An Incomprehensible Condition:
An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers
Andrew Hickey
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 Andrew Hickey, all rights reserved.
The author has reserved his moral rights.
All images, unless otherwise noted, are copyright 2005-2006 DC Comics, and are used under fair use and fair dealing laws for purposes of academic research and criticism.
All quotes remain the copyright of their respective copyright holders and are used under fair use and fair dealing laws for purposes of academic research and criticism.
The cover image, The Temptation Of Eve by William Blake, is in the public domain
Also by the same author
The Beach Boys on CD Volume 1: 1961-1969
All these books also available in print at online retailers.
For Holly
In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.
G.K. Chesterton
Appendix: Jack Kirby and Alan Moore
Seven Soldiers Of Victory is a comic series, written by Grant Morrison, drawn by various artists, and published by DC Comics in 2005 and 2006. Written as a series of seven interconnected but separate mini-series, along with two bookends and a prequel story in another title, it became the most-discussed superhero comic of the last decade.
Unlike most superhero comics, it merited all the discussion it received and more. Wildly innovative in structure, it is possibly the most experimental thing DC (a deeply conservative company) have ever published. Much like the fable of the six blind men and the elephant, everyone discussing it manages to come away with a different description.
It’s an experiment in parallel storytelling.
It’s a comment on trends in modern-day comics.
It’s an attempt to reinvigorate a set of moribund intellectual properties.
It’s a commentary on the works of Alan Moore.
It’s a magickal working designed to make the DC Universe sentient.
It’s a huge success with some of the greatest moments and most ambitious storytelling ever done in the genre.
It’s a glorious, messy failure which doesn’t achieve any of the goals Morrison set out for it before it came out.
It’s a marketing exercise tying together a bunch of disparate stories that don’t really belong together.
It’s an effort in promoting Morrison as a “superstar” writer.
All of these descriptions have an element of truth to them, but like the blind men they miss the elephant in the room. Almost all the commentary on these comics (with a few notable exceptions) has revolved around how they position themselves in the space of the grand superhero meta-narrative. Superhero comics have increasingly become about nothing but other comics, or about figures in the comics business, or about online criticism of other comics, to the point where DC Comics’ other main successful series when Seven Soldiers was running, Infinite Crisis , was literally about an unhappy comics fan reconfiguring DC Comics’ shared universe to be more like the way he wanted it. It wasn’t a story in the conventional sense, and certainly it didn’t have a plot, rather it was a rather confused position statement on DC’s then-current editorial line as regards various issues of postmodernism and deconstruction, with punching.
Increasingly, both superhero comics and their readers have no referents other than themselves, and while this can sometimes produce some quite beautiful works, where a single symbol can, for the correct reader, call up seventy years’ worth of layered associations, equally for anyone who cannot, for example, recognise on sight when an artist is trying to draw in the style of Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby, or who, like the majority of people, has never heard of either of those gentlemen, this can be offputting in the extreme, as those comics have no relevance to their lives or previous experiences.
Seven Soldiers, on the other hand, isn’t like that. While Morrison is as capable as anyone at playing with those resonances - and Seven Soldiers is full of that kind of thing if you want to look for it - he and his co-creators have more important themes in mind.
Where most superhero comics have as their frame of reference only other superhero comics, Seven Soldiers is about things in the wider world. It’s full of allusion - some explicit, some more hidden - to folk song, to fairy tales, to the Bible, to seventeenth century religious poetry, to science old and new, to folklore and myth. And its themes are those of much great art. It demands to be taken seriously as literature, and this book is an attempt to do that.
In treating the series as literature, I am in some ways of course doing it a disservice. Worse, I am doing a disservice to the incredibly talented artists who worked on the comics. All I can say in my defence is that while the themes I examine were placed there by Morrison, the comics would be nothing without the artists who drew them (and the letterers who lettered them) and that while this book’s remit doesn’t stretch to examining their contribution in any great detail, I hope it will encourage others to pay more attention to these comics and thus to their work.
As with all my books, this started life as a series of blog posts, and I would like to thank everyone who commented on them, whether or not I mention you by name later.
Holly Matthies, Bill Ritchie, David Allison and Duncan Falconer read the book in proof and offered invaluable advice, though I’m afraid I didn’t take Bill’s advice to “make every chapter 300 words longer! ” Holly deserves extra thanks for being my wife and putting up with me writing this all the time, rather than just by email. David and Duncan also acted as hip-hop advisors, allowing me to overcome my lack of knowledge of the young persons’ skiffle music of the day.
The comics-blogging collective The Mindless Ones (http://mindlessones.com) to which David and Duncan belong, and which invited me to join in the closing stages of this book’s composition, have been a huge influence on my comics criticism.
The collaborators on my terminally-late ’zine PEP! , Debi Linton, Colin Smith, Gavin Burrows, Gavin Robinson, Wesley Osam, Adam Prosser, Richard Flowers and Alex Wilcock (as well as those named above) have helped me understand structure enormously.
Andrew Rilstone’s Who Sent The Sentinels? did more to shape this book than any other work except Seven Soldiers itself.
Werdsmiffery on Twitter first encouraged me to do a book on Morrison’s work.
Lawrence Burton has encouraged my writing and provided a huge amount of support, as has Simon Bucher-Jones.
Jonathan Calder and Deep Space Transmissions both agreed to host elements of my blog tour to promote this book.
Haroon and Abby at Travelling Man Manchester are the best local comics shop staff one could ask for.
And, in no particular order, I’d like to thank Steve Hickey, Matt Rossi, Marc Singer, Jog, Leonard Pierce, Tilt Araiza, Jennie Rigg, Bob Temuka, Michael Petersen, James Baker, Dave Page, Jen Yockney, Emily Wright, Andrew Ducker, Jo Coleman, Jane Louis-Wood, Andrew Ward, Mike Taylor, Travis Hedge Coke, Cormac O’Connor and Penelope Goodman, all of whom have in ways big and small contributed to either the ideas in this book, to my physical and mental well-being while writing it, or both. Don’t blame them, though.
Finally, I’d like to thank Grant Morrison, Ed McGuinness, Dexter Vine, Dave McCaig, Phil Balsam, Michael Siglain, Mike Carlin, J.H. Williams III, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein, Harvey Richards, Peter Tomasi, Simone Bianchi, Rob Leigh,Cameron Stewart, Moose Bauman, Pat Brosseau, Ryan Sook, Mick Gray, Nathan Eyring, Jared K Fletcher, Frazer Irving, Doug Mahnke, Yanick Paquette, Michael Bair, Alex Sinclair, Pasqual Ferry, Billy Patton, Freddie Williams II, Nick J Napolitano and Travis Lanham, without whom the comics I’m reviewing would have just been some bits of blank paper, interspersed with the odd advert and held together with staples.
JLA: Classified
Where to start when reviewing a modular work, one that has no clear place to jump on or off?
Several months before the beginning, of course.
Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers Of Victory is, to my mind, the great superhero comic of the last decade. While Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman might beat it for emotional power and sheer joy, Seven Soldiers offers more room for analysis, more ways of interpreting it, just more, than any superhero comic since Watchmen .
Announced as seven four-issue miniseries plus two bookends, Morrison intended, when this was announced, to make it a completely modular story, which could be read in any order and still work. Of course, this was impossible, but Morrison seemed to take Richard Herring’s attitude (“I don’t know the meaning of the word hubris! Which is a shame, because I’m entering a define-the-meaning-of-the-word-hubris competition. It’s OK though, I’m definitely going to win…”). What Morrison did manage was, in a very short period of time, to release a thirty-three-part story that could be read in a number of different orders, and in many, many different ways.i
Thirty-three parts?
Yes, because before the official “Seven Soldiers” started, there was a three-part story in JLA:Classified, not included in the Seven Soldiers trades, but which features many of the same themes and the same villain.
But the JLA: Classified story is very much a false start, a dead end in Morrison’s thinking. Where Seven Soldiers is revolutionary, JLA:Classified 1-3 is probably the most conservative thing, thematically, that Morrison ever did. And what’s odd is that it actually functions as an argument – albeit not a very good one – against Seven Soldiers itself.
In JLA:Classified, everything is set up to emphasise that there can be only one real Justice League, and that any inferior imitations cannot possibly live up to their standard. First we have the Ultramarine Corps, a set of generic cultural stereotype superheroes from Morrison’s earlier JLA run, brought back as an analogue of the Ultimates who are…
OK, let’s back up.
This is the problem with so-called “mainstream” superhero comics. They’re written for a fanbase so small, so insular, that everything’s now a meta-commentary on a meta-narrative on a meta-commentary. So let me explain, as succinctly as I can, the sheer depth of up-its-own-arseness that is encapsulated in the characters of The Ultramarine Corps, for those of you who don’t have advanced degrees in comics “culture”.
The Justice League are a team of, ostensibly, the most powerful superheroes in the DC Comics “universe”. I say ostensibly, because their membership usually consists of some combination of the most popular characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) and some less popular characters that DC want to give exposure to. They are generally regarded as a fairly clean-cut team, due to most of the characters having their origins in a time when comics were mostly read by very young children. They usually, but by no means always, have around seven members.
The Avengers (not to be confused with the TV show of the same name) are a superhero team in the rival Marvel Comics “universe”. They consist of “Earth’s mightiest heroes” and, in their “classic” form (I’m simplifying things here, please don’t write angry notes) have exactly seven members – again consisting of a mixture of very popular characters like Captain America and Iron Man, along with less popular characters who can’t consistently sustain comics of their own, like Ant-Man and The Wasp. Because Marvel’s characters started a little later than DC’s, there is a slightly more “realistic” tone to their stories, which is to say they have soap-operatic subplots. While the Justice League might go out and stop Starro The Conqueror from taking over the world again, The Avengers would go and stop Kang The Conqueror from taking over the Earth, but also worry about Ant-Man’s multiple personality disorder. Whereas the Justice League were originally aimed at ten-year-olds, The Avengers were originally intended for boys in early adolescence.
By the late 1990s, however, the audience for superhero comics had dropped to a few tens of thousands of people – mostly men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five – and there was no longer such a thing, for the most part, as a straightforward superhero story. Instead, due to periods of “deconstruction”, “reconstruction”, “post reconstruction” and the like, every superhero comic consisted, at least in part, of a comment on other comics. Rather than being defined by the stories and characters, they were gesturing at positions in an argument-space. Superhero comics had gone the way of other formerly populist, mass-market artforms like jazz and rock and roll, with the difference that a viciously conservative, anti-intellectual streak in the fanbase (and among some of the creators) refused to acknowledge that a debate was taking place, even as they were among its most vociferous participants.
This was the climate in which writer Warren Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch created The Authority. Published by DC Comics under their Wildstorm imprint, so not part of the DC “universe”, The Authority was a team of seven superheroes who were explicitly modelled on the Justice League, but who were all in some way more “adult”. Ellis, while he has done most of his work in the superhero genre, has always been contemptuous of it, and his choices (having two male characters be lovers, having another be a heroin addict), while not intended to shock per se (Ellis is not someone who finds the ideas of homosexuality or drug use especially taboo), certainly appeared so to the conservative superhero comics audience. Ellis and Hitch made The Authority have the feel of an action movie – far more violent and action-heavy than the rest of the superhero comics on the shelf.
Ellis and Hitch were followed on The Authority by Mark Millar (a much less subtle writer than Ellis) and Frank Quitely (a much more subtle artist than Hitch), who made the fascism that was implicit in Ellis’ portrayal of the characters explicit, and amped up what was already a violent comic to absurd proportions.
Millar and Hitch then moved over to Marvel Comics. Marvel had started the “ultimate universe”, which contained new versions of their characters, and Millar and Hitch created The Ultimates, a new version of The Avengers, which featured a Captain America who was a jingoistic psychopath, a probably-insane Thor and so forth. This new team was very heavily inspired by The Authority.
And finally Grant Morrison stopped working for Marvel Comics and started working for DC again, where he wrote this Justice League story in which the Ultramarines (a superhero team he’d created many years earlier) are re-characterised as being very similar to the Ultimates (with some elements of other Marvel characters thrown in), before being comprehensively shown to be gullible, violent, simplistic thugs who very nearly allow the whole human race to be destroyed and have to be rescued by the Justice League.
Even so, though, the Knight and Squire (the “British Batman and Robin) in the Ultramarines) still come across as more sympathetic than the ostensible heroes of the story. As David Allison suggested to me “Maybe Morrison is of the Ultramarines’ party without knowing it? ”
However, a second superteam also gets destroyed in this story – Batman’s robot duplicates of the Justice League, which he keeps in his “sci-fi closet” in case of emergencies. Batman does actually have something for every eventuality, including a Dalek.
You thought I was exaggerating, didn’t you?
(We can presume this comes from the never-seen-except-in-my-head crossover The Dalek Invasion Of Gotham, which is possibly the most exciting story of all time, and certainly better than Aquaman Versus The Sea Devils, though possibly not as good as J’onn J’onnzz, Ice Warrior. I’ll shut up now).
But these robots do get beaten, and rather quickly. Which of course means that we’ve had two separate derivatives of the JLA beaten, only to see the real thing triumph at the end (SPOILER: the goodies win). So we get the most conservative of all comics messages “This is the real thing, accept no substitutes, and this is why the original superheroes are better than these modern upstarts”. It’s doubly troubling, in this context, that the Ultramarines are an international organisation while the JLA are the Justice League of AMERICA.
(Of course the JLA include two members of foreign royalty – Wonder Woman and Aquaman – plus two aliens, but they’re all, very definitely, still American.)
This is odd only because the whole of the rest of Seven Soldiers can be seen as an argument against this form of comics-conservatism and for the “Prismatic” view so ably outlined in, for example, this pieceii by Botswana Beast. I can only suspect that Morrison was so glad to be finished with Marvel that he imposed this on the story, his first superhero work since leaving Marvel.
But enough of this “plot” thing… what about that first panel?
The first part of the first panel, shown at the top of this essay, shows one of the Ultramarines quoting the Newtonian law of gravity, . This crops up time and again over Seven Soldiers, but is quoted here with no real context, no reason for being. Or is it?
I’ve talked before, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! , about some of the resonances that the universal law of gravitation has in this story. I’ll make reference to some of that again, when we get to Mister Miracle and we get back into the Pop Science stuff. But it’s not just the law of gravitation – it’s specifically NEWTON’s law of gravity.
Now that’s very interesting when we talk about sevens…
We all know the colours of the rainbow, don’t we? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. ROY G BIV. Seven colours of the rainbow. Everyone knows that.
But how many of us can actually distinguish between indigo and violet?
By any rational reckoning, there are six colours to the rainbow. There are seven because Newton regarded the number seven as having magical properties, and it was Newton who first described how light refracted through a prism gives us the colours of a rainbow (and how the same prismatic colours, refracted through a prism of opposite rotation, give us pure white light again). Newton regarded the number seven as being a number of God, and God created the rainbow, therefore God must have given the rainbow seven colours. So indigo and violet must be two different colours.
(Six, on the other hand, would be the number of the devil. The devil certainly couldn’t have made something so perfect).
A ray of light going through a prism and becoming seven rays, seven rays going through a prism and becoming one. That’s something else to hold on to. We’ve got a lot of pieces of the puzzle already, if we just look closely enough.
Fruity
Now, let’s keep hold of that name, Neh-Buh-Loh, for one moment. Put it aside. Certainly we don’t want to think about how similar that name is to the name Jah-Buh-Lon, which is DEFINITELY NOT the name of a secret God worshipped by Freemasons. There’s nothing that could possibly be connected to that here, and Freemasons almost certainly don’t have any special thoughts about the number seven, after all. So put all that out of your mind. There is no verifiable record of Newton being a Freemasoniii.
Look instead at those other words. A first seed of evil, planted in the universe, that grew fruit. Sounds like the Adam and Eve story, and the Garden Of Eden, doesn’t it?
But that’s just a myth. After all, we’re all good evolutionists here…
OK, so Grodd isn’t, but who trusts him, anyway?
Of course, the fruit that Adam and Eve ate wasn’t the fruit of evil – it was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But for some reason that became associated over the years with the apple – quite what the humble sky potato did to deserve such a thing, I’m not sure, but the apple became associated with both evil and with knowledge.
after dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. “why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.”
Of course, it’s thought that Newton was playing with his friend, here – the apple being such a symbol of knowledge. Much of 17th century thought is opaque to us unless we realise that Biblical allusions were the common currency of speech.
The apple as symbol of sexual seduction has sometimes been used to imply sexuality between men, possibly in an ironic vein. iv
I’m absolutely certain he meant no such thing! v
On a completely different note, Alan Turing, when he killed himself, did so with a poisoned applevi. He’d apparently been mildly obsessed, some years earlier, with Disney’s film of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.
“Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those Waves which somehow Might
Play out God’s holy pantomime”
Poem by Alan Turing, one of four “Messages from the Unseen World” sent on postcards to his friend, the mathematician Robin Gandy, three months before Turing’s death. It was used as his epitaph.
But all of this obviously has no relevance at all to anything that’s going on in these comics, does it? They’re just a silly superhero story about Batman and robots and flying saucers and talking gorillas.
So let’s have a look at that story, at the basic plot…
A serial killer called Black Death has entered the Infant Universe Of Qwewq, a baby universe the JLA have been given to take care of. They keep it on Pluto for safe-keeping. The JLA, minus Batman (who grumbles about them having “got lost saving someone else’s universe”) go into Qwewq to track him down. Qwewq turns out to be a universe very like our own, one in which there are no superheroes at all. In fact we’re meant to infer that Qwewq is our universe (and this is made explicit in Morrison’s All-Star Superman).
Not so much breaking the fourth wall, as opening a window…
However, Black Death has only entered Qwewq as a distraction. While six of the seven Justice Leaguers are in this miniature universe, Gorilla Grodd has launched an attack intended to wipe out the whole human race, with the assistance of Neh-Buh-Loh the huntsman (formerly just known as The Nebula Man, a foe of the original Seven Soldiers). Using “Sheeda spine-riders” (tiny little fairy parasites… and between the “fairy” and the “fruit” we’re seeing quite a bit of gay subtext here, aren’t we? Although the LGBT rainbow flag only has six colours…) they manage to take control of the Ultramarines, except for The Squire, the “British Robin” (who looks more than a little like British kids’ comic character Beryl The Peril, and shares a name with her).
The Squire contacts Batman, who takes her to Pluto, where she manages to contact the JLA in Qwewq while Batman activates his robot JLA doubles (referring to himself as “knight” and the rest of them as “pawns” in code. Whether this is how he views the real JLA is left open). The robots keep Grodd and Neh-Buh-Loh occupied long enough for the rest of the JLA to get back from Qwewq and (SPOILERS! ) save the day. But Black Death has planted a seed of evil in Qwewq… a seed that will grow until the end of time, the “vampire time” at which point it will come back as Neh-Buh-Loh, to try to kill “the seven”.
So the JLA have been fighting our universe all along…
Because the idea of a universe with no superheroes is, of course, intolerable – and to redeem themselves for their violent, unthinking behaviour having led to Grodd and Neh-Buh-Loh having killed huge numbers of people – the Ultramarines go into Qwewq in order to try to save it. The fact that they’ve already seen its future doesn’t matter – they’ve become heroes, and heroes fight whether or not they can ever winvii.
And that’s basically that.
So, before I wrap this up let’s have a little bit of a talk about Seven Soldiers proper. Because Seven Soldiers started out as a JLA project too…
In fact, it started out as Morrison trying to do a DC equivalent of The Avengers, to be called JL-8:
Dan Raspler asked me what I’d do with the JLA if I came back and I had no idea at all, which kind of nagged at the back of my mind until it came out as drawings and notes. My original intention was to do a team comic called JL8 which would be a Justice League book with no big icon characters at all. I figured, however, that if the Authority could work instantly with a bunch of new characters, wouldn’t it be possible to take a bunch of old characters, polish them up,’re-imagine’ their origins, powers, look and motivations and pass them off as if they were new guys too. Additionally, as a way of giving the JL8 roster a hidden backbone of familiarity, I based the whole thing on the classic membership of the Avengers and went looking for obscure DC character analogues to loosely fit the billviii
In this original idea, we would have had the following characters:
The Guardian – included as a parallel for Captain America, both characters created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both be-helmeted and shield-wielding.
Mister Miracle – a Jack Kirby creation, Mister Miracle comes from the New Gods, who came along “when the old gods died” according to Kirby – those old gods including, in Kirby’s mind, the version of the Norse God Thor that Kirby had co-created and which appears in the Avengers.
The Spider – a villain who pretends to be a hero, who is good with a bow, The Spider is an obvious analogue for Marvel’s Hawkeye – a hero who pretends to be a villain, who is good with a bow.
Etrigan The Demon – another Kirby creation, this man who at times of stress swaps places with a demon is a good analogue for Bruce Banner/The Hulk.
Enchantress – a parallel for The Scarlet Witch
Manhunter – a dark reimagining of J’onn J’onnzz, the Martian Manhunter. Presumably as an analogue to Quicksilver, though I can’t see any obvious link (except that Quicksilver is another name for Mercury, and Mercury and Mars are both planets. Too distant though…)
And The Atom – a scientist who can shrink and grow in size, to replace Ant-Man, a scientist who can shrink and grow in size.
These plans changed, but it’s interesting that even that early on, Morrison was thinking about analogues of analogues and connections between the JLA and the Avengers.
The Facts
Comic issues JLA: Classified 1-3
Artists Ed McGuinness (pencils), Dexter Vine (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Mike Carlin (editor)
Connected Morrison works Morrison wrote the JLA comic through much of the 1990s, and a version of the Ultramarines appeared in that, notably in the stories DC: One Million and Justice For All . Morrison plays with alternate versions of the JLA in the JLA: Earth Two graphic novel, drawn by Frank Quitely. Morrison deals with The Authority coming to our earth (in much the same way the Ultramarines do here) in The Authority: The Lost Year (a story that Morrison started and Keith Giffen finished to Morrison’s plot). Qwewq first appears in JLA: Rock Of Ages, which of all Morrison’s JLA work is most relevant here. Both Qwewq The Infant Universe and Superman appear in All-Star Superman by Morrison and Quitely.
Look Out For Teams of Seven. Gravity. Hands… touching hands… reaching out… touching me… touching you…
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Why writers should never insert themselves into the story The life trap! Pirates! In Manhattan! And a cameo from Booster Gold!
I forbid all young girls
Who have golden hair
To travel down to Carterhaugh
For young Tam Lin is there
From all that pass through Carterhaugh
He will take a fee
Their rings or their green mantles
Or their virginity
From Abigail Acland’s Tam Lin Version Xix
True Thomas actually existedx.
There was a real, verifiable, human being, existing in consensus reality, Thomas Learmouth. He and his prophecies were highly regarded, and he was known as “true Thomas” because he was considered literally incapable of telling a lie. While England’s legendary figures - its Arthurs and Merlins, Robin Hoods and Little Johns, are purely fictional - any pretended connection to real historical figures is so tenuous that even were they the basis of the story, the umbilical cord between reality and fiction has long since been severed - this Scottish legend is rooted firmly in reality. Tom Learmouth - or should we say Thomas Rymer de Erceldun (the Learmouth name appears to have been added later) was a real person.
Not only that, but he has as good a claim as any to being the first real poet of the English language as it is understood today. We don’t have precise dates for his life - he’s referenced in a few documents from ca 1238, as already being an accomplished poet, and he was still alive around 1286 (which would make him extraordinarily long-lived for the time), but definitely dead by 1299 (when his son refers to himself as his heir in a charter). So his work spanned most of the mid-to-late 13th century.
The 14th century is generally considered the time when English (the language, not the country) literature generally began to recover after the Norman invasion several centuries earlier, and in that time the language had changed beyond all recognition. Whereas a typical Old English (pre-Norman) poem might read like:
Næs hie ðære fylle gefean hæfdon,
manfordædlan, þæt hie me þegon,
symbel ymbsæton sægrunde neah;
ac on mergenne mecum wunde
(From Beowulf)
A typical 14th century poem might be:
As hit is stad and stoken In stori stif and stronge,
With lel letteres loken,
In londe so hatz ben longe.
Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde,
ledez of þe best,
Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer,
With rych reuel oryZt and rechles merþes.
(From Sir Gawain And The Green Knight)
Apart from a couple of odd letters (notably þ - the thorn - which is the letter we now represent as th), the latter looks basically like English. It might be oddly spelled, but you can pick up roughly what it means, whereas with the earlier one you can’t.
Until the early 19th century, it was generally thought that 14th century works like Sir Gawain And The Green Knight or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were the earliest extant Middle English literature. But then a manuscript was discovered - written in the early 14th century, but a transcription of Thomas Learmouth’s 13th century poem - of what is now considered the oldest epic poem in Middle English, Tristram , by Thomas The Rhymer.
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says Lady, thou pu’s nae mae.
Why pu’s thou the rose, Janet,
Amang the groves sae green,
And a’ to kill the bonie babe
That we gat us between? ‘
O tell me, tell me, Tam Lin,’ she says,
‘For’s sake that died on tree,
If eer ye was in holy chapel,
Or chirstendom did see? ’
Child Ballad version of Tam Lin
Tristram was based on the story of Tristan and Isolde, itself the work of another poet called Thomas - this time “Thomas of Britain”, a twelfth-century British poet who wrote in Old French. Like many stories of its time, the story of Tristan and Isolde was rewritten by pretty much every writer who came across it, and no doubt Thomas of Britain wasn’t the first person to write it (there are earlier ur-versions of the same story dating back as far as the eighth century), though he was the first to put it in the form by which it became known.
Also like many stories of the time, the Tristan story soon became entangled with Arthurian myth. By the time of Thomas Rhymer, it had expanded into a thirteen-book series, the Prose Tristan . For those who think that modern fantasy writers have a monopoly on particular excesses, it should be noted that not only was this a thirteen-volume series, but also that it was started by one author (Luce de Gat) and finished by another (calling himself Helle de Boron) who was (or claimed to be, though it’s generally thought this was a lie) a close relative of another famous author of the time (Robert de Boron). And the second author took the story in a completely different direction - turning it into a sequel to the works of his supposed famous forebear.
Because Robert de Boron was the person who came up with the modern Holy Grail story - that it was the cup in which Joseph Of Arimathea collected Jesus’ blood when he was on the cross - as well as linking this story to the Arthurian myth, and significantly expanding the story of Merlin. Robert de Boron’s version of the Grail myth was incorporated into the Vulgate Cycle, a series of five books which is the major source of the Lancelot parts of the Arthur myth. Helle de Boron managed to link this into the Prose Tristan by the simple measure of copying a huge chunk of the Vulgate Cycle right into the middle of it. (This was in the days when everything had to be written out by hand, of course, so this was several orders of magnitude more difficult than these Ctrl-C Ctrl-V days. Of course it was also pre-Google, so this sort of plagiarism was a lot harder to track down. Maybe we should posit a Conservation Law for Difficulty Of Plagiarism? ).
The original form of the story of Tristan, before it became entangled in the Arthur mythplex, was a simple one - Tristan was a relative of the King of Cornwall (though his name is a Scottish one, and the area over which he was Prince is probably a French transliteration of Lothian), sent to Ireland to bring back Isolde (or Iseulte) for the King to marry. Unfortunately, Tristan and Isolde take a love potion which causes them to fall in love, and as a result there is a love triangle between the two of them and King Mark, which is resolved in one of several equally tragic ways (most stolen from various classical sources, most obviously in Thomas of Britain’s version, where he just sticks in the end of Theseus And The Minotaur, with the black sails if dead/white sails if alive bit kept intact).
This story has clear parallels with the Arthur - Guinevere - Lancelot love triangle of the Arthurian legend, and it’s that which probably prompted the Prose Tristan’s author to link the two, but even as late as Mallory it was clearly a distinct, different thing - the other seven books of the Morte d’Arthur work as a cohesive whole, while The Fyrste and the Secunde Boke of Syr Trystrams de Lyones dumped into the centre of the story, is more a commentary on its surroundings than an integral part of them.
In such a way did a story about a Cornish Scotsman who fell in love with an Irish woman, as formulated by a Frenchman and retold a century later by a Scotsman, become the oldest surviving poem in Englishxi.
Love is impatient.
It ignores traditions and conventions.
It is not bound by human constructs, jurisprudence, and the laws of men.
Love reaches out and holds, open hearted, it demands attention.