20140625.0839

While I was writing yesterday in the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, Travels in Genre and Medievalism, a thought occurred to me that relates to what I posted but is not of the sort that I can really put into that webspace for a couple of reasons. More important is that I am not sure it will fit. Less is that I do not think it will take the kind of treatment that it needs to receive to be in that webspace. But it will work here, and the idea will nag at me until I get it out and onto something resembling the page, hence this post.

One of the traditional definitions of the Middle Ages, of the medieval, is as the time between the end of the Western Roman Empire (usually set at 476 CE) and the emergence of the Renaissance or Early Modern period (dates vary, but they seem to focus around 1500 CE for various reasons). It occurred to me as I was writing yesterday that Asimov's Foundation series, which proceeds from his reading Gibbon, focuses on the end of the Empire and the millennium between its end and the emergence of a similar order. It is, then, a quiet and subtle iteration of medievalism in a place that would not be expected to display medievalist tendencies.

I have not done the work to explicate the parallels, and I am not likely to do so anytime soon; I have many other projects requiring my attention. But it would be interesting to see who the historical (and perhaps legendary) parallels are for Hari Seldon, Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow, the Mule, the Darells, Golan Trevize, Janov Pelorat, and the like. It would be interesting to see explicated the parallels to the incipient Galaxia seen at the end of Asimov's own work on the Foundation corpus. (As something of a purist, I reject the Second Foundation books despite their authorization by the Good Doctor's estate. I may well comment further on the idea of literary succession in another post; it seems like a good idea to pursue.) And it would be interesting to see what all comes of such analyses of works written by a Russian Jewish immigrant to New York City who was educated in the natural sciences at Columbia; the take on "the medieval" thus presented seems like it would be worth reading and would serve in part as a corrective to normalizing views of the time.

Having such ideas occur and knowing that I will not have the time to be able to pursue them is one of the great curses of my work on The Work. It is one of the reasons I would not mind stumbling into riches (instead of currently working to secure some semblance of financial stability); had I but the time to follow up on all of the thoughts I have...but that will never be the case. Even I can only endure so long, after all, and there are always new thoughts to be had.