There has been a steadily rising interest in a particular form of medieval representation. This has followed what Umberto Eco called “The Middle Ages as a barbaric age” or simply as “Shaggy Medievalism,” that is, the enduring presence of the hyper-masculinized – and often visibly hairy – barbarian, whose brutal and violent disposition demonstrates the inefficiencies of civilization as a staple of many depictions of the Middle Ages. However, in the 1970s this trend was still nascent, and Eco's observations on medieval masculinity would not become a part of broader discussions for some time. In the decades since, however, there has been a veritable explosion of historically located, scantily clad, hirsute, and muscled brutes – and today, we are living in an age where the Middle Ages appear shaggier than ever. Yet it is not for nothing that Eco termed this form of distortion “shaggy,” for this image (like premodern notions of the “wild man”) builds on notions of masculinity and gender in ways that are not always apparent. Therefore, this barbaric figure can work as a Trojan horse, which, in its aspirations for authentic representation, ushers in a fantasy that caters to the psychological needs of its audience. The violently antisocial, nihilistic, misogynistic, and racial elements that so often plague representations of shaggy men in the Middle Ages, thus, cannot be separated from the fantasy itself, even seemingly against the wishes of its creators.

The rise in popularity of shaggy medievalism is both fed, and feeds into, a rising appeal found in savage males in today's world, especially among younger men. Unsurprisingly, the figure that seems to be most frequently at the center of this fascination is the Viking: almost certainly male, with clearly identifiable blond hair, rippling muscles seemingly unrestrainable by anything other than fur, and, of course, wielding impossibly large weapons. Moreover, such figures are only increasing in popularity, as, following in the footsteps of the 2013 History Channel program Vikings, there has been a surge of similar offerings, including The Last Kingdom, Vikings: Valhalla, Ragnarok, and the Vinland Saga. Similarly, in the video-game industry several attempts to follow up on the 2011 massive hit Elder Scrolls: Skyrim have seen franchises such as God of War and Assassin's Creed set their games in a Viking world.

About a decade after the end of second-wave feminism, precipitated by the intra-feminist sex wars of the 1980s, feminism rose again in the 1990s, this time in its third iteration. Third-wave feminism's emergence is bound up with the Riot Grrrl punk bands in Washington – and the feminist “zines” associated with them – and Anita Hill's accusations against judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, which resulted in a wider discussion on the representation of women in leadership roles. Unlike second-wave feminism, third-wave feminism (and postfeminism) have been subject to a commercial uptake that has arguably been both damaging and advantageous for the cause. At the same time as feminism's recovery, the Old English poem Beowulf was witnessing a re-emergence in popularity, most notably in the 2000 translation by Seamus Heaney, and the numerous literary, televisual, and cinematic approaches to the poem in the 2000s. As with feminism, the 1990s and 2000s saw the Hollywood-ification of the poem, and thus, a complex variety of takes on the early medieval text.

This essay explores the intersections of these trends and argues that a number of contemporary Beowulf adaptations are bound up with both the championing of and resistance to third-wave feminism. This dialectic is further contextualized against the cyclical nature of feminism's “waves,” the characteristic peaks that signal a new wave, and the troughs that signal the backlash to it, as seen in the 1950s/1960s, 1970s/1980s, and, in this case, the 1990s/2000s. In a significant departure from Victorian portrayals of Grendel's mother as solely monstrous, each of the four adaptations discussed in this chapter is influenced by and responds to third-wave feminism, as evidenced by their similar depictions of Grendel's mother. All four of these texts depict her character as a shapeshifting being, both as a conventionally beautiful woman, and as horribly monstrous in her appearance. While these more recent adaptations depict Grendel's mother as a dichotomous figure, they do so to very different effect. Although she becomes a more significant character, I argue that some of the ostensibly more “empowering” depictions are nuanced attacks on women and female sexuality. Moreover, this oscillating representation of Grendel's mother can be understood as representative of the complex striations of third-wave feminism and postfeminism explored in this study, wherein female sexuality and its manifestation are often sites of contention.

In 2004, writer Kinoko Nasu and art director Takashi Takeuchi, founders of video-game developer Type-Moon, released the eroge (adult visual novel) Fate/stay night, which also operates as a bishoujo game, or “pretty girl” game, in which the narrative progresses similar to a “choose your own adventure” story. In its entirety, Fate/stay night consists of three storylines and takes more than 100 hours of combined reading and game play to complete. Along with the narrative, consumers also experience rich illustrations, an original soundtrack, and professional voice-overs. Since its release, Fate/stay night has spawned an entire Fate universe, known by fans as the Nasu-verse, which includes video games, manga, and anime.2 These properties envision a modern-day world in which an underground society of mages compete for control of the Holy Grail by summoning heroes from world history to battle each other, with the last hero standing winning the Grail for his or her mage.3 Figures as varied as Shaka Zulu, Cucullain, and Billy the Kid appear in the Fate properties. Based upon the anachronism of bringing past figures into the modern world, Fate provides the opportunity to examine and update the relevance of classic stories for a contemporary audience. As the Fate name implies, overall the series is concerned with questions of destiny and the desire to change past mistakes, while also posing the question, “What does it mean to be a hero?,” often working to undermine traditional heroic archetypes and historical memory.

One of the main characters across all Fate platforms is Artoria Pendragon, a cis-gendered female who willingly chose to live as the male King Arthur in order to fulfill her duty to rule Britain. Wracked with guilt over the end of her reign, she fights in the Holy Grail Wars to change the past and save Britain, but in the anime series thus far, no one actually ever wins a Holy Grail War, owing to various complications that prevent any resolution. The characters who receive much of the narrative attention in Fate seek the Grail either to impose some ideal vision upon the world or, like Artoria, to correct some past mistake. The inability of anyone to win the Grail and, therefore, fulfill these wishes illustrates the impossibility of imposing one's own vision upon humanity or of altering one's past.

In 1823, the historian Jacobus Scheltema (1767–1835) published the text of the Frisian Tescklaow, with his learned commentary on it. This document, bearing the date of 1557 but with many elements apparently reaching back to the later Middle Ages, regulated the annual threshing of rapeseed (L. brassica napus). According to Jacobus's remarks, the law and other documents related to it had been newly discovered by his brother Paulus (1752–1835), and many scholars took Jacobus at his word. Indeed, Paulus's find soon attracted the enthusiastic support of many esteemed scholars, including Jacob Grimm, who appreciated the Tescklaow for its folksy character. Moreover, though some experts raised questions about the text from almost the moment it was published, acceptance of the Tescklaow did not fully end until seventy years after its publication, when it was conclusively demonstrated to be a forgery.

This essay outlines the nature and reception of this fake text written in quasi-Old Frisian and discusses the background against which it appeared. In its apparent antiquity, the Tescklaow appealed to the Romantic desire to support national identity with a medieval narrative, and as a legal text it attracted particular support among many scholars who focused on laws as vehicles for national identity. It also attracted attention because it was written in Frisian, a little-known language that was presumed to be extremely old, older than many other Germanic languages. To be sure, the document's supposedly Frisian character is underscored in its title's use of the spurious word “laow,” which, in its apparent echo of the word “law,” pulls on the commonplace perception that Frisian and English were closely related languages. Moreover, the Tescklaow's frequent references to medieval Frisian legal traditions helped allay many historians’ initial doubts about its authenticity.

Setting the Stage for the Tescklaow

The second half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the agricultural revolution and industrialization in western Europe. In its wake followed accelerated urbanization, and it is hardly coincidental that in the same period a desire grew among the bourgeoisie to look back to times when life seemed simpler and more heroic. James Macpherson, for example, began to collect manuscripts with Gaelic songs on the Hebrides and the Scottish Highlands, which he published in 1760 as Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.

“On Monday evening last, a new Tragedy, called Earl Goodwin, was performed at our Theatre before a very crowded audience, and although it does not strictly adhere to historical facts, yet was it allowed to have a considerable degree of merit,” ran a review of Ann Yearsley's Earl Goodwin in the November 7, 1789 edition of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. Reviews of the play in other papers tended to concur with the assessment published by the Bristol Journal. An extract of an anonymous reviewer's letter in the London Chronicle argues that “where the authoress has failed, the obvious want of materials in that part of our history whence her story is taken is the cause; and considering how scarce they were, her success is beyond even the expectation of friendship.” The prologue was odd, reviewers agreed, yet the epilogue much better; the plot a bit thin, but the dialogue well done. In all, a decent play, if light on historical fact.

Earl Goodwin is one of several medievalist history plays from around the advent of the nineteenth century that were written by women. The plays – which, in addition to Yearsley's Earl Goodwin, include Frances Burney's Edwy and Elgiva, and Joanna Baillie's Ethwald pt. I and Ethwald pt. II – exist at the intersection of history, playwriting, and women's writing. These plays take passages from popular history books and expand them into five-act tragedies in a Shakespearean mold, providing the characters with psychological depth, elaborate monologues, and inferred motivations along the way. Yearsley, Burney, and Baillie all center their plays on women's relationship to power in the royal courts of pre-Conquest England. As such, these plays serve as useful vehicle for exploring early English medievalism in a period often overlooked as “largely barren.” They are also a useful window into not only eighteenth-century perceptions of the lived experience of women in the early medieval period, but which elements of that experience the playwrights felt might resonate with a modern audience – the medieval as a mirror for modern anxieties and desires.

The perceived “barrenness” of Old English studies in the long eighteenth century is contested by the work of scholars such as Rosemary Sweet and Dustin Frazier Wood, whose emphasis on antiquarians and creative work argues for a century that produced plenty of work – and interest – in Old English history.

Critics’ and fans’ reaction to the final two episodes of Season Eight of HBO's Game of Thrones (GoT) was marked by outrage and revisionist writing. A Change.org petition demanding the rewriting of Season 8 garnered more than 1 million signatures, particularly after the infamous “The Bells” episode, where Daenerys torches King's Landing, killing civilians even after the surrender bells have been rung. And in the fanfiction site Fanfiction.net, in the GoT subcategory with thousands upon thousands of submissions, around one-fifth of the submissions are stories that attempt to rescue Daenerys from the showrunners.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have been accused of cramming what should have been another eight seasons into the final two in an attempt to finish the series, and these accusations are valid. What is more insidious, however, is that part of this quick wrap-up relies on the misogynistic trope of female madness and produces another text that illustrates and endorses patriarchy's centuries-old weaponization of mental health/illness to police boundaries and punish transgressors, a practice common in the Middle Ages and continuing in medievalist texts. Margery Kempe's emotional outbursts of weeping, her visions that bypassed clerical authority to connect directly with Christ, and her direct chastisement of figures of the clergy were seen as madness. Stephen Harper notes: “On a sociological level, Kempe's madness constitutes an individual's struggle for autonomy and her rejection of her social role.” The 1381 uprising, an attempt to overturn a patriarchal hierarchy of authority, was described by official discourse as “as an outbreak of diabolical madness which threated to overturn the supposedly natural and divinely ordained feudal hierarchy.” The inability to conform to normative gender roles actually determined legal diagnoses of mental distress. In her exploration of medieval English legal investigations, Wendy J. Turner notes that: “Representatives of the crown […] based their judgements of an individual's mental state on his emotional one” and the emotions termed inappropriate were those that violated gendered expectations of behavior. William de Percy of Kildale was labeled as being “not of sound mind” for weeping during an investigation, while Elizabeth Polglas's quick marriage after her father's death and subsequent remarriage two days after her first husband's death were grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness, since she did not display the required emotional loyalty to father and husband.

Introduction

In London between 1852 and 1871, Edward G. Flight (1803?–71) published multiple editions of a narrative poem entitled The Horse Shoe: The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil. With illustrations by well-known artist George Cruikshank (1792–1879), this text introduced significant innovations into the medieval legend of the English saint Dunstan, a Benedictine monk, Archbishop of Canterbury, and clever opponent of Satan. Flight's Victorian poem uses Dunstan, an important figure of the nation's past, to contain and limit the dangerous potentialities of the trickster Devil by forcing him into a role as “Jim Crow,” who famously sang and danced on American and English stages in the mid-nineteenth century. The ambiguities of both Jim Crow and the Devil are neutralized through Dunstan's torment and containment of his adversary in a “true” account Flight carefully distinguishes from his medieval sources. In The Horse Shoe, Flight aligns the encounter between Dunstan and the Devil with both the complex history of minstrelsy and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, deploying medieval hagiography to navigate rapid socio-economic change and complex racial politics in nineteenth-century Britain.

Like all legends of Dunstan, Flight's account reworks a smorgasbord of folktale types and motifs, including “the smith [who] outwits the Devil,” 330 in the Arne-Thompson-Uther index of tale types. Flight's saint, like the smith of folklore and the Dunstan of the medieval vitae, pretends to cooperate with the Devil and cunningly plots to seize and punish him with his blacksmith's tools. The Devil in Flight's version is also forced to sign a written contract at the end of the poem, a reversal of tale type ATU 756B, “the Devil's contract.” Unlike Dunstan's medieval vitae, Flight's poem, though it ostensibly provides an origin tale for the horseshoe as a talisman against evil, casts the smith-saint himself in the role of a cruel master who forces his captive to dance the “Jim Crow,” integrating Dunstan's legend with racist tropes that persist to the present day. To support this argument, I will first assess Flight's adaptation of Dunstan's legend. Then I will situate Flight's representation of the Devil and his reference to Jim Crow within the context of popular Victorian literature, particularly Richard Harris Barham's The Ingoldsby Legends and the Jim Crow plays and minstrel shows so popular in British theaters between 1830 and 1870.

“I have always wondered […] what [group] is most hated on Flashback? Is it immigrants or women?” The user Merapi asks this exasperated question after yet another heated discussion with anti-feminists on the Swedish online discussion forum Flashback. The site has a reputation for being the home of the populist radical right, represented in the Swedish parliament by the Sweden Democrats. The very existence of Merapi, however, demonstrates that not only radical right-wing anti-feminists use this site. In fact, the forum is widely used in Sweden for a broad variety of reasons. Some seek practical advice on DIY-things; others recommend movies; many more discuss current crimes and politics. But there are also sections dedicated to science and humanities, including one subsection called “History.” Unsurprisingly, the Vikings are among the many topics discussed in this subsection.

The Vikings have long been a topic of scholarly debate and a focus for re-imaginings. In late eighteenth-century Sweden the Vikings were interpreted within the framework of “noble savages,” hostile to modern civilization. During the nineteenth century, an era of intense nationalism, we see an increased use of the Vikings as national symbols. In 1811 the Gothic Society (Gotiska forbundet) was created. This was a patriotic society wherein members recited Eddic poems, drank mead from horns, and gave each other Viking names from the Icelandic Sagas. During this era, historians and authors underlined Sweden as a country balanced between the courageous, adventurous Vikings and the free and proud farmers. Both of these were necessary. Over time, the Vikings became used by and associated with National Socialism and, after the war, with Swedish Neo-Nazis.

In historical scholarship, the traditional view of violent Nordic berserkers went through a revision in the 1960s: the violence of the Vikings was downplayed, and the image of a more peaceful Viking-merchant appeared. While some scholars acknowledged the violent nature of Viking practices, they rejected the previous image of them as particularly brutal. Peter Sawyer, in line with this, claimed that the Vikings were violent in a violent time; they participated in typical Dark Age activities. Both scholarship and media clung to the image of the “trader-not-raider” and so emphasized these more peaceful activities that one historian famously asked whether we now should regard the Vikings as long-haired tourists who just occasionally roughed up the natives.

Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme. In part, that may be owing to the difficulty of knowing when the optimal moment would be for such a collective summation, intervention, and/or foreshadowing. Perhaps no other area of research has expanded as widely, quickly, or fluidly as gender studies, both within and outside of medievalism. Not only scholars but also popularists, journalists, pundits, bloggers, and countless others in medievalism studies and beyond have surpassed the traditional taxonomies of gender to question its very possibility, not to mention its utility.

While there may be widespread, if not universal, agreement that gender is at least in part, and perhaps entirely, a construct, its possible sources are often in dispute, sometimes violently so. The ethics and history of a subject that has for millennia formed the foundation of persecution invite an overtly biased tone and subjective approach that depart from traditional academia's (pretense of) objectivity. Perhaps more than in any other area of the humanities, except perhaps studies of racism, authors assign and assess the motives as well as the nature and intention of sources.

Of course, this approach is also open to such assessments of it, as are those assessments, and as are those assessments, and so forth. In effect, a perception of gender in a medieval source can inaugurate a virtual mise en abyme of layered revelations as to how that instance, and perhaps larger dimensions of gender, have been perceived and operated since the Middle Ages. And since few areas within history and, by extension, academia are more saturated with gender assumptions than the Middle Ages, the invitation to adopt, adapt, question, resist, or reject those assumptions could hardly be richer than it is in medievalism, as suggested by this volume's call for papers:

The actions of Morgan le Fay initiate and motivate the plot of the anonymous late fourteenth-century English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She orchestrates the Christmas challenge that sets Gawain on his adventures, yet she is not a major player in any of the events of the narrative. She appears only briefly, in the guise of a crone, in Lord Bertilak's castle where Gawain is offered harborage. Likewise, the text diminishes the agency of Lady Bertilak when her husband claims responsibility for having sent her to seduce Gawain. Chivalry thus remains in the domain of the masculine with women afforded only peripheral roles. David Lowery's 2021 film adaptation of this work, The Green Knight, reimagines the narrative to allow Morgan and a host of other female characters integral roles in the action. Morgan not only instigates the game that will enable Gawain's chivalric growth, but she also travels with and attempts to protect him. Lowery preserves the chivalric tests of the original poem, but in an altered form that gives women, particularly Morgan as Gawain's mother, a crucial role in the chivalric development of a future king.

Notable among Lowery's changes to the original poem are the following: the depiction of Gawain, played by Dev Patel, as untried and unknighted; the depiction of Arthur and Guinevere, played respectively by Sean Harris and Kate Dickie, as old rather than young; and the depiction of Morgan le Fay, played by Sarita Choudhury, as Gawain's mother rather than his aunt. These changes emphasize the themes of chivalric maturity, succession, and maternal protection. Choudhury's Morgan is integral to the development of these themes. From her initial appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, Morgan le Fay has assumed various roles. She is most often depicted as a sorceress and troublemaker at Arthur's court. Conventionally, she is Arthur's half-sister. In some works of medievalism, her character is confused or conflated with that of Morgause, mother of Mordred through incest and mother of Gawain.5 The malleability of her character and her conflation with Morgause allow Lowery the creative liberty to reshape the narrative. He engages in the time-honored strategy of combining characters in films to create a singular character who possesses the familiar characteristics of both Morgan (enchantress) and Morgause (mother). Taken together, Lowery's alterations empower Morgan's role in Gawain's adventures.

This essay highlights the emphasis placed on brutal combat through the audio-visual and mechanical elements of recent medievalist digital games. Through the analysis of a pair of case studies – the roleplaying games Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018) – it argues that while this violent and bloody medievalism is in part a product of broader trends within cinematic, ludic, and experiential medievalism, these trends are exaggerated and modified through the particular requirements and expectations of digital games as a medium and roleplaying games as a genre. The essay further contends that this combination of tropes and tendencies leads to a unique and particularly graphic representation of violence that mixes medievalist and gaming trends in a somewhat distinct manner. Furthermore, it notes that the influence of popular medievalist tropes has led to the creation of a distinct and “medieval” set of combat mechanics within several games.

Understanding the representational trends within medievalist digital games and the factors behind the prevalence of these trends is increasingly important. Historical digital games can exert a huge influence on their players’ understanding of their subject period, and there is a growing body of evidence that this effect can be deeper and more pronounced than that exerted by other media. It should also be noted that the potency of this influence appears to be particularly pronounced within medievalist games (alongside those set elsewhere in the premodern world). The impact of these games within and outside the classroom demands a more thorough understanding of the medievalist worlds that they present, particularly as these games are increasingly used for historical education4 and research.

Medievalist computer games exhibit a set of tendencies and tropes that are related to but nonetheless distinct from those found within other forms of medievalism. Certainly, medievalist computer games are influenced by other medievalisms both consciously and unconsciously: literary approaches to the medieval are echoed within computer games as they are in multiple other media; cinema and television provide the basis for the audio-visual effects and framings within many games; medievalist musical trends form the foundation of audio effects and ambiance in games; card and tabletop games inform many of the core mechanics of computer games; roleplay and re-enactment events and societies exhibit similar “experiential medievalisms” (as described by Tison Pugh and Angela Weisl) to those that emerge within digital games.

Over the past several decades, there has been a variety of narratives associated with the American Capital One credit card “What's in your wallet?” commercial campaign, and one of them (lasting from roughly late 2000 to 2013) features the medieval men of northern Europe invading contemporary United States. The campaign's central question “What's in your wallet?” is coy – almost seductively sexy – but also invasive and aggressive. Merging that slogan into a bizarre, medievalish, comic allegory to represent empowerment – not to mention male virility – creates a strange sort of message that emphasizes financial empowerment of male right to privilege that ultimately concludes with a belittling of gender identities. Whether this sexism represents medieval practices and/or perceptions does not matter. In fact, inauthenticity allows for increased humor, and humor (sexist or not) sells. The issue instead becomes a question of whether medievalist perceptions of gender have shaped contemporary perceptions of gender or have contemporary perceptions of gender shaped medievalist perceptions of gender. The answer to this chicken-and-egg question can be quite simple: yes. However, the complexities of that “yes” reveal the complexities of gender identity.

There is no question as to the inauthenticity of these commercials. While Pam Clements argues that authenticity “has great significance for medieval studies and medievalism,” it rarely holds significance for commercials, which have a long history of making disingenuous statements, such as Trident chewing gum's “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” Capital One randomly mixes cultural identities of Vikings, Visigoths, and Huns to make a new culture of northern European identity. “Each time the real raiders emerge on screen,” observes Alison Tara Walker, “the advertisement overstates their violent tendencies – showing their ‘authenticity’ when they run the less-believable versions of themselves off screen.” In response, Jeffrey J. Cohen addressed a letter to “Capital One Marketing Gurus” with tongue planted firmly in cheek: “I ask you to grant these groups their full complexity, a first step toward which might be having the spokes-barbarian no longer declare the tagline ‘What's in your wallet?’ in a seriously poor Cockney accent.”