Medieval Myrtle

I’m fortunate enough to have parents who didn’t mind my crashing their Myrtle Beach vacation this past week.  With temps in the 50s and wind in the double-digit knots, it wasn’t exactly swimming weather, but how I did enjoy watching the tides come and go from the balcony of our hotel room!

I’m also fortunate enough to have parents who were willing to take me to Medieval Times, the dinner-and-tournament show in which spectators eat with their hands while watching a live joust.  As a medievalist by training and an equine enthusiast by nature, I was extremely curious about this much-touted spectacle.  I was not disappointed.

Medieval Times is a uniquely American combination of kitsch and drama.  The cinderblock “castle,” in which you mill around for an hour being tempted by pink princess hats, fairy statuettes, and dagger-shaped letter openers, looks like something out of Disneyland.  All the six-year-olds running around with wooden swords and bucklers only contribute to the theme park atmosphere.  The arena around which you’re finally seated smells of horses—ambrosia to me, but I don’t know what it might have done to other people’s appetites.

There’s not much effort at historical accuracy—I don’t know enough about medieval armor to comment on the chain mail worn by the jousters, but I’m pretty sure the “serving wenches” of the Middle Ages didn’t wear such colorful and low-cut barmaid dresses.  They also didn’t call themselves wenches.

But the whole experience isn’t really about historical accuracy; in fact, medieval folks didn’t much go in for historical accuracy themselves, so it’s hardly in the spirit of the thing to nitpick over details.

It’s likewise pointless to protest that eleventh-century Spain didn’t have tomatoes to make soup out of or potatoes to roast, or that the half-chicken served as the main course would probably outweigh a medieval goose.  Because Medieval Times performs a miraculous modern transubstantiation, and what we’re actually being served is dragon’s blood, dragon eggs, and baby dragon.  They don’t bother to transfigure the Pepsi.  A soda is a soda, and it’s that or water.

But amid all the kitsch, there are the horses.  First, the stunningly beautiful Andalusians trained in the art of dressage—dancing, flying carousel horses.  I’ve been to see the Lipizzaner stallions several times, and these Andalusians could hold their own even alongside their more famous cousins.  In fact, their beautiful performance left me breathless; it was my favorite part of the show.

But the joust is the center of the evening’s entertainment.  I think there was a storyline—the king and princess up on the dais did a good deal of talking, and at one point there was a Viking warlord threatening to take over all of Spain—but that was all rather secondary to the sporting event itself.  And of course I know that the joust was fixed, but when it comes down to it, I don’t care.

I don’t care if the Green Knight knows when the Red Knight is going to smash his shield with a mace: he’s still smashing his shield with a mace!  And I don’t care if the Black-and-White Knight’s “fall” is obviously a well-timed leap from his galloping horse: he’s still jumping off a galloping horse!  The athleticism of the knights was impressive (one of them did, in fact, end up really bleeding), and their partnership with their horses was well-schooled and genuine.  It may have been theater, but I’d watch theater like that any day of the week.

If I’d been a boy, I’d have wanted to grow up to be a knight at Medieval Times.  And as it is, I wouldn’t turn down a spot in their dressage show, even if I had to dress like a squire.