Review on W. P. (William Paton) Ker’s Classic Book, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (1931)

By Jay-Dani “Ousmane Atheneus Aabid Aakil Fārūq Farzan” Guzmán Sánchez ~

Edited by Amber Castillo and Coral Reyes

For review this month I have picked a book I stumbled upon relatively recently and that has quickly risen to be one of the most foundational texts in my research library and a favorite personal as an inspirational piece. The scholarship on display is sound and has been acknowledged to be of a quality that makes the text a classic. This book has gone on to influence my creative writing process and shape how I think about medieval literature and how it links the more ancient to the relatively more modern.

To give some context I should say that this book was born out of the famously academically oriented city-town of Oxford and its chain of world-renowned universities. It was written surrounded by the same circles and people that mainstream classics like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings were written with monumental names in literature like C. S. Lewis (author of the Narnia Chronicles) floating within arm’s reach.

“The story for them is not a thing finished and done with; it is a series of pictures rising in the mind, succeeding, displacing, and correcting one another; all under the control of a steady imagination, which will not be hurried, and will not tell the bearing of things till the right time comes.” (Ker, pg.238)

As a writer of fantasy, myself, I can tell that understanding what I do and its relationship to the past and present in these terms helps in understanding a need for restraint in a process that if allowed to grow entirely free will burn itself out. When writing creatively, fantasy is not the least, some limits must be imposed, spatial-chronological and limits between the possible/impossible borderline. Nonetheless, the constraints are not like those placed upon solid objects, but fluid like a liquid that reshapes itself as needed as it moves from one container to another. Being said, it is interesting to say that restraint is not only an advisable element in the writing process but rather instrumental to it, for a story is akin to a picture from a camera; an event frozen in time with clear, well-defined edges for it is yet impossible to build a camera that can photograph the entire world within one single lens.

“One function of the Romantic School… is to make an immediate literary profit out of all accessible books of learning. It was a quick-witted school and knew how to turn quotations and allusions.” (Ker, pg. 309) I must make a note here, that “romantic literature" is different from “Romantic Literature.” The former, written with a minuscule “r” refers to the love stories we well know, the latter, written with a majuscule “R” refers to the 19th-century movement that succeeded the 18th-century Gothics and is known for its staple presentation of the world in its natural state, perhaps in response to the then rapidly industrializing world. “A Romance,” however, often refers to fairytale-like medieval stories blown to literary size. Now, with that out of the way, I shall say that this movement is a descendant of a widely branched family tree, as Professor Ker himself explains. As the title of the books attests, the Romantic Movement owes much to the works of literature of previous ages, significantly, the Epic poetry studied in its day. An Epic poem is also a great grandparent of one of our favorite literary formats today, the Novel. One of the most obvious differences between a Novel and an Epic poem is that one is prose, and one is poetry. But the similarities are equally hard to miss, for they both tell a continual story throughout hundreds of pages, sometimes over many successions of books all centered on one single character, event, or theme. For people who have a literary diet that is strictly defined by the literature of today, it would be easy to take for granted that not all literature functions thus. Ancient Epics for instance are almost always a compilation of hundreds or even thousands of stories synthesized into one narrative. Something akin to that would be like taking a similar amount of famous lyric songs and using them to write one continuous story. Romantic literature of course exploits what ancient and medieval literature had to offer in all manner of creative and intelligent ways that managed to take old stories and tell them anew as “pictures rising in the mind, succeeding, displacing, and correcting one another” With this said, the literature of today does not exist in a vacuum, apart and different from what has come before, but stands and grows out of what has been left behind by older, literary oriented generations.

The book is great, it allows us to have this kind of conversation and discuss a heritage that, though veiled from view, exists and is as alive as ever. Having read this book multiple times, I can vouch for the value of its contents: there are plenty of more odd pearls to be found in it. For those interested in rediscovering this classic there is good news… first, this book is so old that it is in the public domain, second, due to that fact free copies can be found on the internet in the form of PDF and Amazon Kindle for free, and last, for those who want a paper copy immediately, several are to be found in the Leonard Life Library. Enjoy your reading and stay well.

Earnestly,

J-D.O.A.A.A.F.F.G.S. ~