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waysofseeing recommended Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan to me, a novel which touches on a favorite historical subject of mine, but by way of fantasy. I finally got around to reading it, a few weeks ago.
Since I first I plunged into the novel, I've been puzzled by one, nagging question--which troubled me precisely because I've read so much about the events which clearly provide Kay's inspiration, here: Why write what could almost be a historical novel, or an alternate-historical novel, with reconfigured geography and even cosmology? Why rewrite history as fantasy?
Unquestionably, The Lions of Al-Rassan derives most of the details of its setting, storyline, and--especially--its characters from the historical landscape, events, and personalities of late medieval Iberia.
Like that real time and place, Kay's fictional landscape is a large peninsula hanging off the southwest end of an unnamed continent that looks a lot like Europe, and whose peoples are divided by faith. But for the novel's purposes, the religious fissures are not about Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but about more poetic and cosmological concepts--specifically, solar, stellar, and lunar ones:
Iberia's medieval Christians are represented by the sun-worshipping "Jaddites," who call their land "Esperaña" (a thinly-disguised "Hispania"/"España"--Spain), who bear recognizably Castillian names like "Sancho" and "Ramiro," and who inhabit a cluster of northern kingdoms approximating medieval Christian kingdoms of Castille, Léon, and Aragon.
The peninsula's medieval Muslim population appear as the star-worshipping Asharites, who call their country "Al-Rassan"--recalling "Al Andalus," the Arabic name of Muslim-ruled Spain, who bear recognizably Arabic names like "Hazem" and "Tarif," and who control the peninsula's south and east (corresponding to historical Al Andalus).
Finally, medieval Iberia's large and influential Jewish minority, the Sefardim, figure as the moon-worshipping "Kindath," who carry recognizably Hebraic names like "Ishak" ("Isaac"/"Yitzak") and "Avrem" ("Abram"/"Abraham"), and who indeed form an influential minority in Kay's Al-Rassan, serving like long-ago Andalusi/Sefardic Jews as city-kings' physicians, scribes, and courtiers.
The events which form the novel's background will also be familiar to anyone who knows medieval Iberian history--particulary that of the eleventh century: Political violence has recently shattered long-dominant Asharite "khaliphate" of Al-Rassan into dozens of petty city-kingdoms, much as the Andalusian Caliphate of Córdoba fractured into dozens of "taifa" kingdoms after 1031. The resulting tapestry of city-states are centers of wealth, relative tolerance and sophistication, but militarily weak. By contrast, the peninsula's Jaddite north--like eleventh-century Iberia's Catholic kingdoms--are on the rise. Al-Rassan is likewise threatened from the south, where across a narrow straits that are unmistakeably Gibraltar an austere, militant Asharite sect is gathering strength and scorn for their decadent peninsular brethren--much as eleventh-century Al Andalus posed a tempting target for the Berber Muslim fundamentalist Almoravid movement.
Many of the novel's principal characters are, likewise, recognizably modelled on eleventh-century Iberian personalities:
The Jaddite champion Rodrigo Belmonte, for example, is clearly based on medieval Castille's legendary commander Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar--known to posterity as "El Campeador" (from the vulgar Latin for campi doctor or campi doctus, "the champion"), or more commonly as "El Cid" (from the Arabic "Al Sayyid" and its Andalusian derivative, "Al Sidi," "the Lord"). Like Rodrigo Díaz, Rodrigo Belmonte is a renowned warrior who runs afoul of a rising king--King Ramiro of Valledo standing in for King Alfonso VI of Castille--and is forced into exile among the "infidels" (the multiconfessional oasis of "Ragosa" standing in for the Muslim taifa kingdom of Zaragosa).
The Kindath warrior, poet, and courtier Mazur ben Avren appears to be based on Samuel Ha-Nagid (aka Ishmael Ibn Nagrila, Schmuel Halevi, Samuel the Nagid), eleventh-century Granada's undefeated general, vizier, and poet, who boasted "I am ... the David of my age!" But whereas the historical Samuel fought his battles and composed his odes almost a generation before El Cid acquired his fame and as far away from Castille as possible without crossing Gribraltar, Kay's fantasia allows him to make Mazur and Rodrigo contemporaries and have them cross paths.
I had a somewhat harder time identifying the historical inspiration for another of Kay's warrior-poets--medieval Andalusians apparently just worshipped warrior-poets--the Asharite intriguer Ammar Ibn Khairan. Initially, I thought Ammar a purely invented character. But then I noticed that Kay's acknowledgments included a prominent bow to medieval historian Richard Fletcher, who wrote The Quest for the Cid--a book I read about a year ago. Returning to Fletcher's book, the other night, I quickly came across what I think must have been Kay's inspiration: it seems that the Cid really did have an eleventh-century Muslim "opposite number," a renowned Muslim general, courtier, and poet who, like the Cid, ran afoul of his king and found himself exiled in Zaragosa--interestingly, during the same years that Rodrigo Díaz was there. Fletcher's sources tell us nothing about how these men might have interacted, but you can see where the untold historical tale might have fueled Kay's imagination.
(I should also note that Kay's Ammar Ibn Khairan also incorporates elements of the biography of another eleventh-century Iberian Muslim, Al-Mu'tamid, whose words Kay at one point literally puts in Ibn Khairan's mouth ...)
Other gaps in the historical record provide opportunities for Kay's imagination: particularly the role of women. Rodrigo Belmonte's formidable wife, Miranda, is elaborated much more fully than the Cid's wife Jimena is in sources like the Historia Roderici or the Canto de Mio Cid. And if eleventh-century chroniclers and twelfth-century poets gave short shrift to the Cid's aristocratic and accomplished partner (who ruled Rodrigo's Valencia in his stead for a time, after el campeador's death), you can be sure that they weren't going to tell us the story of non-aristocratic women--still less those belonging to the peninsula's Jewish minority. So it's fitting that Kay chooses to place an educated Kindath woman, Jehane bet Ishak, at the heart of the narrative. A physician (a trade she learned from her Maimonides-like father), Jehane's literate, relatively modern perspective provides the reader with an easier object of identification than the stoical, soldierly Rodrigo, the complex, seemingly ruthless Ammar, or the aging, proud Mazur. It's thus understandable that Kay chooses to mediate the relationships between the novel's high-and-mighty through this sympathetic figure.
So, clearly, Kay's novel deploys a fairly detailed knowledge of a real-historical time and place. It's equally clear that he draws much of his inspiration from the many gaps in our knowledge about that patch of history.
But, as I asked above, why not dramatize these themes via a historical novel--or, if preferred, an alternate-historical one? If all that Kay wanted to do was fill in some intriguing historical lacunae, stage some unrecorded or unlikely meetings among historical figures, breathe life into uncelebrated common folk, or imagine events transpiring a little differently, one of these options would surely have been more appropriate than fantasy.
But having read the novel, I think I understand:
Obviously, Kay's venture into fantasia saves the author from having to explain to history geeks like me why certain, carefully-selected historical details are rendered so un-historically, permitting him for example to occasionally condense events that took place decades or even centuries apart.
More importantly, though, Kay's flights of poetic license allow him to defuse the fraught subject of relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in what was about to become the era of the Crusades and Reconquista, events which would lay the foundations of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Instead, Kay imagines a triad of faiths that differ not about scriptures but about heavenly bodies, a move which is both sublime and (in an alternate-universe sense) plausible. So, historical preoccupations aside, I can understand and respect Kay's flights of fancy.
Speaking of my geekiness, did I bother to mention that The Lions of Al-Rassan is vividly, movingly written novel that kept me up at nights and left me with a lump in my throat ...?
waysofseeing recommended Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of Al-Rassan to me, a novel which touches on a favorite historical subject of mine, but by way of fantasy. I finally got around to reading it, a few weeks ago.Since I first I plunged into the novel, I've been puzzled by one, nagging question--which troubled me precisely because I've read so much about the events which clearly provide Kay's inspiration, here: Why write what could almost be a historical novel, or an alternate-historical novel, with reconfigured geography and even cosmology? Why rewrite history as fantasy?
Unquestionably, The Lions of Al-Rassan derives most of the details of its setting, storyline, and--especially--its characters from the historical landscape, events, and personalities of late medieval Iberia.
Like that real time and place, Kay's fictional landscape is a large peninsula hanging off the southwest end of an unnamed continent that looks a lot like Europe, and whose peoples are divided by faith. But for the novel's purposes, the religious fissures are not about Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, but about more poetic and cosmological concepts--specifically, solar, stellar, and lunar ones:
Iberia's medieval Christians are represented by the sun-worshipping "Jaddites," who call their land "Esperaña" (a thinly-disguised "Hispania"/"España"--Spain), who bear recognizably Castillian names like "Sancho" and "Ramiro," and who inhabit a cluster of northern kingdoms approximating medieval Christian kingdoms of Castille, Léon, and Aragon.
The peninsula's medieval Muslim population appear as the star-worshipping Asharites, who call their country "Al-Rassan"--recalling "Al Andalus," the Arabic name of Muslim-ruled Spain, who bear recognizably Arabic names like "Hazem" and "Tarif," and who control the peninsula's south and east (corresponding to historical Al Andalus).
Finally, medieval Iberia's large and influential Jewish minority, the Sefardim, figure as the moon-worshipping "Kindath," who carry recognizably Hebraic names like "Ishak" ("Isaac"/"Yitzak") and "Avrem" ("Abram"/"Abraham"), and who indeed form an influential minority in Kay's Al-Rassan, serving like long-ago Andalusi/Sefardic Jews as city-kings' physicians, scribes, and courtiers.
The events which form the novel's background will also be familiar to anyone who knows medieval Iberian history--particulary that of the eleventh century: Political violence has recently shattered long-dominant Asharite "khaliphate" of Al-Rassan into dozens of petty city-kingdoms, much as the Andalusian Caliphate of Córdoba fractured into dozens of "taifa" kingdoms after 1031. The resulting tapestry of city-states are centers of wealth, relative tolerance and sophistication, but militarily weak. By contrast, the peninsula's Jaddite north--like eleventh-century Iberia's Catholic kingdoms--are on the rise. Al-Rassan is likewise threatened from the south, where across a narrow straits that are unmistakeably Gibraltar an austere, militant Asharite sect is gathering strength and scorn for their decadent peninsular brethren--much as eleventh-century Al Andalus posed a tempting target for the Berber Muslim fundamentalist Almoravid movement.
Many of the novel's principal characters are, likewise, recognizably modelled on eleventh-century Iberian personalities:
The Jaddite champion Rodrigo Belmonte, for example, is clearly based on medieval Castille's legendary commander Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar--known to posterity as "El Campeador" (from the vulgar Latin for campi doctor or campi doctus, "the champion"), or more commonly as "El Cid" (from the Arabic "Al Sayyid" and its Andalusian derivative, "Al Sidi," "the Lord"). Like Rodrigo Díaz, Rodrigo Belmonte is a renowned warrior who runs afoul of a rising king--King Ramiro of Valledo standing in for King Alfonso VI of Castille--and is forced into exile among the "infidels" (the multiconfessional oasis of "Ragosa" standing in for the Muslim taifa kingdom of Zaragosa).
The Kindath warrior, poet, and courtier Mazur ben Avren appears to be based on Samuel Ha-Nagid (aka Ishmael Ibn Nagrila, Schmuel Halevi, Samuel the Nagid), eleventh-century Granada's undefeated general, vizier, and poet, who boasted "I am ... the David of my age!" But whereas the historical Samuel fought his battles and composed his odes almost a generation before El Cid acquired his fame and as far away from Castille as possible without crossing Gribraltar, Kay's fantasia allows him to make Mazur and Rodrigo contemporaries and have them cross paths.
I had a somewhat harder time identifying the historical inspiration for another of Kay's warrior-poets--medieval Andalusians apparently just worshipped warrior-poets--the Asharite intriguer Ammar Ibn Khairan. Initially, I thought Ammar a purely invented character. But then I noticed that Kay's acknowledgments included a prominent bow to medieval historian Richard Fletcher, who wrote The Quest for the Cid--a book I read about a year ago. Returning to Fletcher's book, the other night, I quickly came across what I think must have been Kay's inspiration: it seems that the Cid really did have an eleventh-century Muslim "opposite number," a renowned Muslim general, courtier, and poet who, like the Cid, ran afoul of his king and found himself exiled in Zaragosa--interestingly, during the same years that Rodrigo Díaz was there. Fletcher's sources tell us nothing about how these men might have interacted, but you can see where the untold historical tale might have fueled Kay's imagination.
(I should also note that Kay's Ammar Ibn Khairan also incorporates elements of the biography of another eleventh-century Iberian Muslim, Al-Mu'tamid, whose words Kay at one point literally puts in Ibn Khairan's mouth ...)
Other gaps in the historical record provide opportunities for Kay's imagination: particularly the role of women. Rodrigo Belmonte's formidable wife, Miranda, is elaborated much more fully than the Cid's wife Jimena is in sources like the Historia Roderici or the Canto de Mio Cid. And if eleventh-century chroniclers and twelfth-century poets gave short shrift to the Cid's aristocratic and accomplished partner (who ruled Rodrigo's Valencia in his stead for a time, after el campeador's death), you can be sure that they weren't going to tell us the story of non-aristocratic women--still less those belonging to the peninsula's Jewish minority. So it's fitting that Kay chooses to place an educated Kindath woman, Jehane bet Ishak, at the heart of the narrative. A physician (a trade she learned from her Maimonides-like father), Jehane's literate, relatively modern perspective provides the reader with an easier object of identification than the stoical, soldierly Rodrigo, the complex, seemingly ruthless Ammar, or the aging, proud Mazur. It's thus understandable that Kay chooses to mediate the relationships between the novel's high-and-mighty through this sympathetic figure.
So, clearly, Kay's novel deploys a fairly detailed knowledge of a real-historical time and place. It's equally clear that he draws much of his inspiration from the many gaps in our knowledge about that patch of history.
But, as I asked above, why not dramatize these themes via a historical novel--or, if preferred, an alternate-historical one? If all that Kay wanted to do was fill in some intriguing historical lacunae, stage some unrecorded or unlikely meetings among historical figures, breathe life into uncelebrated common folk, or imagine events transpiring a little differently, one of these options would surely have been more appropriate than fantasy.
But having read the novel, I think I understand:
Obviously, Kay's venture into fantasia saves the author from having to explain to history geeks like me why certain, carefully-selected historical details are rendered so un-historically, permitting him for example to occasionally condense events that took place decades or even centuries apart.
More importantly, though, Kay's flights of poetic license allow him to defuse the fraught subject of relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in what was about to become the era of the Crusades and Reconquista, events which would lay the foundations of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Instead, Kay imagines a triad of faiths that differ not about scriptures but about heavenly bodies, a move which is both sublime and (in an alternate-universe sense) plausible. So, historical preoccupations aside, I can understand and respect Kay's flights of fancy.
Speaking of my geekiness, did I bother to mention that The Lions of Al-Rassan is vividly, movingly written novel that kept me up at nights and left me with a lump in my throat ...?
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:24 am (UTC)Probably a wise choice, there ... ;)
Do check out The Lions--I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it.
By the way, which book of Kay's would you recommend I tackle, next?
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 05:28 am (UTC)I've noticed over the years that the fantasy elements in Kay's books are becoming more and more subtle. Tigana had magician-lords; A Song for Arbonne had priestesses with healing and clairvoyance. Most of his later novels are set in the same 'universe' as The Lions of Al-Rassan, and the fantasy elements are subtle - druidic gods in Germania, fey folk in Celtic Britain, all out of folk tales appropriate to the time and place.
Try Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors next. They're two books telling a single story, set in Italy and Byzantium around the time of Justinian, just after St. Sophia was built. The story is from the point of view of a mosaicist, and is mostly about the relationship between art, history, and power.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 07:33 am (UTC)Thanks again for the recommendations--I'll definitely check those out!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 05:13 pm (UTC)