EC KE RT RT MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES IN TRANSLATION The popular romances of medieval England are fantasy stories of love at first sight; brave knights seeking adventure; evil stewards; passionate, lusty women; hand- RO MIDDL to-hand combat; angry dragons; and miracles. They are not only fun but indicate a great deal about the ideals and values of the society they were written in. Yet M ANC the genre of Middle English romance has only recently begun to attain critical E respectability, dismissed as “vayn carpynge” in its own age and generally treated ENGLISH by twentieth-century critics as a junk-food form of medieval literature. Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas has been assumed to be a satire of the romances’ clichéd formulas E and unskilled authors. But the romances evidently enjoyed popularity among all S IN TRANSLATION English classes, and the genre itself continued to flourish and evolve down to present-day novels and movies. Whatever Chaucer and his contemporaries thought of romances, they would have needed some personal familiarity with the stories and texts for comic tales such as Sir Thopas to be understood. A century ago, Beowulf faced the same problem that the Middle English romances MIDDLE ENGLISH still face: no modern translations were published because few had heard of the poem– because there were no modern translations published. Where the romances have been printed, they have normally been reproduced as critical editions in their original language, or translated into heavily abridged children’s versions, but few have been published as scholarly close line translations with notes. This book is an ROMANCES attempt to remedy this by making some of these romances available to the student or lay reader who lacks specialized knowledge of Middle English, with the hope that a clearer understanding of the poems will encourage not only enjoyment but IN TRANSLATION also further study. amis and amiloun | athelston | floris and Ken Eckert comes from Edmonton, Canada, and is Assistant Professor of English at blancheflor | havelok the dane | Hanyang University (ERICA), Korea. king horn | sir degare Kenneth Eckert Sidestone ISidestoneSBN 978-90-8890-339-7 Press ISBN: 978-90-8890-339-7 9 789088 903397 This is an Open Access publication. Visit our website for more OA publication, to read any of our books for free online, or to buy them in print or PDF. www.sidestone.com Check out some of our latest publications: MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES IN TRANSLATION Sidestone Press MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES IN TRANSLATION amis and amiloun | athelston | floris and blancheflor | havelok the dane | king horn | sir degare Kenneth Eckert © 2015 K. Eckert Published by Sidestone Press, Leiden www.sidestone.com ISBN 978-90-8890-339-7 Layout & cover design: Sidestone Press Cover images: Detail from King Horn, MS. Harley 2253, British Library; Tristan battling fourteen knights, MS. Additional 5474, British Library. Also available as: e-book (PDF): ISBN 978-90-8890-340-3 Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 Textual Notes 19 Amis and Amiloun 21 Athelston 81 Floris and Blancheflor 103 Havelok the Dane 139 King Horn 209 Sir Degare 249 Works Cited 279 Index 287 Acknowledgments In 1994 I was surprised to hear my now late Grandmother Eckert recite lines from the Canterbury Tales which she had probably learned sometime during World War I. As ever, when I write it is partly for her. As well, I owe thanks to teachers and professors who have encouraged me over the years, especially Daniel Thurber (Concordia, Nebraska); Catherine Eddy and Richard Willie (Concordia, Edmonton); William Schipper (Memorial, Newfoundland); my dissertation director, John Bowers (U. of Nevada, Las Vegas) and committee; and my friend Jacquie Elkouz at UNLV. In a book of romances which are often deemed clichéd themselves I will forgo the tired one about standing on giants and simply thank these people for setting me on a path. In the production of this book I would like to thank Karsten Wentink and Corné van Woerdekom at Sidestone for their kindness and guidance, as well as Hanyang University, Korea for their support of research in Edinburgh and England in 2014. For help I received in inspecting manuscripts I would additionally like to thank the rare book people at the British Library, London. For their permissions in clearing the use of public domain images and texts I would like to acknowledge the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; The British Library, London; the Heidelberg University Library; and the Council of the Early English Text Society, Oxford. Soli Deo gloria. acknowledgments 7 Introduction The Medieval Romances A wit-besotting trash of books.–Montaigne, on medieval romances.1 One frustration of engaging in any branch of European medieval studies as an academic pursuit is that few claim expertise about the ancient or Roman worlds, but seemingly everyone on an internet discussion forum believes him or herself knowledgeable about the medieval period, usually based on patently false beliefs. Outside academia, the popular understanding of the period usually presumes one of two stereotypes. The first is the ‘merry olde England’ cliché of Lucky Jim and the renaissance fair, where undergraduates dress as Vikings with Hagar the Horrible horns and discuss trivial minutiae of medieval weaponry, while flirting with underdressed females who serve mead. Hollywood films similarly depict any English century before the nineteenth as one where knights exclaim “forsooth, varlet” in stilted Victorian accents. While puerile and anachronistic, the trope is at least benign in comparison to the second common image of the era, which persistently retains the pejorative mislabel dark ages. This Monty Pythonesque world reeks of ignorance, plague, war, an From black-letter edition ofSyr Degore, by Wynkyn de Worde 1 John Florio, trans., The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, 2 vols. (London, 1603), vol. 2, ch. 25, quoted in Nicola McDonald, Pulp Fictions of Medieval England (Manchester: University Press, 2004), 3. introduction 9 oppressive and misogynist church, violence, inquisitions, and witch hunts, hence the slang get medieval on someone. The medieval Europeans enjoyed regular baths, but to state that they bathed at all invites incredulity among non-specialists. Yet the medieval church, while far from perfect, fostered our western systems of schools, universities, and hospitals, and the period’s supposedly primitive engineering gave us cathedrals and halls which are still standing. One of the bloodiest battles of the European Middle Ages, Agincourt (1415), resulted in about 10,000 deaths–compared to over a million fatalities in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Doubly frustrating is the practice among scholars of belittling and misrepresenting the medieval period in order to place other eras in brighter relief. Just as classicists depict Greco-Roman culture as impossibly idyllic and urbane and pass over its rampant slavery, Renaissance humanists imagine a sudden flowering of civilization in post- plague Europe and present, “for purposes of contrast, a grossly simplified image of the preceding age”.2 The prejudice has a long intellectual tradition; the post-medieval appraisal of the period and its literature was consistently disdainful. Just as gunpowder helped make chivalry obsolete, its poetic values were regarded as primitive. Thomas Nashe was typical in writing about Bevis of Hampton in 1589 and asking who “can forbeare laughing” at the “worne out absurdities” of its “plodding meeter”.3 Milton disparages poetic rhyme itself as “the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter”.4 Much of the condemnation was moral. Even in its own time, the romance genre was dismissed as “vayn carpynge” by medieval churchmen, a sentiment going back as far as Alcuin’s complaint in 797 to the monks at Lindisfarne, “Quid enim Hinieldus cum Christo?” (“What does Ingeld have to do with Christ?”) A homily complains that men who are unmoved by an account of Christ’s passion are “stirred to tears when the tale of Guy of Warwick is read”.5 Such reproaches evidently did not go beyond sporadic grumbling, for romances required expensive parchment and clerics to write them, but the condemnations intensified in Elizabethan England even as printing eased their transmission. Churchman Francis Meres cautioned that such wanton stories were “hurtful to youth”.6 The early humanists had equally firm objections against the corrupting example of the sensational plots and heroes of romances. Juan Luis Vives, Spanish humanist and friend to Thomas More, warned that they make their audiences “wylye and craftye, they kindle and styr up covetousnes, inflame angre, 2 John A. Burrow, “Alterity and Middle English Literature”, Review of English Studies 50:200 (1999): 491. 3 Thomas Nashe, The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, Vol. III, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London, 1905), 26. 4 John Milton, Introduction (“The Verse”), Paradise Lost, Second Edition (1674), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century and Early Seventeenth Century Vol. B, eighth ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). 5 In G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), 14, quoted in Albert C. Baugh, “The Middle English Romance: Some Questions of Creation, Presentation, and Preservation”, Speculum 42:1 (1967): 2. 6 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), ed. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904) 308-309, quoted in Ronald S. Crane, “The Vogue of Guy of Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic Revival”, PMLA 30:2 (1915): 139. 10 middle english romances in translation and all beastly and filthy desyre”.7 Roger Ascham thundered in 1545 that their reading leads to “none other ends, but only manslaughter and baudrye”.8 Nicola McDonald notes that critics have treated such statements with “humorous detachment”,9 wondering how the genre could ever be seen as threatening enough to exercise its critics so.