“Arthurian Border Writing” in “History on the Edge”
Arthurian Border Writing
Medieval narratives about King Arthur constitute a lengthy catalog of both remarkable originality and inveterate repetition. From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s unprecedented account of Arthur’s reign in the Historia regum Britanniae (completed in the 1130s) to the Hystoire du sainct greaal (printed in Paris in 1516), writers composed Arthur’s regnal history at varying intervals, from the western edge of Wales to the eastern regions of France (and throughout the rest of Europe). Yet to say that Arthur was popular does not explain why he attracted attention in these particular forms, places, and times. Writing about the history of the Britons, in fact, served the cultural and political needs of a variety of groups, with conflicting purposes and values. Although unified by a common appeal to what I will call “Briton history” (so as to avoid the imperialist connotations of British),1 these groups considered themselves distinct from one another. I contend in this book that the historical Arthur attracted writers specifically engaged with pressures to defend, maintain, or expand the identity of their region. These historians wrote from peripheral positions, usually in border areas.
The historical use of the Arthurian reign is only one aspect, but an especially notable one, of historiographical responses to the boundary pressures created by the Norman conquest of 1066. Norman colonization focused attention on the Insular past partly because, in general, cultural trauma inspires defenses of collective identities. Colonization shifts boundaries radically, provoking colonizers and colonized alike to demarcate new limits. In border regions especially, imaginative boundaries of all kinds need periodic reconstruction. Post-colonial societies reorder boundaries in relation to land tenure, as well as symbolically in relation to culture. Since swords literally enforce the new political borders, violence dominates the processes of boundary formation. In the twelfth century, the Gesta Stephani explicitly locates the establishment of a new boundary between Wales and England in the edge of the sword. Just after introducing Wales as a country nearly equal to England in delightful productivity (thanks to Norman colonization), the narrator turns to the Welsh rebellion that began in 1136. Seizing the area of Gower, the rebels overpowered the king’s knights “in ore gladii” (with the edge of the sword); the Welsh proceeded to retake most of the country (14–20). This very boundary—perhaps even in the same year—generated Geoffrey’s Historia, the first account of the Britons’ history to narrate Arthur’s reign along with his sword. Similar border pressures inspired iterations of this narrative through the next two centuries.
Arthurian historiography is only a particularly cogent, not a unique, example of a practice that can be called border writing. In the medieval period, any number of writers can be located in border cultures (Gerald of Wales and Orderic Vitalis come immediately to mind, as does the author of Fouke le Fitz Waryn); they, however, responded to boundary pressures without writing histories of Arthur. Likewise, many Arthurian narratives do not engage the identity issues indigenous to border cultures. Nevertheless, I will argue that complete histories of the Arthurian reign, tied to the origins of Insular dominion, were conceived most often at the edges of regional differences. The principal historiographical versions of Arthur’s reign represent the historical tensions attendant on the formation of spatial, ethnic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. Historical narration itself performs limits symbolically, interacting with contemporary tensions by forming and transforming the past. These limits engage force, and are thus conjoined to symbols of coercion.
By beginning at the edges rather than the centers of power, the dynamics that shape identity through resistance and accommodation gain clarity. Throughout this book, I explore the consequences of pressing the edges. As Homi Bhabha hopes to read “from the nation’s edge, through the sense of the city, from the periphery of the people, in culture’s transnational dissemination” (170), I read Arthurian historiography from the regional edges where it was most often written, in an effort to understand its engagements with the dynamics of domination. To substantiate this mode of reading, I draw widely on postcolonial analyses and social anthropologies because they sharpen the contours of cultural continuities and disruptions.
A theory of the border offers a method of historical analysis that confronts the paradoxes that inhere in limits and boundaries. The figure of paradox inhabits all boundary concepts because the line of the limit seeks to institute an absolute difference at the place of most intimate contact between two spaces (or concepts, or peoples, or times, or . . .). Border writing figures history as a space shaped by blood and ink, by sword and chronicle. This is similar to the writing Michel de Certeau associates with the arrival of Europeans at the land across their western ocean, a writing that enacts “a colonization of the body by the discourse of power: this is writing that conquers” (xxv; emphasis in the original). At the same time that border histories articulate the victors’ will to dominate, they also engage the desires of the vanquished. Arthurian border histories thus represent Insular colonialisms in order to stake a multitude of territorial claims—over space, ethnicity, language, and time.
Navigating Landscape
From the earliest versions, histories of Britain begin with a physical description of the island and its natural resources. Usually aestheticized, the topographic descriptio identifies the land as worthy of possession. Landscape description thus works as one of the defining tropes of border writing: the descriptio conquers land symbolically, making the landscape metaphor an agent of history. On an island, the landscape metaphor is fraught with paradox because the shore forms an immutable yet permeable boundary: the land definitely ends, but ships carrying new settlers from overseas easily land. The shore embodies the general paradox of boundaries, where absolute differences occupy the places of most intimate contact.
Border narratives write the history of the land’s shape as an argument for its present and future shape, foregrounding the determinations of place fundamental to all historiography. The narration of landscape symbolically conquers space, for both colonial settlers and resisting colonized subjects. Edward Said, for example, has shown how colonial settlers and colonized subjects both territorialize their identities, celebrating wholeness and condemning partition (85). After colonization, land is first retaken in the imagination; for Said, the anti-imperialist imagination is essentially cartographic (77–79). The descriptio of Britain, which I analyze in detail in later chapters, provides for this same possessive desire; in some ways, the aestheticized landscape makes the viewer its predator.2 Projected onto entire groups of people, this predatory desire makes the cartography of border writing quite poignantly a social cartography. In this way, the narration of topography becomes what Bhabha calls the “inscape of national identity” (143). In the history of the kings of Britain, the “inscape” of collective identification prefaces the story of how the land gained its shape through forceful settlement. Caught in the cartographic imagination, the representation of Insular space equivocates between the fantasy of hegemonic dominion (a land without borders) and the fragmentation that clearly endures in the landscape. Rushdie captures this equivocation in images of mobile topography, such as the Insular coastline that has “moved a mile or more out to sea” (129) since the Norman Conquest, and the rebellious cartography of London, “changing shape at will and without warning” (327).
The genre of landscape narrative shares many of the social effects of landscape painting. Arguing forcefully in favor of this analogy, Jonathan Smith defines space as a geography of cultural signs. According to Smith, the landscape genre promises an escape from time by effacing the painful prospects of the future (80); “[t]he landscape mediates social communication, and privileged landscapes are designed to hide whatever defiles” (85). In contrast to this colonial fantasy, post-colonial landscapes (like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s descriptio) encode portents of the violence that will destroy the aestheticized ideal, such as crumbled buildings set among fertile fields. These shadows of the future also reconfigure history, defying the corollary promise to “raise a wall that blocks the past” (Smith 80). Post-colonial landscapes dismantle this wall, ironically contrasting social ideals with historical transgressions. The founding description of the Insular landscape exposes this irony by actually identifying the hidden sites of threats and aggression. Smith concludes, “When closely observed, every self-image humans have written into the landscape will betray its pretensions with ironic affirmations of an order that is both wider and weirder” (87). The irony of Insular landscape description lies specifically in its invocation of an order that belies the Britonic glory implied in the subsequent narrative. As such, the descriptio performs what W. J. T. Mitchell calls “the ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism”: it discloses “both utopian fantasies of the perfect imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance” (10). Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Insular descriptio positions histories of Britain within these dynamics—as imperial fantasies, nightmares, or dismissals.
The land, as landscape, is not simply natural space but also territory. Territory itself constitutes communication, what Robert Sack calls “the basic geographic expression of influence and power, [which] provides an essential link between society, space, and time” (261). Paul Zumthor has shown in La mesure du monde that the measure of space defines many different kinds of communal belonging in medieval literature. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari investigate territorialization in broader social terms in A Thousand Plateaus. Through their theory of the refrain, they link territoriality specifically to the ritual repetition of patterned discourse, which shapes “melodic landscapes”: to repeat verses is to territorialize history and fabricate time (318–49). The echo of Arthurian historiography across the centuries constitutes what Patricia Clare Ingham has called a “colonial refrain,”3 a repetition of patterned discourse that defines the limits of territorial possession. Several of the histories I will discuss in fact call directly upon the audience to repeat the narrative. If audiences respond, their oral refrains iterate the written refrain of historiographical repetition, extending the territory of historical possession to a perennial “here and now.”
While concepts of territory articulate the ways in which social and imperial identities work the land, physical topography itself engages the paradox of boundaries, thereby contributing to the cultural pressures that generate border writing. Many boundaries inhere in the shape of the planet surface, such as mountain ranges, rivers, and oceans. Indeed, human cultures have most often traced their own differences along these topographical lines, establishing legal limits to jurisdiction and group identity according to the physical shape of land. Topography does not, however, provide stable grounds for difference. Like all boundary concepts, topographic limits sustain paradox. The topographical paradox most pertinent to Insular history concerns boundaries marked by navigable waterways—what the narrator of the Estoire del saint graal calls “les mers ou barges poent corre” (the seas where boats can run) (339). The shore, for example, separates land masses immutably while the waters that lap its edge easily convey ships from distant lands. Geoffrey’s Historia presents the Channel specifically as the part of the island that facilitates navigation to France (“absque meridianae plagae freto quo ad Gallias navigatur”) (73). The water itself contains the unfathomed depths of uncertainty that characterize boundary identity. The physical perils of navigation mirror the perils of transfers between stabilities, of the process itself of identity construction among shifting edges. Insular space thus paradoxically sustains and resists colonizing maneuvers: the open shore facilitates the initiation of conquest while impeding colonial resolution.
Within the island itself, rivers embed instability in the permanent features of the landscape. Navigable rivers flowing to the sea provide easy pathways for conquering foreigners. In the interior, rivers may mark boundaries between the domains of different groups or lords, facilitating lateral communication. The intensity of activity along rivers makes them politically attractive (literally), and they typically draw people together more than they separate: in order to enhance safety, the inhabitants of the bordering lands seek control over both sides of the water. The ebb and flow of these efforts, as the two sides alternately succeed and fail, renders the aquatic frontier the most unstable of geopolitical boundaries.4 While rivers do commonly mark political limits (most famously in the medieval period in the Treaty of Verdun of 843 that set the limits of the Carolingian empire), the actual zone of stability is usually displaced to one side or the other.5 Water, then, invites cultural and political disruption as the ocean conducts ships to the shore and then up the rivers that perforate it.
Medieval cartography represents graphically the dominance of water in the conception of Insular space. On Gerald of Wales’s map of Britain, broad river bands separate England from Wales (the Severn) and England from Scotland (the Humber and the Scottish Sea) (see figure 1). As I show in chapter 2, the conception of Britain as a land divided by the Severn and the Humber inaugurates a structure of nearly permanent political instability; the narratives analyzed in chapters 2, 3, and 4 all respond to the dynamic paradoxes that flow along the Severn (and which do so well into the seventeenth century, when Milton resurrects the river’s eponymous founder Sabrina as a virgin nymph of British unity).6 In contrast to Gerald’s schematic division of the island, Matthew Paris represents veritable aquatic labyrinths, suggesting the near impossibility of travel without water (see figure 2). The fourteenth-century Gough Map and an anonymous fifteenth-century map also represent the land’s permeability by portraying the island as a series of sculpted edges, many curving almost all the way through the (supposedly) solid center.7 These maps manifest the depth of the challenge posed by navigable water to the Insular border, a challenge that shaped Britain well into the modern period.8 Historical writing itself engages the instability engendered by aquatic boundaries, attempting to fix limits in narrative that cannot be satisfactorily fixed in the landscape.
Figure 1. Map of Europe by Gerald of Wales, c. 1200. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, MS 700; reprinted with permission.
The shores of islands and rivers only become boundaries, of course, as a result of human groups’ efforts to create and maintain political differences. A boundary is a legal effect, a logos imposed upon the topos. For much of the Middle Ages, this imposition was discontinuous and often multilayered.9 The practice of performing homage in border areas blatantly exploits the paradoxes of discontinuity. Acts of homage “in the border” (in marchia) affirm the place where powers clearly separate; the very act of meeting, however, demonstrates that they also overlap. The border is thus not a neutral zone but a multiple zone. Whether an homage of peace after war or a formal declaration of tenancy (or both), homage in the border is an act of concession between two powers that creates dependency while affirming independence.10 On the island, the borders between Wales and England sustained some of the most complex boundary engagements (discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4). The fragmented nature of the Welsh March, as with many places of border contact, heightened jurisdictional consciousness and encouraged the development of border laws (lex Marchie) distinct from Welsh and English law.11
Figure 2. Map of Britain by Matthew Paris, c. 1250. Courtesy of the British Library, Cotton MS Claudius D. vi, f. 12v; reprinted with permission.
On the Continent, the dynamics of homage in border areas dominated Norman-French relations into the thirteenth century (as I discuss in chapter 5). All known acts of homage between the duke of Normandy and the king of France between 911 and 1140, for example, took place in border areas, affirming the duke’s autonomy in matters of peace while maintaining the significance of the king’s initial concession of the land. These homages occurred most frequently along the river Epte, plausibly because the waterway made it the most unstable frontier between Norman and French royal interests. Jean-François Lemarignier argues further that as land tenure issues became the primary motivation for homage, the border became a less important space. The duke thus fulfilled the legal requirement of homage at the domus of his lord by appearing in Paris for the first time in 1149. The move from the border to the city (from the edge to the metropolitan center) signals a reduction of the duke’s autonomy as well as a fundamental change in the status of the border itself. Elsewhere on the Continent, Brittany and Champagne also witnessed significant border conflict—and produced significant Arthurian historiography (discussed in chapters 6 and 7). Champagne-Blois provoked special measures for balancing power among aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and royal authorities, for it nearly surrounded the French royal domain. In these areas, the bridge of the river Natiaux served as a frequent meeting point for lords of overlapping and changing jurisdictions.12
Historical writing from these borders performs a jurisdictional accommodation similar to homage and other codified border practices. Border historiography claims space while seeking to transform symbolically the identity of that space, and sometimes the nature of the claim. As spaces of paradox, borders serve important central functions from the margin; they are edges where centers can meet. Like justice and territorial conquest, marches are carved out and defended with the edge of the sword (ora gladii). This defense takes place on the land, but the swords are handled by people. The differences defended thus ultimately concern the collective identities of peoples as much as the actual spaces of their contact.
The Ends of Genealogy
If concern for the land makes border writing cartographic, its concern for peoples makes it genealogic. For Britain, ethnic genealogy begins with the Trojans who became the Britons. Their descendants (Welsh and Breton) and their descendants’ conquerors (Anglo-Saxons and Normans) all actively constructed Trojan-Briton history as part of their own identity. These genealogical constructions strategically deploy ethnic and family resemblances while defending social and political differences. This combination maintains genealogy within the bounds of paradox. The Historia and the narratives it inspired scrutinize genealogical strategies (such as exogamy and endogamy) along with the maneuvers that disrupt them (such as adultery, rape, sodomy, and fratricide) as they interrogate the limits of collective identification.
Ethnic identity is defined as a boundary concept by Fredrik Barth in the introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Barth argues that the “shared traits” usually used to define ethnic groups result from strategies of social interaction rather than from inherent characteristics. Barth’s method shifts attention away from the seemingly autonomous “cultural stuff” that constitutes the internal history of separate groups to “ethnic boundaries and boundary maintenance” (10–17). Boundaries may be maintained, even accentuated, in multiethnic encounters even while the “cultural stuff” changes. Barth underscores the fact that human groups are usually in contact with each other, and thus always organized around boundary maintenance: border regions only magnify the focus. John Armstrong has pursued Barth’s boundary approach across the longue durée of ethnic history in Nations before Nationalism. Armstrong identifies ethnicity as only one of a range of conceptual strategies he calls “symbolic boundary mechanisms” (8), that is, the nontechnical and legal mechanisms that groups use to perceive the boundary between themselves and others. Armstrong locates the significance of boundaries for human identity at the center of a synthetic study of group relations: “The boundary approach clearly implies that ethnicity is a bundle of shifting interactions rather than a nuclear component of social organization” (6). Border writing actively performs the work of what Armstrong calls symbolic “border guards” (6) by ascribing differences and staking out resemblances. In borders, historiography itself becomes a mechanism for policing difference.
The politics of difference are especially poignant in situations of colonial contact. For a colonial subject, a politics of strategic difference and resemblance constitutes an itinerant ethnicity. Bhabha, for example, underscores the partiality of ethnic identification in borders, where presence is never total and being—“the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (2)—perpetually crosses contradictory limits. The in-between subject is always split between here and there, between self and other. Bhabha concludes that the hybridity of border communities engenders “an insurgent act of cultural translation” that defies fixation (7).13 From a similar perspective, Mary Louise Pratt calls border identities “interactive” and “improvisational” (7). The partialities of medieval ethnicities, firmly recognized by many historians, thus resemble post-colonial border subjects in important ways. The performative multiplicity of border identity means that we cannot reason Norman blood from a Norman name or Welsh blood from a perceived political bias toward the Welsh, and that biological parentage works as only one identifying element jostled among many partial contacts.
Barth’s and Bhabha’s approaches to the edges of identity contrast methodologically with investigations of shared “cultural stuff” by Anthony Smith in the Ethnic Origin of Nations and Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. Where Smith defines ethnic according to peoples’ shared characteristics and sense of solidarity (22–31), Anderson identifies nationalism as a set of shared affective ties and sense of group belonging (5–7). Medievalists have taken easily to these models of national community because they do not depend absolutely on the technology of the modern nation-state. Yet Smith and Anderson both imply sociological homogeneities that submerge the characteristics of communities imagined through difference (as Kathleen Davis has shown in detail for Anderson). Blindnesses to discontinuities (in genealogy, time, and space) pose substantial methodological problems not only for analyses of modern post-colonial cultures, as Bhabha argues (159), but for medieval cultures, where discontinuous borders are indigenous. By deconstructing social homogeneity and working through difference, cultural theories like Barth’s or Bhabha’s enable historians to cross the boundaries that define differences without effacing them.
In different ways, Barth, Armstrong, and Bhabha demonstrate that struggles for group identity play out most intensively in border regions. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most active struggles for ethnic and family identity deployed Trojan ancestors. By the end of the twelfth century, many of the ruling families of Europe had traced their genealogies back to Troy. The process did not create bonds of identification among these families, but rather sought to differentiate each group from its potential rivals. The genealogical use of the Trojans shows how the perception of difference rather than identity structures the boundaries between groups. The Trojans’ putative descendants, the Britons, likewise guarded the borders of other ethnic groups. The Britons’ history is an ethnic myth, with all of the traits identified by Smith, from landscape to the vision of a golden age (183–200). Briton historiography remained territory for contesting the past for centuries. In that contest, the Britons remained figured as the people who lost their history, only to have it given back by the takers. The writing of Briton history thus takes place (literally takes place) in a colonial dynamic in which the Britons play the role of the “people without history.”14 When Geoffrey of Monmouth provided the master narrative of the Britons’ imperial past, he gave them history and thus an identity for the future. The gift (identity through history), however, remained the property of others and therefore contested territory. The writing and rewriting of Briton history thus creates and retrenches the boundary between those with and without their own past.
The Britons did not, however, write this myth for themselves: it was written by and for their conquerors. The Britons become a boundary mechanism of many different groups, the ubiquitous Other of European collective identities expressed in genealogical discourse. Arthur, the most contested Briton of all, is contained through repeated resurrection by those who deploy his history to legitimize their own differences. Although Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke present Arthur as a “social signifier whose function was to smooth over the ideological conflicts created by the Norman colonization of England” (4), his reception seems to have divided the different peoples who claimed his heritage more often than it unified them. Indeed, James Holt contrasts Arthur’s reception convincingly with the elocutionary force of Charlemagne, around whose name the Frankish peoples became French.15 Except for the Welsh and the Bretons (whose Arthurian historiography I discuss in chapters 3 and 7), Arthur is an effective antecedent but not a unifying ancestor.
Genealogy, of course, strategically deploys ethnic and family resemblance as well as difference. Bloodlines construct continuities across time, militating against historical differences. When the aristocratic imagination turned to family histories in the eleventh century, as Georges Duby has shown, the redactors of genealogical narratives were drawn to the prestige of royal blood.16 They literally wedded aristocratic families to existing royal genealogies. The Flemish, for example, claimed the Carolingians, while the Angevins joined the Capetians. This practice diffused differences between royal and aristocratic families by exposing their intimate sexual relations. Genealogical discourse thus returns to paradox: it claims vital differences on the basis of shared relatives. The relativity of genealogical difference captures the cultural ambivalence of groups attracted to the powers that dominate them.
The Beginnings of Etymology
The genealogical principle of border writing encompasses an etymological principle, since the history of a people is nearly inseparable from the history of its languages. The symbolic flexibility of language renders it one of the most effective border guards of identity. As Armstrong points out, language does not constitute a presocial identity: in the longue durée of ethnic history, “language was more often the product than the cause of polity formation” (241–42). The choice of a particular language for history writing thus allies the historical content with the linguistic communities capable of reading it. This choice may affirm or transgress conventional alliances, reshaping cultural boundaries through narrative form. In this sense, historiography as border writing belongs to the dominated as well as the empowered.
Etymology is an important boundary mechanism, intimately related to territorial identity and genealogy, because it signals relations among groups in the changing forms of their words. The conceptual power of etymology in medieval European culture has been succinctly (and most influentially) expressed by Ernst Robert Curtius, who declared the genre a “category of thought” and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae sive origines “the basic book of the Middle Ages” (495, 496). More recently, R. Howard Bloch has formulated the privileged role of etymology in the narration of group identity in Etymologies and Genealogies. The etymology of Britain itself, for example, is closely bound to the cultural translation of Briton genealogy since the land takes it name from the first Briton father. Subsequently, histories of Insular naming trace patterns of conquest and domination into the Norman period.
Etymological narrative, like genealogical narrative and historiography in general, is a diachronic mode of discourse. Etymologies thematize not only word formation but also culture formation across time, expressing what Daniel Rosenberg has called “a rhetoric of temporality” (321–22). Just as genealogies represent relations between peoples of different times, etymologies represent the chronology of relations between words. In treatises devoted to language study, etymology introduces a diachronic element into a synchronic explanation of language. In historical narrative, etymologies introduce an alternate and even competing diachronic reference into an already diachronic structure. This reference depends on an alternate memory, which supplements the memory recorded in the primary narrative. Etymologies thus cogently address the problems of representing memory, not only because they conjure moments outside the scope of the main narrative, but also because they record losses of meaning and form.
Like memory and forgetting in etymology, translation remaps historical knowledge to reflect, or change, relations of domination. Translation actively engages the boundaries of identity because it shuttles between differences and near-resemblances. In colonial encounters, translation can enhance power differences and thus reinforce the boundaries that support domination. Walter Mignolo identifies the forceful displacement of one language by another as “linguistic dismissal” (186), which reflects the efforts of colonizing powers to efface cultural differences by eradicating linguistic variation. Language laws, for example, aim to create homogeneous linguistic communities that will facilitate cultural domination; the cultural attractiveness of dominant groups displaces indigenous languages just as forcefully. Through this perspective, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim to translate an ancient book in the Briton language becomes what Eric Cheyfitz calls a “fiction of translation” (15) that serves the colonial fantasies of Geoffrey’s readers. By claiming to displace the ethnically marked Briton source, Geoffrey defeats the Britons with the Latin of the Romans (who occasionally overpower the Britons in the narrative itself). Geoffrey’s translators in turn assert their own cultural sovereignty over his Historia. Always already translation, the writing of Briton history effaces difference and affirms continuity from the origins of Insular dominion to the time and language of each writer. Just as territorial acquisition by the sword defines boundaries through violence, translation enacts an imperialism of sources and a colonization of the past. Vernacular translation in particular renders the past familiar and assimilates the foreign to the indigenous. Like the island itself, the story of the past becomes a cultural space to be conquered.
In the border, however, strategies of difference turn easily into resemblance. Multilingualism is the linguistic manifestation of what Bhabha theorizes as hybridity, “the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” (112). Translation thus “turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention” (112), undermining (rather than reinforcing) the boundaries between cultures in contact. Postcolonial bilingualism can shape a “subversive poetics” that blurs boundaries and undermines hierarchies, thereby challenging the basic structures of power.17 Through this perspective, Geoffrey’s claim to translate makes the Britons more like his Latin-literate readers—that is, more like everybody engaged in the history of imperial domination. Latin universalizes the Briton cultural experience by diffusing ethnic identification in a common, international language.18 Latin thus breaks down the discursive barrier between the Britons’ past and present, the barrier that stands between them and present cultural legitimacy. In one case, Geoffrey directly challenges the homogeneity of linguistic culture by citing dialogue in Saxon (184), just as Rushdie does by citing Latin (276, 404). Finally, Geoffrey repeatedly displays multilingual transference in onomastic histories. These representations of translation subvert the hegemony of the linguistic power that dominates the colonized.
Tellingly, Geoffrey’s Latin history was adapted in Wales (see chapter 3) at the same time that Gaimar set about rendering it in French. Used in this way, border writing disrupts the discourse of the colonizer through an appropriation that overturns the language of domination. The resistance continues in English with Laʒamon’s translation of Wace’s French Roman de Brut (see chapter 4). Laʒamon’s prologue, however, presents the languaging of his history as trilingual, drawing from English, French, and Latin. Laʒamon demonstrates cultural contact as a series of language contacts, staging a polyglot performance characteristic of postcolonial discourse, but subsumed in the performance by English. Through his own resolutely monolingual composition, Laʒamon presents a linguistic gloss on post-colonial experience that dismisses the polyglot condition of life, just as Norman conquerors dismissed English. Even at the close of the fifteenth century, the languaging of Arthurian history remains an urgent cultural issue: in the 1485 preface to Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, William Caxton notes that he agreed to print the text because the deeds of the great Arthur could be read in many languages, including Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and French, but not “in our maternal tongue” (2).
Translation, then, can enact or resist colonialist success, or both. While the Historia represents the Britons’ loss of history through their loss of language, it also resists their colonization by remembering their past. As a strategy for crossing boundaries, translation remains bound to paradox: it makes the past available to both the powerful (Geoffrey’s Norman patrons and translators) and the powerless (Geoffrey’s Welsh readers and translators). For both the Normans and the Welsh, however, the past is always already written in another language. New forms repeatedly displace and re-present (in the double sense of display again and make contemporary again) the origin. Multilingualism accommodates (and challenges) the differences between these contending claims to originary power. The technology of translation thus simultaneously enables memory and facilitates forgetting. In border historiography, descriptions of translation and etymology capture the linguistic dramas lived in encounters among speakers of unequal power.
Taking Time
Genealogy and etymology, as diachronic modes of discourse, shape time as a further boundary concept pertinent to border writing. The identity of the past per se and the shape of its chronology both become instrumental in the imagination of other kinds of borders (between places, peoples, and languages). In processes of colonization, the history of the colonized people is the final frontier of cultural dominion. This process, however, is also paradoxical, since history writing joins the past to the present while simultaneously establishing the temporal divide between past and present realities. As de Certeau argues, historiography creates the past at the same time that it buries and elides it; history writing is the “construction and erosion of units” (98–100). Erosion (a cartographic metaphor) creates new shapes as it erases old ones, especially since the boundaries at work are not only between the past and the present, but also between both and the future. In this sense, border writing both remembers and forgets the founding divisions of history.
Bhabha defines this need to forget in relation to the violence of origins, the always traumatic point of departure in genealogical discourse. Through forgetting, people become unified under a “national will” — an idea credited to Ernest Renan in nineteenth-century France.19 This process reconfigures time: “Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification” (Bhabha 161). In the history of Britain, the Britons are represented as repeatedly forgetting the island’s founding wound, the land’s division by Brutus’s sons. Yet they can never forget long enough to reconstitute a unified space. Narratives of this process by the conquered forget to forget, commemorating original violence as a resistance to post-colonial hegemony. Narratives by the conquerors, however, remember to remember, imagining the incorporation of past differences into a new whole. Bhabha dreams toward this unity as a new kind of counternarrative from within borders: “For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity” (170). This vision of unity must come from the edge, whether it aims to resist or conquer. This explains in part why edges are historiographically and culturally productive: they actively encompass paradox.
While history writing configures the past, it also narrates toward the future: “the locus that it carves for the past is equally a fashion of making a place for a future.”20 Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, turns to the Britons and the Saxons—the historical, not the present, ones—while imagining the future of the Normans. Likewise, the past is the site of counternarratives by Welsh and Breton historians who recover the past to resist the future (see chapters 3 and 7). Geoffrey’s contemporary Henry of Huntingdon recognized this function of history explicitly: “Historia igitur preterita quasi presentia uisui representat, futura ex preteritis imaginando diiudicat” (History therefore brings the past into view as though it were present, and allows judgment of the future by representing the past) (4, 5). Historiography thus takes place in a temporal border, ambivalent and bound by temporal conflict.
Within historical narratives, the borders between one period and another represent a further way in which time figures as a boundary concept. Geoffrey’s Historia, for example, originates a new historiographical shape for Briton history by moving the temporal boundary of Briton dominion from the fifth to nearly the eighth century. The history of Arthur himself takes place liminally, as his reign occupies a space between known historical kings. The narration of Arthur thus creates time, redrawing the boundaries of periodization for an audience frequently engaged in armed conflict over Insular dominion.
The boundaries between historical periods and cultures are of course constituted in writing—in history writing. Indeed, de Certeau argues that history writing itself is a liminal concept: “it [history] is the vibration of limits” (37–38); it has the function of “symbolizing limits and thus of enabling us to go beyond those limits” (85; emphasis in original). Historiography narrates the edges; historiography written from edges does so all the more urgently. Each boundary concept in fact borders the others. Genealogy, for example, traces group identity through time and also in relation to territory. Likewise, etymology locates language diachronically and ethnically. The border, as a figure of paradox, cuts across multiple concepts, joining them indelibly as it separates them irretrievably. Historiography represents the simultaneity of these paradoxes in time. If, as Lee Patterson has argued, the management of paradox constitutes historical consciousness per se in the Middle Ages (210), border historiography represents a hyperconsciousness that textualizes modes of possession.
The imagination of new forms makes border writing both didactic and performative. For de Certeau, this is one of the functions of historiography in general, where the narrative “both describes and engenders” (40). The paradox of this double performance makes historiography an ambivalent form, like a borderline itself (83). Pierre Bourdieu gives a regionalist interpretation of narrative performativity (223), while Bhabha locates it within a nationalist pedagogy (139–52). As tempus is laid across topos, logos, and the populus (sometimes a synonym for regio in Latin), the writing of nationalist discourse lives in what Bhabha calls “double-time”: narrative creates collective identification (the performative function) by explaining it (the pedagogical function). These narratives and counternarratives contest the stability of time and disrupt the homogenization of communities (149). In the contest of narratives, spatial boundaries become the signs of cultural difference; temporal boundaries signify both historical and cultural difference; the people are “liminal,” split between subject and object (151). Every category, then, becomes a border.
In ore gladii
Bhabha’s pedagogy of difference risks turning all writing everywhere into border writing. The border histories of Arthur, however, share one unique trait: they give his sword a proper name. Furthermore, they use the name to identify significant military encounters. The patterns shaped by strategic naming engage fundamental relations between force, territorial possession, and historical judgment. Representations of Arthur’s sword engage the historical roles of medieval swords in general, many of which challenge the boundaries between human bodies, inanimate objects, and abstract principles. Physically, force promises the creation and defense of stable boundaries; socially, this creation disturbs the limits of existing relationships. In this way, coercive boundary formation engenders ambivalence. Swords purvey this ambivalence, as their symbolic effects belie the certitude of their literal edges. Swords, moreover, formally incarnate the boundary paradox: their edges divide trenchantly while forming the blade’s indivisible unity. Swords’ intimate relations with human bodies further enhance their liminal ontology. When named, this unity displaces the ordinary difference between objects and human social systems. As an agent of coercive desire, the named sword becomes a vital artifact of the medieval border imaginary, reaching fundamental cultural relations that are thrown into greatest relief at the edge.
The naming of swords extends back to the origins of heroic culture and is an indigenous European practice.21 Proper names in general, Claude Lévi-Strauss argued, classify social information (285). When applied to inanimate material, proper names assimilate objects to the social logic of human culture. Names structure and contain social information, and so forge cultural and narrative bonds. Through naming, objects acquire the effects of personhood and an implied potential for subjectivity. Indeed, Leo Spitzer suggested that a name in and of itself marks the subjectivity of a sword.22 When, for example, the scabbard of La queste del saint graal promises that its name and that of its sword will be revealed (206), it assures readers that these objects will take their proper place in human society before the end of the narrative.
Personification and subjectivity together furnish the potential for the object’s autonomy and its ability to acquire a reputation independently from the heroes who handle it. Even among unnamed swords, examples of autonomous speaking blades abound, from ninth- and tenth-century survivors who bear inscriptions like “INGLERII ME FECIT” (Inglerii made me)23 to literary voices who describe their own life and history.24 The distance from speech to physical action is small indeed. In the Dutch Roman van Walewein, for example, the Sword of Two Rings leaps out of its scabbard “pommel over hilt” to bow before Gawain, “as if it were a man who had sinned and sought mercy, wishing to do penance” (161). Roland’s sword Durendal also asserts its independence when it remains whole despite Roland’s efforts to break it.25 In numerous other examples, blades shatter at the very moment that human warriors most desire their efficacy. Whenever objects fail to meet human expectations, warriors and readers confront the autonomy of material culture.
With or without names, material objects manifest their own social logic. Interpretive archaeologists engage this logic with traditional (colonial) ethnographic methods, by adopting the perspective of the other: “As we interpret self from the perspective of the other, so we also take the perspective of the object: ‘The stone defines the hand,’ as surely as the hand defines itself.”26 Taking the object’s perspective, it is possible to construct what Igor Kopytoff has called a “biography of things.” The biography of a sword, for example, begins with forging. Individual swords may also experience inscription, hilting, baptism, naming, bloodstains, envenoming, relic storage, breakage, gifting, refitting, sale, burial, drowning, and theft. Narrative representations of named swords draw from the object’s general biography to construct individual histories with unique and dynamic relations to force and legitimacy.
One of the most important elements of a sword’s biography is its relation to human warriors. Since the sword is likewise a vital part of the warrior’s biography, their relation is synecdochic rather than metonymic: the sword is a part of the warrior, not merely associated with him. Through synecdoche, the sword shares the characteristics and reputation of the hero, and the hero attracts those of the sword. The lethal weapon completes the heroic body, whose grip on the hilt weakens the usual boundary between the flesh and the world of objects. Indeed, in one Welsh triad, swords rather than men determine likeness.27 Literary heroes, for example, frequently represent their swords as substitutes for their own being or agency;28 in death, literary and historical warriors share their grave with their steel companion.29 Synecdochic substitution opens a double communication between objects and men, in which it becomes difficult to determine who substitutes for whom. The sword’s desirable battlefield characteristics, for example, become known as the hero’s own performance power.30 And formidable knights become “Longsword,” while weak kings become “Soft-Sword.”31 La queste del saint graal presents the most complete example of this ontological contamination with the description of King David’s sword in the Ship of Faith. The marvelous properties of the hilt turn the hand that holds it into an engine of destruction: one side of the hilt is made from a Calidonian serpent that prevents the man who touches it from feeling too hot, while the other is made from a fish found only in the Euphrates that causes the man who touches it to forget everything except the reason he picked up the sword (202–3). The powers of the hilt define the ways in which humans are naturally ill suited for war, and create in their place a warrior formed in the image of the sword itself: unimpeded by physical or mental discomfort and divested of biographical memory, the man concentrates absolutely on death.
Allegorical interpretations of weapons also assimilate material form to human identity. Extended allegorical interpretations of armor derive from the letter to the Ephesians, who are called upon to put on the “arma Dei” (arms of God): “loricam iustitiae” (the hauberk of justice), “scutum fidei” (the shield of faith), “galeam salutis” (the helmet of salvation), and the “gladium Spiritus quod est verbum Dei” (sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God).32 Described as elements of the chivalric portrait in medieval narrative, armor invites ethical as well as spiritual interpretations. The Lady of the Lake in the prose Lancelot, for example, offers a complete exposition of knightly armor before Lancelot’s departure for Arthur’s court. After explicating the shield, hauberk, helmet, and lance, she pauses at length on the sword, describing the ethical import of its physical possibilities: “Li doi trenchant senefient que li chevaliers doit estre serjans a Nostre Signor et a son pueple . . . la pointe senefie obedience” (The two edges signify that the knight must be the sergeant of Our Lord and of his people . . . the point signifies obedience) (7:251–52).
In many cases the sword enjoys a distinct advantage over the human body—durability. The blade’s ability to survive through time, literally and figuratively, enables the sword to carry historical memory. Because the artifact can survive beyond the life of any individual hand, it communicates across time with relative ease, like written narrative itself. The perceived immortality of the object captures the human desire for perpetual memory, cogently expressed in Annette Weiner’s study of socially prestigious objects in Inalienable Possessions as well as in Jean Baudrillard’s Système des objects. Durable, antique objects maintain the presence of the past and connect both present and past to the future. In this sense, the naming of legendary swords in narrative performs the memorial mediations of historiography itself.
The memorial capacities of legendary swords like Excalibur or Durendal derive not only from their insertion alongside heroic bodies in historical narrative, but also from the social roles of swords in medieval culture. Like the narratives that tell of Arthur or Roland, swords recall conquest. When Edward I challenged Earl Warenne to prove the legality of his land titles, for example, Walter of Guisborough reports that the earl brandished an antique and rusty sword (“gladium antiquuum et eruginatum”) (216). Whatever the exact historical status of the gesture (and some historians doubt its reality), the episode forges a narrative link between the past (when the sword, wielded by the earl’s ancestors, conquered the lands) and the present. The display of the rusty sword as legal proof renders the means of conquest a retroactive sign of the legitimacy of forceful occupation. The passage in fact begins “Cito post inquietauit rex,” evoking the vocabulary of illegitimate disturbance (inquietatione) that also characterizes the narration of jurisdictional conflict in Geoffrey’s Historia. The uniqueness of the object protects the earl’s claim from these disturbances. M. T. Clanchy has called the earl’s sword a prop “in the theatre of memory” and concludes that the relation between objects and property attested by the conveyance of title through symbolic gesture is deeply embedded in post-Conquest thought on legal legitimacy (38–41). The testimonial power of swords permeates some historical narratives, such as the Breton Gesta regum Britanniae, where both narrator and characters call swords to witness (“gladio testante”) (e.g., 56, 206) (see chapter 7). The presence of artifacts in all of the Arthurian histories encodes enduring memories, performing the past so that it can act upon the future.
Medieval swords commemorate submission as well as domination. In imperial, royal, and chivalric ceremonies, the ritual transfer of swords actively reconfigures relationships of authority. Receiving the sword from the altar, emperors, kings, and knights take on ecclesiastical and secular service. In the oldest imperial ordines, the emperor accepts to defend the Church by taking the sword from the ecclesiastical hand.33 Some archaeological survivors materialize the sword’s service to God with the inscription “IN NOMINE DOMINI” or citations of prayers.34 Royal coronation rites echo the language of the imperial rite very closely, perpetuating the sword as a sign of ecclesiastical service.35 The sword, of course, can easily slide from royal submission to royal power, as demonstrated in a French coronation rite that depicts the duke of Burgundy parading the drawn sword throughout the ceremony.36 Gradually, the ideology of the sword slid from the royal to the comital to the knightly.37 The blessing of the sword confers on the soldier the same rights and responsibility of defense as that conferred on monarchs, and frequently in the same language.38 The representation in narrative of the transmission of swords from one hand to another establishes similar bonds of reciprocal dependence—between characters, ethnic groups, and narrative episodes. From Beowulf to the Chanson de Roland to the Cid, named swords bind men to each other, to God, and to their own past actions.39 They share, moreover, in the organizing force of proper names in general.40
Medieval rulers and pontiffs even debated their conflicts over submission and service through sword metaphors. In order to defend their interpretations of relative authority, theologians and lawyers deployed what became known as the “argument of the two swords.” This complex exegetical tradition is built on a brief exchange between Jesus and his disciples as narrated in Luke: having learned of Jesus’s imminent arrest, the disciples look around for a means of resistance and cry out: “Ecce gladii duo hic” (Look, two swords are here), to which Jesus replies: “Satis est” (That is sufficient).41 The multiple and competing exegeses of this passage maintained the sword at the center of medieval thought on the representation of power. Ideological tensions between princely governments and the papacy pulled the sword in different directions, but always with a focus on the fundamental dynamics of constraint. The conflicts argued through the allegory of the two swords concern who has the authority, de jure, to legitimately coerce whom, and when.42 The coercive impact of the figure, in fact, outweighs the relatively benign notion of “spheres of authority” (a concept based on “cultural stuff” rather than boundaries). The “sword pericope” (as Gerard Caspary dubbed it) became a sharp figure for drawing the boundary between spiritual and temporal jurisdiction over the earth, the two broadest jurisdictions of the medieval landscape. The details of the theological and constitutional implications of the arguments are less important here than the fact that throughout the medieval period the most pressing issues of spiritual and constitutional jurisdiction were theorized and “proved” in the image of a sword.
In knighting rituals and chivalric portraits, coronation rites and legal exegesis, battle and burial, swords mediate and signify jurisdictional relationships in human society. They enjoy singular, synecdochic relations with the heroic body; as the hand on the hilt moves to strike or to give, the object engages a broader relation with the social body. In battle, the blade inscribes the answer to jurisdictional dispute indelibly on the body of the defeated. In political theology and ritual, the image of the sword signifies the relation between spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, and the reciprocal obligations of lords (divine, ecclesiastical, and lay) and the men who defend them. When the object moves from one hand to another, it can signify either the plenitude or the limits of the giver’s power. These movements occur at the crossroads of social and economic interests, of generosity and coercion. In narrative, they traverse historical relations between the conquered and the conquering.
Caliburn, Escalibor, Excalibur
From a historiographical perspective, Geoffrey of Monmouth gave birth to Arthur’s sword. In the Historia, the presence of the sword’s name organizes Arthur’s principal military achievements into a visible group that traces the boundaries of Briton dominion. The sword name focuses the reader’s attention on the shape of these boundaries and the means by which they are established. Geoffrey’s Historia names Arthur’s sword before or during three moments of conflict: the battle against Cheldric’s Saxon army, the duel with Frollo at Paris, and the battle against Lucius’s Roman army. In the Historia’s reception, this pattern is never repeated exactly. Writers not only change the distribution of namings within the three episodes, they also add new ones and eliminate inherited ones. These changes to the sword’s biography reflect different approaches to the representation of legitimate authority. In each case, the group of episodes defined by the repetition of the name communicates the historical and ideological vision of the narrative as a whole.
Like most names attached to swords, Caliburn has provoked etymological commentary. As might be expected, the majority of sword names refer rather transparently to the characteristics of an effective weapon: hard, durable, and resistant.43 Caliburn itself seems derived from a relatively rare Latin noun for steel;44 the prefix es- attached to Caliburn on the Continent has a seemingly emphatic value.45 T. Atkinson Jenkins claims further that the prefix originated in “clerical hands” (12) because it also modifies a series of words related to religious practice. Jenkins thus imagines the clerical redactors of the French Arthurian cycle affixing the es- to calibor, like a new hilt for an old blade, as they appropriate the name for their own ideological purposes.46 In each case, the act of naming and the name’s linguistic form signal the sword’s place in a mental landscape of authority, power, and social obligation.
The meaning of the inventio of an Arthurian sword bound to Briton imperialism sharpens when compared with the emblems of power and legitimacy associated with Arthur in chronicles prior to Geoffrey’s. In the Historia Brittonum, Arthur carries an image of Mary across his shoulders (or on his shield) (76); William of Malmesbury interprets the image as integral to Arthur’s defensive covering (“armis suis insuerat”).47 In the Annales Cambriae, Arthur bears the Holy Cross (or an image of it) (85). Both of these objects (or images) reference the divine sanction of Arthur’s battles. They do not, however, literally produce victory as the sword does. By naming the sword, Geoffrey conjoins an offensive instrument to Arthur’s traditional defensive symbols, and then displaces them completely.
In the interplay between idea and action, between political theory and its lethal execution, the sword does not merely function as a symbol (the physical embodiment of an abstract principle); it has the physical capacity to enforce the consequences of that principle. The representation of the named sword thus both performs and comments on acts of conquest. Each appearance of the name interrogates the legitimacy of territorial expansion and boundary formation. Legitimacy surfaces trenchantly because the sword may also be manipulated for illegitimate action: its physical capacities may be exercised against its symbolic valence. The named sword, as emblem and artifact, thus incorporates the conflict between force and law that is at stake throughout Briton history. Arthurian historiography stages the actions of the sword in relation to past and future in order to define the limits of legitimacy in the present. Because of the sword’s capacity to combine lethal force with abstract theory, the path of conquest marked by its presence expresses attitudes toward the imperial journey: when Caliburn draws blood, the reader can draw conclusions.
Ultimately, swords write borders, in the sense that warfare painfully negotiates the geopolitical contours of the land. Borders, however, also write swords, in the sense that geopolitical instability generates historiography acutely concerned with judging acts of force. The chapters that follow here show how Arthurian historiography writes Arthur’s sword and how this historiographical tradition (which tells the history of jurisdictional conflicts) takes shape in disputed regions. I hope to show that while it can be a mistake to make too much of the struggles of medieval historiography, it is also a mistake to make too little of the urgencies and exigencies of writing about the past in the Middle Ages.
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