No excuse for tardiness. Moving on.

Marvelous.

I have just finished reading [rereading most of it as I went] the essay on the Marvelous in Le Goff. I am still not entirely sure where he is coming from or where in the world he may be going. True, in the first circuitous definition of imagination, he picked and pulled to at least form an idea, if not a solidified concept, but in this chapter I felt as though he did actually define the marvelous quite clearly. Somewhere between the words, perhaps, slipping behind a handy h right when you turn to look, like that spook behind the pillar next to you.

The one connection I managed to maintain is that the marvelous is something natural, something old. It is not magic because magic, in the Christian sense at least, has been sourced outside the world itself to Satan [who then could be sourced to God but a bastardization of holy power and everything kind of jumbles itself around in a mental tussel with no clear winner in my head, but that is unrelated to this conversation]. It is not miraculous because that, too, has the implied source, though in God. So marvels are of nature. How does one then define nature and manage to diferentiate between when something that happened was either miraculous or marvelous?

I was interested in his dredging up of the literature and lore of the knights and lower nobility, which brought to mind Once and Future King, The Faerie Queene, and Dante [yes, in that order, though the first and second are hardly as applicable as the first and the latter two are both based in some overt form of Christianity. I did not see fit to include Phantastes, though it also was sluiced in], bringing with them the images [which Le Goff believes is also an important part of the marvelous] of a sword coming from a lady in a lake, and a tree that is bleeding.

And here is where my thoughts trailed off into bafflement...comment. Question. Answer. Something.

Medieval fish sticks--not again!

Nothing changes more than history. The reputation of the Vikings seems to be in a state of constant flux. Thanks to archaeologists of the codfish trade (another in the ever-expanding set of niches for medieval geneticists), it begins to appear that some of the poor Norse were just long-distance fishmongers (think Amazon grocery delivery a-la 10th century). This opens a whole new set of possibilities for interpreting the prayers for protection from the Northmen! It's interesting, but as an explanation for Viking mobility in general, well, it sounds a little fishy.