Apples Far From the Tree: Retelling, Fanfiction, and Stories that Keep Going

You can just view people as this peculiar byproduct that stories use to breed. Really, it’s the stories that are the life-form — they are older than us, they are smarter than us, they keep going.       – Neil Gaiman

Picked while walking the dog: they may look less than perfect, but nothing beats these heirloom varieties for taste.

The story of King Arthur is one that keeps going. It’s been inspiring retellings for over a thousand years, from Chrétien de Troyes to Malory to Spenser to Tennyson to T.H.White to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mary Stewart. In fact, as I like to tell my students, every version of the Arthurian Legend is a retelling. There is no original. And that in itself may be as good a definition of myth as any.

But there’s one part of this story – and a BIG part, to the tune of 7,000 pages of raw material – that hasn’t been retold at all since the fifteenth century.

That’s reason enough for any scholar to put away her MLA style manual and retrain herself as a fiction writer.

The Golden Knight meets the Questing Beast, from a 15th century manuscript of Perceforest

The late medieval French romance Perceforest is a supremely imaginative, wildly grotesque, and unbelievably long prequel to the story of King Arthur. Or a gigantic postscript to the story of the Trojan War, depending on which end you look from.

It’s fanciful, absorbing, filled with monsters and magic – but it’s also thousands of pages long and written in middle French. Oh, and until just this year, when a team of French researchers finally completed their scholarly edition, most of it had been out of print since the sixteenth century.

Title page of an early print edition of Perceforest.

There is still no full translation into any language, so those who don’t read middle French are out of luck. (Although I recommend Nigel Bryant’s “compressed English translation,” at 781 pages, or a bit more than 1/10 the length of the original, that’s very compressed. Okay, it’s really just a summary. Nonetheless, a summary of something absolutely thrilling.)

I’ve worked on Perceforest as a scholar for about ten years now, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this remarkable book needed something more.

Maybe it was the day my six-year-old found me engrossed in volume 2 of part 3 (the romance has six parts, but the now-complete modern edition fills thirteen fat volumes).

“Mom, I always see you with that book. Read it to me. No, read it to me.”

Well. Even when you’re comfortable in middle French, off-the-cuff translation into English is difficult. I kept stumbling, and she kept telling me to keep going. Eventually, I found it was easier just to write the stories down for her.

Moments of origin: the Fairy Queen turns Sir Estonné into a bear, as rendered by a six-year-old

She’s almost fifteen now. She’s still telling me to keep going.

The small slice of Perceforest that I’ve been writing and rewriting for several years now isn’t exactly a “retelling.” It’s about as similar to the medieval version as The Mists of Avalon is to Chrétien de Troyes. That’s precisely what makes it worthwhile.

Opening page of an early print edition of Perceforest.

I try to keep the bones of the myth, to capture the spark that made this story stand out among all the others I’m fortunate enough to work with as a scholar. I also try, through a series of carefully considered changes, to correct the original where I believe it goes wrong. The result is an argument about the true version of the story.

Which is to say it’s a fanfiction.

Writing fanfiction is an authentically medieval enterprise. Medieval romancers were rewriters: they understood that writing was a kind of reading, that books were in dialogue with other books. But there had to be a reason to retell a story: sometimes, that previous redactors got it wrong. As Thomas of Britain says, in defense of his version of the story of Tristan and Isolde over those of his predecessors:

Assez sai que chescun en dit

        E ço qu'il unt mis en escrit,

        [...]      

        Il sunt del cunte forsveié

        E de la verur esluingné. (Thomas, Tristan, 2117-18, 2151-52)

(I know well what everyone says about it, and what they have written. They have strayed from the story, and gone far from the truth.)

The "truth" Thomas references is a mythographic one, based on a necessity that he finds in his source material. My version of part of Perceforest arises from a similar necessity: it's based on something the fifteenth-century writer overlooks, but that the myth itself clearly demands.

Learning to write fiction is overwhelming and confusing. There are days, many of them, when I long for the clarity of academic writing. That’s when it helps to remember that none of this is about me. I’m not “a writer” – I’m just the person who hears what this story says.

The story is what keeps going. I'm just there to help it along.

David Aubert, fifteenth century scribe -- some say redactor -- of Perceforest.

Yes, fanfiction can be good, and even literary. See some famous examples here.