I feel the need to get this out and maybe some folks have similar experiences.
I probably seem to obsess over Mediaeval stuff. For these purposes, Mediaeval is from around 500-1500. It could be called an obsession but for me it's way more than that. When I read Mediaeval Literature in the original form (Old, Middle English or Old French) I could almost break down. There's a voice saying 'How do I honour you? How do I honour you?' Imagine creating your family tree and then meeting family members you never knew you had - it makes you sob. It's similar, but almost worse - I know these are my people, my forebears, but there's a 500 year unbridgeable gap and I can study and read and watch as much as I like but I can never quite
grasp it.
There is also something about the various tribes, their heads and spears poking out from the swirling mist and ashes of a falling Western Roman empire, their new religion, their new polities, emerging languages, cultures and churches. You can almost feel the transition. And it is quietly glorious. The beginning of something wholly new yet intimately connected with the old. Former gods forgotten, former languages erased, a mighty civilisation now gone and yet continued. A sad yet optimistic Christian awakening already towered over by Roman cathedrals and Celtic monasteries.
I could almost characterise it as a religious experience. This is why I have Christian icons, crosses, crucifixes, ultimately - it's a way of bridging that gap, of embracing the unembraceable. I am more often than not in old churches.
But I'm still not really getting it across. There really is something spiritual in it for me. And for all this talk about reclaiming the Mediaeval era and addressing 'Dark Age' myths, for all this there's not much improvement. We obsess over the Tudors, in England, we obsess over Victorians, Vikings (in isolation) and Romans.
For me, this isn't an intense interest or a quaint obsession, it's a deep spiritual endeavour. Some people come across a historical figure to whom they feel particularly close or related thematically in some way, but for me it's a whole era, as ill defined, as vague, it exists. From the Christianisation of European tribes to the Reformation, there's something there for me that's closer than my own soul (it is connected to theirs, after all...)
It's not that I want to live it, I'm more than satisfied with 21st c. hygiene and technology, but that's beyond the point. There's something about it that seems to speak to me in the way some people feel their dead ancestors speaking to them, or will speak to them at graves.
They are long gone, and I highly doubt they feel any envy over what came after them. Philosophically, religiously, they'd probably prefer to remain solidly in place.
@Quintessence I'd appreciate your thoughts, even though this will perhaps be about as far from your experience at possible.
