Heroic Dreams - All Things Medieval

This blog is called Heroic Dreams and part of the allure of the Middle Ages and Medieval things is the pull toward heroism. What is heroism, what makes a hero? Here is a selection of quotes from a very wide variety of sources including Joseph Campbell, other writers and even fictional characters.

“The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact,” said the great American mythologist
Joseph Campbell.

“The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other mens lives.”
Pericles

“The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive”
Joseph Campbell

“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper”
Aristotle

“The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls”
Joseph Campbell

“The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
George Orwell

“Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.”
Ansel Adams

“Trees, though they are cut and loped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again”
Pericles

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Pericles

“What makes one heroic? — Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.”
Nietzsche

“Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes”
Benjamin Disraeli

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
Joseph Campbell

“I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.”
Tanith Lee

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
Thomas Merton

“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valor pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!”
Conan from the movie Conan the Barbarian

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”
Conan from the movie Conan the Barbarian

“It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. Such a little thing.”
Boromir [holding the ring after Frodo has lost it] From The Fellowship of the Ring

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”
Galadriel from The Fellowship of the Ring

“You cannot pass. I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udun. Go back to the Shadow. YOU SHALL NOT PASS.”
Gandalf

“Be on your guard. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.”
Gandalf

Poseidon: I don’t want to kill you. I just want to show you.
Odysseus: WHAT? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SHOW ME?
Poseidon: That men are nothing without Gods.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”
Paul Atreides

“Explore your mind, discover yourself, then give the best that is in you to your age and to your world. There are heroic possibilities waiting to be discovered in every person.”
Wilfred Peterson

“The greatest obstacle to being heroic is to doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

‘Sometimes its damned hard to tell the dancer from the dance’
-Zelazny, Chronicles of Amber

He who fights with monsters might take care
lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for to long
into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you
Friedrich Nietzsche

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I write and read a lot of stuff about siege engines and one things I have noticed - Maybe you have too is that there is some discrepancy in the naming of these engines of war. It is a rather interesting little quirk that has developed over the centuries and it comes down to something rather interesting.

You have to think about the fact that there were as many different variations of siege engine as there were engineers who made them throughout the past two or three thousand years. And these variations were further influenced by cultural differences and the different needs of the armies that used them. Remember that people didn’t always live in stone fortresses so the need to throw big rocks wasn’t always there.

One of the biggest ways that we know about these search engines is from the writings and drawings of clerics and monks who catalogued and transcribed much of what we know today about medieval times. And much of this translation was from Latin and other languages. To top it off, monks and clerics are usually not experts in the art of war so they made guesses, and made mistakes when it came to identifying siege machines.

So sometimes a mangonel is really a catapult and a trebuchet is really a mangonel etc…

So what is really what?

Generally, but not always, it comes down to the means of storing the energy for the projectile.

• Trebuchet: Used gravity in the form of a counter weight. Think of it as a see-saw. If you put a heavy weight on one end the other end moves pretty fast (thus throwing a projectile)
• Catapult: Kind of a catch all for any siege machine that doesn’t use gravity but something else for storing energy.
• Mangonel: Generally a catapult that uses twisted ropes or cords to store up the energy
• Ballista: Generally used to describe a siege engine that throws a large bolt like that of a crossbow - But this isn’t always the case!
• Petrary: The word itself means “stone Thrower” so I guess any siege engine could be called a petrary as long as it throws stones

Here are some other interesting names for big siege engines that have been used over the centuries:

algarradas, brigoles, fundae, tormenti, springalds and calibres.

With all these variations in names, styles, energy storage, projectile and what not I propose we rename them all from a different perspective. Instead of naming them according to any of these systems we just name them according to what the people they were used on would think. “Wow, we are so screwed, that is one big a$$ war machine!”

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