hudebnik | Entries tagged with medieval

When we got our greyhounds, we were told to hold onto the leash using a particular method: lark's-head the leash loop around your wrist and wrap the leash around your fingers. This is quite secure: even if a dog lunges after a squirrel or something and pulls the leash out of your hand, the lark's-head will tighten around your wrist and you won't drop the leash. Of course, it also means that the leash, which is basically a long flat ribbon, gets twisted; if you're like me and your sense of the rightness of the universe requires untwisting the leash, it sometimes requires undoing this whole assembly, untwisting, and redoing the lark's-head and all that.

Of course, I have two dogs, whom I frequently walk together. Which means not only can each leash get twisted, but they can get twisted around one another, and you can't untwist either of them individually until you've undone the twist-around-one-another.

This sounds like a job for... Math! (Into a nearby phone booth, a quick clothes change, and out comes Algebraman!)

I'm sure that better mathematicians than myself have analyzed cord-twisting and braiding from a group-theory perspective, but (a) I want to try developing it from first principles myself, and (b) most of those mathematicians don't know about fingerloop braiding, so I might have something to add.

First, I should give a roadmap to what I'm doing and why. Much of what mathematicians do is "find a concrete phenomenon, erase as many details as possible, and prove things about the resulting abstract concept." If you can prove something about the abstract concept, then since the original concrete phenomenon was an example of the abstract concept, whatever you proved must be true of it. Furthermore, by erasing the details, you may find lots of other concrete phenomena, apparently completely unrelated, that turn out to be examples of the same abstract concept, so the same must be true of them too. So today's voyage is inspired by the concrete phenomena of twisting dog leashes and fingerloop braids, but it'll have things to say about lots of other concrete phenomena like piles of paper in my office and infinite checkerboards.

( Cut a lot of math-for-the-layman content )

Things get much more interesting when you have three or more bowes. But I'd better wrap this up and prepare for bed.

The 2021 movie "The Last Duel" is based on a non-fiction book about a judicial duel in 1386 Paris, at a time when judicial duels had fallen out of favor but weren't completely stricken from the law-books yet, to resolve the accusation by Sir Jean de Carrouges that a squire, Jacques Le Gris, had raped Carrouges's wife, Marguerite.

They say every man is the hero of his own story. The writers of "The Last Duel" took that literally, together with the principle that every court case has people with conflicting views of the same events. The movie is divided into three chapters: "the truth according to Jean de Carrouges", "the truth according to Jacques Le Gris", and "the truth according to Lady Marguerite", each presenting many of the same scenes from a different perspective. Naturally, Carrouges comes off as bold, brave, principled, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; Le Gris comes off as fun-loving, decent, and wronged in his own account, less so in the other two accounts; and Marguerite comes off as three-dimensional, decent, and wronged in her own account, and less so in the other two accounts. All this is interestingly done, and well-acted (by Matt Damon as Carrouges, Ben Driver as Le Gris, and Jodie Comer as Marguerite, as well as Ben Affleck as Count Pierre, to whom both Carrouges and Le Gris are in fealty, and Alex Lawther as the childish, 18-year-old King Charles VI). And one is intended to come away with the sense that Marguerite's account, the least supported by surviving court documents because they were written by men, is probably the most accurate. Also that men are pigs -- some actively malevolent, some clueless and sexist but not actively malevolent, some employing their monopoly on law and science to devalue and discredit women, etc. And that, then even more than now, a woman charging rape will be treated as a criminal herself, and she might be better off keeping silent about it. There's a line "better a mother who's alive than a mother who's right," or something like that.

As a period piece, it's a mixed bag. There are nice touches, like the doctor examining Marguerite's urine in a blown glass urinal, and the kirtle Marguerite wears in the rape scene (at her own home, not expecting guests, so it's an appropriate thing for her to be wearing) is a front-laced Gothic Fitted Dress (tm) with set-in sleeves. I'm no armor expert, but the armor looks to me only a few decades off (aside from the half-visored helmets, which are presumably inspired by jousting helmets that offered more protection on the left side than the right but which just look wacky). And heraldry experts I know say the heraldry is appropriately used, and quite close to the historical arms of Carrouges and Le Gris respectively. But as usual in movies set in the Middle Ages, the extras are better dressed than the named characters, who wear a variety of clothing ranging from the 13th century to the 16th. In one scene Marguerite wears a leather vest/bodice thing-like, and in another she goes to court wearing what might be described as a "frontless surcote", recalling perhaps a burlesque dancer. Most of the headgear dates from between 1420-1470, not 1386, and there are occasional excursions into Tudor. Indeed, Marguerite's forbiddingly old-fashioned and strait-laced mother-in-law (who lectures her about how when you get raped, you should pick yourself up and go on with life rather than whining like a baby) seems to be wearing an Elizabethan neck-ruff, at least 200 years fashion-forward.

Combat is depicted as horrible, brutal, and "by any means necessary" dirty. Again, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but there is lance-play, sword-play, axe-play, dagger-play, and unarmed wrestling, all of which are documented in combat manuals of the time; I think I even saw a moment of half-sword thrusting, although much of the armed combat is wild hacking and blocking.

shalmestere and I were both reminded of the 2018 movie "Ophelia", which likewise takes a story traditionally centered on its male characters (in that case "Hamlet") and re-tells it from the perspective of one of the women. Indeed, both movies have almost exactly the same closing scene, with the female protagonist playing with her toddler in a sunny field of flowers, so I have to suspect that it was an intentional quotation.

So see the movie as a sort of feminist manifesto, not as a period piece, and you'll enjoy it -- if you can stomach the rape and violence.

We went to see the new movie about Gawain and the Green Knight a few nights ago. Yes, went to see, in a theatre, the first time we'd been inside a movie theatre in a year and a half.

The movie is not a period piece, and doesn't try to be. The clothes vary all over the map, from Hollywood-medieval-peasant-rags to 14th-or-15th-century armor to 15th-century female headdress to 17th-century jerkins to modern-looking shirts that look like they're made of printed T-shirt-knit, sewn together with broad contrasting seams diagonally at the shoulders. The feasting-room at Camelot is bleak, cold, undecorated, and ill-lit even at Christmas.

There are many versions of the story: in some, the Green Knight will return to Camelot a year later to deliver his return blow, while in others, Gawain is supposed to make his followup appointment at the Green Knight's place some days' ride away. In this movie, it's the latter, and the majority of the film is spent on Gawain's journey from Camelot to the Green Chapel, a few days before Christmas. Of course, Gawain has no directions to follow, so things are sorta aimless; he asks directions of locals, who take advantage of his out-of-town status to mug him for anything valuable he might be carrying, including his horse but (oddly) neither his sword or the Knight's axe. He pushes onward, on foot, and as he gets increasingly lost, tired, and hungry, his encounters and adventures get more and more surreal. There's an overarching sense of mystery: things don't make sense, and there's no reason they should make sense, because the Arthurian world is impenetrable and ineffable.

Eventually he does find the Green Knight, and has difficult choices to make. Do I submit willingly to have my head cut off? If so, do I do it while wearing the enchanted sash that I've been assured will protect me from harm, or is that cheating? (Or is it perfectly fair, considering that the Knight knew he could walk away after having his own head cut off?) If I go home without facing the Knight, what sort of man do I become? And so on. The end is left ambiguous: the audience doesn't know what happens to Gawain's head, only sorta what's happened to his self-image.

So after we got home from the theatre, I checked the bookshelves for the original tale. Which, it turns, out, we have in Tolkien's edition, but not a modern-English translation. OK, I can sorta handle Middle English... but this is harder Middle English than Chaucer, using a wide array of obscure words to assist the alliteration. So I've waded through about 200 lines so far, understanding about half of what I read. I'm sure there's a translation on-line somewhere....

Specifically "Camelot 3000", a DC comic-book series originally published 25 years ago or so. I mention it because the hardbound edition recently appeared on our dining room table, thanks to my collection-development-librarian wife.

What do you call a guy who stands and fights against vastly superior numbers and weaponry? In fiction, you call him a hero. In real life, you call him a corpse.

Anyway, this is the story of a hero. See, the world is going to hell, being invaded by murderous extraterrestrial aliens, and the human race is losing steadily, apparently because after giving up on space exploration, it lost its will to do much of anything else either. And one day a guy in funny clothes who calls himself Arthur Pendragon and whose chief qualification is his willingness to stand and fight against vastly superior numbers and weaponry (and whose notion of "strategy" is "OK, everybody, on three...") shows up out of nowhere and offers to save the world, if its current political leaders will just hand over all their power to him and declare him King of Earth. The current political leaders, of course, are transparently corrupt, so they take this as nothing but an opportunity to scheme and back-stab one another (and Arthur). Turns out those political leaders are being played by another political leader, name of Morgan le Fay, who gets played a bit herself. Naturally, this being a comic book, Morgan (1600 years old but doesn't look a day over 25) wears a metal bikini most of the time.

An early portion of the book deals with the gathering of the Knights of the Round Table: the spirits of several characters from the original Camelot have been reincarnated in the bodies of somewhat-ordinary people around the world, and they have to be awoken, reminded of their true identities, and brought together to form a fighting team. For example, Guinevere has been reincarnated in the (hot) body of a female army general, so she has a more active role this time around. More interestingly, the Sir Tristan (of "and Isolde" fame) has been reincarnated in a (hot) woman's body, and (s)he spends much of the book demanding, without much success, to be treated as a man. When Isolde is also reincarnated as a woman, things get even more uncomfortable: Tristan still loves and desires her, but he's totally not gay, much less lesbian. This was controversial stuff 25 years ago, and in some parts of the U.S. it still is.

But what makes me really uncomfortable is the "Great Man" trope. See, the problem with Great Men is that, however Great they may be, they're still Men, and therefore susceptible to such human failings as overestimating their own Greatness. Especially when they see disaster looming, and imagine themselves the only thing standing in its way: they act "by any means necessary", putting their own Great judgment above petty things like laws, Constitutions, and basic human decency. The whole reason we have democracy, laws, Constitutions, and slow-moving government bureaucracies is to protect society from the whims of self-proclaimed Great Men.

When I was about about four years old and my mother was teaching me math, she mentioned at one point that numbers could be divided into "even" and "odd", and that even numbers were those you could get by doubling another number. I thought it was really cool that there could be different kinds of numbers that had their own names, and I resolved to make up my own: "even even numbers", which were even more even than regular even numbers. They were the numbers you could get by nothing but doubling over and over again: 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.

Decades later, I read in Isidore's Etymologies:

Numbers are divided into even and odd numbers. Even numbers are subdivided into these categories: evenly even, evenly odd, and oddly even.... An evenly even number is one that is divided equally into even numbers until it reaches the indivisible unity, as, for example, 64 has 32 at its midpoint; 32 has 16, 16 has 8, 8 has 4, 4 has 2, 2, has 1, which is an indivisible singularity. An evenly odd number is one that can undergo a division into equal parts, but then its parts cannot immediately be evenly dissected, like 6, 10, 38, 50. As soon as you divide this kind of number, you run into a number that you cannot cut evenly. An oddly even number is one whose parts can be divided equally, but the division does not go to the point of one, like 24.

(From The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, transl. by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, ISBN 978-0-521-83749-1, Cambridge University Press 2006.)

OK, so Isidore beat me out by 1350 years....