A Station Eight Fan Web Site

Gargoyles

The Phoenix Gate

Search Ask Greg

Search:
Search type:

Displaying 1 record.


Bookmark Link

Todd Jensen writes...

This is more a thought than an all-out question.

In Season One, we see Goliath reading in the libraries at both Castle Wyvern (after the gargoyles' re-awakening) and the public library adjoining the clock tower. We know, also, that he'd been reading the classics (Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, specifically).

In the archives, you offered a list of a few major "classics" writers: Shakespeare, Homer, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. As I looked over that list, I noticed that all of those writers, except Homer, lived after the Wyvern Massacre, meaning that Goliath first had the opportunity to read them after he re-awakened. (Furthermore, I've read that Homer's writings were unavailable in western Europe during medieval times - even Dante, when mentioning him as one of the great poets of classical antiquity in the "Inferno", knew him only by reputation - so Goliath most likely wouldn't have had the opportunity to read the Iliad and the Odyssey before the thousand-year sleep.) It gives a strong sense of just how much of world literature he'd be encountering for the first time. (Not to mention, as I remarked once, that the size of those libraries in both the castle and adjoining the clock tower must have seemed miraculous by tenth century standards, thanks to the printing press.)

I've also reflected that some of those classics must have presented worlds as initially foreign to Goliath as modern-day Manhattan. Homer and Shakespeare's writings would have probably presented a reasonably familiar environment, but the more relatively recent authors would have been another matter (the world depicted in Jane Austen's works would have seemed, indeed, very different from Manhattan as well as from tenth century Scotland)

For that matter, since you included Thomas Hardy on the list, I wonder what Goliath would have made of the cameo of an architectural gargoyle in "Far From the Madding Crowd", if he'd read that one....

Greg responds...

I do think it's fascinating to think about Goliath's reactions to various works. Frankly, if it was me... I think I'd be hit with near paralysis as to where and with what to start.

Response recorded on February 17, 2022