The Tale of Zeus and Dame Ragnelle

No, it will make sense. Bear with me.

So, I’ve a conference next week at which I’m speaking on The Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, a mid-15C analogue of the Loathly Lady tale that also appears in, for example, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. The fact that the conference theme is “Intimacy: Family, Friendship and Fealty” means that I can’t just go haring off after the diversion that occurred to me last night, so: once more unto the blog!

The history of the Loathly Lady figure relative to Irish sovereignty tales (in which the lady represents the country) has been well established.  I have no citations by me, as I am writing this on the bus, but I believe Frederick Madden had something to say about it in his collection of Gawain stories, and it goes on from there according to the usual patterns of late 19-early 20C myth-discovery.  That is, therefore, the accepted mythical ancestor of the figure, and as hunting out mythological precedents is rather out of fashion and the genealogy is well traced I don’t believe  anyone has thought to dispute it, or posit any additional ancestor.

But surely the obvious classical precedent is the god-who-comes-to-dinner? Zeus, or some other god (usually Zeus as the patron of hospitality), disguises him/herself as some ugly, poor old beggar and asks for shelter and food. Or, of course, for help crossing a river, etc.  This is a test, the protagonist responds according to their moral stature, and the god suddenly sheds his unprepossessing exterior to reveal himself in all his glory to pass judgement on the protagonist, along with appropriate reward or punishment.  I don’t recall offhand whether any examples of that trope appear in Ovid, but it’s entirely in keeping with the system of virtue and reward evident in the Aeneid, to consider just two of the most culturally influential classical texts extant in the Middle Ages.

The main linking device is, of course, the transformation: a disguised stranger who appeared unworthy according to the ideals of the genre – poor and old and helpless in Greek mythology, disgusting and unmannerly and often old in romance – is suddenly transformed into the epitome of those ideals. In addition:

• the transformation is in direct response to the actions of the protagonist towards the stranger,
• in entering the narrative, the stranger will, explicitly or otherwise, initiate a kind of test for the protagonist, in which their response demonstrates (and thereby establishes) their virtue,
• the stranger retains to him/herself the authority to pass judgement on the protagonist’s actions after the return transformation (rather than delegating that task to the narrator), claiming the status of moral arbiter of the narrative,
• similarly, the stranger him/herself dispenses punishment or reward.

The trouble with this is that it’s a bit of a jump from Greek mythology to mediaeval romance.  And there is a good deal of cultural filtering and reconditioning that must take place there to make any Greek story (or figure) have any relevance to a late-mediaeval audience.

So where else can we find a more immediate precedent to this figure, a precedent that provides a type of bridging device between classical myth and late-mediaeval readership? a precedent in a tradition that is entirely accustomed to absorbing classical and/or pagan stories and recasting them to its own set of moral values?

Well:

... whanne Seint Iulian reste hym aboute midnyght al forweried [weary] and the wedyr colde and a gret froste, he herde a vois that wepte piteously and cried: 'Iulian, helpe me ouer for Goddes loue or ellis I perische for greuous colde.' And whanne he herde that voys he arose al sodenly [immediately] and passed the colde water and founde that pore creature that deied nigh for colde, toke hym up and bere hym to his hous and light the fere and dede al his diligence to warme hym. And as he myght in no wise make hym take warmthe he toke hym in his armes and bare hym to his bedde... And a litell after he that apered to be so sike and as a foule lepre stied vp shinyng into heuene, saieng to his oste: 'Iulian, oure Lorde hathe sent me to the, sendyng the to saie that he hathe receiued thi and ye bothe shull reste in oure Lorde witheinne a litell tyme' And anone he vanished awaye... (Gilte Legende, ed. Richard Hamer, EETS 2006; v. 1, 144)

Appropriately enough, that comes from the story of St Julian Hospitaller, Zeus’ descendant in the role of protecting the sacred laws of hospitality and defending the safety of guests.  But it works perfectly well in a Christian context, thus refigured – well enough that throughout the Gilte Legende (and elsewhere), saints and even Jesus himself regularly pop up where they’re not expected, mysteriously disguised, usually as someone helpless, and initiate a test of some kind or another.  Quite of a piece with the popular belief that saints really could interfere in a very material way with everyday life – all your big brothers are watching you.

So, if Dame Ragnelle has cross-genre precedents in, for example, St Julian and others, can we expect that her contemporary audience might have recognised them and picked up on the currents? I think so – if nothing else, Ragnelle seems to deliberately play with the collision of genre, pushing herself forcibly into society, conscious of her own incongruity and playing it for all it’s worth with her fine clothes and horse.  If so, the audience could expect her at her appearance to make demands which would set up a challenge as a moral test – apparently for both Arthur and Gawain. And she does, tests which Gawain passes and Arthur fails (largely by fobbing responsibility off on his nephew).

But if she refers to or recalls testing figures in hagiography, does this have an effect on what is being tested? Courtly virtues? Christian ones?  The story of St Julian explicitly opposes the life of the court (and its values) with the humble Christian values that  attend helping mysterious sick strangers (for which you have to live in an isolated hut beside a ‘flode’). The Wife of Bath’s nameless loathly lady gives a pillow-lecture that could be read as being in opposition to ‘courtly’ virtues. And Gawain, when his ugly wife has become beautiful, thanks God for her deliverance from a curse (and presumably for his from the equally horrible fate of having to look on her all the time). Perhaps Arthur’s failure is that he tries to adhere to courtly virtues which are (or could be read as) so dependent on appearance as reflective of personal status.

Chaucer, out of the mouths (et al) of babes.

Let it be known that 12-day-old Elizabeth is already developing literary opinions. She likes the Knight, is indifferent to the Squire, abhors the Shipman, dribbles at the descriptions of the Franklin's feasts and passes gas at the Cook. Most promising, she gets very excited about the Clerk, waves her arms enthusiastically at the idea of having more books in her room than pretty things and claps her hands to her mouth excitedly at the talk of buying books even without being able to get a benefice (tenure?). Let us hope she doesn't emulate him so far as to borrow money for books and forget to pay it back.

Dryden his Tale of the Wyf of Bathe

Only one of my courses for this semester is mediaeval: the other is as close as I can get, restoration literature. Which means I actually have to read up and remember what the Rump Parliament did and memorise a new set of names and motivations and get a feel for the time and develop an opinion on Cromwell's motives and, far from least, read a lot of new work by people like Dryden, Pope, Milton, Marvell, Sidney and a certain Earl of Ill-repute.

The only text I've actually acquired so far is not the stipulated edition of Dryden's poems (ed. Hammond and Hopkins), but a much prettier one, which is a very important consideration, the Globe edition published in 1881 by W. D. Christie, still with beautifully tight binding, and containing a lengthy and very Victorian account of his life, complete with repeated assurances that he was a very discerning man because he liked Shakespeare when no one else of his era bothered with him, and repeated moralising judgements on his lifestyle and relationship with his wife. It pleases me very much.

What pleased me more, of course, was the discovery that he had 'translated' some of Chaucer's poems from the Canterbury Tales. So of course I was immediately distracted from questions like "which of these poems are we likely to be studying this semester" to questions like "ooo, what does he do with this line or that line in the tale of madame de Bath?"

The answer tends to be that the actual lines stay the same, but the setting and connotations shift - sometimes quite a way.

For example, he takes Chaucer's 'fairyland' introduction and makes something sanitised and pretty of it, with some very Shakespearean fairies:

The king of elves and little fairy queen

Gambolled on heaths, and danced in every green;

And where the jolly troop had led the round,

The grass unbidden rose, and marked the ground.

Nor darkling did they dance; the silver light

Of Phoebe served to guide their steps aright,

And, with their tripping pleased, prolonged the night. (3-9)

Compare this to Chaucer's simple

Al was this land / fulfild of ffairye
The Elf queene / with hir ioly compaignye
Daunced ful ofte / in many a grene mede [1] (3-5)

Dryden then casts this into nostalgia in returning to the present day:

I speak of ancient times, for now the swain
Returning late may pass the woods in vain,
And never hope to see the nightly train. (16-18)

Despite Chaucer’s “ ther as wont/ to walken was an Elf / Ther walketh now...” form (17-18), he has no palpable sense of loss or regret. He remains more matter-of-fact, stating that one existed and the other exists, while Dryden repeats “in vain” three times in six lines (17-22) and depicts milkmaids[2] sighing over uneaten cream left out for the little folk. Interestingly, the effect of this is resentment against the priests and friars, which translates nicely into an anti-papist sentiment that is, naturally, missing in poor Chaucer’s original.

The other interesting thing in this introduction is the depiction of these little country rituals relating to the fairies:

In vain the dairy now with mints is dress'd,
The dairymaid expects no fairy guest,
To skim the bowls, and after pay the feast.
She sighs and shakes her empty shoes in vain,
No silver penny to reward her pain. (19-23)

I didn’t know about the mints, or that the fairies were meant to leave payment in your shoe (conflation with the fairy cobbler idea?). Perhaps the lack of fairies in Britain today can be directly attributed to the lack of mints.



[1] Sadly, I lack my Riverside, so quotes from the Tale come from a transcript of the Hengwrt manuscript, because that's more fun to read.
[2] Does the pastoral count as idealistic nostalgic in itself at this point? If Shakespeare was any indication, I’d guess so. Civet is of a baser birth than tar, after all!

Musings on the Canterbury Tales and double-narration

The problem with the Canterbury Tales is that it’s impossible to know, in any given tale or exchange, to what extent Chaucer is being serious and to what extent he’s subverting what he appears to be serious about. Is The Knight’s Tale a straightforward solemn tale of chivalric values and nobility, or is it a complete parody of those tales, the characters it portrays and the society that spawned them? Are we meant to take the Prioress’ virulent anti-Semitism completely seriously, or believe that Chaucer was poking fun of the prejudices of his own society and actually thought Jews were rather nice? I think most critics today would agree that the answer falls somewhere between these two extremes, which would render any attempt to come up with a solid, consistent interpretation rather futile. The difficulty is not just that each tale carries multiple meanings but that those meanings often seem to be mutually exclusive, as if there were two voices constructing the tale, competing for dominance, each contradicting the other in what they want the audience to believe.

Well, but there are, aren’t there? The Miller tells the story to the pilgrims, but who tells it to us?

The Miller’s Tale is indisputably a fabliau, however you choose to define that genre. It contains sex romps, lascivious descriptions of the female body, explicit language, fools being duped, savoir conquering avoir, subversion of the regular social order, and of course farting. As such, it’s exactly the sort of tale the drunken Miller would tell, particularly in the context of “quiting” the Knight’s tale of chivalry and nobility. The trouble is, the tale we actually have is beyond the capabilities of that man "that for dronken was al pale, / So that unnethe [hardly] upon his hors he sat" (I A 3120-21). On the most literal level, he’s far too drunk to consistently rhyme a long poem to that standard. If you protest that ‘twere to consider too curiously to consider thus, do we believe the Miller has the vocabulary to discuss in such detail the workings of alchemy? or the university learning to give us Nicholas’ speeches and quote Solomon? Most seriously, the subtle little moments that warn of distant judgement and remind us of morality and sin could never have come from the Miller, to undermine the characters whose antics he seems to relish so.

And thus lith [lie] Alison and Nicholas
In bisynesse of myrthe and of solas,
Til that the belle of laudes gan to rynge,
And freres [friars] in the chauncel gonne [began to] synge. (I A 3653-56)

The passing of time during their bedroom frolics could be described or marked in any number of ways, but this and the continual glancing references to the social presence of religion (Absolom first sees Alisoun at mass, etc) shape a subtle commentary to the decidedly profane actions in counterpoint to them, well beyond the abilities - or interest - of the Miller.

So, let us hypothesise the presence of another author/narrator here, and let us call him... Geoffrey?

The Canterbury Tales is presented as a recounting of pilgrim-Chaucer's journey and the tales the pilgrims tell to each other. But are we meant to be experiencing it as pilgrim-Chaucer does - hearing the words of the others just as he does - or are we supposed to be reading his later retelling of it, reshaped through the poet's pen into the form of verse? One narrator, laid over the other, doubling and reshaping what the first has given us? I'm probably considering too curiously again, but distinguishing between the Miller and pilgrim-Chaucer would imply a division, and possibly contention, between type/content and form/detail of the poem. This double-narrator effect would account for the internal contradictions, and the impression the tale gives of mocking itself.

The same theory could then be extended to The Reeve's Tale, in which the malicious delight of the narrator in tearing down the miller and seeing his wife and daughter raped/seduced is underminded by quiet details of the characterisation of the students, the women, and the narrator himself. The solemn, high tone of the Knight in telling his tale is undercut by the bickering of Palamoun and Arcites, by the initial uncertainty of the narrator, by Theseus' possibly self-serving attitude to ruling, and the Prioress' self-righteous hysteria by the tiresome depiction of little Hugh and the extravagance of the Jews' eviler-than-Dr-Evil evilness.

The same quietly sardonic voice undercuts the apparent tone of all those tales, and it's tempting to ascribe it to Chaucer. It's tempting to use the double-narrator idea to read, dissect, pin down, all the tales and the intermediary scenes. But it doesn't really hold up as a consistent theory.

Firstly, which Chaucer are we talking about - Chaucer-the-pilgrim or Chaucer-the-poet (and is there really any point distinguishing between them)? If the first, can we believe that the wide-eyed, eager pilgrim of the Prologue and the bombastic poet of Sir Thopas could slyly undermine the stories he retells in this way? If the second - well, we knew Chaucer was the poet anyway, so ascribing the retelling to him demolishes the whole point of the double-narrator theory altogether.

Secondly, the same sardonic voice is present in every other poem of Chaucer's that I've read, despite the lack of narrator-layering. In fact, Chaucer's ability to simultaneously construct and demolish is (to my mind) one of the most characteristic things about him.

Thirdly, the theory itself is mostly an extension of an assumption which rests on taking the characters entirely too literally, as real people rather than poetic creations in themselves.

But surely we're supposed to believe in these characters? If not, where's the story? And if so, surely by the same token we are meant to take the Knight seriously, and feel the same lasciviousness regarding Alisoun as the Miller does in describing her, and want to see and enjoy the Friar's Summoner getting his come-uppance, as all summoners we know deserve. We have to be involved on an emotional level with the ostensible intent of the story, not only because it makes the subtle questioning more effective and potent if we feel ourselves morally implicated as well as the characters, but because it simply makes a better story that way.



Quotes from the Canterbury Tales taken, of course, from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.