Tolkien and Tolkien (ed): Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

J.R.R. Tolkien (trans) and Christopher Tolkien (ed). Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell. London: HarperCollins, 2014. 448pp.

Reviewed by Mark Atherton (mark.atherton@regents.ox.ac.uk)

Beowulf is "the major piece of Old English verse that has survived the wrecks of time – still profitable … to read in its own right, quite apart from its acquired value as a window into the past"; so the author puts it in this ‘new’ publication from the literary estate of J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien, Beowulf, 275). Many present-day medievalists would agree with Tolkien’s view that the poem’s artistic merit matches its historical import. As a "major piece of verse," Beowulf tells an epic tale focusing on two moments in the trajectory of its protagonist: the "young proud" ambitious hero who defeats the monster Grendel in the first part of the poem, the old king in the second, filled, as Tolkien puts it in the commentary to this translation, with "the bitter wisdom of experience" (312). As a historical "window," Beowulf provides an Anglo-Saxon view on the legendary past of northern Europe that would be otherwise unknown, and as a poem it deals with the big themes of the “Northern” epic: loyalty and treachery, redress for wrong, providence, fate and fortitude. Tolkien’s version, now edited by his son Christopher, comes at a time when the reputation of the poem is growing, not to mention the fascination to be had from reading another work by the author of The Lord of the Rings.

The role of Tolkien’s fiction in promoting interest in the medieval world has been immense, but it is also certainly true to claim the reverse: without Beowulf, the Edda, the Kalevala, and a number of other ancient literary works that Tolkien wrote about as an academic, his fiction would never have been written.[1] Today, his expertise on Old English remains impressive and influential, his major publication on Beowulf being a lecture given at the British Academy in London in 1934, "The Monsters and the Critics." The lecture shifted scholarly focus from the text’s legendary background and back to the artistic unity of the poem, and it ushered in a new era in Beowulf studies on its publication in 1936.[2] When The Hobbit appeared a year later in 1937, Tolkien was compared to Lewis Carroll – author of Alice in Wonderland (1865) – another famous Oxford academic who had authored a “children’s book.” Tolkien clearly drew on Beowulf for details of plot and character in The Hobbit, and the borrowings continued as he turned to writing its famous sequel, The Lord of the Rings, which proved to be a long project, intended for a wider audience.[3] In the meantime, as another celebrated lecture "On Fairy Stories" (1939) reveals, he considerably altered his views on how modern fiction should be used as a medium for presenting ancient literature to the modern world.[4] By the time The Lord of the Rings had appeared in 1954-5, Tolkien had considerably refined his own literary method and developed a more sophisticated and consistent prose style.

For all of his career, Tolkien taught and studied Beowulf. But his translation is a relatively early work, completed in 1926, shortly after he had taken up the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. It is evident, from the commentary itself and from editorial information added by his son Christopher Tolkien, that he used this translation as the basis for his undergraduate lectures on the poem throughout the 1930s and after. What this new publication provides then is the prose translation of 1926, together with an introduction and a few related texts by Tolkien, such as his Beowulfian folk-tale Sellic Spell; together with an edited selection of the 1930s lectures which forms a substantial commentary taking up about half of the book, on language, style and cultural background, and with short interpretive "essays" on the poem. Of the two main sections it is arguably the commentary that will prove the more enduring; I will return to that point later, but let us first take look at his approach to rendering Old English alliterative verse into modern English.

The translation is done in a kind of rhythmical literary prose, not unlike the style of his slightly earlier Book of Lost Tales, but more constrained since it follows where possible the arrangement of ideas of the Old English poem, which, like Latin verse, is quite free in its word order. Features employed are mock-Germanic syntax-inversion, archaisms such as "spake," with some attempts to reproduce the sounds of the original; it has an Anglo-Saxon "flavor."[5] For example, one might compare lines 320-321a of the poem with Tolkien’s version.[6] To get something of their "flavor" it is illuminating to manipulate the sentence and arrange it as verse on the page:

                              The street was paved      in stone patterns;
                              The path guided         those men together.


Though it breaks the classic rules for alliterating elements, there is clearly a texture of sound and rhythm and a metrical quality that Tolkien adds to his version. As such, his rhythmical style differs from the plain prose of Clark Hall, the classic student translation of Beowulf, which Tolkien clearly knew and admired: he even borrows short phrases from Clark Hall in his own rendering of the text. [7] The Clark Hall "crib," as it is sometimes called, was republished by the philologist C.L. Wrenn in 1940, together with an essay by his Oxford colleague Tolkien, "Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of “Beowulf”.’

In this preface, Tolkien expounds his principles not only for translating accurately but also for capturing the register and equivalent diction of the original. There is a tension here, for Tolkien feels that the characteristic OE pictorial compounds known as "kennings" are alien to modern English usage. A minor example occurs in the passage above, where the compound adjective stan-fah is rendered "paved with stone" by Clark Hall, but is "resolved" by Tolkien, i.e. expanded, in order to capture the connotation of the poetic adjective fah. A more vivid example is the metaphorical kenning ofer hron-rade (Beowulf, line 10a), literally "over whale-road" i.e. "across the sea." Where Clark Hall has "across the whale’s road," Tolkien resolves this to "over the sea where the whale rides" and adds a long and lively discussion of this kenning in the commentary (141-3). But the net result of all this "resolution" is that Tolkien’s published translation loses the characteristic Anglo-Saxon compactness and becomes a much longer text. And an unintended difficulty is that undergraduate students (in my experience as a university teacher) find the text hard to use in conjunction with their editions of Beowulf, because the resulting line numbers do not match.

A related issue that Tolkien addresses is diction, or choice of word. The Old English literary language possessed a vast "word-hoard," (to use a kenning), i.e. a whole thesaurus or repertoire of words and phrases that appear only in its verse and not in its prose. Such a phenomenon is hard to conceive in present-day English; for since the 1920s and 1930s, which is also of course the time of T.S. Eliot (and Modernism more generally), writers have eschewed a special literary vocabulary and opened up poetry to all sort of registers which it did not formerly employ. On this question Tolkien seems to be working against the grain of his own times, for his solution is to urge us to avoid colloquialisms in the target text in favor of weighty and traditional diction (Preface to Clark Hall, xix):

avoid … exquisite and artistic and prefer the 'cunning craft' and 'skill' of ancient smiths; [avoid] visitors (suggesting umbrellas, afternoon tea, and all too familiar faces) and prefer 'guests' with a truer note of real hospitality, long and arduous travel, and strange voices bearing unfamiliar news.

The latter example sounds to me like just the right register for Beowulf, whereas "umbrellas and tea" suggests the world of the Shire, with its dialect-speaking farmers and respectable citizens who like to express themselves plainly. One of the serious but playful elements of style in The Hobbit or The Fellowship of the Ring is Tolkien’s ear for different registers and clashes of registers: respectable hobbits and kings of ancient lineage do not speak the same language.

However, I wonder whether that ear for the right register was not yet fully developed in 1926, for some of his weighty and traditional terms seem here archaic or even obsolete. It is a matter of taste, but some twenty-first century reviewers and readers find the many archaisms in Tolkien’s Beowulf uncongenial, and others are perplexed by a whole set of terms taken straight out of the Camelot of King Arthur and the world of medieval feudalism and chivalry: squire, esquire, knight, liege, vassal. Tolkien’s justification, it seems, is that present-day English lacks the right terms to apprehend the cultural world of Beowulf, which he believes was courtly and courteous. The only solution is to employ the already existing diction of the Arthurian world and apply that register to Beowulf. He has a point. The default position on the Anglo-Saxons among ordinary readers (or even movie makers) is that they were uncouth, brutal and boorish. Nothing could be further than the truth, says Tolkien, at least in the poem Beowulf, and his argument is a valuable corrective then to popular misconceptions  of the period and its literature. In his commentary, Tolkien develops these ideas at greater length.

Just as Thomas Malory with his Morte Darthur in the fifteenth century came at the end of a long tradition of poems and stories about Arthur and Camelot, giving his own individual take on the themes of the narrative, Tolkien sees the Beowulf poet as in a similar position: he is the Malory of the Heorot legends, which stretch way back into the dim and distant past beyond his own era, the eighth century.[8] This poet brings his own conceptions of virtue and courtesy to the story and adds a distinct "dramatic element" to the presentation of the characters of Beowulf, the young Geatish hero, and Hrothgar the king of Denmark whose court of Heorot he cleanses of its monstrous assailants. The courtliness is not complete; there are a few chinks where the old primitive folktale peeps through, where Beowulf is the uncouth bearlike champion with the strength of thirty men in his grasp. This is the reason for Tolkien’s creative reconstruction of the original fairy tale behind the narrative in his Sellic Spell.

Tolkien lingers particularly over the arrival of Beowulf in Denmark, the historical background and chronology which the poet adds to the plot, the careful assessment of claim and counter-claim in the various speeches that are made at the court by the guest and his hosts. Courtliness is seen in the measured speeches, the ritual drinks and presentations. In the dramatic moments, which Tolkien analyses at length, the young Beowulf reveals himself as passionate, easily angered but loyal and steadfast; Hrothgar as wise in old age, a shrewd judge of character and motive, with a tendency to go for policies of appeasement (204-262). It is interesting to note Tolkien’s method of analysis in the commentary, his modernization of the characters’ speeches in long, sometimes colloquial, paraphrases – despite his love of high diction in the text of the translation itself.

According to Tolkien, we learn another side of Beowulf’s character in the later scene where the hero returns to the hall of Hygelac, his own lord and king back in Geatland. Beowulf tells Hygelac of the Danish King Hrothgar’s plans, now that the monsters have been defeated, of healing the feud between the Danes and the nation of the Heathobards. Hrothgar will give his daughter Freawaru in marriage to the famous Ingeld, son of Froda, the Heathobard king who had been killed in the earlier feud. Beowulf displays here what Tolkien terms his political acuity as he explains why this marriage alliance is doomed to failure. Again in his commentary Tolkien admires the dramatic element in the Beowulf poet’s artistry as he explores the moment of confrontation when the feud will be renewed (338-43).

Tolkien also detects a rare love-interest in this narrative of Freawaru and Ingeld, to which at pages 324-43 a lengthy section of the commentary is devoted (he perhaps has in mind here his own story of the lovers Beren and Lúthien in The Silmarillion). What is clear is that Tolkien sees the story as historical, with a consistent chronology. The war or feud is concerned with control of Heorot, which is associated in Danish historical traditions with Lejre in Zealand, the old royal seat and centre of religious cult. As John D. Niles and others haves demonstrated, there is a good deal of recent archaeological data to support these reflections.[9] In this section Tolkien offers further intriguing remarks on the mythical background to this marriage: the lovers both have names with a Frey-element (Frea and Ing) that recall stories of the ancestral King Fróda and the peace-loving nature of the Heathobards, ‘whose traditions are of Frey and the Vanir rather than Odin the Goth’ (338). Tolkien evidently finds the mythological associations of the Vanir – corn and fruitfulness – more congenial than those of the Aesir – Odin and the ravens and "bloodshed for its own sake" (330). These are interesting insights into the background of the poem, which would merit further exploration.

In brief, courtliness and character seem to be the new and interesting leitmotifs of this translation and commentary, and they are valuable insights for new readers to bring to their encounter with Beowulf. It remains for this reviewer to suggest strategies for approaching this volume for any newcomer to the field. As the editor Christopher Tolkien makes clear, the commentary ranges from linguistic and historical notes to glosses on difficult cruces and passages, to short "essays" on the interpretation of the poem or on the understanding of Old English culture. It is with these "essays" that it is best to begin. Here are some recommendations: the summary of the structure of the poem (312-313); the definition of a kenning (141-3); a note on the originality of the poet (254); a comparison of the aristocratic "code" in Beowulf and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (271-2); the habit of understatement (187-91). The dragon is neglected in this book, probably because the lecture series did not cover that part of the poem; nevertheless there is one fine Tolkienian set-piece on that subject which is well worth reading (350-3). And finally, if only one of the "essays" in the commentary should be read then it is this: Tolkien’s spirited, even moving and provocative, "take" on the ethos of whole poem (272-5).


Mark Atherton 
Regent’s Park College
University of Oxford

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[1] For an essential guide to Tolkien and his world, see Stuart Lee (ed.), A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien (Oxford, 2014).

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London, 1983).

[3] Tolkien’s indebtedness to Beowulf is explored by Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (Basingstoke, 2005). The classic study is Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (London, 1982).

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories, expanded edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London, 2008).

[5] For these criteria see the discussion of translation from Old English in Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3rd edn (London, 2002), pp. 93-101.

[6] Tolkien used F. Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg 3rd edn (Lexington MA, 1950; 1st edn 1922); a recent excellent text and guide is George Jack (ed.), Beowulf. A Student Edition (Oxford, 1994).

[7] John R. Clark Hall, Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment. A Translation into Modern English Prose, revised edition, ed. C.L. Wrenn (London, 1940; revised again 1950; 1st edn 1911).

[8] Tolkien himself takes on the mantle of the Arthurian poet in his The Fall of Arthur, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2013); the tone is courtly and the metre is a fine alliterative verse style which is clearly modeled on the Old English metre of Beowulf.

[9] John D. Niles, Beowulf and Lejre (Tempe, AZ, 2007).

"My fiction is the natural outgrowth of my fascination with the times:" an Interview with Candace Robb

Candace Robb is author of the Owen Archer detective novels, set in late-fourteenth-century York, and the Margaret Kerr detective fiction series, set in Scotland at the time of Edward I's invasion. Writing as Emma Campion, she is the author of the novels The King's Mistress and A Triple Knot, both set during the reign of Edward III. Candace spoke to Michael Evans, an assistant editor of Medievally Speaking, about novels, history, and 'the ethics of historical fiction.' 

ME: Tell us a little about your background in medieval studies, and how you came to write historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. 

CR: I did my graduate work in English literature with a strong concentration in medieval and Anglo-Saxon literature and history. I received my MA and completed the coursework for a PhD in English lit and then… There’s a saw about climbing up to the top rung of a ladder only to discover it’s propped against the wrong tree; but, for me, I’d say I’d climbed the ladder and suddenly saw the forest and wanted to take off and fly from tree to tree, to experience it all, not limit myself to the one I’d climbed. My engagement in the literature had inspired a burning curiosity about how it was to live in those times; the people seemed so like me and, at the same time, so different. But my university was not set up for an interdisciplinary doctorate in medieval studies. So I left. I became an editor of research publications in a university laboratory where I had easy access to a fine research library. I continued my studies in all things medieval and haven’t stopped. Had I been able to assemble an interdisciplinary committee for my dissertation, there might never have been an Owen Archer, Lucie Wilton, Magda Digby, Margaret Kerr, Emma Campion…. My fiction is the natural outgrowth of my fascination with the times. And it didn’t hurt that Ursula LeGuin encouraged me in that direction in a writing workshop years ago. 

ME: How do you see the intersection between ‘academic’ history, and the role of the historical fiction author? Can academic history inform the historical fiction writer, and vice versa?

CR: Academic history is essential to me, which is why I make the pilgrimage to the Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan U almost every May, and often attend the Leeds congress as well. I also stay in touch with a number of academics working in history and literature, and I read read read. I base my fiction on educated guesses based on others’ research; my motivation remains the same—to explore with my imagination how it was to live in the late middle ages. What I add to the mix is the emotion, the heart. I start with facts about the times, and then spin out a speculative yarn, one that entertains. My sleuth Owen Archer was inspired by an article about the longbow. Thinking about the strength and skill it required. How King Edward valued the Welsh longbowmen. How one of them might rise in the ranks. How important, to a right-handed archer his left eye would be… All this came from reading someone’s research on the longbow. 

As to whether historical fiction can inform academic history, I’d say a novelist might perform the same function as students who ask question after question in class or write imaginative papers. Fresh questions are a wellspring, after all, triggering new ideas, speculation. It’s fun to imagine a historian looked up from one of my books with an 'aha'! Maybe something I said about King Edward’s determination that William Wykeham should be the Bishop of Winchester suggested a closer look (The King’s Bishop); or my toying with John Gisburn’s reputation as a merchant and mayor of York in several of the Owen Archers; or Joan of Kent’s burning question for Archbishop Thoresby in A Vigil of Spies. 

ME: It seems to me that historical fiction authors take their research very seriously – for example, your author’s note at the end of A Triple Knot contains footnotes referring to scholarly sources. How much of a duty does the author have to ‘get it right’? How much authorial license does he or she have to alter events, or at least to fill in the gaps in the historical record? 

CR: A caveat: I answer this in light of my own work, my own goal in writing historical fiction. I see altering events and filling in the gaps as two quite different activities.  

When writing about Joan of Kent or Alice Perrers I could not write a coherent narrative without filling in the gaps—the historical record for Joan and Alice is too sparse. So I see filling in the gaps as connecting the dots with plausible motives, incidents, catalysts, emotions that lead from one known point to the next. The gaps can involve largely unimportant but intriguing facts, such as how and why Alice Perrers acquired such a quantity of pearls (The King’s Mistress), or more significant issues, such as the decisions I made about just what sort of “garter” is immortalized in the Order of the Garter, and the origin of the Countess of Salisbury garter incident (A Triple Knot). 

Altering events that are in the historical record doesn’t interest me. In writing the biographical novels, The King’s Mistress and A Triple Knot; and in the Margaret Kerr series, I stuck to the facts as closely as possible, though filtered through a point-of-view character whose interpretation is necessarily personal. In the Owen Archer mysteries I steer clear of the famous, well-documented incidents so that I can enjoy more freedom in plotting. Well, except for allowing John Thoresby to extend his time as Lord Chancellor for some years. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to play with that. 

A while ago I was invited to give a talk about writing historical fiction at Cornell University, after which members of the philosophy department joined me in a round table. Our topic was the ethics of historical fiction, and we agreed that my unspoken but implied contract with my readers is that I do my best to present a plausible, carefully researched historical background.

The Author’s Note is the spot in which most historical novelists state where we’ve taken authorial license. Just to keep the record straight. 

ME: In our post-modern age, the pursuit of ‘historical truth’ might be seen as impossible, yet I see readers of historical fiction – and history-lovers in general – on social media or online forums getting very upset if an author or film-maker takes liberties with history. Does ‘historical accuracy’ matter? 

CR: Does historical accuracy matter? It depends on what the artist is after. In my case, it’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?  I write out of my enthusiasm for what has been discovered about the late medieval period. 

I’m not entirely clear about what you’re saying about the post-modern age and “historical truth.” Are you referring to how quickly new evidence is uncovered and disseminated? How can I possibly keep up? If so, yes, that’s an issue. I know it’s very likely that what I thought of as quite accurate might very well be disproved down the road. That’s why I keep returning to my motive as an artist—I’m feeding my curiosity and having fun fashioning it into entertainment. I was already quite far into the first draft of The King’s Mistress when Mark Ormrod turned up evidence that “Perrers” was not Alice’s maiden name, but the name of her first husband. I made the choice at the time, finding the new information irresistible, to start over. But my editor had the edited manuscript in hand when Mark told me that he’d changed his mind about some dates; at that point I chose to stay with what I had. Or maybe it was my editor—I do recall her reminding me that I’d written a novel, not a dissertation. 

ME: I was thinking of the argument that it’s impossible to arrive at ‘historical truth’; instead, we only have a number of competing discourses about the past, all of which carry the biases of the people who created them. How does this affect the historical fiction author? 

CR: The more I ponder this question, the more I doubt there is any such thing as “historical truth”. The truth of the human condition is something art can suggest, but I don’t think anyone, including an archivist strictly reporting the facts, can ever deliver the Truth of a specific historic event. No one can, not even one who was present—each participant had a unique experience. 

So, how do I answer this? Of course I tend to trust historians who share my bias; yet I question even their theories. There is nothing like putting it into motion in a plot for exposing the holes in a theory. But I don’t see this as a change, something unique about the post-modern age. “Truth” is slippery. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never tried my hand at non-fiction! Even now, in this conversation, we’re role-playing, aren’t we?  I’ve gone off point again, I know—perhaps we’re simply more aware of the futility in the post-modern age. 

ME: You are best known for your Owen Archer series. Do you see a connection between the role of a detective such as Owen, and that of the author or historian in their search for elusive historical evidence?

CR: Oh yes, absolutely! I’ve honed my skill as an interrogator by spending so much time in the mind of a sleuth. I question everything, even the conclusions of scholars I respect (see above)! And that’s the delight of writing for me—I’m always reaching for that elusive idea just at the edge of the story. I write in layers of 'ahas'! I discover the story and the secrets of my characters as I go. Something seemingly insignificant that I add to the story today will wake me up tonight with a startling connection to something else. The seed event for the Countess of Salisbury story regarding the garter that I wove into A Triple Knot took shape in my mind as I wrote—I hadn’t planned it. I read the scholarly opinions and wound up with my own, but based on everything I’d read. The best sleuths are independent thinkers, aren’t they? Inspector Morse, Miss Marple, Sherlock Holmes—they’re always irritating people with seemingly irrelevant questions.  

ME: Can an author – or an academic historian, for that matter – ever truly get inside the head of a figure from the medieval past? Or are our ways of thought too different from theirs?

CR: Can anyone ever truly get inside another’s head? Even our contemporaries? I enjoy trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who knows nothing of technology, who perhaps can’t read or write, who may never have traveled more than a few miles from their homes. But am I accurate? Perhaps a little, perhaps more than that. I enjoy the attempt. Perhaps the reason I found this work so engaging and accessible is that I’d been steeped in the literature of the period—songs, poems, epics, sermons. At the end of the day, as the author of trade fiction my primary job is to entertain my contemporaries, so my characters need to make sense to them. 

  

ME: Historical fiction is written off as genre fiction by some critics. Do you see this changing, especially following the critical success of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels?

CR: All good writing deserves respect. 

ME: I agree – I think there can be a false dichotomy between ‘literary’ and ‘historical’ fiction. After all, Dickens, Flaubert, Dumas etc. wrote ‘historical’ novels. 

Which novelists have influenced your work?

CR: I don’t consciously follow anyone’s style, though I sometimes hear cadences of Anne Sexton’s poetry or Tom Stoppard’s dialogue and wonder whether I’ve read Transformations or seen (and read) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead too often. I believe that it was Marchette Chute’s children’s book The Innocent Wayfaring that brought to the foreground the medieval setting of so many fairy tales and stirred my curiosity about Chaucer. But if you mean whose writing I love, whose books inspired my own attempts at writing, oh, so many! I have eclectic taste. Early influences—E. Nesbit, Margaret Sutton (the Judy Bolton detective series), Madeleine L’Engle (I wrote to invite her to my Brownie Scouts meeting when I was presenting a book report on A Wrinkle in Time—she cordially declined). Soon I shifted to Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Stewart, Mary Renault, Anya Seton. Later, Ursula LeGuin, P. D. James, C. J. Cherryh (for making the strange feel familiar), Martha Grimes (the humor and the community of  characters), Colin Dexter (for Morse’s irritating questions), John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (for playing with stereotypes about the past), Raymond Chandler, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, J. R. R. Tolkien. I’ll stop there. I think I’ve gone far past the point of your question. 

ME: Surveys such as Mary Tod’s suggest that the majority of historical fiction authors and readers are women. Why do you think this might be? 

CR: Hm… respondents were 83% female, 17% male, but does that have more to do with who’s more likely to answer such a survey, and be reached online, or who reads historical fiction? And it can’t help but vary according to the author, or even among an author’s books. I have a large Italian readership that isn’t even specifically represented here. I warn you, I performed horribly on multiple choice and true/false questions in school—my mind immediately begins spinning through possible exceptions. 

That said, if the statistics are true, perhaps this has as much to do with who editors perceive as the audience, and hence what they buy, as it does with what the market might support. And consider the covers, the headless woman in period dress (not necessarily the period of the novel) or the woman with her back to the observer. I’ve sensed editors increasingly playing to the female reader. Despite the popularity of the Owen Archer series, whenever I’ve suggested a new series my agents have recommended I choose a female sleuth. My fan “mail,” whether electronic or paper (increasingly rare), has a slightly higher male to female ratio for the Owen Archers, and reversed for the Margaret Kerrs, The King’s Mistress and A Triple Knot. 

But I’ve noticed a number of self-published authors writing male-dominated books with heavily martial themes and little evidence, at least in the marketing copy or the covers, of romance. I wonder whether they simply could not get the attention of traditional publishers?

See? I always search for the exceptions to the apparent rule. It’s a fascinating survey, but my mind can’t rest there. 

ME: I’ve noticed the ‘headless woman’ trend recently. Do you have any thoughts about why this trend has come about? I worry that female identity is being erased by these covers that don’t show the woman as an individual – I am over-thinking this, or is this a real concern? 

CR: It’s ghastly, isn’t it? I asked my editor at Crown about it a few years ago. Her explanation was that readers don’t like to have the appearance of the heroine thrust upon them, so the publishers have chosen to either not show the heroine’s head at all, or just from the back (as with my two most recent trade paperbacks in the US). 

Yours is an interesting take. 

ME: Was there any feminist (however we wish to interpret that word) intent behind your desire to write about Alice Perrers and Joan of Kent, given that both of them (Alice especially) have arguably been misrepresented by history?

CR: Yes, of course there was some feminist intent, but that motivation would not have gotten me far if I’d not found Alice and Joan strong, complicated women with stories that defied categorization. I once made the mistake of making light of Alice Perrers, in several of the Owen Archer novels; but even in those books I found her too slippery to stay in the cliché. She kept spinning away, changing the story. Joan of Kent has intrigued me ever since I read Karl P. Wentersdorf’s article “The Clandestine Marriages of the Fair Maid of Kent” (Medieval History 5, 1979, 203-131). And then, after exploring her in middle age in A Vigil of Spies (Owen Archer #10), and working with her as a fairly important character in The King’s Mistress, I could not resist the challenge of unraveling the story of her marriages. 

ME: Why do you think there is such an ongoing fascination among the reading public with the Middle Ages? 

CR: Pre-industrial, pre-technology, close enough in time and culture to be familiar and yet far enough in the past to be exotic? Dungeons and Dragons? Tolkien? George R. R. Martin? Armor? Knights? Owen Archer? Hah! (Shrug.) Fairy tales often feel as if they take place in a medieval setting, and, of course, Arthurian tales were read to us at bedtime. Perhaps it simply feels familiar. 

ME: Will we be seeing you at Kalamazoo [International Congress on Medieval Studies] this May?

CR: Yes, you will. Catch me in the roundtable sponsored by the Tales After Tolkien Society, 'From Frodo to Fidelma: Medievalisms in Popular Genres,' 1:30 Saturday. My topic is “Crimes and Conspiracies in Town and Court: Embodying Late Medieval Life”. See you there!

Michael Evans
Central Michigan University

D’Arcens and Lynch (eds): International Medievalism and Popular Culture

Louise D’ Arcens and Andrew Lynch (eds). International Medievalism and Popular Culture. New York: Cambria, 2014. 261pp.

Review by: Molly Brown (molly.brown@up.ac.za)

In one of the essays in this volume, Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg comment that “nothing is easier to mock than medieval aspirations under the harsh light of colonial sunshine” (94). The opposition established in this wry comment on the appearance of the United Tinsmiths marching through the early twentieth-century streets of Melbourne dressed in full or partial suits of armour is reflected throughout this collection in which contemporary scholars associated with the global South focus their attention on a range of tropes and issues conventionally linked to a Northern past. The resulting polarization throws new light on both post-colonial and medieval concerns, allowing two once othered discourses to interact in unexpected and illuminating ways.

The editors acknowledge that achieving this exhilarating creative synergy was precisely their intention. In their introduction they refer to the significance of what Caroline Dinshaw has recently termed atemporal encounters in which “different time frames or temporal systems collid[e]” and argue that the recursive presence of the medieval within the modern not only blurs temporal distinctions, but actually “creates a cultural topography in which national boundaries are redrawn or erased, and familiar polarities and spatial coordinates no longer apply” (xii). In this way the volume becomes a celebration of the multitemporal potentialities inherent in a variety of perspectives on how medievalism may be seen to permeate and in some cases, articulate socio-political aspects of modernity and even postmodernity. 

The current proliferation of volumes of thematically-linked academic essays has been fuelled at least in part, by a postmodern predilection for heteroglossia, but all too often, a form that should facilitate unexpected insights and stimulating differences collapses instead into works in which the individual components talk past instead of to each other. Thanks to the editors’ clear sense and lucid articulation of the importance of the new topography they aim to explore, the essays in  International Medievalism and Popular Culture are given the freedom to range widely without any threat to the essential coherence of the collection as a whole.

International Medievalism and Popular Culture contains twelve essays on subjects ranging from medievalism and contemporary Middle Eastern politics to the presentation of dragons and teenage wizards in fantasies for younger readers. Such is the current rage for specialization that many readers are likely to turn only to those essays directly related to their own interests, but  those who do this will not fully appreciate the strength of the collection as a whole, since all of these essays are linked by a nuanced understanding of how concepts of the medieval commonly infuse and enter into dialogue with responses to the contemporary.

Appropriately enough, the opening essay by Clare Monagle addresses crucial issues of sovereignty and neomedievalism by revisiting the seminal work of an earlier Australian political theorist, Hedley Bull. Bull argued as early as 1977 that the once-dominant concept of the national state was in decline before later suggesting in The Anarchical Society (1995) that this decline would lead to what he called the New Medievalism, a secular version of the system of overlapping or segmented authority presented by him as characteristic of medieval Christendom. Monagle deftly acknowledges the significance of Bull’s work, while also revealing that it may be read as rooted in anxiety about all non-modern forms of political life, so that the “actions of socialist and third world states, the actions of terrorists, and the political formations of primitive societies prior to invasion and colonisation, as well as the political cultures of the Western Middle Ages themselves…are all yoked under the analogy of the medieval, flattened into a disturbing past and a futurological otherness” (12).In this way, Monagle is able to show that the concept of New Medievalism as applied by neoconservatives leads to a refusal to consider the “specificity of the other’s historicity” (13) allowing al Qaeda, for instance, to be presented as the medievalised enemy.

This tendency to use the medieval as a lens through which to examine and even counteract current East West conflicts is illuminatingly developed in Louise D’Arcens analysis of three films by Riddley Scott. D’Arcens, who is widely known for her work on medievalism in Australian and international contexts, argues persuasively that Scott uses his films to explore subjects too sensitive to address more directly, so that in a startling reversal, Robin Hood’s tactics of resistance against his Norman oppressors (Robin Hood, 2010) can be seen to echo the ground-level activities of al Qaeda and the central figure in Body of Lies (2008) “rather than seeking a better Aussie-style multicultural life for all, goes to ground, quite possibly to become a high-skill terrorist” (249). Intriguingly, American medievalist, John Ganim shows that it is not merely the western gaze that projects medieval memes onto contemporary conflicts but that great Islamic medieval figures such as Saladin, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta have become powerful symbols for those anxious to modernise the Islamic world from within. Each of these medieval figures has been used in various contexts and in various Arab states to evoke tradition, but the tradition concerned is one of “Golden Age cosmopolitanism, of geographic mobility before the borders of nation-states, and of often improvisational inventiveness” (71).

If medievalism can allow for multiple interpretations of the othered Orient, a second group of essays from International Medievalism and Popular Culture focuses on how the medieval may help, in Chantal Bourgault du Coudray’s words “to reinstate values that are essential to the reinvention of a subjective experience that challenges the gendered dynamics of Cartesian thought” (153). Du Coudray’s positive re-visioning of the story of Red Riding Hood refreshingly undermines standard readings of the story as one that restricts the feminine and promotes patriarchal authority. Laurie Ormond’s study of witch hunters in contemporary fantasy fiction makes an interesting companion piece to Du Coudray’s essay in that it draws on a similar body of theory, but uses it to infer that while fantasy fiction rarely elides sexual violence against women and therefore resists conventions that systematically downplay the trauma this causes, such works cannot be seen as legitimate forms of feminist protest because they also conform too readily to enduring cultural stereotypes grounded in “an essentialist understanding of female vulnerability that accompanies the figure of the monstrous and deviant rapist” (177). Nicholas Haydock, on the other hand, discusses Julia Kristeva’s   Murder in Byzantium in which a modern scholar is drawn into an enhanced understanding of the First Crusade by an interest in the writing of the Byzantine princess Anna Komnene. Stephen Knight observes in his engaging conclusion to the collection that the reverse pilgrimage described by Haydock  both “claims the Medieval for the Middle-East” and simultaneously uses “forms of abjection seen across time as reason at war with meaning, but also as access to the other”(249).

This idea of accessing otherness is crucial to any assessment of International Medievalism and Popular Culture since it demonstrates not only that the oriental and the woman can both be simultaneously othered and affirmed by competing medievalisms, but so also may the child, who  as modern theorists have noted, has much in common with both. Clare Bradford’s essay, “Here Be Dragons”, argues that dragon stories promote a ludic engagement with texts in that they offer images of delightful alterity, while in no way deluding young readers about the precise boundaries of the fictional and the real. Instead she suggests that by drawing attention to “the codes, conventions and cultural meanings that inform dragon narratives….[such stories] teach interpretive strategies, conducting a kind of training in reading the medieval” (221). In ‘The Battle for Reality’, on the other hand, Helen Dell makes a thought-provoking contribution to the interpretation of the animosity felt towards Harry Potter by the religious right. Rather than glibly dismissing this as an instance of either hysterical fanaticism or neoconservative distrust of the imagination, Dell carefully teases out the implications of a logocentric world view in which words are both frighteningly potent and dangerously vulnerable to change. This leads her to conclude suggestively that “J.K. Rowling with her free-wheeling, ‘unbaptized’ imagination and her blithe disregard for the potency of words together with her immense popularity, presents conservatives with the gravest of threats – the threat to reality” (33).

While a Southern sensibility infuses almost all the essays in this volume, it is particularly apparent in what might be seen as the three most overtly Australian essays in the book. The first of these is Karen Hall’s exploration of medieval influences and connections in the work of four contemporary Australian artists: Alexia Sinclair, G.W. Bot, Irene Barberis, and Laith Mc Gregor. The second is Helen Hickey and Stephanie Trigg’s nuanced study of the ways in which organised labour in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Melbourne consciously positioned itself in relation to medieval chivalry in ways that are both reminiscent of and different from the strategies used by  the international Knights of Labour. The third is Anne McKendry’s analysis of how Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger and Russell Crowe flavour the medieval-themed films, Braveheart (1995), A Knight’s Tale (2001) and Robin Hood (2010), with an Australian sense of mateship expressed in terms of a distinctively egalitarian sense of male bonding, which she argues also “functions as an unidentified – yet discernible factor in the appeal these characters have for broader international audiences” (198). Each of these articles is remarkable for foregrounding the fact that concepts of medievalism do not simply feed into contemporary life, but  in complex reflexive processes, are themselves altered and shaped by current conventions and modes of expression.

If one were of a mind to quibble, one might wish for more chapters like those described in the previous paragraph, analyses that are both unequivocally local and yet suggestive of broader global patterns. It would certainly have been intriguing to have had articles by scholars firmly located in other areas of the global South to sharpen awareness of what Australian and global medievalism have in common and also give a clearer indication of what differentiates them. I confess too that I found the grouping of illustrations at the end of chapters annoying as it required one to riffle continuously backward and forward, especially in chapters like that by Karen Hall where an appreciation of images was central to an understanding of her argument. In addition, I suspect that the casual reader might also have appreciated the listing of full titles in the table of contents so that it would not be necessary to turn to the first page of each essay in order to get a clear indication of its subject matter. Despite these minor qualms, however, International Medievalism and Popular Culture is an intelligently edited, original and suggestive collection that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in the fields of either postcolonial studies or contemporary medievalism. 

Molly Brown

University of Pretoria

South Africa