THE SEA IN BEOWULF, THE WANDERER
AND THE SEAFARER: ON SEMANTIC FIELDS
AND MEDITERRANEAN LIMITATIONS
Much has been written on the influence which the British landscape and
climate have had on the country’s literature. A. Burgess, in his English
Literature. A Survey for Students (1958), dedicated a major part of the second
chapter, What is English Literature?, to the relevance that such factors have
had in defining the English character and its literary history. Snow, frost and
the passing of the seasons, in which a cold, hard winter gives way to a longawaited spring, have always been present in British literary scenes. Of course
we can also not forget that "England is an island and the sea washes its
literature as much as its shores" (Burgess 1958: 10). The sea, not a calm, blue
one, but one that is cold, hostile and treacherous is an eternal theme of
British literature. Anyone who has not experienced a cold, stormy winter’s
night in any coastal town in the British isles will not be capable of
appreciating the hostility of the sea which dominates the life of those who are
engaged in an eternal struggle with the elements while at the same time living
in permanent symbiosis with them.
The first images of man living in harmony with nature go back to the very
beginnings Old English literature. Nature is the central character of the first
vernacular poems to be written in Britain and in all Western Europe.
My aim in this paper is to analyze the prominent role of nature, and
especially of the sea in three of the most important poems of the Anglo-Saxon
period - Beowulf, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. I will present the semantic
field of the sea in these poems, not just as an essential literary element (it
gives us some of the literature’s most poetic and moving images) but also as
a formal and linguistic element which is vital for the global understanding of
these works.
Susana Fidalgo, Selim 9 (1999): 155—162
Susana Fidalgo Monge
The principal features of Anglo-Saxon poetic diction are simplified through
terms which describe geographic and maritime images. The importance which
the Nothern Sea takes on in the literature of the Anglo-Saxons appears in
their poetry before the action actually takes place within Brittish territory. The
Germanic tribes brought with them their continental oral legends when they
th
arrived in the isles in the 5 century. The most important poem of the Old
English corpus, Beowulf1 , has no Anglo-Saxon element is its plot. There is
still little agreement on the origins of the poem, but scholars tend to accept
th
th
that it dates from the 7 or 8 century. However, the only known copy is
found in a manuscript dating from 1000 AD. Nevertheless the events in the
poem go back to a period that predates the Germanic invasion and they take
place in Scandinavia and Denmark.
The poem begins with a maritime image, that of the funeral of Scyld Scefig
(lines 43-50):
Nalæs hi hine læssan
? eodgestreonum
? e hine æt frumsceafte
ænne ofer yÍe
? a gyt hie him asetton
heah ofer heafod,
geafon on garsecg;
murnende mod.
lacum teodan
pon pa dydon
forÍ onsendon
umborwesende.
segen gyldenne
letom holm beran,
him wæs geomor sefa
(They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched alone out over the waves.
And they s et a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
1 The poem is considered the most important due to its length (more than 3000 lines)
and because of the attention that is has received. Furthermore, it is the representative of Anglo-saxon epic genre, the antecent and forerunner of the European medieval epic. Although some scholars have criticised the excessive value attributted to
the poem at the cost of others, no one doubts that Beowulf is the definitive AngloSaxon poem.
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The Sea in Beowulf, the Wanderer and the Seafarer
and mourning their loss.)1
The sea, which sees the departure of the Danish king on his final voyage,
also brings the warrior Beowulf from Scandinavia to his shores so he can free
the village of Heorot from the monster which is devastating it. The characters
which inhabit the pages of the poem are "people of the sea": sæliÍend y
heapoliÍend (lines 1798 & 1818) and they live in the villages which are on the
shores o f "the whales’path"- ymbsittendra ofer hronrade (line 9).
It is not a calm sea. The furious waves (færgripe flodes, yÍa gewin, lines
1472 & 1516) are not only witnesses to the struggle of men against their own
environment, but also they are the setting for the most important battles in
the poem, the first, between two men (Beowulf and Breca) and the second between man and monster (Beowulf and Grendel’s mother). The gloomy, starless night (nipende niht, line 547; sweartum nihtum, line 167) and the freezing, malignant storm (wedera cealdost line 546, laÍ gewidru, line 1375) are
always accompanied by the deep ocean and the choppy waters (deop wæter,
line 508; yÍgeblond, line 1373). Winter is also the perennial witness to the
struggles. The Nothern sea and the rain give the reader powerful poetic images in which the sea releases all its beasts (merefixa) and the sky cries
(roderas reotaÍ), while the waves rise up to meet it (yÍgeblond):
? ær git eagorstream
mæton merestræta,
glidon ofer garsecg.
wintrys wylm[um].
seofon niht swuncon
earmum pehton,
mundum brugdon,
Geofon ypum weol
Git on wætere æht
(You waded in, embracing water,
taking its measure, mastering currents,
riding on the swell. The ocean swayed,
winter went wild in the waves, but you vied
for seven nights) (lines 513-517)
1 The edition of Beowulf used is by Mitchell and Robinson (1998), from which we
have taken off the marks of vocalic quantity. The English translation is the one by
Heaney (1999). The Spanish translation is the one by Lerate.
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Susana Fidalgo Monge
The main characters of the other most important poems within AngloSaxon literature also have to face the hardships of the sea and the winter
while they travel paths of exile (wræclast, wræccan lastum). In The Wanderer
and The Seafarer the adverse climate combines with the narrator’s state of
mind who, in the first poem is forced to travel around the world deprived of
his lord. In the second one, the hero cannot help feeling himself attached to
an environment which causes pain and pleasure at the same time.The exile in
The Wanderer is forced to wander sad and move with his hands a sea of
freezing water:
… peah pe he modcearig
geond lagulade longe sceolde
hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ (lines 1-3)
Deprived of his lord, friends and comrades, the character has only frost,
snow and hail as his travel mates (hreosan hrim and snaw hagle gemenged,
line 48).
However, The Seafarer is without doubt, the Anglo -Saxon poem which
best shows the close love-hate relationship between man and nature or man
and the sea. In this case the sailor is not the sæliÍend of Beowulf. The title
given by Thorpe to the most famous of the Anglo-Saxon Elegies comes from
the word sæfore (sea-voyage) that appears in line 42. In this poem Borges (Mª
Esther Vázquez, 1984: 170) discovered the horror and the fascination that the
sea inspired in Wordsworth, Tennyson, Conrad y Kipling:
(…) Luego, las elegías. En una de ellas, "El navegante", se
encuentra ya un tema que será eterno en la literatura inglesa.
— ¿El del mar?
— Sí. Pero sobre todo el del horror y, al mismo tiempo, el de la
misteriosa fascinación del mar. Tema que luego encontraremos
en Wordsworth, en Swedenborg y en Kipling (…)
Apart from the controversy on the structure of the poem, critics agree to
distinguish two main parts in the one hundred and twenty-four line poem.
The sea complete dominates the first part, which runs through the first sixty-
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The Sea in Beowulf, the Wanderer and the Seafarer
four lines. In this part the sailor and his feelings are pushed into the
background. The first thirty-three lines of these sixty-four describe the
violence of the sea and the man’s efforts to survive in the difficult
environment we have described. All the first part shows a great lexical
richness that characterises Old English. It also shows the different ways of
word formation which, especially thanks to compounds and original
metaphors, like Kennings, are in the service of the sea’s semantic field. The
different terms we find referred to the sea are as follows:
yÍa (lines 6 & 46)- "waves"
sæ (line 14) - "sea"
wæg (line 19) - "wave"
brimlade (line 29) - "sea path"
streamas (line 34) - "streams"
sealtyÍa (line 35) - "salty wave"
lagu (line 47) - "ocean"
flodwegas (line 52) - "flood ways"
mereflode (line 59) - "sea floods"
hwæles epel (line 60)- "whale soil"
hwælweg (line 64) - "whale way"
The combinations adjective + noun and noun + noun, which, in some
cases, make the features of that sea more precise, are also remarkable. As we
had observed in the two previous poems, the sea is often iscealdne (icecold): iscealdne sæ (line 14); iscaldne wæg (line 19). On the one hand the seaswallow (tern) stearn (line 23) is also defined by the adjective isigfepera (icefeathered) (line 24). On the other hand the term "waves" is always
accompanied by the other noun which describes its violence: gewealc
(tossing) (lines 6, 46) or gealc (line 35).
Apart from the sea, the climatic forces, which give some atmosphere to
the sailor’s experiences in the ship, are a semantic field in themselves. Like in
some of the secenes in Beowulf, the winter, the night, the frost, the hail and
the northern wind are principle characters. Some examples are worth.
Lines 8, 9 and 10 of The Seafarer are very well-known. In them the resource to variatio (repetition of the same concept through differe nt but grammatically equivalent elements) and the aliteration (repetition of initial sounds,
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Susana Fidalgo Monge
normally consonantal) are exploited in order to show the extreme situation
which climate imposes on the sailor:
… Calde geprungen
wron fet mine
forste gebunden
caldum clommum
Hrim and hægl are vital aspects of the sailor’s night:
- bihangen hrimgicelum hægl scurum fleag (line 17)
- hrim hrusan bond hægl feol on eorpan (line 32)
Unlike Beowulf and The Wanderer, in El navegante1 the climate features
combine perfectly with the narrator’s own feelings. Many authors have attributed the greatness and modernity of The Seafarer to this symbiosis. Although the semantic field of the narrator’s state of mind could be studied in
much more detail, I will now look at how both states, the external and physical, and the internal and mental, come into contact. In the ship the sailor suffers days of toil and misfortune. In the text, the verbs "endure" and "suffer"
have different alternatives. Three different possibilities appear in three consecutive lines. For example, prowade, gebiden, gecunnad (lines 7, 8 and 9). Terrible experiences are endured on the ship (in ceole, line 5). The narrator describes him as exhausted and distressed - earmcearig (wretched) (line 14) or
werig (weary) (line 29). But undoubtedly that which best describes this combination between sea and feelings is the adjetival compound merewerges
("the worn out by the sea"), which in line 12 accompanies the noun mod, in
clear reference to the sailor’s state of mind (mood).
Although the purpose of this paper was not to delve into the stylistic
peculiarities of Old English, some of the examples given here, referring to,
lexical richness, composition and semantic fields, have allowed us to observe
some of the possible difficulties of the translator when he must render these
texts into the other language. Neither is it our purpose to look at the various
options which the translator into Spanish has when having to deal with
multitude of terms referring to the sea.
1 This is the most generalised Spanish title of the poem.
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The Sea in Beowulf, the Wanderer and the Seafarer
It is now fitting to return to the central theme of this paper, the influence
of the climate and the sea on the oldest English literature and how this forms
the basis of the subsequent British literary tradition. According to A.
Burgess, due to the strong bond that exists between countryside and
literature as well as that between contryside and character, the corpus may
not be understood and appreciated by everyone:
Snow and frozen ponds and bare trees are common images in English literature, but it is only by a great effort of the imagination that
the inhabitant of a perpetually warm land can bring himself to
appreciate their significance for the English poet and his English
teacher.
To what extent will a Spanish reader or anyone with a purely
Meditterranean image of the sea, be able to understand the complexity of
these texts? How can the translator of these texts contribute to a fuller
understanding of them? These questions may lead to future studies in this
area, but for the moment it is perhaps useful to take some of the Spanish
translations to exemplify this idea. The idyllic image evoked by the Spanish
"el océano ondulante" (Rivero, 1988), has little to do with the resounding
sealtypa gelac (line 35). The same can be said for the roar of the Northern
Sea, hlimman sæ, which is translated into Spanish by Lerate (1986) as "el
rumor de las olas" of a moving Meditterranean sunset.
In conclusion, it has been shown that Anglo-Saxon literature reflects the
presence of the perennial experiences of a people whose lives are dominated
by the sea. It is from this that the elegies take their modernity, seeming to go
further than the romantics and on towards symbolic realism.
Almost without realising it, one is lead to think of the works of Eugene
O’Neill, whose view of the sea comes from Joseph Conrad, poet and sailor:
You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to
hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I
was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires.
Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I
lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into
spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight,
towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and
singing rhytm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost
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Susana Fidalgo Monge
my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails
and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight
and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without
past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within
something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life
itself!1
Susana Fidalgo Monge
University of León
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, M. 1966: The Earliest English Poems. Harmondswoth: Penguin.
Burgess, A. 1958: English Literature. A Survey for Students. London:
Logman.
Heaney, S. 1999: Beowulf. A New Translation. London: Faber and Faber.
Lerate, L 1986: Beowulf y otros poemas anglosajones (siglos VII-X). Madrid:
Alianza.
Mitchell, B. & F. Robinson (eds.) 1998: Beowulf. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rivero, A. 1988: El navegante. Anglo-American Studies 8, 1: 80-85.
Vázquez, M. E. 1984: Borges, sus días y su tiempo. Buenos Aires: Vergara.
*†*
1 O’Neill, E. Long Day’s Journey into Night, en The Norton Anthology of American
Literature, p. 1364.
162
THE BOAR IN BEOWULF AND ELENE:
A GERMANIC SYMBOL OF PROTECTION
The boar appears in eight Anglo-Saxon poems belonging to seven different manuscripts. It is sometimes named with its accurate noun, eofor, and
sometimes with swyn, noun which really designates the farm pig. In spite of
this frequency, the boar is not the main theme of any poem belonging to the
classical or Christian tradition, such as a riddle or a physiologus-poem; so
that, proper physical and symbolic descriptions of this animal can not be
found; however, due to the information documented in the poems and in the
archaeological remains of the period, we can have the impression of how the
Anglo-Saxons viewed the boar.
In most of the poems, the allusions to the boar are completely based upon
the observation of its behaviour; in this way, two qualities of this creature are
continuously emphasized: its wildness and its courage. The boar is a wild
beast which inhabits the forest: «eofor sceal on holte» (Maxims II, 19),
grunts: «Sume wæron eaforas, / grymetedon» (The Meters of Boethius 26, 81)
and «ponne amæsted swin, // bearg bellende» (Riddle 40 105-106); destroys
the fields: «Hine utan of wuda / eoferas wrotaÍ» (The Paris Psalter 79.13, 1);
its name is used as an example of bravery: «ond eofore eom / æghwær cenra,
// ponne he begolden / bidsteal giefeÍ» (Riddle 40, 18-19); it is such a
dangerous creature, that when hunting, the hunter must be accompanied by a
very reliable person:1
Earm bip se pe sceal ana lifgan,
1 In Exodus the noum oferholt, a weapon used by the armies is documented. Critics
have tried to identify such weapon, but they do not agree with which one is that
weapon; nevertheless, Sedgefield indicates that oferholt «probably means the forest
of spears rising above the Egiptian army; but perhaps the original word was eoferholt, 'boar-spear'» (Krapp, 1936: III, 205, note 157). If this suggestion is right, we
can assume that Anglo-Saxons considered the boar so dangerous that special
weapons had to be made for its hunting.
Maximino Gutiérrez, Selim 9 (1999): 163—171
Maximino Gutiérrez Barco
wineleas wunian hafap him wyrd geteod;
betre him wære pæt he bropor ahte, begen hi anes monnes,
eorles eaforan wæran, gif hi sceoldan eofor onginnan
(Maxims I 172-175)
However, in two poems which belong to two different manuscripts, the
boar is documented in the descriptions of the decoration of several weapons
and war equipment. These poems are Beowulf and Elene:
Eoforlic scionon
ofer hleorberan gehroden golde,
fah ond fyrheard (Beowulf 303b-305a).
sweord swate fah swin ofer helme
ecgum dyhttig andweard scireÍ (Beowulf 1286-1287).
swa hine fyrndagum
worhte wæpna smiÍ, wundrum teode,
besette swinlicum (Beowulf 1451b-1453a).
According to Marquardt (1938: 222) and Scholtz (1928: 79), in both poems,
there are kenningar which use the nouns eofor / swyn to name the helmet;
such as eofurcumble or eofurcumbol (Elene 76, 259), swyn (Beowulf 1111),
eofer (Beowulf 1112), eoferas (Beowulf 1328), and eaforheafodsegn (Beowulf
2152).
In the Skaldskaparmal (The Language of Poetry), the second chapter of
Snorri Sturluson's Edda, all the different kenningar which can be useful for
the poets are shown, and two of them are related to the Anglo-Saxon ones:
slaughter-shiner, which names the boar and battle boar, which names the
helmet (Skaldskaparmal 75), and this second kenning is once again documented in the Hattatal (List of Verse-Forms), the last part of Edda:
The outstanding one covers the hill of the dwelling of the brain
[his cranium] with a battle-boar [helmet] and the distributor of gold
brandishes the battle-fish [sword] in the hawk's perch [hand].
(Hattatal 2).
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The boar in Beowulf and Elene
When Tacitus in his Germania describes the Aestii's army, Germanic tribe
which lived by the Suebian Sea, he emphasizes the use of figures of boars in
different war weapons as a protective amulet:
Matre deum veneratur. insigne superstitionis formas aprorum
gestant: id pro armis hominunque tutela securum deae cultorem
etiam inter hostes praestat. (Germania. XLV).
These literary descriptions are verified by archaeological finds, and the
boar, as an ornamental motif, is found in several war equipment such as
helmets, shoulder-clasps and swords (Speake, 1980: 78-79):
A […] boar exists […] on the crest of the Benty Grange helmet. The
two shoulder-clasps from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial boast four
pairs of cloisonné boars. […] Three tiny figures of boars stamped
on the blade of a sword from the River Lark, Cambs. […] Again at
Sutton Hoo, on the Swedish-made helmet, each of the bronze
eyebrows ends above the cheek-guard in a small, stylized, giltbronze head of a boar.
The representation of the boar in the Anglo-Saxon art is mainly reduced
to a head with a prominent tusk from its lower jaw (Speake, 1980: 78):
The motif [of the boar] is not so rare in Anglo-Saxon ornament as
has previously been thought. Its chief identifying characteristic is
the presence of a tusk protruding from the creature's lower jaw,
which is essential for identification when only the head is
despicted, as is most commonly the case.
It is quite significant that the only part of the body of the boar / pig pointed
out in the Anglo-Saxon poetry are its tusks: «eofor […] toÍmægenes trum»
(Maxims II 19-20).
However, sometimes the whole body is represented, such as the unique
free-standing boar which crowns the Benty Grange helmet; the two interlinked boars with crested backs of the shoulder-clasps from Sutton Hoo; the
three figures of boars stamped on a sword from the River Lark; and so on.
The boar is also used for the ornamentation of several objects of daily life,
such as bowls, brooches, buckles, plates, bracelets and pendants (Speake,
1980: 78-79):
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Maximino Gutiérrez Barco
The boar-like mounts from the Hildersham hanging-bowl […]. Mere
heads […] occur in each of the four roundels from the damaged
cloisonné composite brooch from Faversham, Kent […] on four
triangular buckles, all from Faversham […]; on a silver plate riveted
to the border of one of the five harness mounts from Faversham
[…]; two pairs on a silver-gilt bracelet from Faversham […]; three
pairs on a bronze-gilt bracelet from Kingston Gr. 299 […]; and there
is the single cloisonné boar head beneath the suspension-loop on
a pendant from Womersley, Yorks. It is possible that the stylized
twin heads at the foot of the open-work buckle from Kingston Gr.
300 […] are also boars […] Pendent boar heads also occur on
square-headed brooches, projecting from the shoulders of several
Leed's Type A3 brooches.
Besides these weapons and objects, boar's tusks have been found in some
Anglo-Saxon graves, as if they were amulets for the protection of the dead
(Speake, 1980: 79):
Also to be considered is the occurrence in Anglo-Saxon graves of
boar's tusks mounted for suspension, as in Wheatley, Oxon.,
graves 12 and 27, and no doubt serving similar symbolic functions
as the boar-motif decorating a brooch, buckle, or bracelet.
Speake gives a few selected archeological examples of war equipment and
different objects from other Germanic tribes, similar to the Anglo-Saxon ones
(Speake, 1980: 79):
In the selected comparative material illustrated, the boar motif
occurs on the cloisonné sword pommels from Hög Edsten,
Bohuslän (one face only) and Vallstenarum, Gotland […];
Skärholmen, Södermanland […]; Gammertingen, Germany […];
Åker, Norway […]; Fétigny, Switzerland […]; the brooch from
Lingotto, Italy […]; the gold foil cross from Milan, Italy […]; and
the fragmentary gold foil cross from Wittislingen.
Tacitus points out that this protective symbolism of the boar is due to its
relation with a deity to whom he names «matrem deum». The worship of that
unidentified goddess might be related to the cult of Freyr and Freyja in
Scandinavia. Both of them are the deities of fertility and have an association
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The boar in Beowulf and Elene
with the boar1 . The relation between Freyja and the boar is documented in an
Old Norse poem entitled HyndluljoÍ, included in the Flateyjarbok, or Book of
the Flat Island (Bellows, 1991: 165-170):
Freyja spake: […]
5. «From the stall now one of thy wolfes lead forth,
And along with my boar shalt thou let him run;
For slow my boar goes on the road of the gods,
And I would not weary my worthy steed.» […]
7. «Wild dreams, methinks, are thine when thou sayest
My lover is with me on the way of the slain;
There shines the boar with bristles of gold,
Hildisvini, he who was made
By Dain aand Nabbi, the cunning Dwarfs.» […]
46. «To my boar now bring the memory-beer,
So that all thy words, that well thou hast spoken,
The third morn hence he may hold in mind,
When their races Ottar and Angantyr tell.»
The relation between Freyr and the boar is documented in another Old
Norse work, Sturluson's Edda:
This burning was attended by beings of many different kinds: firstly
to tell Odin, that with him went Frigg and valkyries and his ravens,
while Freyr drove in a chariot with a boar called Gullinbursti or
Slidrugtanni (Gylfaginning, 49).
How shall Freyr be referred to? By calling him son of Niord, brother
of Freyia and him also a Vanir god and descendant of Vanir and a
Van, and harvest god and wealth-giver. […] He is possessor of Skidbladnir and of the boar known as Gullibursti […] Ulf Uggason said
this: Batlle-skilled Freyr rides in front to Odin's son's [Baldr's] pyre
on golden-bristled boar and governor hosts. (Skaldskaparmal, 7).
Brokk brought out his precious things. […] To Freyr he gave the boar and said that it could run across sky and sea by night and day faster than any horse, and it never got so dark from night or in worlds
1 Damico (1984: 169) indicates that «although as a rule the boar was Frey's animal, it
was also one of the three major emblems linked to his sister [Freyja]».
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Maximino Gutiérrez Barco
of darkness that it was not bright enough wherever it went, there
was so much light shed from its bristles (Skaldskaparmal, 35).
Freyja was the goddess of fertility, and her brother Freyr was the god of
fertility, of plenty and of kings. In spite of the baptism that the Anglo-Saxon
literature suffered, we can establish that the cult of Freyr was continued in
England, since his name was the origin of frea, a title similar to (RitzkeRutherford, 1979: 29) 'prince' or 'lord' (Chaney, 1970: 50):
Connotations of this deity may well have been present in the use
of frea as a common kenning for an earthly lord and for the AngloSaxon king.
This identification of Freyr with a lord also becomes an identification with
'the Lord', and for this reason, the Christian God is named 'frean mancynnes'
in The Dream of the Rood (l. 33); 'folcfrean' in Genesis (l. 1852); 'frea leoda' in
Genesis (l. 2098); 'frea ælmihtig' in Genesis (ll. 5, 79, 116, 150, 173, 852, 904,
1359, 1427, 2353, 2760), in Judith (l. 300), in The Paris Psalter 68.14 (l. 2), 69.6
(l. 2), 79.9 (l. 1), and 85.17 (l. 2), in Psalm 50 (l. 97) and in Cædmond's Hymn (l.
9); 'frea mihtig' in Daniel (l. 377), in Andreas (ll. 662, 786), in Elene (ll. 680,
1067) in Christ (ll. 457, 1378), in The Judgment Day II (l. 19), and in Psalm 50
(l. 135); 'heofona frea' in Genesis (l. 1404), 'rices frea' in Creed (l. 34), 'frea
engla' in Genesis (ll. 157, 1711, 2837); and 'lifes frea' in Creed (l. 5) and in The
Seasons for Fasting (l. 3).
This association of Freyr and the king, makes the boar then become a
royal symbol (Chaney, 1970: 121):
The animals of sacral kingship may indeed be seen behind the
Anglo-Saxon prophecy that 'to see any four-footed beasts
betokens a king's friendship'. However, certain animals are
peculiarly associated with the king, and of these one of the most
important was the boar.
Saxo Grammaticus (1894: xlix) attributes the boar's head to Woden: «to
Woden is ascribed the device of the boar's head, hamalt fylking (the swinehead array of Manu's Indian kings)». In this way, the boar, as an emblem of
168
The boar in Beowulf and Elene
Woden, the divine ancestor of every Anglo-Saxon royal house,1 becomes the
protector of the warriors and also an emblem of kings2 as war-lords.
To conclude, because of the Christian monks who composed all the
manuscripts, and therefore, swept all the pagan beliefs away almost
completely, there is insufficent information for us to establish whether by
wearing the figures and / or amulets of boars in the battlefields and by
placing those figures / amulets in their graves warriors commended
themselves to Freyr, to Woden or to the king (or perhaps to them all); but we
can assume that the boar had a protective symbolic character for the AngloSaxons, as it had for all the Germanic tribes. And this symbolic character
survived through the Christianization. This is illustrated with the seventhcentury Benty Grange helmet which keeps the boar crest in conjuction with
the Christian cross on the nose-piece.3
Maximino Gutiérrez Barco
University of Alcalá de Henares
1 The worship of Wodin in Britain was spread out, as some topographical names
prove (Niles, 1991: 129): «place-names like Wednesbury and Wenslow indicate
sites where Woden was once important»; and Branston (1957: 86-87) points out
that «Woden was the most widely honoured of the heathen gods in England, for we
find him commemorated as the parton of settlements among the Angles of
Northumbria, the East and the West Saxons of Essex and Wessex, and the Jutes of
Kent. There is no doubt that the aristocracy of the Old English looked upon Woden
as chief god: the genealogies of the kings bear witness to the former dignity of
Woden's name, for even in Christian times the royal houses of Kent, Essex, Wessex,
Deira, Bernicia and East Anglia all traced back to Woden.»
2 Chaney (1970: 7) stresses the importance of the kingship and its association with
Woden: «Kingship is the Anglo-Saxon political institution par excellence and gives
cohesion to the realms established by the invading tribes. In each kingdom the royal
race -the stirps regia- which sprang from its founder provided the source from
which the individual rulers were chosen, and beyond the earthly founder was the
god who was the divine ancestor of almost every Anglo-Saxon royal house,
Woden».
3 Chaney (1970: 51) maintains that the new Christian faith did not wipe out the pagan beliefs, but both creeds amalgamated with the supremacy of Christianism:
«Christ and the Scandinavian Frey, god of plenty and of the king, may perhaps have
blended in the new religion, even though the goddess Freyja and her maidens
nowhere appear to have been 'converted' into the Virgin Mary and the three (or
nine) Mary's, as they were in the Scandinavian North.»
169
Maximino Gutiérrez Barco
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bellows, Henry Adams, tr. (1991): The Poetic Edda, introduction by William
O. Cord, Lewiston, The Edwin Mellen Press.
Bessinger, J. B., ed. (1978): A Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic
Records, London, Cornell University Press.
Brady, Caroline (1979): 'Weapons' in Beowulf: An Analysis of the Nominal
Compounds and an Evaluation of the Poet's Use of Them. AngloSaxon England, 8: 79-141.
Branston, Brian (1957): The Lost Gods of England, London, Thames and
Hudson.
Chaney, William A. (1970): The Cult of Kingship an Anglo-Saxon Literature.
The Transition from Paganism to Christianity. Manchester,
Manchester University Press.
Damico, Helen (1984): Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition,
Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press.
Frank, Roberta 1991: «Germanic Legend in Old English Literature» in Malcolm
Godden and Michael Lapidge eds 1991: The Cambridge Companion
to Old English Literature, Cambridge, C.U.P., 88-106.
Grammaticus, Saxo 1894: The Firts Nine Books of the Danish History, Oliver
Elton tr, and Frederick York Powell ed, London, David Nutt.
Isaacs, Neil D. 1967: «The Convention of Personification in Beowulf» in
Robert p. Creed ed, 1967: Old English Poetry. Fifteen Essays,
Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University Press, 215-248.
Krapp, George Philip and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie 1931-1954: The Anglo-Saxon
Poetic Records, 6 vol., London, George Routledge & sons.
Marquardt, Hertha 1938: Die altenglischen Kenningar, Halle Saale, Max
Niemeyer Verlag.
Niles, John D. 1991: Pagan Survivals and Popular Belief. Malcolm Godden and
Michael Lapidge, ed, 1991: The Cambridge Companion to Old
English Literature, Cambridge, CUP, 126-141.
170
The boar in Beowulf and Elene
Ritzke-Rutherford, Jean 1979: Light and Darkness in Anglo-Saxon Thought
and Writing en Karl Heinz Göller, Hans Bungert and Otto Hietsch.
Sprache und Literatur, XVII. Frankfurt, Verlag Peter D. Lang.
Scholtz, Hendrik van der Merwe 1927: The Kenning in Anglo-Saxon Poetry
and Old Norse Poetry, Utrecht, N. V. Dekker and Van de Vegt En J. W.
Van Leeuwen.
Sturluson, Snorri 1987: Edda, Anthony Faulkes ed. and tr. London, J. M. Dent
& Sons Ltd.
Speake, George 1980: Anglo-Saxon Animal Art and Its Germanic
Background, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Tacitus, Gaius Cornelius 1980: Agricola, Germania, Dialogus. M. Hutton ed,
Cambridge MA & London, Loeb.
*†*
171
THE TREATMENT OF SOME SPANISH MATTERS
IN THE OLD ENGLISH OROSIUS
The aim of my paper is to study some of the mentions about Spain which
may sound strange to the modern reader of The Old English Orosius (Or.,
henceforth, in contrast with Paulus Orosius's Historiarum Aduersos Paganos
Libri Septem, which we shall shorten to OH., for a better and quicker
understanding). The fact that they may look strange is because they are
either out of date for the age when they were written or simply untrue. In
order to discover the cause of these mistakes I have compared Janet Bately's
edition of The Old English Orosius with that of Marie Pierre Arnaud-Lindet
of Historiarum Aduersus Paganos Libri Septem (OH.) and I have found that,
as far as Spain is concerned, these falacies or mistakes could be divided into
three different groups according to the nature of the reason that caused them:
mistakes concernig declensions, mistakes due to wrong translations and
mistakes which have their origin in false (or out of date) information. We
show in the following lines some examples of each:
1. M ISTAKES CONCERNING DECLENSIONS
In these cases, the author of the English Orosius shows a faulty
knowledge of Latin declensions; the fact that the mistakes discussed here are
quite similar dismisses, in my opinion, the possibility of misreadings. We
shall comment on five cases concerning Hispanic matters:
a. THE GADES ISLANDS. The Latin noun insulas, (OH.,I, ii. 72), despite being
an accusative plural is translated by Or. (19/3) as iglande (singular). The fact
that Cadis is just one single island (still today) would make us believe that
OH. had made a mistake considering it plural, which Or, a few years later,
perhaps with a better knowledge of geography, corrected. That would put an
end to the trouble, but we are sure that OH. had made no mistake about that,
as we also find the plural for Cadis in ancient writings; in fact, Strabo used to
Salvador Insa, Selim 9 (1999): 173—179
Salvador Insa Sales
call it Gederoi, which is the neuter plural in Greek, as Blázquez et al. (1980:
451), say:
The Phoenicians used to call it Gadir, meaning castle. […]. This is
the equivalent for Agadir, after having lost the article [typical] of
many place names with the same meaning. The Greeks used to call
it ta Gadeira, or in Ionic ta Gedira. The historian [Strabo] refers to
it in plural (Gederoi).
Probably the plural was due to the fact that besides Cadis, there was
Sancti Petri, another minor island, being both the result of a fragmentation of
the land in the quaternary age. Once this is assumed, it is logical to suppose
that Orosius translated from Greek and kept the original plural number. There
was no apparent reason, therefore, for a change of number in Or.
b. THE ISLAND FORTUNATE. The same as explained above can be said
about the change of «insulæ quas Fortunatas uocant», the islands called
Fortunate (OH I, ii.10) into «iglande Íe mon hæt Fortunatus», the island
called Fortunate (Or 9/15).
c. HOW MANY HISPANIAS WERE THERE? A third case of number
conversion happens in Or. 18/29: «Ispania land» (singular) is the translation
for «Hispanias» (OH I, ii. 68): Again, we find no satisfactory reason for the
change of number: although the plural «Hispanias» in Latin is clearly due to
the Roman division of Hispania into two regions (Citerior and Ulterior) at one
time, Or.'s conversion into singular cannot be explained in terms of bringing
facts up to date, when later in his work we find noun phrases such as «seo us
nearre Ispania», the Hispania which is nearer us (Or. 19/ 9) and «seo us fyrre
Ispania», the Hispania which is further from us (Or. 19/ 7). These clearly
show that Or. still believes that there are two Hispanias. Why, then, this
change of number?
d) DID LUCULUS A ULA EVER EXIST ? In Or. 110/30 we read «pa pa Lucius
Lucimius & Lucullus Aula wæron consulas, wearÍ Romanum se mæsta ege…
», as the translation for OH IV, 21.1: «Anno ab Vrbe condita DC, L. Licinio
Lucullo A. Postumio Albino consulibus,… ».
We must remark here that while Lucius Licinius Lucullus and Aulus
Postumius Albinus were consuls in 151 BC., there has never been a Roman
consul named Lucullus Aula as far as we know; it seems that Or. has taken
174
Some Spanish matters in the O E Orosius
the surname of the former and the first name of the latter and put them
together, obtaining thus a new character. The probable origin of this mistake
can be found in the juxtaposition of the ablative absolute in OH: «L. Licinio
Lucullo [et] A. Postumio Albino consulibus». Or. must have jumbled up the
names because he couldn't have expected two proper names joined
asyndetically. This is a linguistic resource only used in specific jargons
according to Mariner (1987: 176) who states that the syntax of legal and
religious writings in Latin is especially prone to juxtaposition and asyndeton,
usual resources when giving names of consuls.
e) W HO BEAT WHOM ? We read in OH (V, iv. 12) that the consul Fabius
obtained victory over Viriatus:
Igitur Fabius consul contra Lusitanos et Viriatum dimicans Buccian
oppidum quod Viriatus obsidebat, depulsis hostibus, liberauit et in
deditionem cum plurimis aliis castellis recepit.
whereas Or. 115/ 18 states just the opposite:
Æfter pæm Fauius se consul for mid firde ongean Ueriatus &
gefliemed wearÍ.
Bately (1980: 302) hints that the evident mistake in translation could be
due to a wrong reading of depulsis (later miscopied as depulsus; We have
found another likely origin of error: «igitur» (consecutive conjunction
meaning so, therefore…) might have been mistaken by «agitur» (3rd person
singular, passive voice of the verb ago, which means make someone (esp. an
enemy) flee or run away. If this was really assumed, then the ending tur
would have had a suitable subject in Flavius
2. M ISTAKES DUE TO VERBATIM TRANSLATION
Here, Or. translates too literally, obtaining untrue statements. We shall
study here several cases:
a. THE HISPANIA WHICH IS NEARER TO US: Or.'s interpretation of
«Hispania Citerior/ Ulterior» as «seo us nearre/fyrre Ispania», the Ispania
nearer/further from us (Or 19/8) and 9) is not accurate, and a couple of
questions arise at once:
175
Salvador Insa Sales
i) Who is us?. After reading Or 19: 8, one naturally wonders; if it is the
British, then Hispania Citerior is not nearer to them than Hispania Ulterior is,
or, at any rate, the distance is not an argument distinctive enough. Of course,
what probably happens is that Or. translates literally, but in keeping the
concepts of far and near changing the reference, he creates confusion.
ii). Is the concept of distance what really gives the two Hispanias the
names «Citerior» and «Ulterior»?. That is what most people believe
(including Bately, who pays little attention to the subject) but, probably, they
had nothing to do with distance from Rome: as Montenegro and Blázquez
(1982: 89) say, Hispania had already been divided into two regions in, at least,
206 BC., taking into consideration the dividing line between both and not, as
it is popularly believed, because they might be nearer to or further from Rome.
Still more conclusive is Spranger (1960: 132):
[…] thus, we wonder which point of view was adopted to make
both sides of Ispania different. Perhaps they had the idea of an
Ispania closer or further (…) or maybe, on the contrary, we should
think of a more accurate dividing line. This latter theory seems to
be backed up by the words 'eis' and 'ultra'. (…). In the contract of
226, the river Ebro was taken to divide both regions of power.(…).
The Ebro became again a dividing line between both powers […]
That would also explain how Livy, in his writings about the war,
told about one Ispania north of Ebro using the words this side and
the land south of Ebro with that side. Likewise, Artemidoros of
Ephesus in 100 BC told about a nearer Iberia and a further one with
similar parameters.
3. OUT OF DATE (OR ERRONEOUS) INFORMATION
We include here those mentions of Spanish matters which provide an
information that might have been true in OH. but it definitely was not in the
times when Or. was written (or that information was simply false).
a) THE TWO BALEARIC ISLANDS. When translating «insulas Baleares» (OH
I, ii. 102), Or. (21/20) implicitly provides additional information (namely, that
there are but two Balearic Islands), which is, obviously false: «Balearis Ía tu
igland». This information had been taken from OH. itself a few lines below:
«Insvlæ Baleares duæ sunt, maior et minor» (OH I, ii.104). It is certainily
176
Some Spanish matters in the O E Orosius
difficult to understand why Or. does not correct an information which, in his
time was fully out of date: in fact the name Baleares had been once applied to
only two of the islands (Majorca and Minorca), whereas Formentera and Ibiza
had been called Pytiusas but, as a matter of fact, keeping this division could
not have made much sense in the times of King Alfred since, at the end of III
AD., all those islands became part of a single Balearic province, which
belonged to the diocesis of Hispania.
b). CARTAGENA, NOW CALLED CORDOVA . The present-day reader of Or.
is most surprised at Or.'s addition, stating that Cordova is the new name for
Cartagena (Or. 104/30): «Cartaina, Íe mon nu Cordofa hætt». Bately (1980: 291)
attributes the mistake to a sort of exchange of historical roles:
Or's substitution of Corduba may have been inspired by the fact
that while Carthagena was one of the most important cities in Spain
in antiquity, Cordoba was the capital of the Spanish Caliphate in
the 9th century, and thus the most important city in that part of
Spain once held by the Carthaginians.
which is, in my opinion, too big a mistake to be expected from Or. The mis take
is difficult to explain because, as I shall try to demonstrate, the confusion probably had over the years two different stages: first Carthagena was identified
with Carteya (or Carteia), an antique city in the south coast of Spain (today in
the province of Málaga, half way between Algeciras and La Línea); then,
once this identification had been established, the resulting new city was
mistaken with Cordova. Let us study these two stages in depth:
i). As for the confusion Cartaina/Carteia both cities share some
similarities:
I) In Spelling (and probably in Phonetics);
II) In Geography (they are not too far from each other);
III) In History (both cities played important roles and were the
setting of many historical events in Roman Hispania: both
were early Roman settlements and both were closely related
to Mago (Hannibal's brother) and to the Scipia saga too)
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Salvador Insa Sales
ii). Once we accept that Cartaghena and Cartaina had been mistaken, we
have to show the identification of this city with Cordova, for which we
present the following line of thought:
I) Both Cordova and Carteya have disputed the honour of being
the first Roman colony in the different books of History in the
past: if this unique privilege had been attributed to two cities,
why could Or. not conclude that Cordova and Carteia were
but two different names applied to the same city?
II) Both Cordova and Carteia were taken and destroyed by Cesar.
CONCLUSIONS
This bunch of inaccurate mentions of Hispania are not a picturesque exception to the work of a scholar or learned man; many other mistakes in Or.
when dealing with Hispania matters (whose absence has to be explained in
terms of space) would clearly show that the author of The Old English
Orosius did not have a good knowledge of Latin and was no expert in
Geography (as far as Hispania is concerned): his wrong interpretation of the
Latin text makes him describe some events and characters in an inaccurate
way. On the other hand, it is surprising, to say the least, to see how Or. supports statements about Geography and History which had proved wrong
much earlier than it were written.
Salvador Insa Sales
Universitat Jaume I
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnaud-Lindet, M. P. 1991: Orose. Histoires contre les Païens. 3 volumes: .
Les Belles Letres. Paris.
Bately, Janet 1980: The Old English Orosius. EETS—OUP. Oxford.
178
Some Spanish matters in the O E Orosius
Blázquez, J. M. et al. 1980: Historia de España Antigua. Tomo I. Protohistoria.
Cátedra. Madrid.
Mariner Bigorra, Sebastián 1987: Lengua y Literatura Latinas. UNED.
Madrid.
Montenegro Duque, A. y José María Blázquez 1982: La conquista de
Hispania por Roma, I.II.1 of España Romana. Espasa Calpe. Madrid.
Partridge, E. 1983: Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary Of Modern
English. Greenwhich House. New York.
Spranger, P. P 1960: Die namengebung der römischen provinz Hispania.
Madrider Mitteilungen, 1. Madrid.
*†*
179
A PROPOSAL OF PERFORMANCE FOR
THE YORK MYSTERY CYCLE:
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL EVIDENCE
The York Mystery Cycle has been one of the most popular among
scholars, since it has a clear connection with the city of York and its civic
records. However, the way it was performed has been so largely discussed
and disagreed upon by scholars, because the records seem to be ambiguous
and obscure as they can hold various interpretations, since Corpus Christi
celebrations in York had certainly been through different stages in their more
than two hundred years of existence.
In a first stage, the festivity of Corpus Christi, from 1325 to the late 1370s,
was probably only an outdoor religious procession in which the laity and
clergy were accompanying a vessel with the Host. The celebration of the real
presence of Christ in the Host at Mass was instituted in 1264 by Pope Urban
IV and was widely observed from its ratification in 1311-12 by Clement V,
when the Church adopted the Feast at Corpus Christi which was firstly
observed in England in 1318 and proclaimed in York in 1325.
In a second stage the festivity of Corpus Christi, from at least the late
1370s, introduced dramatic elements and it is from this period of time that a
cycle was built similar in scope and organization to the one documented in
the Ordos from 1415 and 1420 and which was later recorded in the Register
copied before 1477 (Beadle, 1982: 20-21). York had a great flowering after the
Black Death of 1349 when it was second in importance and wealth to London
(Bartlett, 1959: 25). This period seems the most suitable for an expansion of
the mainly liturgical procession towards a more dramatic one.
The earliest documentary references to cycle drama in York date back to
1376 and 1397, as they are references to pageant houses where waggons were
stored. The first evidence of the payment by craftsmen to their Corpus Chris ti
Asunción Salvador-Rabaza, Selim 9 (1999): 181—190
Asunción Salvador- Rabaza
pageant is found in the Tailors' Ordinances of 1386-87 (White, 1987: 23 &
REED, York: 3, 4-5, 689 and 680-91). In another record from 1399, the citizens
petitioned the Council to ensure that the pageants of Corpus Christi Day
were played ‘en les lieux quelles furent limitez & assignez', that is to say in the
places to which they were limited and assigned because they were being
played in so many places that all the pageants could not be performed on the
same day as they ought to be (White, 1987: 23). It was the duty of the Mayor
and Council to assign the places each year for which leases were paid to hear
the play. The Chamberlains' Books show how much was paid by each lessee
for having the plays performed in front of their houses. It was during this
prosperous period when attempts were probably made for every guild to take
part and expand their participation, which could have been regarded not only
as having a certain status in the community, but as being a way of commercialising and advertising their merchandise (Justice,1979). Connection between guild and subject of the pageants was not entirely arbitrary, for example the Shipwrights were in charge of the play of Noah The Building of the
Ark, the Fishers and Mariners of The Flood, the Vintners of The Marriage at
Cana and the Bakers of the play The Last Supper. This probably caused a
multiplication in the number of waggons and the writing of a text or expansion
of the one existing.
According to a reading of the York civic records a processional performance of the York Cycle has been generally established, although a performance of all the plays at every station would have been impossible to carry out in a single day due to the length of time that would have been necessary to perform all of them. That suspicion was brought to light by M. Rose
(1961: 25-26) and supported later by A. H. Nelson with a systematic time
study in which he concluded that ‘it would have been utterly impossible to
mount a true processional production of the extant cycle in a single day'
(1970: 310). M. Stevens in ‘The York Cycle: From Procession to Play'(1972: 38)
provided evidence for a single performance on the Pavement using a fixed
stage. That would have been impossible too, for the records seem to show
that there were performances on waggons at stations, and also because the
text is structured in small plays. Although all these individual plays seem to
have independence in themselves for being performed individually on waggons, they have unity between them for having been performed in a continuous way at a fixed place.
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A proposal for the York Mystery Cycle
In order to reconstruct and demonstrate a possible new proposal of a
performance of the York Mystery Cycle, it is necessary not only to study the
external evidence supported by the records around the date of its writing, but
also the internal evidence supported by the structured sequence of plays in
the text. It is for these reasons that this study will concentrate on the
performance of 1476, when there are several interesting records and the copy
was probably already written, since it is agreed that the surviving text of the
manuscript of the York cycle was copied by the main scribe between 1463 and
1477 (Beadle, 1982: 11). The external evidence for this new proposal of
performance of the Cycle is based on some records about time, place and way
of performance that need a closer reading or reinterpreting.
According to the records of time or duration of the performance, ‘The
Corpus Christi Plaie' was performed in one day ‘vpon Corpus Christi day' in
the year 1476 (REED, York, I, 110), and the starting time is established in the
1415 proclamation that says that all the players were to be ready at four thirty,
And that euery player that shall play be redy in his pagiaunt at
th
th
convenyant tyme that is to say at the mydhowre betwix iiij & v
of the cloke in the mornyng & then all oyer pageantes fast
folowyng ilkon after oyer as yer course is without Tarieng sub
pena facienda camere vj s viij d. (REED, York, I, 25)
As for the records of place of performance, the number of stations to see
the ‘play' would have been twelve (fig. 1: see appendix), since there were
twelve from 1398 to 1501,except for 1462 when there were only ten. After 1501
the number of stations varied from ten to sixteen (Mill, 1946-51; Twycross,
1978 & Crouch, 1991). The variations in the number of stations, mainly found
during the sixteenth century, could be explained if some stations were not
registered as they were not paying and if two entries for the money received
were by two lessees from a single station.
The records state that the play was performed in all the stations. ‘The
play' according to A. C Cawley (1983: 31) always refers to the ‘Corpus Christi
Play', that is, the whole cycle of smaller plays or pageants, although one
might not believe that that is very convincing in all instances and that some
references to ‘the play' would have stood for a single small play or for a
selection of the plays performed at one station.
183
Asunción Salvador- Rabaza
In addition, the records mention that the liturgical procession had a different
route from the performance procession in their latter parts. That can only be
understood as a way of clearing the way for the religious procession, when
the performance procession was probably going through the last stations of
its route or when the last waggons were queuing to make their entrance into
the last station of the Pavement, where possibly all the plays were performed
in a continuous way. In 1476 the liturgical procession was held on the
following Friday probably after a lengthy performance procession, for the
records say ‘processcione die veneris in Crastino festi Corporis christi'
(REED, York, I, 109).
As for the records of way of performance, evidence that every single play
was not performed at every station is confirmed by another record from 1476,
which could possibly have been misinterpreted as relating to actors doubling
their parts in the plays (Dorrell, 1972: 101, Stevens, 1972: 40 & Stevens, 1987,
27). A plausible interpretation would be that the plays were not to be
performed more than twice:
And pat no plaier pat shall plaie in pe saide Corpus christi plaie be .
conducte and Reteyned . to plaie . but twise on pe day of pe saide
playe And pat he or thay so plaing plaie . not . ouere twise pe saide
day vpon payne of xl s. to forfet vnto pe Chaumbre asoften tymes as
he or pay shall be founden defautie in pe same. (REED, York, I, 109)
According to one reading of the record above, the plays should not have
been played more than twice from that year on, so each play would have been
performed only at two of the appointed stations from 1476, probably after a
period of time in which they would have been performed in more than two,
causing delays in the performance of the whole play and in the religious
procession that followed.
Other records support this type of performance at only two places. An
ordinance of the Armourers in 1475 regarding Masters attending their
pageants says ‘at pe firste place where they shall begyns and toawayte apon
pe same thair pagende thurgh pe cite to pe play be plaide as of pat same
pagende'. Similarly, in an ordinance of the Spurriers and Lorimers in 1493-94
‘at pe furst place vnto such tyme as pe said play be plyed and funshed
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A proposal for the York Mystery Cycle
thrugh the toun at pe last playse' (REED, York, I). Both records mention a
first performance not obviously in front of the Holy Trinity Priory, as has
been assumed. The need of specifying the place by using a postmodification
would mean that there were different stations for every play ‘pe firste place
where they shall begyns' or ‘pe furst place vnto such tyme as pe said play be
played'. Then masters of the crafts were ordered ‘toawayte apon pe same
thair pagende thurgh pe cite', and that ‘pe said play be […] funshed thrugh
the toun', so there were not complete performances through the city as the
waggon was hastened through the town and the masters were waiting on the
waggon for their last performance ‘at pe last playse'.
Further evidence of a certain assignment of place for every play could be
found in the ordinance for the Corpus Christi Play 1398-99 ‘que les pagentz
suisditz soient jueez en les lieux quelles furent limitez et assignez par vous et
les communes suisditz deuaunt ces houres les quelles lieux sount annexis a
ceste bille'.
This new reading of the records for time, place and way of performance
gives evidence for a different type of performance of the cycle from the ones
proposed by scholars until now. This new proposal of performance of the
York Cycle is based on the fact that every play would have been performed
but that they were limited to two performances. One of the two performances
at an assigned station, different for every play, that could have been at any of
the first eleven stations along the route and the other at the last station of the
Pavement.
The internal evidence within the text supports that type of performance
and it is found in the distribution of the plays in the copy of the Register. The
number of plays of the York Cycle is structured in five different groups of
approximately the same number of plays, following a pattern of eleven, eight,
eleven, eight and eleven plays. These five groups are: The Old Testament,
The Early Life of Christ, The Ministry, The Passion and the final group of
Triumphal and Eschatological plays (Woolf, 1972). This regular pattern could
possibly indicate that the plays were written and structured to be performed
in a certain way. This pattern of eleven and eight in the groups and the fact
that there were eleven stations previous to the last one at the Pavement
cannot be considered to be a coincidence. The smaller number of plays in the
groups of eight could have been strategically devised for clearing the way in
185
Asunción Salvador- Rabaza
the first tract of the route so the waggons could have returned to their
storage once they had played their last performance at the Pavement.
Certainly, the way the whole processional performance was to be carried
out created a need for an expansion of certain episodes to cover an equal
division into groups of eleven and eight plays. Some episodes were split in
two like the episode of Noah into The Building of the Ark and The Flood,
and sometimes an episode was even divided into four little plays, for example
the episode of Adam and Eve, or the episode of the Assumption. In the latter,
the play of Fergus was probably part of the play of The Death of the Virgin,
but it developed from it in order to fit the whole structure. Some other plays
were joined together as Herod and The Magi to fit into the structure. On the
other hand, some other plays were joined together with others, as a natural
process, or were eliminated, probably for economic and social reasons. At
this point some stations would have suffered a deficit in the number of plays
performed there, which might explain the variation from station to station in
the amount of money given to the Mayor as M. Twycross (1978: 2,10-33) and
A.J. Mill (1948-51: 492-502) have shown.
Finally, at this point I would like to develop the proposal of a new
possible way of performance for the York Mystery Cycle that would combine
both processional and stationary performances within a reasonable time.
According to the Proclamation, the procession of waggons would start at
4.30 in the morning. If the plays had had an assignment to a station for their
first performance, the first one of The Fall of the Angels would have had to
be performed at the eleventh station, the second play at the tenth station, and
so on. In that way at every station only one of the plays of the Old Testament
would have been performed. The second performance of every play from the
Old Testament group could have been done continuously at the Pavement,
which was the largest and the most suitable station for an audience and
waggons. In that way the two performances of all the plays of the Old
Testament would have taken at the most four hours, assuming average
performances of twenty minutes each, since the production of three extant
plays of the last part of the life of the Virgin Mary in the York Cycle on
waggons in July 1988, took about that time for each play and The Coronation
of the Virgin was acted in fifteen minutes, including the set up of the whole
waggon. When all the plays of the Old Testament had been played once or
after their second performance at the Pavement, providing in that way,
186
A proposal for the York Mystery Cycle
intervals of half an hour for the people attending the performance at the
Pavement, the following group of eight plays of The Early Life of Christ
would have arrived at their assigned station for their first performance, and
their second performance would start at the Pavement half an hour after the
last play of the Old Testament was performed. The two performances of this
group of eight plays would have taken about three hours. Because the
number of plays in this second group was shorter, the first part of the route
was cleared out and the waggons from the Old Testament could return home,
using the only access to cross the river and get back to their store houses.
The same procedure would hold for the following groups of eleven plays
from The Ministry, of eight plays from The Passion and of eleven plays from
the Triumphal and Eschatological Plays.
Even in this way, the performance would have taken a great length of
time, but it would have been reasonable, owing to the specific structure of the
text that permitted its division into five groups and to the possibility that
every play was completely performed at only two stations out of the twelve.
This means that there were five simultaneous performances, in groups of
eleven and eight plays at different stations. Every play was only acted twice,
one of the performances at one of the first eleven stations along the route
and the other at the last station of the Pavement. In this way anyone staying
at any of the first eleven stations would have seen only five small plays
actually completely performed; but these would have been representative of
the whole cycle. The rest of the plays would have been mimed out in a
processional performance as they were passing. But at the last station of the
Pavement, the largest space for audience, the whole performance of all the
plays would have been acted one after the other in a more or less continuous
way and presented with a dramatic unity (Mackinnon, 1931: 438; Kolve, 1966;
Woolf, 1972).
The total number of hours for such a performance would have been
eighteen including four intervals of half an hour each for the performance at
the Pavement. The acting out for every player taking part would have been
completed in about two hours. Setting off at four thirty, the whole
performance of all the plays would have been seen on the Pavement only half
an hour after the performance procession had started and would have been
completed around half past ten, or at the latest by midnight.
187
Asunción Salvador- Rabaza
In conclusion, this new reading of the external evidence relating to how
the York Mystery Cycle was produced is supported by the internal evidence
of the arrangement of the plays themselves, in demonstrating that the text
was written for a well structured performance that would have combined both
processional and stationary performance. The processional performance of all
the plays would have been along the route and the two stationary
performances would have been held one at an assigned station different for
every play and the other one at the last station of the Pavement.
Asunción Salvador-Rabaza Ramos
Universitat de València
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartlett, J. N. 1959: The Expansion and Decline of York in the Later Middle
Ages. The Economic History Review, 2/12: 17-33.
Beadle, R. 1982: The York Plays, London, Edward Arnold.
Beadle, R. & P. Meredith eds 1983: The York Play: A Facsimile of British
Library MS Additional 35290 together with a Facsimile of the Ordo
Paginarum Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book. Introduction by R.
Beadle & P. Meredith, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama
Facsimiles, 7, Leeds, University of Leeds.
Cawley, A. C. 1983: The Staging of Medieval Drama in POTTER, L. ed 1983:
Medieval Drama, The Revels History of Drama in English. vol. I,
London, Methuen.
Crouch, D. 1991: Paying to See the Play. Medieval English Theatre 13: 64111.
Dorrell, M. 1972: Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play. Leeds Studies
in English 6: 63-111.
Johnston, A. F. 1974: The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after
1426. Leeds Studies in English 7: 55-62.
188
A proposal for the York Mystery Cycle
Johnston, A. F. & M. Rogerson 1979: Records of Early English Drama. 2
vols, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, references quoted as
REED, York.
Justice, A.D.1979: Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle. Theatre Journal 31:
47-58.
Kolve, V. A. 1966: The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford, Stanford
University Press.
Mackinnon, E. 1931: Notes on the Dramatic Structure of the York Cycle.
Studies in Philology 28: 433-49.
Mill, A. J. 1948-51: The Stations of the York Corpus Christi Play. Yorkshire
Archaeological Journal 37: 492-502.
Nelson, A. H. 1970: Principles of Processional Staging: York Cycle. Modern
Philology 67: 303-20.
Potter, L. ed 1983: Medieval Drama, The Revels History of Drama in English.
vol. I, London, Methuen.
Rose, M. 1961: The Wakefield Mystery Plays. London, W. W. Norton &
Company.
Stevens, M. 1972: The York Cycle: From Procession to Play. Leeds Studies in
English 6: 37-115.
Stevens, M. 1987: Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, Princeton, Princeton
University Press.
Twycross, M. 1978: “Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York, 13981572. Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 2: 10-33.
White, E. 1987: Places for Hearing the Corpus Christi Play in York. Medieval
English Theatre 9.1: 23-63.
Woolf, R. 1972: The English Mystery Plays. London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
189
Asunción Salvador- Rabaza
Appendix. Fig.1: York pageant route and stations for the York Corpus
Christi Play in 1468 by M. Twycross (1978 & Beadle, 1982: 34).
*†*
190
MEDIEVAL DRAMA: THE SOCIAL USE OF RELIGION
The whole frame of the world is the theatre, and every creature the
stage, the medium, the glasse in which we may see God.1
It is, in my opinion, very obvious that even a superficial study of Medieval
Mystery Plays reveals a rich gamut of social references and pursuits which
demonstrate their being eminently a popular social product, apart from being
deeply religious. But perhaps, better than any other literary genre, drama
proves that our conception of man in Western society has a Christianreligious starting point.
As Rosemary Woolf points out, the Christian Church possessed:
The outward phenomena of a theatrical performance, a building, an
audience and men speaking or singing words to be listened to and
performing actions to be watched.2
This paper will not deal on the acceptance or not of a single explanation
of the rise of Medieval drama, a topic which, I believe, is neither simple nor
easy; but on how a ceremony which was purely liturgical -thus with a mere
religious concern and content- had of necessity, to develop some social
characteristics in order to fulfill that very important concern of all established
Religions: the social dimension of man and the need of attracting the
common man making liturgical ceremonies “palatable”.
As a part of a longer work, I am going to center this paper on the study of
what could be the first attempt at dramatising a part of the official liturgy of
the Christian Mass.
1 Easter Day Sermon; Preached in 1626 by John Donne.
2 The English Mystery Plays; Rosemary Woolf 1972.
Dionisia Tejera, Selim 9 (1999): 191—196
Dionisia Tejera
“Quem-quaeritis in sepulchro christicolae
Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum: coelicolae
Surrexit, non est hic sicut praedixerat
Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit a mortuis.”
“Quem-quaeritis”- “Who are you looking for?”. As a liturgical sentence,
it is a question of faith. The first question of this short dialogue is addressed
to the Christians. There are three instances of the use of the latin verb
“quaeris ” in “The Gospel according to St. John” referred to Jesus Christ,
and in the three examples the aim is to draw a confession of faith from his
interlocutors. Here the question is intended to support and develop the faith
in Christ as God, and find a justification for this fundamental article of faith.
There are many passages in the whole Bible and above all in the New
Testament to prove the divine nature of Christ, this is, in fact, the purpose of
all these texts: to state that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the God, the
most decissive proof of this statement is the greatest event of religion which
is being celebrated at Easter Mass.
The full question of this first verse of the trope is: “Quem-quaeritis in
sepulchro christicolae?” “Christicolae”: that is followers of Christ. The
question is clearly addressed to the believers. Christicolae is a latin
compound of the word “colae” from the verb “colere”, which means,
cultivate, dwell, pray, deal with; the other part does not need an explanation,
it is simply the direct object of the verb “colere”.
The third element of the question is “sepulchro”. The Christians (the
followers of Christ) have come to look for their God to a place that is far from
being a symbol of light or life: the God of the Christians is no longer to be
found upon this world of seemingly living human beings. The intention of
this first verse of the drama is to awake the faith of the Christians towards a
hidden God (as they are used to worshipping him hidden in the altar of the
Christian churches) dead and buried but who, paradoxically, is Life itself.
Once the question is settled the drama intends to open the way to the
foundations of Christian faith. The answer, which is naturally in the
Accusative is the name of a person given also in three elements:
a) The proper name of the person: Jesus
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Medieval drama: the social use of religion
b) His birth place: Nazareth
c) The most important characteristic of His mortal life and that has
become the symbol of a whole Religion: that the man has been
crucified.
“Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum: coelicolae”. In The Gospel According to
St. John, he uses the word Nazarenum as an adjective of “Jesum”. The
meaning here seems, on first reading, to be purely geographic, but on other
passages, St. John remarks on the fact that the inhabitants of that part of
Israel were not very well appreciated by their countrymen.
“Art Thou also a Galilee? Search and look for out of Galilee ariseth no
porphet”1 and in John 7,41 even the common people state their poor opinion
about the Galileans: “Shall Christ come out of Galilee?”
But the title of “Nazarenus” reminded St. John’s contemporaries of the
“Nazareus”: a sort of holy men mentioned in Judges 13,56 and 13,75 and the
Acts 21,23-26 and to medieval Christians, used to reading the Latin Vulgata
this name suggested the idea of these people, consacrated to God in a very
special way. Thus, for the audience (that is the christicolae) this word was
not a mere geographical reference, in all probability the Christians who
attended Easter Mass (that is the Quem-quaeritis audience) thought that
“Nazarenus” rather than the reference to a little village in Galilee meant
“Man of God”.
“Crucifixum”: In order to understand this second adjective applied to
Jesus, we must go back to the Gospel. There are many references to Christ as
“crucifixum”, no doubt, the best known one is the passage of St. Paul: “For I
am determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him
crucified: Nisi Jesum Christum et hunc crucifixum”.2 For St. Paul this is
Jesus’s greatest qualification. But in this trope it seems to keep, in some way,
the negative implication of the original meaning of the word (that of a man
who had had an infamous death in the gallows)
Now following the movement of the trope, we can observe that it has
developed from liturgy, as a part of the Mass, into a direct appeal to the
1 King James Bible -American Bible Society, New York, 1955- St. John 7, 52.
2 Ibid.- St. Paul: 1st. Letter to Corinths, 2, 2.
193
Dionisia Tejera
audience and, like all good drama, it needs a response, the audience becomes
involved in a kind of catharsis. The response should be the realization of the
Christians who are watching the play of the apparent opposition between two
true articles of faith.
a) That on this Easter celebration they are looking for Christ who is
their life and light.
b)That this life and light they are looking for is -paradoxically- in a
sepulchre that is: in the place of darkness and death.
There are, in the answer, various elements of faith: in the first place the
name of Jesus: that is the Saviour, second His special character of Man of
God, and third that he, has been crucified. As men of faith they would see
here the first sign of glory that would be stressed by the final vocative
addressed to the inhabitants of Heaven: “Coelicolae” this word is both
grammatically and etymologically parallel to that used in the first verse
“christicolae”.”Coelicolae” includes, again the verb “colere” here with the
meaning of “inhabitants of” added to the word “coelum” heaven. It is also
in the vocative case, thus clearly stating that the followers of Christ -the
“christicolae”- are fully aware of the celestial personality of the guardians of
the sepulchre. This is another confirmation of faith; they believe that -under
their human appearance- their interlocutors are heavenly beings in disguise.
The climax of the drama is a hymn of Glory, the movement of the dialogue
has been taking the believers from the historical fact of the death of Christ to
the spiritual meaning of an article of faith. The phrase is directly taken from
Mark 16,4-6.
“Surrexit, non est hic sicut praedixerat”. It is the proof that the man who
had been lying in the sepulchre is the God because He has risen from the
dead. There is, besides, a third element: why should the Christians believe
that from a sepulchre -a clear symbol of death- would emerge a new life? The
reason is that Jesus had proved his divinity because his ressurrection had
been prophesied: “Sicut praedixerat”. There is a difference here between St.
Mark and our trope: in the former we have “Sicut dixit” in the latter the
“praedixit” stresses on the fact that it was a prophesy, thus linking the
passage to the Old Testament.
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Medieval drama: the social use of religion
But in the Christian conception of life during the Middle Ages, faith was
not enough, action was for them as essential as faith; the acceptance of the
belief in Christ as God brought the natural consequence of the duty of
transmitting the knowledge to the rest of humanity. Outside the theatre (that
is the church) is the wide world that is entitled to receive the message.
“Ite nuntiate quia surrexit a mortuis”. The final song is purely dramatic
(there is no song in the Gospel according to St. Mark), it is symbolic of the
unity of all Christians who join together in the joy of a faith that iluminates
their lives in the understanding that darkness can turn into light, a belief that
gives the Christian consolation in the security of life after their own death.
Dramatically -if we consider the trope merely as a literary work- it consists
of a very simple dialogue with very few and simple literary devices. But under
the historical and doctrinal viewpoint the play is very rich. Its main device
consists in the paradoxical fluctuation between the Cross, the Sepulchre, a
country man (from one of the most despicable villages of the Israel of the
epoch) and a new life: the Ressurrection. These two aspects (literary and
doctrinal) cannot be separated if we are to understand the full meaning of the
play.
Our twentieth century prejudices might lead the modern reader to believe
that the common Christian attending the Mass would not understand Latin,
the vernacular being by now well extended and established (in all probability
even in other kinds of plays); but this is only an apparent truth.
When it is true that Latin has been the cultural and scientific language
throughout the centuries of Western civilization to very recent times, and
that during the Middle Ages monks, priests and all students at monacal
schools would understand the dialogue in all its implications, we are not to
believe that the audience (which would, naturally, be composed of common
villagers with little or no education) would not understand the meaning of the
words. Even in countries where Latin was not the basis of the vernacular, the
dialogue would be very well understood; firstly because it is composed of
very simple words and sentences, and secondly, because it follows -almost to
the letter- the Holy Writ which was continuosly used in everyday liturgy and
sermons by monks and priests who, even when preaching in the vernacular,
would quote, profusely, from the Bible in Latin.
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Dionisia Tejera
This play or “Trope”, which might be the first modern drama, is a mixture
of a simple but beautiful literary dialogue and a scenification that is the result
of the understanding that our Western civilization has of man; a creature
created to the image of God thus with a spiritual dimension but living upon
this mortal soil and with a need to live with his fellow creatures that is: with a
social dimension. In other words, during the Middle Ages the concerns that
to our twentieth century prejudices might seem merely social, were, in reality,
religious: vices were not a private matter as they affected the social body:
thus when the best lay writers of the age described their society they were
concerned (perhaps unconsciously) with religious topics.
And -as our trope proves- when the religious authors wrote, even of
purely religious topics, they had to be concerned -very consciously- with
society as Religion was social.
Dionisia Tejera
Universidad de Deusto
*†*
196
DAME RAGNELL’S CULTURE:
THE VORACIOUS LOATHLY LADY1
When we try to study popular literature in the Middle Ages we always meet
the same problem: it was oral, so it can barely be guessed at, catching dis torted and fragmentary glimpses of it, in written texts. It was not until the eighteenth century that scholars tried to make faithful records of oral culture.
There is therefore a strong case for studying popular culture backwards
(Burke 1994: 82), by using, in the present case, eighteenth century ballads as
a base from which to consider earlier popular narrative. I propose to establish
a link between the ballad of King Henry and the fifteenth-century romance of
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, in order to make some points
about this romance and similar tales told by Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century, and more generally about women's popular culture in the Middle Ages.
The most obvious ballad version of Gawain and Ragnell is not, however,
King Henry, which was taken down from the most famous of popular ballad
singers, Anna Gordon Brown, but a minstrel ballad contained in the seventeenth-century Percy Folio manuscript, The Marriage of Sir Gawain. In both
Gawain must marry a loathly lady so as to save his uncle Arthur's life, and
she turns into a beauty when Gawain grants her all her will. Therefore the
only major difference between their plot and that of Gower's Tale of Florent
and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale is that in the latter two the hero (who is not
Gawain) performs the feat of marrying the loathly lady to save his own life, as
it was his life that depended on her revealing to him the answer to the enigma
of what women most desire, an enigma common to all four stories. King
Henry, on the other hand, has the hero meeting the loathly lady without any
1 Paper read at the Eighth International Conference of the Spanish Society for English
Mediæval Language and Literature (SELIM), held at the Universitat Jaume I,
Castelló de la Plana (Spain), on 25th-27th September 1995. Rewritten in February
2001 with minor corrections.
Rubén Valdés, Selim 9 (1999): 197—204
Rubén Valdés
previous enigma: she just captures him and makes him feed her with loads of
food and drink, even sacrificing his horse, hounds, and hawks for her to eat
them whole, and then he must make her a bed with his mantle on the heather
and make love to her. The crucial link between King Henry and the romance
of Gawain and Ragnell is that the loathly lady gets, not only all her will, as in
all other versions, but also all her fill. For, as Professor Patricia Shaw noted,
"unlike the other loathly ladies, Dame Ragnell, to add to her charms, is
presented as a monster of gluttony" (Shaw 1988: 216). The description of how
King Henry fed the ogress takes up nearly half the ballad (eight out of twenty
stanzas). It does not take so much of the romance, but nonetheless her
voracity is made conspicuous by the hyperbolic and grotesque description of
her wedding banquet, as shall be shown later.
Apart from the loathly lady's gluttony, Gawain and Ragnell and King
Henry are related by a curious textual lacuna which, even if it is no more than
a coincidence, it is a revealing one. A leaf with possibly some seventy lines is
lacking in the manuscript containing the romance, just after the wedding
episode, and before Dame Ragnell asks her husband to "show her courtesy in
bed." Donald B. Sands (ed. 1986: 341) points out that the missing lines
"probably noted how the wedded couple left Arthur's hall and retired to the
bridal chamber." But seventy lines are too many for such a passage with no
more ado. I would venture, therefore, that they might as well have contained a
close, perhaps even obscene sketch of the loathly lady's grotesque body, to
stress the trial that Gawain is enduring at the bridal bed. As for the ballad,
most editors, including Child (1965: 299), find a gap after stanza 17, precisely
after the loathly lady has ordered King Henry to take off his clothes and get
into bed with her. The transition to the next stanza seems too abrupt even for
a ballad. Suddenly it is sunrise and the beast turns into beauty, but we do not
know how the hero actually fared in bed with the lady monster. We may
wonder again whether some bawdy stanza was not forgotten by Anna
Gordon, who, though extremely faithful to her ballads, took with them all the
liberties to which a good ballad singer is entitled, and who, after all, was
Reverend Andrew Brown's respectable wife. In short, these textual
uncertainties suggest hesitations on the part of those who handed down the
tradition, leaving gaps which perhaps cover up some indecorous trait of
Dame Ragnell's sex.
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Dame Ragnell’s culture: the voracious loathly lady
From her first appearance, Dame Ragnell's aspect suggests she will be
hard to fill up, for most of her physical description refers to her "wide" and
"foul" mouth (Sands ed. 1986: 331-2, lines 231-45, 545-55). The description of
her monstrous mouth has symbolical references to a sexual and digestive
womb ("Her cheeks [were] side [i.e. broad] as wemmens hippes", line 236)
that were typical of the representation of witches at the end of the Middle
Ages, which are said to be founded upon pathological male obsessions
(Kappler 1986: 309-14). King Arthur, whose heroism is much diminished in the
poem, and the other courtiers would see her from such an angle. But in her
description there is also humour, or, more precisely, what Bakhtin calls
grotesque realism. The poem shares with King Henry and other ballads,
including Kempy Kay and various Gaelic and Scandinavian analogues cited
by Child (1965: 297-301), a zest for hyperbolic description which is traditional
in tales of magic. In this sense, the romance implies a confrontation between
the courtly, official culture of King Arthur, and the popular comic culture that
Dame Ragnell embodies.
To understand what official, respectable culture feared of female voracity
- whether for food or sex, the difference was seldom made - we just have to
turn briefly to the many "learned" discourses of medieval misogyny. Woman
was "envious, capricious, irascible, avaricious, as well as intemperate with
drink and voracious in the stomach" (Marbod of Rennes); like the monstrous
Chimaera, to who she is very often identified, she has "the belly of a stinking
goat" (Walter Map); "no woman [since Even took the apple] has ever been
seen who did not yield when tempted to the vice of gluttony" (Andreas
Capellanus); her "gluttony, disobedience, and persuasions were the cause
and origin of all our miseries" (Giovanni Boccaccio) (Blamires ed. 1992: 101,
105, 119, 172). In contrast with all these (at the time) serious condemnations is
what comic culture tended to make of that commonplace of female voracity.
Let us cite four literary examples before returning to Dame Ragnell. Three
are taken from drama, perhaps the genre which is most likely to reflect on
popular comicality; the other is from the Scottish makar William Dunbar, a
master of grotesque realism. Perhaps the most proverbial glutton after Eve is
Noah's Wife of the Chester cycle, who will not yield to enter the patriarchal
Ark until she has drunk a quart bottle of good and strong "malmesy" with her
gossip (Happé ed. 1985: 127, lines 229-36). Secondly, the wife of Mak the
sheep-thief in the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play, who besides being "as
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Rubén Valdés
great as a whale" and full of "gall" (ill-temper), eats "as fast as she can" and
drinks "well, too", and gives birth to a child a year, some years two (Happé
ed. 1985: 269-70, 275, lines 100-6, 237-43), which makes Mak obsessed with
feeding his fast growing family and so pushes him to stealing. Then we have
Dunbar's "Twa Cummeris", who, after intimating that "in bed their husbands
are not worth a bean" decide that "this long Lent should not make them lean"
and take vengeance on their husbands by drinking two quarts of "mavasy"
(i.e., Malmsey) wine (Kinsley ed. 1989: 77-8, lines 21-30). Last but not least,
the Sowtar's Wife and the Tailor's Wife in Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie
Estaitis, who, after literally chasing Chastity away and beating up their
husbands, make no bones about folding up their clothes above their waist, to
cross the worldly water and run to town for a bottle of good wine and pastry
to comfort their bodies (Lyall ed. 1989: 49, lines 1376-87). All these examples
present women who challenge the institution of marriage because they can
get no satisfaction from their husbands, and who eat and drink in order to
avenge themselves.
Fortunately we have a book like Caroline W. Bynum's Holy Feast and
Holy Fast (1987) to help us understand the significance of food to medieval
women. The way Bynum views it, abstinence for holy women was not really
an ascetic flight from fleshliness, but an expression of their power to
manipulate their own bodies. For if women saints, notably Mary Magdalene,
often renounced food like male saints generally renounced wealth, it was
because food was the only thing women were supposed to control: "eating in
the European Middle Ages was stereotyped as a male activity and food
preparation as a female one"; similarly, "'heavy' food, especially meat, was
seen as more appropriate for men and lighter food for women, in part because
meat had, for a thousand years, been seen as an aggravator of lust" (Bynum
1987: 191). That society made "even women in happy marriages often [feel]
guilty about their sexuality […]. Thus […] some medieval women renounced
food because of overpowering and deeply rooted fears of sexuality" (ibid,
215). Then, if the female saint was "in many ways the mirror image of society's
notion of the witch", with equally great supernatural powers, whether good
or evil, and "uncanny shrewdness" (ibid, 23), no wonder witches were
regarded as voracious.
In both the romance and the ballad versions of "The Wedding of Sir
Gawain" the loathly lady's own bewitched brother, the giant who captures
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Dame Ragnell’s culture: the voracious loathly lady
Arthur and forces him to find a way to solve the enigma of what women most
desire, vows he will burn his sister if he can get hold of her. This does not
happen because, by accepting her "maestrie", Gawain breaks the spell that
affected brother and sister (a wicked stepmother had turned them into
monsters). But before the fairy-tale ending, which might be said to prevent
Dame Ragnell from having to be accused of witchcraft and burned at the
stake, she manages to bring the Arthurian Court to its knees in a way that
surpasses even Morgan le Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
We may now understand Dame Ragnell's voracity as a challenge to
Arthur's Court as an emblem of ideal secular culture and society. Not that
grasping this is essential for enjoying the fun of her outrageous banquet before the appalled eyes of courtiers. But it helps us to better appreciate the comicality of Dame Gaynour (Queen Guinevere) and other ladies' efforts to convince Ragnell to have her wedding early in the morning, as privately as possible, and Ragnell's insistence on having the wedding announce throughout
the shire and the banquet held in the open hall, amidst the whole court,
taking the place of honour at the table. What Bakhtin argued about the image
of the banquet in popular culture is stressed and enhanced when the diner is
question is a woman like Dame Ragnell, and sitting at Arthur's stately table.
Dame Ragnell does not make a speech at the table. Her subversive
discourse simply consists in eating wholesale:
This foulle lady began the highe dese;
She was fulle foulle and not curteis,
So said they alle verament.
When the service cam her before,
She ete as moche as six that ther wore;
That mervailid many a man.
Her nailes were long inches three;
Therwithe she breke her mete ungoodly;
Therfore she ete alone.
She ette three capons and also curlues three,
And great bake metes she ete up, perdé.
All men therof had mervaille.
Ther was no mete cam her before,
But she ete it up less and more,
That praty foulle dameselle.
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Rubén Valdés
Alle men then that evere her sawe
Bad the deville her bonis gnawe,
Bothe knighte and squire.
So she ete tille mete was done,
Tille they drewe clothes and had washen
As is the gise and manner. (Sands ed. 601-21).
She is the grotesque body in the flesh among an astonished masculine
audience, perhaps even more carnal than Chaucer's Wife of Bath, who also
likes a drop but who tends to wrap up her own "jolly body" in the body of
anti-feminist texts her that her verbal discourse is trying to subvert. At the
banquet, says Bakhtin (1987: 253), the body evades its own limits; it
swallows, gulps, grubs, tears up the world, thrives and grows at its expense.
While eating Ragnell swallows up society instead of being swallowed up by
it as a woman. From Antiquity, in Bakhtin's analysis, the images of banquet
had a foremost of importance in their universalism, that is, their especial bond
with life, death, struggle, victory, triumph, renascence… In addition, Dame
Ragnell's banquet celebrates her victory as a woman over her assigned duties
to be ashamed of her fleshly nature, practise abstinence or at least
moderation, and selflessly feed others.
As the banquet stands for the victory of life over death, like the wedding,
it plays in popular works (or those which reflect popular culture) the same
role as the coronation (Bajtin 1987: 254-5). So it does for Dame Ragnell, even
though she fails to make it a communal celebration because they leave her
alone, since no courtier can stand her table manners (see quotation above).
Then, after banquet and wedding comes institutionalised married life, and
what it the courtly Gawain to do with a wife like her? The social context
demanded either her transformation or her dissapearance. She is transformed
into a beautiful, tame wife ("In her life she grevid him nevere", line 823), and
then she will disappear. The comic romance ends up in a bleak note: for
Ragnell dies only five years later. Marriage must have killed her merry
voracity. To paraphrase Bakhtin (1987: 255) just once more, in the truly
popular work death never serves as a coronation, unless it is followed by a
funeral banquet (as in the Illiad), because the end should always be pregnant
with a new beginning. With its weird addition of a tragic ending the romance
of The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell brings to mind what,
according to Lee Patterson (1991: 321), was also Chaucer's usual "practice of
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Dame Ragnell’s culture: the voracious loathly lady
articulating but finally containing the voice of political protest." In the end
Dame Ragnell's resistance is incorporated into the hegemonic culture of the
romance, which explains away her gluttony as witchcraft. Her ironic female
self-assertion is dismissed as unnatural, black magic. Yet her grotesque last
supper may be said to have been celebrated for centuries in oral culture with
ballads like King Henry.
Rubén Valdés Miyares
Universidad de Oviedo
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