Why a Medieval Romance is not a 'love' story. Owain and the Lady of the Well #2

 Why Medieval Romances are not Love stories.

The danger of dealing with past texts is succinctly expressed by Corinne Saunders in ‘Rape and ravishment in the literature of medieval England’:

‘[…] by contrasting past and present, and assessing the past according to contemporary ideologies, we validate our own political assumptions. The temptation is to assume the transhistoric nature of contemporary premises and therefore to fit the evidently ‘misogynistic’ structures of the middle ages into a pattern to be censured and exposed…’

It’s that danger of assuming the ‘transhistoric’ nature of human attitudes and behaviour that I want to explore, and here the danger, as always, is compounded by the words we use and the silent way they shape our readings of a text and ‘understanding’ of the past.

Three examples from ‘Owain or The Lady of the Well’ from the Mabinogion. Translations are by Sioned Davies unless otherwise stated. 

The basic scenario which underlies the story is that every knight who finds the well of the title has been told what to do when he gets there: throw a bowl of water on the stone. This initiates a chain of events which ends with the arrival of a Black Knight. The knights then fight until one of them is beaten. The assumption in the story world is that no one finds the well by accident, and every knight who finds it is therefore looking for a fight.

Owain, the ‘hero’ of the story, mortally wounds the Black Knight, and chases him to his castle where he is trapped by a falling portcullis. He is saved by Luned, who hides him in an upstairs room. 

Example 1

Owain watches the funeral of the man he’s just killed from his hiding place, and at the end of the procession sees a beautiful but distraught woman.

And when he saw the woman he was inflamed with love for her until it filled every part of him.

Owain asked the maiden [Luned] who the lady was.

‘God Knows.’ says the maiden, ‘a woman you could say is the most beautiful of women, and the most chaste, and the most generous and wisest and noblest. She is my mistress, known as the Lady of the Well, the wife of the man you killed yesterday’.

‘God Knows’, said Owain, ‘she is the woman I love best.’ 

‘God knows’, said the maiden, ‘there is no way she loves you, not in the very slightest.’  

Jones and Jones, in a more literal rendering of her reply give it as ‘ God knows’, said the Maiden, ‘she loves not thee, neither a little nor at all.’

What Owain says is: ‘Duw a wyr arnaf, mae mwyhaf gwreic a garaf I yw hi’

garaf is from karu/caru, which is translated as ‘to love’. There’s no option. 

It’s related to the noun ‘Karyat/cariad ’ that names what fills every part of him and inflames him and can be translated as love, affection, fondness or friendship, though here it’s translated as ‘love’.  

Luned’s response sounds like the voice of modern reason. But in the world of the story, it isn’t. Whatever ‘love’ meant to the original audience, it is a very different collection of emotions than those we might associate with it today. Consider the second example.

Example 2

Luned will try to trick her mistress into accepting Owain as her new husband. Her approach is brazen. She finds her mistress grieving over her dead husband who she’s just buried. Luned asks her what’s wrong with her. The Countess is surprised. 

‘God knows, said Luned, ‘I really did think you would have more sense. It would be better for you to start worrying about replacing your husband than wish for something you can never have back’.

‘Between me and god’, said the countess, ‘I could never replace my lord with any other man in the world.’  

‘Yes you could’, said Luned, ‘marry someone as good as he, or better.’

The Countess’s initial reaction is understandable, She tells Luned to get out and never come back. But Luned points out the Kingdom can only be protected by deeds of arms, so the Countess needs a new man quickly. While the countess is initially offended by this, she also accepts its logic. Luned pretends she has gone to Arthur’s court to find a better man than the dead one. When she tries to pass off Owain as the man she’s found, the countess sees through the ruse, perhaps proving Luned’s description of her wisdom. 

The Lady looks at Owein, and points out he doesn’t look like a man who’s been travelling.

‘What harm is in that lady?’

‘Between me and god’, said the Countess, ‘this in none other than the man who took away my Lord’s life’.

Luned replies ‘All the better for you Lady; had he not been stronger than your lord he would have not taken his life. Nothing can be done about that’, she said, ‘since it is over and done with’.

At no point in the interview does Owain speak. His character and personality, if he has either, are irrelevant.  

Example 3

The Lady calls a meeting of her realm and puts the problem before them. Either one of them marries her and defends the well…or she is free to take a husband from somewhere else. 

If Owain’s love for the lady sounds like a dreamy infatuation of an adolescent with a wall poster, as far as ‘love’ goes this seems to be the defining moment in the story. She’s beautiful, wise, intelligent, rich. And not one man in her lands wants to marry her. In this story world not one man in her realm desires the Countess or her wealth. 

The reason for this is fairly obvious. 

Her Husband becomes the new Black Knight and he has to ride out every time a passing knight comes to the well and risk his life in combat. He has no choice. One day he will meet his match, or a strap will break, his horse will stumble, or a weapon will shatter and he will die.  

And the men of her kingdom are quite happy to let an outsider take that risk..

She marries Owain. Up to this point, she hasn’t spoken to him nor he to her.

Imagine the wedding night.

We hear of Owain’s subsequent career as the Black Knight, but nothing about his dealings with his wife. He will abandon her for three years. He will go mad and eventually be reunited with her. But they never speak to one another in the story. 

We translate what Owain feels for the Lady as ‘love’, but we have to accept that this is in no way a ‘transhistorical’ emotion.  

The Lady’s body is tied into her role as Countess of the Well…she is the wife of the Black Knight, and the Black Knight is whoever is currently defending the fountain.

Her husband is always going to be the man who killed her husband. 

It’s a story, but in this storyworld the body is not a private, privileged space. Just as Owain has no choice once he marries her. His body is now at the mercy of every passing Knight. 

Arthur turns up with a retinue three thousand strong. After he has beaten Kei, Owain pitches his tent and fights (by implication) every one of them except Gwalchmei. It’s an absurd logic, but he doesn’t seem able to avoid the consequences of his position, any more than the Lady can avoid a wedding night with a passing stranger who just killed her previous bedfellow.

It's fairly obvious that this story represents a very different attitude towards the body, to the way society organised the relationships between the sexes, to the way people regarded themselves and each other. And it’s not unique to this story nor is it only fictional.

I’ll get back to Uther eventually.    

The joys of (West-Midlands) Slang (dictionaries)

Slang dictionaries have a seductive subversive irresponsibility. Some, especially Australian ones, are dangerously funny and achieve a ribald poetry; others like the canting dictionaries of the renaissance are relics of an alternative universe peopled by rufflers and upright men, jarkmen, bawdy baskets, doxies and kinching morts .
So I have been wallowing in Chambers new Dictionary of Slang; the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and some Tudor and early Stuart “Rogues Literature” surfacing occasionally to cross check words in the OED or Brewer’s. It’s far too enjoyable to call research.
I’ve come to the unexceptional conclusion that at some stage in the history of English almost every common word has been press ganged from its standard usage to do service as a term for something completely different. In fact, in the wrong place and time, the most innocuous sounding phrase would probably be interpreted as obscene or as evidence of membership of some kind of illegal or secret society.
But while I enjoy slang dictionaries, I remain sceptical. Even the huge Chambers leaves out terms I grew up with. How is standard usage of a slang term established? How many people have to use it and for how long before it gets recorded?

Soon after I came to Australia I read an article in the travel section of a national newspaper which purported to be the results of the journalist’s interest in West Midlands slang. I thought I’d grown up speaking it fairly fluently, or at least playing rugby with people who were experts. So it came as some surprise to learn that in the west midlands a “shag” is a type of bread roll.

The young lady journalist told her readers that if they went into a bakery in the region and asked for a “hot buttered shag” they would be offered a warm bread roll with toasted cheese on top.

So here’s my dilemma about slang dictionaries. Where I grew up, in the west midlands, and where I went to uni, still in the west midlands, if you went into a bakery and asked for a hot buttered shag they would have assumed a) you were nuts, b) into some really weird kind of perversion or c) taking the mickey. But does that mean that nowhere in the wide west midlands this term wasn’t used? Does this mean that somewhere some poor guy was wondering why his girl friend had stopped talking to him after he’d innocently offered her a bread roll?

If you lived in Coventry you knew that people in Wolverhampton spoke a strange and mysterious language. Even the move to Birmingham was fraught with incomprehension. (ok, not so bad as being English and arriving in Australia and hearing the phrase “shag on a rock” or “look at that hunk of spunk over there”..but still enough to make you wary.)

I imagine two codgers in a pub, reluctantly accepting free drinks and earnestly answering the young lady Journalist’s questions. Everyone knows the English are serious unimaginative literal minded people (unlike the Irish) and so they can be trusted to tell the God’s honest. I can also imagine two said codgers pissing themselves when she left having told her to go ask for a hot buttered shag in the local bakers. Maybe things have changed. Maybe there is such a thing, (after all you can go into a shop in Qld and ask for a Gaytime) but in the world I grew up in I’d love to have been there to see the baker’s face, and his customers’, if she did….

Dream, semiotic, symbolic

The modern English “Dream” comes from the old English noun Dream: gladness delight, ecstasy, mirth, rejoicing, melody, music, singing, minstrelsy.
The verb dryman, means to sing aloud or to rejoice. Though the noun drymann means a sorcerer or magician. Music as magic.

So the obsolete meanings in English: Joy/pleasure, gladness/mirth rejoicing…the sound of musical instruments/music. Melody, minstrelsy melody noise sound.

Music as dream, as sorcery, time travel, rejoicing. Mirth. A dream of something worth while and very ancient.

Up the mountain to play on a Friday night for a change. I’ve driven that road almost every Sunday for three or four years. I’ve driven down in the dark so many times, but never up. The familiar road now totally unfamiliar; disorientating. Somehow it evokes so many night drives the car curves upwards and time starts to slip.

The pub sits on a slight rise; light streaming from windows. Smoke from the chimney. The moon’s up. Walking in from the car park; the dark wall broken by the windows which frame colour and light inside; outside dark quiet, cold. Crossing an abrupt threshold, into light and noise; music and voices. In daylight there is liminal space. Here there are borders/edges/abrupt transitions. It’s like falling asleep and entering a different space which seems to have come unmoored from its context.

We play. We dream: rejoice, celebrate, laugh. Make music. But also dream in the modern sense: caught in fluid dislocations of time. Song is Kristeva’s semiotic, but the songs and the singer co-exist in monumental time. Singing as time travel, diving into the song and finding only other songs and memories of their performance… words and melody unreeling images: Molly Malone, the tart with the cart. In the rare old times, we ride on to the red rose café where I tell the story of my cousin, Arthur Macbride and what we did to the recruiting sergeant. Leaving Liverpool via fisherman’s green we meet Captain Farrel, wishing he was back home in Derry, who is doomed yet again to get held up in some dirty old town.

If this were a dream then the narrative would slide around a corner and looking up I’ll find myself back in the Fisherman’s arms in Golant twenty years ago. But in the real world, in monumental time, I am still there, in the fisherman’s arms, twenty years ago, Mick’s coming back from the bar with the drinks and the rowing club boys are making so much noise I can’t hear my guitar, let alone tune it. Who cares. It’s a Friday night. The moon’s up. We will stagger home later, up Harry’s hill, pausing to look down at the moonlight on the boats moored in the Fowey.

If we’re lucky the Owl will be sitting on the gate.

After Ten O’clock the place empties out. The bar becomes a score after the orchestra have left the stage. Even the light seems tired and flat, unable to shine off anything. The echoes have retreated to the corners, unable to sound. It’s a comfortable space. A few late arrivals wander in and ask if there is any music.

Driving down the mountain, far too tired, what a friend used to call road stoned. drifting round the bends, drifting in and out of memories of night drives and night conversations, not really sure If I’m awake at all.

I’m convinced I’ve just been to Heorot.

Fortunately, I’m home, parked, asleep, before Grendle or his mum can put in an appearance.

Dan Gerous and E. Mergency seek the Mad Ness Monster

I grew up with Dan Gerous, that well known French Canadian outlaw and his friend E. Mergency. There was also Fatty Gew and Cal Iber. The Mahogany Gas Pipes I never understood (Until I read Last Night’s Fun), and the Stew Barbed Wire and Rhubarb was confusing.

A love of verbal play:

If you mean to insinuate that I will tolerate such diabolical insolence from a such a miserable specimen of anatomy as yourself, you are wrongly governed by a misapprehension of false ideas;

and a delight in nonsense:

One Fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead men got up to fight
Three blind men to seek their way
Four dumb men to shout hoorary!
A legless Donkey walking by
Kicked the blind man in the eye
Knocked him through a nine inch wall
Into a dry pond and drowned them all.

(although to be honest, the last four lines of the above have always seemed sinister).

It’s tempting to ascribe the word play to the Anglo-Irish tradition, point an accusing finger at Joyce, and god knows they were all great talkers when they got going, fine story tellers, masters of the digression, but you can also trace the pleasure in verbal nonsense through English culture too; think Shakespeare, Lewis Carol, the Two Ronnies:

Lady Olivia swept down the grand staircase in her ball gown and then she dusted the china.

and those wonderful, awful music hall puns:

I say I say I say. My Wife’s gone on holiday to the West Indies
Jamaica
No, she went of her own accord.

Or the Goons:

How do I get out of here. The door is locked.
Turn the nob on your side
I haven’t got a nob on my side!

But I think that it’s partly the migrant’s revenge. Unable to escape the normalizing effects of English, with all its class and racial assumptions built into syntax and diction and accent, you could at least shrug it loose occasionally by turning it back on itself and underlining its own absurdities.
Nonsense in children is play; nonsense in adults is subversion or madness. But it’s a Dan Gerous game. If you can imagine the legless donkey walking by, you're not far from Mad Ness(That little known scotish loch):
“If I should return during my absence keep me here until I come back”. (Quoted in David Cooper: ”The Language of Madness”.)

Anno 2009. Her Bligh rice onfeng

So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(And without the weird Hilary Clinton I'm a woman, you're a woman, why aren't you voting for me ploy.)
But that phrase from the Chronicle, in this year x came to power/acquired the Kingdom/come into the ruler ship...reveals the problem not so much of translation but of understanding.
Imagine Godwin or Leofric, Harold or William the Bastard, resurrected to watch the election campaign. They were astute men used to the getting of power. But would they have had a chance of understanding or appreciating what was happening? The juxtaposition, the image of them sitting in the commentary box sending dispatches home as the election unfolds, reveals the problem.
Those nouns and verbs in Old English which describe power can be easily translated into modern English. And t'other way round. You could explain things like Parliaments in terms of Witan or Moot, and the idea of election wouldn't have been too alien (certainly not to Harold). But the translations mask the realities. To rule, to govern, a kingdom, a nation, a state, a King, even "to be elected" don't mean the same thing now as then, can't mean the same thing now as then.
SO our encounter with the past, which is irremediably other, is domesticated and familiarised simply though the effect of language. Not just the vocabulary but the syntax too, of which much more later.
Hardly an original thought, but enough for a Sunday morning...
So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(I like that, said Offa, sing it again!)

Reading Asser’s life of Alfred

In an edition with no notes, no critical apparatus, which is to say reading it for the fun of it. It’s been too long since I read the life of Charlemagne which is supposed to be its model. I can’t help but like someone who uses such overblown metaphors to say “I’ve drifted off my subject”. Why he didn’t go back and delete the digressions in his draft is a moot point. Either he couldn’t be bothered, or the whole thing is a rhetorical strategy to have it both ways. But I like him. I like the way he squirms round the fact that the king holds him in high esteem, and he obviously thinks Alfred is Great, but he’s still doing his best to sound “objective”. And I’m sure someone has argued that “him” isn’t really Asser and this is just Wessex propaganda, but this time I don’t really care.

But above all that sense, as with all dark age texts, of language being used to map a version of the world, giving it coherence and shape it essentially lacked. Those words: King, Ruled, Kingdom. With all their modern connotations, of process, law, organization, predictability, don’t quite capture the huddle of cold dirty men standing together in the wind, watching the Vikings burning another settlement. Under Asser’s tales of Alfred’s love of learning and his struggle with piles is a world of ongoing brutality and violence. What must it have been like for Alfred’s family, for the families of his ealdormen and thanes? How must it have shaped the simplest of relationship or friendship? When he’s not inventing time pieces and translating, Alfred is hacking Danes, or planning the hacking of Danes and trying to avoid being blood eagled by Danes.

If there was a poetry of the abattoir, it would be like this; and you have to look at it slantwise, eyes half shut, to see and hear the messy reality under the rhetoric.

The Old English “Wanderer”.

The Old English “Wanderer”.

Coming home, after only two years. Top of the Humber hill, and I’m seeing what I expect to see, except what I expect to see is no longer there. There’s a small roundabout at the bottom of the hill and the factory has gone. The latter is almsot impossible to take in.

The end of The Wanderer starts chiming in my head.

Eald enta geweorc idlu stodon

Earlier in the year I had reviewed two books of Old English translations, and though it doesn’t appear in the reviews, I went line by line through the two translations of the wanderer, comparing them with the original. Which is probably why random bits of the poem are stuck in my head.

In the poem the speaker has encountered his worst nightmare…his lord is dead, his kin are gone, and alone, he travels across a hostile landscape in search of a new Lord. For an Anglo-Saxon in the heroic age, this is as bad as it gets. There’s nothing remotely romantic about his isolation. He is lost and vulnerable. He reflects on a ruin, on the transience of life, and he laments its passing.

Both the translations are what could be described as formal equivalence. They transfer the Old English into Modern English by finding the nearest equivalent word in Modern English. And while I may be critical of the occasional choices, I have nothing but respect for anyone who can translate and keep to the original metrical patterns.

There’s another type of translation, called Dynamic Equivalence. In which the translator attempts to create in the target audience the same effect the original had on the original audience.

I don’t have a lot of time for the idea that works like The Wanderer need to be rewritten or revisioned for the modern age… that it has to be “made relevant” by importing modern paraphernalia. A) This pseudo intellectual waffle assumes the modern reader is too stupid to see the relevance in the original metaphor (as though someone had to point out to the original audience that this is a meditation on life from a Christian perspective as well as a dramatically realised incident) and b) it usually leads to a diminishing of the original text.

But if you were going to do a dynamic equivalence, then imagine a speaker with a solid fulfilling career and a good relationship with his or her boss. Imagine the boss moves on…the company “down sizes’..suddenly unemployed the speaker can’t pay off debts, the flat is repossessed. Packing personal possessions in the car, he or she sets off for new accommodation, hoping to find a new job soemwhere else, driving past the factory: it has changed names enough time in my life time…the Humber, Roots, Chrysler, Talbot, Peugeot. Gone. A locked gate that protects nothing, a broken façade facing the road, a vast muddy space behind railings speckled with fat sea gulls and silent mechanical diggers discarded as the light fails:

The Maker of men hath so marred this dwelling
That human laughter is not heard about it
And idle stand these old giant works…

How to make historical characters sound historical.

Robert Graves claimed that in his novel about the wife of Milton, he used no words that were not in current usage when his characters were alive.

It’s a splendid Gravesian maneuver. Who’s going to sit there with the OED and check every word? And even if you did, and found some evidence to challenge his claim, I suspect Graves’ ghost would come back and argue that the OED was wrong and he knew better. This was the man who delighted in proving that the details in the I Claudius novels could all be substantiated.

So how do historical characters speak? If you’re really worried about this then, since we know both Godgifu and Leofric spoke Old English, it would be theoretically possible to write their dialogue in that language. Except my OE grammar isn’t that good. But even if it was, who else would read it? And what would be the point?

There are popular routes to follow. Not OE, ME or NE but PHS-‘Pseudo Historical speak’. Throw in some thee and thous, a few God Wot’s and By our Lady’s, and someone somewhere will think you’re recreating the sound of a person in the past talking.

My problem is I wouldn’t be that someone. If you read any Middle English, or even just Shakespeare, neither sounds like PHS. And there’s a pedantic presence (come to think of it, he looks a bit like Graves), that reaches for the OED, or something like Crystal’s “Shakespeare’s Words’ and wants to point out that thee and thou not only have grammatical meanings, but also shades of social meaning, and most “pseudo-historical” misses both.

The other PHS move is to rupture the syntax: God’s Bones and teeth and toenails, knowest thou not, thou fiend most foul, Lady Digberry my good lady is to be my affianced, by our Lady ?

Even Joyce, in the Oxen of the Sun, mangles the ME bits. Graves was a stickler for detail. But even he doesn't make Claudius speak English in Latin word order.

No, the solution I think is to ignore the question. Or to say, you don't even bother trying. Since I am writing in Modern English (NE), my character will sound like they are speaking naturally in Modern English. If Peeping Tom swore in ME, then he can swear in NE. But he’ll swear like a modern person, not by god’s bits.
The historical background, where possible, functional, or necessary, will be accurate.

Reinventing the past

The Latin legends, like the picture, prove the fact that we reinvent the past by viewing it through the lens of our own assumptions. The 19th century pictures of Lady G (and she was a popular topic) show her in a Coventry that never existed and certainly doesn't look anything like the settlement that would have been there in the 11th century.

For the ride to have occurred we need a town, a developed community, a market place and a charter of Liberties. While Leofric and Godiva probably did have a residence in the 1050s, the "town" was an agricultural community growing up around the religious foundation. (Two years ago, at a talk on Coventry's archeology, the pre conquest, post roman settlement was described as 'obscure".)Think West Stow with a church. While riding round something that looked like West Stow is easier to imagine the real reason why I'd bet a stack of currently devalued Australian Dollars she didn't do it, is that a free noble-woman in Anglo Saxon England possibly enjoyed legal and economic status that wouldn't be regained until the late 19th, early 20th century.

The flaw in the whole story, is that any taxes or tolls levelled on the people of Coventry, that weren't the King's, (and which couldn't be tampered with) went to Godgifu herself. She 'owned' the settlement at Coventry, not Leofric.

Unlike married women for the next eight hundred years, an Anglo-saxon wife could hold land in her own right. While not as rich as her husband, Godgifu was the wealthiest woman in England at the time of the Conquest.

Writing over a hundred years later, the first tellers of the tale simply couldn't imagine a world where married women held land independently of their husbands. Presumably neither could Tennyson, eight hundred years or so later...

Which raises the obvious question. Where did such a story originate?

The History

Godiva is the Latin form of Godgifu. Women’s names in Old English do not end in A in the nominative. That simple act of renaming, which ignores cultural and linguistic conventions, is the real clue to the process by which an historical character came to be associated with something that probably never happened.

Godgiefu, or Godgifu, God’s gift, did exist and she did play an important role in the development of Coventry and late Anglo-Saxon England. She was the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia.

Not much is known about her except her connection to Coventry and the fact that by 1067 she was one of the wealthiest women in England.

She and her husband founded, or reestablished, a religious institution where Coventry now is, in about 1043, dedicating it to St Mary, St Osberg and All Saints.

There had already been a convent there which had been sacked by the Danes in or about 1016. Its Abbess, Osberg, had been martyred. Little is known about the early foundation or its abbess, except that she died and courtesy of Godiva and Leofric her head ended up on the alter in a jewel spangled box.

The couple were noted benefactors, and amongst the things that they were supposed to have donated to their new establishment was a reliquary holding the arm of Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Stumbling over such little gems of information is what makes doing research for a project like Lady Godiva and me so enthralling. But while it sent me spinning off on a productive sidetrack for now the digressions can wait.

Although her dates are sketchy, she outlived Leofric.
Before he died there is some evidence that that Coventry may have become their chief residence if not their permanent home.

Their granddaughter was twice a Queen. First of Wales, then married to the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, probably in a move designed to appease her bothers, whose activities in 1066 probably didn’t make Grandma proud. She was alive after the conquest, recorded as one of the richest women in England, and was buried by Leofric’s side in Coventry.

And the ride?

Remember that mistranslation.