Kablammo!

Some possibly counterintuitive examples of temporal distance. The first two have been making the rounds on the Internet for quite some time on “mind-blowing facts!” lists, while the third occurred to me recently.

• Less time separates us from Tyrannosaurus rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus. There’s roughly 65 million years between you and the last of the T. rexes, and roughly 83 million years between the last of the Stegosauruses from the first of the T. rexes.

• Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing (or to the writing of this post) than to the building of the Great Pyramid. (And, of course, the filming of Cleopatra was even closer.)

• The writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was closer in time to you than to King Arthur. The poem was written around the end of the 14th century (let’s call it the year 1400), and to the extent there’s a historical basis for King Arthur, he lived somewhere in the 5th or 6th century (let’s call it the year 500). So the poem was written about six centuries ago, but that was already some nine centuries after King Arthur might have existed. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was written/assembled/compiled even more recently by several decades.

  This is particularly interesting to me because it shows that just as you can look at works like Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (published 1976) or T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (published 1958)—to say nothing of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (published 1983) or Jack Whyte’s Camulod Chronicles series (first book published 1992)—as King Arthur fan fiction, the same is true of much much older texts. (Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as a time-travel Arthurian crossover, obviously qualifies too.) I say “fan fiction” rather than “literary tradition” advisedly. There’s nothing wrong with adaptating and reinterpreting existing works; it’s been going on as long as people have been telling stories (I’m far from the first to make this point; see also this book).

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