This might be based on Hulagu Khan. While his relgious position prior to his late conversion to Buddhism seems to be unclear, several prominent early Ilkhanids were Nestorian.
The Christian Shah of Persia seems unlikely, yes, but it's the shape of error that a 16th-century audience, which had heard about Crusader-founded Christian kingdoms in the Middle East, might have found plausible.
Having just read the 19th century EETS edition that Norton was drawing on[1], and then glanced through the Norton, I can say that the Norton is significantly abridged. The original *is* often quite fast-paced, but Norton elides a fair amount of political maneuvering, battle sequences, and just repetition. Also, she ends the book when Huon inherits fairyland, whereas the source material goes on for hundreds of pages and three generations of descendants. It's a pretty good abridgement, all told, but if you want more, more is out there.
The trope of "high-ranking person in pagan lands who is secretly a Christian (or long-time Christian sympathizer who hasn't formally converted yet)" was quite common in the source era. Heck, it shows up five or six times in _Huon of Bordeaux_ alone. So it may not be plausible, as such, but there was ample literary precedent.
bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2014-11-22 12:35 am (UTC)(link)
Thanks for embarking on this very fine Norton-themed project! I look forward to future installments.
I dunno if people of the ruling classes were killing each other off quite so casually back in Charlemagne's day: Huon, after all, was what people _aspired_ to rather than actually did. (Hmm - the ultra-violent macho ideal - still pretty popular among certain segments of the genre-reading public today, actually).
Is it just me, or does Charlemagne often come across as a bit of a jerk (by contemporary standards, I guess?) in these medieval tales?
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-11-21 01:15 am
Christian Shah of Persia
(Anonymous) 2014-11-21 11:35 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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The trope of "high-ranking person in pagan lands who is secretly a Christian (or long-time Christian sympathizer who hasn't formally converted yet)" was quite common in the source era. Heck, it shows up five or six times in _Huon of Bordeaux_ alone. So it may not be plausible, as such, but there was ample literary precedent.
[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=tfUKAAAAYAAJ
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I dunno if people of the ruling classes were killing each other off quite so casually back in Charlemagne's day: Huon, after all, was what people _aspired_ to rather than actually did. (Hmm - the ultra-violent macho ideal - still pretty popular among certain segments of the genre-reading public today, actually).
Is it just me, or does Charlemagne often come across as a bit of a jerk (by contemporary standards, I guess?) in these medieval tales?