Why Romance Of The Middle Age Use Supernatural Entities?


Romance is a literary fictional narrative that developed and tremendously famous in Europe in the medieval times or Middle Ages. It was widespread in France, Spain, Italy and England. The main topics in this literary form were an ordeal of love, dignity, fear and admiration. It is also comprised of mystifying trials, fight with the foe like monster and consequently the hero would be the lover who rescues the lady, showing his love for his beloved. Just like folklore, romances are made with the relationship between parents and children, sad travel to the wild, falling in love at first sight, the monster and the common and between tragedy and victory. In medieval French, writing romance or en romans is simply utilizing vernacular, not Latin.


Writing is not monotonous and it is therefore at the discretion of any writer to use his or her wild imagination which is true for romance also. It integrates circumstances from heroic poems, far east folk tales, the lives of the saints and poems about love. Above all, romances are propelled by dramatic ways of life, for example an orphan becomes a powerful ruler, going from diaspora to homecoming or defamed women who became queens. It was at this time that people generally believed in the presence of spirits and the even the educated shared this belief. People could undertake customs like talking to the dead through a medium. Likewise, including supernatural beings in fiction stories was a common element of that period like mortal maids that were pursued by the god Zeus. This is the source from which modern writers draw in their endeavor of writing and literature. We can see the presence of spirit beings in English movies like the mortal woman falling in love with a ghost or a witch and even mortal men falling in love with ghosts. Since the general populace already believed in spiritual entities, writers just continued to write their stories involving supernatural beings, thereby daring the standard way of writing, but one could ask himself why exactly did they have to reiterate superstitious pagan beliefs with their narrative? An author has the freedom to use different characters, situations and settings for his or her prose, and we can see that this is the reason why romance during medieval times used supernatural entities or spirits like ghosts which are often and rightly regarded as evil and wicked in our present day world. The romance writers used spirits because of their thought of telling stories that were and are relevant for that period in history. Another reason was the necessity of being creative in writing such stories, defying the standard way of writing which draws the audience taste for mystery, unique and the stranger. The famous climax of the romance story is the death of the hero, which is defying the norm or objective narrative.