Unthinkable Wings

Oh dear. I've never actually _read_ Buchan, but I know what "faithful to the spirit and period of the book means". Ususally, "Well, they certainly _wanted_ to be shagging everyone they met, they were just repressed!".

I don't recall any women in 'The Thirty-Nine Steps'; I don't suppose they'll go the slash route, though...

Buchan is great, though 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' is one of his weakest, IMO.

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Is Rupert Penry-Jones now typecast as a spy? How different will his Hannay be from Adam Carter?

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Hm. Hannay isn't a spy in the book, of course - he's a South African-Scots mining engineer (relevant to the plot) - but I'd have said Penry-Jones was, if anything, too posh, and goodnes alone knows what the adaptors are planning....

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I didn't know that Hannay hadn't been professionalised in the first book - though doesn't he end up so, later? - and the adaptation could seek to remodel the character to Penry-Jones's established image.

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Sort of - Buchan's intelligence department (never given a name, if I recall correctly) uses Hannay, along with Sandy Arbuthnot, as a sort of freelancer, ocasionally yanking him away from his 'real job' in the trenches. Hannay always resists thinking of himself as a professional, or even as particularly bright, though various people call him on this. But he just blunders into the plot at the start of the Thirty Nine Steps, thanks to his next-door neighbour, who is a pro. I suspect it's this aspect that appealed to Hitchcock.

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If you believe that the contemporary super-PC BBC, who wrote Friar Tuck out of the Robin Hood legend, would ever do anything remotely faithful to the world view of a Tory imperialist such as Buchan - especially since The 39 Steps contains some pointed sarcasm at the expense of the Liberal party of the time - I've got a bridge to sell you. I know what to expect and I shall be otherwise engaged any time this terrifying notion turns up on TV.

However, the last episode of "Who do you think you are" featuring Boris Johnson was both amusing and educational. Indeed, the whole series is quite good.

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helflaed.livejournal.com

Oh bother- I missed that one. Is it worth downloading?

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From my point of view, yes. You learn quite a bit of nineteenth and early twentieth century Turkish and German history.

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The BBC - or rather, Tiger Aspect who make the series - have announced that Friar Tuck will be included in the third series of Robin Hood.

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Oh good. And will they write out the noble female Muslim, the negative references to church and crusade, and the rest of their ideological panoply? Somehow, I do not think so.

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I thought the noble female Muslim was written out at the end of series two?

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Oh. I haven't been following (can you imagine why?).

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To be fair, doesn't the original legend lend itself to a negative reading of crusading (though not necessarily of the church as a whole?) After all, it's easy to draw the moral that bad things happen when kings neglect their duties at home for adventures abroad...

I haven't actually seen any of the new Robin Hood, though, and don't specially want to.

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It actually lent itself much more easily to a criticism of the Church, given the amount of venal and treacherous bishops and abbots who are trashed by Robin and co. However, it was all done in the name of Christian charity, and, I believe, with a certain Catholic and Marian slant to it. The anti-Crusading element was invented by nationalist writers in the nineteenth century, and you should read Chesterton's stinging criticism of Macaulay on Frederick II to understand its full folly.

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There's certainly quite a long tradition of mediaeval anti-clericalism to draw on (and, as you point out, often goes in hand in hand with Catholic and Marian piety - Sayers says something similar in one of her introductions to Dante).

I don't know enough about the Robin Hood legend (indeed, I have difficulty remembering that it wasn't made up of whole cloth in the nineteenth century!) to comment, though there are mediaeval authors who seem to be at best ambivalent about crusades - the most obvious example being Wolfram von Eschenbach, although for different reasons, and the sense that one gets from Joinville's Life of St Louis of the various reactions to Louis' crusades.

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...For Frederick II is the first figure, and that a rather fierce and ominous figure, who rides across the scene of his cousin's birth and boyhood: a scene of wild fighting and of fire. And it may be allowable to pause for a parenthesis upon his name, for two particular reasons: first that his romantic reputation, even among modern historians, covers and partly conceals the true background of the times and second that the tradition in question directly involves the whole status of St. Thomas Aquinas. The nineteenth century view, still so strangely called the modern view by many moderns, touching such a man as Frederick II was well summed up by some solid Victorian, I think by Macaulay; Frederick was "a statesman in an age of Crusaders; a philosopher in an age of monks." It may be noted that the antithesis invokes the assumption that a Crusader cannot easily be a statesman; and that a monk cannot easily be a philosopher. Yet, to take only that special instance, it would be easy to point out that the cases of two famous men in the age of Frederick II would alone be strong enough to upset both the assumption and the antithesis. St. Louis, though a Crusader and even an unsuccessful Crusader, was really a far more successful statesman than Frederick II. By the test of practical politics, he popularised, solidified and sanctified the most powerful government in Europe, the order and concentration of the French Monarchy; the single dynasty that steadily increased its strength for five hundred years up to the glories of the Grand Siecle whereas Frederick went down in ruin before the Papacy and the Republics and a vast combination of priests and peoples. The Holy Roman Empire he wished to found was an ideal rather in the sense of a dream; it was certainly never a fact like the square and solid State which the French statesman did found. Or, to take another example from the next generation, one of the most strictly practical statesmen in history, our own Edward I, was also a Crusader.

The other half of the antithesis is even more false and here even more relevant. Frederick II was not a philosopher in the age of monks. He was a gentleman dabbling in philosophy in the age of the monk Thomas Aquinas. He was doubtless an intelligent and even brilliant gentleman; but if he did leave any notes on the nature of Being and Becoming, or the precise sense in which realities can be relative to Reality, I do not imagine those notes are now exciting undergraduates at Oxford or literary men in Paris, let alone the little groups of Thomists who have already sprung up even in New York and Chicago. It is no disrespect to the Emperor to say that he certainly was not a philosopher in the sense in which Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher, let alone so great or so universal or so permanent a philosopher. And Thomas Aquinas lived in that very age of monks, and in that very world of monks, which Macaulay talks of as if it were incapable of producing philosophy.

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