Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green

Huon, pray for me’ / & then he made the synge of y^e cros recommendyng his sowle to god, the which incontynent was borne in to paradyce by a greate multytude of angelles sent fro our lord Iesu cryst, who at ther depertynge made such shynynge and clerenes in y^e palays that ther was neuer none suche sene before / and there with there was so swete a smell that euery man thought they had bene rauysshed in to paradyse, wherby they knewe suerly that kynge Oberons sowle was saued.”¹⁰⁹ Though Melusine’s spirit, by contrast, must suffer “greuouse and obscure penytence” until Doomsday, this is due less to her fairy nature than to her husband’s bad faith; had he not broken his word, she suggests, she too might have made a good end: “[I] shuld haue had al my ryghtes, & hadd lyued the cours natural as another woman; & shuld haue be buryed, aftir my lyf naturel expired, within the chirche of our lady of Lusynen, where myn obsequye & afterward my annyuersary shuld haue be honourably & deuoutely don.”¹¹⁰

      Jean d’Arras had a powerful patron and evidently felt comfortable discussing fairy phenomena quite openly, but some writers and copiers of popular romances display rather more circumspection. I recall once teaching Sir Degarré and remarking on the hero’s fairy paternity, only to have my students complain that there was nothing in the text to support this. The source of our disagreement became clear as soon as I realized that I had been citing the poem from an edition based on the early fourteenth-century Auchinleck Manuscript (Advocates Library of Scotland, MS 19.2.1),¹¹¹ while the text the students had been reading was based on the much later Bodley, MS Rawlinson Poet. 34.¹¹² When Degarré’s father encounters his mother-to-be deep in the woods, his first speech to her, according to the Auchinleck Manuscript, is,

      Damaisele, welcome mote þou be!

      Be þou afered of none wihȝte;

      Iich am comen here a fairi knyȝte.

      Mi kynde is armes for to were,

      On horse to ride wiþ scheld and spere;

      Forþi afered be þou nowt[.] (lines 98–103)

      However, the same passage in the Rawlinson manuscript reads,

      Madame, God the see;

      Be noughtt adrad, thou swete wyght,

      Y am come to the as a knyght;

      My kynd ys armys for to bere,

      On horss to ryde wyth scheld and spere,

      Be dradd of me ryght noughtt[.] (lines 88–93)

      A similar suppression occurs in another fifteen-century manuscript of the poem (Cambridge University, MS Ff. II. 38).¹¹³ There can be little doubt that the Rawlinson scribe (or an intermediate scribe in the textual tradition) has deliberately bowdlerized this passage: not only is the reference to fairyland suppressed, but in addition the knight now greets the lady in God’s name. Lest we should be tempted to ascribe this to a simple scribal slip, a few lines later, when the lady abandons her newborn child, she furnishes him with a suitable identification token; in the Auchinleck MS it is “a paire of gloues / Þat here lemman here sent of fairi londe” (lines 191–92),¹¹⁴ but in Rawlinson this becomes simply “a peyr of glovys / Hur lemman to hur for to sonde” (lines 178–79).

      Degarré belongs to a group of romances that employ the ‘fair unknown’ motif.¹¹⁵ That the hero’s noble pedigree should be obscured by his fairy parentage—either a father (as in Degarré) or a mother (as in Le Bel Inconnu)—conforms closely to Jameson’s hypothesis about the role of magic in romance, since this meme (to use Cooper’s term) functions primarily to reinforce class solidarity (despite his obscure upbringing, and sometimes deliberate countermeasures on the part of his mother, the hero always adapts ‘naturally’ to the demands of the chivalric life). Pressure from the great tradition meant that such connections were always liable to be suppressed. Lybeaus Desconus,¹¹⁶ the English adaptation of Renaut de Beaujeu’s early thirteenth-century Le Bel Inconnu, offers a particularly good example. In the French original the hero, Guinglain, the product of a liaison between Gawain and the fairy Blancemal (line 3237), is torn between his attraction for two women: a fairy seductress, the Pucele as Blances Mains; and a human queen (whom Guinglain rescues from enchantment), the Blonde Esmeree.¹¹⁷ In this battle between the competing sides of his nature, Li Biaus Descouneüs finally submits to the dynastic imperative and, with Arthur’s encouragement, marries Esmeree. In contrast, the fifteenth-century Middle English adaptation of this romance removes all the fairy allusions: there is no hint that the mother who begets Gyngelayne “vnder a forest syde” is anything other than Gawain’s human mistress.¹¹⁸ Similarly, the Pucele as Blances Mains (here called the Dame d’Amour) offers Gyngelayne nothing more than a brief distraction on his quest to rescue the Blonde Esmeree (here called the Lady of Synadowne); the only suggestion that she has any otherworldly associations is the remark that she

      Cowthe more of sorcerye

      Than other suche fyve;

      ………………

      Whan he sawe hir face

      Hym thought that he was

      Jn paradice on lyve;

      With false lies and fayre

      Th[u]s she blered his eye:

      Evill mote she thryue!¹¹⁹

      The accusation of sorcery (as we shall see later with Partonope of Blois) was a way of rationalizing and repressing fairy discourse, and that this passage has undergone bowdlerization is suggested by the fact that the line “With false lies and fayre” appears in another manuscript (B.L., MS Cotton Caligula A. II) as “Wyth fantasme and feyrye.”¹²⁰

      The disenchantment of the fairy world we encounter in Lybeaus Desconus may be seen as part of a larger pattern,¹²¹ for while the deliberate suppression of fairy elements is not often exposed to view as clearly as in the Rawlinson manuscript of Degarré,¹²² a similar process may be suspected in several romances that lack a definite source. The couplet version of Generides offers an especially clear example.¹²³ In the opening scene King Aufreus, following a mysterious hart while out hunting, is led to a palace deep in the woods, where he meets a beautiful lady. In early romances women encountered in such mysterious silvan settings (Melusine, for example) are often explicitly identified as fairies, and here the fairy atmosphere is enhanced by the absence of a visible house hold in the palace (as happens in Guingamor, Tydorel, Partonopeu of Blois, and others):¹²⁴ the lady is accompanied by only a single maid and an old man, “and elles he saw no moo meigney” (214). Even more telling is the pillow Aufreus finds when he is led to a bedchamber:

      In noo lond marchaunt ther nys

      That devise it couth I-wis.

      An hundreth sith in day and night

      Chaunge it wil his colour bright;

      Oft it was white, and oft grene.

      Oft reid, and oft blew, I wene,

      To all coloures it would chaunge;

      That was to the king ful straun[ge]. (lines 292–99)

      The general association of rich cloth with fairy work was a romance commonplace,¹²⁵ but this particular type of chromatic instability was specifically associated with fairies. When the narrator encounters the protean figure of “Prevy Thought” in the late fifteenth-century allegory The Court of Love, he is immediately reminded of fairyland:

      “Yon is,” thought [I], “som spirit or som elf,

      His sotill image is so curious:

      How is,” quod I “that he is shaded thus

      With yonder cloth, I not of what colour?” (lines 1270–73)¹²⁶

      Petitcriu, the dog from Elfland that Tristram sends as a present to Ysolt, is similarly elusively polychrome: no one “could relate or record its shape or appearance, for however one looked at the dog