A literary demake

Spearhand Faring stems from one part of Malory’s Morte Darthur.*

I’ve set out to see what I could take from a story in Malory, with some of his cyclical, stripped-down style, and then retell in forms and diction that smack more of much earlier contexts.

Specifically, I’m reworking the material with an infusion of style from Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright. That means it draws on the imaginings of earlier heroic ages in Old English and Homeric Greek. Imaginings plural, note: I don’t think there ever were times like these imagined ones, nor do I think that the cultural contexts of the (very long) Old English period and the (multi-layered) Homeric thought-world resemble each other very closely. But I’ve an interest in how people spun such times up in their minds.

And moving it into verse at all is a challenge, of course. For Spearhand Faring, I’m using a backbone of blank verse, and writing all the dialogue in alliterative verse.

Among computer games, a demake reworks a game for earlier hardware. As a noted example: Bloodborne PSX tries to offer a version of Bloodborne, a 2015 Playstation 4 game, as it might’ve existed on the original Playstation, a games console from 1994. A bunch of other examples’re kicking around here on Itch under the demake tag.

That’s not unlike writing a poem that hauls its source material back into an atmosphere from an earlier age.

A key difference, mind, is the absence of technological progress. Computers today can calculate more, faster, than computers from thirty years ago; literary history and language history don’t work like that. But perhaps some people who demake games think that progress over time in gaming isn’t as secure an idea as we tend to assume, and perhaps they’re right to think that.

The reworking I'm attempting doesn’t resemble anything that someone would have attempted in the early Middle Ages. The very idea of doing this is an extremely twenty-first-century idea. I do it not because it’s authentic, but because it’s funny.

* Or Morte d’Arthur, but I think it's worth keeping the original spelling, sometimes.