Medieval fanfic

Posted by Cory Doctorow, March 15, 2008 3:17 AM |
The Got Medieval blog traces the history of fanfic all the way back to the middle ages, when enthusiastic Chaucer nuts wrote their own Chaucer sequels, and even wrote themselves into the literature of the day:
Chaucer seems to have attracted this sort of activity more than other writers--or possibly, we modern readers are more interested in tracking down this sort of thing when it's done to a writer we admire as much as Chaucer. Chaucer left a lot of gaps in the Canterbury Tales, and other writers stepped up to fill them, writing tales for the poor Ploughman who never got one in the original, an extra tale for both the Merchant and the Cook, and a whole story about what the Pilgrims did once they got to Canterbury. Robert Henryson, a 15th-century Scottish writer, went so far as to write a sequel to Chaucer's earlier work, Troilus and Criseyde, in which he punishes Criseyde for all the things Chaucer had her do to poor, noble Troilus.
Link (via Making Light)

See also:
California got its name from fanfic
How fanfic makes kids into better writers (and copyright victims)
In Praise of Fan Fiction: Cory's latest Locus Magazine editorial Organization for Transformative Works: defend fandom!

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Discussion

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#1 posted by David Carroll, March 15, 2008 3:42 AM

Gee do you think there is a fanfic version of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending/future? Perhaps Antonio wins the powerball and pays his debt? Actually it would be fun to see what lies in store for Portia and Bassanio.

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#2 posted by Gorgonzola, March 15, 2008 8:00 AM

There's something about that verse that gets in your head. I had Canterbury Tales with me in Mexico, and when a bout of tourista put me totally out of commission for a day, it inspired this little bit of nonsense.

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#3 posted by Kaleberg, March 15, 2008 9:24 AM

Fanfic is MUCH older than that. The Dead Sea caves were full of ancient fanfic with what we now consider biblical prayers, stories and psalms repurposed for various deities and hacked and remixed in a variety of creative ways.

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#4 posted by Avram / Moderator, March 15, 2008 11:00 AM

David Carroll, there were knock-off versions of King Lear that took Shakespeare's play and stuck a happy ending on. (The original version of the story ended happily. Shakespeare gave his version a twist tragic ending, and I guess a lot of people couldn't stand it.)

And of course the gospels are Torah fanfic, with Jesus as a Mary Sue.

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#5 posted by Roach, March 15, 2008 11:00 AM

Troilus and Criseyde is just really really good Greek fanfic, after all, and the Canterbury Tales is Dante fanfic, and Dante's Divine Comedy is Vergil fanfic, and Vergil is Homer fanfic, and Homer is Zeus fanfic, and Zeus is Jesus fanfic...

#1 - actually, there were numerous performances of Romeo and Juliet, mostly in the Restoration era (17th century), where the duo did not die at the end. Earlier ages often had much less of a problem changing an author's work for performance or republishing. It's only in the last century that the obsession with plagiarizing, authorial intent and extreme copyright has caught on.

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#6 posted by yuki101, March 16, 2008 7:37 AM

I think that it's all about being able to freely show yourself in different ways, so fanfic reflects the "thoughts of the day" whether medieval or now - now it's more of a fantasy world via anime manga or pokemon or harry potter types of fanfic e.g. JustExpressing that have some really creative content.

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#7 posted by ndollak, March 18, 2008 5:51 AM

Not as old as Chaucer, but as old as Shakespeare, and one of the earliest incidents of an author getting miffed at someone else stealing his thunder: The unauthorized lost sequel to the first part of Cervantes' "Don Quixote." Cervantes wrote first one volume, which proved to be such a hit that he tried his (one good) hand at a sequel, which became volume 2. During this time, however, one Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda wrote his own bit of "Don Q" fanfic in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the original. No copies of this spurious sequel remain, to our knowledge, but apparently it was pretty bad, and it definitely incurred the wrath of Cervantes. It inspired him to make mention of it in one of the funniest self-referential scenes in literature: In volume 2, Don Quixote & Sancho Panza stop at an inn, where they overhear another traveler asking his servant to read to him from "the new book about Don Quixote." Quixote, amazed to discover that he's been written about, listens and realizes that he's hearing total lies about himself. So he introduces himself to the traveler and asks to read these stories for himself. The traveler happens to have Cervantes' original book with him as well. Don Q. likes Cervantes' treatment very much, but denounces Avellaneda's sequel as lies and balderdash, written by a total hack. (Cervantes himself took a cue from Mateo Aleman, who had parodied a jealous rival who had written a spurious continuation of Aleman's own bestseller.)

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