Nuns and Troubadours: a Medievalist Pilgrimage through RuneScape

‘In the Middle Ages, it was a pioneer culture. They were just beginning to create things. There was a sense of newness moving forward, evangelical, full of weird and wonderful mixtures, ultra-religious, and yet at the same time, ultra-decadent. I think that's one of the reasons why we're so fascinated in America with the Middle Ages. Because we're living it.’

In his appearance on This American Life, medievalist Michael Camille reflects upon an evening at chain restaurant Medieval Times. You can watch a jousting tournament there, while medievally eating chicken with your hands and medievally drinking medieval Pepsi. Needless to say, Camille has an amazing time. Mulling it over in the car on the way home in the above quote, he suggests that postmodern America--a country which had no Middle Ages--is attracted to medieval Europe because both are hybrid cultures, at once hedonistic and pious. Perhaps this might explain why Medievalism has found so a frequent home in roleplay gaming, from Dungeons and Dragons to RPG videogames and LARPing.

But if, as Camille says, ‘we’re living it’, that begs the question: why re-live it? Why travel through time if not for escapism, but to strange old worlds that paradoxically resemble our own? In this post, I want to take up Camille’s ultra-religious/ultra-decadent hybrid in a particular instance of popular Medievalism: by demonstrating how this hybrid idea is played out particularly convincingly in the music of the game RuneScape, I ultimately aim to begin to acknowledge what it is that the roleplaying postmodern subject is playing for.

Medieval Times Dinner Theatre in Scottsville, Arizona.

RuneScape

RuneScape is the largest and most-updated free multiplayer online role-playing game to date, with over two hundred million registered accounts since its launch in 2001. In it, players explore a fantasy-medieval world, gaining experience points in magic, tradecrafts, and combat in order to compete and collaborate with other players. There are also several solo quests, which elaborate on the RuneScape universe’s history and cultures, and invite the player into certain narrative arcs. This post focuses on a quest released in 2011, ‘One Piercing Note’.

A 'minstrel' plays at Lumbridge; the Abbey is visible on the horizon.

‘One Piercing Note’ takes place in the Abbey of St. Elspeth Citharede in the Eastern desert region of the map, just outside the city of Al-Kharid. As its name suggests, Al-Kharid is loosely based on the medieval Islamic world.

RuneScape world map.

The abbey, conversely, is explicitly Catholic-coded: as you move through its cloisters, you pass nuns in habit, stained glass, a floor patterned with crosses, and a belltower. St Elspeth, the abbey’s namesake, bears striking resemblances to Saint Cecilia (the patron saint of music), and comes with a hagiography in which she slays a demon simply by singing the eponymous ‘piercing note’. Moreover, the pioneer-style medievalist zeal described by Camille gains a particularly evangelical edge among these white nuns, cloistered off from an Islamic-coded city with its implied oud and mizmar music. ‘Adventurer!’, the abbess greets you, ‘thank Saradomin you’ve come!’.

Inside the Abbey, facing the oratory and belltower.

I do not have space to elaborate on the nuances of RuneScape’s polytheism here, but suffice to say that Saradomin is the god of order and light, and his counterpart Zamorak is the god of chaos and darkness. The abbess then tells you that she wants you to investigate the murder of one of the nuns, Sister Anna. Immediately, the Benedictine offices are invoked: Anna was last seen at Vespers the day before, and her body was found when she didn't turn up for Compline.

From its conception, ‘One Piercing Note’ was designed as a music-based quest, and was the first in the game’s history to be fully voice-acted. In its development blog, developer ‘Mod John A’ writes that he wanted to create, ‘a quest that you’d want to turn your sound on for, even if you normally play with it turned off’. There are three main musical elements in this quest: the troubadour’s song, the Hymn to Saint Elspeth, and the funeral music which combines both. 

For the duration of the quest, you explore the abbey, questioning the sisters and looking for clues. You learn that a mysterious troubadour has been lingering outside the abbey since he learned of Anna’s death, claiming to have been her lover before she was converted by a travelling preacher and took holy orders. Anna’s extraordinary piety is discussed as a source of tension among the sisters, some of whom found her to be an extremist. This is confirmed when, in a plot-twist climax, she is revealed to have faked her own death, disguised herself as a demon, and murdered a string of sisters in cold blood. She insists that it was Saradomin’s will that all lusty, music-loving sinners must die. In the end, she overhears her own funeral, and is so moved by the combined singing of the sisters and the troubadour that she repents, then jumps from the belltower to her death.

Sister Anna, disguised as 'The Ripper' demon, falls from the belltower.

Valerio's Song

The troubadour Valerio’s song can be heard as the player approaches the abbey. As my avatar ‘Georgery Kempe’ demonstrates in this clip, the player may dance with a scantily dressed partner:

This song was RuneScape’s first piece of live-recorded music, and much of the soundtrack in the rest of the game is rendered in midi. The change in sonic landscape as the player crosses from the desert into the abbey’s compound is striking, and in overture fashion establishes a plot in which music plays a key role. As Brendan Lamb and Barnabas Smith write, there is folky ‘neo-mediaevalist fraying typical of fantasy media’. This is no exception. The mandolin, violin, and drum vary the song’s simple strophes and establish a bright soundworld, while the troubadour’s clean vocals foreground his song’s text:

From the outset of the quest, Valerio’s lyrics establish the abbey as a locus of sacred-secular tension. The first two verses describe Anna, emphasising her beauty as she dances ‘barefoot’, living a nomadic, carefree life. Before the morbid final verse, a turn in verse three tells of Anna’s conversion, in which a travelling preacher tells her that dancing is a sin, and she leaves her hedonistic ways behind in favour of a life of prayer. 

From the beginning of the thirteenth century and following the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, travelling preachers were not only commonplace, but occasionally somewhat glamorous. Homer G. Pfander has written of the friar’s sermon as ‘a living thing, bubbling with sacred eloquence, spontaneity, and inspiration’ in the ears of ordinary people, and he directly compares the friar’s ‘footloose’ lifestyle to that of the troubadour. In Speculum Perfectionis, Saint Francis called his minorites ioculatores Domini (or ‘God’s jugglers’), and troubadour and friar alike used vernacular rhyme and emotive language to move audiences. There are accounts of friars being followed around for hundreds of miles, holding ‘multitudes [.…] spellbound, trembling with emotion’. The frayed boundary between collaboration and competition is familiar to role-play gaming; here are two distinct players borrowing one another’s tactics, and dealing in desire.

A woman dances while a friar 'plays music' on a pair of fireplace bellows. Maastricht Hours, British Library, Stowe MS 17, fol. 38r.

Hymn to Saint Elspeth

Meanwhile, in the oratory, the sisters are rehearsing for Sister Anna’s funeral. Like Valerio’s song, their ‘hymn to Saint Elspeth’ has four simple strophes. The women’s unaccompanied voices underscore conversations in the abbey and signal to the player that they have entered a ‘holy’ space.

Sound producer ‘Mod John A’ discusses his approach to recording both of these songs in terms of authenticity and naturalism:

  ‘For the choir, the aim was to represent the humility of nun’s singing in an Abbey rather than a traditional polished cathedral choir. Likewise for the troubadour band; there was a temptation to over produce the sound but we wanted to keep the natural outdoor feel of a group of travelling musicians’.

The ideal of the ‘polished cathedral choir’ is strikingly reminiscent of the ‘authenticity wars’ of the 1990s, in which several musicologists were drawn into passionate discussion of the aesthetic norms of historically informed performance practices. Anna Zayaruznaya writes of ‘the ascetic English choral ideal’ a ‘pure sound with its equal timbres, matched vowels, and lack of vibrato [….] evocatively described by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson as “freshly cleaned Anglicanism”’.

While this hymn is not plainchant per se, its homophonic, modal line with its small compass and simple, pious text shares much with the numerous instances of neo-medievalist chant identified in several video games by Karen Cook. As she demonstrates, chant’s polyvalent pop connotations, from the pure to the superstitious, remain rooted in the reception of liturgy. Given the ‘purported origins of the phrase “hocus pocus”’ as a nonsense parody of ‘hoc est corpus meum’ ('this is my body' in the Mass), this is the product of post-reformation anti-Catholic sentiment.

The Funeral

Like the Troubadour’s song, the hymn’s ethereally strange voices stand out amidst RuneScape’s musical landscape. The pure-versus-corrupt dualism is borne out at the climax: Sister Anna disguised as a demon, in a state of murderous piety. That Camilles’s ultra-religious and the ultra-decadent Middle Ages finds itself played out as a violent response to women’s sexual desire should come as no surprise. It maps all too easily onto the virgin-whore dichotomy, the Christian heritage of which should not be underestimated. Drawing the death-drive from both, sexual desire and the desire for God are interwoven in the funeral music. This cut-scene leads into the final chase up the belltower before Anna’s unveiling and suicide, and the music continues as an underscore:

The Hymn now has an organ accompaniment, with a descending lament bass. Valerio interpolates it with verses of his song, altering his melody to fit the sisters’ harmonic trajectory and changing his metre from simple to compound. His mournful accompaniment now involves arpeggiated chords from the mandolin and violin counter-melody. The sacred and the secular encounter one another here, but only in a discourse for which the secular must adapt itself. 

As such medievalist theological schools as Radical Orthodoxy maintain, the secular itself is arguably a modern construct alien to Medieval culture. As Johan Huizinga wrote in 1924, ‘the Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be absurd if their meaning were exhausted in their function and their place in the phenomenal world, if by their essence they did not reach into the world beyond this. This idea of a deeper significance in ordinary things is familiar to us as well, independently of religious convictions’.

Does this modernist-phenomenological approach translate into the twenty-first century? The joyfully unproductive activity of gaming reaches beyond its surface value as a ‘mere’ pastime, for sure, and William Cheng emphasises as much, writing that ‘alleged provisions of escapist pleasure have long placed music and games at the centers of comparable debates about the intellectual and moral valencies of all things leisurely [….] Play is about more than make-believe; it's about re-making belief, redrawing frontiers of the imagination through performances of actions, identities, and ideologies previously unfulfilled’. Here is a faith, in a sense: the faith there is always the possibility for more. In its excessive hedonism, excessive religion, medievalism actualises that ‘more’.

Pilgrimage

To return to my initial question, then, of what the postmodern subject seeks in a Medievalism that they are in a sense already living, I characteristically turn back to medieval culture. More often than not, the nuns in ‘One Piercing Note’ refer to the player as ‘pilgrim’. In medieval terms, this could be anyone, regardless of class, age, or gender, because as Anna Osterreith shows, the pilgrim must leave ‘the local society that she knows and where she is known’ and relinquish the ‘roles, statuses and obligations that make up their social self’. Anonymity itself is assumed as a role, and the pilgrim ‘gaped at the sight of opulent and well-fortified cities’, ‘marvelled at the riches of cathedrals’, and was ‘fascinated by the topography of sacred sites and the legends attached to them’. Osterrieth conceives of this act of self-discovery as a quest: a public act of piety, but ‘an adventure which was in a way very private’, wherein the journey is essential to the penitential act. It is a journey amplified by ever-new experiences of the self and the world.To re-quote Cheng, a pilgrim was ‘re-making belief, redrawing frontiers of the imagination’.

Surprising parallels with gaming abound in the practice of leaving everyday life to have fabulous experiences, not as mere escapism, but to be somehow transformed before returning again. ‘What role-play affords’, writes Chen, ‘is not the facile transcendence of corporeal existence, but rather effortful renegotiations of this existence's material contingencies and experiential boundaries’. By playing the pilgrim and traversing medieval landscapes, the player travels in hyper-reality, oscillating between the pre- and postmodern with that same ‘sense of newness moving forward, evangelical, full of weird and wonderful mixtures’; ultra-faithful and ultra-playful.

Travelling pilgrims from all walks of life inThe Voyages of Jean de Mandeville and the Liber peregrinationis by Ricoldo de Montecroce (BNF Fr. 2810), c. 1410-1412 (fol. 142v).