The Romances : Sir Orfeo , Emare , Sir Gowther , The Sege of Melayne
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The essence of these four romances is a society with a particular religious or secular ethos, that society under threat, and individuals as microcosm of their societal ethos, whose behaviour, both at ease and under trial against the threat, actualises and validates that ethos . These themes can and do serve in the tragic and epic genres . Where they become romance is in their other-worldliness, their appeal to the imagination . The introductory lines of each poem are an invitation to the reader to share in the poet's imaginative construct : a romance Quest that is a cerebral experience . The reader is detached from the other-world that the poem's characters inhabit . As reader of a lay within a lay, of a completed artifact in a genre with specific convention and motif, the reader is detached, supervisory, except where the character under trial experiences the marvellous, the supernatural . There we have one possible area of shared reader-character experience, were the reader--simply as reader-- not already so detached . Effectively, he experiences the marvellous, the supernatural objectively, and the character's experience of these is gauged strictly against the revealed societal ethos . The romance sum is cerebral experience--the premise for recognising idealisation, and itself a breeding-ground for it .
Society and Ethos
Society as depicted in these four romances is a highly stylised one, reduced to what the poets deem the representative essentials : the elite--the best in blood, breeding, position, virtues, beauty, valour, and judgment . It is not a perfect circle . It has its rogue elements : the acquisitive, vengeful Ganelon ; the diabolic Gowther ; the raving screams of Herodis breaking the ideal, serene, courtly ambience ; the incestuous intent of Emare's father and the jealousy-inspired interventions of her mother-in-law .(Indeed, Emare is a specific examination of royal fallibility.) These, however, in falling short of the ideal standards set by their peers, set off and thereby negatively confirm the ideals actualised in their peers .
The viewpoint is elitist, the society is that of the court, and the court, with king or emperor at the head, is underpinned by a very real feudal system of vassalage : the right of a lord to loyalty, obedience and service from his minions . This is what Orfeo requires of his steward (and later tests him on), what Charles requires and receives from Rowlande, what the king of France, as feudal overlord, requires without demur from Emare's husband, king of Galys, and what the disguised Gowther shows in successive sorties in the service of the emperor of Allmeyn . This sort of incidence of feudal obligation honourably fulfilled makes the practitioners of it stereotypes of an ideal .
The concerns of society in the four romances hinge on the extent to which that society is under direct physical threat, or its authority is being challenged, from the outside . Orfeo's is under no such threat : leisurely strolls into the orchard, a court that is the Mecca of minstrels and where feats of arms consist in to harpe and layde theron his wittes scharpe (37-8)--that is until the promised abduction of Herodis produces 1,000 knights for her defence . Emare opens into a courtly world, but here it is less pervasive. It serves functionally : as scenario wherein the robe of nobull ble is introduced as tribute-gift between royals ; and as ethical source of Emare's abiding virtue, courtise--the reality unthur wede . Sir Gowther is some distance from Sir Orfeo in ambience . There is still the stock courtly motif on Gowthere's mother's beauty--non hur luke, for comly under kell (32-33)--but here a fiend in the shape of her husband is In hur orchard . And the bulk of the poem concerns genuine feats of arms : Gowther's post-conversion deeds in expiation of his sins . The world of The Sege of Melayne is that of the warrior-class, with Charles as temporal feudal overlord, but against the backdrop of his vassalage to the eternal, divine overlord . It is a world of Teutonic consultation alle at the borde (157), with feats of arms translated into numerical slaughter on a grand scale, but which are reduced to concentrated focus on cameos of combat that exclusively point up existential embodiments of the chivalric ideal--Rowlande, Charles and Turpin .
This spectrum drawn from the virtually exclusive fine amors of Sir Orfeo through to the virtually exclusive chanson de geste of The Sege of Melayne is coextensive with an ethical spectrum from virtual secular through to virtual Christian . I say 'virtual' because in Sir Orfeo Christian references are minimal--the pilgrim's mantle that Orfeo dons, his oath at 316, these allied to the poet's prayers at 263 and 603 . The point of this seems to be that the courtly ethic is self-sufficient, and supportive of its practitioners when they are under trial : Orfeo's undilutable love for his lady wife, his minstrelling skills, and his belief in word of honour surmount the arbitrary dangers of Fairyland . Emare's consistent virtue is courtly cortise, but backed up by Christian belief--cf. her double-entendres on the worde (256-8) and commaunndement (629-30), in moments of great personal stress : religious ethic vying with incestuous intent across the blood line, and wifely obedience to her lord and husband vying with Kadore's subversive intent across the chivalric-feudal line . Also, Rome the location where the pilgrims, Emare's husband and father, rediscover Emare--Rome serves as the fountain of Christian reconciliation . In Sir Gowther, Christianity is inevitably a more potent ethical presence, as counteraction to Gowther's rampant diabolism . For all his evil, Gowther has had a courtly upbringing, and after his conversion he is the flower of Christian chivalry : humbly eschewing a praiseworthy identity, utterly obedient to the strictures of his spiritual lord, the emperor . God miraculously provides his knight with horse and equipage secretly to facilitate the expiation . God also intervenes miraculously in The Sege of Melayne, giving his earthly champion the symbolic sword summoning him to holy war, and when Turpin succeeds the dilatory Charles to the role of Christ's champion, God miraculously provides the altar host and wine (891-5) before the battleground . Turpin and the army of clerics who respond promptly to his call shame Charles, by deed and example, out of his dilatoriness and into his divinely assigned role--indeed, required role out of vassalage to his divine overlord . But there is a sense in which Turpin overreaches his imperium : out of anger with Charles, he is prepared to reduce Paris to rubble, and at one point in his struggle with the heathen--1174--it is as if he is testing Christ's support . He dies the archetypal heroic death, just on the point when the Christian host is preparing to assault the now weakened Melayne, and just when the poet terminates the narrative . Turpin dies like Moses, in sight of but not in the place on which he had set his sights from the first, and which he had expended all his energies to reach . Turpin is the archetypal epic hero, embodying the communal will, who characteristically dies . Rowlande--who survives the test of his faith in the heathen camp (422ff.)--and Charles--who, via Turpin, survives the test of his vassalage to divine overlord-- are archetypal heroes of Romance, who characteristically survive and return to their own community .
Corroboration of the fact that aristocratic courtly elite and ideal virtues are intended to coincide can be seen from the very few instances where non-aristocrats feature in these romances . In Emare, the messenger is weak enough to be diverted from his course by the temptation of a fine feast at the castle of Emare's mother-in-law, and he is weak enough to succumb 'in his cups' . By contrast, the Lords (913-4) have breeding and self-control enough to know when they have had sufficient . In Sir Gowther, our hero is often in the van or fighting by his emperor's side, and always pressing forward . By contrast, immediately after our chivalric knight slays the sultan (571-89), we find that the heathen fote men on tho feld...thenward radly ranne . Again, in The Sege of Melayne,1364ff., Charles is seeking a knight as courier, and is met with a sequence of refusals . The cameo is, in effect, an imperial test--concomitantly a Romance sequence of tests--of the parameters of vassalage : duty to fight for one's lord to the death, unswervingly, as against duty to obey the lord's commands . This sequence of refusals is followed by the line, The symple thay bade none sende (1429) . In short, only the knightly class is to be trusted, asked, and permitted a refusal : only the elite have worth .
Curiously (and yet not so curiously), Sir Orfeo, the romance that achieves the most complete separateness into an ideal world, has the king sounding the opinion of a beggar on the events at court, taking lodgings for himself and Dame Herodis with the beggar, and borrowing the beggar's clothes for his visit to court . This sense of common humanity could be said to have emerged from Orfeo's ten years of self-abasement and self-discovery in the wilderness, or to have proceeded from the shock of seeing the mysterious panel of bodies alive in death--the 'Ubi sunt' theme redolent of Villon given flesh and instantaneity . Whether it be one, the other, or both, the fact is that the steward disregards, and the lords at the feast ignore, his beggarly appearance : his entree is in being a harper--For mi lordes loue Sir Orfeo (518) . Love is the base line, and, in the good old days before Herodis's abduction, fine amors was manifest as a pervasive thing : love of life, of music, of music's artisans, of leisure, and unswerving love of one's lord, or of the lord for his lady . The feast Orfeo attends has all of these, save the last, and with Dame Herodis safe and to hand, he and she can return to fill that niche in the Orfeo court panel of love-in-life, but now with the additional niche housing common humanity .
The Threat to Society
The threat in Sir Orfeo is the intrusion of the supernatural into the thereunto closed ambience of fine amors, and specifically coming between Orfeo and his wife . The supernatural seems to be a means of articulating a period of dissension, stress and estrangement between husband and wife, against a fine amors backdrop that does not permit fraction, imperfection in or dilution of the ideal love-relationship . For example, the list of the Fairy King's domains (159-60) has the identical formula of that describing Orfeo's 9245-6) . A thousand knights, armed and ready, surround Herodis but cannot prevent her abduction : a mirage of 1,000 knights parade past Orfeo with swords drawn, but with no evident conclusion (290-6) . Herodis falls asleep at the orchard's edge : when Orfeo sees the mirages, his mind straddles the border between real and unreal . If seen as an extension of himself, the king of fairy with his rout hunt vapidly and to no avail (283-7) . Similarly, if the mirage Herodis is seen as an extension of the real, then she is not the 'quen of fairy with hir rout', but one of a large group of ladies on equal footing, whose hunting reaps an abundance of game . The point of this double mirage seems to be that in the matter of 'hunting', i.e. of pursuing a courtly love-object, even a king performs vapidly, ineffectively, while ladies in general, including Herodis, perform effectively, gentil and iolif (305), with diverse love-objects . It would seem, then, that the ympre-tre is a young, aristocratic scion at court, and Herodis's fits are an open display of uncontrollable fashion . A period of estrangement ensues . A moment of silent communion presents itself after Orfeo makes the move (318), at which time Herodis weeps at seeing the distraughtness written in Orfeo's features (323-7) . But the other ladies cut short this open display of affection : it is for the new Orfeo, chastened by the estrangement and by the time in the wilderness, to win Herodis back by minstrelsy from the old Orfeo, the Fairy King who 'hunted ineffectively' . In sum, the supernatural in Sir Orfeo is a writ-large articulation of a period of private dissension between king and queen : it is consummate idealisation--from private rift to rift across the kingdom .
The threat in Emare is the robe of nobull ble, with its exotic antecedents, and its transforming effects on Emare's appearance in the eyes of all who see her in it : a noble emperor and father becomes a lecher with incestuous intent ; the king of Galys becomes husband ; the loyal Kadore becomes disaffected steward and putative suitor ; even the merchant Jurdan is both entranced and aferde of that syght/For glysterying of that wede . At base, the reality in Emare is her abiding courtise in whatever trials and circumstances she has to face as a result of the robe's transformative effects . Emare ia a moral allegory about appearance and reality, and the supernatural robe is a writ-large articulation of the unreliability of human affections where they concern beauty .
The threat in Sir Gowther is in Gowther's diabolic paternity, and the inference from Gowther's behaviour from cradle to conversion is that his diabolic nature has been genetically transmitted from father to son . His destructive progress from wet-nurses to mother to nuns is, again, a writ-large poeticisation of the destructive side of man's inner nature--voracious of those who give of themselves (wet-nurses and mother), destructive of those who shun the giving (nuns), or, latterly, of those who occupy the ethical middle ground between the other two groups--All that ever on Cryst con lefe (190) . But Gowther's mother was a lade, non hur lyke (32), and he may equally have a share of her nature, to which may be added an upbringing in ducal surroundings . We are still in the world of elites, and it is, typically, an olde erle of that cuntree who has courage enough to confront Gowther on his evil ways and deeds . On the allegorical level, he is the requisite type to stop the bully in his tracks . From Rome onwards, he fulfils the truism that the recent convert ethical--from extreme evil to extreme good--or the recent convert religious--from diabolism to Christ--is ever in the van against those who oppose his new stance : writ large, this means the heathen host, and God supporting his Christian chevalier . Gowther's progress is a writ-large poeticisation of the conflict within man between good and evil tendencies . By virtue of his hero, the poet enacts the maxim that the sins of the father are visited on the son , plus his own twist in similar vein about the mother :...to have a chyld/On what maner scho ne roghth (63) .
In The Sege of Melayne, the obvious threat from without is the Saracens . From within Christianity, the threat is within the mind of the Christians' feudal overlord, Charles . It takes the loss of 40,000 crusaders, plus the bustling example of Turpin and his army of clerics to shame Charles into becoming God's appointed champion . This romance is the story of Charles's internal progression from lethargic and reluctant to active and committed spirit .
These four romances are poeticised external landscapes relaying the mental internal landscapes of four courtly archetypes--Orfeo, Emare, Gowther, Charles . These are not cardboard characters who never deviate from the continuum of courtly ethos . Their deviations are recorded so that what internal divisions there be are replicated in riven societies . They are the ideal archetypes of the courtly ethos, and when they are flawed, courtly society is flawed . Essentially, these romances have been about the restoration of these courtly archetypes to their only true home : the Ideal .
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