Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Joshua Byron Smith

citing another for his source. But a general feeling of critical unease arises from the association of Walter Map with the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.¹¹⁹ Somehow, this claim does not feel quite right. For many, Walter Map seems incongruous in terms of genre: what does a Latin satirist have to do with an Arthurian romance written in French? Nevertheless, Walter’s relationship with the genre of romance is less vexed than his relationship with Wales. While Chapter 6 will address the question of whether or not Walter wrote French romances, this section examines Walter’s engagement with romance as witnessed by the De nugis curialium. It is clear that Walter was a voracious reader of romance, and he even wrote some himself: four short, but skillfully written, romances of his survive in distinctio 3, and these show the influence of a broad range of contemporary romances. Nonetheless, Walter’s modern reputation as a satirist and as a supposed collector of folktales has often overshadowed this aspect of his career. Yet if the contents of the De nugis curialium are even somewhat representative of Walter’s literary output, he spent much of his artistic energy on reading, contemplating, and composing romance.

      While glimpses of romance appear throughout the De nugis curialium, distinctio 3 provides the easiest demonstration that Walter had read widely in this popular genre. The entire distinctio—which, as I argue in Chapter 3, should be read as its own independent work—consists of four polished romances, all of which feature a love triangle. These romances seem addressed to a fellow secular cleric, someone who has to recover his breath after “consulting the philosophic or sacred page.”¹²⁰ Naturally, the fact that these romances are in Latin also strongly suggests a clerical audience. Moreover, this anonymous addressee seems to have a specialty in the law, since Walter announces that he will not be touching upon the disputes of the law court (fori lites) or the sober matters of those pleading (placitorum … seria), matters that presumably occupy the time of his addressee.¹²¹ In a nod to current literary debates, Walter opens this work by playing on the topos of sens and matière, of meaning and subject matter. Even though Walter’s stories are, in his own words, “base and bloodless absurdities,” it is nonetheless possible for good men to make good use of them.¹²² Walter’s task is simple; his readers, on the other hand, must do the work of making sense of the matter that has been gathered before them.¹²³

      The first romance of the four, Sadius and Galo, is the longest and has attracted the most interest from critics.¹²⁴ In order to appreciate its debt to contemporary romance, a brief overview will be helpful.

      Sadius and Galo, two noble knights, are peers in almost every manner. Sadius is the beloved nephew of the king of the Asians, while Galo is intensely desired by the queen. Foreseeing trouble, Sadius attempts to cool the queen’s illicit desire by implying that Galo does not have masculine genitals: “Although he could acquire everything from women, he has confessed—but only to me—that he is completely unable to perform that act.”¹²⁵ This plan, true to fashion, goes awry when the queen decides to test Galo to make sure that he truly is unable to perform. She sends one of her servants to investigate matters. The queen instructs her “how to slide into Galo’s embrace, how to unite her naked body to his naked body, and orders her to lay her hand on his privates and to report whether he can or whether he can’t, all while remaining pure.”¹²⁶ The servant goes out and stays gone much too long, stirring up worry and envy in the queen. When the servant returns, she tells the queen, “I almost pleased him, and I felt him to be all man and ready for the occasion, if he had only perceived you. But when he realized that I was smaller than you, that I was harder to handle, and that I was not as suited to him, I was cast out at once!”¹²⁷ The queen realizes this is a lie—she has, after all, never been with Galo—and she becomes furious and vengeful.

      At the king’s birthday feast, she seizes an opportunity for revenge. When the king grants the queen the opportunity to have whatever present she wants, she pounces upon Galo, who has been sitting at the banquet clearly nursing some internal anguish. The queen demands that Galo admit to the entire court what is causing him such harm. Reluctantly, he recounts a marvelous adventure, stopping at times, but always forced to continue by the merciless queen.

      Galo tells how a year ago on Pentecost, while recovering from a fever, he had gone out in arms to test his strength. His horse led him through a dark forest until he entered a palace without any inhabitants, except for a maiden sitting under a tree. Despite his attempts to greet her, she remained silent. Galo admits that he tried to rape her, but Rivius, a giant, came to the maiden’s aid and pinned Galo to a tree. Another maiden appeared and begged Rivius to relent, persuading the giant to grant Galo a year’s truce before the two should enter into single combat.

      Galo laments that today is the day on which he must fight Rivius. He leaves the banquet, but Sadius catches him and requests that he fight the giant in place of Galo. Galo counters that they should exchange armor, making it only appear that Sadius is the one fighting the giant. They switch armor and the battle begins. Galo, disguised as Sadius, fights valiantly, getting the best of the giant on several occasions, only to grant him mercy. All the while, the queen berates Galo, though it is actually Sadius in disguise. Finally, Galo triumphs over the giant, and the two friends slip away to exchange armor. They reveal their ruse to the court, and Galo is praised while the queen is vilified.

      This brief summary makes it clear that Walter knew his romance motifs: intractable male friendship; banquet speeches; a rash boon; a knight errant wandering through a dark forest into a strange land; the importance of Pentecost; a desolate city; a maiden under a tree; a hostile giant; and an exchange of identities. Studies of analogues to Sadius and Galo show that Walter’s romance has many close similarities to Gawain and Bran de Liz, Guerehés, Amis and Amiloun, Eger and Grime, Tristan and Isolde, the Lai de Graelent, Petronius Rediuiuus, and perhaps some of Chrétien’s work.¹²⁸ Stylistically, Walter takes part in the new twelfth-century vogue of writing inner monologues for his characters, of describing “the subtleties of inner debate and the scenes of emotional see-sawing.”¹²⁹ While the queen in Sadius and Galo is the clear villain, she is without a doubt the most compelling character, an effect largely created by her wonderfully impassioned inner monologue. “I am my own deception,” she laments at one point, “my own betrayer; I’ve caught myself in my own net.”¹³⁰ In these long inner monologues, Walter reveals that he has absorbed not only the motifs of romance, but its stylistic innovations as well.

      The question of exactly what romances Walter had read is not particularly important for my purposes. Rather, I merely wish to draw attention to the fact that Walter had read broadly in contemporary romance, a fact that Sadius and Galo easily demonstrates. That said, the other three romances in distinctio 3 have received considerably less critical attention than Sadius and Galo. Yet all four romances are thematically linked and respond to one another, indicating that Walter thought about romance in a sophisticated manner, on par with the best romancers of his age. All four romances in Walter’s collection concern problematic love triangles that eventually reach some resolution, destroying the original triangle in the process—a plot structure that has much in common with Marie de France’s Lais. Marie’s Eliduc suggests that religious sublimation is the only acceptable way to disentangle the love triangles of romance. Walter, on the other hand, prefers another strategy. Every romance reasserts what we might call traditional male values, usually at the expense of women.¹³¹

      The second romance, which the chapter heading calls On the Variance Between Parius and Lausus (De contrarietate Parii et Lausi), contrasts the perfect friendship of Sadius and Galo with the poisonous one of Parius and Lausus.¹³² The two men are chamberlains of King Ninus of Babylon, and their friendship is broken when Parius grows envious of Lausus. He murders Lausus and covers up any evidence of the murder, thus committing homicide, as well as what Walter playfully calls morticide.¹³³ However, King Ninus soon grows fond of Lausus’s surviving son, which stirs up Parius’s jealously once again. Parius devises a plan to remove the boy from the king’s favor. He tells the boy that his breath stinks so badly that he should take care not to offend the king with his stench. In turn,