...una verde pradera, de aspecto paradisíaco, en cuyo centro se alza un castillo espléndido, adornado con piedras preciosas. Allí se ve gente a la que se cree muerta, que permanece retenida, como prisioneros de las hadas, algunos de ellos mutilados, quemados o locos.
[···] del castillo y [···] ante el rey y la reina de las hadas, que escuchan el canto. El rey concede la recompensa que designe y entonces [···]
La influencia céltica es notable, por ejemplo, en ese misterioso país de las hadas, que es, más que un mundo de ultratumba, un espacio maravilloso que existe al lado del mundo cotidiano, con evidentes rasgos paradisíacos. [···] y el paso del río que confina el jardín del reino de las hadas es fácil. Por otra parte, la adaptación escenográfica a la moda medieval es típica de las novelas corteses. Es un efecto de la idealización costumbrista: la vida en las novelas tiene que ser más refinada, más coloreada o más exótica que la existencia cotidiana conocida de sus lectores, y como un resultado de los esfuerzos medievales para embellecer las vidas de los caracteres clásicos sobre los que se conocían poco, las figuras antiguas resultaban maravillosamente up-to-date. Aun las hadas van a cazar con halcones, a la manera de la nobleza de la época.
CARLOS GARCÍA GUAL
(Nota de Sandra: Ver también el Apolo violinista y/o tenista de la Edad Moderna, p.ej. de dell'Anguillara y Tiépolo, que crea el mismo efecto)
Faerie’s wonder and dread are in part the effect of this displacement across genre boundaries: unmoored from their theological framework, the motifs of the vision tradition endow the Faerie realm with their numinous associations, but at the same time alienate it from human mortality and immortality alike. The Faerie realm’s blurring of genre boundaries exemplifies a larger phenomenon in the portrayal of these marvellous places: the unstable boundaries that characterize places of wonder and danger. The geographical, theological, or epistemological boundaries of these places are permeable or unstable, their geography mysterious, their location persistently secret and difficult to find. I call this phenomenon spatial indeterminacy: the inherent spatial mysteriousness and instability of marvelous places, an abiding trope in Old and Middle English narratives alike. The second chapter of this dissertation investigates how this trope of spatial indeterminacy emerges in Old English poetry through declarations of unknowing, quasi-formulaic assertions that marvellous spaces and their monstrous denizens are mysteries unfathomable by humankind. The declarations of unknowing, like the iconography of Faerie, are a trope rooted in religious discourse. In Old English, declarations of unknowing appear chiefly in homilies and religious poetry, with reference to God, heaven and hell, death, and the afterlife. These declarations bring their traditional otherworldly associations into the habitats of monsters, to Grendel’s mere in Beowulf or the Indian river of the hippopotami in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. In so doing, the declarations emphasize the sheer magnitude of the gap between these places of wonder and dread and the human community.
Among these glimpses there emerge, as in the Faerie realm, displaced motifs from the traditional iconography of the afterlife. Yet this Paradise itself, like the marvelous spaces surveyed in Old and Middle English, is defined by spatial indeterminacy; it is determinedly unreachable and shrouded in mystery, even as its fluid boundaries both separate and connect it to the human world.
the Faerie kingdom... There one sees a glorious royal castle, made with great artistry out of gold and precious stones. But amidst this splendour one encounters a grisly sight:
& seiʒe liggeand wiþin þe wal
Of folk þat were þider y-brouʒt
& þouʒt dede, & nare nouʒt. 390
Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
395 & sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al forschreynt.
Wives þer lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded & sum awedde,
400 & wonder fele þer lay bisides:
Riʒt as þai slepe her undertides, E
che was þus in þis warld y-nome,
Wiþ fairi þider y-come.
hadde bihold þis meruails alle
went in-to þe kinges halle (ll. 387-410).
The people abstracted from this world by magic are the “taken,” the human captives of the Faerie kingdom. Their presence in Faerie is not without parallel; several medieval accounts of the faeries, recount the misadventures of mortals in the Faerie kingdom.
This version simply mentions the presence of human beings brought to the Faerie kingdom although they are not dead. The concessional clause makes no sense in the absence of their injuries.
In the Ashmole version, several categories of victims from the Auchinleck version are absent, namely the drowned, the burned, the women dead or driven mad in childbirth. However, the mutilated prisoners of Faerie are here, as in the Auchinleck version: from head to saddle, the anaphoric catalogue enumerates them in anatomical order, by their missing or wounded body parts (ll. 382-5), followed within the same anaphora by the choking victims and their commensals (l. 385-6). Like the Auchinleck, the Ashmole version of the poem presents the human inhabitants of Faerie as a gallery of grisly images, contained within a fairly formulaic anaphoric catalogue. This catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie is a controversial passage, both in terms of its pertinence to the poem and in terms of its emotional impact on the audience or readership of the poem. Bruce Mitchell calls it “an interpolation by some scribe or minstrel” and “an insensitive artistic blemish,” arguing that without the enumeration of these prisoners “we have a perfectly smooth progression, as in the Harley MS. (which omits them all), and their absence eliminates certain inconsistencies.”
The emotional impact of the scene is likewise controversial. In his analysis of the Faerie kingdom, Seth Lerer disagrees with Bruce Mitchell’s dismissal, calling the passage “a tour de force of narrative skill” in which “anaphora, variation, and a potentially endless catenulate structure” impose rhetorical bounds on boundless horror. But other critics contend that the horror of the experience is a modern readers’ artifact. Felicity Riddy argues that any sinister quality in the description “is an effect that works against the ostensible drift of the narrator's approbation” of the splendid Faerie court. Anne D’Arcy, too, notes that “the narrator does not register horror … but rather a sense of detached wonder.”
D’Arcy, however, argues that the poet does mean the realm of Faerie to disturb the reader, though it does not disturb the characters. Ingeniously, she argues that the captives in the courtyard resemble statues in the round. In patristic writings and popular medieval culture alike, statues in the round have sinister associations: idolatry, demonic possession, potentially sinister uses of imperial power. Accordingly, the captive mortals here mark out the King of Faerie as a demonic artificer and a tyrannical usurper of human sovereignty.
The Faerie kingdom recalls the visionary tradition in disturbingly conflicting ways. On the one hand, as the narrator says, it looks like “the proude court of Paradys”; with its artistry, its palace of crystal and jewels, and its continual light, the Faerie kingdom resembles the Paradise of the Christian tradition. On the other hand, the Faerie kingdom also recalls the regions of punishment: its catalogue of captive mortals bears a striking resemblance to the anaphoric catalogues of the tormented dead from descriptions of Hell or Purgatory. Constance Davies first describes the mutilated prisoners of Faerie as a translation of the classical underworld and its tormented dead into the imagery of “the Christian otherworld of punishment.” Davies considers that the inconsistency between the grisly prisoners and the splendours of Faerie “show[s] up the seams in the joining of Celtic and classical tales”; I will argue, on the contrary, that the inconsistency is a deliberate poetic effect, which emphasizes the metaphysical displacement of the faeries’ human prisoners and the alterity of the kingdom of Faerie itself.
the catalogue of the tormented dead appears in the three most important streams of the vision tradition in Old and Middle English, namely the Visio Sancti Pauli, the vision of Tundale, and the legend of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The transmission and development of this motif reveal not only its importance, but its traditional emotional tenor: between the eighth and the fourteenth century, as it is transmitted from one stream of the vision tradition to the next, and as it is translated from the Latin to the vernacular, the formulaic catalogue grows more and more elaborate: the lists of tormented sinners increase and multiply, and their torments become more varied and more grotesque. But while the scene itself, and the anaphoric catalogue that describes it, are considerably heightened and expanded, the narratorial commentary on the scene and the visionary’s reaction to it remain either spare or nonexistent, suggesting that the horror of the scene resides in the gruesome sensory details more than in narratorial cues or in the reactions of an intradiegetic audience. These structural characteristics link the catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie with the anaphoric catalogues of the vision tradition, and with the wonder, dread, and pity that these catalogues traditionally inspire. As a result, the catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie disturbs, not only because the prisoners are frozen into gruesome states, but because, amidst the paradisal splendour of Faerie, the catalogue provides—unmoored from its traditional theological significance—a vivid, unreasonable, unmotivated hint of the infernal regions.
Like the visionaries and their redactors, the poet is depicting a place radically different from the mundane human world; unlike them, he is not depicting any part of the Christian afterlife, but the kingdom of Faerie. The catalogue of its human prisoners, however, strongly recalls, in its structure and imagery, the visionary catalogues of the tormented dead. As in many of the visions, the narrator does not explain the import or the emotional impact of the scene; however, the description of human captives, especially in the Auchinleck version, mostly falls into a “some…some” anaphora very like the catalogues of the vision tradition, an anaphora that details the wide variety of the prisoners’ grisly fates:
Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete, 395
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al forschreynt.
Wives þer lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded & sum awedde… (ll. 391-400)
The anaphoric catalogue shares with the visionary catalogues the preoccupation with mutilation and dismemberment, the elements of human anatomy enumerated only to describe their wounds and torments. True, the captives of Faerie are neither suspended, nor immersed to various degrees; instead, their “poses” reflect a variety of human activities through which they may have met either their deaths or their abduction by the fairies. But the aspect of bondage, of confinement, that is common to the infernal or purgatorial catalogues emerges here through the choice of verbs: every single verb in the passage is either passive 58 (“were…adreynt”) or static (“stode,” “lay ybounde,” “sete,” “lay”). The captives of Faerie are not affixed to burning hooks or confined in pits of boiling metal: they are trapped in a grim instance of their past. The grisly variety of their predicaments and the shape of the list that contains them recall the anaphoric catalogues of the vision tradition, especially those found in the vernacular renditions of the legends of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The traditional associations of the anaphoric catalogues--with supernatural horror and suffering, with torments beyond the limits of time and of the mortal human body--form the burden of association that the catalogue of captives carries into the poem. When the catalogue appears, its traditional association is supernatural horror. The narrator describes the reaction only as “merveyl”: but the horror is immanent in the imagery and the structure of the formula. This counter-traditional use of a traditional motif is in keeping with the aesthetic of the poem as a whole. As Felicity Riddy notes, the poet “conveys feelings—often very powerfully”—without explicitly describing what the characters feel.
In the same way, the enumeration of mortal captives in the Faerie King’s courtyard recalls a rhetorical structure and a set of imagery that have been associated in the visionary tradition with torment that is supernaturally horrible, torment that suspends the natural limitations imposed on suffering by human mortality. This is the association that the “some… some” passage carries into. Amidst the paradisal beauty of the Faerie realm, the anaphoric catalogue opens a window into sheer hell. The dissonance originating from this passage is what makes the Faerie kingdom so otherworldly—so remote, that is, from the human world, the human experience as it appears in the poem. The background of the visionary tradition, invoked so strongly, yet in such a disorienting, expectation-thwarting way, at once crystallizes the sheer alien-ness of the Faerie world, suggested throughout the poem, into a single striking image. The Faerie King’s sudden, motiveless irruption... all these are focused here into one image of human suffering, grotesquely framed amidst marvelous splendour. In this particular moment, the Faerie world is at once like heaven and like hell. It exists, like them, at a remove from human time. It displays, like them, extremes beyond earthly life—extremes both of beauty and of horror. It suggests, like them, a metaphysical separation from the human world. But it lacks the moral rationale of the divisions of the afterlife; it lacks, too, the focus on human life, on human sin and virtue, that these divisions imply. That Faerie resembles both heaven and hell is the clearest proof it is neither. As a result, the affinities of the Faerie realm with both Paradise and the penal regions turn the Faerie realm into a place of two-fold exile from the human world: a place separate from human mortality and human immortality alike.
portraying the Faerie realm as a disturbing hybrid of heaven and hell. The wonder and dread of Faerie are in part the effect of this migration across genre boundaries and across metaphysical boundaries: displaced from their home in the afterlife, the motifs of the vision tradition endow the Faerie realm with their numinous associations, but at the same time alienate it from the worlds of humankind—the living world and the other world alike. This boundary-crossing, generic and metaphysical, exemplifies a larger phenomenon in the portrayal of marvellous places: in general, the boundaries of such places are unstable, their geography mysterious, their location persistently secret and difficult to find.
splendid realm,
the faeries’ loveliness, cruelty, and mystery. The mystery is explicitly spatial: the emphatic question that goes unanswered about the faeries is “where.” This spatial indeterminacy that surrounds the faeries and their place of habitation...
the way to the Faerie kingdom and enters the Faerie king’s castle...
Having passed through the rock, one finds oneself in a land in stark contrast to the landscapes he inhabited before: utterly unlike the land of “stub [and] ston”, or the comfortless forest that the faeries so mysteriously passed through, the Faerie kingdom is a place without any asperities, indeed without any landforms at all--a near-paradisal landscape, “smothe and plain and al grene,” with a royal castle of preternatural artistry and magnificence. The faeries, so elusive in the human world, are motionless in the splendour of their own.
the faerie king so impervious, earlier,
The lost Paradise also haunts the dangerous otherworldly places of Middle English poetry. In visions of the afterlife, the Earthly Paradise borders on the regions of punishment. ...the Faerie realm first appears as a vision of Paradise; only after does one see its human victims, hideously mutilated among Faerie’s more than earthly splendours.
the landscape of Faerie is a place of natural beauty and splendid artifice far superior to the human world. However, it is also a fearful place because of its gallery of mutilated human prisoners. Its threat is not exile but captivity.
the depiction of the Faerie realm draws, in form and image, on the afterlife motif of the suspended and immersed sinners in the regions of punishment. In so doing, the poet exploits the horrific traditional resonances of the motif in a counter-traditional setting, evoking hell amidst the near-paradisal Faerie kingdom. This counter-traditional use of an afterlife motif signals the disturbing distance of the Faerie realm from human mortality and human immortality alike.
Mandeville amplifies this account, adding evocative sensory detail that appeals to taste, smell, hearing, and most of all sight: trees and their fruit, herbs and their scents, chambers with wall paintings, mechanical songbirds, youths and maidens dressed in cloth of gold and masquerading as angels, fountains decorated with gems and running with wine, milk, and honey. His is a far more detailed and vivid “Paradise,” one that appeals to sight, smell, and taste, one that holds wonders of human artifice and sources of sensual pleasure:
In þat lond was a riche man [noght long sethyn] whiche was yclepid Catolonabes. He was ful riche and he hadde a fayre castel vpon an hille and a strong. And he hadde let make a wal aboute it ri3t strong, and withynne þe castel he hadde a fayre gardyn whare were many trees bering dyuerse fruytes þat he might fynde. And he lete plaunte þerynne al maner of herbes of good smel and hit bare feire flouris. And þer were many feire wellis [and by þeyme was made many faire halles and chambers] arrayed wiþ gold and azure, and he hadde ymade þer dyuerse stories and beestis and briddes þat songe and turned by engyn as orlagis as þei hadde be [alle] quyke. And he hadde in þat gardyn alle maner of briddis and bestys as þat mi3t fynde to make a man solace and disport. And he hadde in his gardyn also maydouns wiþynne elde of xv. 3ere, þe fairest þat he mi3t fynde, and knaue children of þe same elde. And þei were alle cloþed in cloþis of gold, and he seide þat þese were aungels. And he hadde ymade iii. wellis faire and goode, al enclosed aboute wiþ precious stones of iasper and crestal and wel ybounde wiþ gold and perlys and oþer maner of stones. And he hadde made a condyt vndir þe erþe so þat whan he wolde one of þese wellis ronne of wyne, anoþer melk, anoþer hony. And þis place he clepid paradys. (pp. 118-119, ll. 22-28, 1-13).
The ornaments and wonders that the Mandeville-author lavishes on the false Paradise are at once wistful and suspicious. As a locus amoenus, a place that combines the beauties of nature and the splendours of art, it recalls visionary depictions of Paradise itself, which is described both as a beautiful green landscape and where gold and jewels are mere building materials.515 However, as a human creation, Catolonabes’ false Paradise is suspicious for its very artfulness and beauty. In and of itself, marvelous artifice evokes both wonder and unease in medieval texts. Moreover, in the courtly romance tradition—one of the genres with which medieval readers aligned The Book of John Mandeville—such artificial places of delight are also places of moral duplicity and danger. As Seth Lerer notes, referring to places of artifice in Old French and Middle English romance,
while [such places] may look like the landmarks of a locus amoenus, they signal the application of human craft to disguise potential danger. […] [They are] world[s] of illusion, whose technical tricks and decorative richness fail to conceal the moral vacuity of [their] inhabitants.518
One artificial locus amoenus with which Catolonabes’ garden may be productively compared is the Faerie realm. The Faerie castle recalls the traditional iconography of the Earthly Paradise: an abundance of more than natural light; splendid and elaborate architecture; the profusion of gems and precious metals as building materials. However, the resemblance to Paradise ends at the Faerie castle’s outer wall, for its human captives are nothing like the blessed souls: they are the grim gallery of the abducted, the mutilated, the mad, the seeming-dead, the people stolen away in their sleep. The anaphoric catalogue of these stolen people resembles, as argued earlier, visionary depictions of hell or purgatory. Once Faerie’s splendour is undermined by this grisly sight, disquieting nuances emerge even from the initial vision. The initial vision of Faerie is emphatically artificial, its vocabulary dense with the technical vocabulary of “the plastic and decorative arts.” Even Faerie’s perpetual light is artificial:
Al that lond was ever light,
For when it schuld be þerk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne (ll. 369-72)
Shepherd argues that the perpetual light implies “that time in this place is—like those abducted into it—arrested in a perpetual noon.”5 However, the perpetual light shows not quite an exemption from time—for night still comes—but a circumvention of time; it is as incomplete an approximation of eternity as the castle is an incomplete approximation of Paradise. Falling so short of Paradise’s bliss, at least for its human inhabitants, Faerie and its splendour become sinister, suggestive of deliberate deception. The shadow of Paradise, falling on this marvelous space, reveals “the hollowness of fairy artifice.” The parallels between Faerie and the Earthly Paradise indicate not only the marvelous nature of the Faerie realm, but also its moral distance from Paradise. That distance gains its emotional weight not from the sense of exile, as is the case in the Old English poems, but from the sense of illusion and deceit; Faerie is not primarily a prison or a place of exile, but a counterfeit. As Anne D’Arcy observes, the emphatic artificiality of the Faerie realm shows Faerie up as “a painted simulacrum of paradise designed to deceive by ornament.”
Deceptive intent is a suspicion in the Faerie realm; it is a certainty in Mandeville’s garden of Catolonabes. The Old Man has a sinister agenda in whose service he creates the artificial locus amoenus, the false Paradise of his garden. The Mandeville-narrator plays up both the artifice and the delight. The emphasis on the garden’s beauty in no way detracts from its sinister purpose; on the contrary, in light of the romance tradition, the vivid beauty and the ingenious artifice in the description of Catolonabes’ garden are not just markers of delight, but instruments of seduction. The seduction is not just erotic in nature, though sex is one of the delights offered in Catolonabes’ garden; it is a metaphysical seduction, a deception that makes its victims accept the false Paradise instead of the true. This deception takes significantly different shapes in Odoric and in Mandeville. In Odoric, the creator of the false Paradise has a complicated plan for winning over assassins: a drug-fuelled parody of the Fall from Grace. He causes young men of worth to be put into this “Paradise.” When he needs someone murdered, he looks for a young man particularly fond of his habitation. He then drugs this young man and removes him from “Paradise.” When the young man wakes up, the Old Man of the Mountain promises to restore him “en celui paradis ou il [the young man] estoit premierement” (to that paradise where he was at first) if he attempts the assassination (p. 80, l. 20-1). Mandeville’s Catolonabes has a simpler routine and a stronger promise. He invites young men to a tour of his “Paradise,” drugs them to enhance the experience, and promises them Paradise if they serve him. He promises quite explicitly that “þat was paradys þat God grauntid to þese þat he loued” (p. 119, ll. 19-20), and that “if þey wolde dei3e as for his sake, when þey were deede þey schulde come into his paradys, […] and he schulde putte hem in a fairer paradys whare þei schulde se God in his ioi3e and his maieste” (p. 119, ll. 24-29). In short, Catolonabes does not just offer them the physical pleasures of his garden; he simultaneously demands their absolute loyalty and claims to offer them the supernatural bliss of the Beatific Vision. In essence, he lays claim to a spurious sort of divinity. The young men’s brief experience of Catolonabes’s Paradise and the stronger claim that Catolonabes makes about its metaphysical status place the focus more starkly on their choice: will they accept that this is Paradise? Those who become Catolonabes’s victims (and assassins) take his paradise at face value, accepting its material beauty as proof of its spiritual nature. But the spuriousness of the false Paradise is soon revealed. It is open to living mortals, whereas the true Paradise is out of reach; it is vulnerable to the ravages of time and war, whereas the true Paradise is remote and inaccessible. Mandeville’s account concludes with the destruction of the false Paradise by Catolonabes’ adversaries:
And whenne lordis of þe cuntre and riche men perceyued þis malice and þe [cautele] of hym þis Catolonabes, þei gedrid hem togedir and asayled þis castel and slow hym and destruyd al his richesse and faire [places] þat were in his paradys. Þe place of þe wellis is 3it þare and somme oþer þingis but no richesse [and it is noght longe sethen he was distroyed] (p. 120, ll. 7-12).
For the master of the garden as for his deluded servants, the false promise of paradisal bliss ends in death and ruin. The seductive beauty of this “malignant bower of bliss” is, retrospectively, an elegiac reminder of the lost wonders of the true Paradise; its falsehood is a measure of its distance from the truth; and by the end of Mandeville’s account, even this false reflection, even this counterfeit Paradise, is gone, inaccessible. Like the marvelous relics that flow from the true Paradise, like the stories scattered across the landscape of the East, the seductive, malignant counterfeit recalls the true Paradise only to emphasize its loss. In Mandeville, the Earthly Paradise epitomizes dangerous otherworldly spaces, exhibiting all the literary tropes of displacement that set such spaces aside from the mundane world. Paradise, the true home, is an insistent reminder of humankind’s fundamental homelessness. This contrast between the lost paradisal homeland and the exilic state of earthly life is as pervasive in the medieval tradition as in its biblical and classical antecedents. Brian Stock traces the topos of the journey back to a lost Paradise through several traditions in Late Antiquity that converge on “the themes of exodus, exile, and alienation."
So, for instance, the depiction of the Faerie realm draws on the afterlife motif of the suspended and immersed sinners in the regions of punishment. This glimpse of hell amidst the near-paradisal Faerie kingdom signals the disturbing distance of the Faerie realm from human mortality and human immortality alike.
the kingdom of the fairies as consisting of “castels and tours, rivers, forests, frith with flours” (ll. 159-160). However, the fairy world resembles paradise rather than hell. After arriving in fairyland, one encounters a beautiful crystal palace, which make one “think that it is the proude court of Paradis (ll. 375-376). The location of the fairyland is typically Celtic rather than Christian (Rider 362), as one is able to enter it effortlessly. To enter the mysterious world of the fairies,one has to enter a rock, as the fairy ladies did, “in at a roche the levedis rideth – and after, and nought abideth” (ll. 347-348). Therefore, the fairy world is “neither and afterworld nor an underworld” (Friedman 190), but rather an otherworld, “a counter world to that of men” (Friedman 191).
The poet added the description of torn apart and dead bodies in front of the fairy castle: “And sume a-strangled as thai ete, and sum were in water a-dreynt” (ll. 396-397). The presence of these eternally suffering and dying persons in the fairyland seem to refer to purgatory within the predominantly positive portrayal (Friedman 193). In conclusion, the poet depicts the fairies and their kingdom mainly positively, even though a resemblance to purgatory is present.
Convinced of their negative nature, Friedman claims that the poet explicitly connects the fairy king to Satan (190). He bases his argument on the fact that the fairy king appeared at noon, just as Satan does in traditional folklore. Furthermore, Friedman argues that the wounded, mad and dismembered people one finds at the courtyard of the fairy palace were torn apart by the fairies themselves, as the fairy king threatened to “tore thine limes al” (l 171). However, this negative view on the fairies and their king does not fit in with the general picture of fairies and their behaviour. The fairies do not kidnap people from the real world at random, but they take those whose were about to suffer a sudden and unnatural death (Jirsa 148). These people were not murdered or tortured by the fairies, but merely “taken into some realm beyond the mortal one, from which these victims could often be reclaimed” in the fairy kingdom.
The king of the fairies himself does not exhibit any negative behaviour either. On the contrary, he proves himself to be a polite and hospitable host. Without objection, he keeps his promise of rewarding for the music and even wishes well. The occupations of the other fairies the poet describes – hunting, riding and dancing – are also peaceful and harmless, and the poet calls the fairies “gentil and jolif as brid on ris”(l 305). The suffering people one encounters in the courtyard are in fact the only negative element in the otherwise innocent fairy world. Mitchell goes as far as to claim that the courtyard passage must be an interpolation by an early scribe (157). His assumption seems plausible when comparing the poem to the general representation of the fairy world one finds in other Celtic tales. Kittredge discusses a few Celtic tales, and concludes that the fairy world is represented as “bright and noble, in which is not spoken falsehood or guile” (197). The typical Celtic fairy, he states, is “a being of human stature, wonderful beauty, and extraordinary powers” (197). Rider also confirms that, although there was uncertainty regarding the true nature of fairies, “fairies were never devils” (15). Overall, the poet presents his audience with a distinctly positive picture of the mythical fairy world and its inhabitants.
The positive portrayal of the fairy world is surprising to a modern reader as it contradicts the typical narrative structure with a protagonist and an antagonist. However, the only distinctly negative feature of the fairy world, the suffering humans at the courtyard, does not lead to a negative portrayal of the fairies. It may very well be a later interpolation, and even if it was part of the original poem, it need not mean that the fairies are guilty of causing any pain or suffering. When one analyses the descriptions of the fairies and their occupations it becomes clear that, although the fairies are of a supernatural and mysterious nature, the poet depicts their world as a paradise and the fairies themselves as polite and friendly beings.
The tableaux in the courtyard is quite a comprehensive list of 'unnatural', bloody deaths likely to happen in this era.
The display of the mutilated `taken' also seems horrible and pointless.
3. The Faerie Otherworld
The faerie otherworld is segregated from our own, and in the tale is only known to be accessible from a passage through the transitional space. s. However, one of the most noticeable aspects of the otherworld into which one arrives is that it is not all that different from our own: “physically and in its operations it does not differ substantially from the medieval, human courtly world, but rather exists as a more beautiful, parallel world which can disturb the human without the reverse being true” (Finlayson 391). In the tale it is quite apparent that, although the inhabitants of the faerie world are capable of both invasive and monstrous behaviour, there is also an emphasis on courtly culture and beauty that places the faerie world on a more localized plane than the non-Christian other of King Horn:
com into a fair cuntray,
As bright so sonne on somers day,
Smothe and plain and all grene,
Hille no dale was ther non y-sene.
Amidde the long a castel sighe, 70
Riche and real and wonder heighe. (325-32)
It is significant, for instance, that the preternatural world is fair in appearance: “Beautiful dwellings, feasting, music, and chess are accepted commonplaces of fairyland” (Paton 85); the otherworld is therefore not inferior, but in many ways superior to our own. There are, however, a number of ways in which the faerie world can be read. A number of scholars have attempted to prove the otherworld’s defiance of, or reliance upon, Christian doctrine (Finlayson 393; Lerer 92), but rather than concede that the otherworld represents either the world of revelation or a world in which Christianity is entirely absent, it would be more practical to consider the otherworld in terms of the historical and literary context in which it appears. Another key consideration for the otherworld is its narrative purpose within the context of medieval romance, which above all seeks to promote virtue:
“The valley itself does not serve merely as an enchanted prison; it has an additional quality which we shall see is found in countless enchanted objects,—it serves as a fidelity test. Only the loyal lover can overcome its difficulties” (Paton 89-90). The faerie otherworld therefore aids the progression through the narrative within the context of chivalric court culture. The otherworld can serve a number of purposes within the narrative, and is essentially ambiguous: “Romance writers play on the shifting manifestations of the otherworld, which seems most of all to be defined by enigma and ambiguity” (Saunders 207); the real and other worlds collide here so that the preternatural space is both positive in its beauty and negative in its association with the violent actions that have been undertaken by its inhabitants. The castle in which one finds the faerie king is as full of mystery as the landscape in which it is situated. One aspect of the castle which has puzzled scholars is its Norman design (Battles 193); the equation of the castle with the Normans means that it can be interpreted both as a form of architecture that would have been familiar to English readers and as a signification of foreign craft that establishes the otherness of the faerie kingdom in comparison to Horn’s own: “Given that this beautiful castle of foreign design belongs to the intruder in the poem, it would seem that the poet uses architectural detail to indicate cultural difference” (Battles 196). This division contributes to the uncanny status of the preternatural that draws it simultaneously closer to and further from the normative ideal. Lerer notes that “[t]he enamel work of the fairy castle would have signaled to a contemporary audience the latest in decorative technique,” and so the crafted nature of the castle both enhances its familiarity and its otherness as “an attempted ordering of the world through human artifice,” using “the vocabulary of craft” (98). In contrast to the natural landscape, then, the castle is another example of crafted material used for preternatural means, but with contemporary details which the reader might recognize and relate to our own world. The crafted status of the castle denotes that its form is not entirely natural; however, the fact that the otherworld outshines the real world means that the preternatural elements of the tale should be considered as an amplified version of the natural form. The narrator even compares the castle to heaven: “By all thing, think that it is / The proude court of paradis” (351-2); this journey is comparable to a journey to the afterlife (Putter 239), and the emphasis that the narrative places on light in the faerie landscape and the architecture of the castle is significant for its implication that the faerie world is heavenly and beautiful rather than dark or demonic:
All that lond was ever light,
For when it shuld be therk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne.
No man may telle no thence in thought
The riche werk that ther was wrought. (345)
The emphasis on light instead of dark uses positive imagery to place the faerie castle’s beauty on a level above that of our own world, and thus implies that the faerie world is not demonic. The castle represents an ambiguous space which embodies the beautiful aspects of the faerie world, and reflects the more positive and uncanny aspects of the faerie preternatural in the romance. The figures within the castle grounds provide a conflicting representation of the preternatural within the tale, and the description of their gruesome, mutilated forms breaks the otherwise beautiful and well-ordered space of the faerie otherworld. The narrator declares the figures to be “thought dede and nare nought” (366), and also observes that “[e]che was thus in this warld y-nome, / With fairy thider y-come” (379-80). The evidence suggests that each figure is a victim that has been snatched by the faerie king to the otherworld either on the verge of death or soon after it, and that within this world they exist in a state somewhere between life and death. The wounded figures can therefore be read through common understandings of faerie lore within this period: “many of the fatal injuries described in the poem conform to the sudden and unnatural causes of death believed in medieval folklore traditions to cause people not simply to die, but to be stolen away or taken into some realm beyond the mortal one, from which these victims could often be reclaimed” (Jirsa 148). The idea that anyone could be snatched away to the faerie world with little warning was therefore not uncommon in the late medieval period, and represents an attempt to understand the concept of death: “death haunted medieval people. Vexed by plague and war, as the death-dealing centuries of the later Middle Ages wore on, death became an even greater fixation for popular devotion” (Shinners 513). The manner of the ghostly figures and their deaths might also have some bearing on their marginal state within the faerie world; a church dedication from around 1400 states that “the devil has no power to do anything to a body buried in a Christian grave” (Shinners 36), and it is therefore possible that the figures are monstrous in the faerie world because they have died unburied or buried in unconsecrated ground. It is also possible that the monstrous figures are in a form of purgatory: “medieval people usually understood ghosts to be the pitiful souls of the dead begging earthly prayers to allay their suffering in purgatory” (Shinners 252). The faerie otherworld accommodates the concept of purgatory in a number of ways; the wounded figures suffer, and yet the setting for their suffering is beautiful rather than hellish. It is possible, therefore, that the otherworld represents the space in which these souls must complete their penance in order to progress to heaven: The notion of purgatory as a way station for Christian souls who still had penance left to do for their sins before they reached heaven emerged by the twelfth century, driven largely by lay people’s enthusiasm for it. Mediating, as it did, the soul’s earlier stark fate of either heaven or hell, purgatory offered hope to ordinary, fallible Christians; for while the pains of purgatory were unspeakable by earthly comparison, eventually the soul was purged and entered heaven. (Shinners 517) Beautiful purgatories appear in a number of medieval literary texts, such as the tale of Owein, which was hugely popular and is thought to have been a source for Dante’s Inferno (Shinners 517). Like most aspects of the faerie preternatural, the monstrous figures occupy the margins of existence, in a transitional state that could signify either the liminal status of the faerie world or the Christian concept of purgatory. It is difficult to say, in such a case, whether the figures really are supposed to be considered monstrous or simply victims of circumstance. The faerie king’s objection to the request is evidence for an appreciation of beauty in the otherworld which renders it less monstrous than the previous actions of the faerie king would imply:
“Nay,” quath the King, “that nought nere!” (433-8)
It is telling that the faerie king, an occupant of the otherworld, promotes beauty and virtue. The faerie king’s hall is a “seemly sight” (387) and his queen is “fair and swete” (390), which means that the fair appearances of the immediate surroundings. However, the king and his company are also described as fair in the lines immediately preceding Herodis’s initial abduction (111; 124); it is possible, then, that the beauty of the faerie king is comparable to that of the crypto-monster, and is only a façade for monstrous intentions such as his earlier attack. The portrayal of the faerie king also draws upon his original counterpart, Hades, but this presents further confusion in the faerie king’s relationship, thereby potentially placing in the same league as the supernatural host in the association between Hades and the king of the underworld. The faerie king is not treated as particularly dangerous in the text, either because the faerie world is not considered to be an enemy of our own world, or because one trusts in one's own skill and virtue to outwit the king: “fearsome though they were, spirits were often easily fooled. Popular stories of tricks played on the devil and the stage buffoonery of demons in pageant plays helped reassure people that the forces of evil were not invincible” (Shinners 252). The faerie king’s occupation with beauty would imply that he is not demonic or “other” in the usual sense, not least of all because he does not behave in the manner that would usually signify demonic attributes (Jirsa 148), but instead represents a popular figure within secular culture. The threat from the otherworld is diminished by the faerie king’s more admirable qualities, such as the fact that he immediately concedes once he has been reminded of his promise (440-6); the faerie king therefore represents a near-equal adversary more than a monstrous other, and an ambiguous form of preternatural that is more acceptable within the context of medieval romance than the politically real threat of the non-Christian other. The otherworld, then, is an ambiguous space which defies concrete definition, but which is at once positive and negative and therefore physically rather than socially liminal.
Conclusion
The interplay between preternatural items, places and beings indicates that there are a number of factors to consider in medieval literary representations of the faerie other. Particular attention to the episode of the faerie otherworld reveals that the magical elements of the tale are ambiguous in their positive or negative implications, but also that this ambiguity determines the marginal or transitional spaces of the text. Though there are malevolent aspects of the faerie other in the lai, these are portrayed in a manner that is entirely different from that of the Saracen invaders in King Horn. The faerie other, instead of being presented as fully monstrous, is therefore a more natural facet of the medieval preternatural in late medieval literary romance. The incursions of the faerie world are uncanny and often threatening, but the threat is reversible through the actions of the tale’s protagonist and, perhaps most importantly, does not attack religion as the Saracens attack Horn’s. Though there is an invasive and often sinister quality to the faerie other’s involvement in the tale, the effects are presented as reversible and the faeries themselves as pale, ghostly comparisons to the living, and it is perhaps because of this that the faerie world represents less of a threat to Christendom than the more political and religious threat of the Saracen invaders in King Horn.
the Otherworld as a pastoral scene, endowed with architectural wonder. The poet’s emphasis of the marvellous landscapes and magnificent architecture in the fairy territory serves as a means not only to surprise the audience but also create a fantasy to the Otherworld.
unexpected ‘mervailes’ of supernatural events: the fairy hunt, the marvellous Fairy Castle. the pastoral scenery of green plains and the magnificent architecture, which is not only exquisitely constructed with advanced architectural features such as the ‘butras’ (line 361) but also decorated with ‘diuers aumal’ (line 364), ‘burnist gold’ (line 368), and various kinds of precious stones (lines 364-368). In the Otherworld, everything appears to be beautiful, spectacular, and incredible to human eyes. The Otherworld represents not merely a parallel or mirror world to the mortal world; in fact, it has surpassed the mortal world in many ways in regards to materiality and aesthetics. As the poet narrates, the precious stones make the fairy castle ‘clere & schine as cristal’ (line 358). The poet not only rewrites the Underworld but also further removes it from its classical roots: the Underworld of the classical Orphic myth is as dark as night, whereas the Fairy Kingdom is set in crystal bright pastoral scenery. The Fairy realm now shines as bright as the sun at noontide, like in the ‘proude court of Paradis’ (line 378):
Al that lond was ever light,
For when it schuld be therk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne. (lines 369-372)
By portraying the splendid Fairy Castle decorated with various precious stones, the poet strengthens the castle’s artistic value as if it had not been created by the mortals: ‘No man may telle, no thenche in thought / The riche werk that ther was wrought’ (374-75).
The Fairy Castle is a spectacle in itself, not merely because of the decorations of rare jewels, but also because of the ‘exotic’ and innovative architectural features, such as the flying buttresses, fortifications, high towers and the ditch. Bliss mentions that the architectural feature of the flying buttress was scarcely known in England in the thirteenth century but was a common feature in French architecture. The poet may call the audience’s attention to the function of a real castle in the real world regarding its military use or even to the knowledge of medieval lapidary that concerns the allegorical meaning of diverse precious stones. Yet, what is more important is the poet’s refashioning of the classical Underworld that in turn exhibits the aesthetic value of the Fairy Castle as a craft of art in architecture.
At the edge of the Fairy Castle, one witnesses a group of distorted figures that seem to be dead and yet not dead, ‘þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt’ (line 390). Marginalized from the communal society of the Otherworld, these grotesque figures are a display of the Fairy King’s collection of bodies—they may have been taken alive by the fairies and now remain forever frozen in the posture of the moment when they were snatched. These grotesque bodies articulate the molestiae (pain) and fear of the mortal world by portraying various horrifying manners of death, including decapitation, dismemberment, still-birth, death on the battlefield and so forth:
Sum stode wiþ-outen hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt,
Wiues þer lay on child-bedde,
Sum ded, and sum awedde’. (lines 391-400)
I argue that with their static poses and terrifying gestures reflecting their deaths, the grotesque bodies are themselves a part of the Otherworldly spectacle, speaking to the heteroglossia reflecting and refracting medieval people’s fear of warfare, childbirth, disease, accidents, death itself and hell. The fascinating Otherworld encloses a dark side where death and the tableau vivant of human suffering are exhibited. As Saunders rightly points out, the Otherworld serves as the two sides of one coin—it is both an idealized golden world and a world of ambiguous force, violence, and threat. I read the imagery of the Otherworldly figures—’þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt’—as the poet demonstrating his deep concern for human suffering and emotion in his contemporary world.
The Otherworld of the Fairy Kingdom is transformed from the world of the dead to an ambivalent space composed of wonders, spectacles, latent threat, and human suffering.
a kingdom” of glorious beauty, “glittering, sophisticated, full of artifice” (p. ).
combination of artifice and nature typical of the faery world”
the elegance of the fairy world and the macabre tableau of the death courtyard,
Where the brilliant Otherworld is characterized by visual artifice and stasis,
What is Fairyland like?
[···] del castillo y [···] ante el rey y la reina de las hadas, que escuchan el canto. El rey concede la recompensa que designe y entonces [···]
La influencia céltica es notable, por ejemplo, en ese misterioso país de las hadas, que es, más que un mundo de ultratumba, un espacio maravilloso que existe al lado del mundo cotidiano, con evidentes rasgos paradisíacos. [···] y el paso del río que confina el jardín del reino de las hadas es fácil. Por otra parte, la adaptación escenográfica a la moda medieval es típica de las novelas corteses. Es un efecto de la idealización costumbrista: la vida en las novelas tiene que ser más refinada, más coloreada o más exótica que la existencia cotidiana conocida de sus lectores, y como un resultado de los esfuerzos medievales para embellecer las vidas de los caracteres clásicos sobre los que se conocían poco, las figuras antiguas resultaban maravillosamente up-to-date. Aun las hadas van a cazar con halcones, a la manera de la nobleza de la época.
CARLOS GARCÍA GUAL
(Nota de Sandra: Ver también el Apolo violinista y/o tenista de la Edad Moderna, p.ej. de dell'Anguillara y Tiépolo, que crea el mismo efecto)
Faerie’s wonder and dread are in part the effect of this displacement across genre boundaries: unmoored from their theological framework, the motifs of the vision tradition endow the Faerie realm with their numinous associations, but at the same time alienate it from human mortality and immortality alike. The Faerie realm’s blurring of genre boundaries exemplifies a larger phenomenon in the portrayal of these marvellous places: the unstable boundaries that characterize places of wonder and danger. The geographical, theological, or epistemological boundaries of these places are permeable or unstable, their geography mysterious, their location persistently secret and difficult to find. I call this phenomenon spatial indeterminacy: the inherent spatial mysteriousness and instability of marvelous places, an abiding trope in Old and Middle English narratives alike. The second chapter of this dissertation investigates how this trope of spatial indeterminacy emerges in Old English poetry through declarations of unknowing, quasi-formulaic assertions that marvellous spaces and their monstrous denizens are mysteries unfathomable by humankind. The declarations of unknowing, like the iconography of Faerie, are a trope rooted in religious discourse. In Old English, declarations of unknowing appear chiefly in homilies and religious poetry, with reference to God, heaven and hell, death, and the afterlife. These declarations bring their traditional otherworldly associations into the habitats of monsters, to Grendel’s mere in Beowulf or the Indian river of the hippopotami in the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. In so doing, the declarations emphasize the sheer magnitude of the gap between these places of wonder and dread and the human community.
Among these glimpses there emerge, as in the Faerie realm, displaced motifs from the traditional iconography of the afterlife. Yet this Paradise itself, like the marvelous spaces surveyed in Old and Middle English, is defined by spatial indeterminacy; it is determinedly unreachable and shrouded in mystery, even as its fluid boundaries both separate and connect it to the human world.
the Faerie kingdom... There one sees a glorious royal castle, made with great artistry out of gold and precious stones. But amidst this splendour one encounters a grisly sight:
& seiʒe liggeand wiþin þe wal
Of folk þat were þider y-brouʒt
& þouʒt dede, & nare nouʒt. 390
Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
395 & sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al forschreynt.
Wives þer lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded & sum awedde,
400 & wonder fele þer lay bisides:
Riʒt as þai slepe her undertides, E
che was þus in þis warld y-nome,
Wiþ fairi þider y-come.
hadde bihold þis meruails alle
went in-to þe kinges halle (ll. 387-410).
The people abstracted from this world by magic are the “taken,” the human captives of the Faerie kingdom. Their presence in Faerie is not without parallel; several medieval accounts of the faeries, recount the misadventures of mortals in the Faerie kingdom.
This version simply mentions the presence of human beings brought to the Faerie kingdom although they are not dead. The concessional clause makes no sense in the absence of their injuries.
In the Ashmole version, several categories of victims from the Auchinleck version are absent, namely the drowned, the burned, the women dead or driven mad in childbirth. However, the mutilated prisoners of Faerie are here, as in the Auchinleck version: from head to saddle, the anaphoric catalogue enumerates them in anatomical order, by their missing or wounded body parts (ll. 382-5), followed within the same anaphora by the choking victims and their commensals (l. 385-6). Like the Auchinleck, the Ashmole version of the poem presents the human inhabitants of Faerie as a gallery of grisly images, contained within a fairly formulaic anaphoric catalogue. This catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie is a controversial passage, both in terms of its pertinence to the poem and in terms of its emotional impact on the audience or readership of the poem. Bruce Mitchell calls it “an interpolation by some scribe or minstrel” and “an insensitive artistic blemish,” arguing that without the enumeration of these prisoners “we have a perfectly smooth progression, as in the Harley MS. (which omits them all), and their absence eliminates certain inconsistencies.”
The emotional impact of the scene is likewise controversial. In his analysis of the Faerie kingdom, Seth Lerer disagrees with Bruce Mitchell’s dismissal, calling the passage “a tour de force of narrative skill” in which “anaphora, variation, and a potentially endless catenulate structure” impose rhetorical bounds on boundless horror. But other critics contend that the horror of the experience is a modern readers’ artifact. Felicity Riddy argues that any sinister quality in the description “is an effect that works against the ostensible drift of the narrator's approbation” of the splendid Faerie court. Anne D’Arcy, too, notes that “the narrator does not register horror … but rather a sense of detached wonder.”
D’Arcy, however, argues that the poet does mean the realm of Faerie to disturb the reader, though it does not disturb the characters. Ingeniously, she argues that the captives in the courtyard resemble statues in the round. In patristic writings and popular medieval culture alike, statues in the round have sinister associations: idolatry, demonic possession, potentially sinister uses of imperial power. Accordingly, the captive mortals here mark out the King of Faerie as a demonic artificer and a tyrannical usurper of human sovereignty.
The Faerie kingdom recalls the visionary tradition in disturbingly conflicting ways. On the one hand, as the narrator says, it looks like “the proude court of Paradys”; with its artistry, its palace of crystal and jewels, and its continual light, the Faerie kingdom resembles the Paradise of the Christian tradition. On the other hand, the Faerie kingdom also recalls the regions of punishment: its catalogue of captive mortals bears a striking resemblance to the anaphoric catalogues of the tormented dead from descriptions of Hell or Purgatory. Constance Davies first describes the mutilated prisoners of Faerie as a translation of the classical underworld and its tormented dead into the imagery of “the Christian otherworld of punishment.” Davies considers that the inconsistency between the grisly prisoners and the splendours of Faerie “show[s] up the seams in the joining of Celtic and classical tales”; I will argue, on the contrary, that the inconsistency is a deliberate poetic effect, which emphasizes the metaphysical displacement of the faeries’ human prisoners and the alterity of the kingdom of Faerie itself.
the catalogue of the tormented dead appears in the three most important streams of the vision tradition in Old and Middle English, namely the Visio Sancti Pauli, the vision of Tundale, and the legend of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The transmission and development of this motif reveal not only its importance, but its traditional emotional tenor: between the eighth and the fourteenth century, as it is transmitted from one stream of the vision tradition to the next, and as it is translated from the Latin to the vernacular, the formulaic catalogue grows more and more elaborate: the lists of tormented sinners increase and multiply, and their torments become more varied and more grotesque. But while the scene itself, and the anaphoric catalogue that describes it, are considerably heightened and expanded, the narratorial commentary on the scene and the visionary’s reaction to it remain either spare or nonexistent, suggesting that the horror of the scene resides in the gruesome sensory details more than in narratorial cues or in the reactions of an intradiegetic audience. These structural characteristics link the catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie with the anaphoric catalogues of the vision tradition, and with the wonder, dread, and pity that these catalogues traditionally inspire. As a result, the catalogue of the human prisoners of Faerie disturbs, not only because the prisoners are frozen into gruesome states, but because, amidst the paradisal splendour of Faerie, the catalogue provides—unmoored from its traditional theological significance—a vivid, unreasonable, unmotivated hint of the infernal regions.
Like the visionaries and their redactors, the poet is depicting a place radically different from the mundane human world; unlike them, he is not depicting any part of the Christian afterlife, but the kingdom of Faerie. The catalogue of its human prisoners, however, strongly recalls, in its structure and imagery, the visionary catalogues of the tormented dead. As in many of the visions, the narrator does not explain the import or the emotional impact of the scene; however, the description of human captives, especially in the Auchinleck version, mostly falls into a “some…some” anaphora very like the catalogues of the vision tradition, an anaphora that details the wide variety of the prisoners’ grisly fates:
Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete, 395
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al forschreynt.
Wives þer lay on childe bedde,
Sum ded & sum awedde… (ll. 391-400)
The anaphoric catalogue shares with the visionary catalogues the preoccupation with mutilation and dismemberment, the elements of human anatomy enumerated only to describe their wounds and torments. True, the captives of Faerie are neither suspended, nor immersed to various degrees; instead, their “poses” reflect a variety of human activities through which they may have met either their deaths or their abduction by the fairies. But the aspect of bondage, of confinement, that is common to the infernal or purgatorial catalogues emerges here through the choice of verbs: every single verb in the passage is either passive 58 (“were…adreynt”) or static (“stode,” “lay ybounde,” “sete,” “lay”). The captives of Faerie are not affixed to burning hooks or confined in pits of boiling metal: they are trapped in a grim instance of their past. The grisly variety of their predicaments and the shape of the list that contains them recall the anaphoric catalogues of the vision tradition, especially those found in the vernacular renditions of the legends of St. Patrick’s Purgatory. The traditional associations of the anaphoric catalogues--with supernatural horror and suffering, with torments beyond the limits of time and of the mortal human body--form the burden of association that the catalogue of captives carries into the poem. When the catalogue appears, its traditional association is supernatural horror. The narrator describes the reaction only as “merveyl”: but the horror is immanent in the imagery and the structure of the formula. This counter-traditional use of a traditional motif is in keeping with the aesthetic of the poem as a whole. As Felicity Riddy notes, the poet “conveys feelings—often very powerfully”—without explicitly describing what the characters feel.
In the same way, the enumeration of mortal captives in the Faerie King’s courtyard recalls a rhetorical structure and a set of imagery that have been associated in the visionary tradition with torment that is supernaturally horrible, torment that suspends the natural limitations imposed on suffering by human mortality. This is the association that the “some… some” passage carries into. Amidst the paradisal beauty of the Faerie realm, the anaphoric catalogue opens a window into sheer hell. The dissonance originating from this passage is what makes the Faerie kingdom so otherworldly—so remote, that is, from the human world, the human experience as it appears in the poem. The background of the visionary tradition, invoked so strongly, yet in such a disorienting, expectation-thwarting way, at once crystallizes the sheer alien-ness of the Faerie world, suggested throughout the poem, into a single striking image. The Faerie King’s sudden, motiveless irruption... all these are focused here into one image of human suffering, grotesquely framed amidst marvelous splendour. In this particular moment, the Faerie world is at once like heaven and like hell. It exists, like them, at a remove from human time. It displays, like them, extremes beyond earthly life—extremes both of beauty and of horror. It suggests, like them, a metaphysical separation from the human world. But it lacks the moral rationale of the divisions of the afterlife; it lacks, too, the focus on human life, on human sin and virtue, that these divisions imply. That Faerie resembles both heaven and hell is the clearest proof it is neither. As a result, the affinities of the Faerie realm with both Paradise and the penal regions turn the Faerie realm into a place of two-fold exile from the human world: a place separate from human mortality and human immortality alike.
portraying the Faerie realm as a disturbing hybrid of heaven and hell. The wonder and dread of Faerie are in part the effect of this migration across genre boundaries and across metaphysical boundaries: displaced from their home in the afterlife, the motifs of the vision tradition endow the Faerie realm with their numinous associations, but at the same time alienate it from the worlds of humankind—the living world and the other world alike. This boundary-crossing, generic and metaphysical, exemplifies a larger phenomenon in the portrayal of marvellous places: in general, the boundaries of such places are unstable, their geography mysterious, their location persistently secret and difficult to find.
splendid realm,
the faeries’ loveliness, cruelty, and mystery. The mystery is explicitly spatial: the emphatic question that goes unanswered about the faeries is “where.” This spatial indeterminacy that surrounds the faeries and their place of habitation...
the way to the Faerie kingdom and enters the Faerie king’s castle...
Having passed through the rock, one finds oneself in a land in stark contrast to the landscapes he inhabited before: utterly unlike the land of “stub [and] ston”, or the comfortless forest that the faeries so mysteriously passed through, the Faerie kingdom is a place without any asperities, indeed without any landforms at all--a near-paradisal landscape, “smothe and plain and al grene,” with a royal castle of preternatural artistry and magnificence. The faeries, so elusive in the human world, are motionless in the splendour of their own.
the faerie king so impervious, earlier,
The lost Paradise also haunts the dangerous otherworldly places of Middle English poetry. In visions of the afterlife, the Earthly Paradise borders on the regions of punishment. ...the Faerie realm first appears as a vision of Paradise; only after does one see its human victims, hideously mutilated among Faerie’s more than earthly splendours.
the landscape of Faerie is a place of natural beauty and splendid artifice far superior to the human world. However, it is also a fearful place because of its gallery of mutilated human prisoners. Its threat is not exile but captivity.
the depiction of the Faerie realm draws, in form and image, on the afterlife motif of the suspended and immersed sinners in the regions of punishment. In so doing, the poet exploits the horrific traditional resonances of the motif in a counter-traditional setting, evoking hell amidst the near-paradisal Faerie kingdom. This counter-traditional use of an afterlife motif signals the disturbing distance of the Faerie realm from human mortality and human immortality alike.
Mandeville amplifies this account, adding evocative sensory detail that appeals to taste, smell, hearing, and most of all sight: trees and their fruit, herbs and their scents, chambers with wall paintings, mechanical songbirds, youths and maidens dressed in cloth of gold and masquerading as angels, fountains decorated with gems and running with wine, milk, and honey. His is a far more detailed and vivid “Paradise,” one that appeals to sight, smell, and taste, one that holds wonders of human artifice and sources of sensual pleasure:
In þat lond was a riche man [noght long sethyn] whiche was yclepid Catolonabes. He was ful riche and he hadde a fayre castel vpon an hille and a strong. And he hadde let make a wal aboute it ri3t strong, and withynne þe castel he hadde a fayre gardyn whare were many trees bering dyuerse fruytes þat he might fynde. And he lete plaunte þerynne al maner of herbes of good smel and hit bare feire flouris. And þer were many feire wellis [and by þeyme was made many faire halles and chambers] arrayed wiþ gold and azure, and he hadde ymade þer dyuerse stories and beestis and briddes þat songe and turned by engyn as orlagis as þei hadde be [alle] quyke. And he hadde in þat gardyn alle maner of briddis and bestys as þat mi3t fynde to make a man solace and disport. And he hadde in his gardyn also maydouns wiþynne elde of xv. 3ere, þe fairest þat he mi3t fynde, and knaue children of þe same elde. And þei were alle cloþed in cloþis of gold, and he seide þat þese were aungels. And he hadde ymade iii. wellis faire and goode, al enclosed aboute wiþ precious stones of iasper and crestal and wel ybounde wiþ gold and perlys and oþer maner of stones. And he hadde made a condyt vndir þe erþe so þat whan he wolde one of þese wellis ronne of wyne, anoþer melk, anoþer hony. And þis place he clepid paradys. (pp. 118-119, ll. 22-28, 1-13).
The ornaments and wonders that the Mandeville-author lavishes on the false Paradise are at once wistful and suspicious. As a locus amoenus, a place that combines the beauties of nature and the splendours of art, it recalls visionary depictions of Paradise itself, which is described both as a beautiful green landscape and where gold and jewels are mere building materials.515 However, as a human creation, Catolonabes’ false Paradise is suspicious for its very artfulness and beauty. In and of itself, marvelous artifice evokes both wonder and unease in medieval texts. Moreover, in the courtly romance tradition—one of the genres with which medieval readers aligned The Book of John Mandeville—such artificial places of delight are also places of moral duplicity and danger. As Seth Lerer notes, referring to places of artifice in Old French and Middle English romance,
while [such places] may look like the landmarks of a locus amoenus, they signal the application of human craft to disguise potential danger. […] [They are] world[s] of illusion, whose technical tricks and decorative richness fail to conceal the moral vacuity of [their] inhabitants.518
One artificial locus amoenus with which Catolonabes’ garden may be productively compared is the Faerie realm. The Faerie castle recalls the traditional iconography of the Earthly Paradise: an abundance of more than natural light; splendid and elaborate architecture; the profusion of gems and precious metals as building materials. However, the resemblance to Paradise ends at the Faerie castle’s outer wall, for its human captives are nothing like the blessed souls: they are the grim gallery of the abducted, the mutilated, the mad, the seeming-dead, the people stolen away in their sleep. The anaphoric catalogue of these stolen people resembles, as argued earlier, visionary depictions of hell or purgatory. Once Faerie’s splendour is undermined by this grisly sight, disquieting nuances emerge even from the initial vision. The initial vision of Faerie is emphatically artificial, its vocabulary dense with the technical vocabulary of “the plastic and decorative arts.” Even Faerie’s perpetual light is artificial:
Al that lond was ever light,
For when it schuld be þerk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne (ll. 369-72)
Shepherd argues that the perpetual light implies “that time in this place is—like those abducted into it—arrested in a perpetual noon.”5 However, the perpetual light shows not quite an exemption from time—for night still comes—but a circumvention of time; it is as incomplete an approximation of eternity as the castle is an incomplete approximation of Paradise. Falling so short of Paradise’s bliss, at least for its human inhabitants, Faerie and its splendour become sinister, suggestive of deliberate deception. The shadow of Paradise, falling on this marvelous space, reveals “the hollowness of fairy artifice.” The parallels between Faerie and the Earthly Paradise indicate not only the marvelous nature of the Faerie realm, but also its moral distance from Paradise. That distance gains its emotional weight not from the sense of exile, as is the case in the Old English poems, but from the sense of illusion and deceit; Faerie is not primarily a prison or a place of exile, but a counterfeit. As Anne D’Arcy observes, the emphatic artificiality of the Faerie realm shows Faerie up as “a painted simulacrum of paradise designed to deceive by ornament.”
Deceptive intent is a suspicion in the Faerie realm; it is a certainty in Mandeville’s garden of Catolonabes. The Old Man has a sinister agenda in whose service he creates the artificial locus amoenus, the false Paradise of his garden. The Mandeville-narrator plays up both the artifice and the delight. The emphasis on the garden’s beauty in no way detracts from its sinister purpose; on the contrary, in light of the romance tradition, the vivid beauty and the ingenious artifice in the description of Catolonabes’ garden are not just markers of delight, but instruments of seduction. The seduction is not just erotic in nature, though sex is one of the delights offered in Catolonabes’ garden; it is a metaphysical seduction, a deception that makes its victims accept the false Paradise instead of the true. This deception takes significantly different shapes in Odoric and in Mandeville. In Odoric, the creator of the false Paradise has a complicated plan for winning over assassins: a drug-fuelled parody of the Fall from Grace. He causes young men of worth to be put into this “Paradise.” When he needs someone murdered, he looks for a young man particularly fond of his habitation. He then drugs this young man and removes him from “Paradise.” When the young man wakes up, the Old Man of the Mountain promises to restore him “en celui paradis ou il [the young man] estoit premierement” (to that paradise where he was at first) if he attempts the assassination (p. 80, l. 20-1). Mandeville’s Catolonabes has a simpler routine and a stronger promise. He invites young men to a tour of his “Paradise,” drugs them to enhance the experience, and promises them Paradise if they serve him. He promises quite explicitly that “þat was paradys þat God grauntid to þese þat he loued” (p. 119, ll. 19-20), and that “if þey wolde dei3e as for his sake, when þey were deede þey schulde come into his paradys, […] and he schulde putte hem in a fairer paradys whare þei schulde se God in his ioi3e and his maieste” (p. 119, ll. 24-29). In short, Catolonabes does not just offer them the physical pleasures of his garden; he simultaneously demands their absolute loyalty and claims to offer them the supernatural bliss of the Beatific Vision. In essence, he lays claim to a spurious sort of divinity. The young men’s brief experience of Catolonabes’s Paradise and the stronger claim that Catolonabes makes about its metaphysical status place the focus more starkly on their choice: will they accept that this is Paradise? Those who become Catolonabes’s victims (and assassins) take his paradise at face value, accepting its material beauty as proof of its spiritual nature. But the spuriousness of the false Paradise is soon revealed. It is open to living mortals, whereas the true Paradise is out of reach; it is vulnerable to the ravages of time and war, whereas the true Paradise is remote and inaccessible. Mandeville’s account concludes with the destruction of the false Paradise by Catolonabes’ adversaries:
And whenne lordis of þe cuntre and riche men perceyued þis malice and þe [cautele] of hym þis Catolonabes, þei gedrid hem togedir and asayled þis castel and slow hym and destruyd al his richesse and faire [places] þat were in his paradys. Þe place of þe wellis is 3it þare and somme oþer þingis but no richesse [and it is noght longe sethen he was distroyed] (p. 120, ll. 7-12).
For the master of the garden as for his deluded servants, the false promise of paradisal bliss ends in death and ruin. The seductive beauty of this “malignant bower of bliss” is, retrospectively, an elegiac reminder of the lost wonders of the true Paradise; its falsehood is a measure of its distance from the truth; and by the end of Mandeville’s account, even this false reflection, even this counterfeit Paradise, is gone, inaccessible. Like the marvelous relics that flow from the true Paradise, like the stories scattered across the landscape of the East, the seductive, malignant counterfeit recalls the true Paradise only to emphasize its loss. In Mandeville, the Earthly Paradise epitomizes dangerous otherworldly spaces, exhibiting all the literary tropes of displacement that set such spaces aside from the mundane world. Paradise, the true home, is an insistent reminder of humankind’s fundamental homelessness. This contrast between the lost paradisal homeland and the exilic state of earthly life is as pervasive in the medieval tradition as in its biblical and classical antecedents. Brian Stock traces the topos of the journey back to a lost Paradise through several traditions in Late Antiquity that converge on “the themes of exodus, exile, and alienation."
So, for instance, the depiction of the Faerie realm draws on the afterlife motif of the suspended and immersed sinners in the regions of punishment. This glimpse of hell amidst the near-paradisal Faerie kingdom signals the disturbing distance of the Faerie realm from human mortality and human immortality alike.
the kingdom of the fairies as consisting of “castels and tours, rivers, forests, frith with flours” (ll. 159-160). However, the fairy world resembles paradise rather than hell. After arriving in fairyland, one encounters a beautiful crystal palace, which make one “think that it is the proude court of Paradis (ll. 375-376). The location of the fairyland is typically Celtic rather than Christian (Rider 362), as one is able to enter it effortlessly. To enter the mysterious world of the fairies,one has to enter a rock, as the fairy ladies did, “in at a roche the levedis rideth – and after, and nought abideth” (ll. 347-348). Therefore, the fairy world is “neither and afterworld nor an underworld” (Friedman 190), but rather an otherworld, “a counter world to that of men” (Friedman 191).
The poet added the description of torn apart and dead bodies in front of the fairy castle: “And sume a-strangled as thai ete, and sum were in water a-dreynt” (ll. 396-397). The presence of these eternally suffering and dying persons in the fairyland seem to refer to purgatory within the predominantly positive portrayal (Friedman 193). In conclusion, the poet depicts the fairies and their kingdom mainly positively, even though a resemblance to purgatory is present.
Convinced of their negative nature, Friedman claims that the poet explicitly connects the fairy king to Satan (190). He bases his argument on the fact that the fairy king appeared at noon, just as Satan does in traditional folklore. Furthermore, Friedman argues that the wounded, mad and dismembered people one finds at the courtyard of the fairy palace were torn apart by the fairies themselves, as the fairy king threatened to “tore thine limes al” (l 171). However, this negative view on the fairies and their king does not fit in with the general picture of fairies and their behaviour. The fairies do not kidnap people from the real world at random, but they take those whose were about to suffer a sudden and unnatural death (Jirsa 148). These people were not murdered or tortured by the fairies, but merely “taken into some realm beyond the mortal one, from which these victims could often be reclaimed” in the fairy kingdom.
The king of the fairies himself does not exhibit any negative behaviour either. On the contrary, he proves himself to be a polite and hospitable host. Without objection, he keeps his promise of rewarding for the music and even wishes well. The occupations of the other fairies the poet describes – hunting, riding and dancing – are also peaceful and harmless, and the poet calls the fairies “gentil and jolif as brid on ris”(l 305). The suffering people one encounters in the courtyard are in fact the only negative element in the otherwise innocent fairy world. Mitchell goes as far as to claim that the courtyard passage must be an interpolation by an early scribe (157). His assumption seems plausible when comparing the poem to the general representation of the fairy world one finds in other Celtic tales. Kittredge discusses a few Celtic tales, and concludes that the fairy world is represented as “bright and noble, in which is not spoken falsehood or guile” (197). The typical Celtic fairy, he states, is “a being of human stature, wonderful beauty, and extraordinary powers” (197). Rider also confirms that, although there was uncertainty regarding the true nature of fairies, “fairies were never devils” (15). Overall, the poet presents his audience with a distinctly positive picture of the mythical fairy world and its inhabitants.
The positive portrayal of the fairy world is surprising to a modern reader as it contradicts the typical narrative structure with a protagonist and an antagonist. However, the only distinctly negative feature of the fairy world, the suffering humans at the courtyard, does not lead to a negative portrayal of the fairies. It may very well be a later interpolation, and even if it was part of the original poem, it need not mean that the fairies are guilty of causing any pain or suffering. When one analyses the descriptions of the fairies and their occupations it becomes clear that, although the fairies are of a supernatural and mysterious nature, the poet depicts their world as a paradise and the fairies themselves as polite and friendly beings.
The ... fairy story, [is] a secondary world of romantic knightly adventure, which ... "it is impossible to fit into any actual or practically conceivable political system."The faerie kingdom, superficially, seems perfect. The castle is beautiful, it is always light, the grounds are a pastoral paradise. However, within the castle's courtyard hides the grotesque.
The tableaux in the courtyard is quite a comprehensive list of 'unnatural', bloody deaths likely to happen in this era.
Some stood there without a head,All of these `taken' people are being mysteriously kept alive, and on display by faerie magic. What political comment could this be making? It would seem to be making comment on political power relations between a King and his subjects. The faerie kingdom seems to be representative of the worst of the Middle Ages. "In the feudal age the private wars between two families have no other discernible reason than rivalry of rank and covetousness of possessions".
And some others no arms they had,
And some through the body had a wound,
And some lay mad, and they were bound,
And some in arms on horse they sat,
And some were choked as they ate,
And some had been drowned in water
And some were all withered in the fire.
Wives lay there in childbed,
The display of the mutilated `taken' also seems horrible and pointless.
. At another level ... fairy land promises violence and pain. ... The fairy kings words pervert the rhetorical rituals and conventions of civilised life.This lack of honour on the part of the Faerie King, the perverted way he uses his powers, is the one real difference.
3. The Faerie Otherworld
The faerie otherworld is segregated from our own, and in the tale is only known to be accessible from a passage through the transitional space. s. However, one of the most noticeable aspects of the otherworld into which one arrives is that it is not all that different from our own: “physically and in its operations it does not differ substantially from the medieval, human courtly world, but rather exists as a more beautiful, parallel world which can disturb the human without the reverse being true” (Finlayson 391). In the tale it is quite apparent that, although the inhabitants of the faerie world are capable of both invasive and monstrous behaviour, there is also an emphasis on courtly culture and beauty that places the faerie world on a more localized plane than the non-Christian other of King Horn:
com into a fair cuntray,
As bright so sonne on somers day,
Smothe and plain and all grene,
Hille no dale was ther non y-sene.
Amidde the long a castel sighe, 70
Riche and real and wonder heighe. (325-32)
It is significant, for instance, that the preternatural world is fair in appearance: “Beautiful dwellings, feasting, music, and chess are accepted commonplaces of fairyland” (Paton 85); the otherworld is therefore not inferior, but in many ways superior to our own. There are, however, a number of ways in which the faerie world can be read. A number of scholars have attempted to prove the otherworld’s defiance of, or reliance upon, Christian doctrine (Finlayson 393; Lerer 92), but rather than concede that the otherworld represents either the world of revelation or a world in which Christianity is entirely absent, it would be more practical to consider the otherworld in terms of the historical and literary context in which it appears. Another key consideration for the otherworld is its narrative purpose within the context of medieval romance, which above all seeks to promote virtue:
“The valley itself does not serve merely as an enchanted prison; it has an additional quality which we shall see is found in countless enchanted objects,—it serves as a fidelity test. Only the loyal lover can overcome its difficulties” (Paton 89-90). The faerie otherworld therefore aids the progression through the narrative within the context of chivalric court culture. The otherworld can serve a number of purposes within the narrative, and is essentially ambiguous: “Romance writers play on the shifting manifestations of the otherworld, which seems most of all to be defined by enigma and ambiguity” (Saunders 207); the real and other worlds collide here so that the preternatural space is both positive in its beauty and negative in its association with the violent actions that have been undertaken by its inhabitants. The castle in which one finds the faerie king is as full of mystery as the landscape in which it is situated. One aspect of the castle which has puzzled scholars is its Norman design (Battles 193); the equation of the castle with the Normans means that it can be interpreted both as a form of architecture that would have been familiar to English readers and as a signification of foreign craft that establishes the otherness of the faerie kingdom in comparison to Horn’s own: “Given that this beautiful castle of foreign design belongs to the intruder in the poem, it would seem that the poet uses architectural detail to indicate cultural difference” (Battles 196). This division contributes to the uncanny status of the preternatural that draws it simultaneously closer to and further from the normative ideal. Lerer notes that “[t]he enamel work of the fairy castle would have signaled to a contemporary audience the latest in decorative technique,” and so the crafted nature of the castle both enhances its familiarity and its otherness as “an attempted ordering of the world through human artifice,” using “the vocabulary of craft” (98). In contrast to the natural landscape, then, the castle is another example of crafted material used for preternatural means, but with contemporary details which the reader might recognize and relate to our own world. The crafted status of the castle denotes that its form is not entirely natural; however, the fact that the otherworld outshines the real world means that the preternatural elements of the tale should be considered as an amplified version of the natural form. The narrator even compares the castle to heaven: “By all thing, think that it is / The proude court of paradis” (351-2); this journey is comparable to a journey to the afterlife (Putter 239), and the emphasis that the narrative places on light in the faerie landscape and the architecture of the castle is significant for its implication that the faerie world is heavenly and beautiful rather than dark or demonic:
All that lond was ever light,
For when it shuld be therk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne.
No man may telle no thence in thought
The riche werk that ther was wrought. (345)
The emphasis on light instead of dark uses positive imagery to place the faerie castle’s beauty on a level above that of our own world, and thus implies that the faerie world is not demonic. The castle represents an ambiguous space which embodies the beautiful aspects of the faerie world, and reflects the more positive and uncanny aspects of the faerie preternatural in the romance. The figures within the castle grounds provide a conflicting representation of the preternatural within the tale, and the description of their gruesome, mutilated forms breaks the otherwise beautiful and well-ordered space of the faerie otherworld. The narrator declares the figures to be “thought dede and nare nought” (366), and also observes that “[e]che was thus in this warld y-nome, / With fairy thider y-come” (379-80). The evidence suggests that each figure is a victim that has been snatched by the faerie king to the otherworld either on the verge of death or soon after it, and that within this world they exist in a state somewhere between life and death. The wounded figures can therefore be read through common understandings of faerie lore within this period: “many of the fatal injuries described in the poem conform to the sudden and unnatural causes of death believed in medieval folklore traditions to cause people not simply to die, but to be stolen away or taken into some realm beyond the mortal one, from which these victims could often be reclaimed” (Jirsa 148). The idea that anyone could be snatched away to the faerie world with little warning was therefore not uncommon in the late medieval period, and represents an attempt to understand the concept of death: “death haunted medieval people. Vexed by plague and war, as the death-dealing centuries of the later Middle Ages wore on, death became an even greater fixation for popular devotion” (Shinners 513). The manner of the ghostly figures and their deaths might also have some bearing on their marginal state within the faerie world; a church dedication from around 1400 states that “the devil has no power to do anything to a body buried in a Christian grave” (Shinners 36), and it is therefore possible that the figures are monstrous in the faerie world because they have died unburied or buried in unconsecrated ground. It is also possible that the monstrous figures are in a form of purgatory: “medieval people usually understood ghosts to be the pitiful souls of the dead begging earthly prayers to allay their suffering in purgatory” (Shinners 252). The faerie otherworld accommodates the concept of purgatory in a number of ways; the wounded figures suffer, and yet the setting for their suffering is beautiful rather than hellish. It is possible, therefore, that the otherworld represents the space in which these souls must complete their penance in order to progress to heaven: The notion of purgatory as a way station for Christian souls who still had penance left to do for their sins before they reached heaven emerged by the twelfth century, driven largely by lay people’s enthusiasm for it. Mediating, as it did, the soul’s earlier stark fate of either heaven or hell, purgatory offered hope to ordinary, fallible Christians; for while the pains of purgatory were unspeakable by earthly comparison, eventually the soul was purged and entered heaven. (Shinners 517) Beautiful purgatories appear in a number of medieval literary texts, such as the tale of Owein, which was hugely popular and is thought to have been a source for Dante’s Inferno (Shinners 517). Like most aspects of the faerie preternatural, the monstrous figures occupy the margins of existence, in a transitional state that could signify either the liminal status of the faerie world or the Christian concept of purgatory. It is difficult to say, in such a case, whether the figures really are supposed to be considered monstrous or simply victims of circumstance. The faerie king’s objection to the request is evidence for an appreciation of beauty in the otherworld which renders it less monstrous than the previous actions of the faerie king would imply:
“Nay,” quath the King, “that nought nere!” (433-8)
It is telling that the faerie king, an occupant of the otherworld, promotes beauty and virtue. The faerie king’s hall is a “seemly sight” (387) and his queen is “fair and swete” (390), which means that the fair appearances of the immediate surroundings. However, the king and his company are also described as fair in the lines immediately preceding Herodis’s initial abduction (111; 124); it is possible, then, that the beauty of the faerie king is comparable to that of the crypto-monster, and is only a façade for monstrous intentions such as his earlier attack. The portrayal of the faerie king also draws upon his original counterpart, Hades, but this presents further confusion in the faerie king’s relationship, thereby potentially placing in the same league as the supernatural host in the association between Hades and the king of the underworld. The faerie king is not treated as particularly dangerous in the text, either because the faerie world is not considered to be an enemy of our own world, or because one trusts in one's own skill and virtue to outwit the king: “fearsome though they were, spirits were often easily fooled. Popular stories of tricks played on the devil and the stage buffoonery of demons in pageant plays helped reassure people that the forces of evil were not invincible” (Shinners 252). The faerie king’s occupation with beauty would imply that he is not demonic or “other” in the usual sense, not least of all because he does not behave in the manner that would usually signify demonic attributes (Jirsa 148), but instead represents a popular figure within secular culture. The threat from the otherworld is diminished by the faerie king’s more admirable qualities, such as the fact that he immediately concedes once he has been reminded of his promise (440-6); the faerie king therefore represents a near-equal adversary more than a monstrous other, and an ambiguous form of preternatural that is more acceptable within the context of medieval romance than the politically real threat of the non-Christian other. The otherworld, then, is an ambiguous space which defies concrete definition, but which is at once positive and negative and therefore physically rather than socially liminal.
Conclusion
The interplay between preternatural items, places and beings indicates that there are a number of factors to consider in medieval literary representations of the faerie other. Particular attention to the episode of the faerie otherworld reveals that the magical elements of the tale are ambiguous in their positive or negative implications, but also that this ambiguity determines the marginal or transitional spaces of the text. Though there are malevolent aspects of the faerie other in the lai, these are portrayed in a manner that is entirely different from that of the Saracen invaders in King Horn. The faerie other, instead of being presented as fully monstrous, is therefore a more natural facet of the medieval preternatural in late medieval literary romance. The incursions of the faerie world are uncanny and often threatening, but the threat is reversible through the actions of the tale’s protagonist and, perhaps most importantly, does not attack religion as the Saracens attack Horn’s. Though there is an invasive and often sinister quality to the faerie other’s involvement in the tale, the effects are presented as reversible and the faeries themselves as pale, ghostly comparisons to the living, and it is perhaps because of this that the faerie world represents less of a threat to Christendom than the more political and religious threat of the Saracen invaders in King Horn.
the Otherworld as a pastoral scene, endowed with architectural wonder. The poet’s emphasis of the marvellous landscapes and magnificent architecture in the fairy territory serves as a means not only to surprise the audience but also create a fantasy to the Otherworld.
unexpected ‘mervailes’ of supernatural events: the fairy hunt, the marvellous Fairy Castle. the pastoral scenery of green plains and the magnificent architecture, which is not only exquisitely constructed with advanced architectural features such as the ‘butras’ (line 361) but also decorated with ‘diuers aumal’ (line 364), ‘burnist gold’ (line 368), and various kinds of precious stones (lines 364-368). In the Otherworld, everything appears to be beautiful, spectacular, and incredible to human eyes. The Otherworld represents not merely a parallel or mirror world to the mortal world; in fact, it has surpassed the mortal world in many ways in regards to materiality and aesthetics. As the poet narrates, the precious stones make the fairy castle ‘clere & schine as cristal’ (line 358). The poet not only rewrites the Underworld but also further removes it from its classical roots: the Underworld of the classical Orphic myth is as dark as night, whereas the Fairy Kingdom is set in crystal bright pastoral scenery. The Fairy realm now shines as bright as the sun at noontide, like in the ‘proude court of Paradis’ (line 378):
Al that lond was ever light,
For when it schuld be therk and night,
The riche stones light gonne
As bright as doth at none the sonne. (lines 369-372)
By portraying the splendid Fairy Castle decorated with various precious stones, the poet strengthens the castle’s artistic value as if it had not been created by the mortals: ‘No man may telle, no thenche in thought / The riche werk that ther was wrought’ (374-75).
The Fairy Castle is a spectacle in itself, not merely because of the decorations of rare jewels, but also because of the ‘exotic’ and innovative architectural features, such as the flying buttresses, fortifications, high towers and the ditch. Bliss mentions that the architectural feature of the flying buttress was scarcely known in England in the thirteenth century but was a common feature in French architecture. The poet may call the audience’s attention to the function of a real castle in the real world regarding its military use or even to the knowledge of medieval lapidary that concerns the allegorical meaning of diverse precious stones. Yet, what is more important is the poet’s refashioning of the classical Underworld that in turn exhibits the aesthetic value of the Fairy Castle as a craft of art in architecture.
At the edge of the Fairy Castle, one witnesses a group of distorted figures that seem to be dead and yet not dead, ‘þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt’ (line 390). Marginalized from the communal society of the Otherworld, these grotesque figures are a display of the Fairy King’s collection of bodies—they may have been taken alive by the fairies and now remain forever frozen in the posture of the moment when they were snatched. These grotesque bodies articulate the molestiae (pain) and fear of the mortal world by portraying various horrifying manners of death, including decapitation, dismemberment, still-birth, death on the battlefield and so forth:
Sum stode wiþ-outen hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt,
Wiues þer lay on child-bedde,
Sum ded, and sum awedde’. (lines 391-400)
I argue that with their static poses and terrifying gestures reflecting their deaths, the grotesque bodies are themselves a part of the Otherworldly spectacle, speaking to the heteroglossia reflecting and refracting medieval people’s fear of warfare, childbirth, disease, accidents, death itself and hell. The fascinating Otherworld encloses a dark side where death and the tableau vivant of human suffering are exhibited. As Saunders rightly points out, the Otherworld serves as the two sides of one coin—it is both an idealized golden world and a world of ambiguous force, violence, and threat. I read the imagery of the Otherworldly figures—’þouȝt dede, & nare nouȝt’—as the poet demonstrating his deep concern for human suffering and emotion in his contemporary world.
The Otherworld of the Fairy Kingdom is transformed from the world of the dead to an ambivalent space composed of wonders, spectacles, latent threat, and human suffering.
a kingdom” of glorious beauty, “glittering, sophisticated, full of artifice” (p. ).
combination of artifice and nature typical of the faery world”
the elegance of the fairy world and the macabre tableau of the death courtyard,
Where the brilliant Otherworld is characterized by visual artifice and stasis,
What is Fairyland like?
A fairy kingdom, a flat expanse of countryside presided over by a magnificent castle, built from gold and crystal and glass. Once allowed into the castle by the gatekeeper and looking all about, see, lying inside these castle walls, people who had been thought to be dead, but who were not:
Some were headless, others had been drowned or burned.
Let's say you ride into a cleft between two certain rocks, into the dark, three miles into the rock... and... what appears before your mortal eyes?A fair country, as bright as the sun on a summer’s day, smooth and level,
and all green, without sign of hill or dale. In the midst of the land there is a castle, rich and royal and wondrous high. All the outermost wall was clear and shone like crystal, and an hundred towers were set about it of quaint fashion and stoutly embattled; and the buttresses rising above the dyke were of red gold richly arched. The great hall within was adorned with diverse enamels; and there were wide dwellings all of precious stones. Even the worst pillar there was made of burnished gold.
All that land was ever in light, for when dark evening came the rich stones reflected rays as bright as the noon-day sun. No one might tell or even think of all the splendid work there wrought; and by all marks it seemed to be the proud court of Paradise.
into the castle... lying there within the wall a crowd of folk that had been brought thither, and were thought to be dead but were not. Some were headless, others without arms, some had wounds through the body, some lay mad and bound, some sat armed on horseback, some had been strangled as they ate, some had been drownedsome had been strangled as they ate, some had been drowned and others all shrivelled up by fire. Wives lay there in childbed, some dead and some raving mad; and wonder many lay there right as they were taken by the fairies from the world, while they slept at underntide.
After seeing all those marvels... the king’s hall wherein stood a splendid canopy, under which sat the king and his fair, sweet queen. Their crowns and their garments shone so dazzling bright that one could scarce bear to look at them.
“What art thou?” answered the king. “I know that none of my people have sent for thee; and never since I first reigned here, have I found anyone so foolhardy that he or she durst come hither to us unless I sent for.”
All the folk in the palace came to listen.
The king sat full still, and gladly hearkened to the music that so enchanted him and his queen. Then, we passed quickly out of that place, and away from that people...
... a wilderness in a strange land, in the wilderness, Fairyland...
The dim Hades of Greek myth has become a glowing en- chanting Otherworld; the sad Greek gods of the dead have turned to beautiful, passionate, and mysterious fairy beings. Folk superstition has intruded itself...
4 The pagan Irish Otherworld was a fairy realm which lay beneath or beyond the sea, or was hidden in a mound. For details concerning its pleasant landscape and the Perilous Passage which commonly led to it, see A. C. L. Brown, " Iwain," Harvard Studies in Phil, and Lit. vm (1903); L. Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, p. 8s ff., Boston, 1903; T. B. Cross, "The Celtic Origin of the Lay of Yonec," Revue Celt, xxxi, 461, n. 3; Hibbard, "The Sword Bridge of Chretien de Troyes and Its Celtic Original," Rom. Rev. rv, 178 ff. (1913). Even H. R. Patch, who discredited in his study of " Mediaeval Descriptions of the Otherworld," PMLA. xxxni (191 8) the idea of Celtic influence on these descriptions, ad- mitted (p. 612) that the idea of a fairy hill was peculiarly Celtic, and noted that in the Lay, the fairy throng " in at the roche " as theonly means of penetrating the fairy hill. There is, however, a genuine reminiscence of the classic legend in the description of the fairy-land as a place of the dead and of the court held by the fairy king.
But in addition to the other world, there are places that are not theologically separate from the human world, but that are nevertheless both marvellous and horrifying: the monster-mere in Beowulf, the Faerie kingdom....
The Celtic Other-World was reached sometimes across the sea, again through a dense forest, and still again, as here, through a cavern. For references, see Kittredge’s article. The rock entrance is found also in Teutonic and in classical mythology.
Without . . . hill or dale. According to medieval ideas, this was a beautiful landscape. What we call picturesque country was at that time associated with terror of supernatural creatures, and sometimes of lawless human beings.
As bright as the noonday sun. In the Middle Ages gems were commonly supposed to be a source of light.
Thought to be dead, &c. The fairies were commonly looked upon as dethroned pagan gods, who were therefore active for evil. Like the devils, with whom they are sometimes confused, they have power under certain conditions, as, for instance, over people who have forgotten to protect themselves by the sign of the cross. The description of the victims shows little if any influence from the classical conception of Hades.
...dark realm is transformed into a fairy kingdom, a Gothic castle.
Here we do not travel to Hades or Hell but to the Celtic Otherworld "in at a roche". Knocking at the gate of the Otherworld palace...
...the elegance of the fairy world and the macabre tableau of the death courtyard...
...the eerie Otherworld...
The fairy king is not overtly identified as evil; instead, he operates outside and beyond the human framework of understanding. He can be read as a demonic figure, particularly if we invoke a medieval Christian framework. But invoking other frameworks will produce other readings: he can serve as an image of fate, a representative of death, an adversary who comes to life to punish sin, a pre-Christian divinity or spirit, a rupture in meaning, the representative of artifice, irrationality, "king of textuality," and more.
The paradis of the Otherworld holds beauty and sorrow. The beauty of the fairy castle is static and its visual beauty does not restore the dead.
The Otherworld and its fairy king become bound to cultural codes and laws and are no longer beyond recognition. The law of "trouthe" and the beauty of art rule even over the fairy king.
Outsiders and the traits that mark them as such are often termed “other” or “otherworldly.” In “The Other Worlds of Romance,” Jeff Rider considers outsiders to belong to various other worlds which exist opposite the central aristocratic one: Opposite this central aristocratic society, most medieval romances establish, or assume the existence of, other social “worlds” of various kinds. The members of these other worlds may resemble the members of the central society – they may be as sophisticated, rich, elegant, well-mannered as members of “our” society – but their worlds are nonetheless recognizably different from “ours.” Their motives and customs may be enigmatic or at least strange, and they themselves may be monstrous. (115) >Unlike society, the forest is not a place where people normally live together. Yet, although one would expect the forest to be uninhabited and deserted, in several Middle English romances castles providing homes to various characters can be found in the wilderness. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, Gawain stumbles upon a magnificent castle located in the middle of the wilderness, while searching for the Green Chapel (lines 763-70). Likewise, in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, Sir Gawain, Sir Kay and Bishop Baldwin seek shelter at the castle of the Carle of Carlisle after having followed their game too far into the woods (115-76). In both stories, the protagonists leave society and ride into the woods before coming across these castles, which indicates a separation from society. Although the inhabitants of these castles live in the wilderness, they are not per definition uncivilised nor do they live, as a rule, in total isolation. For instance, Sir Bertilak, lord of the forest castle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lives together with his family and an extensive household and is said to entertain many guests at his home. The Carle in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle also shares his castle with his wife, daughter and servants. What is more, both lords provide the protagonists with comfortable lodgings for the night. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of these castles belong to the forest instead of society: not only is their home located outside civilisation, but they often have a particular quality or feature setting them apart from society .
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