Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
Lyones lends to Sir Gareth for the tournament at the Castel Peryllous magically endows him with a similar quality: “at one tyme he semed grene, and another tyme at his gayne-commyng hym semed blewe. And thus at every course that he rode too and fro he chonged whyght to rede and blak, that there myght neyther kynge nother knyghte have no redy cognysshauns of hym.”128 Predictably, King Aufreus is joined in the bed by the lady of the castle, who with fairy prescience predicts that the issue of their union will be the great knight Generides. Everything in this opening scene, in other words, suggests that we are dealing with a fairy encounter, yet pointedly the words ‘fairy’ and ‘elf’ are never used.
The fashion, associated in English scholarship particularly with Roger Sherman Loomis, for uncovering hidden Celtic motifs in medieval romance has long passed,129 and while I have no desire to resurrect it here, the fact remains that earlier scholars often made a plausible case for suppressed fairy elements, not only in fair-unknown romances (the English Sir Percyvell of Gales, for example)130 but also in the world of medieval romance in general. When Lancelot in the Chevalier de la charete crosses the sword bridge into Melegeance’s kingdom of Gorre, is he not really passing into a fairy realm, and when Yvain marries Laudine, the Lady of the Fountain, in the Chevalier au lion, is he not marrying into a fairy lineage? Admittedly such readings are unprovable, particularly with a writer whose “uneasiness with folkloric beings” is as patent as Chrétien’s,131 but the campaign of cultural repression I have been trying to sketch offers at the very least a plausible context for them. Similarly, one need not accept Jessie Weston’s far-fetched theories of displaced pre-Christian rituals in order to recognize that medieval grail romances sometimes reveal clear evidence of a substratum of fairy lore: the black knights with flaming lances who appear in the Perlesvaus, for instance,132 look very like the arzei (feu-follets?) described by Étienne de Bourbon;133 and at least one text, the enigmatic Elucidation, attributes the scourge of the Wasteland to human violation of fairy hospitality.134
Suppression is only one of the ways in which medieval writers display their “uneasiness with folkloric beings.” Another is displacement, both temporal and geographical. Keith Thomas, discussing the views of early modern writers such as Reginald Scot, Sir William Temple, and John Aubrey, remarks that “it seems that commentators have always attributed [fairies] to the past,” a move he traces back as far as the opening lines of The Wife of Bath’s Tale.135 The villagers of Domrémy used just such a tactic for deflecting the curiosity of inquisitors away from issues of current belief, and at an early date it had clearly hardened into a widely deployed defense mechanism. Similarly, the way its magical domain is always displaced to a distant past appears symptomatic of the pressure exerted on popular romance by clerical disapproval: “In Bretayne bi hold time / Þis layes were wrouȝt so seiþ þis rime.”136 Thus fairy romances generally employ a once-upon-a-time (jadis) setting that helps insulate them from contemporary censure: “En Bretaigne ot .I. roi jadis” (Guingamor, line 5); “Un vavasur i out jadis” (Désiré, line 13); “Jadis au tens qu’Artur regna” (Tyolet, line 1).137 The far-off time of King Arthur, of course, serves this purpose particularly well, but in Sir Orfeo the classical world provides a similarly safe haven for fairy encounters (a tactic parodied by Chaucer at the end of The Merchant’s Tale). In much the same vein, Oberon in the Huon of Bordeaux cycle is said to be the son of Julius Caesar, though he lives long enough to encounter both Arthur and Charlemagne. So too fairies are often displaced in space as well as time: Huon of Bordeaux first encounters Oberon in Arabia; Melior, the fairy mistress of Partonopeu de Blois, comes from Byzantium and abducts her lover while he is hunting in Ardern (the Ardennes); and the Ardennes is the site of another fairy abduction in Reinbrun, a continuation of Guy of Warwick. Interestingly, other genres do not exhibit a similar tendency to displacement: the fabliau Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons and Adam de la Halle’s farce Jeu de la feuillée, both of which employ fairy agency, show no such aversion to a contemporary setting or a recognizable location. No doubt humor, as in the case of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, served to defuse difficult questions of orthodoxy and belief.
A final way in which romance writers might respond to clerical disapproval was to collude with it. The most dramatic example is to be found in the works of Robert de Boron, but since Merlin’s fairy/demon paternity is discussed at length in the next chapter, I illustrate this point here by reference to Sir Gowther.138 In the Breton lai of Tydorel a queen of Brittany, after ten years of childless marriage, is seduced by a handsome knight who lives in secret deep in the forest. It is made quite clear that this knight is a fairy, and their child, Tydorel, betrays his fairy paternity by his inability to sleep at night.139 (Interestingly, the non-cyclic prose Lancelot applies this characteristic to devils: “car deiables ne puet dormir.”)140 The popular romance of Robert the Devil, found throughout Europe and appearing in England as Sir Gowther, is clearly a sanitized retelling, if not of this specific romance, then of one very like it. Gowther, described at one point as “eyvon Marlyon halfe brodur” (line 95), is fathered by the devil upon a childless Duchess of Austria (interestingly, like Uther Pendragon, he assumes the appearance of her husband to accomplish this), but where Tydorel’s father is described as “the most handsome man in the world” [li plus biaus hon du mont] (line 43), Gowther’s soon reveals his true colors: “When he had is wylle all don, / A feltured fende he start up son” (lines 70–71). The offspring of these two unions lead very different lives. Tydorel grows up to be an ideal king of Brittany:
De Tydorel firent seignor.
Onques n’orent eü meillor,
tant preu, tant cortois, tant vaillant,
tant large, ne tant despendant,
ne miex tenist em pes la terre
nus ne li osa fere guerre.
De puceles ert molt amez
e de dames molt desirrez,
li sien l’amoient et servoient,
e li estrangé le cremoient. (lines 221–30)
[They made Tydorel their lord. They had never had a better, nor one so gallant, courteous, brave, generous, and open-handed, nor one who better kept the peace of the land so that no one dared make war upon him. Much loved by maidens and desired by ladies, his people loved and served him, and outsiders feared him.]
Gowther, in contrast, when he becomes Duke of Austria, immediately institutes a reign of terror; in addition to indiscriminate rape and murder, he takes particular pleasure in pushing friars off cliffs and setting fire to hermits:
All that ever on Cryst con lefe,
Yong and old, he con hem greve
In all that he myght doo.
Meydyns’ maryage wolde he spyll
And take wyffus ageyn hor wyll,
And sley hor husbandus too.
And make frerus to leype at kraggus
And persons forto heng on knaggus,
And odur presys sloo.
To bren armettys was is dyssyre:
A powre wedow to seyt on fyre,
And werke hom mykyll woo. (lines 190–201)
Both Tydorel and Gowther confront their mothers with the question of their paternity. When Tydorel learns who his father is, he sets off to join him in the forest. After Gowther discovers that he is the son of a fiend, he sets off for Rome to confess his sins to the pope. Only after a lengthy period of penance can Gowther return to his homeland, where he rules wisely and where after his death he receives a Christian burial.
Few fairy romances provide such a thoroughgoing illustration of cultural compromise formation as Sir Gowther (though, as we shall see, the French Robert le diable has been even more thoroughly sanitized), but it is not uncommon to encounter specific details that betray the author’s desire to demonstrate his orthodoxy. At times this