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Thursday, December 04, 2008
Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks
Splendid, splendid: this is what you want from a history: viz., interminable lists of battles and meetings by people you’ve never heard of but whose names you find a constant delight, interspersed with theological debate and the occasional Sign and Wonder. Most of it, then, is like this:
While King Chilperic was still in residence at Nogent-sur-Marne, Egidius Bishop of Rheims arrived on an embassy, with the chief notables of Childebert’s court. A conference was arranged and they made plans to deprive King Guntram of his kingdom ... Lupus the Duke of Champagne had long been harassed and despoiled by those who were hostile to him, especially Ursio and Berthefried.[328-9]
It should be law: any booksellers selling a history book be required to ask ‘do you want Berthefrieds with that?’ The Cs alone are worth the price of admission: the son of Lothar I is called ‘Chramn’; the King of the Alamanni is ‘Chroc’ and Chilperic (a major player, is Chilperic, which is ... you know, great) has a daughter called Chroma. I shall never need to invent a SF or Fantasy name, ever again.
The signs and wonders sometimes live up to their name (snakes falling from the clouds, loaves of bread bleeding when broken etc) but more often than not Gregory relates things under the ‘signs and wonders’ heading that seem to me less than wonderful, and significant only of ordinary winter weather: ‘great signs and wonders ... floods devastated parts of Auvergne. The rain continued for twelve days ... in Bourges there was a hailstorm’ [295-6]; ‘signs and wonders ... that year the wine harvest was poor, water lay about everywhere’ [483].
But by far my favourite intervention is when Gregory stops his narrative in Book VII in order (chapter 41) to tell us about a giant. Understand, the whole of this (admittedly fairly short) chapter is given over to this. ‘One of the servants of Mummolos was brought to the King. He was a giant of a man, so immense ...’ Yes you’re excited. A genuine giant. You’re thinking, what, 40 or 50ft tall? You read on: ‘so immense that he was reckoned to be two or three feet bigger than the tallest man ever known. He was a carpenter by trade. He died soon afterwards.’ [425] So, to recap: Gregory stops his history to tell us about a man two foot taller than a Frenchman. Isn’t that splendid? ‘Never mind the battles and councils, look over here! A fairly tall person!’ Chramn it, I’m two foot taller than a Frenchman. Which leads me to believe that I ought to be in the history books.
This isn’t snark. What makes this so wonderful is the way Greg-de-Tours’ history begins, quite literally, at the beginning (’in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth in His own Christ’, 69) and rattles through Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, David, Christ (all this within 12 pages), then the Roman Imperium, the invasion of France by the Alamanni and King Clovis (in about another dozen) Thus the entire history of absolutely everything and everybody is covered in a couple-dozen pages, and the dynastic squabbles of four of the sons of Lothar I and the other goings-on of Greg’s own time fills the rest of this (in the penguin ed) 700 page tome. In other words, it is precisely the glorious mismatch between the global prospectus and the fantastically niggly, parochial, particularism of the actual history that is so winning.
Comments
One of my favorite books ever.
I guess I should add some substance to that garbage me-too comment. We’ll see how the weekend goes, but one thing you didn’t mention is Gregory’s unflappable aplomb. He wasn’t just a historian of the deepest of the Dark Age—he was an active participant, and comes across as thoroughly sane, hard-headed, and self-satisfied about his handling of those lurid surroundings. The Connecticut Yankee wouldn’t have phased him a bit.
You missed Chlochilaicus (= Beowulf’s patron Hygelac).
Surviving Latin writing from between 500 AD and 800 AD (or even 1000 AD) is, as far as I know, almost all no better than Gregory’s.
Judging by Beowulf, the Germanic poetry of that era was far superior to anything in Latin, but none of that has survived either. (The earliest date for Beowulf is 700 AD, but some date it as late as 1000 AD.)
Gregory’s history has one of my favorite first lines: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.” That’s right up there with the beginning of Njal’s Saga: “There was a man named Mord Fiddle.”
Surviving Latin writing from between 500 AD and 800 AD (or even 1000 AD) is, as far as I know, almost all no better than Gregory’s.
Well, there is Bede, after all.
Bede and Gregory seem to me to be about on a par. Adam’s excerpts here are pretty selective in a way not completely flattering to Gregory.
Gregory, Peter the Deacon, Isidore of Seville, Giraldus Cambrensis, Jordanes, Bede.... I’ve glanced at all of them without going in very deep, and you do get the feeling that in that area of the world civilization really was hanging on by its fingertips.
BTW it’s Saint Bede now, IIRC, not “The Venerable”. Please update your databases.
I will first admit that my Latin is not very good. Reading the original online, however, I can’t help but notice that Jim Harrison’s quotation of the first line of the book seems slightly reductive.
I know it’s not as funny this way, but it seems to me if you faithfully translate the Latin into English the first line shouldn’t really bear much similarity to “there was man named Mord Fiddle.”
So, to recap: Gregory stops his history to tell us about a man two foot taller than a Frenchman.
Napoleon’s Imperial Guard selected by (among other things) height. To join this elite corps, you had to be at least five foot eight.
As a result of their poor diet and health, the average French peasant soldier in the revolutionary army had roughly the physique of a modern thirteen-year-old - five feet tall or slightly more, and weighing around 110 lb. These people were tiny.
Gregory’s history has one of my favorite first lines: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.”
History: well, it’s just one f-ing thing after another, isn’t it?
-- Alan Bennett, “The History Boys”