精品SM在线影片

精品SM在线影片 history professor digs up tales of the unquiet dead, sometimes 鈥榗hatty,鈥� departed souls

Scott G. Bruce has been hanging around ghouls and the graveyard, literally and figuratively, for a long, long time.

As a kid growing up in the 鈥渕uch maligned鈥� Toronto suburb of Scarborough (鈥淚t was pretty much 鈥榃ayne鈥檚 World!鈥欌�� he says), he was a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard鈥檚 Conan the Barbarian, the movies of Ray Harryhausen and Dungeons & Dragons, all of whose invented worlds were haunted by myriad ghosts and revenants.

During college, he took a job as a gravedigger.

鈥淚n summer, we dug with shovels. In winter, we had these jackhammers and a backhoe; the ground was all frost and mud,鈥� says Bruce, professor of history at the 精品SM在线影片. 鈥淚鈥檝e got a memoir in a drawer, 鈥楥onfessions of a Teenage Gravedigger.鈥欌��

Whether that one sees the light of day, he鈥檚 currently indulging his fascination for restless spirits with the September publication of The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters, a collection of translated ghost and zombie stories written between the time of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, and teaching History 4803, 鈥淕host Stories in the Western Tradition from the Romans to the Renaissance鈥� in the fall semester.

鈥淚n this book, the reader will find a macabre menagerie of agitated souls and unquiet corpses,鈥� Bruce writes in his introduction. 鈥�(M)oaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins; dead souls appearing to their loved ones in dreams; the ghosts of sinful monks returning to beseech the prayerful assistance of their brethren to escape the fires of purgatory; great armies of spirits clad in white armor and marshaled for battle; hordes of tormented souls doomed to never-ending nocturnal marches through desolate hinterlands; bloated corpses shambling from their graves to sicken the living with their deathly breath; spectral crows and dogs and cattle encountered on lonely moors; and, perhaps most strangely of all, the tiny ghost of a miscarried fetus rolled up in a sock.鈥�

Given the current glut of 眉ber-popular undead entertainment, from the cable TV hit, 鈥淭he Walking Dead,鈥� (based on the graphic novels of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore) to Charlaine Harris鈥� best-selling Sookie Stackhouse series of Southern supernatural tales, many contemporary Westerners may think they鈥檝e got a pretty good handle on the behavior of ghosts, zombies and other undead. But the bothersome dead go way, way back, and many might be surprised by their long, shifting history.

In Homer鈥檚 day, there were widespread, detailed beliefs about why the dead might not lie easy in the grave. Those who took their own lives, were killed in combat, or died before marriage were particularly likely to haunt the living.

鈥淭he dead and the living could have commerce, and if you performed the correct necromantic rites, they could tell you things you didn鈥檛 know,鈥� Bruce says. 鈥淕hosts often returned to tell you why they were killed, where they were murdered 鈥� they were super chatty in the ancient world!鈥�

That began to change with the growing influence of Christianity, whose institutions and theologians did their best to meld old ideas about the returning dead with a new doctrine of salvation. In the sixth century, for example, Pope Gregory the Great proposed that prayers, alms and masses were tools to help the restless dead move from a place of punishment to paradise.

鈥淢onks told stories about how good their prayers were at releasing people from suffering in the other world,鈥� Bruce says.

As Christianity spread to northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, it ran headlong into traditions 鈥� still a puzzle to historians 鈥� about more vexatious risen corpses and malevolent revenants.

鈥淭hey wandered around troubling people they knew, spreading pestilence with their breath,鈥� Bruce says. There also were tales of undead armies, some that helped Christians, others constantly on the march in a quest to do evil.

Christians attempted to combat the northern dead by asking clerics to write letters of absolution, but storytellers generally weighed in on the side of more, shall we say, aggressive action: chopping off their heads, removing their hearts and burning them on pyres, that sort of thing.

The Protestant Reformation utterly eschewed old pagan and Catholic beliefs about the undead. Believing that God pronounced final judgment on the dead, Protestants believed that ghostly presences were either angels or, more typically, devils, sent to deceive the faithful.

Bruce finishes the book with Hamlet, 鈥渨ho was probably a Protestant, but clearly his father is a very Catholic ghost.鈥�

鈥淚t is only when Hamlet confronted the ghost himself and recognized it as his father鈥檚 genuine soul, and not a 鈥榞oblin damn鈥檇,鈥� that Shakespeare鈥檚 invitation to his audience to consider this spirit in Catholic terms becomes clear,鈥� he writes.

鈥淭he persuasive power of the ghost鈥檚 plea for Hamlet not only to avenge his 鈥榤ost foul, strange, and unnatural murder,鈥� but also to 鈥楻emember me鈥� was contingent upon the shared understanding that Hamlet was actually conversing with the spirit of his beloved father, who was suffering in purgatory because he died before he could confess his sins.鈥�

Even the modern undead have a pedigree, beginning with the 1932 Bela Lugosi flick, 鈥淲hite Zombie,鈥� and ripening with George Romero鈥檚 graphic 1968 film 鈥淣ight of the Living Dead,鈥� which gave us the modern trope of the shambling, mindless, ever-hungry hordes of undead.

鈥淚n the 鈥�60s, there was a lot of underpinning of fear of Communism, of being controlled,鈥� Bruce says. 鈥淭he modern craze 鈥� seems to be more about the power that comes from science, its misuse and the fear that we might not be able to stop disease or science run amok.鈥�

Bruce came to the topic of old ghosts by way of his studies of medieval European monks, with a nudge from Penguin editor John Siciliano. They had so much fun with the restless dead that they are now hard at work on a companion volume, The Penguin Book of Hell: Fifteen Hundred Years of Torment.

鈥淗eaven was just too boring. The visions of hell were way more interesting,鈥� Bruce says. 鈥淲e even have a chapter on megafauna of the netherworld.鈥�

Scott G. Bruce will read from and sign The Penguin Book of the Undead Oct. 25 at Barnes & Noble in Boulder; Oct. 26 at the Tattered Cover in Denver; and Oct. 27 at the Boulder Book Store. The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters will be published on Sept. 27, 2016.

听