The history of the Wild West is so enshrouded in myth, lies, obfuscations, half-truths, and rumor that once these delicate layers are peeled back, the definite facts they're mounded on seem scant enough to be scattered by a breeze — if they weren't weighted with blood and gold. Famous figures like outlaw Emmett Dalton and Wyatt Earp's wife, Josephine, intertwined the bare facts of their lives with legend. In the attempt to immortalize themselves, they erased themselves: it is not always clear whether something really happened, let alone how it happened or who did it.
As I began to discuss last week, the writers of RDR2 create a taut juxtaposition in the game by presenting the uncolonized natural world as Eden — but also basing each of the gang’s camps on a different aspect of hell, as imagined by Dante Alighieri in The Inferno.
It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that everyone in the English-speaking world, and much of the rest of the world besides, has heard of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But this statement is more vexed than it first appears. Which version of King Arthur have people heard of, and which versions of the knights?
One of the ways Red Dead Redemption 2 often makes literary allusions is in prophetic statements from special NPCs. Blind Man Cassidy gives Arthur Morgan one that alludes to Paradise Lost and that appears, at first blush, to be about Dutch Van der Linde and Micah Bell: “Your father is seduced by the one with the forked tongue. It's no use hoping.” However, that isn't the truest reading of this prophecy. Dutch is also Satan/Eve (as we’ve seen, these characters combine in Dutch) to Hosea Matthews’s Adam. It's Hosea who is Arthur's truest father.
