#bisclavret

[rhuberb]

Bisclavret, 2022 by Walton Ford (b. 1960)

[finnlongman]

Dear Tumblr, I have been desperately wanting to share this news with you since May last year and now I finally can: Gollancz is publishing not one, not two, but THREE of my queer medieval retellings over the next few years! You'll have seen me posting little bits about these books in the past, but I'm so excited to get to share them with you properly.

First up in 2025: The Wolf and His King, a queer retelling of Bisclavret that uses werewolfism as a metaphor to explore chronic pain and illness. It's also very much about gay yearning, fealty, and the mortifying ordeal of being known. Partially in second person and partially in verse, you can see my previous posts about it under the tag the wolf and his king or, for the really early ones, werewolves and gay yearning.

In 2026, I'm bringing you The Animals We Became [working title], which is a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, looking at gender, compulsory heterosexuality, and trauma, via nonconsensual shapeshifting. Lotta trans vibes, lotta trauma; I wrote a first draft of this last year because I got carried away writing the sample chapters for my proposal and I'm excited to get deeper into it in edits. Aka t4t shapeshifting and trauma; generally tagged as also owls are transmasculine now.

And finally, in 2027, which is the one I've honestly been most excited to tell you guys about, it's To Run With The Hound [working title]. If you've been following me for a while, you'll know that I wrote a book with this title way back in 2018… well, the one I've sold isn't exactly that book, it's a proposal for how I intend to completely rewrite that book from the ground up, but yes, this is it: my Cú Chulainn novel, my queer medieval Irish book, my (hopefully) magnum opus. Haven't written it yet, but the plan is to use a nonlinear narrative to explore why Táin Bó Cúailnge is a tragedy, featuring a great many feelings about Fer Diad, Láeg, and Cú Chulainn himself.

There's a bit more detail and some FAQs on my website right now, but the most important thing is QUEER MEDIEVAL BOOKS WRITTEN BY SOMEBODY WITH MULTIPLE DEGREES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE. If that sounds like your jam, stick around.

[werewolf-transgenderism]

Wherever the king had to go, it did not care to be apart from him; it always went along with him. He could see well that it loved him.

On the king’s own bed he found the knight sleeping. The king ran to embrace him; more than a hundred times he hugs and kisses him.

some Bisclavret for you in the style of the Codex Manesse :)

[bisclavaret]

Werewolf History Project- Medieval

Part 2 of my werewolf history project!

Chose to focus this era's piece on Bisclavret, or the Lay of the Were-Wolf written by Marie of France in the 12th century. It's a very unusual story for its time, where the werewolf is not a force of evil, but sympathetic and cursed. And also smooches the king.

[deoidesign]

The king and his favorite knight, his loyal dog, his dearest partner, Bisclavret

[chiropteracupola]

And now my fur has turned to skin / And I've been quickly ushered in / To a world that I confess I do not know / But I still dream of running careless through the snow...

[a bisclavret for @mortiscausa’s ’march to camelot,’ for the prompt ‘monstrous’]

[keclan]

the best part of bisclavret is that when he attacks that knight, instead of being like “omg this feral wolf the king found in the woods just attacked that man,” everyone is like “omg that man must have wronged that feral wolf the king found in the woods.” and they’re right.

[mephistopheles]

i fucking love the lais of marie de france. everyone else was like hurrrrrrr burrrrrrr arthurian mythology is about Hating The Saxons and marie was like ‘ok but what if it was about werewolves.’ fucking baller

[agnesandhilda]

switching the thesis of the lay of bisclavret from "a good dog is like a knight" to "a good knight is like a dog"

[kimikaami]

recent schoolwork, a spread for a werewolf story from the 1100s with big (unintentional) gay overtones that holds up really well and you should def go read

[sanddef]

So how do y'all think Marrok Bisclavret's whole system works. Bisclavret implies clothes are a kind of tether to humanity so is he just a wolf any time he's not wearing any clothes. I'm just saying if I were his wife I would be concerned too if I've never seen him. Bathe or anything.

[finnlongman]

Starting a conspiracy theory that the king in Bisclavret is not actually a king. Somebody mistook him for one once and he was too polite to correct them, and now it's been going on for too long to say anything.

[nyxshadowhawk]

Gay medieval shenanigans:

This is from The Quest for the Holy Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by David Staines:

When [Percival] did see [the knights] in the open without the woods concealing them, and noticed the jingling hauberks and the bright shining helmets, and beheld the green and the scarlet and the gold and the azure and the silver gleaming in the sun, he found everything most noble and beautiful. [...] "Here I behold the Lord God, I believe, for one of them is so beautiful to behold that the others, so help me God, have not a tenth of his beauty." [...] They stopped and he [the knight] galloped toward the young man. Greeting him reassuringly, he said: "Youth, have no fear." "By the Savior I believe in, I have none," the young man answered. "Are you God?" "No, I swear" "Who are you then?" "I am a knight." "I never knew a knight before, and never saw one or heard talk of one," the young man said. "But you are more beautiful than God. I wish I were like you, so sparkling and so formed."

TL;DR: Percival sees a knight for the first time, and thinks he's so pretty that when the knight comes up to talk to him, the first thing Percival says is, "Are you God?"

That's maybe the gayest thing I've read in medieval literature so far. And I've read this:

There on the king's bed, they could see asleep, the knight. How the king ran up to the bed, to embrace this man, kiss him, a hundred times and more! --Marie de France, "Bisclavret"

Also @prokopetz was right, the real deal is Monty-Python-levels of weird and funny.

[kuzure-collapse]

OCs I drew for my story on TURN OFF THE LIGHT VOL. 3, a huge Halloween collab on Quotev hosted by Millie. I’ll link the collab here when it’s posted in October.

[wokeuplaughing]

trick or treat!!! 👻💀🦇🎃

YOUR TREAT

not one but TWO gifs of otacon falling in twin snakes

[gaheriskinnie]

BISCLAVRET!!!!