Tales from Heroic Ages

Great Conflicts breed great tales, and most of the best are tragic

Tragedy and Revolution

The fifth to the eighth centuries have been called Europe’s heroic age, in memory, perhaps, of the heroic age the classical Greeks looked back to when Jason, Theseus, and Hercules lived. In Europe’s heroic age the old order of the Roman Empire crumbled. This has been linked to a change in climate, and there is evidence of a volcanic eruption that darkened the sky and led to several years without summer. Crops failed, starvation came on, and whole peoples grew desperate. Desperate, they left their homes and sought warmer and richer lands. Out of the higher lands and the steppes of Asia the Huns and other peoples moved west, seeking some place where they could survive. But those lands were already full of peoples who also suffered. The clashes led to epic battles. These were not wars such as we have known, where armies go out to battle. These were wars of whole peoples, more like the invasion the Americas by Europeans, or on a much smaller scale the invasion of Palestine by European and Russian and American Jews.

Such movements had taken place in the past as well, but now the Romans had brought Mediterranean technology and a long period of peace and commerce, which led to much higher population. The carnage must have gone beyond anything we can imagine. Not so terrible in its way as today’s air wars of terror — they lacked the total destruction of today’s bombardments and high explosives. But the fighting was hand to hand and face to face, tribe against village, and as full of blood and rape as any war could be. And it went on for centuries. Whole civilizations fell. Burgundy, once famed for its wealth and high culture on the Empire’s north-eastern edge, fell and never rose again. Other cultures changed — they had to change, from top to base. The old order had grown in times of peace and plenty to mete out laws on the Roman model, to trade with other rich lands within the Empire’s sphere. Now under the constant of war’s millstone, a new social order had to arise, one fit for an age of war.

The elders and law-makers and merchants could no longer rule. The towns that clung to the old rules were ground under foot. The only groups that survived cast aside their elders and their societies based upon family and blood. They gave power to whoever could protect them, to the war chief and his band of warriors who fought as fiercely as their enemies, and took in turn what they pleased from the people they led. They had no pity or mercy, and they made the brutal choices as to who should live and who should die.

Thus was born in after time the Age of Chivalry which would arise in centuries to come out of the cradle of this Heroic Age, and the great Kings and Queens of the European monarchies traced their lines and the basis of their rule back to these bloody-handed pitiless killers.

The Heroic Age is also called the Age of Migrations and the early Middle Ages as well as the Dark Ages.

The Rise of New Rulers

The Heroic Age left us little art; the endless warfare and death gave those peoples few breaths to take up song. But a few stories have reached us. The tales are tragic, and a few heroic sagas such as the cycles of King Arthur and the Emperor Charlemagne, whose rise marked the end of this period. But those grim times gave grim tales, and death and ruin ended most of them. Victories were brief, and succeeded by destruction utter and long.

Some of the best of these tales have tragic elements, that interest me because the base of the tragedy springs from the social change that the old kingdoms and cities had to bear in order to survive. The hub of the conflict lies in a choice between kin and alliances, between duties owed to family and those owed to war-chief.

The war-chief demands obedience that is absolute and unthinking. Military commanders have always felt more at ease trusting on their men to obey blindly when they face likely death, rather than on their love and loyalty. Fathers in the patriarchal orders have always preferred to rule by love but needed to know that in the end they could make commands that are unreasonable and unexplained and yet are obeyed by force and sheer authority.

Love and Duty, Self and State

One of the great and lasting founts of conflict in tales lies between personal desires and the demands of the state (or tribe or city, or family or country, or race or nation, or political party or corporation). Where the individual does what he wants, whatever he wants, and all he wants, there the community will suffer; it may even fall to bits. But where the individual acts only and in all ways for the good of the community and never thinks of his own desires, the people lose their souls. And where the individual is made to obey the dictates of the community and forced to break his every personal wish and bent, the people lose their hope and the community loses it soul. There is no easy mark to set the perfect balance. Each of us must set it where we will or can, and each community must say where it thinks the mark should lie. The community naturally wants its members to set the mark nearer the side of order; each member in his youth wants to set it nearer to liberty, but in his age he identifies with the community more and values order over liberty. Liberty is a young man’s dream, as he seeks to make the community shift to make space for his desires. Order is an old man’s comfort, as he seeks to keep the community the same so as to preserve the space he has already made for himself. By the time a man is old, he has already shaped the community to suit himself (in a small way), and he has shaped himself to suit the community (in a big way).

When societies change in revolution, defeat, or war, the tailorings of old men are torn apart, and young men’s dreams will change to dreams of a new order — which may as yet lie hid in the darkness of time to come. Conflict rises everywhere and there is no peace and no easy answer. And the old ways die — they must die — they are killed. Those who cling to the old ways are destroyed. But some who live on in the grim wreckage of the aftermath remember the old happy times, and they sing their tragic songs of the ways that now seem to have been doomed from the start.

In every man’s heart there is the conflict among his desires. In every community there is the conflict among men. But when the communities themselves are in conflict that will end with the death of the community and the birth of some new order from the ashes, then all these conflicts can add to one another, and make for the basis of strong tales such as are long remembered.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 29, 2008)