#with crusaders treating muslim bodies as more than filth (nourishment) lol

[merrymorningofmay]

Intensive historical writing follows “a crisis in national affairs” that alienates a people from its past (...) If invasion of the domus produces a disorder that requires one kind of cultural work, extraterritorial invasion—the invasion of foreign lands—requires another: especially when that foreign invasion also renders the invaders foreign to themselves, and denatured, by their own unrecognizable and self-transformative performance. (...) It is commonplace, of course, to find cultural enemies depicted as giants—or cannibals—in the literatures of many nations and eras, especially in narratives of territorial invasion, conquest, and settlement. It takes a crisis of subtle alienation, however, to produce oneself as a giant of monstrous proportions, requiring the intervention of a cultural savior [king Arthur] plucked from the distant past (an older, intact representative of cultural identity) to rescue the contemporary past, and, with giant heroism defeating gigantic horror, restore proportionate dimensions, and thus secure the possession of a right-sized future.

Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: medieval romance and the politics of cultural fantasy