The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty

Note from the reviewer: Between the submission and the publication of this review, credible allegations of sexual assault and other appalling behaviors have come forward against Neil Gaiman. Needless to say, many elements of Shiloh Carroll’s book, especially those dealing with gender, may need reconsideration in light of these revelations, but I have chosen not to pull the review because it is an evaluation of Carroll’s strong work at the time it was produced. Carroll’s work deserves to be respected and valued, but this review should not be seen as promoting Gaiman or his work in any way.Shiloh Carroll’s The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman is a broad-reaching survey of the medieval influences and medievalist reconstructions that permeate Gaiman’s oeuvre, including his comic books, fairy tale adaptations, novels, and more. It takes as its guiding principle Gaiman’s metaphor of the “compost heap”: the odds and sods of cultural, historical, and personal data that blend together to fuel his creativity. As Carroll’s work convincingly lays out, a considerable portion of that compost heap is medieval or medievalist in nature.Carroll begins by pointing to Gaiman’s diversity of audiences, and something similar can be said for Carroll’s book: readers from a variety of audiences will find significant value in this work. Scholars of medieval studies with an interest in medievalism, such as myself, will find a roadmap to various corners of Gaiman’s work that we might not have previously considered medievalist. Scholars of modern cultural productions will be provided with a valuable introduction to the variety of medieval texts that influence Gaiman. Perhaps most unusual is the book’s accessibility to more popular audiences, in part because Carroll’s writing style is highly engaging: the tone is energetic and at times pleasantly informal, without crossing into the unserious. With this in mind, general fans of Gaiman will come away with a deeper appreciation of his close and enduring relationship with the medieval.This broad appeal is a double-edged sword. Carroll achieves the accessibility in part by not delving too deeply into the intricacies of the terminology and theoretical approaches she employs. Theoretically inclined scholars may find themselves wishing to see what further insights Carroll could have generated had she engaged some of these concepts more robustly; for example, Carroll raises the importance of abjection to conversations about the monstrous feminine, but she then moves on from the concept after a simple definition (99). But this characteristic of the book should be seen less as a weakness than a choice: spending more time engaging the complexities of such concepts might have come at the cost of alienating popular audiences, so the choice is justifiable.The first of three broad arcs of the book, comprised of chapters 1 through 3, focuses on Gaiman’s early and highly successful comic series Sandman, a part of the DC universe. Carroll draws intertextual connections between Sandman and a number of medieval sources (bleeding naturally a bit into classical and early modern). Chapter 1 argues that Gaiman’s “anthropomorphic personifications,” most notably the series’ main character (a personification of dreaming), should be read as reimaginings of the allegorical characters from late medieval morality plays. Moreover, on top of other intertextual connections, Sandman adopts the morality plays’ tradition of a moral lesson, particularly one that explores the relationship between life and death. Chapter 2 places Sandman in conversation with late-classical and late-medieval dream visions, particularly in terms of formal structure and didactic instruction of both dreamer and reader. Of particular insight in this chapter is Carroll’s argument that reclassifying dreams, in this case within a late classical categorization, can be a tool for disrupting the power of a dream over the dreamer, which helps Rose, an important character, improve her mental health (28). Chapter 3 turns to the interactions between Sandman, Dante’s Inferno, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, particularly regarding the relationship between hope and hell, the characterizations of Lucifer/Satan, and themes of free will and justice; this chapter’s strongest contribution is probably its discussion of suicidality and resignation within these three texts. I would be curious to see how the groundwork laid by this arc of the book could influence conversations about the recent Netflix adaptation, Sandman, which has created a yet more complex set of audience experiences and interactions within and between these clusters of intertexts.The second arc of the book, chapters 4 through 7, is more eclectic, both in the Gaiman texts they examine and in the source texts Carroll identifies; it is also where the book really comes into its own. Chapter 4 focuses on Gaiman’s comic book miniseries, The Books of Magic, placing it in contact with medieval faerie, Arthuriana, and even the tarot; Carroll argues that through these connections, The Books of Magic pushes back against resigning magicality to the medieval past in favor of seeing modern reality and fantasy as complementary. Using medieval apocalyptic thought and women’s hagiography as context, chapter 5 considers how Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens critiques modern religion and apocalypticism. Of added interest is the analysis of a scene from the Amazon Prime adaptation that includes a mashup of setting and costume elements from across the British Middle Ages. Chapter 6 turns to Gaiman’s fairy stories “Snow, Glass, Apples” and The Sleeper and the Spindle; these, Carroll contends, capitalize on audience familiarity with stories like “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty,” disrupting expectations to create socially productive discomfort, particularly around gender. Chapter 7 sees this self-aware use of medieval or medievalist sources taken even further in Stardust, Gaiman’s novel-length adventure of an English man in Faerie. In Carroll’s words, “Stardust not only uses and fuses centuries of fantastic literature but also layers them in such a way that the layers are visible” (87), with a particular eye to the ramifications for gender created by the friction between these layers. It is this increased awareness of the social ramifications of the intertextual connections Carroll identifies that makes this arc of the book strong; taken together, these chapters make clearer that a vital element of Gaiman’s medievalism is his engagement with medieval and medievalist representations of gender.The final arc of the book, chapters 8 through 11, shifts its attention to Gaiman’s enduring interest in Old Norse/Icelandic mythology and Beowulf. Chapter 8, on Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, details how Gaiman adapts the myths to make them more accessible and, at times, more palatable to modern readers, including Gaiman’s response to the myths’ misogyny. Chapter 9 argues that American Gods depicts America as a place that dulls the magic of the myths and gods it imports; perhaps most valuable in this chapter is the characterization of the novel as a postmodern morality play, fitting the definition Carroll establishes in chapter 1. Its view that “in Gaiman’s fictional America, there are no truly native peoples or gods” misses an opportunity, however, to consider how the treatment of an Indigenous culture is fundamental to Gaiman’s European medievalism (122). Chapter 10, on Robert Zemeckis’s film Beowulf, which Gaiman cowrote, explores questions of modern desire to reconstruct original, authentic medieval worlds and, importantly, the toxic male sexuality that the movie depicts. Chapter 11 turns to two further adaptations of Beowulf: “Bay Wolf,” a short poem casting a werewolf as the futuristic hero, and “The Monarch of the Glen,” a novella in which the central character of American Gods is manipulated into fighting a monster for the uber-rich, paralleling Grendel and Hrothgar of the source poem. The chapter argues that these texts destabilize the hero-monster binary, doing so by foregrounding the relationship between class and monstrosity.Area specialists will find some minor errors that should be corrected in a future edition. For example, Carroll identifies William Morris as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which he was not, though he certainly was influenced by them (6). As a medievalist, I note, for another example, that the book indicates that the thirteenth-century The Romance of the Rose was “the earliest known formal, structured dream vision poem” (24), but The Dream of the Rood (composed in the tenth-century at the latest) fits Carroll’s definition of the form. However, such errors are minor and localized, and so do not significantly compromise the important contributions that the book makes.More important than picking those nits is acknowledging the book’s value. Books on medievalism are usually strong in terms of source identification and analysis, and the largest contribution of The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman is a continuation of this important work. But the book is yet more valuable when it pushes into the implications of Gaiman’s medievalisms for understandings of gender and sexuality (with briefer considerations of nationalism and class). Study of medievalism does not stop at source identification and, particularly as the book goes on, Carroll identifies more and more places in Gaiman’s work where such conversations can productively take place.