Abstract
In the first stanzas of the late-fourteenth-century northern English romance The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn, an unexpected storm turns one of King Arthur’s hunts to chaos.1 A sudden darkness falls, and snow whips around the otherwise controlled and courtly hunters as they scurry for cover. The tarn bursts into flame. Guinevere and Gawain are cut off from the rest of the party in the confusion, and a grisly phantom accosts them, gliding across the burning water. The apparition turns out to be the soul of Guinevere’s mother, now suffering torments in expiation of the pride and licentiousness she exhibited during her life. She warns Guinevere not to make the same mistake, despite the fine trappings and retinue of courtly sycophants that make it possible for her to maintain the illusion that all is well. The appearance, in the second half of the poem, of Galeron of Galloway—a (possibly) Scottish knight who demands a judicial combat to recover land that Arthur unlawfully took from him and gave to Gawain—confirms that all, indeed, is not.2
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Notes
Ralph Hanna, The Awntyrs Off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library Ms Douce 324 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974).
For a discussion of Galeron’s ambiguous national identity, see Randy P. Schiff, “Borderland Subversions: Anti-Imperial Energies in the Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane” Speculum 84 (2009): 623–25 [613–32].
Ralph Hanna III, “The Awntyrs off Arthure:An Interpretation,” Modern Language Quarterly 31 (1970): 281 [275–97].
Richard J. Moll, Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 134.
A.C. Spearing, “Central and Displaced Sovereignty in Three Medieval Poems,” Review of English Studies 33 (1982): 250 [247–61].
Several critics have seen this positioning as central to a reading of the poem, most notably Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 180–91
For example, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009);
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle Warren, Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003);
Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, eds., Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008);
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Michelle Warren, Writing on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Notable exceptions include Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007);
Rees Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
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Anthony Goodman, “The Anglo-Scottish Marches in the Fifteenth Century: A Frontier Society?” in Scotland and England: 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), p. 30 [18–33].
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Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles 1100–1400 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995);
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Wendy R. Taylor and John Childs, eds. The Anonimalle Chronicle: 1307–1344 from Brotherton Collection MS 29, vol. CXLVII, Record Series (Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2001), p. 113.
Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. D.E.R. Watt, 9 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), 13.4.
Joseph Stevenson, Chronicon de Lanercost (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1839), p. 249;
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Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (1994; repr. New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 162.
Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 56.
Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 26–27.
Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–320.
Jean E. Jost, “Margins in Middle English Romance: Culture and Characterization in the Awntyrs Off Arthure and the Terne Wathelyne and the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell” in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 141 [133–52].
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© 2012 Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell
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Bruce, M.P., Terrell, K.H. (2012). Introduction: Writing Across the Borders. In: Bruce, M.P., Terrell, K.H. (eds) The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_1
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