Tales Of A Wayside Inn Part 3 Interlude 2 - Analysis

A fireside debate about where legends come from

This interlude stages a friendly argument about the birth of stories: do they grow from ancient myth and literal sources, or from the mind’s need for wonder? It opens with a room well pleased, gathered around the Student’s tale, but quickly becomes a miniature symposium. Each speaker—Student, Poet, Theologian—offers a different genealogy of the marvellous, and the poem’s central claim emerges most clearly in the Poet’s rebuttal: legend is not a simple record of what happened, but a human invention that feels truer than fact because it satisfies hunger in the imagination.

The Student’s brute marvel: the red-hot embrace

The Student’s summary of the tale is deliberately extreme: a figure with an iron flail, a portentous Man of Brass made by Hephaestus, stalking the Cretan shore and hurling stones at the Argonauts. The violence is indiscriminate—he is filled with indiscriminate ire—and the most disturbing detail is the twist from hostility to hospitality: when strangers land, he heats himself red-hot and hugged them in his arms, pressing them to a burning breast. That contradiction—welcome expressed as incineration—captures a specific kind of mythic logic the Student seems to enjoy: the marvelous as spectacle, where the body becomes a weapon and even kindness is deadly.

The Poet’s correction: wonder outvotes history

The Poet pushes back, not by denying the pleasure of such tales, but by relocating their source. The legend, he says, sprang at first from hunger and the thirst for the marvellous. In his view, this appetite makes an ideal that is truer than historic fact—a provocative claim that treats emotional or imaginative truth as more consequential than accuracy. His example is Charlemagne: Fancy enlarged and multiplied him until he became Armipotent, wrapped in mystery, appearing not as he was seen but as he was feared. The poem’s tone shifts here from the Student’s sensational summary to the Poet’s cool insistence that people don’t merely remember rulers; they inflate them into shapes that fit their anxieties.

Who owns the iron flail: myth, romance, and moral policing

Then the Poet does something subtler than theorizing: he disputes the Student’s sourcing. The iron flail, he says, is not an ancient myth at all, but Talus in the Faerie Queene, the iron groom of Artegall. That correction matters because Talus is not merely monstrous; he is an instrument of justice, one who threshed out falsehood and deceit and righted wrong. The comparison the Poet adds—Talus is as the swallow is fleet, and as the lion is strong—turns the iron figure into a moral emblem. The tension sharpens: is the metallic body a nightmare of indiscriminate violence (the Student’s version), or a fantasized machine for perfect enforcement (the Poet’s)? Either way, the human wish is the same: to give abstract powers—fear, justice—an unforgettable body.

The Theologian’s dust cloud: history as ominous pageant

The Theologian enters with another kind of authority: the chronicle of war. He points to Xenophon’s Anabasis and the approach of Artaxerxes, described first as a low gray cloud of dust, then a blackness o’er the fields like a thunder-gust, before resolving into the flash of brazen armor bright, spears up-thrust, and chariots with scythes upon their axle-trees. Even when the poem gestures toward “history,” it chooses images that behave like myth: weather, darkness, sudden metallic light. The Theologian seems to argue that the marvellous can arise from eyewitness description too—battle itself produces its own terrifying poetry.

Rose-tinted Charlemagne: the next story as a rebuttal

The Student’s final move is not to concede but to pivot: he will tell a tale of Charlemagne that casts a softer light, more tinged with rose than the Poet’s grim apparition. This is the interlude’s quiet turn. Charlemagne can be what men feared, but he can also be what they choose to fondly repeat as gossip, preserved by a good Monk in mediaeval Latin prose and remade into English rhyme. The poem leaves us with a final, unresolved contradiction: if legend is driven by hunger for the marvellous, is that hunger mainly for terror and power, or for warmth and rose-colored intimacy? The room of listeners seems ready to test both, one tale after another.