The Medieval Marvel Cinematic Universe

And then what I also want to focus on is some of the more fun crossover appearances that we see in some of these medieval legends, where we see different characters from, you know, different storylines basically crossing over into each other's stories.

And that can actually be really fun and exciting, you know, like seeing Spider-Man make a, a cameo in the X-Men '97 series, right? One thing to keep in mind, most of these stories are began as oral traditions.

This Western Europe, the Germanic tribes, the Celtic tribes, they are part of...

They have these rich oral storytelling traditions.

And so these stories would be told, repeated, and retold orally for centuries before they were ever written down, right? And so a lot of the figures that we're covering in these episodes, these are people that are living in the fourth and the fifth centuries, people like Theodoric the Great or Attila the Hun, people that are living in the fourth and fifth centuries, but a lot of these legends are first being written down in, say, the 12th or 13th centuries.

And so there's a lot of change that happens in that time.

I mean, that's 800 years of oral storytelling before someone first codifies it by writing it down.

And if something's not written down, that means it can change.

And when people tell stories, they retell stories, they tell them a little different.

It's just something that we do as people.

It's how our memories work.

Every time that we remember something, we change it a little bit.

Uh, that's one of the, the most interesting things about human memory.

And so even though these m- oral medieval storytellers would, could train their whole lives to memorize like a, a host of stories where they could b- uh, get employed by these rich nobles to be professional storytellers, even though they would spend their whole life doing that and trying to get these stories right and memorizing these stories, there is just a level of inevitable change, ine- a level of inevitable flexibility that happens in these stories.

And that's why we see some things develop that, you know, almost certainly didn't happen in the historical record that are recorded in these, in these oral legends, right? There is an opportunity for change in an oral storytelling culture that there isn't really so much of an opportunity for in a literate culture that writes everything down.

That can be hard for us to understand.

I mean, we live in a, a 21st century world where everything is being recorded, right? And so to us, things are a little more, things in our cultural memory are a little more fixed than they would be if we lived in a preliterate culture.

If we lived in a culture without writing, without cameras, you know, without social media and mass surveillance technology, just think about how different it would be to live in a world where the only thing that can be relied upon for factual evidence is the human memory, the imperfect, eminently flexible human memory.

Now, that explains why a lot of these stories have different variations.

Many of them were written down at the same time, and a lot of times different oral versions of these stories would be recorded in different sources.

And so sometimes we'll see something that is, like, 80% the same story, but in one recorded version, you know, it's just a little bit different than another recorded version, which suggests that they were pulling from different oral traditions about the same character.

So even though the characters do tend to remain the same and a lot of the main story elements do stay pretty consistent across the, the various oral traditions and across the various stories that are being recorded and written down, there is still a degree of flexibility.

So throughout this episode, as we kind of talk about some of these legends, you will notice that I'll say, "Well, in this version of the story, this happened, but that didn't happen in this other version of the story." The truth is we can't really know what, like, the original version of the story is, right? The original version of the story was not written down.

The original version of the story was thought up by some oral storyteller in the fourth or fifth century AD who then transmitted it to people by telling the story, and they retold the story, and it kind of gained a new life from there.

And so when I say, like, the oldest written versions, when I'm referring to the oldest written versions of some of these stories, you need to keep in mind that these oldest written versions are still really, really, really not the original versions.