Page 7 - Fandom: Fic Writers, Vidders, Gamers, Artists, and Cosplayers

LITERARY CRED

Anyone can self-publish fic. Its quality varies wildly, and it hasn’t enjoyed
the highest reputation in literary circles. Fans, however, are quick to point
out that fanfiction has a noble pedigree. Sometime before 29 BCE, Roman
author Virgil lifted Aeneas, the hero of his epic Aeneid, from a much older
tale, the Iliad, by Greek storyteller Homer. And Homer’s epic was composed
by many people—we could even call it crowdsourced. Bards had been
retelling the tale about the Trojan War for a long time, possibly hundreds of
years, before it was credited to Homer around 700 BCE.
Adam Nicolson, author of Why Homer Matters, described the process in
a way that could apply to fic too. “I think it’s a mistake to think of Homer
as a person,” Nicolson said. “Homer is . . . a tradition. An entire culture
coming up with ever more refined and ever more understanding ways of
telling stories that are important to it. Homer is essentially shared.”
What literary scholars call the intertextual use of Homer––one text
borrowing from another––didn’t end with Virgil. The characters made their
way from the Mediterranean world to what is now Great Britain. There,
around 1135 CE, Geoffrey of Monmouth expanded on the Aeneid. In
Geoffrey’s book The History of the Kings of Britain, Aeneas’s grandson Brutus
leaves Rome and travels to an island inhabited only by a few giants. He kills
the giants and names the land Britain, after himself. His royal descendants
include King Arthur, whose life story Geoffrey tells in racy detail. Geoffrey
claimed he was merely translating an ancient text. His fellow historian and
contemporary William of Newburgh scoffed, “It is quite clear that everything
this man wrote . . . was made up, partly by himself and partly by others either
from an inordinate love of lying or for the sake of pleasing the Britons.”
Ever since, the Arthurian legend has spread and morphed. A bridge of
stories spans from Geoffrey to the medieval Canterbury Tales by Chaucer to
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s feminist retelling The Mists of Avalon (1983) to the
British TV show Merlin (2008–2012) to the 2017 film King Arthur: Legend of
the Sword. Each has its fic-writing fans, and there is no end in sight.

THE ExTRAORDINARY WORLD OF FAN WRITERS 15