Category: Special Series

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Undergrad Wednesdays – How to be a Good Anglo-Saxon King, according to King Alfred

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester in response to Maj-Britt Frenze’s prompt for her course on “Tolkien’s Myths and Monsters.”]

“Oh, King, eh, very nice. And how d’you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By ‘anging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.” -Dennis, the constitutional peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

In the above quote from Monty Python’s classic comedy, Dennis berates King Arthur for his alleged systematic oppression of the proletariat, but, at the same time, raising the question of what makes a good political leader. What lessons could Arthur learn about how to properly govern his subjects, even those who think they are part of an anarcho-syndicalist collective?

The fictional Arthur, living in 963, according to the film, could actually take advice from someone who lived roughly a hundred years before him in real life: Alfred of Wessex. During his reign, King Alfred embarked on a massive venture of translating Latin texts into Old English, “so that he could / send them to his bishops, because some of them /who knew very little Latin needed it” (Alfred, Verse Prologue to the Old English Pastoral Care, 14-16). As a part of his translation efforts, Alfred translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, albeit, his definition of translation was understood much more loosely than our standards of translation today. Rather than simply translate Boethius’ work word for word, Alfred instead opted to insert his own thoughts and ideas into the text, modifying and editing it in accord with his own, Anglo-Saxon worldview.

Among the many topics Alfred discusses in his own rendition of Boethius’ summary of Late Roman philosophy is what a king must do in order to govern effectively. First and foremost, he must have the right materials because these will enable the king to exercise his skill of ruling. Regardless of whether he had good skills at ruling or not, his effort would be wasted if he did not have people to rule. Wisdom, the literary Boethius’ allegorical interlocutor, instructs him that a king would need three types of people in order for a kingdom to be run effectively, namely, “prayer men and army men and workmen” (Alfred, P9.2). Furthermore, he must see that they have the supplies to attend to their needs. In order to govern effectively, a king needs all three of these, but how well does Monty Python’s fictionalized Arthur stack up?

Indeed, pretty well as he has members of these three estates on his quest with him. In terms of prayer men, he has Friar Lawrence and his companions, who furnish him with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Likewise, the first part of the film is spent collecting his group of army men. Lastly, in the form of his servant, Patsy, he has a workman under his command. However, it must be pointed out that the scene in which Dennis accuses Arthur of tyranny occurs so early in the movie that Arthur really hasn’t collected anyone other than Patsy to his traveling court. No wonder Dennis accuses him of poor governance; he doesn’t have all the tools needed to rule!

But what about once he has the full court assembled? Again, Alfred’s Boethius suggests that in order for a king to rule properly, he must not only have the necessary tools, but also supply them in order to enable his men to function (Alfred, P9.2). In this respect, Arthur is not able to maintain his expanded traveling party, as, in the midst of a harsh winter, the narrator depicts Arthur and his knights as having to eat Sir Robin’s minstrels in order to survive. While they don’t strictly fall into one of the three outlined categories, this nevertheless reflects poorly on Arthur. Furthermore, his absentee, traveling kingship, going so far as to dismiss the center of government as “a silly place” does not indicate that he could rule effectively. Indeed, the peasants didn’t know they actually had a king. They thought they were an anarcho-syndicalist collective. 

Mark Florig
University of Notre Dame

Citations

Gilliam, Terry., Jones, Terry, Forstater, Mark, Cleese, John, Chapman, Graham, Idle, Eric, and Palin, Michael. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Burbank, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1998.

Irvine, Susan, Boethius, and Godden, Malcolm. The Old English Boethius : With Verse Prologues and Epilogues Associated with King Alfred. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library ; 19. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

unknown (publisher, British). ca. 1907-1914 (publication date). Statue of King Alfred the Great, Wantage.; verso: [divided back, no message], overall, recto. Picture postcard. Place: Trinity College, Watkinson Library (Hartford, Connecticut, USA). http://library.artstor.org.proxy.library.nd.edu/asset/SS35428_35428_24881292.

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Undergrad Wednesdays – The Edge of the Woods and Shifting Identities in Sir Orfeo and The Lord of the Rings

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester in response to Maj-Britt Frenze’s prompt for her course on “Tolkien’s Myths and Monsters.”]

The Prologue of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods ends with a dramatic, “Into the woods and out of the woods and home before dark!” as the characters make a determined effort to convince themselves that “the woods are just trees, the trees are just wood,” and that there is nothing to be afraid of in the woods. Though the wordplay is comical, their concern is real, and not altogether unmerited. The idea that woods are a place of fantastic adventures is a common theme in both medieval and modern works.

Perhaps more interesting than the adventures that occur within the woods, however, is the way entering and exiting the woods tend to mark significant turning points in the characters’ identities. This is particularly evident in Sir Orfeo, an anonymous Middle English text, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring.

Sir Orfeo: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Jean-Baptiste-Camille_Corot_-_Orph%C3%A9e.jpg

In Sir Orfeo, after his wife is taken, grief-stricken Orfeo forsakes his kingdom and enters the wooded wilderness with nothing but a beggar’s cloak and his harp. He effectually leaves behind his kingly identity, retaining only his identity as a musician. The author emphasizes this shift in Orfeo’s identity with four striking comparisons between his kingly identity and his new beggarly identity (241-56):

He once had ermine worn and vair,
On bed had purple linen fair,
Now on the heather hard doth like,
In leaves is wrapped and grasses dry.
He once had castles owned and towers,
Water and wild, and woods, and flowers,
Now though it turn to frost or snow,
this king with moss his bed must strow.
He once had many a noble knight
Before him kneeling, ladies bright,
Now nought to please him doth he keep;
Only wild serpents by him creep.
He that once had in plenty sweet
All dainties for his drink and meat,
Now he must grub and dig all day,
With roots his hunger to allay.

At the end of ten years, Orfeo finally sees his wife again, and, in following her party, leaves the wooded wilderness and enters “a country fair / as bright as sun in summer air” (Sir Orfeo 351-2). As he leaves the woods, Orfeo alters his beggarly identity, assuming the identity of travelling minstrel offering service to the king in order to gain entrance to the mysterious castle.

Finally, after Orfeo rescues his wife and exits the metaphorical woods of testing his steward’s loyalty, he reassumes his kingly identity, bringing his kingdom back to the joy of former days.

Old Forest: https://bohemianweasel.com/2017/11/21/the-old-forest/

Another character whose identity shifts in his woodland journeys is Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring. In chapter 4, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin begin the journey that ultimately takes Frodo to Mount Doom. When they begin their travels, leaving the Shire and entering the Old Forest, all four hobbits are relatively carefree. Merry even says triumphantly, “There! You have left the Shire, and are now outside, and on the edge of the Old Forest,” as if leaving the Shire was to be the worst part of their journey (Tolkien 124).

Shortly after entering the Old Forest, Frodo experiences the first symptoms of his identity shift. As the hobbits lose their way, we learn that “a heavy weight was settling heavily on Frodo’s heart” (Tolkien 127). It is in the Old Forest that Frodo completely adopts the identity of grim determination that follows him throughout his journey to Mount Doom.

Later in the Fellowship’s journey, Frodo has a brief chance to reassume a relatively carefree identity as the party enters the woods of Lothlórien. Though the chain of events that follow Frodo’s entrance to the Old Forest have completely altered his identity and made mirth impossible, entering Lothlórien does give Frodo a sense of hope as he takes in the purity of its woods and realizes that “on the land of Lórien there was no stain” (Tolkien 393).

Finally, the phial of the light of Eärendil’s star that Galadriel gives to Frodo as the Fellowship prepares to exit Lothlórien proves to be a beacon of light and hope for Frodo, helping to carry him through the rest of his journey.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/clairity/199505029

Both the tale of Orfeo in Sir Orfeo and Frodo’s experiences in The Fellowship of the Ring can be summed up in another section of the Prologue of Into the Woods:

Into the woods
without regret,
The choice is made,
the task is set.
Into the woods,
but not forget-
ting why I’m on the journey.

Orfeo knows that his life is nothing without his queen, so he chooses to go bravely into the woods to find her, accepting the inevitable changes that he will undergo on his journey.

Frodo recognizes the severity of the task Gandalf presents to him and knows that once he chooses to set out, there can be no turning back.

As we learn from Orfeo and Frodo, a journey into the woods is often not as simple as “into the woods and out of the woods and home before dark.” A journey into the woods is not easy, and a journey into the woods will often change the journeyer. However, as the end of Into the Woods so neatly sums up:

Into the woods—you have to grope
But that’s the way you learn to cope
Into the woods to find there’s hope
Of getting through the journey.

Carolyn Bergdolt
University of Notre Dame

————-

Texts & Other Sources:

“Sir Orfeo.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1975, pp. 123-137.

Sondheim, Stephen. Lyrics to “Children Will Listen/Finale.” Genius, 2018, genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-into-the-woods-children-will-listen-finale-lyrics.

—. Lyrics to “Prologue: Into the Woods.” Genius, 2018, genius.com/Original-broadway-cast-of-into-the-woods-prologue-into-the-woods-lyrics.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

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Undergrad Wednesdays – Islamaphobic Rhetoric in Chaucer: Not Just ‘A Thing of the Past’

[This post was written in the spring 2018 semester for Karrie Fuller's course on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It responds to the prompt posted here.]

The Canterbury Tales were written in the late 1300s, using language so antiquated to modern ears that it sometimes hardly resembles modern idiomatic English. But does this mean some potentially problematic ideals reflected in the tales are antiquated as well? Certainly not. Anti-Semitism, misogyny, and class issues are just some of the relevant and often troubling topics which pervade the tales. Particularly disquieting is the Islamophobic language used in “The Man of Law’s Tale” because of how eerily reflective it is of language used in instances of hate crimes today in the Western world. Not only that, but a driving force behind an increase in such abuses is often attributed to misrepresentation of the Islamic faith in the media, particularly in newspaper headlines. Some may scoff at the archaic lexicon of Middle English, but hundreds of years after the death of Chaucer, we must reckon with the bitter truth that we are continuing to use the written or printed word to perpetuate extremely hateful and prejudiced ideas of Islam.

A medieval depiction of the Crusades, with Muslim soldiers on the left and Christians on the right (de Tyr).

There is no question that Geoffrey Chaucer’s representation of the Islamic faith in “The Man of Law’s Tale” is extremely negative. In this tale, a Syrian Sultanness massacres her own son and hundreds of his followers in cold blood in order to gain political power. She uses her son’s conversion to Christianity to manipulate her court against him and justify the massive slaughter. Chaucer paints her as the ultimate, heartless villain, using language which suggests her Islamic faith is the root of all evil, whereas the Sultan himself may be considered an upstanding character, but only because he has forsaken his beliefs and converted to Christianity. Even though this action is merely to become eligible to marry the Christian woman, Custance, any reason for conversion is seen as preferable to retaining the Islamic faith. Syria itself is referred to as “the barbre [barbaric] nacioun” (Chaucer 126), and the Sultanness as a “welle of vices” and “roote of iniquitee [evil]” (Chaucer 128). The Muslim nation is painted as barbaric and corrupt, a mysterious land of lawlessness where a mother may murder her son without remorse and become the source of evil itself. The devil, as a snake bound to hell, is invoked in comparison to the Sultanness, with the lines, “O serpent under femynynytee [femininity], / Lik to the serpent depe in helle ybounde [like the serpent bound deep in Hell]!”(Chaucer 128). There is no definitive proof that this starkly anti-Muslim rhetoric is representative of Chaucer’s personal attitude toward Muslims; he may have been incorporating a popular sentiment of prejudice inherited from the Crusades. Fought from around 1090 through the 1200s, this was the period of Holy Wars between Christians and Muslims over sites of shared religious significance (“Crusades”). But, whether Chaucer upheld those attitudes or not, the widespread popularity and influence of The Canterbury Tales could have facilitated the spread of such hateful views in medieval popular culture.

Modern-day readers may only speculate about just how much the Man of Law’s views spread originally, but it is certainly evident that the hatred continues today. The consequences are truly tragic, as the rate of hate crimes soars in places like London, where tension over Islamophobic media representation has been building since the ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris. The Metropolitan Police of London reported a 70% increase in Islamophobic hate crimes committed over the course of the year following the month of July 2014-2015, from 478 reported the previous year to a disheartening 816. The people most at risk of becoming victims to such crimes are women wearing hijab, as they are more easily targeted (Sudan). Verbal abuse like that used against a woman riding public transportation often echo sentiments which appear in The Man of Law’s Tale; in this attack, the woman is referred to as “the devil,” reminiscent of the way in which Chaucer refers to Satan’s jealousy of the Muslim Sultanness (Sudan). Newspaper headlines make damaging blanket statements with gross and off-base generalizations like “UK mosques fundraising for terror” in The Daily Star Sunday, or “Muslim sex grooming” in The Times. The first of these headlines was condemned by IPSO press regulation, and the second was referred to as “appalling” by Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police Ian Hopkins. Both were criticized for using extremely misleading language to paint the Islamic faith in a negative light (Versi). Statements like these are meant to make the Islamic faith and culture appear violent and barbaric, similar to the illustration of the Sultanness depicted by the remorseless mass murder and descriptions of the “barbre nacioun” of Syria (Chaucer 126).

A Muslim woman becomes the victim of verbal attack in language which invokes the devil, akin to that used in “The Man of Law’s Tale” (“ISIS bus rant: In the grip of hate”).

Hate-filled rhetoric of this nature proves that we cannot dismiss the prejudiced sentiment depicted in medieval texts like The Canterbury Tales as antiquated and irrelevant. Instead, the striking similarities it has to how Muslim culture is represented in language today are a testament to the fact that we have not made enough progress in promoting more globally-minded and tolerant thinking. Islamophobic rhetoric has existed for far too long in written, print, and now electronic media, and improvements must be made in the kind of language used to discuss Islamic culture in unbiased and culturally aware terms. We must recognize how deeply rooted intolerant language is, the consequences it has, and the need to finally move forward and correct the manner in which Islamic culture is represented.

Meggie Kollitz
University of Notre Dame

Works Cited

“Crusades.” History.com.A&E Networks 2010. Web.

de Tyr, Guillame. Histoire d’Outremer. 1500s. France (Paris), Paris, BnF, département des Manuscrits, FranÇais 22495 fol. 90

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor, 2nd ed. (Broadview, 2012)

“ISIS bus rant: in the grip of hate.” YouTube, uploaded by RT UK, 19 October 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7NUgWhxLmg&feature=youtu.be&has_verified=1

Sudan, Richard. “Increasing attacks on Muslims caused by media-hyped Islamophobia.” RT. RT 8 December 2015. Web.

Versi, Miqdaad. “Why the British media is responsible for the rise in Islamophobia in Britain.” Independent. independent.co.uk. 4 April 2016. Web.