Which ‘pagans’? The influence of the crusades on battle narratives in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia

The influence of the crusades on battle narratives in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia Natalia I. Petrovskaia In mockery of literary critics of his own time, Théophile Gautier wrote the following lines: Encore du moyen âge, toujours du moyen âge ! qui me délicrera du moyen âge, de ce moyen âge qui n’est pas le moyen âge? ‘Again the Middle Ages, always the Middle Ages! Who will deliver me from the Middle Ages, from this Middle Ages which is not the Middle Ages? ’ According to Gautier, this only fuelled the public’s interest, a comment on the fashion for the Middle Ages, real or imagined, which took hold in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, in his inaugural lecture as chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at the University of Cambridge, C. S. Lewis observed that this nineteenth-century ‘Romantic distortion’ of the Middle Ages has its own ‘imaginative value’,...