That season three Sex Scene (example: “Young Royals”)

One of my less eccentric hobbies is going to archaeological digs and…

No, no, you’ve read that right: ‘going to’, not ‘going on’.

And no, this isn’t me, as a non-native speaker of English, getting confused about my prepositions again – although I’m sure that happens often enough in my texts. It’s literally ‘to’, not ‘on’ here!

I’m not going on any archaeological digs in my spare time with a shovel in hand and an Indiana Jones hat on my head, sorry to disappoint you. (And now I’ve put that tune in your head, haven’t I: Tan-ta-ta-taaa. Tan-ta-taaaaaaa. Tan-ta-ta-taaa. Tan-ta Taaaaaaa-Taaaaaaa-Taaaaaaa...)

Ahem.

Okay. Let me start over:

One of my less eccentric hobbies is going to archaeological digs, as in literally driving up to a dig site, parking my car by the side of the road, nonchalantly strolling up to the archaeologists who are working there with my hands behind my back, whistling innocently all the while…and then starting to pester them with curious questions.

You think that’s weird?

If you live in Europe, you probably know that there are archaeological digs happening pretty much everywhere.

No, I’m not talking about the big Search-for-the-Holy-Grail-and-find-the-Ark-of-the-Covenant Hollywood-cinema-type of digs.

What we’ve got here pretty much everywhere are the less spectacular but far more interesting dig sites:

The ones where construction workers accidentally discover a prehistoric campsite, for example, that yields fascinating artifacts left behind by Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) some 9,000 years ago or whatever. (That’s the population that used those Mesolithic arrowheads that can be found all across Western Europe today and that left a trace in the DNA of modern-day Europeans, as well, by gifting some of them their blue eyes.)

Or the types of sites where an unsuspecting farmer with his tractor accidentally digs up a Neolithic ‘henge’ circle built, say, 5,000 years ago by the Early European Farmers (EEF) who replaced the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) by pretty much crowding them out, pouring into Europe from the Fertile Crescent and bringing agriculture with them. This population developed into the various Megalithic cultures that erected the dolmens, passage graves and menhirs we are still in awe of today, and modern-day Greeks, Italians, Spaniards and Portuguese owe most of their DNA and (at least stereotypically speaking) their looks to them.

Or how about the kinds of sites that are discovered when routine maintenance work on a parking lot, say, lays bare a Bronze Age battlefield where the incoming Western Steppe Herders (WSH) slaughtered the Early European Farmers (EEF) with abandon and in doing so and settling all across Europe from 4,000 BC onwards brought in not just the taller height you can still see in modern-day Scandinavians, North and Central Europeans but also the Indo-European languages that were the ancestors of the very language I’m writing this blog in today. Cool, right?

Then there are, of course, the many Iron Age sites that give us the incredible wealth of the proto-Celtic and Celtic goldsmiths. Or the mysterious places that turn out to be ancient cult sites where Slavic tribes worshipped Svarog and Perun.

And where would Europe even be without the ancient Greeks, as evidenced by everything from their mosaics to their amphorae? Without the Etruscans whose bronzes and frescoes we can still admire today? Without the Romans whose ancient roads continue to connect us? Without the Visigoth treasures and the Moorish castles of the Iberian peninsula? The long lost ruins of Lindisfarne and the rusty Viking swords? The Merovingian chalices and Carolingian gems…

The most intriguing excavation sites will invariably catch your eye right next to the charming little café in some rural part of whatever country you’re currently visiting. And as you merrily chat away with its handsome waiter, he’ll give you one of those trademark, less-than-charming looks waiters reserve for the densest of their customers (i.e. all of them) as he answers your questions with an expression of deep disdain, “Oh, you mean that spot over there by the hill? The one covered with the white tarp? I think that’s where our local field mice are at it again.”

“Field mice?”

“I mean those crazy nerds from the university of X that keep digging up old stuff nobody needs…Why? You one of them?”

“No, not exactly. Uhm…Do you know what they’re looking for there? Something Minoan/Phoenician/Hittite/Mycenaean/Únětice/Bell Beaker/Corded Ware/Cucuteni-Trypillia…?”

Please insert your preferred question here, dear reader. But whatever you ask this hypothetical handsome arsehole of a waiter, the bristly answer he will most likely bark in your general direction will be:

“Who cares?! I just wish they would get on with it already. We really need that new car park! And they’re just holding everyone up.”

And that’s the point in the conversation (wherever I may be at the time) where I usually just get up and stroll over to the tarp-covered molehill (or whatever it may be) and strike up a conversation with the spade-, sieve- and trowel-wielding ‘field mice’ in question.

And you know what? Never have I ever met an unkind archaeologist. Archaeologists are literally the nicest people on the planet. And they’re usually thrilled to meet people who are genuinely interested in their work – even if the people in question show up unannounced and start asking them a million different questions. They’re also nothing like Indiana Jones. Archaeologists are actually really humble and polite. Maybe that comes from being one of the very few scholars who largely work with their hands, get said hands dirty on a daily basis and in general from doing actual, honest, hard and often backbreaking work for a living instead of, say, just lazing about in front of a computer screen all day long like other people in academia (ahem).

(In any case, if by some giant cosmic coincidence, you’re that one archaeologist who semi-recently walked me through the remnants of that old settlement for over an hour, explaining to me that it was, in fact, mediaeval and showing me every single post hole on site, then thank you so much for your patience with me. And no, my companion was definitely not rolling his eyes. At least not at you, I promise.)

One of the recurring themes whenever I party-crash a dig like this is the fact that the clever and wonderful people working there turn out to be chronically underfunded and understaffed.

Another common one is the shocking reality of them only being called in for emergency digs right before the site in question is destroyed anyway (because the cliff it’s located on is about to crash into the sea and be washed away, say, or because the whole area is already scheduled to be urgently bulldozed and then paved over with concrete to make space for a parking lot, for example).

I’m serious: Archaeology is the prime example of ‘It’s not like it is in the movies’. Fiction is not reality, as I keep saying. Nobody is showering archaeologists with accolades. The powers that be don’t care about them, and archaeologists usually have to actively fight the authorities in order to be allowed to dig somewhere in the first place, let alone preserve anything in situ.

So, when a beautiful building dating back to the 1600s, say, gets torn down carelessly, without a single protester in sight (it’s not like it is in the movies!) and the heritage protection commission in question is largely helpless to prevent it or too clueless to care despite the fact that the building was listed as a national monument, then there are usually a few archaeologists who come sweeping in, in order to at least make the best of this bad situation and dig through the soil that had previously been hidden underneath the house in question – soil that was inaccessible since the 17^th century at least.

But when they do so, they’re often only granted some ridiculously short period of time (three weeks, say) and one or two full-time employees to excavate the site. If they’re lucky, they can drum up some support and hire a few students and local volunteers, who are then usually unanimously hated by their own communities for impeding the construction of whatever concrete box of a shopping mall or parking garage is scheduled to be built on top of that site – and not just on top of it, but often enough underground, as well. That’s when construction workers have to drill down so deep into the soil for the new building’s concrete foundations that any remnants of the archaeological site in question are destroyed forever and thus lost for all future generations that might ever want to dig there again.

The concrete shopping mall in question will, of course, then fall into disrepair and collapse within thirty or so years (because our modern-day ‘copy-paste architecture’ is not exactly built for eternity the way the Pantheon was when the Romans made it of opus caementicium).

After which time, everyone will go through some sort of mysterious collective re-awakening experience, exclaiming, “How could we?! Whyever did we do that to our cultural heritage?”

…until about three seconds later, when the next historic monument has to be torn down to make way for some eyesore of a multiplex cinema where people can go to watch eyesore-cinema type movies they don’t even understand, and all the ‘lessons learned’ are forgotten again. Rinse and repeat.

I feel this text has got away from me a little bit. (Can you tell?) Blame the outrage and despair bubbling up in my gut.

So, where was I? Ah, yes.

If you walk in on an archaeological dig spontaneously like that, the archaeologists in charge will tell you all about this. They’ll tell you the stories about how they had to plead with the authorities to finance the heavy machinery they typically need. They will tell you how your multi-million-inhabitant strong region has only two full-time archaeologists on retainer. They will tell you about arson, sabotage and theft, how their equipment is often systematically destroyed or stolen, the perpetrators usually being corrupt politicians working hand in hand with organized crime, trying to undermine the excavation in question. They will tell you about the looting, the pot-hunters and illegal digs destroying many a site and polluting the environment on top of that. And they will tell you about the massive political pressure exerted time and time again on their discipline, as well – pressure to interpret artifacts in a way that fits whatever the zeitgeist demands the past was like.

But they will tell you about some of their great triumphs, too: About that one find that made national or even international headlines. About the artifacts that are now exhibited behind glass in some important museum or other. And, most importantly, they will tell you how some of their insights impacted scholarly research about that particular area or culture or time period, about how one of their discoveries overturned a deeply held belief among historians or about how many scientific papers sprung from that one afternoon one single archaeologist looked at that one thin layer of soil a tad longer than politicians or locals wanted him or her to.

If you’re not like my better half, who’s chronically exasperated with me because I start to pull over and then firmly engage the brakes the second I spot the telltale tarp by the side of the road in a field somewhere (“Do we have to?...Darling, you can’t just walk up to them like this…What do you mean ‘watch me’?...Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. Doesn’t mean you have to do it again…Please, I told my mother we’d just pop over to the bakery. What am I going to tell her if we disappear for two hours?…Just let the poor archaeologists work in peace…Leave them alone. You’re embarrassing me…Oh, shoot, well, okay, here we go again,”), so, if you’re not that easily embarrassed, have no conscience and know no shame, in short, if you’re just like me and don’t mind keeping other people from their work and pestering them with obnoxious questions, I can promise you that you will meet the nicest people on planet Earth, and they’ll tell you some fascinating tales:

How, sometimes, when you excavate a site and have already dug deep into the soil, layer by layer, cave-ins can happen without warning and how you’re then suddenly faced with the prospect of having to work on that other section of the site where the rain-soaked topsoil gave way and laid bare something unexpected underneath the mud right next to your old pit.

I feel working on a text can be a very similar experience: You’re digging into said text, deeper and deeper, excavating its meaning. (Could you theoretically just stare at the topsoil and bemoan the injustice of the grass being greener on the other side of the dig site? Sure you could. Do your social justice thing if that’s what you want. All of tumblr does exactly that all day long with virtually any text, book, play, film or whatever. It’s practically the only lens people can apply to a text anymore. Sadly, this is true for many students these days, too.

Personally, I’m more interested in what’s underneath said topsoil and underneath the unevenly distributed grass. In what’s buried deep, deep down underground. Are there several different layers of text instead of just one? And are there commonly accepted rules on how to interpret the finds excavated during a textual ‘dig’ like that?)

Obviously, digging into a text isn’t remotely as hard as digging up half-frozen ground or dirtying your knees with a shovel in hand. You don’t get wet under the constant drizzle of rain in a field somewhere. Your hands aren’t freezing. Your skin isn’t burnt to a crisp by the Mediterranean sun. You’re back doesn’t hurt. (Well, maybe a little from sitting in front of a computer for too long.) Working on a text isn’t backbreaking work by any means. And I’m not even half as nice and kind as your average archaeologist, I’m sure.

And yet…this other thing happens here, too: The cave-ins!

Imagine you dug this pit a long time ago, which you largely dismissed because it was just filled with boring old shards. (And just for context: Pottery shards are the most common find of all. Virtually anywhere. Whatever culture you’re excavating and whatever time period you’re examining. Shards, old, broken, often completely plain shards are a dime a dozen. There are billions upon billions of them.) So, let’s say one of your pits yielded a ton of boring old shards. And that’s why you dismissed it.

The second pit was filled with coins. Perhaps a bit more interesting, but shall we say they were…Roman coins in Britain, to make this analogy more realistic? (In case you don’t know: Roman coins are pretty much ubiquitous in Britain. There are, in fact, so many Roman coins that British historians don’t even catalogue them all anymore; only the most spectacular finds are exhibited in museums these days. This is also why you can buy actual, real, authentic Roman coins in Britain, and it’s totally legal. It’s also cheap! That’s how many Roman coins there are there.)

So, one of your pits is filled with pottery shards; the other one is stuffed with Roman coins, i.e. one is completely boring, and the other one is only slightly better in that regard.

And you, the textual archaeologist in this analogy, didn’t see any connection between these two pits. They were just two boring old pits filled with boring old stuff. So, you put those two on the back burner.

But then, oh, then…a downpour happened, with water rushing towards your dig site, and that’s when the mudslide occurred…

Shall we call it a seasonal change? (You see what I did there? Seasonal! Like season three…Okay, I’ll shut up now with my stupid puns.)

So, suddenly the soil between the two pits was washed away; the earthen mound between them caved in.

And there it was, right there: the connection between the shards and the coins, the connection between the two pits you had dismissed as boring. You can clearly see it now in the mud between the two old pits: There are remnants of old wooden crates preserved almost perfectly in the bog-like, anaerobic soil. Apparently, the shards used to be pots, and the coins used to be hidden inside those pots.

It’s a hidden treasure!

There are bracelets and pendants and rings now, too. It’s a hoard. You’ve stumbled upon some hidden, long lost treasure.

But as long as you were just staring at the pottery shards in one pit and the coins in the other, you didn’t see the connection, and thus couldn’t grasp what it was that you were looking at. You didn’t know what this was!

Something similar happened to me with ‘Young Royals’, my friends (and I’m sure it happened to many of you, as well):

There was a mirror character (very obvious and the most basic of mirror characters there is). This mirror character existed right from the start, from episode one season one onwards, and I actually did know about him. This mirror was so basic and boring, so obvious and, most importantly, so useless (at least largely) that I just dismissed him. I looked at this mirror and went, “Oh, it’s just old shards in the mud, nothing special. Not writing about that one.”

And then I had a metaphor sitting right in front of me all this time. I saw it. I knew about it. But again, it didn’t seem all that important. I could see a bit more of it in season two, but again, it didn’t seem to be all that significant even after those two seasons. I thought, “Ah…a few Roman coins. A bit more interesting than the shards. But nothing special. Maybe I’ll write about it later. Let’s see how it goes.” And then I put it aside, just like I had put the mirror character aside, and decided to do more useful stuff with my time.

Until…well, until the seasons changed. Literally.

Season three came along, and it felt like one of those cave-ins between two old pits. Suddenly all the soil between the mirror character and the metaphor eroded, and…hurray! There was treasure. The two of them were actually connected. And suddenly – once you looked at them together – they made so much sense.

I want to write about that season three sex scene on ‘Young Royals’ today.

And for that, we need that metaphor I had never written about and the mirror character I had dismissed early on and never devoted a post to either. The shards and the Roman coins.

We need to examine how and where they are connected.

And once we do all of that, that whole season three sex scene between Wilhelm and Simon will magically break open, the soil eroding, and we will find something unexpected…

We will talk about cultural history today. And about literature (a lot!). About historical court records. And about Valborg. (Obviously.) We will talk about sex in very explicit terms (so if that’s not your thing, perhaps you should stop reading right here). And we will try to shine a light into some of the darker corners of season three of ‘Young Royals’. We will dig, dig, dig our way through the mud for this one. I will show you one scene in season three that I think is brilliantly written, another scene that has some of the most sexually explicit subtext I have ever seen on screen (and potentially one explicit allusion I can barely believe made it into the script) and last but not least a scene that seems tiny and yet gives away so much about how exactly the show connects the way it talks about sex to the way it talks about politics.

Seriously…if you thought the metaphor from ‘House M.D.’ where breast milk represented sperm is bad…wait till you read this text. It gets so much more coarse and so much more explicit. (I say blushing furiously.)

So, if you want to know what an elevator in Lisbon, the witch trials in European history and a famous Russian novel have got to do with Simon and Wilhelm’s sex life, please proceed to the text below.

If you want to know what the ‘studentmössa’ metaphor is, then you’ve come to the right place, too. (No Swedish student caps were harmed in the making of this text!)

And if you want to know why I said that that season three sex scene isn’t as lovely and harmless as it seems, if you want to know why I hinted at the fact that there’s something tragic going on in it, in short if you want to know what the subtext says is really going on with the two main protagonists as they rush into Wilhelm’s bedroom and tumble onto his bed in episode three of season three, then this is where to look…