John Royce – Page 53 – THE LEGEND OF THE GREAT HORSE trilogy

Equestrian Sport and the Next Generation

My 5-year-old niece watched the Rolex Kentucky 3-Day Event this weekend, and she was full of questions:

“Why are they jumping that?”

“Is that a boy or a girl horse?”

“Why do they go one at a time?”

“What’s on the horse’s legs?”

As intensely as she watched, my niece didn’t care about the teams or the scoring. She just loved seeing the horses.

We humans have had a long fascination with watching horses. Chariot racing, dressage, jousting, polo, flat racing are spectacles of past ages, and today newer sports like show jumping, reining and eventing reflect the athletic and humane partnership we’ve developed with the horse.

(This sport with cross-country jumps is still figuring out what to name itself, having been called the Military, horse trials, 3-Day, combined training, and — the name that seems to be winning — Eventing.)

Of course, horses are not part of our everyday lives as in the past. The challenge for equestrian sport today is to explain itself, to welcome the public to enjoy the beauty and excitement of horsemanship.

Probably few people could have guessed 100 years ago, as the horse was being released from the plow and carriage, that a future generation would be still be watching horses — on a box of moving pictures, no less — asking the same questions they had once asked.

Horses and the Dark Ages of Man

Horses may have pulled and carried humanity up the long ascent from primitive cultures, but it wasn’t a straight line. Human societies have been subject to cycles of falling away from civilized life.

“Dark age” describes the lack of historical records from these periods, such as during the Bronze Age collapse about 1200 BC, which ended the Mycenaean culture and extinguished literacy for several centuries.

The most recent “dark age” of Western culture was the approximately 1000 years after the collapse of ancient Rome, or the Middle Ages. The wonders of ancient Rome included heated public Baths, running water and vast entertainments — the Middle Ages were marked with mud roads, illiteracy, poverty and disease.

What does this have to do with horses?

Horsemanship has been a slow road of progress from brutal subjugation to humane partnership. Understanding the horse, an excitable prey animal, has been a major exercise in empathy for human culture.

A new idea of riding was discovered by the ancient Greeks we now call dressage, which emphasizes the cooperation of the horse rather than forced submission. Dressage develops a harmonious partnership with the horse and provides greater control, balance and athleticism.

This civilized form of riding was lost during the Middle Ages; as humans reverted to illiteracy and brutality their riding became brutal as well.

It’s interesting to note that dressage was one of the earliest classical arts to be reborn in the European Renaissance. The return of humane horsemanship to the world coincided with the birth of the modern era in about the 17th century — not so long ago.

In a sense, good horsemanship is a celebration of empathy, and perhaps a barometer of its presence. Our relationship with the horse started before recorded history, but the goal of humane partnership as practiced today is only a few centuries old!

“The horse hijacked the novel…”

It seems to me the world belongs to those who have time to think … will the texting, tweeting future allow us commoners that luxury?

A fine and well-established writer, Robert Olmstead, spoke in Nantucket, MA this past January about his novel “Coal Black Horse.” Two things struck me about his work.

I related to the “excessive” time it took him to write. “For 10 years my mother and my brother would ask me what I was doing and I would say ‘writing.’ They would ask if I was working on the same book and I would say yes. I felt pathetic.”

My own work, The Legend of the Great Horse took that much time, and yes I felt embarrassed about it after the first few years. (Years! How many tweets could I have done?) I was doing quite of bit of research, since the Great Horse deals with history, but it was the writing — or more the re-writing — that filled every moment I could give it.

Is book-writing becoming impractical?

More importantly, is book reading becoming an anachronism? Life seems to have sped up into a facebook news stream, blurbs and tweets and advertising combining into a time-consuming torrent of steadily less meaning.

A happier thought was something else Olmstead said: “The horse started out as a way for the boy to get where he needed to go, and the horse hijacked the novel…”

Now, I could have warned him ’bout that.

Ebook editions of “Eclipsed by Shadow”

Ebook editions of “Eclipsed by Shadow,” the award-winning 1st volume of “The Legend of the Great Horse” trilogy, will be available through major outlets on May 1, 2010.

Eclipsed by Shadow, the award-winning 1st volume of The Legend of the Great Horse trilogy, will be available through major outlets on May 1, 2010 in the following formats:

– iPad (Apple)