May Flowers

Pairs very well with the 2020 album "Songs for Pierre Chuvin" by the Mountain Goats, which approaches the historical setting and narrative material of "Chronicle of the Last Pagans" through the musical and poetic form of 1990s lo-fi guitar music. The album's lyrics are more or less impossible to decode without this book, although the tracks are sure to be enjoyable musically for fans of the form regardless, and the emotional energy of the delivery transcends the language gap between academic and popular fiction, both of which are drawn from two opposing threads of Chuvin's history. To avoid being wrapped in the "exegetic chains" of either form, Chuvin and Darnielle each manage to offer their audience a brief glimpse into the world of the distant past, a world where pagan religion was beginning to lose its hold on the Roman Empire, but Christianity had not yet established its later dominance. When the history text and the album are intermingled, those two glimpses into the past combine, and form a window.