The Book of the Lion
Page 17
My own family religious background has been Methodist and Quaker, and my skepticism regarding war is very deep. And yet I feel the call that war has on young people, how the need for adventure and personal meaning finds its truest expression, for some, on the battlefield. This terrible paradox—that caring, responsible individuals can engage in acts of brutality—both baffles and fascinates me. I respect the faith of these Crusaders, without loving anything that they did.
Medieval faith strikes me as strikingly unfamiliar. Few contemporary Christians see the hand of the Devil in random household mishaps, and imagine demons behind every shrub. Not to mention elves, and the so-called longaevi, the longlivers, wood spirits who lived for centuries. These beliefs would have been a part of everyday faith in the 1190s, not as a teaching of the Church, but as a part of an ordinary persons’ view of nature and the vast, non-human world.
Ballads and stories were very important to the folk in this novel’s era. They had no books, no TV, but I don’t believe they lived barren lives. Just as jokes and urban legends flavor our work days, so the ballads would have provided humor and music. Some of the quoted ballads I have made up, others—particularly the religious ones—are authentic.
This novel takes place in an age before most people developed a respect for critical thinking, and before ordinary people had a tradition of self-questioning. Men and women in King Richard’s time did not ask themselves what they really thought about war, or about God. They did not usually question their leaders, or the elements of faith they had been taught, as so many of our contemporaries do. If we suddenly found ourselves in the company of a group of Crusaders, we would find them very unlike the people we have known.
But at the same time I discovered how unlike my own friends the characters of this novel are, I began to see that we have not come so far from those brutal times. War still calls to us, and massacres still take place. We still hunger to reach a sacred city, either an actual, real place, or one inside ourselves.
And the journey is still hard. While Edmund is a character out of my imagination, I think of him as one of the many seekers who have traveled before me.