To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Getting Medieval

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strainchamps. Today, we're getting mid -evil. It's the Dark Ages, a time of starvation, plague, torture, and open sewers. But now, thanks to the Game of Thrones, it's a whole lot more attractive. There are hunky guys with big swords, women in and out of fabulous gowns, dragons. It's historical fantasy, but it's got one thing in common with the real middle ages. A lot of death. There is a lot of killing in Game of Thrones. For sheer on -screen butchery, there's not much to rival it. Steve Paulson has watched all three seasons, and he wonders how much of that hacking and chopping is historically realistic. So he called Kelly D 'Vries, a mid -evil military historian who consults on scenes just like this. Kelly, I guess I should actually ask her,

are you a fan of Game of Thrones? Oh yes, I'm a fan of it. I watch all the old medieval stuff, I've watched really bad mid -evil. This is a lot better than Kevin's. How realistic are the weapons? Oh, the weapons are wonderful. Sometimes I have real questions, because I do a lot of work with the Royal Armouries in England, and arms and armor historians can be very particular. There are some really bad suits of armor in medieval movies and in TV shows over the time. This one has set out to make things real or plausible at least. Let's put it this way. If I got hit by a sword in Game of Thrones, it would hurt, and if I got hit the sword in the middle ages, it would hurt, and it probably would hurt the same. Did armor really protect people? I mean, would it protect someone from getting sliced by a sword? Yes, absolutely. Sometimes some of my colleagues will say, no, no, no, on mail, which is chain mail for everybody else. There's this mythology about hitting

the armor, and the rings will just burst. They didn't. I've seen experiments, and then I've had TV shows that I've been consulting. Actually, take the biggest guy they could, put a mail coat on a mannequin that moved, and then put what would have been underneath, leather or padded felt, or something, and just take a whack at it with whatever weapon you've got. They never can break through that armor. I mean, there's no doubt if you got hit with a big sword, you would feel it for days afterwards, but you wouldn't be cut. Have you ever tried this? I mean, putting on a suit of armor and having someone whack you? I have, and let me tell you, it takes a little bit of guts. At that moment where the swing is in progress, you suddenly, your beliefs go right out, the window, and you say, okay, have I been completely wrong on this? And then when it bounces off, you feel very, very justified, and also kind of thankful that you were right. One of the things I did was wear a suit of armor that was based on 108 suit,

which was kind of insulting because it was the only one I could fit into. But when it came down to it, I was absolutely impressed by the way that armor moved. And in many ways, having played football as a kid, it was far better than football, you know, for us. Isn't armor really heavy, too? I mean, isn't it like weighing lots of pounds? When they get to plate armor, you're looking 60 pounds, then add the helmet onto that. And it can go up, I mean, tournament armor, which was the most protective armor, is obviously the nights there were less worried about movement and much more worried about protection when you're charging at somebody else with a horse and the lance. That armor can go well up to 80, 100 pounds. It takes two people to arm anyone. You cannot put armor on yourself. Now, when we watch Game of Thrones, I mean, obviously there's non -stop action. People are dying constantly, battles are on every front. Is that what actually happened back in the Middle Ages? Well, yes and no, I mean, there was war constantly. The difference is, is that not many

people did die and not many people did die because the armor was so protective and also battles were extremely short two hours maximum, usually. There's one or two battles that I calculate to be about 20 minutes total. Why were they so short? Well, because the object is not to kill the other side, the object to get in the run away. Of course, the movie version is you're fighting for your honor or you're fighting for your countrymen and you know, you're going to fight till you can't stand anymore. Yeah, and you know, that's a more modern concept if you think about it. If you were a town's militiam, or you are even if you are a paid soldier, often you're told who you're fighting for. Honor is a nice concept, but if you're a single man in the line of other towns people and somebody says, oh, you're fighting for that guy over there who's extremely rich and he's got a, you know, he's got a nice banner and he's very call for and everything else. That tie to that man is going to dissolve as soon as you start seeing bloodshed and the trauma of battle

and so forth. Now, the other thing about Game of Thrones, I mean, speaking of the violence is, I mean, there's just a lot of brutality showing this is probably the signature feature of Game of Thrones. I mean, people get their heads chopped off, you know, other body parts too. There's torture fairly routinely. Did this kind of thing happen? Not often, even at the battle of Hattin, for example, in between the second and third crusade, the one that Saladin wins. Most of the crusaders live and because of Saladin's piety as a Muslim, he's not going to kill individuals who might actually convert to Islam. There was a real value of human life in Christianity for Europe and in Islam for the Middle East. So all those TV scenes of people getting beheaded or having their hands chopped off, that really didn't happen. It's funny one time there was a TV show asked me, what about a beheading? We'd like to see a beheading and I said, well, if you think about it, I mean, you're looking at a man who's wearing a helmet, which descends onto his

neck, then he's wearing male quaff underneath that, which will cover the neck, then he's probably got armor that's coming off the torso that's covering his neck. So you have to get through those three layers of armor, then whatever he's wearing underneath, leather or padded felt, then the skin, the muscle, the bone and back out the exact same way. The likelihood of that of a beheading is very, very slim. So they said, well, how would someone kill a person on a battlefield? And I said, well, you'd disable them. You knock them silly with your sword or with your mace or whatever, and then everybody had a dagger. And at that point you went up and you lifted up the armor that was covering the neck and you went in there or you lifted up the armor that was covering the armpit, went into the heart or you lifted up the armor that was covering the groin and you went into the femoral arti and the TV show says, well, we can't show that. So they could show up a beheading, but an actual death when somebody is, you know, the fact of that there is is there was no reason to kill anybody on a battlefield. In fact,

if you were a lower class citizen or poor individual, you actually wanted to capture that guy because it was an ability to get his ransom and he was much more wealthy than you were. I call it the Yuppie Program in the Middle Ages. It was an immediate economic boost. So when you do find that people are killing prisoners on the battlefield such as the Ottomans and the Coppolis or Henry V of the Battle of Agicore, everybody decries it. It's not just that they can't understand it, but economically it's just really stupid. So one thing I'm still trying to figure out is why we keep getting all of these medieval stories that are just hugely popular in movies and TV. I mean, you've mentioned Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, I mean, the list goes on. What is it about the Middle Ages that just that gets us? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. First of all, I think that it is a period where you do see honor that still can be between individuals. The notion of a man standing next to a man so that he can actually feel his breath. So you actually

feel it leaving him with this death stroke. That produces a personal connection with your enemy that is gone in later periods. So I think the notion of honor becomes extremely important to our interpretation of the Middle Ages. So I think that that's one of the reasons. The second reason is we don't have any direct connection with it. We know that our ancestors must have made it through the Black Death because we're here. But we don't, you know, very few of us can trace our lineage back to that point in time. So we can rewrite our Middle Ages to fulfill our fantasies. Exactly. And we don't. I mean, could you set something like this in the Vietnam War? Not when people are around who actually know the Vietnam War or even World War II. People would say, no, no, you can't. It's too close to us. The Middle Ages, that far away. So we don't have any stock in the actual accuracy of the Middle Ages except for funny,

dirty professors like myself. Kelly DeVries is a historian at Loyola University and at the Citadel, where he teaches medieval warfare to the military leaders of the future. And some people prefer their medieval adventures up close and personal. Producer Aubrey Ralph takes us inside one of those groups. About 15 years ago, my friend Mike took me to a park near my home in Florida and brought me into a group that I would never forget. The SCA, Society for Creative Anachronism. If you've not heard of them, they're a worldwide group dedicated to recreating the arts and sciences of the Middle Ages. You can almost think of them as experimental archaeologists with members studying everything from medieval recipes and songs to art and chemistry. But what they're really known for is the fighting, heavy, armored combat. It's a Wednesday night in Madison, half a lifetime later and I'm walking up to a fighter

practice. I know I'm in the right place because there are armored soldiers milling around outside. The fighters in the SCA have broken up into a few different groups, armored combat, rapier, which is like fencing and archery. I got to fight as a Roman Legionary, armored infantry. I do mean armor too and this is no costume stuff. All the weapons are made from inch thick retain and that can pack a serious punch. Your armor has to be able to stand up to it. This is an area where the diversity and time span of the SCA really shines through. It's 600 to 1600 so if you want to do dark ages sprank from right after the fall of Rome, you can do that if you want to do a 16th century night of fleeing a lizard that you can do that too. Most people make the bulk of their armor themselves one piece at a time. You go to an armorous house and they show you how to pattern and cut the metal and then hammer it to shape and fit and form. When it's finished your efforts are put to the test not only at the biweekly fighter practices but also at huge gatherings called wars held several times a year around the country. Imagine

a medieval tent city and bizarre a joining a battlefield. There's music and games and things to buy and eat and drink and of course the war itself. At the big fights there can be hundreds of soldiers on each side. Units are lined up and in the call is given huge formations march towards each other slowly at first and then nearly running. Your breath is hot and loud in your helmet. Shield up and sword at the ready. All your muscles are tense for the crash and then it begins. It's a pretty intense experience. There's a lot of stuff coming at you really fast. If you don't react properly you get hit sometimes and that's not always fun. Fighting is hard and you might be killed but just for a little while after it's over you get back in line and do it all over again. So if your real world life is lacking in community and thrill and virtual worlds aren't for you either. The SDA just might

be. With time and patience and hard work you can advance through the ranks. Perhaps even the royalty. A former Baroness I spoke with told me the reason she first joined. They were going to let me wear pretty dresses. That was how it turned out. That was pretty much it. They were going to let me wear pretty dresses whatever I wanted and fantastic. I think we can all raise a glass of meat to that. Producer Aubrey Ralph drinks his meat in Madison, Wisconsin. I have to confess I prefer my middle ages safely between the covers of a book. I'm a huge fan of historical fiction and coming up we've got a gritty crime drama set in the year 1385 Dark Times and Nicola Griffith's immersive visionary novel inspired by a real woman of the seventh century. I'm Anne Strange -Hamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International.

It's to the

best of our knowledge. We are getting medieval in this hour and here's something for all you English majors. Juan Nathapral with his shortest suit, the Dracht of March, Paris de l 'Route, and bothered every vine and switch lacour of which virtue and genre is the flora. When Zephyr is egg with his sweat breath and speeded half the nevary halt and heath, the tendra cropus and the young son half and the ram, his half -course irona. The opening lines of the Caterbury Tales by Jeffrey Chaucer, written more than 600 years ago and college students still have to memorize it. Now medievalist Bruce Holsinger has given Jeffrey Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet John Gower some new adventures in a thriller called A Burnable Book. Bruce, when your novel opens the year is 1385, which I know you think was an important year. Why? What was happening? It was a really important year. It was the year a truce with France was about to expire. For only four years after the great rising, the peasants revolt of 1381,

Richard II has been on the throne for a number of years, but he's still only 19 years old. So it's really an extraordinary time for a city and country alike and just a general time of crisis. The age of Richard II is called an age of crisis for a reason. Are there any parallels you draw between the world of 1385 and our world today? I mean in terms of, I don't know, the zeit guys, what people were thinking or worrying about or even political or social issues? I would. I think there are a lot of parallels. There's a lot of parallels in terms of communication, which obviously moves a lot more slowly, but anything you write can get out of your hands immediately. Somebody has compared what happens in manuscript culture in the Middle Ages to tweets gone wild. If you write something, your scribes can take it and revise it and twist it and distort it anyway they'd like. But that's fascinating because a lot of the plot of this book revolves around a single copy of a book that everybody is hunting for. As I was reading it, I was thinking it's so

hard to imagine an age when there would be just one copy of a book. We live in the age of infinite digital copies. And yet at the same time, we're still, I mean, information is still power. Think about the the furor over wiki leaks or the hunt for Edwards -Nodance files. Exactly. And in the Middle Ages, manuscripts did have a kind of erratic charge to them. Single manuscripts can be invested, a kind of enormous sacred and political and cultural energy. So you have manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels. Beowulf, for example, survives in a single manuscript. So does Sir Gowing in the Green Night? If a manuscript had that kind of charge, how did people think about language writing? They must have felt even more potent to them than it does to us today? Oh, it does. And the Middle Ages gave us some absolutely wonderful metaphors for thinking about writing. Almost all writing in the Middle Ages is done on animal skin, on parchment and vellum. And people are

very self -conscious about that. Writing is an act that is done upon a physical body, the physical act of writing is in some ways an act of torture, an act of pain upon this body of skin. So those kinds of metaphors, I think the notion of writing in the Middle Ages is a very physical notion. It's a very incarnate notion, and it goes along, of course, with an incarnate religion that thinks very carefully about faith in terms of the body, the relationship between the flesh and the spirit and so on. No wonder the writing was earthier in some ways. It is earthier. Although there's a lot of earthy writing today as well. Fifty Shades of Grey has nothing on the medieval Fablio. There have been court cases about whether it's okay for Chaucer's Miller's tale to be taught in high school. I mean, there's enormous amounts of obscenity in medieval literature, and that's one of the things that I love about medieval literature is how it's body -ness. It's it's earthiness. It's bodily -ness. It

also sounds different. I mean, it's written in Middle English, a lot of it, right? Yes indeed. Is there any of it you have by heart that you could recite? Because I always love hearing what the words sound like. Absolutely. Well, my favorite passage in all of Middle English literature comes near the end of Sir Gowing and the Green Knight, which is a romance written at the same, roughly the same time as the Canterbury Tales and the events that take place in a burnable book. And my favorite moment comes when Sir Gowing is walking along about to meet the Green Knight, and he knows he's maybe facing his death. He's pretty sure he's going to get his head lopped off, and he passes by a cliff and the poet writes, on her day of that, he hot he hill in a hard rock beyond the brook in a bank, a wonderbrem noise, quiet. It clattered in the cliff. I said, Claveshoda, as on upon a glindleston, hath grounded a seath. And what's happening there is he's passing by a high hill, a hard rock beyond the brook in a bank, and he hears a noise.

What the noise echoed in the cliff and what was it? It was somebody sharpening a sith upon a grindstone. And what Gowing is hearing is the sharpening of the axe that's about to cut his head off. Oh, that's, I mean, that suspends right there. That's worthy of anything in Stephen King. So we should back up and talk a bit about the plot. Can you just sketch the plot for us a bit, would you? Sure. Well, the way I like to describe this book is if you could imagine a season of the wire set in Chaucer's London, you'd have something like what a burnable book feels like. The story itself is about a hunt for a dangerous manuscript. It's a book of prophecies for telling the deaths of England's last 13 kings and the final prophecy in the manuscript. The 13th prophecy concerns the death of Richard II. It's a story of murder, crime, vice, urban corruption, political intrigue, and also a lot of moving parts and points of view. God, I hope HBO is calling you. Not quite yet. We'll see. It's such fun talking with you. I just got one last

question, sort of a large one, but I'm curious to know what it means to you to have a historical imagination, or if that phrase means anything to you. You almost have to leave the fact behind from the beginning. And I think to have a historical imagination that allows you to write a historical novel, let alone a historical thriller like a burnable book, you have to value the past on its own terms while translating it into contemporary terms. You have to take this world that can seem utterly foreign in so many ways, a world of utter degradation in some ways, but make it a kind of living and breathing thing for contemporary audiences. And that's the real challenge, I think, with historical fiction. And I think it's what distinguishes great historical fiction, something like Hillary Mantell's Wolf Hall that takes you into just the most intimate moments of people's lives living 500 years ago, and yet makes them absolutely compelling for contemporary readers. And I think a sense of empathy is absolutely

necessary for that, that way, and thinking about how past lives can come to new life in the present. I think that that's the kind of historical imagination I think that I strive for. Bruce Hulsinger is a medieval scholar who teaches at the University of Virginia. A burnable book is his first novel. We had deep into the seventh century next, where Nicola Griffith has set her new novel called Hild. Griffith has legions of fans. She has won multiple awards for her fantasy novels, and Hild is her first piece of historical fiction. It's the story of the girl who grew up to become St. Hilda of Woodby. The child's world changed late one afternoon, though she didn't know it. She lay at the edge of the hazel coppice, one cheek

pressed to the moss that smelled of worm cast, and the last of the sun, listening to the wind in the elms, rushing away from the day, to the jackdaws changing their calls from outward, outward, to home now, home, to the rustle of the last frightened shoes, scuttling under the layers of look for before the owls began their hunt. From far away came the indignant honking of peace, as the goose -gill heard it them back inside the wattle fence, and the child knew, in the wordless way, that three -year -olds reckoned time, that soon Onan would come, and find her, and Kean, and hurry them back. Onan, some left -wise cousin of Keradig King, always hurried, but the child Hild did not. She liked the rhythm of her days. Time alone, Kean didn't count, and time by the fire listening to the murmur of British, and English, and even Irish. She liked time at the edges of things, the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood, where

all must pass, but none quite belonged. Nicola, from those very first words, this world comes so incredibly vividly alive. How did you end up writing about seven -century Britain, let alone writing about it as though you'd actually lived there? Well, I did live there, in my head, in my heart, in my mind, and it all began one day in my very early twenties. I needed to get away for a few days, so I went up the coast to a town called Whitby, and I discovered this monastery, this abbey, founded by a woman, and her name was Hild. It really, it turned me inside out like a sock. History just fisted up through the turf, and through me, and it took the top of my head off. So, I tried to find out more about Hild, and it comes down to one paragraph in a book by the venerable bead. She changed the world, and yet nobody knows about her, so I went off to try

find a book about Hild, and the wounded, I could find nothing. So, I researched for more than 10 years, I think I researched seriously. So, you became obsessed with seven -century Britain? I became utterly, utterly involved in seven -century Britain. The tides, I knew the phases of the moon, I researched what birds there were, because there were different birds, then I researched the trees, because there were different trees, then, the weather, the, the floor, the fauna, the jury. I came across this piece of research, I found out that by, certainly some estimates, women spent 65 % of their time on textile production. Working on making cloth? Yes. No wonder women didn't make history. They were too busy making cloth. One of the challenges of bringing Hild back to life is that she is a seer,

a visionary. Explain what that would have meant, then. Okay, the way I have imagined the early Middle Ages, and I'm making this up. Okay, as long as we're clear on it, think of seers, think of prophets as political spin -meisters. Certainly, that's how Hild regarded her job. Whenever Edwin, the king, ran into a problem where he wanted a particular outcome, it was always Hild's job to figure out what it was that he wanted, and to, even even the things that he hadn't admitted to himself, and had certainly never admitted in public that he wanted, and to feed him a prophecy that gave him permission to do what he wanted to do anyway. In Hall, Edwin King sat on his great chair with a bloody sword across his knees. The bandage on his upper arm was bulky and clumsily tied. He could barely keep still,

a muscle by his eye, and one at the corner of his mouth fluttered and twitched. His gaze flicked this way and that, probing the shadows. Paulinus stood at his left hand, his bony forehead like old wax and his eyes glittering. The buckle blade was a gift from me, Hild said, from my hand to Keyons, into his hand to protect your life. Indeed, Edwin rested his chin on his fist. And how did you know he would need it? She touched the crystal hanging at her left hip. I am your seer. Quitjum, you say, he scratched his beard, thinking, he tried to kill me, and you claim you stopped him. Lord, he lifted his hand, yet Paulinus here says it was the Christ's will that I be saved. She said, perhaps it was the Christ's will that I be born to see your path and guide

others to keep you safe. Paulinus crow stared at her, Hild stared back. The bishop of Christ and the hand made of weird Edwin said, which should I believe? Do you think of Hild as more historical or more fiction? That is, if we have the Game of Thrones and that kind of foam and evil world on one side and a non -fiction scholarly history of Seventh Century England on the other side, where does Hild fall? Hild, I remember being on the phone with my editor one day, and he said, so how accurate is Hild? You could think of Hild as an ethnology of the Seventh Century, and I could feel him to impale on the other end of the phone. Don't ever

say that in public, it's a... I said, okay, okay, then it's Game of Thrones without dragons. He said, that's much better. Yeah. Well, I read something you wrote in your blog, which was really interesting about wanting to imagine the world Hild could have lived in, a world in which she could have shaped her own life in the ways that the actual women of her time probably couldn't. Adrian Rich said, we must use what we have to invent what we desire. It's our job to go back and recast the past to make it a world that makes the present possible, because if you look at history is just a story. It's a story that people have told through their cultural lens based on the facts as they see them, but there are all these facts, the facts are neutral. You can go back and recast them, retell the story. Is that why you give Hild a sword? Is it some powerful battle scenes? Yeah, but she never uses the sword. She does

have a very large knife. It's called a sacks, a slaughter sacks. A slaughter sacks? Yeah, it's a very large knife. She always had a weapon, and she practiced with that thing. She was very, very competent. Flicks and flirts of wind ran over the glass of slope. Hild lay on her belly, well, do you so slowly through her wall? She ignored it. To either side, her men inched forward. Nothing stood. Light began to leap into the hollow below, tinting the sleeping bandits in tones of ash and charcoal. By the fire, one of the bandits twitched, then unfolded to become a thin woman who tottered two paces before slumping into a squat with her shift around her waist. Hild looked right and left, nodded, Bowman drew. Yes, it's tensed. Then she drew her hand across her throat.

No mercy. Strings thrummed. Spears lofted. She ran. She ran silent as a deer, muscles pumping heels, thudding on the turf, straight for the squatting woman. A spear thumped into the woman's foot and she started to shriek and turn, but Hild was already swinging. Her stave took the woman in the throat. She felt the soft shock all the way to her shoulders. Then she was leaping over the riving ruined lips, skinned back. Death, she howled. Death and the dark hollow filled with men and spears and screaming. Did it change how you see her after you'd written her first, her first kill the first time she killed someone? Oh, I wept for her really the first time she killed someone because the first time she killed someone, it was after after a battle and there were all these enemy combatants lying around, burst open, their guts all over the field. They were all begging for mercy and she took it

upon herself to mercy kill them and she swept and she threw up, but she did it anyway because she had to. Once you've crossed that, take a human life line, I think it becomes a little easier each time. Do you think there's any particular reason that the Middle Ages is suddenly popping up? I was talking about this just the other day actually. I really think that there are many similarities between medieval times and the beginnings of feudalism. feudalism was quite a way after this, but it was certainly apparent in, for example, Game of Thrones, feudalism and corporate culture like Google and Microsoft. I think these charismatic leaders of these huge world -changing entities that just like kings. So we've got Google, for example, in mountain view, building their own little kingdom, they're trying to get planning permission for bridges and housing developments. And in what

essentially is kind of an island, almost like a peninsula, very like an island, perhaps they won't fortify it, but they may as well have. Then are we all the the serfs? No comment. Okay, thank you so much for talking. It's my pleasure. Nicola Griffith's new novel is called Hild. So there's a question we've been asking in this hour. Why the Middle Ages now? Is there something about the medieval period that's especially appealing here in the 21st century? We began the hour with the Game of Thrones, so here's George R .R. Martin's answer. What happened, I think, the social changes of the last 50 years has made the future something that we no longer want to go visit the way we did when I was a kid. I mean, back in the 50s and 60s, when science

fiction was perhaps as popular as it had ever been, we really had a lot of belief in the future. I mean, we couldn't wait to get to the future. The future is going to be much better than anything in the present. We were going to have robots and flying cars and all these labor -saving devices and we were going to take our holidays on the moon and space stations and we were going to go to the stars. When they took poles, everybody gave the answer. Yes, yes. My kids are going to have a better life than I do and my grandkids are going to have even better life than they do and we're going to go into space and we're going to go into the stars. Well, some of that came true, but also things happened to change that. I mean, we went to the moon and then we stopped going. There are kids, well, they're not kids anymore. They've grown adults today who've never had a man on the moon in their lifetimes because they were born after 1972, which was the last trip. Also, people take poles now and most people think that their children are not going to have better lives than they do. They think that their children are going to have worse

lives. They're worried about things like ecological problems, global warming. I mean, we had to cold war when I was growing up. We did duck and cover and stuff like that, but there was still in some ways more optimism about what the future was like. So I think this people no longer believe that the future is going to be a good place. They prefer to read about other times and other places that are maybe not so scary. George, our Martin wrote the Game of Thrones books. I don't know. Do we escape the past because we're scared of the future? Or do we visit the past to enlarge and inform the present? Why do you read historical fiction? I'll post my answer on our Facebook page and you can join the conversation there. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll talk about something different. Karen Joy Fowler, just won the Penn Falkner Award for her latest novel, she joins us for a conversation about sibling rivalry, animal intelligence, and family

secrets. I'm Ann Strainchamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI, Public Radio International. And now bookmarks, writers

on books they love. Hi, this is Nick Bantock. You may know me from the Gryffin and Spine Trilogy's. I have a new book out called The Tricksters Hat. And the book I would like to recommend is Arturo Perez is the Fencing Master. I'd read a number of Perez's books, particularly the Spanish adventures, washbuckling type stories, and then I came across the Fencing Master. It's for me an extraordinary book that is hard is this extraordinary character 200 years ago who teaches fencing. He believes in the art of fencing as something that represents a total way of being. He is committed to his fencing in an utterly dignified and honorable way. At a time when his society and his culture is moving away

from it, he does not want to enter into a world where any behavior is possible as long as the outcome is short term reward. He considers commitment to his craft and his dignity the most profound of importance and within that there is a great story and a great fencing match and it's a struggle between good and evil which many of the best stories actually are. A simplification in that sense but quite quite an extraordinary little book and I think absolutely pertinent to our time. I guess I'd been looking for someone else to be talking about the way that I feel often in our day and

age we can forget the quality at the base of the content because we're so carried away by the speed and the movement and the flashingness and the ultimate reward whether it be money or stardom or whatever because it was set in another time period and something that not many people know much about fencing he was able to encapsulate the essence of that struggle I think that's in all of us as to make our lives dignified. Nick Bantock is the author of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy and his latest book is The Tricksters Hat. You can find more bookmarks and an interview with Bantock on our website at ttbook .org and now it's time for our minds Karen Joy Fowler just had a big week she won the Penn Faulkner award for her novel we are all completely beside ourselves it's a story of family secrets memory guilt and

animal intelligence here's a passage from early in the novel as the narrator rosemary reflects on a childhood trauma as part of leaving Bloomington for college and my brand new start I'd made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister Fern though I was only five when she disappeared from my life I do remember her her smell and touch scattered images of her face her ears her chin her eyes but I don't remember her fully not the way lol does I would think better of myself now if like lol I'd been angry about Fern's disappearance but it seemed too dangerous just then to be mad at our parents and I was frightened instead there was also a part of me relieved and powerfully shamefully so to be the one kept and not the one given away the central mystery in this novel is what happened to rosemary sister Fern why did her parents give Fern away there's a secret that's pivotal to the story but you'll have to listen to Steve Paulson's interview with Karen Joy Fowler to discover it Karen early on

in your novel we learn that there are these two sisters rosemary and Fern of the same age how would you describe the two of them they are in the beginning of the book describe very much as twins although they are not in fact exactly the same ages they are very close in age and what are their differences in personality Fern is the sister who was given away is much more flamboyant much more outgoing much more filled with schwaad vivre and more physically more capable to much more physically capable and rosemary is sort of the chronicler the personary in their lives so rosemary is the big talker rosemary is a nonstop talker and a sort of trying to explain Fern to the rest of the world because Fern does not talk at all that's exactly right and because Fern has so many other qualities in which rosemary is deficient rosemary really

has settled on the talking as the thing that she does the one thing that she does better than Fern now at this point in our interview I think we need to reveal a certain secret which you do not reveal in your novel until about a third of the way into it and that is that Fern the sister is a chimpanzee and it is ingenious what you've done because you know once we attach the label chimp on to Fern we're going to think about it in a totally different way and we don't know that for the first what 80 or 90 pages of a novel of course it was my intention that you meet Fern and think of her as a sister which is the way rosemary thinks of her first and learn that she is a chimp only later for exactly the reason that you just said that if I start off telling you she's a chimp you are picturing the family in quite a different way so the conceit of the story is that this family and the parents are scientists the fathers of psychologists at Indiana University in Bloomington wants to raise a chimp as a human basically a chimp of the same age as one of his own children and this is based on an

actual historical experiment right it is yes quite a famous experiment I'm also conducted at Indiana University by a psychologist named Winthrop Kellogg of course I have fictionalized everything Winthrop Kellogg's experiment took place in the 1930s the experiment in my book takes place in the 1970s the Kellogg experiment lasted 19 months my experiment goes on for five years so what happened in that early experiment from the 1930s what what happened to the Kellogg family the experiment came to a pretty abrupt end you know as it was conceived it was all about how human the chimp might be if the chimp were raised exactly the way you would raise a child you know what behaviors might the chimp have what capabilities might the chimp have what appears to been completely unanticipated is that having a chimp sibling of a similar age affected the behaviors of the human child then the human child was actually very quick to take on chimp behaviors and he began

food hooding when his breakfast was put in front of him and then the morning he did that Mrs Kellogg said to her husband that's that's the end of this experiment they didn't want the plan at all one of the issues in your book is as verned the chimp becomes an adolescent I mean chimps are very powerful creatures they sort of cannot be contained within a human household and so then there's the real question of do they pose a danger to the humans including in this case to rosemary the young human girl yes if you could imagine you know what it would be like to have a three -year -old with superpowers I believe there have been movies written about this you know the landscape would be nothing but smoking devastation for three -year -old actually had the power to do whatever came into his or her head at the at the moment sort of like the id runs wild exactly and in a chimp a three -year -old chimp is

physically very powerful I mean stronger than than any human yes well it's really about age five where it becomes a problem as the chimp moves into adolescence all of these issues get much more difficult that chimp gets much much stronger smarter you know I'm sure most everybody listening will know something about some of the horrific chimp attacks of the last few years well there was the one case where a woman had lived with a chimp for years and seem to have lived very well with the chimp and then suddenly the the chimp turned on her and mold her chimp actually turned on a friend who came to visit yeah and it was just a devastating lead tragic event that illustrates yet again why chimps are not to be kept in the house much of the story is rosemary your narrator is reflecting back on what happened and she can't exactly remember all the details of when she was five when fern was removed from the household but various

glimpses of of this past life come back to her and I'd love to have you read a passage where she reflects on some of the differences between fern her chimpanzee sister and herself could you go ahead I would love to thank you I always used to believe I knew what fern was thinking fern wants to go outside fern wants to watch sesame street fern thinks you are a dude who had some of this was convenient projection but you'll never convince me of the rest why wouldn't I have understood her no one knew fern better than I I knew every twitch I was attuned to her why does she have to learn our language law last my father once why can't we learn hers dad's answer was that we still didn't know for sure that fern was even capable of learning a language but we did know for sure that she didn't have one of her own dad said that law was confusing language with communication when they were two very different things languages more than just words he said languages also the order of words and the way one word inflex another

I am the daughter of a psychologist I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied so what was the goal of the fern rosemary rosemary fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end I'm still not sure but it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine so I think instead of studying how well fern could communicate our father might have been studying how well fern could communicate with me here's the question our father claimed to be asking can fern learn to speak to humans here's the question our father refused to admit he was asking can rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees that's a wonderful passage and so so suggestive I mean you're really raising some profound questions here because perhaps we've never really studied chimpanzees the right way I mean trying to measure their intelligence by language studies because of course they don't have language as we do so what changes if we really try to watch how chimps communicate with each other

I mean what worlds open up then you know worlds in which we acknowledge and recognize a kind of intelligence that does not resemble human intelligence when I started the book I was interested in chimps because their kind of intelligence is so similar to ours and you know it was really only in the process of writing the book that I started to ask myself what's so important about that you know why is an intelligence that is more alien to us not equally valid and equally interesting can you speculate at all on what kind of intelligence chimpanzees might have and I recognize you're a novelist not a primatologist thank you where does that lead you I think a lot of the questions revolve around a sort of theory of mind to what extent can you anticipate the mind of the person that you're dealing with or the chimps that you're dealing with whether chimps have episodic memory and you know the extent to which memory also depends on language is another question is larger

question here what it means to be human absolutely that is absolutely the larger question and where do you draw the line between humans and chimpanzees or you know you could talk about other animals as well yes so where do you draw that line I am not sure there is a line it's a dotted line at best I put that in the category of many many questions about the world that I cannot answer and as a writer the only questions I'm really interested in are the questions that I cannot answer I'd reassure myself that the fact that the world is bigger and more bizarre and stranger than I will ever be able to comprehend is a good thing and like I leave it at that do you think science will ever be able to answer this question I do not any of in some ways the you know the topic of a novel is always what it is like to be human what it means to be human then perhaps the place to look is at non -humans to try to see what's the

same and what's different thank you very much thank you I've enjoyed this Karen Joy Fowler talking with Steve Paulson about her novel we are all completely beside ourselves which just won the Penn Faulkner Award for Best Fiction if you we do we do we do we do we do we do we do we do do we do we do we do we do we do we do couple of notes about upcoming shows next week we'll hear the winning stories from our three -minute futures flash fiction contest and we're also working on a show about selfies and we want to see you're to the best of our knowledge selfies send us a snap of yourself with a book or film or even a piece of music you discovered through to the best of our knowledge and we'll put it in our gallery. Post them on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, hashtag TT bookies. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison. Our producers are Charles Monroe Cain, Doug Gordon, Sarah Knicks,

Raymond Tungacard, and Stephanie Youngblood. Our theme music comes from Steve Mullen from Walk West Music. Carole Owen is our technical director, Steve Paulson is our executive producer, and I'm Anne Strange -Champs. Thanks for R .I. Public Radio International.