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Towards a Poetics of Marvellous Spaces in Old and Middle English Narrative

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Towards A Poetics of Marvellous Spaces in Old and Middle English Narrative by Ioana Alexandra Bolintineanu A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Ioana Alexandra Bolintineanu, 2012 Towards A Poetics of Marvellous Spaces in Old and Middle English Narrative Ioana Alexandra Bolintineanu Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract From the eighth to the fourteenth century, places of wonder and dread appear in a wide variety of genres in Old and Middle English: epics, lays, romances, saints’ lives, travel narratives, marvel collections, visions of the afterlife. These places appear in narratives of the other world, a term which in Old and Middle English texts refers to the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, even Paradise can be fraught with wonder, danger, and the possibility of harm. But in addition to the other world, there are places that are not theologically separate from the human world, but that are nevertheless both marvellous and horrifying: the monster-mere in Beowulf, the Faerie kingdom of Sir Orfeo, the demon-ridden Vale Perilous in Mandeville’s Travels, or the fearful landscape of the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fraught with horror or the possibility of harm, these places are profoundly different from the presented or implied home world of the text. My dissertation investigates how Old and Middle English narratives create places of wonder and dread; how they situate these places metaphysically between the world of living mortals and the world of the afterlife; how they furnish these places with dangerous topography and monstrous inhabitants, as well as with motifs, with tropes, and with thematic concerns that signal their marvellous and fearful nature. ii I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts. This overarching concern with displacement encourages the migration of iconographic motifs, tropes, and themes across genre boundaries and theological categories. iii Acknowledgements It is such a pleasure to acknowledge the guidance and help that I have received from so many exceptional people during the course of this project. My thanks, first of all, to Andy Orchard, my advisor, for his astonishing erudition, unstinting support, and high expectations. I was sure, in the beginning of this project, that my impression of his omniscience about Old English was youthful naiveté and that eventually I would bring him a question he could not answer; so far, I have not found that question. I am also grateful to my dissertation committee, Antonette diPaolo Healey and Suzanne Conklin Akbari. I can never thank them enough for their cheerful encouragement, their generous engagement with my work, their insights and helpful advice. I am also extremely grateful to Ian McDougall for reading the dissertation and offering such interesting questions and comments, and to my external examiner, Mark C. Amodio, whose insights, generous comments, and searching questions made my dissertation defence so much more fruitful and enjoyable a process than I could have ever hoped for. My debt of gratitude to Professor Healey goes much farther back, for she introduced me to the study of Old English words and Anglo-Saxon culture when I was still a high school student. Before I even began my university studies, she opened a new world of learning and embodied, through unfailing kindness, curiosity, imagination, and relentless logical rigour, the ideal of a scholar. I am so grateful for her support throughout my dissertation, in times of doubt and anxious floundering, in times of happy researching and writing, and in the time just before my daughter’s birth, when she ordered me to stop dissertating and start stocking up on sleep. My warm thanks go out to Judith Deitch, who taught me how to read Old English, introduced me to the awesomeness of Old English poetry, and gave me encouragement and excellent advice throughout my studies; to Will Robins, for an enthralling Chaucer course that iv accelerated my slide into medieval scholarship; to Caroll Balot, for her kind mentorship and teaching advice; to Sabine Süsstrunk, for so hospitably offering me excellent writing advice, encouragement, adoptive supervisorship, and a “study home” during my year in Switzerland; to Fabienne Michelet, for generously reading and commenting on portions of this dissertation. I am enormously grateful to Alice Cooley, for her staunch support, good advice, mind- clearing questions, nonsense-eradication capabilities, and amazing friendship; to David Clark, for so many midnight-oil-burning discussions that inspired this project; to Bronwen Moore, Leslie Carscadden, and James Carscadden, for needful sanity checks along the way. I am grateful to my parents, who raised me with so much love in a house full of books, who filled my childhood with fantastic stories, and who first set my feet on the path of learning; and to my brother, who shared first the childhood stories, and then the trials and tribulations of an academic career. And I am grateful beyond words to my husband, Francisco, for his generous support and patience, his faith in this project, his love that sustains me in this and in all other endeavours; and to my daughter Sofia, simply for herself. v Table of Contents Introduction: A Map of Wonder .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Prisoners of Faerie and the Inmates of Hell ........................................................ 22 Chapter 2: Declarations of Unknowing in Old English ............................................................... 63 Chapter 3: Spatial Indeterminacy in Middle English ................................................................. 130 Chapter 4: The Shadow of Paradise ........................................................................................... 180 Conclusion: Haunted by the Other World ................................................................................. 243 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 276 vi Introduction: A Map of Wonder Medieval world maps place marvels and monsters at the round world’s imagined edges. Take, for instance, the famous Hereford map of the world, created in the thirteenth century.1 The Hereford map unfolds the earth’s geography and history on twelve square metres of vellum. Jerusalem is at the centre; marvels and monsters crowd into the margins. The Earthly Paradise sits at the very top of the map, in the uttermost East. The monstrous nations, from blemyae to sciopods, march along the southernmost edge. Amazons, griffins, and the cannibal nations of Gog and Magog populate the extreme North. In the words of a fourteenth-century historian, Ranulph Higden, “At the farthest reaches of the world often occur new marvels and wonders, as though Nature plays with greater freedom secretly at the edges of the world than she does openly and nearer us in the middle of it.”2 To judge by the world maps, the centre is the place of normality, of civilized humankind; the edges are the place of marvels and monsters, of the supernatural and the uncanny. Yet as soon as we enter the world of medieval English narrative, this neat partition dissolves. In the Old English Beowulf, the monsters’ home is not at the world’s edge; on the contrary, it is “not far from here by the count of miles”--not far removed, in physical terms, from the home of humankind, Heorot. In the Middle English Sir Orfeo, the perilous realm of Faerie lies both far and near the human world. Orfeo himself reaches Faerie by a long, weary road 1 Harvey, Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map 1-11. For an overview of medieval mappae mundi, their structure, and their uses, see Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” 510-52. For the traditional representation of marvelous and monstrous races, see also Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. For the theological and cartographic place of the Earthly Paradise in the Middle Ages, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise: Heaven on Earth in the Middle Ages. 2 Ranulph Higden, cited in Daston and Clarke, Wonders and the Order of Nature 25. 1 through the wilderness; yet his wife Heurodys is first taken to Faerie in a dream. In the Ebstorf world map, we see Paradise, the lost Eden, at the top of the map in the easternmost corner of the world. In the mid-fourteenth century, the narrator of Mandeville’s Travels assures his readers that “no lyvynge man may go to Paradys,” to the lost Eden in the uttermost East of the world, because of all the obstacles, physical and supernatural, that bar the way.3 Yet in the legend of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, current and widely popular across Europe since the twelfth century, the way to the Earthly Paradise lies not through India, Prester John’s Kingdom, and the dark lands beyond them, but through a cave in Lough Dergh, Ireland, and after that through the regions of punishment where the dead endure torment for their sins.4 In yet other visions, the way to the regions of the afterlife transcends earthly geography altogether. Pilgrims such
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