I finished Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim a couple of days ago, in between checking the fire news on-line; I’d have read it long ago, based on all of the glowing reviews I’d seen, but I was waiting for it to come out in paperback.

The premise of Eifelheim is pretty nifty: what would happen if a party of extraterrestrials were “shipwrecked” in 14th Century Europe? Would they be hailed as demons? Would there be mobs with pitchforks and torches? Or would they, just maybe, be seen as oddly shaped men? Flynn chooses the latter course, and justifiably in my view. In my pursuit of St. Thomas Aquinas I’ve been getting an education in how the Medievals thought, and so far as I can tell Flynn absolutely nails it.

According to the Medievals, a man is a rational animal: an animal distinguished from other animals by being rational. And this was seen as the way in which Man is made in God’s image: Man shares God’s rationality. Note that there’s nothing in this about shape: if the ETs were demonstrably rational, the learned of the time would have judged them to be men.

Remarkably, there is historical evidence for this. It was generally believed that all manner of odd creatures lived in distant lands, including the cynocephali, or “dog heads”. And the topic of whether the “dog heads” were rational animals, and hence men, was discussed. (Indeed, St. Augustine addressed the general question long before the Middle Ages.)

It’s amusing how little has changed. The Medievals like to hear stories about odd races living in far off lands, and so do we…it’s just that we’ve explored this planet so thoroughly that we have to put the far off lands in other solar systems.

But Eifelheim‘s not just an interesting thought experiment. As a detailed and accurate picture of Medieval life and thought, it shines a fascinating light on the usual run of “medieval” sword-and-sorcery novels. I like those, too; but few of them are anything at all like the real thing.

All that said, I didn’t cordially love Eifelheim. It’s mostly a tragedy, when all is said and done, and I’m not really into tragedy; and it’s a serious book, at a time when I was really in need of something lighter. But please note: I finished it anyway, and was glad to do so.

One thing I did love: Pastor Dietrich’s argument that the Krenkl were men rather than demons, done in the style of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae. I really have to hand it to Flynn. It’s one thing to research a subject well enough to fake it; it’s another to understand it. So far as I can tell, Flynn does.