The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance

Julie Nelson Couch

The Chaucer Review, Volume 42, Number 3, 2008, pp. 330-352 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/cr.2008.0002

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v042/42.3couch.html

Access provided by Boston College (28 Sep 2013 14:05 GMT) THE VULNERABLE HERO: HAVELOK AND THE REVISION OF ROMANCE by Julie Nelson Couch

Þe tale is of Hauelok imaked: Wil he was litel he yede ful naked. (Havelok the Dane, lines 5–6)1

This first image of Havelok the Dane in the early-fourteenth-century Middle English poem is striking because it introduces the protagonist first and foremost as a destitute child. Doubly striking is the lack of attention these lines have drawn. Generally, editors attend to the more conventional introduc- tions of Havelok as a “god gome” or the “wicteste man at nede” (lines 7, 9).2 The critical conception that reduces Havelok the Dane to an early example of a formulaic or “popular” Middle English metrical romance has periodically obscured the poem’s particular appropriation of the medieval romance genre, that is, the alternative cultural-literary aesthetic it expresses, beginning with the atypical introduction of its hero.3 The hero, son of the King of Denmark, is presented to the reader first as a child, as “litel,” and, in this Middle English version, it is Havelok’s childhood—his experience of it and the narrator’s focus on it—that fills out the tale, fills the hero’s speech, and motivates his drive to reclaim his kingdom. In a genre better known for its invincible heroes, “litel” and “naked” immediately establish this hero’s defining characteristic: vulnerability.4 These descriptors dog Havelok through the story, signaling the hero’s material and social lack and under- lining an unshakeable susceptibility. Ultimately, this romance dramatizes an experience of vulnerability—rhetorically and culturally epitomized by childhood—as the core of a less aristocratic heroic subjectivity.5

Romance

Inscribing heroism with vulnerability violates a generic dictum of chivalric romance that equates nobility with invincibility and aristocratic identity with social supremacy. Prototypical twelfth-century Francophone romance

THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2008. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. JULIE NELSON COUCH 331 formulates an idealized aristocratic world in which the knight-hero retains his innate high-born identity as an invincible shield even while he constructs that identity, and even when he ventures, nameless or mad, into the treacherous forest of romance.6 In contrast, the vulnerability adhering to childhood never diminishes in the upward, social-and-maturational trajectory of Havelok, so that a generic model that focuses exclusively on aristocratic ideology is not sufficient for analysis of this Middle English poem.7 This essay will demonstrate that Havelok becomes king through vulnerability, not in spite of it. The vein of vulnerability that infuses the Middle English Havelok evidences the poet’s appropriation of the romance genre into a non- elite vernacular. By virtue of not being composed in a status language, the English poem does not concern itself so persistently with aristocratic exclusivity.8 My argument about the function of vulnerability in Havelok participates in recent criticism that approaches Middle English romances in terms of their distinct aesthetic and cultural priorities, rather than in terms of their assumed aesthetic inferiority beside French models. The essays collected in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert’s The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (2000), for example, read Middle English romances as “strategic interventions,” especially in relation to the elite genre they adapt.9 Traditionally, the alterations to the romance genre evident in Middle English poems—more action, less speculation; gratuitous, sans-sword violence; non-aristocratic characters and activities; unrefined love and speech—have been interpreted as an inability on the part of a vernacular writer, accommodating a socially inferior audience, to render fully and appropriately aristocratic romance into English.10 In contrast, Gilbert and Putter, among others, recognize that Middle English narratives relate in oblique rather than in imitative ways to the aristocratic basis of the genre.11 To earlier readers as well as to current ones, it has been obvious that the Middle English Havelok the Dane is neither courtly nor chivalric.12 The poem hosts a surplus of emotional bluster and indignation from a garru- lous narrator who also supplies a store of homely proverbs and “realistic” details of peasant work and life. The hero grows up in a fisherman’s hut, and, to secure employment, the starving youth knocks down other aspi- rant porters on a Lincoln bridge. Even when Havelok marries the English princess Goldboru, their union is not an occasion for courtly spectacle. Fin amor is not on their minds when Goldboru’s evil guardian Godrich forces her to marry his cook’s scullion (Havelok) in an attempt to deprive her of the English throne. As Laura Hibbard writes, Havelok “is frankly horrified at marriage with a wife whom he is too poor to support.”13 Later, when Havelok returns home with Goldboru and Grim’s sons to reclaim Denmark, he successfully overthrows the evil usurpers not by 332 THE CHAUCER REVIEW chivalric conquest, but by popular verbal support, capture of the villains, trials by jury, and tortuous executions. Leaving off the usual chivalric apparatus of love and conquest, the poet of Havelok nevertheless negotiates the issue of identity that is central to the romance genre.14 In romance’s most familiar arc, a knight embarks on a quest that, while reaffirming the particular social identity of an empowered, glorified nobility, inflects his character with a certain individualism of experience. Initially, the Middle English Havelok appears to fulfill the generic function of reasserting noble identity in the traditional manner—that is, of resolving the anxiety of aristocratic identity by fantastically representing nobility as innate and readable. Although child Havelok loses his kingdom, he eventually regains it with the help of miraculous recognitions of his proper identity via a king’s birthmark (kynmerk) on his shoulder and a light-beam that emanates from his mouth when he sleeps. Though “proper” identity is ultimately recog- nized in Havelok, anxiety is not sublimated from the narrative plane by means of an abiding presence of invincibility.15 Instead, the hero Havelok—going without food and clothing, and being abused and threatened without the ability to fight back—is perpetually vulnerable. And the poet perpetually concretizes the hero’s vulnerable subjectivity by means of expressions of fear: Havelok’s own utterances as well as the narrator’s urgent prayers for help. In Havelok anxiety is incorporated into the very structure of heroic identity. A special feature of romance, idealization, is used in Old French and Anglo-Norman romances to glorify an exclusive, feudal elite. It is turned in Middle English romance toward the glorification of a society that perceives itself (whether accurately or not) as more centralized and integrated.16 Middle English romances typically promote the proper fulfillment of roles within boundaries of family, social class, kingdom, and church, and these institutions are represented as entities that intertwine to form ideal society.17 Middle English poems such as Havelok never presume to duplicate an idealization of aristocratic culture. Since the poem is not so bent on maintaining a discrete caste of elites, the happy ending goes beyond the conventional restoration of prior nobility. In fact, the nobles of Havelok—the grasping guardian earls—are demoted to donkeys’ backs. Hence, when Havelok regains his position after an ignoble, vulnerable childhood and youth, the result is not merely a rematerialization of a static aristocratic court with its proper personages back in their places. In Havelok the experience of vulnerable childhood, by being reenacted through the course of the poem, redraws the final configuration of (noble) adulthood. Furthermore, the rearticulations of Havelok’s childhood experiences become more than simply repetitious; they create an operative tissue of JULIE NELSON COUCH 333 textualized memory.18 As Havelok’s vulnerable childhood is “remembered” through the poem, the memorializations shape a nobleness constitutive of vulnerability and commonness.

Childhood in the Text

Hwo micte yeme his children yunge Til þat he kouþen speken wit tunge, Speken and gangen, on horse riden, Knictes an sweynes bi here siden. (Havelok, lines 368–71)

When Havelok’s father, King Birkabeyn, consults his knights about who should “yeme,” or take care of, his children after his death, the narrator maps in little a journey through age. The young children will progress from not-speaking to speaking, walking, and, finally, to the class-signifying activity of noble adulthood: riding on a horse accompanied by knights and swains.19 In this image of accretion, as in Havelok and Middle English narrative generally, childhood falls just outside the social identity that delimits adulthood, occupying a preclassed space.20 Though the son of a king, Havelok grows up as fisherman Grim’s son and works in his youth as a fishseller and cook’s scullion, experiencing the activities and oppres- sions of the lower social classes before returning to his birth status. As I will demonstrate in this essay, Havelok’s social nonalignment and his subsequent freedom to work and play as a commoner moderate the concomitant experience of harsh vulnerability. The narrative represents childhood as outside the secure props of social hierarchy in ways that are both dangerous and exciting.21 A notion of vulnerable childhood does not inform identity in the earlier account of Havelok in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman L’Estoire des Engleis (ca. 1135–1140), nor in the Anglo-Norman poem, Lai D’Haveloc (ca. 1190–1220), the two versions most often linked with Havelok.22 Writing a History of the English, Gaimar logically focuses on the English side of the legend: the English princess and the injustice wrought against her. When Haveloc the cook’s scullion enters the tale as Argentille’s unlikely betrothed, he is already an invincible youth. The reader never sees him as a child.23 The later Lai, in traditional romance style, redirects the focus onto the hero and does begin, like the Middle English poem, with Haveloc as a child. However, the unnamed heir’s childhood slips by in two lines, which simply note that Baron Grim and 334 THE CHAUCER REVIEW his wife raised him well.24 Moreover, the hero is never described as childlike but rather as precociously invincible. Unlike the Anglo- Norman versions of this tale, the Middle English Havelok centers the hero’s identity on his experience as a child, and the poem engages with the social and material conditions of childhood. While still a child, the Middle English Havelok is named, possesses a voice, and suffers his trials because of the vulnerable state of childhood. Contrasting Havelok to the baronial preoccupations of Gaimar’s L’ Estoire and the Lai testifies to the Middle English poet’s unique and fundamental interest in children, an interest that ultimately casts heroic subjectivity as familial rather than simply lineal, developmental rather than static, and vulnerable rather than invincible. The Anglo-Norman versions begin and end on a broader plane of territorial and baronial politics.25 The Lai narrator announces he will tell a story of a “riche rei / E de plusurs altres baruns” (a rich king and many other barons) and then relates King Arthur’s conquest of Denmark and his man Odulf’s subjugation of the Danish barons.26 The Lai ends with Haveloc’s victory over King Edelsi of northeast England and his fief settlements with the English barons. The last image of Haveloc in both Anglo-Norman versions is of his successful reign as a conqueror.27 In contrast, the Middle English Havelok begins and ends with an attention to children that equates their good keeping with the proper, orderly continuation of the kingdom. At the beginning the Danish and English kings’ foremost desires—to find trustworthy guardians for their soon-to-be orphaned children (Havelok and his sisters in Denmark, Goldburu in England)—are fully elaborated with dialogue and deathbed scenes.28 And at the end the writer celebrates the success of Havelok and Goldboru by rewarding the happy ruling couple with a generous excess of fifteen offspring. The narrator hyperbolizes the heroes’ successes in terms of children rather than aristocratic power. Though the Anglo-Norman Lai and the Middle English Havelok may be grouped together on the basis of shared baronial concerns and audience, as Susan Crane does in her seminal reading of insular romance, the Lai relies more heavily upon the ideological conventions of aristocratic romance.29 Whereas the Lai clearly presents a baronial narrative, Havelok tells a familial story, concerning itself not simply with the due inheritance of a noble child, but also with the right treatment of that child when he or she is left without his/her primary natural protector (in this case, the father). The narrator’s excessive emotional investment in the bad and good treatment of child characters quickly moves beyond an initial concern with safeguarding an inherited estate. The narrator curses vehemently those who mistreat Havelok and renders affectionately those who care for him tenderly. With its narrator’s attention to saving, feeding, JULIE NELSON COUCH 335 and tucking in bed the orphaned prince, Havelok comes across as more familial than baronial, more intimate than political. The narrator’s concluding proverb on the blessing of having a “good child” dramatizes how (caring for) the child is centrally important to this poem: “Him stondes wel þat god child strenes!” (line 2984).

The Vulnerability of Havelok

With its attention on Havelok as a vulnerable child, the poem postulates the hero’s subjectedness, elaborating the concept of childhood as a plight that lies dangerously outside one’s proper identity. Vulnerability registers on child Havelok’s subjected body, which is starved and fed, abused and disguised, ogled and exhibited. While Havelok falls prey to deprivation and abuse, the hero of the Anglo-Norman Lai D’Haveloc is always already noble and does not suffer a real “tyranny of circumstances.”30 When we see the Anglo-Norman Haveloc in any detail, he has “gr[own] and matured, bec[o]me stronger of body and limbs.”31 Though still young at this point, he can fight and beat any “bearded man.”32 Surmounting the danger implied by the hero’s exile is made a foregone conclusion by a rhetoric that brandishes his nobility like a talisman: the narrative regularly refers to the child Haveloc in terms of his status, as “le dreit eir” (true heir), for example.33 In contrast, the Middle English Havelok exposes the violence involved in the subjecting of the subject to adventure; the subject’s being a “child” concretizes the vulnerability that produces subjectivity.34 Because of its distinctively dependent nature, childhood inflects the romance with a degree of victimization that the poem amply magnifies and foregrounds. The narrator’s initial portrayal of Havelok as “little and naked” proves accurate: he and his sisters first appear as the baby prisoners of the traitor Godard, their assigned guardian, who starves and freezes them before they are three years old (lines 408–21). Godard kills and dismembers Havelok’s sisters before the young hero’s eyes, and then, with Godard’s knife at his heart, Havelok, too “litel” to defend himself, must plead for his life. He cries, “Louerd, merci nov!” (line 483), a plea in which desperation, not invincibility, shines through. Godard relents momentarily: instead of killing Havelok himself, he hands the boy over to fisherman Grim to be drowned. The conventional assumption that all will turn out well for the hero is much disturbed when Grim stuffs Havelok into a bag and his wife hurls the bagged child against a big stone (lines 568–70). In Havelok the hero is thus stripped violently of both class identity and class power. 336 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

This representation of a vulnerable child-hero runs counter to a common movement in romance to separate the hero from vulnerability, often by projecting this trait onto the heroine of the tale. Geraldine Heng explains that, typically, a “problem assailing male elites is presented in romance as an occasion of feminine vulnerability, necessitating male intervention and rescue.”35 Medieval romance often separates the knight from any weakness, upholding him as the one who rescues others and solves their problems. In Havelok, though, no separation between hero and vulnerability is proffered. The child Havelok is the one who is imprisoned, starved, ill-clothed, and mishandled. One could say that the child-hero is both “knight errant” and “maiden in distress” who must be rescued—that is, the subjected subject. The poem proceeds with a generic awareness of its more vulnerable hero. The singular moments in Havelok are those in which the anxiety merely sensed in other romances blooms into the actual event of child abuse and Havelok is physically menaced and harmed. In this poem the lion or wolverine that in other stories takes the child away and shelters him until it is safe for him to return to his proper station is but a child’s fantasy; the boy Havelok wishes a wolf or lion would rescue him and eat his tormentor Godard: “Weilawei Þat euere was I kinges bern— Þat him ne hauede grip or ern, Leoun or wlf, wluine or bere, Or oþer best þat wolde him dere!” (lines 571–75) Havelok’s words refer to the deus ex machina that appears in other romances to rescue children in the nick of time.36 His lament exposes the poem’s awareness of its forays into a world not proscribed by traditional romance genre, that is, into the “real” world of harm inflicted on a vulnerable child. In this world Godard’s diabolical child abuse is the “dragon” of the romance, a dragon remade into the physical suffering of children. Havelok’s moments of destitution are comparable to a knight’s relation to a progressively difficult set of obstacles, such as the boar, lion, and dragon in Sir Eglamour. Havelok’s “victories,” that is, the mere receipt of food and clothes, are elaborated in a narratorial tone of pathos and relief. Exhibiting intimate scenes of feeding and clothing, this poem renders the child-hero somatically. Havelok’s initial utterance expresses an awareness of physical need: “us hungreth swiþe sore,” he groans to Godard (line 455). After Grim and wife Leve recognize the boy-king and JULIE NELSON COUCH 337 refrain from drowning him, the narrator thoroughly and reassuringly dramatizes his first meal in their house. Havelok’s destitution continues through a narrative that halts at scenes of hunger and nakedness, food and clothes. When, as a youth, Havelok goes to find work in Lincoln, his starvation drives the scene. He goes two days without food, at last receiving on the third day a little cake from the earl’s cook in return for carrying fish (lines 866, 879). When the cook finally hires him as his full-time scullion, Havelok asserts that he needs no pay other than “inow to ete” (line 912). And once again his meal of bread and broth is staged in full. The desperate need for food and clothes makes tangible the experience of loss that other romance heroes experience as easily won adventures. For example, Havelok’s journey to Lincoln out of necessity may be set in contrast to Baron Grim’s sending of the Anglo-Norman Haveloc to Lincoln so he can be around courtly people and learn manners. While no sense of material hardships intrudes on courtly convention in the Lai, the Middle English Havelok goes to Lincoln “barfot” (line 863) and hungry. Ruminations on his appetite, not on his noble status, are what prompt him to go to work (lines 791–811). In turn, Grim continues to nurture Havelok as if he remains a vulnerable child; when he sends him off to find work, he makes Havelok a cloak from a sail so “no cold þat þu ne fonge” (line 857). Even as a youth Havelok remains subject to his bodily needs. Unlike Haveloc in the Lai or the child-heroes in some French Enfances (or even other Middle English romances such as Bevis of Hampton), Havelok functions specifically as a child in his relations to others; he is not simply an early version of a noble king.37 Hence, after Grim and Leve feed him, the thralls feed and tuck the “king” into bed. Assuming the role of foster father (rather than humble subject) to Havelok, Grim undresses him and soothes him to sleep:

“Slep, sone, with muchel winne! Slep wel faste and dred þe nouth— Fro sorwe to ioie art þu brouth!” (lines 661–63; my emphasis)

Grim’s injunction against fear is not only characteristic of a parent’s goodnight to a child. It touches on the centrality of Havelok’s experience as a vulnerable child: he has already experienced great “dred” from an abusive adult and great “ioie” from nurturing guardians, and he will continue to do so in varying degrees until his final restoration. The scene of feeding and tucking little Havelok into bed stands as the emblem of Havelok’s nurturance in the Grim family and confirms his nonchivalric identity as a vulnerable child. 338 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

A Vulnerable Nobility

Havelok’s persistent vulnerability and its attendant anxiety inhere even in the recognition scenes. Since the adults who recognize Havelok are deciphering and handling a subjected body, reading Havelok as noble emerges as another instance of the vulnerability of the child-hero. Significantly, Havelok’s true status, though efficacious, is only visible in the private space of his bedroom, a circumstance that places the very act of identifying Havelok uncomfortably close to the site of previous abuse. Two of the three instances of recognition—those by fisherman Grim and Earl Ubbe—take place at night when Havelok lies at the mercy of his caretakers.38 Leve and Grim’s position of power over him is not abated by their discovery of the light-beam; they still take him up and proceed to strip him: “Als he tirueden of his serk, / [they find] On hise rith shuldre a kynemerk” (lines 604–5). Reading Havelok’s body proves an extension of the hero’s subjection. This power dynamic between reader and what is read is even more hyperbolized in the scene at Earl Ubbe’s house, which is noteworthy because Havelok is, at this point, technically not a child but rather a married man. The act of reading is arranged here explicitly as an act of surreptitious voyeurism on the part of Ubbe, who has put Havelok and his wife Goldboru in a room divided from his own only by a willow screen. Ubbe sees light coming from their space, so he gets up and “to- tede in at a bord” (line 2107). Ubbe then calls a huge crowd of knights and sergeants to witness the marvel of the light-beam issuing from Havelok’s mouth. The crowd stares at the young man and woman as “Bi þe pappes he leyen naked” (line 2133). The voyeurism is deliberately displayed and prolonged; the act of reading Havelok’s body conflates with the erotic pleasure of gazing at the naked couple:

Þe knithes þouth of hem god gamen, Hem for to shewe and loken to. (lines 2136–37)

Formerly the victim of abuse, Havelok, here literally naked and still vulnerable, becomes the victim of others’ eroticizing gaze. The objec- tification of the youth with his wife infantilizes him, and Havelok remains functionally a vulnerable child. Readable nobility in Havelok does not erase the memory of Havelok’s vulnerable childhood; in fact, it serves only to remind the audience of Havelok’s experience of abuse. Though Ubbe’s knights’ prolonged reading of his body is to the advantage of Havelok (“he knewen at þe JULIE NELSON COUCH 339 laste / Þat he was Birkabeynes sone” [lines 2150–51]), the imbalance of power remains. It becomes palpable when Havelok wakes to a hundred men kissing his feet, “Þe tos, þe nayles, and þe liþes” (line 2164). Havelok grows pale and fears for his life. His fear is articulated in the very terms of abuse he has already suffered: he fears “he wolden him slo, / Or elles binde him and do wo” (lines 2167–68). The act of reading, which leads to homage, recalls earlier acts of abuse. As stated at the beginning of this essay, the vulnerability of childhood does not disappear as Havelok ascends the social scale, so that narrowing the intent of the romance genre to a matter of confirming nobility does not account for what occurs in Havelok. The hero is produced in terms of vulnerable childhood, not in terms of social status alone. In fact, as attested by the recognition scene in Ubbe’s house, Havelok becomes king by way of his vulnerability. Ubbe, who will lead all of Denmark to crown Havelok king, comes to acknowledge his status via the oppressively intimate scene of voyeurism and kissing described above. The original instantiations of Havelok’s vulnerability—starvation, Godard’s graphic murder of his sisters, the threat to his own life—exemplify the constant presence of the hero’s status as vulnerable child. At every transitional moment in his identity, Havelok (or the narrator, or another character) recalls these initial childhood insults. As I discuss in the following section, this repetition is symptomatic not of a monoto- nous style but rather of an intricate rhetorical operation of reconstitution, which animates Havelok and reorients the romance genre. This alteration of the aristocratic genre at the turn of the fourteenth century confirms that divergent narrative strategies were already in play in early Middle English romance.

Reconstituting the Romance Hero

Like other medieval romances, Havelok is a narrative of the development of identity, yet it posits a more fluid version of the process of constructing identity than the more familiar aristocratic one.39 By adding the traits of vulnerability and childhood, this romance presents a dynamic strategy of reconstitution that holds in tension two contrary movements: the alterations an ignoble childhood imposes on heroic identity versus the generic drive to maintain a noble hero. The rhetorical structure of the narrative can be described as a continual process of renarrativizing what has gone before in light of present events. The method is not simple repetition. Specifically, the narrative and its dialogue regularly reenact Havelok’s childhood, creating a “surrogation” 340 THE CHAUCER REVIEW that does not repeat exactly the original event (of father, starvation, abuse, and so on) but rather draws an altered version of it.40 Thus Havelok’s first (real) father is repeatedly substituted, first by an evil father and then by good foster fathers (Grim, Bertram, Ubbe). The fact that these subsequent characters function as surrogate fathers is made plain by a repeating of words and a deliberate recalling and recasting of the traumatic events of Havelok’s encounter with the evil usurper. Feeding scenes exemplify the rhetorical pattern of reconstituting the original father/identity and simultaneously establishing Havelok’s early deprivation as the basis from which he follows a new, uncharted path of identity. Though Havelok is quickly relieved of his hunger by Grim and his wife Leve, the narrator pursues his hunger for five more lines:

Couþe he nouth his hunger miþe— A lof he het, Y woth, and more, For him hungrede swiþe sore. Þre dayes þer-biforn, I wene, Et he no mete—þat was wel sene! (lines 653–57)

At the very moment that Havelok is being nurtured, the narrator forces the audience to dwell on his recent deprivation—when he hungered very sorely; this moment recalls and replaces the ordeal, but does not erase it from textual consciousness. Later, cook Bertram’s proverbial comments on Havelok’s eating reinstate the link between the hero and hunger. His exclamation—“Wel is set þe mete þu etes” (Wisely placed is the food you eat) (line 908)—and curse—“Daþeit hwo þe mete werne!” (A curse on who refuses you food!) (line 927)—recall the one who did not feed Havelok and whose starving of Havelok is damnable. The proverb unexpectedly reappears after the married Havelok has returned to Denmark. Telling Earl Ubbe about Havelok’s great feat in killing the thieves, host Bernard expands his praise until it finally reaches an exclamatory climax: “We[l] is set he etes mete!” (line 2037). In this instance, the idea of food is not in any way related to the event of Havelok battling thieves. The recourse to this proverb recalls specifically the cook’s restorative feeding of him, and, more generally, the path that Havelok is taking from deprivation to good guardianship. With each repetition, Havelok’s present circumstances first recall and then replace the initial non-fostering by Godard. Havelok ultimately ascends to the throne not merely by reclamation of a noble identity but also by the recollection of ignoble circumstances. Dialogue plays a crucial role in the poem’s strategy of reconstitution, with utterances functioning as reflexive memory. Not only do the narrator JULIE NELSON COUCH 341 and characters such as Bernard or Ubbe rearticulate assessments of Havelok’s identity, but Havelok himself also constructs his subjectivity, that is, he articulates his own process of self-identification by means of an access to potent speech. Notably, being a vulnerable child does not erase Havelok’s verbal power to represent his situation. Indeed, he first speaks when he is “little and naked,” when he tells Godard that he and his sisters are hungry (lines 455–64). With his power of speech, Havelok ultimately owns his vulnerability, his childhood, transforming it into the core of his heroic identity. Havelok’s monologues as a young man and his subsequent work in his father Grim’s trade betray no anxious concern about royal status. In fact, his experience of childhood in a fisherman’s home seems effectively to transform Havelok’s identity from king’s son to fisherman’s son. As Havelok matures, he does not assimilate to a traditional generic form and metamorphose into a knight errant, concerned with arms and women. Instead, aphorisms on the worthiness of work come readily to his lips, and he goes cheerfully off to learn “his mester” (lines 789–824). Calling the work of selling his father’s fish his “mester,” his occupation or trade, is significant. Havelok’s words are those of a worker and son of a worker. As he had outlined his hunger to Godard, Havelok outlines thoroughly, in a twenty-one-line soliloquy, the need and the honor of working; to paraphrase: “I eat more than the rest of the family put together; I can learn how to earn a profit; it is shameful that a man would eat and drink without working for his board” (lines 791–811). The depiction of Havelok as a meek, laughing, tireless young worker reminds us not of a romance hero, nor even of an idealized laborer like Chaucer’s plowman, but rather of Havelok’s childhood.41 In this way, the child-hero has not “forgotten” his identity, as some critics have suggested; he (the text) is (re)forging it.42 The unique foregrounding of Havelok’s love for children takes us back to his own childhood:

Euere he was glad and bliþe— His sorwe he couþe ful wel miþe. Jt ne was non so litel knaue For to leyken ne for to plawe, Þat he ne wode with him pleye. Þe children þat yeden in þe weie Of him he deden al here wille, And with him leykeden here fille. (lines 948–55; my emphasis) The poem’s poignant reminders do not allow the audience to forget Havelok’s burden of experience, his “sorwe,” even though they have seen 342 THE CHAUCER REVIEW him fostered well for awhile. Significantly, Havelok’s “sorwe” is directly associated with his deliberate attention to children. The representation of his informed sensitivity is salient: the image of a little “knaue” needing a playmate recalls the little Havelok and the great perverter of play, Godard.43 The abundance of Havelok’s regard for children—his concern to do “al” their desire, to play with them to their “fille”—contrasts sharply with his experience of privation in childhood. Affection for children derives from his experience as a child rather than from any conventional set of romance hero virtues.44 The child-hero is distinctively free to shift identity and to rearticulate himself—as worker, as playmate—as each situation requires, constructing identity as he goes along, out of narrated experience. Havelok shares a certain passivity with the traditional romance hero, but it is a passivity that accumulates identity from a situation rather than by simply passing through a situation. This accumulation of identity is absent from the French lai where the young Haveloc is unaware of his royal past and thinks he is what he appears—a baron fisherman’s son. He learns of his heritage only after his return to Grimsby. Unlike in the Middle English Havelok, identity in the Lai is figured as a static object: a discrete, untouched royalty that is temporarily hidden and then revealed at the opportune moment.

Havelok’s Identity: Tricks of Memory

The idea that noble identity could be affected by circumstance, especially ignoble contact, contradicts the romance assumption that nobility is innate and inheres, unperturbed, in a select group of persons. Unlike invincibility, vulnerability is a mode that leaves its bearer open to imposition, to change, to moving outside of a status-based identity. By continually articulating his own experience and, later in the poem, narrating his past, Havelok actively speaks and thereby shapes his own subjectivity rather than having his identity simply happen to him. However, the act of carving a heroic subjectivity out of vulnerability is not a seamless labor. Havelok is a romance hero whose generic goal of regaining his rightful royal position remains the audience’s expecta- tion. Recapitulations of Havelok’s childhood negotiate this narrative tension between, on the one hand, Havelok’s construction of his ignoble past as unbefitting his royal status and, on the other, the substantive influence of that childhood on Havelok’s mature identity and its tangible reconfiguration of his kingdom. JULIE NELSON COUCH 343

When Havelok begins his ascent to kingship, his “memory” (as vouchsafed in speech) takes on a more active role, at times decrying his ignoble childhood. Havelok’s verbal reconstitution entails a remembering and forgetting—a rhetorical performance of selective memory. In other words, this “surrogation” does not repeat exactly the original event. What Havelok retells is linked to the identity and personal connections the hero must forge at particular moments. Thus Earl Godard’s crimes are repeated, remembered, and assigned blame for Havelok’s harder childhood while fisherman Grim’s initial, whole-hearted intent to drown the boy and his wife’s complicity—their binding, bagging, gagging, and hitting him, for example—are recalled by Havelok the child at the time (lines 635–41), but are carefully left unmentioned by the adult Havelok in his account of the experience to Grim’s sons (lines 1401–25). Havelok wields rhetoric to shape usurped royal identity out of a lower-class childhood. Havelok’s (re)construction of his royal identity begins the morning after Goldboru learns of her husband’s royal status (via the light-beam and an angel) and advises him to reclaim his rights in Denmark. Havelok goes directly from their bed to church, falls on his knees before the Cross of Christ, and prays “Haue merci of me, Louerd, nou!” (line 1363)—the same words he uttered to Godard to stop his knife, and the same words Grim uttered to him after seeing his light-beam. While his prayer recalls medieval adorations of the Cross, we receive not a picture of Christ’s pains but a reiterated picture of Havelok’s painful experience, or, more accurately, an image of Havelok’s childhood experience wholly in terms of pain.45 Havelok’s prayer does not serve the orthodox function of reinscribing Christ’s suffering and passion in the penitent; rather it serves an analogous function within the narrative of (re)inscribing Havelok’s suffering as the essence of his subjectivity. In his prayer Havelok ascribes his entire childhood experience as following from Godard’s villainous theft of his position (by slaying his sisters and ordering his death), and he reconstructs his childhood wholly as a time of suffering:

For I ne misdede him neuere nouth, And haued me to sorwe brouth. He haueth me do mi mete to þigge And ofte in sorwe and pine ligge. (lines 1372–75)

Working for his food, which he had praised earlier as a worthy exercise (“Jt is no shame for to swinken!” [line 800]), is now refigured as shameful begging. All the activity of his childhood—the lively eating, working, 344 THE CHAUCER REVIEW and playing—is here transformed into a passive image of a poor beggar who lies pining for relief.46 Havelok’s childhood is reduced to victimization in order to configure his identity as a usurped king, without any of the modifications of tone or animated activity that had earlier tempered the portrayal of his childhood. The first public assay of Havelok’s revisionist childhood narrative comes immediately after his prayer, when Havelok tells Grim’s sons who he is. Havelok is telling them, as he says, “A þing of me” that they “wel” know (line 1403), so it is the act of telling, of self-articulation, on the part of Havelok, not the information itself, which is new and crucial here. In his rendition to Grim’s sons, Havelok elaborates the unbefitting cast of his childhood, going back to his dying father who was given “wicke red” in regard to entrusting him to Godard (line 1407). He magnifies Godard’s murder of his sisters, rendering it more graphic than it was in his prayer, including now the cutting of their throats and the dismemberment of their bodies. He elaborates Godard’s order to Grim to drown Havelok. On this point, Havelok performs a radical reconstruction: he erases Grim’s initial willingness to drown Havelok, telling Grim’s sons:

But Grim was wis and swiþe hende— Wolde he nouth his soule shende. Leuere was him to be forsworen Þan drenchen me and ben forlorn. (lines 1422–25)

The audience of the romance can recall that Grim, regardless of the threat to his soul, was quite ready to drown the child in order to receive freeman status from Godard. Havelok’s revision of Grim works not only to secure Grim’s sons as his loyal subjects but also enhances the justifica- tion for overthrowing the usurper Godard—both results leading toward a coup on Havelok’s part, thereby building his kingly identity. The poem’s strategy of rhetorical reconstruction should alert critics to reassess the generic function of repetition within Middle English romance and to reconfigure the critical parameters for reading these poems.47 Repetition, or rather, re-narrativization, participates in the overall function of romance to provide cultural meaning for shared experiences. In other words, repetition instantiates romance’s generic act of regrouping, recasting events to smooth over possible cultural contradictions.48 In Havelok reiterations attempt to reconcile anxieties about the vulnerability of childhood and the consequent permeability of social status, not by occulting such hazards, but by rhetorically recasting the hero’s past—in this case a particular ignoble childhood—in order to create the proper JULIE NELSON COUCH 345 king—proper in his body and his connections. Significantly, though, the (re)constructed “memory” of childhood, the revision, insinuates vulnerability into the construction of adult nobility. Hence, vulnerability becomes part of the official encomium attached to Havelok’s drive toward the kingship; it is part and parcel of his identity as king. Havelok’s childhood was a time literally outside his proper, potent, classed position—in England, in a working-class home, and in service to another. Returning to Denmark to recover his kingdom, Havelok takes his “child-ness” with him. For example, in the midnight recognition scene in Earl Ubbe’s bedroom, Ubbe’s speech conflates the dual identity of Havelok as a child and king into one expression of homage. Ubbe calls him “Dere sone” (line 2171), as Grim had done before. Ubbe’s words recall Havelok’s relation to King Birkabeyn, which he goes on to relate explicitly, but his words also play an immediate role as those of a parent reassuring a frightened youth who finds himself the object of a manifold gaze in the middle of the night. The repetition of this simple phrase richly enfolds the identities of Havelok, merging them all into the central image of Havelok as a child and a royal son, here on the verge of his kingship. Ubbe’s review of Havelok’s life extends the obligation of (re)establishing Havelok’s identity to all the people. As he presents his vassals with the legit- imate heir to their kingdom, Ubbe begins in identical manner to Havelok: he will show them a “þing” they “ful wel knawe” (lines 2207–8). Ubbe dwells longer on the part of the “thing” the vassals would know: the trans- fer of governance and guardianship from the dying Birkabeyn to Godard. Ubbe extends the guilt of Godard and Grim to the people as he clearly implicates his audience in the evil that befell Havelok. What Havelok had called “wicked red” that led his father to trust Godard, Ubbe calls “youre [the people’s] red” and points out that they all witnessed Godard’s oaths (lines 2212, 2217–20). Havelok’s identity becomes a matter not only of his own making but also of the community’s making. The people, both high and low—“drenges” and “thaynes,” “knithes” and “sweynes”—become part of the revised narrative of Havelok’s childhood and must subsequently accept this redrawn king (lines 2261–62). The aventure of childhood in Havelok does not simply open up a little free time before the classed role of adulthood; rather, it actually reconfig- ures that role. Havelok’s experience as a child motivates his subsequent actions as the ruler who judges the evil earls and who replaces them with his foster family. Fisherman Grim’s sons and daughters take possession of the earldoms and join with Havelok to govern England. Havelok’s peasant childhood family has become the royal family and the country’s family. The subjectivity of Havelok and the new configuration of the realm all derive from his experience as a vulnerable commoner’s child rather than 346 THE CHAUCER REVIEW from the experience of high-status or chivalric conventions. Havelok’s childhood functions as the source of both heroic subjectivity and a proper kingdom. What Crane calls in Havelok an “ideal of transcendent and universal social harmony” takes on a more dynamic, less striated, more socially inclusive shape because of the central experience of vulnerable childhood.49

Conclusion: Romance and Childhood

Havelok thus exploits a tension between the generic drive of romance to make individual identity a matter of aristocratic class (an always already- invincible subjectivity) and an alternative drive to make identity a matter of narrated experience, a (re)constructed subjectivity. The rhetorical maneuver of selective rearticulation of the past, a performance of memory, enables a stretching of the genre (as it inevitably adapts to a different context) to include the constitutive influence of the experience of vulnerability. Havelok’s childhood is not simply a personification of a lower class with designs of upward mobility (although that reading is, I think, available). Rather, vulnerable childhood is presented as the essen- tial shape of Havelok’s heroic subjectivity, possessing aesthetic value and existential power. If vulnerability can plague or make a noble king—and not just a long-suffering Custance—then all are vulnerable. Havelok and other later Middle English romances formulate, I suggest, a ubiquitousness of vulnerability, and thereby effect a modification of the romance genre. The chivalric romance tradition contrives the inevitability of noble invincibility, the glorification of aristocratic power. In the insular appropriation of the romance genre, the attention given to childhood, to vulnerability, and to characters high and low implicitly calls into question the idealized power of an invincible nobility. With one Middle English romance at least, the motif of the underdog—a motif widely exploited in subsequent narratives—finds its romance niche.50 Well before Geoffrey Chaucer’s renovations of genres, the Havelok poet was engaging in a revision of the romance genre and in writing childhood as a site of productive vulnerability.

Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas ([email protected]) JULIE NELSON COUCH 347

1. My emphasis. All citations from Havelok the Dane are drawn from G. V. Smithers, ed., Havelok (Oxford, 1987), by line numbers. Havelok is found complete in one manuscript, the Bodleian Library’s MS Laud Misc. 108 (ca. 1300) and in fragments in the late fourteenth-century Cambridge University Library MS Add. 4407. See Smithers, xi–xciii, for a comprehensive account of the texts and manuscripts. 2. In his notes, W. W. Skeat begins referencing formula analogues at line 9 (The Lay of Havelok the Dane, EETS e.s. 4 [London, 1868]). Other editors of the poem—including F. Holthausen, ed., Havelok (London, 1901); W. W. Skeat, ed., The Lay of Havelok the Dane, 2nd edn. rev. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, 1915); Smithers, ed., Havelok (1987); and Ronald B. Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds., Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999)—have also not com- mented on these lines. Nancy Mason Bradbury notes the emphasis the lines place on “the importance of misery and deprivation in childhood” (Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England [Urbana, Ill., 1998], 94). Her argument concerns the poem’s relation to an oral poetic tradition. 3. Derek Pearsall’s criticism of the poem’s tendency to use “characteristically arbitrary and inane formulae and phrases” typifies the early tradition of reading Havelok (and Middle English romances generally [see note 10 below]) as popular narrative (hack-)written for a peasant or bourgeois audience (“John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katharine and Popular Romance Style,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 6 [1975]: 121–37, at 125). See, e.g., H. le Sourd Creek, “The Author of Havelok the Dane,” Englische Studien 48 (1915): 193–212; and John Halverson, “Havelok the Dane and Society,” Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 142–51. This critical approach has largely been superseded by reading Havelok as the artistic work of a literary writer. Critics frequently praise Havelok for its formal and thematic virtues, admiring, for example, its original use of local legend, its show of legal expertise, and its structural symmetry. See, respectively, Nancy Mason Bradbury, “The Traditional Origins of Havelok the Dane,” Studies in Philology 90 (1993): 115–42; Smithers, ed., Havelok, lix–lxiv; and Robert W. Hanning, “Havelok the Dane: Structure, Symbols, Meaning,” Studies in Philology 64 (1967): 586–605. Other analyses have destabilized assumptions of a popular audience for a “non-literary” Havelok; see Roy Michael Liuzza, “Representation and Readership in the Middle English Havelok,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 504–19; Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 1987); and Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley, 1986). 4. Donna Crawford also notes the attachment of vulnerability to the hero; she reads the vulnerability of Havelok’s body metaphorically, as a figure of the vulnerability of the body politic (“The Vulnerable Body of Havelok the Dane,” Medieval Forum 1 (2002), http://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/Volume%201/Crawford.html). Her article participates in the dialogue on English national identity and governance which has become a main- stay in Havelok criticism; see also Sheila Delany and Vahan Ishkanian, “Theocratic and Contractual Kingship in Havelok the Dane,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22 (1974): 290–302; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), 143–55; Diane Speed, “The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance,” in Carol M. Meale, ed., Readings in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 135–57; and Robert Rouse, “English Identity and the Law in Havelok the Dane, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild and Beues of Hamtoun,” in Corinne Saunders, ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., 2005), 69–83. 5. I use the term subjectivity here as a function of language: a text constitutes a subject through linguistic acts. See H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, 1990), esp. 8–10, 24–25, for a discussion of grammatical 348 THE CHAUCER REVIEW subjectivity in relation to Chaucer’s CT. This textualized subject is not to be confused with a psychological entity: “the linguistic subject is equivalent neither to the subject of consciousness nor to the subject of action: it is frequently their simulacrum” (Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages [Stanford, 2004], 3). 6. Chrétien de Troyes’s knight-heroes do find themselves in predicaments—Yvain trapped in his enemies’ castle, for example. In such instances, chivalric romances rely upon audience recognition of the potency of the hero’s noble status. In other words, imminent danger does not register as a vulnerability on the part of the hero. Though Yvain is trapped, he is not vulnerable: a young woman instantly enters the room and offers efficacious aid: an invisibility ring and a well-prepared meal. Lunete helps Yvain because she immediately recognizes who he is: “Sir Yvain, the son of King Urien,” who acted courteously toward her in the past. She also commends his lack of fear in the situation, reading it as a further sign of his nobility (David Staines, trans., The Complete Romances of Chretien De Troyes [Bloomington, 1990], 268–69). See also Chrétien de Troyes, Chevalier au Lion, in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 794 (ms. H), ed. Pierre Kunstmann, lines 965–1023, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu.lib-e2.lib.ttu.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/TLA/. For the chivalric hero Yvain, his identity, his noble bearing, his prowess, a hermit’s food, or a damsel’s magic ring is ever at the ready. While chivalric heroes manifest a variety of emotions, ambivalences, and ironies as they cultivate their identities through aventure, they remain within the bounds of a noble knightly world as it is being staged for a noble courtly audience. On romance adventure as a “class-specific behavior” and the genre as a vehicle of aristocratic ideology, see Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, 1994), 167. See also Eugene Vance, “Chrétien’s Yvain and the Ideologies of Change and Exchange,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 42–62; Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago, 1961), 316–19; Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley, 1977), 112–22; and Erich Auerbach, “The Knight Sets Forth,” in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953), 123–42. 7. Contemporary definitions of medieval romance account for the broad scope of the genre, unhinging it from the necessity of belonging solely to one historical moment of aristocratic, feudal ideology. Geraldine Heng reminds us that chivalric romances are but “one skein of magical narrative” (Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy [New York, 2003], 4; her emphasis). See Heng’s “Introduction,” 1–15, for a discussion of the multifarious medieval romance genre, that “expanding category of fabulous narratives of a literary kind” (1). John P. Boots also disentangles chivalric content geared toward an aristocratic audience from a rhetorical style which distinguishes a nonchivalric narrative as romance (“Parataxis and Politics: Meaning and the Social Utility of Middle English Romance,” in Dennis M. Jones, ed., A Humanist’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of John Christian Bale [Decorah, Iowa, 1990], 3–10). See also Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives,” Speculum 46 (1971): 348–59, at 354. 8. See Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London, 1968), esp. 3–6; and Crane, Insular Romance, esp. 6–8, for accounts of the distinctive, less aristocratic cultural milieu of Middle English romance. 9. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, “Introduction,” in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds., The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow, 2000), 1–38, at 22. 10. For the traditional view, see Helaine Newstead, “I. Romances: General,” in J. Burke Severs, Albert E. Hartung, and Peter G. Beidler, eds., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, 11 vols. (New Haven, 1967–2005), 1:11–16, esp. 11–12. For a more recent proponent of this view, see Robert B. Burlin, “Middle English Romance: The Structure of Genre,” Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 1–14. JULIE NELSON COUCH 349

11. In their “Introduction” to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, Putter and Gilbert offer a review of the critical tradition that has regularly devalued Middle English romance. Putter deconstructs the romantic/revisionist dichotomy that insists on either a minstrel or hack-writer origin for metrical romances, either position shackling the narratives to an assumption of literary inferiority (3–15). Gilbert exposes the social-class discrimination inherent in the popular-versus-canonical opposition and the resulting conflation of literary quality and social status (17–28). See also Rosalind Field, “Romance in England, 1066–1400,” in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 152–76; and Corinne Saunders, ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England (Cambridge, U.K., 2005). 12. Because of the poem’s nonchivalric “homely” character (a ubiquitous adjective in Havelok criticism), some critics have fretted about its generic status. Most notably, John Finlayson has argued that Havelok is mistakenly identified as a romance by its manuscript association with the romance King Horn. His censure of the uninformed, non-courtly author of the poem unconvincingly discounts Havelok by restricting the definition of romance to chivalric narrative (“King Horn and Havelok the Dane: A Case of Mistaken Identities,” Medievalia et Humanistica 18 [1992]: 17–45, esp. 36–41). For a recent response to Finlayson’s argument, see K. S. Whetter, “Gest and Vita, Folktale and Romance in Havelok,” Parergon 20 (2003): 21–46. 13. Laura A. Hibbard, Mediaeval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (New York, 1960), 106. 14. “[R]omances contemplate the place of private identity in society at large” (Crane, Insular Romance, 11). On the centrality of identity across the romance spectrum, from eleventh-century French romance to later Middle English romance, see Roberta L. Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 2000). As Phillipa Hardman states, “at a profound level the subject of identity is the matter of all romance” (“Introduction,” in Phillipa Hardman, ed., The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 2002], 1). See also Edmund Reiss, “Romance,” in Thomas J. Heffernan, ed., The Popular Literature of Medieval England [Knoxville, 1985], 108–30, esp. 117–20). Tracing the etymology of romans, Strohm finds it attached early to a narrative “de cui,” about someone (“The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce,” Genre 10 [1977]: 1–28, at 4; see also Strohm, “Storie,” 355–56). Mehl also elaborates the idea of romance centering a hero (Middle English Romances, 16–17). Other critics define Havelok specifically as a romance in terms of its working out the relation between social and personal identity; see, for example, Hanning, “Havelok,” 592–93. Crane’s Foucauldian-informed articulation of the social web that contains and defines the romance hero—that is, the framework that articulates and grants meaning to his actions—fine-tunes classic statements on romance genre and subjectivity and is representative of the current critical awareness of the genre as a “fabulous” site for constructing identity, specifically status-, gender-, and race-based subjectivities (Gender and Romance, 32–33; see also Heng, Empire, esp. 1, 7). Classic statements on the romance genre include Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Pamela Gradon, Form and Style in Early English Literature (London, 1971); and Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981). 15. A Middle English example of the perpetuation of an aristocratic ideology of invincibility is found in the same Laud Misc. 108 manuscript, in the early Middle English romance King Horn. Horn, like Havelok, is orphaned (by the murder of his father) when young, but his youth is seen solely as an asset, not a vulnerability. Though he is exiled, danger never truly threatens. Horn’s radiant, youthful beauty saves him: because of his “fair- nesse” (Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury, eds., Four Romances, 19 [line 91]), the heathens will not kill him, choosing to exile him on a rudderless boat instead. Subsequently, his fairness, 350 THE CHAUCER REVIEW prowess, and a magic ring will bail him out of thorny situations with pagans and other enemies. 16. See Crane, Insular Romance, esp. 6–8, on the more centralized political landscape of insular society. On idealization in romance, see Gradon, Form and Style, and W. R. J. Barron, English Medieval Romance (London, 1987). 17. The more inclusive-looking social and political landscapes of Middle English romances have been variously interpreted as baronial (Crane, Insular Romance); didactic (Mehl, Middle English Romances); domestic or familial (Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances [Bloomington, Ind., 1983], esp. 157–88; and Felicity Riddy, “Middle English Romance: Family, Marriage, Intimacy,” in Robert Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 2000], 235–52); and nationalistic (Heng, Empire; and Turville- Petre, England the Nation). 18. In key readings of the poem, critics have seen repetition in Havelok as meaningful, arguing against an assessment of hackwork or banality. See, for example, Hanning, “Havelok,” esp. 590–99, 602; Mehl, Middle English Romances, esp. 162–63; Bradbury, Writing Aloud, 92–97; and A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, 43–55 (Cambridge, U.K., 1987). 19. A parallel image represents the child Goldboru, whose dying father also laments that she is yet unable to “speke ne sho kan go” (line 125). He imagines her coming of age with an image of riding a horse accompanied by “a thousande men” (line 126–28). 20. I have argued this elsewhere, identifying child characters who range outside adult formations of identity. See Julie Nelson Couch, “Misbehaving God: The Case of the Christ Child in Ms Laud Misc. 108 ‘Infancy of Jesus Christ,’” in Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kirk (New York, 2006), 31–43, and “‘The Child Slain by Jews’ and ‘The Jewish Boy,’” in Daniel T. Kline, ed., Medieval Literature for Children (New York, 2003), 204–26. Daniel T. Kline also discusses the “malleable” identity of medieval child subjects, both historical and literary (“Textuality, Subjectivity, and Violence: Theorizing the Figure of the Child in Middle English Literature,” Essays in Medieval Studies 12 [1995], http://www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/VOL12/kline.html). Other critics have investigated the features of child characters in medieval literature, emphasizing distinguishing qualities or demonstrating sympathetic adult interest in children. For the most recent scholarship, bibliographies, and surveys of the field of medieval childhood, see Barbara Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77 (2002): 440–60; and Albrecht Classen, ed., Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin, 2005); see also Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001). 21. This literary representation of childhood as a time of both vulnerability and adventure corresponds to what Hanawalt and others have found in the historical record where childhood is also marked by a rhetoric of vulnerability and of play; see Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York, 1993), and The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986). See also Ronald C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York, 1997). Court records reveal youth using a rhetoric of vulnerability to elicit sympathy, expressing their pleas with excuses related to age: for example, “I was but a child then” or “. . . being of tender years”; such remarks “evoked a sympathetic and sentimental picture of helplessness in his or her adult listeners” (Hanawalt, Growing, 6). In Havelok the paralleled loss of the hero and heroine’s fathers and subsequent assignation of guardians showcase the legal issue of wardship (what a child enters upon the death of a parent); the situation also manifests the cultural intolerance for abuse of dependent children and their inheritances. As Hanawalt has demonstrated, law and custom placed a high priority on protecting and nurturing minors, especially when a child is orphaned by the death of a parent (Growing, esp. 89–107). Noël James Menuge goes so far as to label Havelok a “wardship romance” JULIE NELSON COUCH 351

(“The Wardship Romance: A New Methodology,” in Rosalind Field, ed., Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 1999], 29–43). 22. Alexander Bell, ed., Le Lai D’Haveloc and Gaimar’s Haveloc Episode (Manchester, 1925). For English translations of the Lai, see William A. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories in Search of an Author: The Narrative Versions of Havelok,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 21–97; and Judith Weiss, trans., The Birth of Romance: An Anthology (London, 1992). There is also no comparable child-hero in any of the accounts of Havelok interpolated into later chroni- cles. On these, see Smithers, ed., Havelok, xxii–xxxii. 23. Bell, ed., Le Lai, 146–47; see also Smithers, ed., Havelok, xvii–xix, for an English summary. 24. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 48–49. I refer by page number to Kretzschmar’s facing-page copy of Bell’s edition and his English translation of the Lai. 25. The contested territories in the Anglo-Norman versions consist of smaller domains, while the baronial ties between the English parcels and between England and Denmark are more convoluted. Smithers remarks that the Middle English Havelok “modernized” the tale by streamlining to one ruler over all England, with the usurper being the Earl of Cornwall (xxxii–xxxiii). On the baronial context, see Crane, Insular Romance, 6–24, 40–52. 26. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 42–43. 27. The Lai ends: “Vint anz regna e si fu reis, / Assez conquist par ses Daneis” (He reigned twenty years and was the king; he conquered much with his Danes) (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 96–97). For Gaimar’s version, see Bell, ed., Le Lai, 175; and Smithers, ed., Havelok, xix. 28. The kings are primarily introduced in the context of their children, as dying fathers needing to assure proper guardianship. The narrator mentions promptly that Birkabeyn has three children, noting immediately that “he hem louede so his lif” (line 349). When Birkabeyn entrusts his realm to Godard, it is the children who are mentioned first (line 385), and the narrator later specifies that the treason Godard contemplates is against the children (line 445). 29. Crane acknowledges that the Lai adheres more to “the limited aristocratic termi- nology” of baronial concerns than does the Middle English poem with its broader social appeal (Insular Romance, 50). 30. In Secular Scripture, Frye writes: “Identity means [for romance] . . . a state of existence in which there is nothing to write about. It is existence before ‘once upon a time’ and subsequent to ‘and they live happily ever after.’ What happens in between are adventures, or collisions with external circumstances, and the return to identity is a release from the tyranny of these circumstances” (54; my emphasis). What the archetypal approach does not make visible is the insistent, protective presence of noble identity in an aristocratic genre. While the hero may temporarily lose his position or his mind, his inherent beauty, courtesy, or prowess—traits that mark him as invincibly noble—never leave him. Such noble accoutrements dilute the potency of the word tyranny. 31. “Li enfes crut e amenda, / De cors, de membres, efforca” (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 48–49). 32. “Home barbé” (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 48–49). 33. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 46–47. 34. Kline observes that children who appear in Middle English texts are frequently abused, “regularly threatened, violated, killed, or already dead” (“Textuality”). He argues that the subjectivity of the child is persistently voided by the child’s victimization: violent acts resituate the child in a fixed position in the social/political hierarchy. While Kline claims this operation erases the child’s subjectivity, he does note the possibility of a transgressive agency in certain child characters. 352 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

35. Heng, Empire, 326n52. She cites the dispute over an inheritance between the two sisters in Chrétien’s Yvain. 36. For example, see Sir Isumbras, in Harriet Hudson, ed., Four Middle English Romances: Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1996). Havelok’s wish points to the genre awareness and intertextuality Carol Fewster finds in Middle English romances (Traditionality and Genre, esp. 1–25). 37. On the representation of the invincible child-hero in Old French Enfances, see Anna P. Carney, “A Portrait of the Hero as a Young Child: Guillaume, Roland, Girard and Gui,” Olifant 18 (1993–94): 238–77. 38. The third, Goldboru’s recognition of him as noble on their wedding night, also takes place at night in the private space of the bedroom with as yet no public support. 39. Though the particulars vary, the chivalric knight-hero generally follows a recog- nizable pattern in his self-discovery: the hero will realize his chivalrous, knightly nature— e.g., his prowess, his desire to love—and contend with all the attendant dilemmas. 40. I borrow the term surrogation from Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York, 1996), who applies the term to dramatic performance as a mode of cultural memory. 41. Critics have read the Middle English Havelok as the figure of an ideal laborer, functioning as a desirable fantasy for an upper-class audience. See Crane, Insular Romance, 44–45; and Delany and Ishkanian, “Theocratic and Contractual Kingship,” 297. 42. I disagree with those readings, including Whetter’s, that suggest Havelok has forgotten his identity. Whetter applies implausible psychological features to the hero, conjecturing that the trauma of his escape has affected his memory (“Geste and Vita,” 25–27). My reading of Havelok takes a converse approach: the poem is not a narrative about forgetting identity but one explicitly about reshaping and rearticulating remembered identity. One could argue that Havelok epitomizes the romance genre in that it more visibly (re)constructs the identity of the hero. 43. Godard was pretending to play with Havelok’s sisters when he cut their throats (467–71). 44. This poem’s emphasis on Havelok’s playing with children contrasts to the descrip- tion of the young Haveloc in the Lai: after he becomes the cook’s scullion, he immediately shares any food he can get with valets and squires (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 54–55). This franchise toward fellow courtiers is the conventional virtue of the young romance hero. 45. Smithers notes that Havelok calling on “Croiz” and “Crist” (line 1359) in his prayer imitates the adorations of the Cross, such as are found in the Ancrene Riwle (Havelok, 128). 46. Even his physical posture in prayer converts his body into a performance of such a childhood: he lies prostrate before the Cross and “Siþen yede sore grotinde awey” (lines 1390–91). 47. Mitsunori Imai has recently called for revisiting the aesthetics of repetition in Middle English romances (“Repetition in Middle English Metrical Romances,” in Risto Hiltunen and Shinichiro Watanabe, eds., Approaches to Style and Discourse in English (Osaka, 2004), 27–50. Imai suggests, for example, an integral relation between the repetition of merisms and the plot and themes of Havelok (31–40). 48. Heng calls this generic operation “cultural rescue” and analyzes how romances reformulate historical events (Empire, 2–3). See, for example, Chapter 1 in Empire, 17–61. 49. Crane, Insular Romance, 45. 50. What Field finds in later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English romances, an emphasis on vulnerability, is already given precedence in Havelok (“Romance in England,” 173–75). Though Havelok may not have any heirs in terms of its specific narrative tradition, as Field suggests (166), its hero bequeaths a place for vulnerability in romance.