Updates (April 29 - May 3, 2024)

New Episode, Eifelheim, French Ovide, Magic

Hello everyone, it has been another week! Here are more updates for your enjoyment.

Flower World and True Myth (ft. Joseph & Monique González)

The most recent episode of I Might Believe in Faeries came out this past Tuesday, April 30th. Here is the description:

The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a special one for me. Every year, I learn something new and am able to dive deeper into this miraculous event.

This year, I had the pleasure of reading a new book called Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy: How God Prepared the Americas for Conversion Before the Lady Appeared from Sophia Institute Press. This book has become a new favorite of mine, so this episode is not one to miss.

In this episode, I am joined by the authors, Joseph and Monique González, to discuss their book, the Flower World myth, the propaganda of Snake Woman, the poet king Hungry Coyote, and how Our Lady and St. Juan Diego fulfill the yearnings of a desperate people.

If that sounds interesting to you, then check out the newest episode and then go read the book!

Eifelheim Book Discussion

I am wrapping up my reread of Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. I am looking forward to the discussion on May 10th at 08:45 pm (Central Time). Early next week, I will send out a post with the link to Google Meets and photos (hopefully legible) of the essay Flynn wrote about writing Eifelheim titled “Discovering Eifelheim”. In this essay, Flynn talks about the research he put into the book and the difficultly of accurately portraying Medieval people. The essay can be found at the end of the book, Medieval Science Fiction (pub. 2016 by King’s College London Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies), which was edited by Carl Kears & James Paz.

I am currently working my way through the other essays in that book. Due to the price tag, I had to get a copy through Interlibrary Loan. There will be more on Eifelheim next week.

I feel badly for patrons who cannot make it to these late book discussions due to time zone differences. It may be possible to have the next book discussion earlier in the day to accommodate them, if they want to join.

Medieval French Moralizing

I am still paging through this enormous three volume collection of the Medieval French Ovide moralise (OM). So far, so good. The introduction describes the tradition the poem was written in:

Mythography is distinct from myth in that “myth” identifies the story, and the “mythographic tradition” encompasses the body of explanations and interpretations that emerge from the reading of such tales. By the time Ovid composed the Metamorphoses, the mythographic tradition had flourished for centuries. And throughout history, the emergence of mythographic commentary is often intimately tied to questions of reception…and scandal.

Consider the reception of Homer and Hesiod. When Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony were analyzed by critics in ancient Greece, they came under attack for portraying the classical gods engaged in immoral behavior. Heraclitus (540-470 BC) didn’t mince words: he said that Homer deserved “to be given a beating!” By way of rehabilitating Homer, the pre-Socratic philosophers proposed physical, or cosmographic, ways to find meaning in the great epics of old: explanations signaling truths concealed in the poetry. For example, Theagenes of Rhegium (c. 525 BC) interprets squabbles between gods to signify tensions between the physical elements: hot vs. cold, light vs. heavy, and so on. He deduces a moral level of interpretation as well: battles between Athena and Ares might be read as the moral opposition of Wisdom and Foolishness, and Aphrodite’s opposition to Hermes as the moral tension between Desire and Reason (or Logos). Almost two thousand years later, similar hermeneutics of interpretation remain in play in the OM.

The introduction continues:

The OM must be distinguished from what most readers — even learned ones, who entertain Plato’s distinction between “poets” and “philosophers” — might think of as poetry today. The OM is not purely a work of literature, as opposed to, say, a philosophical or theological treatise. Modern scholars might describe it as “interdisciplinary” in nature. Taking Ovid’s “fables” as a point of departure, the completed translation and commentary weaves together what we now regard as the separate disciplines of philosophy, theology, and literature. This tells us something about about author, too: he was concerned not only with discussing the big questions — about life, ethics, faith, belief, society, mythology, and so much more — in learned, religious, and therefore Latin-centered circles, but with sharing these concerns and ideas in the vernacular, presumably for courtly audiences…Like Dante, our author integrates many philosophical and theological teachings of the thirteenth century, from the rediscovery of Aristotle, to the wealth of systematic theology that ensues.

Magic and More!

I am still in the process of writing my next post on Catholic (or otherwise) fantasy. I’m realizing that I may have bit off more than I can chew with the discussion and purpose of magic in fantasy, but I will give it a try.

The research on The Goosegirl story from The Brother’s Grimm begins this weekend as well. I have an inkling as to what is going on in this story, but we will see where the research leads.

Thank you all for reading!