Someone shoot me now

Dear Beowulf studies:

I am changing languages. Please go away.

No, I don’t care if what I’m saying about women’s function as agents of social cohesion in Yvain and Erec et Enide looks surprisingly like the role(s) of a peace-weaver bride, as argued by Rosemary Huisman. PLEASE GO AWAY.

Nyah Nyah Nyah NOT LISTENING. (Besides, the differences in social structures are, I estimate, sufficiently significant that the similarities are more coincidental than meaningful. YES? RIGHT?)

Nolove,

Aspiring Arthurianist Highly

In which Chretien de Troyes > modern fantasy in general

One of the things I’ve been doing with my brain in my spare time / while entering things into the government record-keeping system is madly analysing random bits of pop culture from gendered perspectives. I’ve learnt about things like the Bechdel Test; read about your chances of death in the BBC Merlin according to race and gender, and… well, pretty much anything else LJ has decided to teach me.

While archiving a bunch of correspondence the other day, it occurred to me to wonder: why do we so rarely see, in modern fantasy, protagonist groupings where friendships between women are given as much screen-time and weight in plot/character development as are friendships between men or between men and women?

I can think of a lot of modern fantasy, both good and bad, which has strong female characters. However, the most common plot set-ups that I can think of involve:

* A strapping young lad and his best (male) friend(s) or older male mentor(s). Random example: Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy.

* A brave young woman kicking arse and taking names in a male setting. Random example: Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet.

* A lone girl or woman and boy or man on a Dangerous Quest. (There will be Bad Fantasy Sex.) Random example: JV Jones’ Sword of Shadows trilogy (note that I haven’t finished reading yet, and I think when I stopped the characters had parted ways).

* A mixed group of men and women, in which there are usually fewer women than men. There will be a high level of character development through m/f relationships, not all involving sex (there will be lots of Contrasting Gender Roles happening). If the protagonist is male or the book has mixed POV, a substantial amount of plot and character development will occur within homosocial relationships: if the dominant POV is female, it is more common to develop character in the context of heterosocial and heterosexual relationships. Random example: David Eddings’ Belgariad.

* Two or more strong or supposed-to-be-strong female characters who are set up in opposition to each other. Their relationship, or the comparisons the reader draws between them, will be very important to the plot and character development, but they’re not friends or allies; each exists primarily in her own sphere. Random example: Morgan and Guinevere in Mists of Avalon.

Where are the books about girls working together? Why, in a mixed bag of protagonists, are female homosocial relationships always the last thing we hear about? I did a quick and unscientific scan of my brain, and came up with a few books that score highly in this regard: Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic quartet; The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian (granted that the reason Susan and Lucy’s relationship stands out as distinct is that Lewis organises the children’s roles in the adventure by gender); Sara Douglass’ Troy Game series…

and Chretien de Troyes Chevalier au Lion. Ok, Yvain’s our protagonist, and his character development swings on his attempts to balance his homosocial relationship with Gawain against his heterosexual and heterosocial relationships with various women (and his relationship with a lion. WTF IS THAT LION DOING, anyway?). I could go on about this at length. I did go on about this at length and got rather pleasant marks for it, too. But even while sticking almost exclusively with Yvain’s POV, Chretien still manages to pwn most 20th and 21st century fantasy when it comes to strong female homosocial relationships.

We have:

* Lunette/Laudine. We’re left in no doubt that Lunette is the biggest influence on Laudine’s life – and Laudine appears to be the only strong claim on Lunette’s affections. There’s that gorgeous inversion of the courtly blind promise trope, and has anyone pointed out that Lunette’s negotiation of Yvain’s marriage to Laudine is a genderswapped version of the m/f/m triangle, with the man as the token between women?

* The Dame de Norison and her maid – a small-scale reproduction of Lunette/Laudine, delicious triangle dynamics and all.

* The tag-team of Questing Maidens on behalf of the Disinherited Sister.  I can never remember how many of them there were, exactly. They don’t have names and they don’t have direct dialogue, but they’re there and they’re a major plot device. A bunch of women (or was it just two? SOME WOMEN, anyway) recognising that another woman is in trouble, and setting out to fix it. That the only way, within Chretien’s social construct, for them to do so involves going and fetching a man, shouldn’t undermine the fact that they’re a bunch of women actively collaborating in the interests of one of their fellows and putting themselves at considerable physical risk to do so.

And in case we thought that everything was all happiness and roses in female homosocial-land, Chretien goes and adds tensions and misunderstandings to the female homosocial relationships he’s set up: Laudine blames Lunette for her betrayal and throws her out; the Feuding Sisters bicker their way across the narrative climax; and even at Norison (which, for a bunch of reasons I shan’t go into here, I think is meant to function as an example of good and harmonious social relationships, as opposed to Yvain’s unbalanced home situation), the Lady gets temporarily cranky with her maid.

What’s more, female homosocial relationships contribute to the narrative not just as plot devices but as character development. There have been reams of paper spent on the question of Laudine’s motives in first marrying and then re-marrying Yvain – does she love him? Is she manipulated? Does she really care? No matter what the conclusion is, no one can attack this question without examining the relationship between Laudine and Lunette, and the changes in their public and personal relations as evidence for Laudine’s feelings and choices.

But wait, it gets better! Or I think it does. I have a rather hazy thought that I swear I will chase up one day, to the effect that the female homosocial relationships in Le Chevalier au Lion also contribute to male character development. I think we’re supposed to read Lunette/Laudine in particular, but also the women of Norison and the tag-team of Questing Damsels, in contrast to Yvain/Gawain. Which homosocial relationships work to preserve a balanced social order? Which are compatible with balanced and mutually beneficial heterosexual relationships? And which homosocial relationship causes constant discord and demands preference above all other loyalties? I’m not sure if Yvain learns anything from the women around him, but I’m fairly sure the reader is supposed to use the examples of the women in the story to evaluate Yvain’s choices and character development.

In short: Chretien de Troyes > modern fantasy in general. But I’m sure we all knew that already .

Evolving Mythology: Arthurian Fanfic and Medieval Tradition

I don’t have here the jotting books I had with me through high school, or I’d quote to you directly from  Kevin Crossley- Holland’s “The King Who Was And Will Be”, an illustrated miscellany of athurian legend and medieval culture designed for kids of around thirteen. Something he said in the introduction stuck with me to this day (sadly, i can no longer quote it directly from memory): Camelot was never a place. Camelot has always been in people’s minds and hearts, never on a map. We don’t need to ask where or when Camelot was: we need to ask what it meant and what it means now.

You don’t need to have read much modern Arthurian fantasy to know that Camelot tells us more about the author’s time than Arthur’s: T.H. White ruined a good story with a lot of pondering about power and nationhood, during and following World War Two; Marion Zimmer Bradley put together cringe-worthy New Age Celtomania with criticisms of Christianity and a laudable desire to see stronger female characters; don’t ask me what the 2004 movie says about modern society, aside from the fact that we like to see Keira Knightley running into battle dressed in leather and blue paint.

On discovering the purist joys of medieval lit, I thought to wash my hands of such terrible inauthentic modern creations. Unfortunately, one can only spend so long with high medieval texts before realising that they are all in connection with each other: poets and authors create and recreate characters, extend one anothers’ stories, and recast old tales in new ways. As Hannah pointed out the other day, the late Middle English poem The Grene Knight reads like bad, bad SGGK fanfiction: but even our best texts don’t stand in a vacuum. I am increasingly convinced that the Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is substantially the same as Chretien’s Gawain, and that our Gawain’s adventures in a watery forest chapel are in some way connected to and commenting on Yvain’s adventures in a simiilar setting. Thomas Malory is fabulous, but his work is largely a compilation of earlier poets’ tales, with considerable effort put into ironing out the inconsistencies.

This is what mythology does: it is recast and retold, adapted to the tastes of new authors and new audiences. Most of you know that there’s a flourishing market for fantasy novels in general out there, and a sizeable corner of that market for Arthurian fantasy. Today, I shall bring you a few recommendations as to the best of Arthurian fanfic: non-professional stories (although some are by professional writers under psuedonyms) written for the author’s personal entertainment and/or for particular online audiences. There’s some truly horrific writing out there on the internet, and Arthurian fandom is no exception. But there is also some very, very very good writing out there. This is people taking up Arthurian legend- starting from medieval sources or from Marion Zimmer Bradley- and making it their own.

The best place I’ve found yet for Arthurian fic online is the aptly named LJ community arthurian_fic. Go, browse. Do be warned that, like all Arthurian lit, these works reflect the concerns and interests of their authors and audiences. Fandoms interests include, but are not limited to: romance, strong female characters, slash and lots of it (slash being m/m or, sometimes, f/f pairings), angst, serious literary commentary, dark and hopeless situations, and porn. All fics are posted under cuts or with links to other websites, so pay attention to the pairing and rating before you click to read.

In my opinion, the best medieval fic in the business is written by irisbleufic. She knows her medieval source texts well, and writes Roland/Oliver and Gawain/Bertilak. I heartily recommend Men Well Met, a retelling of parts of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written for the Yuletide 2005 Challenge. It’s work-safe, and lightly alliterated. The description she gives on the Yuletide database is: I’d like to suggest that there is more than one sequence of seduction scenes in the narrative, and I’m not referring to the parallel hunts, either. Happy Yule! (Rated PG-13)

Another excellent piece is Written in the Stars, by odette_river: Morgan considers her brother Arthur. Rated PG-13 for incest.

The Good That Won’t Come Out by ladybedivere is a delightful piece, from the point of view of Sir Bedivere, about age, wisdom and what makes a knight worthy. Rated PG.

And my absolute favourite, Their Mouths Were Fire, a 200 word drabble by Mhari. It’s rated R, because it’s set in the middle of a sex scene: its pairing is Mordred/Galahad, and it’s from Galahad’s POV. A beautiful and delicate exploration of the space between the good knight and the bad, between Arthur’s son and Lancelot’s. Galahad has always been my favourite Grail character, and it’s nice to see him written as something other than a total wet blanket.

So there you have it. Arthurian legend is alive and flourishing on the interwubs.

Two interesting things from the blogosphere

Dr Nokes posted this clip, from a most hilarious French TV show, about medieval music:

Giggle. Giggle.

And on an entirely unrelated note, Dr Rundkvist posted, as a side note in his notice about an Antro/Archaeo blog carnival, this fascinating tidbit:

The Rota System, from the Old Church Slavic word for “ladder” or “staircase”, was a system of collateral succession practiced (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus’ and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia, in which the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother (usually to the fourth brother) and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise.

Looks a little like the supposed Pictish succession, from uncle to nephew down the matrilinear line, which, as Michelle has discussed before, may not have been a proper system but an emergency measure.

The Wiki article on the Rota System goes on to say:

The system was begun by Yaroslav the Wise, who assigned each of his sons a principality based on seniority. When the Grand Prince died, the next most senior prince moved to Kiev and all others moved to the principality next up the ladder.[1] Only those princes whose fathers had held the throne were eligible for placement in the rota; those whose fathers predeceased their grandfathers were known as izgoi, “excluded” or “orphaned” princes.

Apparently some scholars doubt this was such an organised system at all, as always. If it were, it would create an interesting mix of sibling and cousin rivalries, and loyalties as well. It would behove a king to treat his nephew or brother well, lest said heir’s succession be artificially accelerated. The king’s *son*, meanwhile, who might see his uncle or cousin as a threat, would be well advised to demonstrate his loyalty thereto in order to survive the years between his father’s succession and his own intact. But what of second sons, who would probably not live long enough to inherit? What of these orphan princes?
Your fourth sons wouldn’t be the expendable end of the royal family, as they would be under direct patrilinear succession systems. Instead, they’d be the ones likely to live long enough to take the throne. How very, very interesting.

I wonder, in this system, how the precedence is worked out? Simply by age? Does your father’s age also count?
Let’s say King A dies, and his throne passes first to his son A1, and then to his son A4, A2 and A3 having died in the meantime. When A4 dies, A1’s eldest son, A1.1, inherits. Presumably he is succeeded by one of his brothers, ≥A1.2, in turn. When ≥A1.2 dies, does the throne necessarily pass back to A1.1.1? Or does it pass to A2.1? if A2.1 were older than ≥A1.2, would he have had seniority on the death of A1.1?
What if A1’s first wife had been barren, and A2.1 were older than A1.1? If the position of princes on the ‘ladder’ were based simply on their age, A2.1 would succeed A2. If on the other hand the system were designed to ensure that each branch of the family had their place on the ladder in turn, he wouldn’t.

I wants to know, precious…

Roland and Gawain- further expoundings

I foolishly drank red wine at Formal Dinner, and got all teary over a UNICEF presentation, and now I don’t feel like doing any work. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to trick myself into writing my commentary for my Gawain class tomorrow by putting it online. Sound fair?

First up, if you’re wondering what’s going on, read this morning’s post about the parrallels between the Charlemange/Roland and Arthur/Gawain relationships. (note- thanks for the tip-off about Ralph the Collier, Jeff. I’m going to see if Middle English Reading Group will help me out with it.)

This morning, I looked at the structural relationships between Roland and Gawain in the courts to which they respectively belong. (Now, I must note that it’s over a year since I read Roland, in translation, and my copy thereof is now in the hands of the Goblin. So I’m really pulling things out of my backside here.) There are two further aspects of the two heroes which I feel worth investigating: one, their personal natures, and two, their wider settings.

The Character of the Hero

No one ever accused Roland of being the sharpest sword in the armoury, did they? If I had my copy (I think it’s the Penguin?) here, I would quote to you from the introduction, but as is, you’ll have to trust me when I say that the editor, whose name I’ve forgotten, talks about just this fact. Roland isn’t the quickest of wit, or the wisest. Not much of a tactician, nor, one suspects, was he really one for courtly poncing around. Rather, he is young, and beautiful, and brave, and that is all that is required of him. See enemy, hoist banner, charge. Instant hero.

The editor of my Roland (damn, I wish I could remember her name…) had some very eloquent phrases to the effect that ‘The phrase ‘Middle Ages’ are a misnomer… these are the young ages’- young, good-looking, brash and overconfident. We’re talking about eleventh century Francophonia¹ here, the height of the Feudal era, but before the chivalric code and courtly literature had really taken off. Roland and his cohort are defined as knights by two things: their relationship with one another, and their courage. Intelligence and refinement are not held at a high premium.

Now, turning to Gawain. He’s a knight cut from the same mould as Roland. He is young, and beautiful. He is known for his valiant courage, and demonstrates this against tangible enemies in the wilderness of the Wirral. He loves his uncle the king steadfastly. Intelligence is not his strong point. (I have a complicated anaylsis of this, but a) i’m not that generous with the internet, and b), it’s really kind of boring to sit through.) Suffice it to say, Gawain is perfectly equipped to deal with the dangers right in front of him, but he is completely flummoxed by the otherworldly machinations of The Green Knight, Morgan and the Lady. He just plain doesn’t know what’s going on, or how to deal with it, and in the face of these mind-games he is lead into a spiral of deceit, cowardice and sin.

Which brings us to…

The Hero’s world

It doesn’t matter that Roland isn’t the pointiest pike in the rack. His world- or his poet, if you like- doesn’t ask it of him. It asks only beauty and courage and loyalty, and these he has aplenty. Gawain, likewise not the bendiest bow in the rank, would be quite at home in Roland’s world.

* Roland’s life is defined by deep homosocial relationships.² Roland is off with his troops, under the command of his uncle, supported by his foster-brother Olivier. Gawain, meanwhile, is off on his journey alone, into a world where the homosocial is undermined by the homosexual. Does Gawain even know what he would have to give to the Lord if he had his way with the Lady?

Gawain’s masculinity is at stake. Before I go on talking about hetero/homosexual, it’s worth making the disclaimer that I know these categories don’t cookie-cutter fit the Middle Ages. I prefer a disctinction which David L Boyd makes and then passes over, which is that (high) medieval (western european) sexuality is a binary not of hetero/homosexual but top/bottom, the former being appropriate to a man and the latter to a woman. M/M sex is dangerous because it feminises one or both of the participants. Boyd argues that Gawain would be feminised, in that he would have to offer what the Lady gave him, a ‘receptacle’. He doesn’t go that far, happily (for him, if not for future slash fans), but there’s a whole lot of complicated scholarship (see Boyd and Shiela Fisher, for starters), explaining how the girdle is feminising and the axe-wound is a vaginal symbol and so on. Point is, the whole setup runs Gawain in circles, and is a far cry from the straightforward manly bonding of Roland.

As someone known as Nathaniel (sorry, I don’t remember where you blog…) pointed out to me the other day, fourteenth century England had good reason to be concerned about the erosion of boundaries between the homosocial bonds of the feudal order and potential homosexual bonds, in the form of Edward II and his ‘favourites’. Gawain, and the straightforward heroic order he represents, are threatened.

* Roland’s world is utterly devoid of female sexuality. It’s not devoid of women: Bramimunde, in the Saracen court, is an active character. But on Roland’s side, there is only the distant Aude, a token passed between Olivier and Roland to cement their brotherly affection. This looks like a perfect example of Boyd’s heterosex-as-vehicle-for-homosexual-desire trope, but I don’t buy it, in this case. Marrying sisters is a good way to tie two men and their families together in a political as well as affectionate alliance. (And if you like your sister, you’d probably rather her married to someone you know and trust…) IMHO, it’s significant that Roland never makes it home to Aude and the marriage (and the sex) never takes place.

At Hautdesert, however, heterosex does imply some kind of homosexual exchange, as I noted above. Gawain can’t be quite certain of that, though. What he can be certain of is that he’s faced with transgressive and aggressive female sexuality. I’m digging in my heels and maintaining that the Lady is dominant, at least in the first temptation scene. At the very least, the boundary between masculine/top and feminine/bottom is blurred.

Furthermore, the machinations of female sexuality are behind all this confusion. As Boyd points out, the blame for transgressive homosexual desires is shifted onto women; his women-as-objects-between-men thesis can be inverted, and the men become ‘taken men’ in women’s power, as Shiela Fisher argues. Sadly neither of them consider the sexual implications of this- what does it mean for the Lady to instigate a homosexual exchange? If Gawain knows he may have to ‘pay back’ Bertilak, does he think Bertilak has orchestrated it, or the Lady? And then, at the end of the poem, we find out that Morgan is behind the whole operation. As a result of his ‘trafficking’ with women, as Sheila Fisher puts it, Gawain dons the girdle and loses his heroic standing. Women, to put it bluntly, are dangerous and they’re undermining the masculine warrior code by which Roland lived and Gawain ought to live.

* Roland’s enemies are this-worldly and they stay that way. He’s facing a whole pile of Saracens, all he has to do is charge them down and die heroically. His conflict is that between sensible tactics and his stubborn pride- pride wins, and he gets to be a hero. Bonus points.

Gawain’s enemies, on the other hand, can’t make up their mind if they’re otherwordly or thisworldly. First off, he has the otherworldly Green Knight, who is scary as hell. Next, he has the Lady, who ought to be thisworldly but is behaving very transgressively. Then there’s the fact that his host, apparently thisworldly, is also the otherworldly Green Knight. And finally we find out that the whole apparently thisworldly castle of Hautdesert is ruled by Morgan ‘the goddess’, and she orchestrated the entire sequence of events. Poor ole Gawain just can’t keep up. He doesn’t have the information he needs to understand what’s going on around him, but what’s more he just doesn’t seem to try. He just bumbles along trying to keep his head on and his masculinity invoilate from moment to moment.

* Finally, and this is a point I haven’t investigated properly in relation to either poem, there’s the question of economic anxiety. I have a book waiting to be read called ‘The Poem as Green Girdle’, which is all about commercial imagery in SGGK. For now, suffice it to say that in Roland, everything is shiny and beautiful, while in Gawain, everything is shiny and beautiful and has a definite price, even Gawain himself. Roland associates display with nobility and worth; Gawain associates display with wealth and commercial value. Roland’s worth as a hero is displayed in his rich ornamentation; Gawain’s worth as a hero is measured and curtailed by pricing. I need to poke into this a bit more, and have another look at Roland (in the French… blerg…), but I venture the suggestion that the later poem is evidencing an anxiety about the burgeoning market economy, the nature of wealth and the possibility of it amassing in non-noble hands, a concern which simply isn’t relevant in Roland.

What I’m trying to say here…

is that Gawain is an old-skool knight, a big, pretty, kinda dumb warrior of the Roland type, completely at sea in the confusing and threatening world of the fourteenth century. A good three centuries separate the two poems, and in that time a whole courtly culture has had time to develop, on the foundations of the feudal society in which Roland is located, and is now threatened by all kinds of things. The poet emphasises this disparity between the heroic past and the unstable present through the character of Gawain- not through a great courtly knight like Lancelot, or even the later French incarnation of Gawain, but through a Gawain who bears more resemblance to Roland, and who simply cannot cope with the confusion of his new situation. Perhaps this is why the poem shows such leniency toward Gawain’s cowardice in saving his own life- a hero used to facing down his enemies in combat shouldn’t be expected to unravel the twistings of monsters and Morgan.

~

1. As Keith Busby pointed out to the CMS the other night, a good deal of medieval ‘french’ literature is preserved in English manuscripts. Nobody mention this to the French department, ok?
2. If you try to tell me Roland and Olivier were having slashy gay buttsex, I will cry.

Gawain and Roland: Matching Pair

Let me test this theory out on you, O Blogosphere.

France’s great hero-king, Charlemagne, had a nephew. Roland. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them are commemorated in the Chanson de Roland (11thc), where Charlemagne embodies France, and French Kingship. Roland, meanwhile, embodies France and French knighthood. Everybody with me so far?

England’s great hero-king, Arthur (sorry, no humourous videos), had a nephew. Gawain. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them turn up all over the place in medieval English literature. Before someone imports Lancelot from the Continent, Gawain is the premier knight of Arthur’s court- take, for example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14thc). Arthur embodies England and English kingship. Meanwhile, Gawain embodies England and English knighthood. We have a parrallel, yes?

Back when I wanted to be an Arthurianist, and read all kinds of crappy Arthurian pop-history, quite a few books I read talked about the creation of the Arthur myth as a response to the French foundation legends centred around Charlemagne. Now, being old and wise, I’m willing to bet that there’s more to it than that. However, I do note that, in all my (fairly haphazard) research into the Gawain tales, lots and lots of people make comparisions between the ‘English’ Gawain and the ‘French’ Gawain- and squabble over which the Gawain of SGGK better embodies- but no one seems to step outside the Arthurian canon, which is odd. I’m not so sure that the fourteenth century would’ve drawn such a big distinction.

I have more Gawain-Roland relationships I can draw out, but I have to go and get ready for work now. So I’ll leave you to sit on this one- tell me what you think!

Why Fourteenth Century Knights Had Good Reason To Be A Little Angsty

I just finished a long and complicated article on what J.P. would call ‘Boy History’. Not something I’m used to dealing with- now many of his classes have the assessment blocks broken up so that you have to write one ‘boy history’ essay (politics, warfare, technology, economics, maybe disease and medecine?) and one ‘girl history’ (religion, women, books/literature/art, daily life), but I happily sailed through three years writing my papers on the Church (although in my defence, for JP’s classes I picked the ‘boy’ end- papal polcies and ecclesiastical politics. Have I mentioned my ginormous crush on Innocent III?), literature and women. Now, however, I find myself embroiled in a long paper on the Infantry Revolution of the Fourteenth Century. Tactics and weapons and all far too late for my taste. Why, you ask? Well, good question.

The last two papers I read- David L. Boyd’s Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight¹ and Donald R. Howard’s Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain, both made mention of ’social tensions’ which were undermining the economic and political validity of the chivalric class. I can’t remember what Howard said about it, but Boyd’s argument was that this was *displaced* in the form of transgressive sexuality (threatening male social order) and the blame placed on women.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think Gawain is, in himself, a barely-hero (not an anti-hero, but still not up to heroic standards), and I have an arse-kicking grammatical analysis to prove it. He’s not a perfect hero and his personal flaws lead to his downfall. However, it is true that he’s systematically disempowered throughout the text- I think his flawed character is such as to encourage this- and it seems that this reflects some anxieties on the part of the knightly class whom he represents. What could they be, though? To this end, I ploughed my way through Technology, Society, and the Infantry Revolution of the Fourteenth Century, an article by John Stone.

What I have learnt so far is:

* That in the fourteenth century, as anyone who has seen Braveheart will remember, infantry start defeating cavalry across Europe. Apparently the first such battle was at Courtrai in 1302, when Flemish commons defeated French horsemen.
So Thing One is: if infantry start replacing cavalry as Awesome Troops of Doom, perhaps the class of mounted chevaliers start feeling out-of-control.

* That in the fourteenth century, contemporary with these changes, come social changes which result in greater political privileges for the commons. Stone takes issue with some deterministic military historians who argue that technological innovations in warfare *create* social change, and argues for a combination of factors. He points out that the Flemish commons who defeated the French were defending their rights, not establishing them. However, he notes that the English case is quite different to the Flemish. Where the Flemish urban population had been experiencing relative peace in which to grow wealthy and powerful on the back of their textile industry, in England, resources had been funneled consistently into the Hundred Years War. This was causing resentment (and possibly revolts? I seem to remember hearing somewhere along the line that there were some revolts around about now? Wycliffites?)
So Thing Two is the commons agitating for (and gaining) political power. Do we have a House of Commons in England by now? I’m terrible with late medieval history…

* That Europe was in a period of economic prosperity, something which had been developing since the twelfth century. Prosperity means surplus resources, which means you can set up commerce and industry, which creates a liquid, cash-based economy. New commercial opportunities also means new power bases- this is the period where guilds become powerful, and where towns start setting up as communes. I’m not sure to what degree this is happening in England- the history teacher who taught me about guilds and so forth had no respect for geographical differences. But it’s happening, and even if it’s not on a large scale at home, the English do know what goes on on the Continent.
So Thing Three is: a flourishing cash-based economy with new opportunities for commerce and power is undermining the land and produce based economy which supports the feudal system.

All up, the chivalric class, collectively, have good reason to be feeling insecure in the fourteenth century. Hero-tales like the Arthur legends are a sort of group reassurance activity; they glorify the chivalric ethos, and reinforce the identity and purpose of the knight in the face of contemporary changes. I think Gawain himself, as a barely-hero with no control over his impossible situation, reflects the anxieties of the time. The poem glorifies the material and social world of chivalry, but it is at the end of the day a poem about failure- about one man who failed his code; about a code which fails to equip its hero with the skills to face his new situation.

~

1. SUCH AN AWESOME PAPER ZOMG. Really. Queer theorists take things like medieval kink seriously. Boyd’s footnotes include a paper titled ‘Anal Rope’, which from the reference Boyd made to it, looks like it deals with the bondage jokes that none of my class believe are actually there. I don’t buy Boyd’s ‘chivalry is all based on repressed homosexuality’, though. Dude. Chivalry is based on LOTS of things, particularly on the feudal system. And the feudal system is an economic and political structure wot is necessary for things like keeping Vikings out of your territory. Time goes on, a system becomes an ideology and it picks up things like the chivalric code, which may or may not provide a way of chanelling mano-a-mano desires, but you don’t seriously think ALL homosocial activity is repressed homosexuality, do you? And I have a rant coming up about the way Boyd completely sidelines female sexuality.

They taught me half-arsed Foucault in first year…

Same as they taught me half-arsed Functional Grammar.¹ These two things turned me off the English department entirely. Yet here I am, working on a presentation for the English Honours Conference, and if you’d told me in first year that I’d be grateful to have learnt these two things, I would have told you to shove it up your jumper and let me go back to history class. How wise I thought I was then!

Ahem. Hello again, blogosphere! Long time no see! I have few ideas these days and those I have I am cuddling close to me in the hope of knocking them into articles at some stage.

Here is a thought I had tonight while brushing my teeth:

When the Green Knight arrives in Camelot, all the power of the gaze lies with Arthur and his court. There are five sight/seeing verbs in the 286 lines I was looking at. Four of them have Arthur or his court looking at the Green Knight. They are all in the (authoritative) narratorial voice. The fifth is in the Green Knight’s voice, has him as the subject, and is modified by wolde. Though it is to be presumed that the GK does see Arthur, as he wishes, since he SPEAKS to Arthur, this is not noted by the narrator.
The GK’s ‘occular acts’² are expressed indirectly, as action clauses involving his eyes (which he casts and rolls). Arthur and his court are never the direct objects of the GK’s gaze.

What we have here is not a Foucault-ian Panopticon, where an unseen watcher judges many. Rather, many seen spectators judge one. In one of the three cognitive verbs in the narratorial voice, the court deme the GK to be phantom or fairy. If we have an unseen watcher it is the Narrator, who himself makes two direct judgements on the GK- but the Narrator is not associated with any verbs of sight/seeing, he is a purely intellectual presence.

When Gawain gets to Hautdesert, though he represents Arthur’s court, he (and the court through him) lose all the power of their gaze. He acts in two sight verbs in the 183 lines I analysed (once at the beginning and once at the end), looking first upon Bertilak and then upon the Lady. Each sight act is associated, not with judgement (as in deme, above), but with an indirect perception, thuht (seemed, appeared (to him)) or loked (She looked/appeared gracious). The agency in Gawain’s gaze is lost in his inability to follow through with an agentive judgement. And, to make matters worse, both times his perception is shaky, if not outright wrong. (Is Bertilak a worthy lord? Is the Lady gracious? I don’t think so, but the poem doesn’t make it clear one way or the other.)

~

1. Or was I a half-arsed learner? Undoubtedly I was, particularly when it came to Foucault. But they gave me brilliant marks, so their standards must have been as low as mine. I actually quite liked half-arsed functional grammar, and the fact that only three of us in the room could remember what an adverb was, so I put a good effort into it, and wrote a ripper essay in my final exam defending the use of grammatical analysis in literary studies. The real nightmare in that course was Sassure. Put me to sleep every tuesday for a month with signs and signifiers and whatnot.
2. Isn’t that a fabulously wanky phrase? I lifted it from Sarah Stanbury’s book Seeing the Gawain Poet. Sadly, she doesn’t think about agency at all when talking about shifting occular perspectives. Can anyone suggest a more comprehensible phrase than ‘ocular act’?

Medieval Kink: or, what better way to up my google ranking?

I am, (un)fortunately, blessed with an innocent mind, and despite the best efforts of many of my friends and associates, sometimes, I just don’t get the dirty jokes. Fortunately, in the world of medieval literature, there is almost always someone who’s done a close text study of the dirty joke, and spelt it out in sensible terms like ’symbolism’ and ‘inversion’ and ‘verbal echoes’, which is the only way an innocent nerd like me will pick up on it.

Tonight I have discovered, courtesy of one David Mills and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, that the temptation scenes in SGGK are full of bondage jokes.¹

I did realise they were an extended innuendo, I’m not that dim. Lady sneaks into Gawain’s bed, refuses to let him get up and dressed, baldly announces ye are welcom to my cors, and gloats about how many ladies wish they had him in their embrace, as she does here. Gawain, meanwhile, sputters and prevaricates, and manages, for three successive nights, to keep pushing their discourse back into the conventional exchange of loyalty and compliments between knight and lady. Amusing stuff, right? Is Gawain cleverly blocking her every attack? Or is he simply too dumb to pick up on what she’s offering? (The irony being that, even if he knows exactly what she’s offering, he can have no idea what game she and Bertilak, and Morgan behind them, are playing at.)

The factor that I’d not noticed until I picked up Mills’ article is that the Lady comes in and assumes the dominant role- not only by propositioning Gawain, but by doing so in the language of assault, restraint and servitude.

She addresses Gawain as a sleeping sentry, who ought to be on better guard: Ye ar a sleeper unslyge, Þat mon may slyde hider. Mills notes the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘mon’- while not specifically masculine, it removes from her any particularly feminine typecasting. Next, she announces I schal bynde yow in your bedde. Gawain picks up on this imagery of attack and conquest, asking her to deprece your prisoun, but evades the sexual innuendo, asking permission to get up and dress before he becomes the butt of any more sniggering jokes. The Lady refuses, announcing that Ye schal not rise of your bedde… I schall happe you here Þat oÞer half als, and syÞen carp with my knyght that I kagt have. In the next stanza, she alludes to other ladies, each of whom wishes she haf Þe, hende, in her holde, as I Þe habbe here. Politely speaking, many ladies wish they could hold Gawain in their arms… but the Lady’s halde on him is rather more forceful, a prisoun in spite of his attempts to extricate himself. In line 1257 she reduces him from Þe to hit holly in my honde Þat al desyres- which, as Mills puts it, ‘reduces him from a human-being to an object of desire’.

The symbolism here is working on several levels. The imagery of attack and capture parrallels nicely with the hunt scene in the previous stanza. I don’t know my courtly lyric poetry nearly as well as I should, but it strikes me that the Lady’s pursuit of Gawain is an inversion of the sort of hunting imagery associated with the ‘heart/hart hunt’ in The Book of the Duchess. Here, it is the woman who is actively hunting- and her quarry is not Gawain’s heart, but his body. (For one thing, that would be a damn sight less funny when it comes to the exchange of winnings at the end of the day…) Her ‘knightly’ role serves to create a link with her husband, out hunting and doing his knightly thing in the forest. At this stage, it looks as if there is a parrallelism forming between the two (Berty out in the forest, bravely hunting down what he wants… and the Lady, inside, going after her desire with the same dedication)- as the plot unwinds, it turns out they are in fact assaulting Gawain together, and, in hindsight, the Lady’s dominant role in the scene perhaps symbolises her husband’s masculine direction of her actions.²

Mills links the Lady’s sexual dominance with the genre of fablieux, which seems fair enough. It’s downright funny, watching poor little Gawain scrabbling to extricate himself from a sexual situation. Compared to the studly Gawain of the later Chevalier a L’Epee, whose lady-friend has to keep excusing herself from his attentions,³ our Gawain is far from the virile figure the Lady paints him out to be.

The joke goes further than mere sexual exuberance on her part, though. The Lady is offering Gawain the her body, to take his awen won from it. But how is she offering this service to his desires? [O]f fyne force, of course! By binding him in his bed and holding him against his will! What’s more, she intimates that any number of other women would love to dominate him in kind.

Now, this emasculation of Gawain is quite definitely not supposed to be read as the natural order of things. You could probably link it with the exchange of winnings and make a good homoerotic analysis out of it. And it all works wonderfully with the plot at large. But for the dirty joke to fly in the meantime, how much of an idea of erotic domination do you need circulating in your culture? It’s funny seeing a woman take on an unnatural role- but the intimation that other women would like to do the same suggests that the Lady doesn’t consider herself alone in her kink… and nor are the audience intended to.

I’m not suggesting that it would be encouraged or accepted, or that you could buy bondage gear on the streets of London. But it seems to me that the poem is suggesting that the Lady thinks domination would serve Gawain’s awen won (so therefore, the idea of domination as erotic can’t be completely foreign), and that the joke is on Gawain. As he scrabbles to escape, does he even realise exactly what she’s offering? Is he trying to preserve his honour by not sleeping with his host’s wife… or is he trying to keep his manly person out of the hands of this rogue domme and her unnatural tastes?

~
1. David Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, JEGP 1968, p. 612-630.
2. But then, of course, there is Morgan Le Fay lurking around in the background, directing him. Gawain’s reduction to a sexual object in this scene may also be reflecting his reduction to the object of Morgan’s grudge against Arthur.
3. If you missed out on the fun, read about how Gawain keeps the ladies happy in bed here.

The Naked Philologist Brings You (Medieval) Bedroom Satisfaction

Let’s talk about… Medieval Sex. Which is, as anyone will tell you, one of my very favourite topics, right after megalomaniac bishops.¹

Last night, while reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, a collection of texts largely in translation, by Elisabeth Brewer, ² I discovered Le Chevalier a L’Epée. A section- in informally styled English prose translation- appears at the end of her chapter on Temptation episodes associated with Gawain.³

In this section, Gawain meets a knight in the forest, who invites him home for tea and scones. Along the way, some shepherds warn Gawain that no one invited to the castle for tea and scones ever returns. Gawain is rather put off by this, but cannot honourably back out. So he heads on up to the castle, where his host goes to every effort to set him up with his lovely daughter. Come evening, the host shuts Gawain and the girly into his own bedroom, ordering her to “shut the doors, my girl, and do what he tells you, for I know such knights have no need of a crowd.”⁴ The girl strips down and cuddles up with Gawain, whereupon she informs him that- unlike all the other men her father has brought home- she cares very much for him, and doesn’t want him to die. Accordingly, he mustn’t make any amorous moves upon her, or the big sword which hangs over her father’s bed will come down and cut him to pieces.
Gawain is perplexed, and “he suspected that she told him all this to protect herself, so that he could not satisfy his desire. On the other hand, it could not be concealed… that he had lain all night with her alone, both of them naked, in her bed, and that he had, on account of a single word, desisted from making love to her”.⁵ So he snuggles up closer, and lo and behold the sword drops down and clonks him one on the shoulder, whereupon Gawain ‘lost all desire’ and retreats to the far side of the bed.⁶ After a while, though, his pride- or possibly his libido- prods him into trying again.

He drew close to her very gently because he was not a peasant. He was playing a certain game when the sword jumped from its scabbard and made another attack on him… But the sword was deflected a little and turned to his right shoulder so that it cut three fingers’ breadths into the skin…⁷

He begs a ‘truce’ from the lady, who snarks back that if he’d given the truce when she asked it, he’d be a lot better off now. The pair of them lie awake all night until her father raps on the door. She opens it, and he is astounded to find Gawain still alive. Noticing the blood on the sheets, he demands to know what went on. On hearing that the sword deflected from Sir Gawain, he tells Gawain that the sword was to choose his daughter’s husband, because it would deflect from the best knight who came to her. There’s a big wedding feast, and then the host escorts them to bed, where he “married them with goodwill”⁸.

That night he had his desire, and no sword was unsheathed there. If he returned again to the attack upon the courteous damsel, it does not distress me, and she was not upset.⁹

Everything is fine and dandy for a month or so, before Gawain decides he ought to take his new wife back to Arthur’s court. Off they set, but at the bend she suddenly refuses to move unless he goes back to the castle and brings her beloved greyhounds. Gawain, being a nice enough bloke, does so, and when he returns to her, a knight bristling with arms careers up and plants himself between Gawain and the lady. Said knight takes her bridle and leads her away, and she goes with him, as quiet as you please. Gawain, who is only lightly armed, calls out and reproves the other knight for taking away his beloved. As Gawain is at a disadvantage, and his opponent will not allow him to return to the castle for more arms, Gawain proposes a fair contest: they set the lady between them, and her consent will decide which of them shall keep her. Gawain is convinced he will win this contest, but

the girl, who knew very well how Gawain could aquit himself in love, wanted next to know about the knight, and how bold and valiant he was. You all, both great and small, and those who laugh as well as those who groan, know that there is scarcely a woman in the world, if she is a sweetheart and a wife, with the best knight there can be from here to Greater India, who would ever love him enough to value him as much as a pinch of salt if he was not valiant in the castle- you all know to what prowess I refer.¹⁰

The lady then gets cold feet, and tells her new paramour that she will not go anywhere without her greyhounds. The knight returns to Gawain, and the same scene is played out, save that the dogs return straight to Gawain, who taunts his rival:

… if you hope to satisfy this girl, you will have little joy of her- I hope she can hear what I am saying- for I can assure you that when she was mine she got what she wanted, and now see how she has served me! It doesn’t happen like that with this does as it does with the woman, as you can see: he will never change his master who has reared him for a stranger. A woman completely throws over her master if he does not give her all she wants, and it is an astonishing thing about such an exchange that she will leave her own for a stranger.¹¹

They have a nice manly joust over it; Gawain kills the stranger and keeps the dogs. The lady begs him to take her back, saying that she only feared for his life, as he was so lightly armed, and accordingly she had gone with the stranger to save Gawain. Gawain doesn’t believe a word of this, and leaves her in the dust, taking the greyhouds with him as his prize.

Now, needless to say, there are many objectionable gender stereotypes here. I’m jolly glad my father refrains from shutting me naked in a room with random young men, and also refrains from chopping up my suitors. Gawain isn’t really that nice a bloke- his reputation being more important than the lady’s wish to ‘protect’ herself from his desire.

But do you notice that all the way through this episode, a knight’s big tough manliness depends on his bedroom performance… and that depends on his ability to satisfy his lady friend’s desires? That a *nobleman* is distinguished in the bedroom by gentility and playing ‘games’ before intercourse? That lack of sexual satisfaction on the woman’s part is acknowledged- though not approved- as a common cause of relationship breakdown?

I found this quite interesting. I haven’t read far and wide in high medieval literature, either French or Middle English, and this was the first time I’d encountered such a strong focus on female pleasure in a sexual context. Is this more common than I’d thought? Is it a special for Le Chevalier a L’Epée?
These things I wonder.
Plus, it’s a rollicking good story.

~

1. I blame Awesome, who, in second year, noted that class attendance was dropping off halfway through semester, and rocked up to class with the announcement that “I can see we’re boring you a little. So I decided to scrap what’s in the program this week. Let’s talk about sex in Anglo-Saxon England”, and read us dirty riddles for an hour or so. This was a highly effective teaching strategy, because dirty riddles aren’t something you forget easily.^1.1
2. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). Previous edition From Cuchulainn to Gawain, 1973. I have grave reserves about this book as a scholarly text. Brewer includes no introductions to the sources- we don’t knowtheir origins, dates, or even their original languages. Her citations are minimal and the bibliography non-existant.

Having said that, her introduction and nine chapters of ’sources and analogues’ do provide a quick grounding in the genre of Arthurian romances in the time of the Gawain poet. Plus, some of them are fun to read. I’d recommend the book as a source for high school students or perhaps first years, or as light background reading for anyone else. If you’re wanting serious research into the sources and contemporaries of SGGK, don’t go here.
3. pp. 109-126.
4. pp. 115-116.
5. p. 117.
6. p. 117.
7. p. 118.
8. p. 120. I’m curious about this wedding, incidentally. Anyone know much about medieval French marriage law and customs?
9. p. 120.
10. p. 122-123.
11. p. 124.

1.1 Also, Sydney Uni is the place to be in 2009 for medieval sex. Awesome and a colleague are offering a course entitled ‘Sex and Sin’, or possibly ‘Sex and Sinners’. A whole semester of medieval sex! I almost wish I wasn’t graduating…