Arthur's Two Historiographies in Alliterative Romance

Before I'm overwhelmed by a massive student paper deluge, I thought I'd try to draft my paper for the "Biopolitics" session organized by the Arthurian Literature Discussion Group for the upcoming MLA convention in Los Angeles held during the first week in January.  As I was working my way through this, I realized how HELish it really is (hopefully without the second "l"!).  My reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in particular, explores the meanings and histories of enigmatic words in the prologue such as "winn" (could mean "strife" or "joy") and "depreced" (could mean "conquer" or "release").  If you have any suggestions or comments I would love to read them.  

             For admirers of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, the myth of King Arthur has an irresistible appeal.[i]  Arthur’s identity as rex quondam rexque futurus resonates with Kantorowicz’s analysis of the theological character of early modern royal succession, whereby the death of a king (the body natural) is a recurrent episode in the metaphysical life of sovereignty (the body politic).  Scholars have identified this juridical sempiternity of the sovereign in late medieval incarnations of a King Arthur who never dies or dies and returns in messianic fashion.[ii]  Yet, as Giorgio Agamben points out, Kantorowicz fails to acknowledge the absolutist nature of sovereignty that this political theology entails.  Rather than merely perpetuate the dignitas of the kingship, Agamben suggests that “the metaphor of the political body appears . . . as the cipher of the absolute and inhuman character of sovereignty.”[iii]   In other words, the expense of the principle le roi ne meurt jamais is the evacuation of value from human life.  By mitigating the impact of a king’s death on the political body, sovereignty is simultaneously maintained and dehumanized.  In this light, Arthur’s legendary immortality is demystified as a trace of premodern statecraft. 

            Optimism about Arthur’s return abounds in most Arthurian texts, but resistance to such political theology can be found in the Middle English alliterative romances, especially the alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Critics have acknowledged the ambivalence about war and territorial expansion in these poems, but most have read them solely in contrast to one historiographic tradition, namely Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie and its vernacular translations.  The influence of the Galfridian tradition upon these poems must be considered, since it is the basis for their narrative and genealogical structure, but Geoffrey’s enthusiasm about the translation of sovereignty (translatio imperii) from Troy to Rome to Britain runs counter to the morbid dispossession of Arthur’s imperial inheritance that emerges in the alliterative texts.  The images of a burning Troy and the subjugation of provinces invoked in these poems can be located in a second historiographic tradition, which originates in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae.  Surviving in approximately 150 manuscripts and in three English translations, Guido’s account does not include a glorious prophecy about the authority of the Trojan line.  Instead, Guido recalls the origin of the strife between the Greeks and Trojans and articulates a vision of calamity for the inheritors of Troy that is markedly inconsistent with Geoffrey’s fantasy of a New Troy.  As a result, Arthur's Trojan identity in alliterative romance is defined by the corporeal violence it inflicts against itself and others.  Rather than suggest that the Arthurian body politic will transcend violence against the Arthurian body natural, Arthur’s physical and political bodies coalesce into one indivisible entity – the destruction of one entails the destruction of the other.  As a site of contention for two historiographies, Arthur's sovereign body becomes a cipher for the cruel logic of translatio imperii.

            The English sovereignty invoked by late medieval writers of the Morte and Gawain are essentially patriotic fantasies of the elite, which seek justification not in popular rule, but through dynastic inheritance that could be traced back to ancient Troy.[iv]  In both the Morte and Gawain, this retrospective historiography emerges even at the expense of narratological unity.  The British history, which occupies the beginning and/or ending lines of these alliterative poems and others such as Winner and Waster, rehearses a Trojan past that appears to bear little relevance to the present action of the Arthurian romance.  Even though these poets articulate the traditional genealogical connection between the destruction of Troy and the Arthurian court through Brutus’ translation of empire from Rome to Britain, the abrupt transition in time and genre from ancient history to chivalric romance is difficult to explain or justify.  The images of a burning Troy, the treacherous Aeneas, and the subjugation of provinces that are invoked provide a grim historical background for Britain's Roman conquest and the mischievous beheading game that are the predominant subjects of the poems. 

            Using the Trojan prologue from Gawain as a representative example, I want to suggest that these disjunctures between past and present, history and romance emerge from the confluence of the irreconcilable historiographies of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Guido delle Colonne.  Despite the sinister mood of the opening lines of Gawain, scholars have continued to read them from an optimistic perspective, emphasizing the “blysse” over the “blunder” (18).[v]  While the passage includes positive references to the “high kynde” (5) of the British heritage and the “blysse” (18) that ensues from Brutus’s founding of Britain, the references to the destruction of Troy (1-2), Aeneas’ “tresoun” (3), and “blunder” (18) paint a negative picture of Arthurian sovereignty that is not entirely Galfridian.  While Geoffrey’s Historia certainly comprises much of the historiographic borderlands of the narrative, this territory is share with Guido’s Historia. 

            To understand the specific linguistic influence of Guido on these lines, we should first grapple with the confusion about who indeed is the “tulk” who betrays Troy.  If we turn to Guido’s Historia, we find the ultimate traitor to be Aeneas, even though Guido originally condemns Aeneas and Antenor equally: “While the Trojans were experiencing such painful sorrow, and were enclosed in the city, Anchises, with his son Aeneas, and Antenor, with his son Polydamas, entered a plan how they could make their lives safe so they would not be lost to the Greeks, and if they could do it in no other way, to betray the city” (218).[vi]  It is no surprise then that the Gawain-poet would associate both Aeneas and Antenor with the treason, but we are left with the question of why Aeneas is singled out among a group that includes not only Antenor, but also Anchises and Polydamas.   As Guido’s narrative unfolds, the roles of the other traitors, including Antenor, are effaced by the centrality of Hecuba’s invective against Aeneas for his responsibility for Troy’s destruction.  She clearly identifies Aeneas as the “proditor,” articulating particular disgust for his resolve that allows him to “behold its [Troy’s] ruin . . . as it goes up in smoke” (234).[vii]  Her emphasis on his callous gaze invites readers to interpret his observation as an act that certifies Troy’s fall and confirms his culpability.[viii]  The Gawain-poet’s ambiguous placement of Aeneas’ treachery in the “frame” then simultaneously encourages us to condemn this deed and “see” Troy “brent to brondez and askez” through the eyes of Aeneas.  Such a perspective requires that readers confront the treasonous circumstances of Britain’s foundation and gaze through the smoking ashes of Troy to view the rest of the romance.

As the passage continues, the Gawain-poet’s reliance upon Guido’s Historia increases.  After the establishment of Aeneas as a traitor, the poet tracks Aeneas’ exile, which according to the logic of translatio imperii transforms him into a conqueror who “depreced prouinces.”  The reference to “prouinces” likely depends upon Guido’s own explanation for the transfer of empire after Troy’s fall: “And therefore some other provinces (prouincie) received (receperunt) from the Trojans an entire settlement” (11).[ix]  Guido’s Aeneas then becomes the original colonizer of the Western Empire, whose Trojans are benignly “received” by prouincie such as Rome, Sicily, and Britain.  The Gawain-poet ironically deploys and belies Guido’s representation of the colonized as those good-natured natives who “received” the colonizers through the use of “depreced,” a word with the harsher connotations that the MED lists as “conquer, subjugate, overthrow, drive out, exclude, and oppress.”  This negative portrayal of the transfer of empire transforms the subsequent Trojan strongholds from migratory settlements to imperial conquests.             

Yet, the Gawain-poet engages in a bit of wordplay at Guido’s expense by using the word “depreced,” since it appears again two more times later in the romance during the lady’s negotiations with Gawain.  In one instance, she “depresed hym so þikke” (1770), literally suggesting that she “pressed him” in her wooing game, but given its use in the colonial discourse of the “frame,” the Gawain-poet encourages readers to consider the forceful image of the lady as an imperialist who conquers Gawain and obtains his body.  On the other hand, we see the more playful connotation of Guido’s “receperunt” when we encounter the next instance in which Gawain beseeches the lady to “deprece your prysoun” (1219), which here emerges in an opposite sense, meaning “release your prisoner.”  Such a use of “deprece” from the French “de(s)presser,” also motivates readers to consider the positive implications of Aeneas’ imperialism, which demonstrates the Gawain-poet’s clever use of Guido and preference for ambiguity.  Thorlac Turville-Petre suggests that the use of “depreced” in the opening is “deliberately ambiguous.”[x]  But like many readers of the poem who look for references to Geoffrey’s Historia, he claims that the opposite valences of the word, “liberate” and “subjugate” can be traced back to the Galfridian account, which describes both Brutus’ liberation of the Trojan exiles in Greece (6.20) and his subjugation of Gascony (8.18).[xi]  While the play on “depreced” is thematically consistent with Geoffrey’s history, the Gawain-poet’s overall pessimism about imperial endeavours, translation of “provinces” from Guido’s “provincie,” and emphasis on the words themselves evince a particularly anti-Galfridian perspective.  This polysemic linguistic subtlety suggests that the Gawain-poet approaches his Roman heritage in the manner of the Morte-poet, who consistently attends to the underbelly of imperial expansion and moral foundation of Arthurian rule.               

            This compilatio of two historiographies reaches a climax with the reference to “Felix Brutus,” the legendary founder of Britain.  Silverstein notes that the “felix” label refers specifically to imperial princes and Roman numismatic formulas for city founders such as Sulla and Commodus, which certainly applies to the case of Brutus, who established the New Troy.[xii]  However, the Gawain-poet was most likely familiar with this epithet through its traditional association with Aeneas that may have emerged through Tiberius Claudius Donatus’ interpretation of the Aeneid.  In Book 3, Aeneas observes the miniature Troy (effigiem Troiam) established by the Trojan refugees at Buthrotum and tells them, “Live on blessed ones (felices), whose fortune is accomplished! / As for us, from change to change according to Fate we are called” (493-4).[xiii]  Donatus perceives these lines as an opportunity to discuss Aeneas’ position as both “felix” and “infelix” in his exilic wanderings and discernment of his imperial fate.[xiv]  After treating Aeneas’ felicity, Donatus paraphrases Aeneas’ words to the Trojan exiles: “Live on, you who are separated from my misfortune (infelicitate) and do not seek Italy with me, which recedes as much as we pursue it in our journey.”[xv]  According to Donatus then, Aeneas’ imperial itinerary is one that is defined by the fluctuation between the felicity and misfortune, the Gawain-poet’s “blysse and blunder” (18), which accompanies the founding of cities.  Donatus’ point is amplified by the fact that Aeneas’ speech to the Trojan exiles is one that goes on to express the danger of rebuilding New Troys.  This scene serves as a warning to Aeneas that he cannot simply replicate the architecture and authority of his Trojan predecessors.  For the Gawain-poet, such a reading of the Aeneid is consistent with the treason and conflagration that provides the basis for the founding of Britain by “Felix Brutus” in the first stanza.  “Felix” then reeks with ironic overtones that accentuate the misfortune which accompanies imperial designs. 

            The Gawain-poet’s sophisticated Virgilianism is confirmed by the juxtaposition and wordplay of “felix” and “with wynne” two lines later.  Most editors read “wynne” as “joy,” an interpretation that is certainly consistent with the Galfridian enjoyment of imperial expansion, but its proximity to the ironic “felix” presents other compelling possibilities.[xvi]  The Old English “wynn” supports the “joy” reading, but the similar Old English “gewinn,” which means “strife, conflict, or labor,” presents another compelling possibility.  According to the MED, the Middle English “wynne,” derived from the Old English “wynn,” is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the Middle English “winn,” derived from the Old English “gewinn.”  This latter reading is therefore a plausible one, undercutting any sense of “joy” with a suggestion of the suffering that inheres to the vacillation of fate of the (in)felix conqueror.  Silverstein attributes these antithetical connotations to the Galfridian tradition, claiming that the “winn” reading is also “authentic for the Brutus story.”[xvii]  However, as Silverstein admits, Geoffrey’s narrative is primarily concerned with the “wynn” that ensues from the fertile foundation of Britain.[xviii]  I would suggest that the “winn” connotation is not based in the Galfridian model, but rather in the darker interpretation of the Aeneid that is embodied in the Guido-tradition.  In fact, if we were to translate “with wynne” into Latin, we would have the adverb “feliciter,” a word whose morphology brings us back to the ironic “felix” and Aeneas’ conflicted speech to the Trojan exiles.[xix]  This hyperbolic use of “felix” is corroborated by the alliterative context of SGGK, in which “Felix Brutus” sails “fer ouer þe French flod” (13).  The alliteration of “Felix,” “fer,” “French,” and “flod” would have elicited a chuckle from the Gawain-poet’s readers, enjoying the image of a Brutus styled as a Roman conqueror who sails far across a Frankish sea, when in fact the channel between England and France was indeed too short a distance for the fourteenth-century English mired in the Hundred Years War.  Such a complex and comedic use of “felix” and “wynne” reflects the Gawain-poet’s philological prowess and remarkable ability to undercut traditional recitations of lineage that seek glory in a Trojan origin.

             While the historiographic background from which Gawain emerges is irreducibly complex, the elusive critical perspective of this poem and its alliterative cousins, notably the Morte, can be explained, at least in part, as the product of two opposing historical traditions.  For the Arthurian romances, Kantorowicz's theory of sovereignty provides a helpful metaphor for these two historiographies.  Whereas Geoffrey's providential translation of power relies on the immortality of the body politic as it migrates from Troy to Rome to Britain, Guido's retrospective gaze and emphasis on death and destruction, on the other hand, is informed by the corruptible character of the body natural, which inevitably must die and be buried.  Even in Chaucer's Squire's Tale, the subject of Wan-Chuan's paper, the brass steed (5.209-15)[xx] becomes for its onlookers an ominous reminder of Guido's Trojan horse and a warning about the Trojan "plague of great destruction" that will infect future empires (11).[xxi]  But by the time Edmund Spenser incorporates Trojan history into his Faerie Queene, the subject of Shaina's paper, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account holds greater political sway and offers a prophetic means to justify the Tudor line and its Arthurian ancestry (3.3.49).[xxii]  As Agamben suggests, this imperial translation necessitates a callous indifference to the destruction of life.  The Arthur that appears in alliterative romance is pulled in two historiographic directions, both quondam and futurus.  Both Gawain and the Morte end with a recitation of Britain's Trojan lineage, but in each instance the Galfridian future is belied by the destructive past.  In the Morte Arthur’s body is not translated to the Isle of Avalon (4332-41).[xxiii]  No ethereal transfer of the body politic to future generations is implied or allowed – instead the poem ends, like Gawain, with a hollow evocation of his Trojan ancestors (4342-6).  As a conduit of antithetical historiographic discourses, these alliterative romances demonstrate that assertions of sovereignty, while temporarily glorious, are inextricable from the violence inflicted upon aggressor and victim.

           

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[i] Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; repr. 1997).

[ii] For a recent and full treatment, see Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).  See also Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983); Martin Shichtman and James Carley, eds., Culture and the King: The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Elizabeth T. Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda: Le Morte Darthur as an Historical Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1971).

[iii] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1998), 91-103 at 101. .  Cf. Kantorowicz, “Dignitas non moritur” in The King’s Two Bodies, 383-450.

[iv] Throughout the rest of the essay, the alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be abbreviated as Morte and Gawain, respectively.

[v] J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).  Future references to Gawain refer to this edition.

[vi] “Troyanis igitur existentibus tantis doloribus anxiosis et inclusis in urbe, Anchises cum eius filio Henea, Anthenor etiam cum eius filio Pollidamas consilium inierunt qualiter uitas eorum possent saluas facere ne perderentur a Grecis, et si aliud facere non possent, prodere ciuitatem.” Guido de Columnis, Historia Destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936).  Future references to Guido’s Historia are from this edition.  See also J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 70.

[vii] “eius ruinam aspicias . . . quibus fumat”; Tolkien and Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 70.

[viii] For the way medieval optical theory can be applied in reading the poem, see Richard E. Zeitkowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14^th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 93-8; Sarah Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 96.

[ix] “Et nonnulle alie propterea prouincie perpetuum ex Troyanis receperunt incolatum”; Tolkien and Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 70-1.

[x] Arthur Lindley, “Pinning Gawain Down: The Misediting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 (1997): 26-42; Thorlac Turville-Petre, “The Brutus Prologue to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 344-5.

[xi] See Friedrich W.D. Brie, ed., Anglo-Norman Brut: The Brut, or the Chronicles of England, Part 1, Early English Text Society o.s. 131 (London: Oxford University Press, 1906).

[xii] Silverstein, “Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain’s Fortunate Founding,” 198; Thesaurus linguae latinae 6.1.440, lines 54 and following, s.v. “felix”: “principium cognomen”; and 6.1.451, lines 67 and following, s.v. “feliciter”: “speciatim de rebus ad principem pertinentibus.”  Compare the Greek equivalent “§utux≤w” in F. Preisigke, Wörterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden 3 (Berlin, 1929), Abschnitt 22, 56 ff; M.-T. Le Bon, “Felix virtus,” Latomus 1 (1937): 165-72.  In ancient Rome, the epithetic pairings for founders were “fortis” and “felix,” “virtus” and “felicitas,” but by the time of Charlemagne, they became “patientia (constantia)” and ‘felicitas,” “prudential” and “felicitas”; see Einhard, Vita karoli 7.4, 6-8.3, 12, and 15.1-3, ed. H.W. Garrod and R.B. Mowat (Oxford, 1925), 10-12 and 17.  For a full numismatic survey of “felix” and “felicitas,” see E. Spanheim, Dissertationes de praestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum (London: R. Smith, 1706-17), 725-9.  It should also be noted that “felix” is commonly used in hagiography.

[xiii] “vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta / iam sua; nos alia ex aliis in fata vocamur.”

[xiv] H. George, ed., Donati Interpretationes Vergilianae 1 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1905), 330-1; Silverstein, “Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain’s Fortunate Founding,” 199-200.

[xv] “vivite qui estis a mea infelicitate discreti nec mecum quaeritis Italiam, quae tantum recedit quantum eam nos insistendo persequimur.”  Donati Interpretationes Vergilianae 1, 330-1; see also Servius’ comments on Aeneid 1.98, “animam hanc”: “quasi cum dolore animam hanc, ac si diceret ‘infelicem’ ‘quae ad laborem nata est” (1.68).  Compare also Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae 4, ed. H.F. Stewart and E.K. Rand (London, 1918), 334, lines 3-7; Silverstein, “Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain’s Fortunate Founding,” 200.

[xvi] For more on the optimism of the Galfridian tradition, see Francisque Michel, ed., Gestum regum Britanniae (Cambrian Archeological Association, 1862), 16 (1.458-9); LaЗamon, Brut, ed. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1995), 1783-99; Judith Weiss, ed., Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), 1058-62; Brie, The Brut, 10-11; Silverstein, “Sir Gawain, Dear Brutus, and Britain’s Fortunate Founding,” 201.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] "Or elles it was the Grekes hors Synon, / That broghte Troie to destruccion, / As men in thise olde geestes rede. / 'Myn herte,' quod oon, 'is everemoore in drede; / I trowe som men of armes been therinne, / That shapen hem this citee for to wynne. / It were right good that al swich thyng were knowe.'"  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Squire's Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

[xxi] “Propter quas tante cladis diffusa lues orbem terrarum infecerit.”

[xxii] "Thenceforth eternall vnion shall be made / Betweene the nations different afore, / And sacred Peace shall louingly perswade / The warlike minds to learne her goodly lore, And ciuile armes to exercise no more: Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall / Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore, / And the great Castle smite so sore with all, / That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall."  Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1980), 334.

[xxiii] Mary Hamel, ed., Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1984).  All citations from the Morte refer to this edition.