That Which We Call Ælfwaru…

It may surprise you to learn that, according to the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project, run by Kings College London, there was not a single landowner in England in 1066 by the name of Æthelred. This oh-so-characteristic Anglo-Saxon name was evidently suffering a massive dip in popularity, only 50 years after the death of the chronically inept king Æthelred the Unready (Ill-Advised). Christopher Lewis, who took part in the project, has likened this to the unlikelihood of any German boys born post-1945 being called Adolf.

Common names give a pretty good indication of the cultural sensibilities of a period. Something as cataclysmic as the Norman Conquest inevitably had an effect on the names of people from all social strata – initially within the landowning classes, but eventually across the whole of England. One of the multiple reasons for my concentrated hatred of Ken Follett’s World Without End is the author’s lack of distinction between Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and Anglo-Norman or French names. Are we really to believe that, two and a half centuries after the Conquest, Elfrics, Wulfrics and Godwins really live cheek-by-jowl with Alices, Cecilias and Matildas? What is the statistical likelihood of aristos Gerald and Maud calling their sons Ralph and Merthin?

But more generally, there is an unfortunate lack of medieval-sounding names in use in the English-speaking world. At one end, the market is being heroically supported by Thorlac Turville-Petre and Scyld Berry, but for obvious reasons they are in a tiny minority. One of the younger fellows in the Medieval English department here has joked that her children will be given gratuitously medieval names – Æthelfleda was one suggestion – and someone in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic shortlisted names of Irish saints for her recently-born son. As these cases may suggest, is the use of such names to be restricted to academics?

Amongst the many names I’ve ‘promised’ to call my future offspring, I count ‘Banjo’, ‘Turtle’, ‘Endymion Oberon Amadeus’, ‘Marco’, ‘Aurelio’, ‘Marcus Aurelius’, ‘Mary Tokyo Banjo Iphigenia’, ‘Saint Thomasina Cantilupe’, ‘Wulfstan’, ‘Æthelthryth’, ‘Carmina Burana’ and ‘Constantine’. Many of these names were approved when drunk, but obviously I am more likely than most to give a medieval name if inspiration were to be sought. If a daughter should be named after a feminist icon, Hildegard and Hrotsvitha are as likely to occur to me as Emmeline and Gloria. You may pity the fool who names a son Chrodegang, but in the grand scheme of crap names I don’t see this as any worse than Brayden.

All of this may speak of an unconscious snobbery on my part, that children with obscurely intelligent names must have intelligent parents and that, in the brave new world where Katie Hopkins is our vampire overlord, these names will confer automatic social cache. But really I just happen to like certain medieval names. People I think worthy of admiration had these names, and that is as good a reason as any to bestow them on a child. After several generations of Elizabeths in my family, I don’t see why Mechthild can’t get a look-in.

Lost in Translation

Yesterday I attended a seminar about the history of the word ‘crusade’, which seemed to conclude that everyone using it had different ideas as to what it meant, and that it wasn’t nearly as widely used as everyone thinks. [Then we had wine and cheese straws, and a fine evening was had by all.]

This experience was an echo of a class I took last week, where one of my students noted that a 40-line passage contained five different words for ‘man’, and lamented ‘Why can’t they just use the one word!’ The rest of the class, utterly rejecting the multifarious charms of gome, burn and weiy, agreed wholeheartedly with this statement. [Neither wine nor cheese was involved, and the afternoon was generally crummy.]

The problems of learning Middle English vocabulary are recognised as threefold: 1) not all the words resemble their modern equivalents; 2) there are so bloody many of them; 3) dat orthography. And it’s all very well saying to a student ‘What does that look like in Modern English if you take away a letter and switch two around?’ but my ultimate goal (and, I suspect, the goal of many who read and teach and love Middle English) is that they understand the word and recognise it, not only in its immediate syntactical context, but also in the long context of how it got to be an English word in the first place.

The manifold synonyms for ‘man’ delighted me, not least because, after the third question ‘What does that mean?’, I could legitimately say ‘Guess’ and they would get it right. As an undergraduate I remember being disproportionately excited by the variety of Old English words for ‘God’, many of which appear in a single poem, famously attributed to the swineherd Cædmon in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and later, supposedly, retranslated into different dialects of Old English: Weard, Metod, Wuldorfæder, Dryhten [my students were monumentally unimpressed when I told them that the Icelandic word Drottinn was used in the same context], Sceppend, Frea. While these can be and have been translated as guardian, creator, lord and so on, it seems rather a shame to have to explain, ‘It basically means God’.

Fetche? Yt ys like vnto slangge, from Engelond.

I love Middle English poetic synonyms, but then again I am the sort of saddo who admits, in public, that the future perfect is my favourite tense and that so-and-so’s got the best Grace Latin I’ve ever heard. I love kennings. I love practically everything about the line

Watz he never in þis worlde wyȝe half so blyþe!

And we do not speak a streamlined language: by internet estimates there are over a million words under the umbrella of Modern English. Not only should we expect to find synonyms in Middle English, but surely it’s also one of the most enjoyable (and, dare I say it, least taxing) elements of studying the language.

How ought one then to communicate this enthusiasm to a room of teenagers for whom medieval literature is a compulsory subject, and who just want to play the ukulele and read Faulkner? I considered playing a variation on Just a Minute where only Middle English words count but, frankly, c.b.a. Moreover, adding the phrase ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ to the end of every sentence did not, apparently, convince them of the fact.

So currently I’m bribing them with facsimiles and references to The Hobbit. And currently it’s working like a charm. Or a spell, or witchcraft, or whatever.

No More Mr Knight Guy

I’ve been teaching Malory this week, and had the same conversation four times in four hours, about the importance of Sir Gareth (or more accurately, his death) in provoking Gawain to insist that Arthur wage war against Lancelot, thereby hastening the destruction of the kingdom. If Gareth had not died, I have no problem in arguing, the Round Table would perhaps still have fallen eventually; Arthur may not have been happy to let his wife be stolen away; Mordred would have had to find other ways to undermine the king and steal his throne – all this, of course, happens in Geoffrey of Monmouth, before Gareth was introduced to the cycle – but Gawain wouldn’t have given a shit.

Gawain’s reaction to Gareth’s death, though brutally and beautifully expressed, doesn’t exactly cover him in glory:

But where ar my brethren seyde sir Gawayne, I mervayle that I se nat of them. Than seyde that man truly sir Gaherys and sir Gareth be slayne. Jhesu deffende seyde sir Gawayne // for all thys worlde I wolde nat that they were slayne and in especiall my good brothir sir Gareth […] Than the kyng wepte and he bothe and so they felle on sownynge. And whan they were revyved than spake sir Gawayne and seyde sir I woll goo and se my brother sir Gareth. Sir ye may nat se hym seyde the kynge for I caused hym to be entered and sir Gaherys bothe […] Alas my lorde seyde sir Gawayne how slew he my brothir sir Gareth I pray you telle me. Truly seyde the kynge I shall tell you as hit hath bene tolde me. Sir Lancelot slew hym and sir Gaherys both. (ff. 458v–459r)

It would seem that Gawain doesn’t care about the death of his other younger, unarmed brother Gaheris. One of my students suggested that this is because Gaheris is a bit of a nonentity: he’s the only Orkney brother who doesn’t exactly do anything, and his honourable behaviour is arguably modelled on Gareth’s, exactly as Agravaine’s dishonourable behaviour is arguably modelled on Mordred’s. The reader only mourns Gareth, so why shouldn’t Gawain? But for argument’s sake – and because it’s quite dull to write a blog post on serious, nuanced readings of characterisation in a medieval epic – I’d say it’s because Gawain’s a bit of a dick. A dick with his family’s interests at heart (I suggested the student consider Gawain in the light of Tywin Lannister), and who has a very moving deathbed repentance of his dickishness, but a dick nonetheless.

‘Dude, get off, that’s my head.’ ‘Lol, noob.’

Thinking more about it, many of the big-name Knights of the Round Table are pretty dickish much of the time – up to and including Lancelot. After all, William Caxton’s famous advice to ‘Do after the good and leave the evil’ may have referred to the murder and adultery that underpin many of the book’s wider struggles, but the characters who perform these less noble acts could have stood for a lesson in and of themselves. Arguably, Caxton is saying ‘Don’t be that guy.’ And by that guy, I mean Tristram.

T.H. White got it bang-on (again) when he wrote that Tristram was ‘a lout’:

Inside he was not a bit gentle. He was foul to his wife, he was always bullying poor old Palomides for being a n****r, and he treated King Mark most shamefully.

Many of us have a romantic attachment to the largely Wagnerian ideal of Tristram as a noble knight in a terrible situation. In Malory’s Morte Darthur he is undoubtedly very good at jousting, but is also the kind of person who will bottle someone for looking at his girlfriend. He overhears the lovelorn and widely-bullied Saracen knight Palomides lamenting for Iseult (also not very nice), ‘whych was mervaylously well seyde, & pyteously & full dolefully made’ and naturally challenges him to fight.

Palomides by this point is presumably getting tired both of the racial slurs (even King Arthur joins in with this) and the fact that the unrequited love of his life is romantically attached to this canker-blossom, and eloquently explains,

Sir I have done to you no treson […] for love is fre for all men, & thoghe I have loved your lady, she ys my lady as well as yours. Howbehyt that I have wronge if ony wronge be for ye rejoyse her & have youre desire of her and so had I nevir nor never am lyke to have and yet shall I love hir to the uttermuste dayes of my lyff as well as ye. (ff. 319v–320r)

Tristram still wants to fight. Why? you may ask. Because he’s a dick.

There’s much to be said for the presentation of nuanced, imperfect characters – the best knight and most famous lover in Cornwall can also be petty and vengeful; the Best Knight of the World can be rude and condescending; Arthur the High King is kinda racist – but I (who will probably get Team Palomides t-shirts made some day in the near future) find it very difficult to care about Tristram and his tribulations when he’s so utterly spiteful.

Getting real tired of your shit, Percival.

While some see this as a natural corollary to an über-macho culture where the best fighters command the most respect, I believe that at some level we do want to like the Round Table knights. Hence why Gareth is such an emotional barnstormer. He wants to prove himself without revealing that he is a king’s son, he is endlessly respectful and patient towards the ghastly Dame Lyonet, he refuses to side with his wicked half-brother Mordred in plotting against the King, and he will not arm himself against his friend Lancelot, even though this leads to his death. Gareth is a dude. Vote for Gareth.

All of which rambling leads me to this point: knightly behaviour should not be dickish, and the status of a knight (even one who is really ridiculously good at fighting) should not excuse dickish behaviour. And I’m not saying that Malory does excuse it, but when the chips are down, Tristram’s a dick. As Goldie Lookin Chain once said, ‘It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.’

Dancing in the Dark (Ages)

I am what one might call a terrible dancer. Despite baskets of enthusiasm, and the genuine shapes I cut (blurry is a shape), this is one of the several skills I do not possess, and one of the few skills defeat in the face of which I will not accept. My chief problem is that I am very good at counting but reciprocally crap at operating my limbs. I got rhythm, but my heart won’t let my feet do the things they should do.

What I find particularly upsetting is that in manuscript images of medieval dancers, they often look about as ungainly as I do. Of course, everything may be exaggerated to clarify that these nattily-dressed jokers are dancing and not just about to elbow one another, but it’s perfectly plausible that dancing in the Middle Ages was all about cutting genuine shapes, with no obligation to look cool.

Shake yt lyke vnto a Polaroid pyctour.

This impression is somewhat undermined by the dancing scene in A Knight’s Tale, in which the late, lamented Heath Ledger finds himself forced to invent a dance from his fictional homeland, only to be saved by his lady love and a cracking rendition of David Bowie’s Golden Years. But I maintain that, despite the strict specifications of the musical genre, the act of dancing in the period was a cross between waving ones hands in the air like one just didn’t care, and Durmstrang’s entrance into the Great Hall in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. If such a thing were possible.

But in the absence of Blondel’s Dynamic Dancercise!, what hope do I have of injecting a little bit of medieval into my steps? Can I pull off a saltarello/Daft Punk remix, or is the Safety Dance video doomed to remain forever only a dream?

Come, my lady, do the locomocioun.

So I’ve formulated a few simple steps towards achieving a seamless blend of coolness and Middle Age. In very specific order:

1. Learn to clap in syncopated rhythms.
2. Hire a peasant band. (Mumford and Sons on Spotify will not cut this mustard.)
3. Ask everyone ‘Is this a real estampie?’, then explain how witty you are.
4. Sleep with the sackbut player.
5. Have him arrested and pilloried for blasphemy.
6. Forget to fasten your poulaines to your knees.
7. Trip over.
8. Blame the malmsey.
9. Carry a handkerchief at all times.

I will report back if any of this works.

In Memoriam

Were is þat lawhing and þat song,

Þat trayling and þat proude gong,

Þo havekes and þo houndes?

Al þat ioye is went away,

Þat wele is comen to weylaway,

To manie harde stoundes.

The moral of that particular story, so beautifully put in Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 86, is that we will all die, and the good times we have on earth may translate to bad times in Hell. I like to think of this as the anti-YOLO: notwithstanding that you do only live once, now is the time to prepare for the afterlife. Less drink hard and play harder than think hard and pray harder.

In BL Harley MS 2253 we read,

All goþ bote Godes wille,

Alle we shule deye þagh us like ille.

All that grein me graveþ grene,

Nou hit faleweþ all bidene.

And in the same manuscript,

Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh,

Erþe oþer erþe to erþe droh;

Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh.

And there are others of this ilk in the collection, and countless others in manuscripts of the same period. Take John Audelay’s tortured ‘Timor mortis conturbat me/ Passio Christi conforta me’, or a thirteenth-century meditation in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.1.45, which considers the new corpse before lamenting ‘All too late, all too late, Whanne the bere is ate gate’.

Were the medievals obsessed with death?

Yes.

There are numerous ways to consider death, and clearly the most popular in the fourteenth century were ‘just as leaves wither and die, so will I’, ‘when I die, none of this nice stuff will matter anymore’, and ‘Hell sounds a bit grim, better do my best to avoid it’. These are thoughts to have whilst still alive, and chiefly about oneself. Were they at all comforting? Your guess is as good as mine.

Rosemary Woolf writes that meditations on death tend to focus on the ‘process of dying and burial: the appearance of the dying man, the poverty of the winding-sheet and the grave, or the repulsiveness of the decaying body’, but also argues that the fear thus engendered, ‘when it has issued effectively in action, rightly ceases to be fear. Fear is thus a transitional emotion.’ That is, if you right your life, you have nothing to fear from death. Or so it goes.

But on the eve of All Souls’, and bearing in mind that I cannot fittingly remember those who should be remembered, I’d like to consider what was said for or about the dead after their deaths.

The Solesmes edition of the Liber Usualis differentiates amongst the dead (omnium fidelium defunctorum) only in the case of very young (but nonetheless baptised) children: they have a different order of service, the inference of which is that those who have barely lived can barely have sinned. So rather than penitential psalms, there are the psalms of universal celebration which, however beautiful they are in whichever language, retain something of the primary school assembly: give thanks to God for frost and cold, give thanks to God for ice and snow.

The ‘adult’ burial service is, if you will excuse an unintended pun, rather more grave, and at its centre is the solemn, ubiquitous responsory Libera me. One must assume that the service would have been known to the Middle Ages in Latin, but my homeboy William Herebert, a Franciscan friar and academic, translated verses of it into English in the early 14^th century. His begins

Louerd, shyld me vrom helle deth at þylke gryslich stounde,

When heuene and oerþe shulle quake and al þat ys on grounde,

When þou shalt demen al wyth fur þat ys on oerþe yuounde.

From this, as from the Latin version, we see that everyone’s chief concern is still Doomsday and all the things the deceased may have done to avoid or ensure hellfire. Yet the rest of the service is filled with hope of angels leading souls into paradise (In paradisum), the faithful dead resting in peace through the mercy of God (Anima eius) and blessings on the Lord God of Israel (Benedictus dominus deus Israel). The associated Vespers also suggests psalms of calm and hope (Levavi oculos meos in montes; Confitebor tibi Domine), but by Matins we return to the poenis tenebrarum.

If these Offices seem overshadowed by the fear of punishment and damnation, is this because of a fear of purgatory? Was singing an essentially penitential song (tremens factus sum ego […] quid ergo miserrimus, quid faciam?) in memory of someone seen to be as efficacious as that person’s own penitence? Or was the service still directed towards its attendants? The Mass for the Dead, at least from the 14^th century onwards, may have contained the terrifying sequence Dies irae, with its trumpets waking armies of corpses, its copious weeping, and the ever-present threat of eternal fire. On behalf of the dead, or for the benefit of the living?

From Wulfstan’s apocalyptic sermons to Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts, if an age is so gripped by terror of the afterlife, how can it react to the fact of death? Probably, as we do, incompletely but personally. But alongside fetishizing both damnation and decay, writers of this period draw on a shared language of hope to imagine an alternative to worms and sulphur: ‘day wiþouten night, Wiþouten ende strengþe and might […] And pes and rest wiþoute strif, Wele wiþouten wo.’ Or, in modern terms, YOLT.