by Jess Howe

Created on: September 11, 2007

What's meant anyway by the title phrase? The Society of Creative Anachronism defines its "Medieval Era" as 900-1600 AD. That covers an awful lot of ground with regards to world history. I've known people in the SCA who go a bit farther back, too, to somewhere around 600 AD, say; that makes it an even longer list.

You do, after all, come up with a good list, if you look. Herodotus' writings might be a little before that time to say the least, but there were plenty of others running around who were quite as interesting to read.

The question, though, is do you want to read these things? Let me try a different route with you. If we take the SCA generic standards of Medieval Era, then we can't have writings of North America, obviously. However, we also can't have works of writing for a large amount of the world that was "known". Those works that were written were done by special scribes for the first seven hundred or so years of the Christian Era, and not likely too available to the public. Since the printing press was invented 1440 by Gutenberg, does that mean we are to start with works from only then on? After all, the Library at Alexandria was destroyed apparently enough times by the final time at 648 or so for people to stop rebuilding it. So that great collection of books was unavailable as well. The Bible is basically what seems to have been left until 1440.

That's a long time to be without literature. In this day and age it's almost unfathomable. But let's examine again what we're calling literature. "acquaintance with letters", is the general definition, in which case all societies that use an oral tradition are to be assumed illiterate and therefore unworthy of our attention. But, those societies include the Celts, which at one point in the BCs of history covered as an empire all of Europe, stretching down the Iberian Peninsula, out as far East as the Czech Republic and Georgia. The "illiterate" societies also include the Scandinavian Vikings, who in their time dominated much of Europe, the Finns who sacked numerous Viking towns, and the peoples of later Europe in General, whose folk tales were collected by the Grimm brothers.

By now, the "illiterate" societies' works have been taken down; I know from my own research that the monks in Ireland were the ones to painstakingly collect their stories. However, the tale of the Children of Lir has been mutated from what it was into a tale about how we'll all be saved... no matter. The point is, the oral traditions'

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