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My Favourite Merlin Anachronism
Sep. 28th, 2010 10:33 pmI must apologise for the recent radio silence - first I got distracted by the last Dragon Age DLC when I finally got it, and then people kept asking me to LEAVE THE HOUSE and DO THINGS. Things like going to an awesome steampunk LARP, see my brother who was visiting from interstate and look at all the alpacas in the Melbourne show.
Anyway. Although I have not posted about it much here, I've been watching Merlin since the first season screened in Australia, and it's a show I greatly enjoy. I've been a fan of the Arthurian cycle all my life (possibly because my mother was reading The Dark is Rising when she went into labour with me) and Merlin is an entertaining take.
For someone with my educational background - for those coming in late, I have a degree in Renaissance history - part of the fun is mocking all the things that make no historical sense. And, Maker, there are a lot of them. I don't just mean the obvious ones like the fact that everyone's teeth are straight and white and everyone is too tall and clean, the stuff TV pretty much has to get wrong about the Middle Ages. I mean the stained glass windows and the faceted gems and the white bread and the underwire bras. (You can't actually see the underwire bras except maybe once or twice when a female characters is wearing a shift, but you can tell they are there.) You have no idea how much I laughed when it was explicitly stated that Camelot has TOMATOES AND POTATOES. None of this damages my enjoyment of the show - on the contrary, it adds a whole other level to the entertainment as I try to spot anachronisms I haven't taken note of before. My latest observation is that the historically improbable shorts Arthur wears to bed seem to have elastic in the waist.
My very favourite, however, is that Geoffrey of Monmouth is a character in the story, presiding over the castle's library. (Where there are a vast number of books that all seem to be written on paper. See, the fun never stops!) For those unfamiliar with the background details, Geoffrey was a real person who lived in the 12th century and wrote History of the Kings of Britain. He is now credited as one of the major shapers of the legends of Merlin and Arthur. However, since he lived six hundred years or so after the era in which they were vaguely presumed to have existed, he certainly never met them unless he was a Time Lord.
Therefore, my personal theory about Merlin is that it occurs in the dimension where the Meddling Monk went to hide from the Time War. He amused himself by setting things up so that he could watch the Arthurian story play out and still enjoy chips and take baths, then fobwatched himself so he wouldn't be found. That golden symbol Geoffrey has around his neck probably contains his Time Lord self in some fashion.
Anyway. Although I have not posted about it much here, I've been watching Merlin since the first season screened in Australia, and it's a show I greatly enjoy. I've been a fan of the Arthurian cycle all my life (possibly because my mother was reading The Dark is Rising when she went into labour with me) and Merlin is an entertaining take.
For someone with my educational background - for those coming in late, I have a degree in Renaissance history - part of the fun is mocking all the things that make no historical sense. And, Maker, there are a lot of them. I don't just mean the obvious ones like the fact that everyone's teeth are straight and white and everyone is too tall and clean, the stuff TV pretty much has to get wrong about the Middle Ages. I mean the stained glass windows and the faceted gems and the white bread and the underwire bras. (You can't actually see the underwire bras except maybe once or twice when a female characters is wearing a shift, but you can tell they are there.) You have no idea how much I laughed when it was explicitly stated that Camelot has TOMATOES AND POTATOES. None of this damages my enjoyment of the show - on the contrary, it adds a whole other level to the entertainment as I try to spot anachronisms I haven't taken note of before. My latest observation is that the historically improbable shorts Arthur wears to bed seem to have elastic in the waist.
My very favourite, however, is that Geoffrey of Monmouth is a character in the story, presiding over the castle's library. (Where there are a vast number of books that all seem to be written on paper. See, the fun never stops!) For those unfamiliar with the background details, Geoffrey was a real person who lived in the 12th century and wrote History of the Kings of Britain. He is now credited as one of the major shapers of the legends of Merlin and Arthur. However, since he lived six hundred years or so after the era in which they were vaguely presumed to have existed, he certainly never met them unless he was a Time Lord.
Therefore, my personal theory about Merlin is that it occurs in the dimension where the Meddling Monk went to hide from the Time War. He amused himself by setting things up so that he could watch the Arthurian story play out and still enjoy chips and take baths, then fobwatched himself so he wouldn't be found. That golden symbol Geoffrey has around his neck probably contains his Time Lord self in some fashion.