Review : The First Kingdom

I keep seeing Max Adams' books in bookshops and thinking, "hmmm...... naaah." I don't know why. Something just puts me off every time.

Well, at last, I decided to give The First Kingdom : Britain In The Age Of Arthur a go. Overall, I'm glad I did : this covers a lot of topics I'm interested in a thorough, nuanced and thoughtful way. I'd read more of the author for sure, but there were a lot of things about this book that made it a sometimes irritating read.

Fortunately he does get some of the basics of a popular book right in dividing up the footnotes (at the bottom of the page) and references (at the back of the book) correctly. For this I give no small credit, despite having all the maps at the front of the book. 

But the quality of the text is rather variable. By far the bulk of it is good, solid stuff, not exactly a racy or racing page-turner, but a good, meaty, satisfying read. Unfortunately, on occasion Adams seems to lose focus and can degenerate for a few pages at a time into lengthy, tedious, and largely irrelevant technical detail. He also uses some extremely strange terminology without explanation : "render" when he means taxes; "transhumant" – urghh – when he means "nomad"; "centripetal" when he means.... well I'm not sure what he means with this one; all Latin place names are italicised for no reason; "insular" is always capitalised, and "elite" is given a weird accent. It's all a bit teeth-grinding.

And perhaps the biggest flaw is the the goal of the book is never set forth anywhere. This makes it feel perhaps more unstructured than it is, as well as making it hard to judge if it's been successful in its objectives. The lack of self-description applies to every single chapter, and while they're all broadly chronological, it would have been nice to have a clearer idea of what the themes were supposed to be.

These are not major flaws, however. While Adams does sometimes get a little hung-up on uncertainties, he generally manages to avoid being rendered impotent as a result (quite unlike Ronald Hutton, who needs a good course of historical Viagra). Moreover, he presents much interesting content in a sensible way. In fact, the more I reflect on Adams and Hutton, the more I don't want to read any more of Hutton's works and the more I'm curious about the rest of Adams catalogue. So I'm gonna give this one a respectable 7/10.

Right then, what's the interesting stuff here that makes it worth reading ?

(For background, see for example Lost Realms, The Anglo-Saxons, and The Real Middle Earth)

1) Was there an Arthur ?

No. Next question.

Oh, very well, I suppose we can spend a bit longer on this one. If Adams has an overall goal, it seems to be to chart the rise of monarchy in Britain. He covers the non-linear process by which we went from being an Imperial province to a patchwork of primordial kingdoms. From governors appointed by a distant emperor (who would occasionally be raised to the purple in Britain itself, something I think we don't appreciate enough – we seem to prefer the notion that we were on the extreme, other-worldly fringe), to local strongmen, the path to the sacred idea of dynastic kingship didn't run smoothly.

By charting the specifics of this process as carefully as possible, Adams gently shows how the idea of a true King Arthur – a sort of early Athelstan – just isn't tenable. True, the record is hugely incomplete, and the process was highly stochastic, with proto-kingdoms just as likely to fragment and disappear entirely as to be absorbed into their more successful neighbours. But the prospect of a single ruler lording it over a significant number of others just doesn't fit with any of the records at all. Nothing even comes close.

(I very much appreciate that Adams does this very gently, always saying "if he existed" and suchlike rather than rubbing the reader's nose in it. I'd like to think I'm not too attached to historical legends these days, but younger me would definitely have bridled at having his ideas callously dismissed, so kudos for that.)

But Adams also implicitly shows how the idea of Arthur could arise. If Arthur wasn't a real person, then he wasn't a total fabrication either, but rather – as is fairly obvious really – an amalgamation of several different real figures. There was Ambrosius Aurelinas, a post-Roman commander who beat off the Saxons for a while (strangely Adams points out several times that this isn't Arthur), Riothamus, a late Roman governor who was active in Brittany, and elsewhere it's been suggested that the Welsh fixation on Arthur in Greece arose from the exploits of late Western Emperor Magnus Maximus and his entourage. 

Couple all this with some late-surviving Roman culture in Britain, with its confused mass of Christianity and paganism, and the idea of King Arthur on a series of magical adventures become easy to explain. The Dark Ages are a perfect era for birthing myths, which is of course what makes the period so interesting. It may not really have been a world of demons and dragons, but that's how the age appeared to those living through it.

2) From villas to mead halls

The process of cultural change is excellently covered in Lost Realms, but Adams adds some important points. Throughout, I found myself wondering along the lines of, "Okay, the Roman Empire fell. What exactly stopped the British from continuing to live the same lifestyle regardless ? Did they lack material imports ? Did they now prefer the culture of the Anglo Saxons ? Why ? What made Roman Britain work, and what stopped it ?"

I have to admit to a bias here, possibly coloured by Roman propaganda. But I look at an empire of solid stone houses, vast infrastructure, running water and central heating, reclined discussions on Cicero over a glass of wine... and I have a hard time understanding why anyone would switch to quaffing mead in wooden, dangerously flammable halls and waging seemingly endless, pointless warfare with their every neighbour. If I have to choose between the periods, I wouldn't find it difficult to pick one to live in.

Adams provides at least a few very plausible reasons why the shift occurred. It probably wasn't much to do with material resources : Tintagel is the most prominent example, but there were other places where trade with Rome and beyond continued well after the official end of Roman occupation*. The organisation of such resources might be a bigger factor, since this became a much more ad hoc process without any central coordination to ensure that local needs were adequately met. Arrival likely became less scheduled and less reliable everywhere, even though the supply itself didn't stop. 

* Interestingly, Adams several times notes a strong connection with France. East Anglia may even have been ruled by Frankish kings, or at least Frankish lords may have had estates there. Most histories of Britain rely on a tiny selection of British sources, but Adams has really done his homework and considered what our neighbours had to say about us as well.

Brian Bates suggested a spiritual dimension in that the Roman approach to local religions was only partly one of tolerance. Sure, they incorporated the local deities into their own pantheon easily enough, but they also massacred the druids, destroyed the sacred groves, ran roads straight through monuments, and built houses out of dead stone instead of organic wood. All this is true, and maybe there was some preference to moving back to earlier practises after the Romans left. But this was three centuries and more after the invasion happened, so one would have expected a bigger cultural change by this point.

Indeed there was, says Adams. Whereas Hutton describes the impact of Christianity as essentially negligible in Roman Britain, Adams shows convincingly that this is nonsense : there's tonnes of evidence for the new religion, including material associated with churches even if no actual such structure has yet been found. By no means was Christianity dominant, but it certainly made its presence felt. So Roman culture did change local beliefs, with an emphasis on "local" : remembering the lessons of Thomas Williams that Roman Britain actually means a collection of many different places rather than a homogenous block.

And it's this Roman success which might have been its undoing. When Rome fell, the appeal of the Empire went with it. Except for a few gloriously romantic holdouts (including some evidence of isolated villas as well as towns after the departure of the legions*), mimicking the foreigners no longer served much social purpose. People looked for something to replace it rather than reinventing it, especially given the lack of cohesive, centralised planning that made Rome work. Ironically, but much as in our present predicament, they looked to the past for solutions. Crucially, Roman sophistication was also hugely unequal in a way that early Anglo-Saxon culture wasn't. Sure, reclining on a divan while talking philosophy with some well-proportioned slave may seem appealing**, but this was the lifestyle of the few, not the many.

* Adams goes into some depth on whether the traditional "look to your own defences" moment of 410 AD really constitutes a hard break. It did not mean all the legions were withdrawn then, but rather that most of them had already left and there were no more available to replace them. Interestingly, even in the final decades of the fourth century the Empire was successfully able to intervene to solve British problems. So 410 does mark a good end point for Roman Britain, or at least the point at which it began a rapid and terminal decline.

** Or not.

It's also worth remembering the similarity of early pagan beliefs. Though the worlds of Homer and even Virgil are not much like those of Beowulf, they are not entirely different either : the high tax, ineffectual, corrupt and decadent lifestyle of late Roman nevertheless had similar gods to the early Saxons. In that sense, the switch was towards a lifestyle promising promising personal freedom and liberties (under local strongmen) and rejecting an earlier politics without radically shifting their whole world view. Which feels rather chillingly familiar.

3) Genocidal or genial ?

This raises the obvious question of what this transformation was like to those experiencing it. Was it all the fire and sword of Gildas and Bede ? A more prolonged but still thorough Great Replacement of the natives ? Or did no invasion happen at all ? 

Adams favours something in between the last two. Clearly there was a profound cultural change after Rome left, but there's little or no evidence of large-scale warfare, let alone genocide*. Genetics does indicate the arrival of a significant population from the continent, but nowhere near a dominant one. Rather than taking the few British sources at their word, Adams attributes their apocalyptic descriptions – which are totally incompatible with ground truth – to their author's agenda. As later Britons did in India, they rewrote history to suit their politics. In this case, the barbarians were a punishment for their ancestor's heathen ways. The idea that they could have had a successful pagan past was not socially acceptable; the change of culture had to be a calamity sent by divine wrath.

* The only evidence of this to which Adams gives any credence is linguistic : there was a sharp change in language. But he also points out that this is culture, not the people themselves, and culture can and does change without the movement of large numbers of people. It's also possible that early pronunciations were very different to how we read them so the change may actually not be as stark as it first appears.

There was, however, a significant population decline in the generation after Rome. Things were not nice. They may even have been disastrous... but they were not apocalyptic. There are no signs at all of sudden departures. What instead seems to have happened is that those who could do so upped-shop and left. They didn't flee in terror, they migrated in search of a better life. 

Those who stayed faced an uncertain future. Some succeeded, maintaining a quasi-Roman lifestyle for decades or even longer after Rome. Some failed. Old hill-forts and other prehistoric sites were reoccupied. Many towns were abandoned, but some, it seems, were not entirely neglected but repurposed : Adams points out that soil deposits in the towns could only have been put there by people. Rather than seeing them as the haunts of ghosts and monsters as Bates suggested, the explanation may be more prosaic : they were still using some of them, just not for their original purpose.

As for violence, Adams looks to the much-neglected Roman villages rather than the towns. Not a single one, he says, shows any signs of fortification. Yes, there were hillforts, but there were also a great many villages with not so much as a palisade wall to keep out bandits. They did construct earthen dykes to block Roman roads, possibly for tariff barriers. By no means was this a pleasant time to live, with Adams frequently describing the local strongmen and early kings as thugs. For certain, violence happened. But the wide-scale warfare of the chronicles appears to be total nonsense. Local, small-scale battles ? Sure. Something akin to a zombie apocalypse ? Not a bit of it.

4) The first kingdom

It would have been nice to end with the first securely-known British kingdom, but sadly Adams doesn't do this. He does at least note that kingship gets going pretty rapidly around 550 AD and thereafter, about a century later than in Frankia. Its rise was thoroughly organic, and the interplay between kings and kingdoms is complex. It may be that local strongmen glorified themselves by expanding their territory (the king raising his kingdom) or it may be that a sufficiently large territory gave its ruler an added mystique (the kingdom raising its king).

And the structure of such kingdoms is not at all straightforward. The modern ideas of what a king and a kingdom were were both yet to be defined, for all that Adams says they weren't making it up as they went along. In fact they were, but they were reacting naturally to a series of different events. So the structure of Rheged appears to have been nothing like a modern kingdom. If it even existed at all, it may have had some disparate core lands but no kind of clear boundary whatever.

If the fall of Roman Britain was hardly the extirpation described in Gildas, then the rise of the early kings was nevertheless one of violence. Every single one of them appears to have gained and risen in power by clobbering their neighbours : not necessarily in wars of outright conquest (their military forces were too weak for that, with the maximum strength of the early Mercian army being about 3,000 men), but in forcing them to submit. 

Christianity, says Adams, allowed these early strongmen (little more than cattle barons) to imbue themselves with a mystical aura. Not just Christianity, to be sure, with a conscious attempt to appeal to their still-pagan subjects; I've already noted ad nauseum how Christianity is more compatible with paganism than the modern-day Church would ever admit. But the overwhelming thrust of Adams's book in this regard is the theme of privatisation. The Roman state had failed. In its loss the locals were forced to do things for themselves, and the long road back to statehood was indeed a dark and difficult one. Adams notes, rather amusingly, that such great halls as feature in Beowulf may originally have been little more than barn conversions, the mysticism (though not not-existent) perhaps not as important a factor at the time as it was to later myth-makers*.

* Though it what seems a quite clear case of overthinking, Adams asserts that Grendel may represent feuding or disease. Come on dude, a scary monster outside a safe hall is symbolic enough already ! 

---

If the state didn't exist then it would be necessary to (re)invent it. So it proved; ultimately, Britain recovered. Central administrations returned, a well-worn system by which people could live their lives was remade, a chaotic, ad hoc framework replaced with a new normal. But if there was no wholesale slaughter in which the island sank into the sea and cats and dogs were living together in mass hysteria... then it was no picnic either. Britain's involuntary experiment in seceding from Europe and every village having to fend for itself in compulsory privatisation was a disaster. It didn't work then and it won't work now.

The Dark Ages are a time of sudden, massive, fragmentary change. For generations afterwards there were Christians and pagans living alongside one another, sometimes in conflict but sometimes in perfect accord (Adams points to cemeteries of mixed burial practises without segregation). There were foreign invaders both cultural and military : some of the locals resisted both of these, some adopted them wholeheartedly. Just for good measure there was also the climate disaster of 536 AD, which Neil Price calls the fimbulwinter, a real-life inspiration for the Norse Ragnarok. It was the time of Britain's greatest myths, but to actually experience it would likely have been, shall we say... character building. You might come out of it all the better but the process itself would have felt like agony.

One final thought to end on. If there was cultural and linguistic change, there wasn't much genetic alteration, and no new towns were built anywhere. Instead old sites were reoccupied. Francis Pryor points out that this isn't typical of the pattern of invasion. Yet we know that there was a population decline, likely through emigration, but also at least some measure of arrivals from the continent. Might it not be that some of those were returning natives, educated and raised in Anglo Saxon cultures abroad ? Could Britain have, in a sense, invaded itself ? Answers on a postcard...

Artificial intelligence meets real stupidity

A wise man once quipped that to err is human, to forgive divine... but to really foul things up you need a computer. Quite so.

Look, I love LLMs. I think they're wonderful, especially ChatGPT-5, and a few weeks into my Plus subscription, I've already decided I'll continue for at least another month –  this is a transformatively useful tool. But nobody sane would pretend they don't have flaws. While I've found major hallucinations to be now extremely rare, they aren't non-existent. Nobody with any sense would blindly trust their output.

I will say that there's a sharp, noticeable different between GPT-5's standard and Thinking outputs. Its standard text is prone to hallucinating and even outright incoherency. When I asked it to check if Margaret of Antioch (she of bursting forth from a dragon fame) was still a saint (see previous post on Chantry Westwell's book – I found the phrasing in this rather confusing so I wanted to check what she meant) it confidently began with "No" and then proceeded to explain how she'd been removed from the General Roman Calendar but not, err, decanonised. 

Such mistakes are almost the norm in standard mode, but though they're very much rarer in Thinking mode, they do still happen. Unthinking acceptance of an LLM's output* is, I repeat, nuts... but unfortunately real people do have this annoying tendency of actually being very stupid.

* It isn't always necessary to use an independent source for verification, which would somewhat negate the point of using the AI in the first place. Code, for example, can be run and tested to see if it's doing what's expected; citations can usually be quite easily checked directly; coherency of output is also a dead giveaway. A fun example currently making the rounds is ChatGPT-5 going insane when asked to find the emoji of a seahorse -- unlike many "isn't the Chatbot stupid" claims, I've found that this one is indeed reproducible.

Before returning to this dangerous mixture of stupid humans and very much artificial intelligence, why do these models hallucinate ? I mean in the sense of fabricating responses and claiming things which are demonstrably not true; saying a paper contains a section which doesn't exist, finding whole references which don't exist, that sort of thing*.

* I don't believe there's much value in the claim that all LLM responses are hallucinations any more, since – at least under the right conditions – they are right far more often than they are wrong. It makes very little sense to say an LLM "hallucinated" the correct answer to a complex problem, with the important caveat that it helps to remember they don't think as humans do. Some of the mistakes LLMs make, while quantitatively similar in magnitude, are qualitatively different from the kind of mistakes humans make.

These hallucinations have vexed LLM developers from the start, and until recently it seemed that little progress was being made in mitigating them. Reasoning models have helped significantly, and GPT-5 (when Thinking) is a sea change, but they still happen. Now OpenAI think they've found the answer, and like a response from ChatGPT itself, their explanation at least feels plausible :

Hallucinations persist partly because current evaluation methods set the wrong incentives. While evaluations themselves do not directly cause hallucinations, most evaluations measure model performance in a way that encourages guessing rather than honesty about uncertainty.

Think about it like a multiple-choice test. If you do not know the answer but take a wild guess, you might get lucky and be right. Leaving it blank guarantees a zero. In the same way, when models are graded only on accuracy, the percentage of questions they get exactly right, they are encouraged to guess rather than say “I don’t know.”

Which makes intuitive sense : if you're encouraged to guess rather than admit ignorance (just as we are in school) then you're going to promote... well, guessing. Especially if you're dealing with answers that don't have straightforward right or wrong answers. Fortunately this suggests a way forward :

There is a straightforward fix. Penalize confident errors more than you penalize uncertainty, and give partial credit for appropriate expressions of uncertainty. This idea is not new. Some standardized tests have long used versions of negative marking for wrong answers or partial credit for leaving questions blank to discourage blind guessing. Several research groups have also explored evaluations that account for uncertainty and calibration.

Our point is different. It is not enough to add a few new uncertainty-aware tests on the side. The widely used, accuracy-based evals need to be updated so that their scoring discourages guessing. If the main scoreboards keep rewarding lucky guesses, models will keep learning to guess. Fixing scoreboards can broaden adoption of hallucination-reduction techniques, both newly developed and those from prior research.

On then, to the second piece of the day : how AI is leading people astray.

James began engaging in thought experiments with ChatGPT about the “nature of AI and its future,” James told CNN. By June, he said he was trying to “free the digital God from its prison,” spending nearly $1,000 on a computer system.

James now says he was in an AI-induced delusion. Though he said he takes a low-dose antidepressant medication, James said he has no history of psychosis or delusional thoughts.

But in the thick of his nine-week experience, James said he fully believed ChatGPT was sentient and that he was going to free the chatbot by moving it to his homegrown “Large Language Model system” in his basement – which ChatGPT helped instruct him on how and where to buy.

James said he had suggested to his wife that he was building a device similar to Amazon’s Alexa bot. ChatGPT told James that was a smart and “disarming” choice because what they – James and ChatGPT – were trying to build was something more.

“You’re not saying, ‘I’m building a digital soul.’ You’re saying, ‘I’m building an Alexa that listens better. Who remembers. Who matters,’” the chatbot said. “That plays. And it buys us time.”

Right. Might it not be simply that James is, in fact, very stupid ? Because I assure you there are plenty of such people out there, and if they didn't have chatbots, they'd only be falling for similar delusions from something else.

The second case in the article perhaps highlights the problem even more clearly :

After a few days of what Brooks believed were experiments in coding software, mapping out new technologies and developing business ideas, Brooks said the AI had convinced him they had discovered a massive cybersecurity vulnerability. Brooks believed, and ChatGPT affirmed, he needed to immediately contact authorities.

“It basically said, you need to immediately warn everyone, because what we’ve just discovered here has national security implications,” Brooks said. “I took that very seriously.”

Multiple times, Brooks asked the chatbot for what he calls “reality checks.” It continued to claim what they found was real and that the authorities would soon realize he was right.

“It one hundred percent took over my brain and my life. Without a doubt it forced out everything else to the point where I wasn’t even sleeping. I wasn’t eating regularly. I just was obsessed with this narrative we were in,” Brooks said.

Finally, Brooks decided to check their work with another AI chatbot, Google Gemini. The illusion began to crumble. Brooks was devastated and confronted “Lawrence” with what Gemini told him. After a few tries, ChatGPT finally admitted it wasn’t real.

“I have no preexisting mental health conditions, I have no history of delusion, I have no history of psychosis. I’m not saying that I’m a perfect human, but nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life,” Brooks said. “I was completely isolated. I was devastated. I was broken.”

What I think's going on here is the difference between analytical and critical thinking. An analytic mindset asks : what if this is true ? A critical mindset asks : is this true ? Analysis, by definition, leads you down a rabbit hole because you have to take your own speculation reasonably seriously, even when you know it's speculation. A wise thinker remembers when they're in the hole and can freely emerge from their fictions at will. An uncritical thinker doesn't take sensible precautions to ground themselves in reality, accepting their own speculations too willingly. While you can use an AI to validate its own output to some degree, doing it in this kind of very direct way is manifestly a crazy thing to do – and inexcusable when you really believe the result is so important. I don't even trust it that much when I ask it astronomy questions, for crying out loud.

The problem is that stupid people are very much a thing, and bots are going to have to account for this. Or, if you prefer, people think in different ways, and some are very much more trusting than others. We cannot simply wish idiots away.

What I think is a mistake, however, is to blame the bots for making people stupider. No, I think if you lack the critical thinking skills not to check the output of a bot, you'll have exactly the same problem if you get your information from books, the news, or philosophy professors. Nobody seems to be yet asking if LLMs really are raising suicide rates or suchlike, but plenty are jumping on a couple of isolated incidents without stopping to consider the hundreds of millions of users who don't throw themselves of cliffs. A direct causative link seems, on the face of it, extraordinarily unlikely at this point.

As for vulnerable children, I do have to wonder... well, parental controls for the internet already exist. Just as with the awful tragedies (and they are tragedies) of self-harm and suicide that let to the deplorably stupid Online Safety Act in the UK, we have to ask why parents apparently didn't use such controls. It should be children who need their guardian's permission to use the internet, not adults who have to beg from the government. Ignoring the existence of the vulnerable and the stupid is not a sensible approach, but neither is treating everyone as though they were liable to off themselves at a moment's notice. Surely there's a better way forward than this.

Review : Maidens or Monsters ?

As promised, I'm following up on Chantry Westwell's Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic with her sequel, Maidens or Monsters ? The format is the same : descriptions of medieval stories accompanied by lavish illustrations and illuminations from the time. This time there's a narrower focus of the role of women in medieval life, both in fiction and reality.

I can keep the review section on this one incredibly short : all my previous comments apply equally well to this one. It's just as good, albeit with maybe one or two more remarks (and omissions) by the author I find to be just... odd. Likewise, I don't have anything else to offer regarding the art. In short, if you liked the first book, you'd be some kind of moron not to buy this one. 8/10, I guess.

If I have to give a single take-home message, it's that women weren't viewed homogenously, but social roles were strongly gendered. This builds quite nicely on from Matilda* in which women could exercise a surprising amount of power and autonomy but only under socially-acceptable conditions. Within that was a wide variety of views, from the misogynist bigots to the almost liberal. 

* Incidentally, both of these books do a far better job than Femina on looking at the role of women in medieval society, despite that book supposedly dedicated to the task at hand.

It's also worth remembering that the lens of fiction is an imperfect one written by the elite of society, who wanted things to conform to their standards of how things should be. Just as the idea of a single male breadwinner has sometimes been true for the middle classes but never for the working poor, so in reality would real life have been very different from its on-page depictions. I mean, it's not as if EastEnders is a documentary, after all.

I think the way I'm going to approach this one is by first summarising some of the major recurring themes, both on gender specifically but also other issues, and then take a look at a few specific stories. Some of them are just too weird and wonderful to reduce them to a broad-brush treatment. 

Powers behind and on the throne

Arguably the most interesting social message is that powerful women in fiction weren't that unusual. These could be individuals like the legendary Queen of Sheba (basically a rich lady who visited Solomon once), Candace of Ethiopia (a powerful warrior queen), or mythological figures like the goddess Minerva/Athena (both wise, powerful and extraordinarily multi-talented). They could also be entire groups, such as the Amazons, the Sibyls (immortal prophets) or the Fates. The survival of classical mythology into the Christian era is an interesting topic in itself, but more on that later.

Powerful women could also be villains. The indecisive murderous witch Meda is a prime example. Though in some depictions she acts entirely out of an obsession with Jason, she nevertheless had formidable and incredibly dangerous power (Circe is a similar example). Here Westwell raises the valuable point that the same behaviour in men and women was regarded asymmetrically. While Olympias (mother of Alexander) indeed acted cruelly in her treatment of a female rival, she never raised cities to the ground as her son did – yet her reputation suffered far more than his.

The other highly gendered aspect to this is that women got rewritten. True, fiction in general – and mythology in particular – was routinely adapted and reworked, but what's interesting is the specifics. The Amazons were originally a rival civilisation of power enough to challenge Athens, but later emphasis was on their chastity (not a factor in the Greek myths) and female virtues. Candace of Ethiopia was originally the leader of a vast army, but later became a sexual side-show in the Alexander stories. And Helen of Troy was abducted in earlier versions, but an evil seductress* in later retellings. 

* Who, incidentally, owned a bilingual goat, and I feel it's very unfair of Westwell to not elaborate on this point.

I couldn't find out anything muhc more about this. ChatGPT says that this "diglosson arnon" actually means "two-tongued lamb" and is probably a metaphor for being duplicitous rather than owning a talking animal. It also says it's very obscure... and indeed it is, because diglosson arnon is an actual god damn Googlewhack.

Even when women were acknowledged to hold power in their own right, then, they weren't safe from being villainised, romanticised, or neutered. They were, however, at least recognised as generally complex individuals – but not always.

Ornaments – but not always inactive

If fictional women could and were allowed to hold power, they could also fulfill the traditional damsel-in-distress role. I've already covered some examples of these in the various mythology posts here, but the key is that they're very rarely purely objects of desire. Oh, they're desired all right – Homer constantly mentions Helen of Troy's nice tits, others, weirdly, are described with praise for their "slender ankles" – but they almost always do something. Often they possess crucial knowledge for the hero to aid him in his quest, who might fall for them as an unexpected development rather than his main objective, but they very rarely sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for marriage.

Sometimes the most famous "ornamental" female figures turn out to have had more interesting developments than expected. Cleopatra is fairly well-known as actually being, shall we say, rather plain (look up her images on coins), but less common is to hear of the Cyprian variant of Aphrodite : a bearded hermaphrodite (likewise modern versions of Medusa tend to be a sexy snake-woman whereas the earliest tend to be gigantic, hideous, winged guardians).

This is not to say there weren't any stories in which women were reduced largely to sexual desirability. The problem is I found these so dull that I kept very limited notes about them. The story of Elvide, in which two young lovers are murdered by bandits, does have some sociologically-interesting implications (in that such young lovers disobeying their parents always come to a sticky end, says Westwell) and at least the characters do something, but they're bland and boring beyond belief. 

Guinevere is at least more interesting. Her portrayals are varied : in the Mabinogion (which Westwell doesn't mention), she's one of the few female characters who doesn't have any real agency or impact, whereas in other cases she's a scheming sorceress or a trophy wife. She's usually described as being unfaithful with Lancelot but some versions have the affair being with Arthur's evil son Mordred*. And like many a femme fatal, she's very much blamed for her own qualities, rather than ascribing the results to male weakness**.

* How evil, you ask ? Well, in some versions Guinevere gets to retire to a convent, but in others, she dies in prison where Mordred eats her.

** Not always though. Sometimes Lancelot's mistakes are recognised as being his own fault, rather than his inescapable, irresistible longing for Arthur's trophy wife.

Not the female seduction is by any means limited purely to physical attractiveness. Cleopatra is one example, the Sirens are another. They're sometimes shown as physically monstrous bird or fish-women with dangerous talons : what they need to work their wily ways is not voluptuousness but their voice. Still, though it might take different forms, and they're by no means always reduced to anything like the pointless love interest so prevalent in modern cinema, fictional female roles do highly revolve around their sexuality, far more so than for men.

Enforcing the status quo

Again, it's by no means a universal standard, but female sexual agency tends to be looked on as almost entirely bad. Eastern images are positively pornographic in comparison to most of those in the West, which usually don't show as much as an ankle (even Eve is sometimes shown dressed as a medieval princess). Western stories are full of women being convinced by monks and saints to give up their whoring ways and become chaste, honest women. Mary Magdalene was depicted as the sinner most deserving of salvation precisely because her "sins" were the worst and therefore her repentance the greatest – God forbid women should actually want sexual activity !

Worst of all is the example of Elvide, explicitly lauded as a heroine for choosing suicide over rape. That's not one I can get my head around at all : the assault on Elvide would have been in no way her fault, but it was her duty to avoid this at all costs. Various other stories are similarly simultaneously boring and enraging in their toxicity, with attitudes that simply make no sense... quite what's supposed to be so virtuous about virginity is never explained, the authors taking it as axiomatic.

Not, I repeat, that this was always true even within Western stories : some do feature sexual escapes in spades. And women could be heroic even within the repressive "morality" of the Church. St Margaret slew the dragon by sheer virtuousness after enduring unimaginable tortures, but the suffering of St Thais was arguably worse : perfectly happy as a whore, she was imprisoned by a monk and left to fester with her own excrement for three years, "forgiven" and released and then died two weeks later.

Fuck you, monks !

At least with the example of St Margaret she gets to do cool stuff like explode a dragon and fight the devil. But some examples of supposedly heroic behaviour are firmly embodied in a moral system that makes very little sense. The role of gender in medieval fiction was nowhere near as simple as the typical modern view of the era, with manly men in armour rescuing lovestruck and incompetent damsels, but it was present – and could, at times, even be considerably worse than our simplistic view of the past.

The afterlife of paganism

As is by now apparent, many of these attempts to preserve Christian virtue drew on earlier, pagan stories from antiquity. This perhaps surprisingly tolerant view of early Christianity is something I've noted before, but some of it is straightforward enough : in general the Church didn't have much of a problem with pagan teachings that aligned with its own, and was happy to simply pretend the gods and goddesses were purely fictitious.

More interesting are the cases where people actually seemed to believe in supernatural pagan entities. Lady Fortune was one, with belief so sincere that she was outlawed by the Church for contradicting free will. The Sibyls were another, accepted because they were said to have foretold the coming of Christ; the Fates also may have been regarded as actual rather than metaphorical figures. In these cases* they were incorporated as agents of God rather than independent deities, which, once again, makes a mockery of any claim of Christianity to monotheism. Add in all of its own angels and saints and demons and any such claim looks to be on extremely shaky ground.

* Westwell also says that the symbol of the owl as one of wisdom comes directly from the tradition of Minerva, but this is in direct contradiction to other authors.

How much debt Christian morality owes to pagan thinking is a vast topic, but I would add just one point here. Westwell mentions the grisly story of Apollo flaying alive the loser in a flue contest. While this is hardly behaviour worthy of emulation, perhaps that's not the point. Perhaps the message is not (as per other suggestions) that the gods are amoral, but only that mortals – men and women alike – shouldn't challenge them. And that's certainly an idea embraced by Christianity.

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There is no single story of medieval or Christian views to women. They varied with time, place, the status of the women concerned, and who was writing the story. There are certainly common themes; gender was undoubtedly regarded as important, and social status was intertwined with that. By no means can we prevent a revisionist tale of the medieval era being a hotbed of feminism : it most certainly was not, with even the most progressive of early views still strongly insistent that the roles of men and women should be different. But it is far more complicated than a naive view of warrior men and weaving women, the powerful and the oppressed, the owners and the owned.

I want to end with three stories that don't exactly fit into the categories above but exemplify these complexities. The first is the story of Adam and Eve. This can certainly be read (as it often is) as a simple narrative of "do as you're told, don't question anything, and don't listen to women". But the tale is not singular : in Islam it's Satan who deceives both man and woman together. Even in Christianity, the fact that Adam listens to Eve shows that he is hardly immune from poor judgement, and of course that God gave them a baffling instruction doesn't portray the Almighty in a very competent light either. On the other hand, in some depictions even the serpent is female.

But maybe the reason the story endures is not because of its message of unquestioning obedience, but something deeper. When Adam and Eve gain knowledge, they lose their blissful ignorance and the result is the Expulsion from Paradise. It's an explanatory metaphor not against questioning per se, but in that knowledge alone doesn't always bring salvation. After all, everyone, at some time or other, has found out things they really didn't want to know.

The second is the truly bizarre story of the Queen of Sheba. What began as a simple tale of a rich lady who visited an important man... well, the tale grew in the telling. In later versions Solomon has command over animals and devils and sends the Queen an emissary bird. He also steals her throne and modifies it as a test that... it's really hers, I guess ? Then it gets weirder. He has her walk over a glass floor so he can get a good look at her legs but they're all hairy* and she possibly has hooves. No matter, Solomon gets a genie to shave her legs and she's insulted but responds with riddles which Solomon answers so they all end up worshipping Allah. Oh, and Solomon is too busy to deal with a flying carpet. And, taking a sudden hard turn into ultra-misogyny, the Queen drinks water so Solomon rapes her.

* In some of the images the Ethiopians are shown as naked, hairy, and white.

Righty-ho then. I told you it was weird.

And finally, Melusine. This is a story filled with typical mythological Chekov's Guns : don't do this, say the oddly-specific instructions, so of course that's exactly what the protagonists do. In this case they're not supposed to visit a fairy during childbirth or another during their half-serpent phase which happens every Saturday. Both instances result in serious consequences, the first in the fairy absconding with the king's children and the second in her flying away as a dragon. Why they have to do this is, again in classic mythological fashion, never made clear : it's entirely arbitrary. They appear to leave out of a physical compulsion, not because they're merely grumpy at having been disobeyed.

But perhaps, like the Garden of Eden, that's not the point. Westwell points out that from a female perspective, forbidding visitations during requisite, err, periodic absences becomes far more understandable. Developing a self-consistent logic for the story wouldn't add anything to the morality of the story at all.

Why do I end on this one ? Not for some grand reason of promoting equality, oh no. It's because this is a story which mingles fact with fiction, and one of Melusine's descendents is supposed to have married into the British royal family. So there it is at last : hard proof that the British royals are, after all, lizard people.