So we talked about She Who Must Not Be Named, J.K.
473
00:31:44,200 --> 00:31:45,200
Rowling.
474
00:31:45,200 --> 00:31:49,560
You know, there's been a big fan request, especially before the last five years, for
475
00:31:49,560 --> 00:31:51,760
a sort of a prequel of the Harry Potter series.
476
00:31:51,760 --> 00:31:56,360
Something that would look at like the Harry Potter dad's time, the Marauder's time.
477
00:31:56,360 --> 00:31:57,520
And Chris, you mentioned fan fiction.
478
00:31:57,520 --> 00:32:00,740
I mean, that's where there's been a lot of great fan fiction writing.
479
00:32:00,740 --> 00:32:06,360
And there seems to be this space where if it's a fan generated type of prequel, that
480
00:32:06,360 --> 00:32:13,760
still maintains the possibility for new directions because it's not canon, quote unquote, but
481
00:32:13,760 --> 00:32:17,200
it also still kind of scratches that itch for what was going on.
482
00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:21,320
That maybe turning something into a officially licensed piece adds a different...
483
00:32:21,320 --> 00:32:25,600
It adds that question that we were talking about, about like accuracy to a text.
484
00:32:25,600 --> 00:32:31,560
But it also, having more notes from a text can also close down your imagination, I guess.
485
00:32:31,560 --> 00:32:35,360
Well, I do think that's so interesting because my view on prequels is a lot more cynical.
486
00:32:35,360 --> 00:32:41,480
I just kind of am thinking that a lot of it is just about existing IP and the kind of
487
00:32:41,480 --> 00:32:45,960
demands of streaming at this point because we've gotten now what Rings of Power, the
488
00:32:45,960 --> 00:32:48,000
Game of Thrones prequels.
489
00:32:48,000 --> 00:32:51,580
There's a lot of interest in sort of continuing successful franchises.
490
00:32:51,580 --> 00:32:57,940
My question is though, why go back in time as opposed to going forward adjacent in time?
491
00:32:57,940 --> 00:32:59,600
Why this move backward?
492
00:32:59,600 --> 00:33:03,880
And I think it's really interesting that you bring up the fan fiction element and that
493
00:33:03,880 --> 00:33:08,600
fans also tend to move backward in this series, maybe not as a way to fill in more details,
494
00:33:08,600 --> 00:33:14,280
but as a way to kind of live in the world more before the ending point of the series,
495
00:33:14,280 --> 00:33:19,040
which definitely changes my own approach or how I was thinking about prequels because
496
00:33:19,040 --> 00:33:21,840
for me, I just am thinking this is really kind of cynical.
497
00:33:21,840 --> 00:33:23,920
Well, endings are really scary.
498
00:33:23,920 --> 00:33:27,800
And I don't think we're in a culture that wants to think about endings really in most
499
00:33:27,800 --> 00:33:31,040
ways at all, unless you're ending somebody else.
500
00:33:31,040 --> 00:33:32,920
But ending your own self?
501
00:33:32,920 --> 00:33:34,760
No, thank you.
502
00:33:34,760 --> 00:33:41,400
So I mean, again, I think Tolkien himself in a pretty famous interview said that the
503
00:33:41,400 --> 00:33:44,600
main theme of The Lord of the Rings was death.
504
00:33:44,600 --> 00:33:46,280
And that's what the whole thing was about.
505
00:33:46,280 --> 00:33:50,120
That was how he as the author saw what he was writing about.
506
00:33:50,120 --> 00:33:56,240
Okay, so first of all, if it's death, it's hard to imagine a place to go beyond it.
507
00:33:56,240 --> 00:34:04,040
And second of all, endings have this force of kind of tamping down and fear that I think
508
00:34:04,040 --> 00:34:07,480
most writers go out of their way to evade.
509
00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:13,700
So moving backwards in a franchise does come from, I think, nostalgia for the experience
510
00:34:13,700 --> 00:34:20,760
that you had while reading the book or viewing the property or doing the fan fiction franchise
511
00:34:20,760 --> 00:34:21,760
or whatever.
512
00:34:21,760 --> 00:34:25,720
You get this even in miniscule in fan fiction communities.
513
00:34:25,720 --> 00:34:28,360
This is all my sins coming out.
514
00:34:28,360 --> 00:34:35,800
So you know, the people who do the first powerful, long, extended, multi novel fan fiction become
515
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:38,080
canonical within that fan community.
516
00:34:38,080 --> 00:34:39,080
Absolutely.
517
00:34:39,080 --> 00:34:41,520
And everyone gestures towards them and then works around them.
518
00:34:41,520 --> 00:34:48,960
So there's a kind of almost fractal logic to the way the recession goes on.
519
00:34:48,960 --> 00:34:51,800
But then you get authors who, unlike J.K.
520
00:34:51,800 --> 00:34:57,280
Rowling, do change their little formula with every novel.
521
00:34:57,280 --> 00:34:58,760
And she did by the end of it.
522
00:34:58,760 --> 00:35:00,960
She blew Hogwarts to pieces.
523
00:35:00,960 --> 00:35:04,680
So she also did experiment with that.
524
00:35:04,680 --> 00:35:10,440
But you get people like China Mieville who just don't write the same book ever twice,
525
00:35:10,440 --> 00:35:13,200
always something completely different.
526
00:35:13,200 --> 00:35:14,200
You get people like N.K.
527
00:35:14,200 --> 00:35:19,440
Jemisin who just reinvent worlds with every time she comes back.
528
00:35:19,440 --> 00:35:26,280
There's so many people who are sort of using fantasy non-nostalgically right now to talk
529
00:35:26,280 --> 00:35:36,080
about ends and futures and different genders and no genders and different time periods.
530
00:35:36,080 --> 00:35:40,920
It's such an exciting moment and a lot of them are people of color.
531
00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:47,280
And I think the whole franchise go back to Tolkien thing is riding on fear of what the
532
00:35:47,280 --> 00:35:51,760
genre, the literary genre, is already becoming.
533
00:35:51,760 --> 00:35:53,680
You know, it's that level of nostalgia.
534
00:35:53,680 --> 00:35:57,080
Oh my God, our genre has been colonized.
535
00:35:57,080 --> 00:36:02,320
The Hugos have been dominated by non-white people.
536
00:36:02,320 --> 00:36:03,320
What can we do?
537
00:36:03,320 --> 00:36:07,920
We can go back and sell Tolkien in the prequels where there isn't any danger of that.
538
00:36:07,920 --> 00:36:10,440
And oh my God, they're betraying us there too.
539
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:15,180
And just to tie that back to your earlier point, Christy, about having Lord of the Rings
540
00:36:15,180 --> 00:36:17,520
end in the age of men or humanity.
541
00:36:17,520 --> 00:36:23,120
Yeah, if we're thinking about Tolkien as being or the Lord of the Rings series as being centered
542
00:36:23,120 --> 00:36:29,600
around death, then what does that leave the potential future for us as readers if death
543
00:36:29,600 --> 00:36:32,080
is just going to be human death?
544
00:36:32,080 --> 00:36:37,800
There are no Saurons, there are no external major forces that are setting themselves in
545
00:36:37,800 --> 00:36:39,120
opposition to human life.
546
00:36:39,120 --> 00:36:44,400
So then the fantasy completely dissolves at that point because then we're just left in
547
00:36:44,400 --> 00:36:46,160
the world with ourselves.
548
00:36:46,160 --> 00:36:47,160
Yeah.
549
00:36:47,160 --> 00:36:48,160
What is it about men?
550
00:36:48,160 --> 00:36:49,160
Mortal men doomed to die.
551
00:36:49,160 --> 00:36:50,160
That's it.
552
00:36:50,160 --> 00:36:51,160
We die.
553
00:36:51,160 --> 00:36:52,160
That's it.
554
00:36:52,160 --> 00:36:55,200
Which also, I guess, goes to the question or the conversation we were having about why
555
00:36:55,200 --> 00:37:00,440
a prequel as opposed to the next chapter is somehow the next story of Aragorn and his
556
00:37:00,440 --> 00:37:01,440
family.
557
00:37:01,440 --> 00:37:02,440
Well, it's kind of the same old.
558
00:37:02,440 --> 00:37:05,400
We know it's a king who lives and dies and then he has a son who lives and dies and it
559
00:37:05,400 --> 00:37:10,080
becomes less of a fantastic story because if we're thinking about this in terms of death,
560
00:37:10,080 --> 00:37:12,560
right, like, oh, it's more of an average mortality story.
561
00:37:12,560 --> 00:37:16,140
Okay, so this is your opportunity to tell me something.
562
00:37:16,140 --> 00:37:20,600
How does Game of Thrones actually capitalize on the future of death?
563
00:37:20,600 --> 00:37:23,200
Oh, that's a good question.
564
00:37:23,200 --> 00:37:29,040
Because that's the next big gigantic franchise and it sells itself by saying this is for
565
00:37:29,040 --> 00:37:30,040
adults.
566
00:37:30,040 --> 00:37:37,480
Well, and I think part of how it sells itself for adults is by, I mean, really facing death
567
00:37:37,480 --> 00:37:39,160
head on in a way that Lord of the Rings does not.
568
00:37:39,160 --> 00:37:42,160
Like, when you read the books, part of what is there and when you watch the show, it's
569
00:37:42,160 --> 00:37:43,160
very graphic, right?
570
00:37:43,160 --> 00:37:44,880
Like, the deaths are vivid.
571
00:37:44,880 --> 00:37:46,800
You're not just getting like a death off screen.
572
00:37:46,800 --> 00:37:50,200
It's like, we're going to describe to you how this dude's head is getting squeezed off
573
00:37:50,200 --> 00:37:51,800
and his eyeballs are like bursting.
574
00:37:51,800 --> 00:37:52,800
You know, it's gross.
575
00:37:52,800 --> 00:37:58,880
There's scenes I can't watch because of, you know, how visceral they make the violence.
576
00:37:58,880 --> 00:38:01,720
And that seems to be, you know, part of maybe the appeal.
577
00:38:01,720 --> 00:38:07,840
I think that as someone who's kind of seen the fan communities, people respond to that
578
00:38:07,840 --> 00:38:11,480
positively because they think in some way what I've heard is like, you know, oh, it's
579
00:38:11,480 --> 00:38:13,100
like the Middle Ages were violent.
580
00:38:13,100 --> 00:38:16,480
And so this show is just capturing the violence of the Middle Ages, right?
581
00:38:16,480 --> 00:38:22,400
It's even though it's a fantasy, it's getting us at that same effect, that same feeling
582
00:38:22,400 --> 00:38:26,960
of, you know, brutish, violent and short, brutish, nasty and short of the Middle Ages
583
00:38:26,960 --> 00:38:30,760
as people have kind of described it.
584
00:38:30,760 --> 00:38:37,760
You know, so I think that death does get centered there, but then we also have so many characters
585
00:38:37,760 --> 00:38:45,880
who defy death or that question of, you know, resurrection or can you outlive a mortality?
586
00:38:45,880 --> 00:38:51,040
You know, we see that with, you know, characters beyond the wall or with that.
587
00:38:51,040 --> 00:38:53,240
I know we're not really getting into Game of Thrones here, but you know, there are a
588
00:38:53,240 --> 00:38:57,600
lot of characters who really emphasize that sort of possibility of immortality, right?
589
00:38:57,600 --> 00:38:59,920
Or that possibility of a renewal of life.
590
00:38:59,920 --> 00:39:06,040
What I do think is quite different about Game of Thrones from Tolkien's world is that in
591
00:39:06,040 --> 00:39:10,960
Game of Thrones, I think the majority of the most impactful deaths are done at the hands
592
00:39:10,960 --> 00:39:18,520
of other human characters or other human characters wielding a tool, a magical tool like dragons.
593
00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:24,680
The dragons themselves seem to have no nefarious kind of agency of their own.
594
00:39:24,680 --> 00:39:25,680
They're just used.
595
00:39:25,680 --> 00:39:26,680
Right.
596
00:39:26,680 --> 00:39:27,680
They're almost like pets, right?
597
00:39:27,680 --> 00:39:31,280
It's like, oh, you can be an attack dog, but only because we told you to attack.
598
00:39:31,280 --> 00:39:33,760
It's not like you or yourself were going to go and kill those people.
599
00:39:33,760 --> 00:39:37,480
I like Grisela K. Le Guin's wild dragons much better.
600
00:39:37,480 --> 00:39:41,320
The adult part of Game of Thrones, but there's still going to be dragons.
601
00:39:41,320 --> 00:39:46,240
Like, don't worry, the fantasy will still be there, but the majority of the drama and
602
00:39:46,240 --> 00:39:50,960
the narrative kind of momentum is going to be done through human actors as opposed to
603
00:39:50,960 --> 00:39:53,340
anything that is magical or otherworldly.
604
00:39:53,340 --> 00:39:57,360
To quote Ben Wyatt in Parks and Rec, he says, they're telling human stories in a fantasy
605
00:39:57,360 --> 00:39:58,360
world, right?
606
00:39:58,360 --> 00:40:01,680
And so that's what we're seeing here, right?
607
00:40:01,680 --> 00:40:06,600
These stories of human politics and intrigue and sex and violence, right, that are in this
608
00:40:06,600 --> 00:40:23,400
fantastic medieval-esque world that has magic.
609
00:40:23,400 --> 00:40:27,160
So Chris, a lot of what we've talked about already has kind of thought about Lord of
610
00:40:27,160 --> 00:40:32,520
the Rings as a war novel tied into questions of nationalism.
611
00:40:32,520 --> 00:40:37,240
And so let's think about, I guess we can turn a little more to Rings of Power specifically,
612
00:40:37,240 --> 00:40:39,760
but also kind of Lord of the Rings in general.
613
00:40:39,760 --> 00:40:43,880
Chris, when you watched Rings of Power, you know, as both a fan of the Lord of the Rings
614
00:40:43,880 --> 00:40:48,240
and as a scholar of the Middle Ages, did anything surprise you from this adaptation?
615
00:40:48,240 --> 00:40:51,520
You know, just kind of what you were saying, for instance, with the Peter Jackson adaptation,
616
00:40:51,520 --> 00:40:57,100
that was such a great point that like, yes, the orcs in the books are not all necessarily
617
00:40:57,100 --> 00:41:02,920
coded black, like there is a racial diversity to the books that gets lost in adaptation.
618
00:41:02,920 --> 00:41:07,240
So was there anything like that in Rings of Power that surprised you?
619
00:41:07,240 --> 00:41:11,640
What do you make of the fan backlash against the inclusion of, you know, more actors of
620
00:41:11,640 --> 00:41:12,640
color?
621
00:41:12,640 --> 00:41:16,480
And what do you think that says maybe about fandom generally or Lord of the Rings specifically?
622
00:41:16,480 --> 00:41:20,200
Because so much of our conversation has talked about it as a nationalist text, but I also
623
00:41:20,200 --> 00:41:23,600
want to emphasize that that's still pretty much a white nationalist text, right?
624
00:41:23,600 --> 00:41:28,760
So we're thinking of it as, you know, this World War I post epic, right?
625
00:41:28,760 --> 00:41:31,600
That's still a very kind of European story.
626
00:41:31,600 --> 00:41:37,280
Well, again, confession, I have not finished watching Rings of Power.
627
00:41:37,280 --> 00:41:42,760
I'm still at number four, so I'm halfway through stalled, really well stalled.
628
00:41:42,760 --> 00:41:47,120
Is part of the reason that you're holding off on finishing it what we had talked about
629
00:41:47,120 --> 00:41:49,500
about prequels where like, you know where it's going to end.
630
00:41:49,500 --> 00:41:53,520
And so it becomes less exciting to see how it ends because you're like, I know that
631
00:41:53,520 --> 00:41:56,000
Mountain Doom is coming, for instance.
632
00:41:56,000 --> 00:41:57,760
I know that the fall of Numenor is coming.
633
00:41:57,760 --> 00:41:59,240
I know that Mount Doom is coming.
634
00:41:59,240 --> 00:42:03,800
I know that there's a corrupting the rings sequence where the elves have to like grab
635
00:42:03,800 --> 00:42:05,000
them and hide.
636
00:42:05,000 --> 00:42:09,880
But I'm also just sick to death of fucking chisel faced white elves.
637
00:42:09,880 --> 00:42:13,800
What the freaking hell with the Elvis cheekbones and jawbones?
638
00:42:13,800 --> 00:42:17,120
I mean, just the way they were cast.
639
00:42:17,120 --> 00:42:21,080
I'm talking about the white people, the people of color.
640
00:42:21,080 --> 00:42:22,600
Thank God for Princess Disa.
641
00:42:22,600 --> 00:42:25,480
I swear to God, you know, thank God for Princess Disa.
642
00:42:25,480 --> 00:42:27,140
Thank God for Arandir.
643
00:42:27,140 --> 00:42:28,140
They were great.
644
00:42:28,140 --> 00:42:33,520
Okay, so there's this critic I was looking up again as part of the prep for this.
645
00:42:33,520 --> 00:42:37,520
And her name is Kristen J. Warner.
646
00:42:37,520 --> 00:42:40,760
And she talks about plastic representation.
647
00:42:40,760 --> 00:42:45,360
So plastic representation is when you just basically and go read her if you want this.
648
00:42:45,360 --> 00:42:48,120
This is my baudlerization of it.
649
00:42:48,120 --> 00:42:49,760
Maybe there will be a link in the.
650
00:42:49,760 --> 00:42:51,720
Yeah, we could do that.
651
00:42:51,720 --> 00:43:00,440
So plastic representation is where you basically sort of almost cynically put some black faces,
652
00:43:00,440 --> 00:43:02,960
Asian faces.
653
00:43:02,960 --> 00:43:06,040
You get maybe one non-binary character.
654
00:43:06,040 --> 00:43:08,380
You stick them in non-important roles.
655
00:43:08,380 --> 00:43:15,280
And people are so happy to see anyone at all, given the history of whatever franchise it
656
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:20,540
is, that they don't think hard about whose stories are really being told.
657
00:43:20,540 --> 00:43:26,440
So the delight of finding those faces there sort of comes in as a sort of ersatz replacement
658
00:43:26,440 --> 00:43:32,280
for a fuller satisfaction of seeing a wider variety of life stories told.
659
00:43:32,280 --> 00:43:39,960
So if you notice that the Harfoots are mostly dark skinned people, except for the one that
660
00:43:39,960 --> 00:43:48,440
we spent the most time with, Norrie, who's this adorable little Irish accenty white person.
661
00:43:48,440 --> 00:43:52,360
Every single one of the elves who is powerful is white.
662
00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:56,800
Right, because one thing that we haven't discussed, and this does get very much into the weeds
663
00:43:56,800 --> 00:44:02,440
about the legendarium of the Tolkien universe, but Arandir as a sylvan elf is a low class
664
00:44:02,440 --> 00:44:03,440
elf.
665
00:44:03,440 --> 00:44:06,600
The types of elves that Arandir are the one elf of color, it's like you're the lowest
666
00:44:06,600 --> 00:44:11,920
class of elf that would have been ostracized by the fancy elves, like the better elves.
667
00:44:11,920 --> 00:44:14,440
So even there, we have that.
668
00:44:14,440 --> 00:44:19,560
No, wouldn't it have been cool if Peter Jackson had used the same logic and made Legolas black,
669
00:44:19,560 --> 00:44:24,000
made all of the Mirkwood elves, it's called Mirkwood, come on, there's precedent, Mirk
670
00:44:24,000 --> 00:44:27,520
means dark, let's have black elves and Mirkwood.
671
00:44:27,520 --> 00:44:30,360
That would have been really an interesting choice.
672
00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:35,600
It would have gestured at that class system, it would have made it more visible, but one
673
00:44:35,600 --> 00:44:41,380
single guy instead of maybe a whole culture doesn't have the same force.
674
00:44:41,380 --> 00:44:45,880
And I think that that's a really great point, I'm definitely gonna link to this, the plastic
675
00:44:45,880 --> 00:44:49,880
representation in the article description, because one thing that Misho and I were reading
676
00:44:49,880 --> 00:44:55,660
as we were getting ready for this interview was Jonathan Shue's Anti-Racist Medievalisms,
677
00:44:55,660 --> 00:45:01,360
and the introduction to that talks about how people of color can and have kind of claimed
678
00:45:01,360 --> 00:45:07,540
medievalism for their own stories, but Rings of Power is not doing that, right?
679
00:45:07,540 --> 00:45:13,320
It's not like, let's take this and cast it through this experience, it's as you're saying,
680
00:45:13,320 --> 00:45:19,120
let's take these characters that, we'll give them some agency, but Prince Esdisa versus
681
00:45:19,120 --> 00:45:23,920
Prince Doran, if Prince Doran was made a black character, that would be a different level
682
00:45:23,920 --> 00:45:26,240
of I guess commitment of representation.
683
00:45:26,240 --> 00:45:30,720
I'm gonna steal one more point that's gonna further one of your own interests.
684
00:45:30,720 --> 00:45:35,360
Racial representation is not the only fail that I think we get in Rings of Power.
685
00:45:35,360 --> 00:45:42,000
Verily Bitchy, I did look for their real name, but I could not find it, their email is Verily
686
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:46,120
Busy, fabulous essay called Tolkien Fucked Up First.
687
00:45:46,120 --> 00:45:50,480
Basically, I thought it was very, I thought it was fair, I think it got the things he
688
00:45:50,480 --> 00:45:56,720
did well, and it opinioned the things he did badly, and she focuses, she they, focuses
689
00:45:56,720 --> 00:46:01,680
on gender, and how actually in Tolkien you've got a lot of gender play.
690
00:46:01,680 --> 00:46:08,040
Yes, it is not the biggest feminist book in the world at all, not even slightly, but the
691
00:46:08,040 --> 00:46:10,240
elves are more or less androgynous.
692
00:46:10,240 --> 00:46:15,200
The women are as tall as the guys, they're as strong as the guys, they have as big leadership
693
00:46:15,200 --> 00:46:20,360
as the guys, and Galadriel is of course the finest example, and that's something that
694
00:46:20,360 --> 00:46:22,560
I thought Rings of Power did well.
695
00:46:22,560 --> 00:46:28,080
Galadriel should be a pretty scary, pretty rash, pretty interesting at an earlier moment
696
00:46:28,080 --> 00:46:32,520
of her journey sort of presence, but why make her five foot two?
697
00:46:32,520 --> 00:46:34,560
I mean, she's not a hobbit.
698
00:46:34,560 --> 00:46:37,480
If you're going to tell the story of Little Pea, and again, I'm just riffing off this
699
00:46:37,480 --> 00:46:46,520
video essay, she they, she actually gives both pronouns, says that Tolkien, if you want
700
00:46:46,520 --> 00:46:51,320
a formula for a Tolkien novel, you start with a little guy who makes their way progressively
701
00:46:51,320 --> 00:46:57,240
into a bigger and more epic world and leads you with them, and at the end manages to change
702
00:46:57,240 --> 00:46:58,800
something about it for the better.
703
00:46:58,800 --> 00:46:59,800
That's the formula.
704
00:46:59,800 --> 00:47:03,360
That is not the formula that you get in Rings of Power.
705
00:47:03,360 --> 00:47:07,800
Everyone there is already always already powerful except the Harfoots, and they aren't making
706
00:47:07,800 --> 00:47:09,560
their way into a large world yet.
707
00:47:09,560 --> 00:47:14,200
We're just at the beginning of whatever journey they're doing.
708
00:47:14,200 --> 00:47:18,440
And they're kind of aside from a lot of the other main plot points.
709
00:47:18,440 --> 00:47:26,960
We just have lots of scary stuff in the Southlands and do video game tunneling against orcs.
710
00:47:26,960 --> 00:47:30,600
There and then we go off to Numenor and there's intrigue and whatnot.
711
00:47:30,600 --> 00:47:37,600
And then we have a little idol with the pastoral Irish Harfoots and you know, whatever, and
712
00:47:37,600 --> 00:47:38,840
the stranger.
713
00:47:38,840 --> 00:47:42,360
But if you look at Tolkien, he has Eowyn.
714
00:47:42,360 --> 00:47:50,720
Here's a woman who, who basically experiences patriarchal control in her own life, tries
715
00:47:50,720 --> 00:47:56,720
to replace her brother, tries to abet the heir of the realm who's just been killed
716
00:47:56,720 --> 00:48:02,120
in a previous battle, and gets squelched by everyone and then just goes into battle in
717
00:48:02,120 --> 00:48:06,680
disguise and along with another underling does it anyway.
718
00:48:06,680 --> 00:48:08,780
You don't get that in Rings of Power.
719
00:48:08,780 --> 00:48:15,360
The guys are hyper masculine, the women are hyper feminine, and it's really, really scary
720
00:48:15,360 --> 00:48:20,480
actually how they change and diminish the women and domesticate them.
721
00:48:20,480 --> 00:48:23,960
Diza should have a beard.
722
00:48:23,960 --> 00:48:27,880
So thank you, Verily Bitchy, for this brilliant video essay.
723
00:48:27,880 --> 00:48:33,360
Speaking as a personal young queer experience, like, I mean, Legolas was a big first crush
724
00:48:33,360 --> 00:48:34,360
of mine.
725
00:48:34,360 --> 00:48:38,200
I had a cardboard cut out of Legolas and I was, you know, kind of pondering once I came
726
00:48:38,200 --> 00:48:39,200
out, I was like, why?
727
00:48:39,200 --> 00:48:43,800
And I was like, oh, because Legolas is a beautiful, very feminine looking man, right?
728
00:48:43,800 --> 00:48:46,120
He has lovely long blonde hair.
729
00:48:46,120 --> 00:48:48,880
Like that androgyny is lost in the Rings of Power.
730
00:48:48,880 --> 00:48:52,640
I'm trying to think about where do we see similar androgynous elves?
731
00:48:52,640 --> 00:48:55,440
I'm not seeing them in the same way.
732
00:48:55,440 --> 00:49:00,080
As we're thinking about possibly teaching Lord of the Rings or teaching Rings of Power,
733
00:49:00,080 --> 00:49:05,360
I was wondering, where do you think Rings of Power succeeds or falls short kind of as
734
00:49:05,360 --> 00:49:09,120
this, as an epic fantasy in general?
735
00:49:09,120 --> 00:49:13,360
And how would you include it or would you include it in a syllabus for a course on global
736
00:49:13,360 --> 00:49:14,840
medievalisms, for instance?
737
00:49:14,840 --> 00:49:18,880
So I haven't taught a course on global medievalisms.
738
00:49:18,880 --> 00:49:23,880
I've taught courses on medievalisms and I've taught courses on global.
739
00:49:23,880 --> 00:49:29,560
So I was trying to prepare for this question and I was kind of coming up blank because
740
00:49:29,560 --> 00:49:34,880
there are lots and lots of people, say, translating and riffing on Chaucer that I know about thanks
741
00:49:34,880 --> 00:49:42,240
to the amazing sort of global Chaucer website of my friend Candice Barrington and Jonathan
742
00:49:42,240 --> 00:49:50,520
Hsu and the work they've done to basically show the globality of Chaucer studies is really
743
00:49:50,520 --> 00:49:51,680
cool.
744
00:49:51,680 --> 00:49:57,400
If I think about texts I would consider global but also middle period, and I don't want to
745
00:49:57,400 --> 00:50:04,200
use the word medieval for them because it has such a sort of Latinate, this is Europe,
746
00:50:04,200 --> 00:50:06,160
sense of things.
747
00:50:06,160 --> 00:50:11,080
So middle period is one bad kind of work around.
748
00:50:11,080 --> 00:50:15,400
I think about the Thousand and One Nights and the way that has traveled and changed.
749
00:50:15,400 --> 00:50:21,200
I think about several of the tales that eventually, that originated in India and eventually made
750
00:50:21,200 --> 00:50:27,420
their way all over the world, sometimes by, you know, kind of taken by colonialists as
751
00:50:27,420 --> 00:50:34,000
part of their European indoctrination programs and then seized and translated into indigenous
752
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:35,000
languages.
753
00:50:35,000 --> 00:50:42,520
So, for instance, there's a story that's called The Scholarly Slave Girl or Abdelhazen and
754
00:50:42,520 --> 00:50:46,120
his slave girl Tawadud in the Thousand and One Nights.
755
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:52,760
It also circulates separately and it ends up translated into Castilian Spanish in the
756
00:50:52,760 --> 00:50:57,680
thirteenth century and then it's printed up in the sixteenth century when books become
757
00:50:57,680 --> 00:51:06,440
big and then it's exported in crates to the Yucatan Peninsula by the conquistadors and
758
00:51:06,440 --> 00:51:14,100
it's used to indoctrinate Maya culture and show them what Christianity should be after
759
00:51:14,100 --> 00:51:21,440
it's been Islamized and changed, de-Islamized and changed in translation.
760
00:51:21,440 --> 00:51:27,680
And then you get Maya translations of it in three community books, which are secret books
761
00:51:27,680 --> 00:51:33,720
that the Maya use to sort of, okay, so this is what the colonialists are telling us.
762
00:51:33,720 --> 00:51:38,600
This is what we can use to make sense of them, to basically find our own footing.
763
00:51:38,600 --> 00:51:47,000
And very interesting hybrid texts about basically finding leverage against what's called colonial
764
00:51:47,000 --> 00:51:54,280
reduction and so you get these tales that travel globally all over the place.
765
00:51:54,280 --> 00:52:01,040
I would love to have a course where I sort of teach them as medievalism, but it's hard
766
00:52:01,040 --> 00:52:06,960
to separate them from medieval because there's such a, so I guess I run up short against
767
00:52:06,960 --> 00:52:11,800
what is medieval and what is medievalism and where do you draw the line if you're looking
768
00:52:11,800 --> 00:52:18,640
at a version of the text that's been translated four times and has ended up in 18th or 19th
769
00:52:18,640 --> 00:52:26,640
century Brazil in Portuguese, which is something that happened to the story of Tawadud becomes
770
00:52:26,640 --> 00:52:28,360
Tanzele Theodore and whatnot.
771
00:52:28,360 --> 00:52:34,760
I'm talking to a group of scholars who are scholars in Maya, who are scholars in Castilian,
772
00:52:34,760 --> 00:52:39,260
who are scholars in expertises that I don't know anything about and can't presume to,
773
00:52:39,260 --> 00:52:44,760
but we're just basically talking together about the global progression of these stories
774
00:52:44,760 --> 00:52:46,400
and it's really, really exciting.
775
00:52:46,400 --> 00:52:52,120
But is it medievalism in the sense of I'm making a fantasy novel about this particular
776
00:52:52,120 --> 00:52:57,240
thing or this particular issue or I just want to do the Wars of the Roses and how nasty
777
00:52:57,240 --> 00:53:00,720
and brutish and short they really were?
778
00:53:00,720 --> 00:53:03,360
Or it's so where would you put medievalism?
779
00:53:03,360 --> 00:53:09,240
I wouldn't put, okay, I would not teach Rings of Power in a global medievalism course because
780
00:53:09,240 --> 00:53:17,920
it's European and at least in terms of its base texts and Amazon can claim to be the
781
00:53:17,920 --> 00:53:24,880
world but I'm not buying it and I want to basically subvert that wherever I can.
782
00:53:24,880 --> 00:53:32,220
Yeah, I think this discussion really hits at how imprecise global is in terms of talking
783
00:53:32,220 --> 00:53:36,580
about a lot of the trends that's happening right now among medievalists.
784
00:53:36,580 --> 00:53:40,440
So global medievalisms, I think you can take that in a couple of different ways.
785
00:53:40,440 --> 00:53:46,400
One way might be to, if we're thinking about Rings of Power, use a term like multicultural.
786
00:53:46,400 --> 00:53:52,880
Even that feels like Rings of Power fall short in that promise, but having a different word
787
00:53:52,880 --> 00:53:57,440
because again, this is Tolkien's worlds.
788
00:53:57,440 --> 00:54:04,560
These are worlds that are rooted in European history and have been adopted by fans as being
789
00:54:04,560 --> 00:54:12,960
kind of indicative of a European past that could have been or might have been potentially.
790
00:54:12,960 --> 00:54:16,560
So I am struggling a little bit, actually more with the word global than with the word
791
00:54:16,560 --> 00:54:18,480
medievalisms here.
792
00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:24,080
We have a really wonderful colleague Stephanie Madabang who studies how the Middle Ages and
793
00:54:24,080 --> 00:54:29,000
what we think of as being like the European Middle Ages, she studies how that has turned
794
00:54:29,000 --> 00:54:33,840
into a form of sort of historical discussion in the Philippines.
795
00:54:33,840 --> 00:54:38,960
And so this is a place outside of Europe that's using the European Middle Ages as a source
796
00:54:38,960 --> 00:54:45,480
for, as a productive thought experiment, a way to kind of think about processes of colonialism
797
00:54:45,480 --> 00:54:49,160
and a kind of globality and interconnectedness.
798
00:54:49,160 --> 00:54:53,840
And so I think that that could be a potential way to teach global medievalisms how do the
799
00:54:53,840 --> 00:55:00,440
European Middle Ages get imagined and deployed outside of Anglophone cultures or regions.
800
00:55:00,440 --> 00:55:07,720
And I think another way would be to look at how the pre-modern past is fantasized in different
801
00:55:07,720 --> 00:55:09,920
places around the world.
802
00:55:09,920 --> 00:55:12,960
The example that you brought up Chris is so dynamic and illustrative.
803
00:55:12,960 --> 00:55:17,400
I think another really analogous one would be the story of Son Goku or the Monkey King
804
00:55:17,400 --> 00:55:18,400
in China.
805
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:23,400
So that story I think originated in India as well and that's one that has circulated
806
00:55:23,400 --> 00:55:29,120
across the Asian continent and has a lot of continued cultural purchase and continues
807
00:55:29,120 --> 00:55:35,960
to be a source of reimagining something like Dragon Ball Z rooted in that sort of medieval
808
00:55:35,960 --> 00:55:36,960
imaginary.
809
00:55:36,960 --> 00:55:43,200
So there are ways to talk about medievalisms looking at a pre-modern past roughly within
810
00:55:43,200 --> 00:55:51,680
the same time period of 500 to 1500 ish without it being just solely centering European stories.
811
00:55:51,680 --> 00:55:56,200
But that does require a little bit of careful framing I think.
812
00:55:56,200 --> 00:56:01,120
Speaking of teaching that was a little bit of a digression but with our last question
813
00:56:01,120 --> 00:56:07,440
I wanted to introduce another medievalism another recent adaptation of a medieval text
814
00:56:07,440 --> 00:56:11,440
that I think would be a great point for us to end and that's the Green Knight.
815
00:56:11,440 --> 00:56:12,440
Chris have you seen that?
816
00:56:12,440 --> 00:56:14,080
I have and I loved it.
817
00:56:14,080 --> 00:56:19,960
When I've taught this in the past students have really responded to the casting choices
818
00:56:19,960 --> 00:56:24,920
first I think that's probably the most obvious thing and so they're immediately challenged
819
00:56:24,920 --> 00:56:27,680
with their assumption of what the Middle Ages should look like.
820
00:56:27,680 --> 00:56:32,880
I'm using air quotes podcast you can't see it but yeah I think a lot of times especially
821
00:56:32,880 --> 00:56:36,120
for first year students or students who are not particularly interested in the Middle
822
00:56:36,120 --> 00:56:41,160
Ages but are maybe taking a requirement course they don't really have a clear sense of the
823
00:56:41,160 --> 00:56:48,040
period the historical period particularly in Europe because it has such a strong mythology
824
00:56:48,040 --> 00:56:52,080
or mythos around it that there's a really popular imaginary and that doesn't really
825
00:56:52,080 --> 00:56:53,160
reflect the reality.
826
00:56:53,160 --> 00:56:57,720
So when students see something like the Green Knight it's an immediate challenge and it
827
00:56:57,720 --> 00:57:03,120
opens up new possibilities for identification for dis-identification for thinking about
828
00:57:03,120 --> 00:57:07,560
the medieval texts that we are also encountering alongside the film how they might be engaged
829
00:57:07,560 --> 00:57:14,600
in conversations around kind of concretizing who gets included in a group who gets excluded
830
00:57:14,600 --> 00:57:18,580
and so I thought it was really wonderful in that way just to open up new ways of thinking
831
00:57:18,580 --> 00:57:22,760
about the medieval it makes it a little bit more alive to students I think.
832
00:57:22,760 --> 00:57:27,800
Okay so to the question Chris do you think Rings of Power and the Green Knight are in
833
00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:34,720
dialogue with one another culturally somehow why are we getting these more diverse re-imaginings
834
00:57:34,720 --> 00:57:38,040
of medieval worlds right now?
835
00:57:38,040 --> 00:57:43,800
Again really great question I had a very different reaction to Green Knight it was puzzling it
836
00:57:43,800 --> 00:57:49,600
was experimental I don't want to make that a highfalutin new class distinction between
837
00:57:49,600 --> 00:57:55,800
oh it's complex we validate this better than we like the simple sort of black white schemas
838
00:57:55,800 --> 00:58:01,360
I mean I don't want to do that but I kind of find myself doing it because hey the academy.
839
00:58:01,360 --> 00:58:07,560
So to some extent it's differently marketed it's an art house deliberately where's its
840
00:58:07,560 --> 00:58:15,080
experimentalism on its face it has no predecessor I mean you could count sort of the valiant
841
00:58:15,080 --> 00:58:22,000
if you really kind of wrenched it with us but it's really the first wholesale representation
842
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:28,720
mediatized representation re-representation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and it
843
00:58:28,720 --> 00:58:33,280
could it basically went in whole hog at its cultural moment and it just did it and it
844
00:58:33,280 --> 00:58:42,280
did it in a really interesting way and I do see the racial sort of its non-plastic representation
845
00:58:42,280 --> 00:58:52,400
because Gawain remains an outsider and the outsiders this is complexly kind of geared
846
00:58:52,400 --> 00:58:54,800
through both race and species.
847
00:58:54,800 --> 00:59:02,620
The Green Knight is this vegetal wooden creaky thing it's hard to classify as human it looks
848
00:59:02,620 --> 00:59:10,520
more like a puppet and when you think about how the thing ended without any spoilers to
849
00:59:10,520 --> 00:59:14,880
those of you who haven't seen it you should go out and see it.
850
00:59:14,880 --> 00:59:26,300
It seemed to me about masculinity and its bad choices given bad parenting put from absolutely
851
00:59:26,300 --> 00:59:34,020
impenetrable mothers and terrifying you will I'm going back on war again you will inherit
852
00:59:34,020 --> 00:59:40,280
the masculine legacy of war either you are a soldier and will give yourself up to die
853
00:59:40,280 --> 00:59:46,960
or you are a coward and will not rate as anyone that matters and it does it all at once and
854
00:59:46,960 --> 00:59:55,260
it does it as kind of exfoliating the bad bargain that patriarchy offers to those who
855
00:59:55,260 --> 01:00:02,320
are both racially inside and racially less inside a particular system and does it by
856
01:00:02,320 --> 01:00:09,000
basically saying look you play by the rules of the system and you get validated you get
857
01:00:09,000 --> 01:00:15,480
the girl you can basically be the sexual aggressor I think that's why the St. Winifred scene
858
01:00:15,480 --> 01:00:23,280
how dare you presume that you can even touch me that moment in there puts a full stop to
859
01:00:23,280 --> 01:00:31,760
a lot of the kind of assumption of entitlement that Gawain is trying to short circuit his
860
01:00:31,760 --> 01:00:35,180
way around in the course of the film.
861
01:00:35,180 --> 01:00:42,560
But in the end it's just this horrible bargain of bad choices be a coward or die be a coward
862
01:00:42,560 --> 01:00:47,280
or die oh you choose death fine.
863
01:00:47,280 --> 01:00:50,880
That's so interesting I think I do have a different reading of it and it might be a
864
01:00:50,880 --> 01:00:56,080
little over emphasizing the racial dynamics of it but I'm kind of and I'm sure as we
865
01:00:56,080 --> 01:00:59,960
all are as people who teach medieval texts regularly well in ball is sort of the text
866
01:00:59,960 --> 01:01:07,400
that comes to mind is the one that is about outsiderness among the knights and what was
867
01:01:07,400 --> 01:01:15,000
so visually striking to me about the Christmas scene in the green night is how much visually
868
01:01:15,000 --> 01:01:21,600
Dev Battelle's character Gawain is kind of segregated and isolated and shown to be outside
869
01:01:21,600 --> 01:01:26,320
of the rest of the community all the other knights around the round table are sort of
870
01:01:26,320 --> 01:01:31,240
laughing with one another and he's separated and he only gets called forward by the king
871
01:01:31,240 --> 01:01:37,160
when there's an absence when Lancelot is notably not there and the king sort of looks around
872
01:01:37,160 --> 01:01:42,040
for a moment King Arthur and realizes oh I guess we can we can have Gawain come sit with
873
01:01:42,040 --> 01:01:48,320
us in this moment and it's sort of the second hand afterthought and to me that is so striking
874
01:01:48,320 --> 01:01:55,640
that it really dramatizes how much of an outsider Gawain is in the court and how much he has
875
01:01:55,640 --> 01:02:00,400
to or how much he feels he has to prove himself and I see that as being in a lot of ways racially
876
01:02:00,400 --> 01:02:03,400
motivated as the one man of color.
877
01:02:03,400 --> 01:02:09,360
That's great that's great and that really undoes the idea of the hero's journey basically
878
01:02:09,360 --> 01:02:15,440
it raises real questions about sort of who get to be the heroes and how do they get to
879
01:02:15,440 --> 01:02:23,200
be the heroes and you know I mean wouldn't it be nice if rings of power thought through
880
01:02:23,200 --> 01:02:29,160
that a little bit also I mean a lot of people were pissed off at Galadriel because she was
881
01:02:29,160 --> 01:02:32,140
such a stereotypical male hero.
882
01:02:32,140 --> 01:02:36,000
One thing that I've been thinking about in this discussion is how the adaptation of the
883
01:02:36,000 --> 01:02:39,960
Green Knight really does a lot of imaginative play with the source material you know one
884
01:02:39,960 --> 01:02:45,120
thing that struck me when I watched it was how much seemed brand new from not in the
885
01:02:45,120 --> 01:02:50,480
romance right and at first I wasn't sure I'm like is this a question of fidelity to the
886
01:02:50,480 --> 01:02:54,560
original text right kind of how I've talked about here I'm like is that influencing adaptation
887
01:02:54,560 --> 01:02:59,040
and I think what it does really well is it kind of engages in some of that fan fiction
888
01:02:59,040 --> 01:03:05,400
play that we've described in in terms of imagining what the text possibly means when it says
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01:03:05,400 --> 01:03:10,400
you know Gawain had adventures on his journey to find the Green Knight and the film Green
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01:03:10,400 --> 01:03:15,600
Knight gives us you know the Saint Winifred gives us a lot of these episodes the kind
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01:03:15,600 --> 01:03:17,960
of Giants fighting right that we don't get in the romance.
892
01:03:17,960 --> 01:03:24,760
The Giants scene was freaking brilliant right we get these like really beautiful and intense
893
01:03:24,760 --> 01:03:29,880
scenes that aren't in the romance necessarily but are you know perhaps hinted at in that
894
01:03:29,880 --> 01:03:37,840
text and maybe that's part of what makes this movie adaptation kind of a successful adaptation
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01:03:37,840 --> 01:03:43,960
in a way that Rings of Power doesn't is that it does engage in this imaginative play that
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01:03:43,960 --> 01:03:48,560
allows us to not just have plastic representation but to say let's take this seriously and let's
897
01:03:48,560 --> 01:03:53,480
say what happens if we have Morgan Le Fay the King's half-sister and cast her as a you
898
01:03:53,480 --> 01:03:57,760
know a woman of color what happens when we have Gawain and say let's actually add this
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01:03:57,760 --> 01:04:02,240
racial dynamic to the larger question of being an insider or an outsider at King Arthur's
900
01:04:02,240 --> 01:04:08,280
court and one thing that I think the question or the point that you both were just discussing
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01:04:08,280 --> 01:04:13,840
which is you know who gets to be a hero or kind of how does that work that's one thing
902
01:04:13,840 --> 01:04:18,200
that I think the Green Knight carries through really well from Sir Gawain and the Green
903
01:04:18,200 --> 01:04:22,720
Knight the original romance because part of the romance question really is you know Arthur
904
01:04:22,720 --> 01:04:28,120
and Camelot you all claim to be a hot shot big deal and yet you all are not even answering
905
01:04:28,120 --> 01:04:33,840
the challenge it's your kind of feckless nephew who's dealing with this on your behalf while
906
01:04:33,840 --> 01:04:38,040
in the in the movie right we're getting that sort of same oh King Arthur are you really
907
01:04:38,040 --> 01:04:44,280
a great king it seems like you're actually a pretty crappy ruler and uncle I guess the
908
01:04:44,280 --> 01:04:47,920
last couple of things I'll say about the Green Knight I could talk about this film for a
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01:04:47,920 --> 01:04:53,520
while but I'll limit it I think what was really clever on the filmmakers part was drawing
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01:04:53,520 --> 01:04:59,800
from the mythology of the founding of England even to kind of make up the world and constitute
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01:04:59,800 --> 01:05:04,680
the world of the film and to also use that mythology as a way to comment on racial politics
912
01:05:04,680 --> 01:05:09,560
in the post-colonial British Empire setting so the the Giants I thought was a brilliant
913
01:05:09,560 --> 01:05:14,320
way to reference that because the story of the founding of England Brutus of Troy kills
914
01:05:14,320 --> 01:05:19,040
the Giants who are indigenous to the land and we see that same sort of migration happening
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01:05:19,040 --> 01:05:26,040
of the Giants leaving just as the I guess Gawain's own incursions into the land further
916
01:05:26,040 --> 01:05:32,200
sort of signal a deepening relationship of the settlers to the space at the same time
917
01:05:32,200 --> 01:05:37,280
it's hard to watch that film and watch a British Indian actor without being reminded of the
918
01:05:37,280 --> 01:05:44,240
colonial legacies of England in the 18th and 19th centuries and beyond and to have both
919
01:05:44,240 --> 01:05:52,720
of those histories and mythologies being woven together and having that tapestry actually
920
01:05:52,720 --> 01:05:59,040
produce a clear commentary about race and medievalism I think that is what these kinds
921
01:05:59,040 --> 01:06:03,720
of adaptations ideally would do I do not think that's what Rings of Power does unfortunately
922
01:06:03,720 --> 01:06:08,920
but I think to kind of counteract Rings of Power we do have examples of how that can
923
01:06:08,920 --> 01:06:10,320
be successfully done.
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01:06:10,320 --> 01:06:14,640
That's really great I think that when I was preparing for this episode I had maybe imagined
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01:06:14,640 --> 01:06:17,720
without thinking critically that like yeah they're probably in conversation with each
926
01:06:17,720 --> 01:06:22,920
other they're both recent IPs that have come out with you know adaptations in the past
927
01:06:22,920 --> 01:06:27,720
five years sure but what you and Chris have really shown me in this conversation is like
928
01:06:27,720 --> 01:06:32,840
no they're really very different aims in these adaptations and they're telling very different
929
01:06:32,840 --> 01:06:37,000
types of stories and they're very different differently invested in kind of the stakes
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01:06:37,000 --> 01:06:41,840
of identity for instance in each of their narratives.
931
01:06:41,840 --> 01:06:49,080
Guys thank you so much this takes us just about out of time but wow this has been a
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01:06:49,080 --> 01:06:53,000
really exciting conversation and I've learned so much from talking to you guys.
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01:06:53,000 --> 01:06:56,480
Chris thank you so much for sharing your time and your expertise with us.
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01:06:56,480 --> 01:06:59,200
Misha thank you for being the best co-host ever so grateful.
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01:06:59,200 --> 01:07:04,680
I also want to say a huge thanks to the Multicultural Middle Ages podcast team, the Medieval Academy
936
01:07:04,680 --> 01:07:08,080
of America Graduate Student Committee, and to everybody listening for supporting this
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01:07:08,080 --> 01:07:10,800
episode and the important work of this podcast.
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01:07:10,800 --> 01:07:14,320
Please like I hope that this conversation has inspired you to kind of go forth and challenge
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01:07:14,320 --> 01:07:17,760
narratives of nationalism and to reinterpret fantasy on your own.
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01:07:17,760 --> 01:07:21,720
Thanks so much for joining us.
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01:07:21,720 --> 01:07:26,680
This has been an episode of the Multicultural Middle Ages, an anthology style podcast series
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01:07:26,680 --> 01:07:31,480
brought to you by the Graduate Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America.
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01:07:31,480 --> 01:07:38,080
Season 2 was produced by Will Beattie, Jonathan Correa-Reyes, Reed O'Meara, and Logan Quigley.
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01:07:38,080 --> 01:07:53,240
This week is by Anna O'Connell.