THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Filicide in Medieval Narrative A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Program in Comparative Literature School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Margaret E. McKenzie Washington, D.C. 2012 Filicide in Medieval Narrative Margaret E. McKenzie, Ph.D. Director: Joan T. Grimbert, Ph.D. The majority of children who appear in the narrative literatures of the Middle Ages garner attention because they mature into kings, queens, warriors, knights, or lovers. An oft ignored but significant type of literary child is the one who dies - sometimes at the hand of a parent - during the tale. This dissertation explores the purpose of such filicides featured in medieval narratives. While shocking to audiences even today, these killings have received little scholarly attention, and extant studies, though valuable, are hampered by their narrowness of scope. This study widens the field with a multilingual approach that permits the consideration of works based upon Celtic and Germanic mythology and heroic tales alongside their more famous and frequently studied continental and British counterparts. Primary texts identified through consultation of tale-type indices and reviews of secondary literature were grouped for evaluation by content: medieval adaptations of classical narratives, feudal narratives, Celtic narratives, and Germanic narratives. Historical and legal materials aid in the contextualization of these tales. These filicide episodes, regardless of origin, serve a dual purpose within their narratives, to captivate with gripping material and to educate through example. Patterns regarding victims and perpetrators transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. Few females become victims, and all those are adolescents; male victims range in age from infancy to adulthood. All these deaths, even those where the child's characterization is minimal, highlight social anxieties, including concerns about preserving one's lineage and promoting social order. These narratives further demonstrate a sacrificial ability of mothers that was previously ascribed only to fathers. This dissertation by Margaret E. McKenzie fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in Comparative Literature approved by Joan T. Grimbert, Ph.D., as Director, and by Stephen K. Wright, Ph.D., and Claudia Bornholdt, Ph.D., as Readers. _______________________________________ Joan T. Grimbert, Ph.D., Director _______________________________________ Stephen K. Wright, Ph.D., Reader _______________________________________ Claudia Bornholdt, Ph.D., Reader ii Acknowledgments I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my dissertation director, Dr. Joan T. Grimbert, not only for her prompt and thorough constructive criticism but also for her infinite patience and her unswerving faith in me. I would like to thank the rest of my committee, Dr. Stephen K. Wright and Dr. Claudia Bornholdt, for their invaluable feedback and Dr. R. Mark Scowcroft, for his guidance while I formulated my original proposal. I would also like to thank Dr. Hanna Marks for providing me with extensions and the Lee-Hatzfeld Scholarship Committee for providing me with funding so that I could complete this project. Many thanks go out to my friends and family members for their years of encouragement. I especially thank Jim for helping me overcome numerous technological hurdles and supplying me with an endless stream of coffee. I owe the greatest thanks to my parents. This dissertation is dedicated to them, for without their love and support, I could never have begun this project, let alone finished it. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Classical Traditions of Filicide 24 Chapter Two: The Classical Traditions of Filicide Revisited 66 Chapter Three: The Feudal Traditions of Filicide 127 Chapter Four: The Celtic Traditions of Filicide 177 Chapter Five: The Germanic Traditions of Filicide 244 Conclusion 300 Appendix of Summaries 315 Works Cited Primary Sources 347 Secondary Sources 359 iv Introduction In the Skáldskaparmál portion of his Edda, Snorri Sturluson describes how Gudrun avenges the murder of her brothers Gunnar and Hogni (also known as the Niflungs), whose deaths had been arranged by her husband, King Atli: Litlu síðar drap Guðrún tvá sonu sína ok lét gera með gulli ok silfri borðker af hausum þeira, ok þá var gert erfi Niflunga. At þeiri veizlu lét Guðrún skenkja Atla konungi með þeim borðkerum mjöð, ok var blandit við blóði sveinanna, en hjörtu þeira lét hon steikja ok fá konungi at eta. En er þat var gert, þá sagði hon honum sjálfum með mörgum ófögrum orðum. (section 50) A little later, Gudrun killed her two sons and had cups made out of their skulls, with gold and silver, and then the funeral feast for the Niflungs was held. At that feast, Gudrun had mead, which was mixed with the blood of the boys, served to King Atli using these cups, and she had their hearts, which she had had roasted, given to the king to eat. And when that was done, she then told him this to his face with many harsh words.1 Despite gruesome episodes of child murder like the one above, specialists in the field of medieval narrative literature have traditionally focused on the roles of kings, queens, warriors, knights, and lovers, but have largely overlooked the literary role of children. This lack of scholarly attention may seem surprising if one considers the importance of children to the concept of lineage, something valued in nearly all epochs and cultures. Even today, people pore over archived records, hoping to discover where they and their ancestors have come from by tracing their lineage back as far as possible. Concerns about 1 Translation mine. 1 2 lineage are evident in many medieval narratives. The Old French chansons de geste, for example, tell the deeds of one's purported ancestors in order to legitimize one's own actions and acquisitions of property. Such attempts to legitimize a people's claim to territory are not unique to the chansons de geste or even to Old French literature. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae traces the English royal line back to Aeneas, through his great- grandson Brutus, and Virgil's Aeneid was written, in part, to establish the Roman empire as a continuation of the legacy of Troy. In medieval romance and, to a lesser extent, in epic, anxieties over succession and inheritance manifested themselves in the concern for appropriate courtship and marriage, as seen in Marie de France's lai, "Le Fraisne," in which the vassals of the lord of Dol deem a foundling unfit to become his bride because she is not known to be of noble birth. Because children served not only as heirs but also were somehow seen as the physical embodiment of the success or failure of a conjugal union, they held special significance in a world concerned with lineage. Why, then, have scholars overlooked the roles of children in medieval narrative? Likely, this negligence derives in part from observations that despite how frequently adulterous affairs occur in medieval romance, these unions rarely produce children (McCracken, Romance 119). Some unions, both legitimate and illegitimate, do produce offspring who appear in medieval narrative texts, yet unless children grow to be heroes, they have held little appeal for the modern literary scholar. Some scholars have argued that children in medieval narrative exist merely to aid in the plot; in that way, they lack agency and are considered more as objects than as people. Even Nicole Clifton, whose dissertation examines the role of children in Old French and English romance, claims that, "children with 3 important roles are fairly rare anywhere in medieval literature" (64). Béatrix Vadin, in "L'absence de représentation de l'enfant et/ou du sentiment de l'enfance dans la littérature médiévale," has also argued that when a child is present, his or her importance is minimal: "il n'est que très rarement promu au rang d'acteur du récit ou même simplement de personnage pouvant prétendre à une vraie caractérisation" (365). Vadin then argues that children were, at most, proto-adults and thus existed at the fringe of adult society and that even in heroic narratives, the child heroes are not psychologically developed as children and are essentially young adults with chivalric skills (365-71, 375-80). While Vadin's assertion that young heroes are proto-adults may appear to be borne out by episodes such as the famous hunting scene in Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, in which the young Tristan impresses Mark's men with his ability to break down a hart (lines 2757-3078), other tales of young heroes prove that there are exceptions. For instance, in the Táin Bó Cuailgne, which includes the macgnímartha or "youthful exploits" of the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, the audience is told how the young Cú Chulainn lies to adults in order to take up arms at a very young age and to joyride in a chariot (158-63). Another theory regarding children in medieval narrative is that some children "appear mainly as 'local color,' adding an element of verisimilitude" (Clifton 57). This theory seems reasonable enough to explain some roles of children in medieval narrative, but what of the victims of the child murder depicted by Snorri Sturluson? Are such tales meant to mirror reality? If they are not, then what purpose do they serve in these narratives, and what do they indicate about medieval families and medieval societies? Barbara A. Hanawalt, in her article, "Medievalists and the Study of Childhood," presents an overview of the circumstances that led, in the late twentieth century, to a flurry of 4 scholarship on the history of childhood in the Middle Ages. She cites, among the reasons, a rising interest in cultural studies in the academic world of the 1960s and 1970s and a corresponding interest in studying the lives of marginalized individuals (440-43).