Tolkien: The Fall of Arthur

J.R.R. Tolkien. The Fall of Arthur. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Reviewed by: Alex Mueller (alex.mueller@umb.edu)

Imagine Sir Thomas Malory pouring over the alliterative poem before him, reveling in its contagious rhythms, until the cataclysmic fall of Arthur causes him to stop short. Arthur has just ravaged the Italian countryside, led his glorious knights to their deaths, and even ordered his enemy’s children to be tossed into the sea. What might happen, Malory wonders, if he were to replace these undesirable episodes of violence and tyranny with investigations of the psyches of his beloved Guinevere, her lover Lancelot, and the lecherous Mordred, all the while retaining the sonorous sounds of war through alliterative verse? For those of us who know Malory’s treatment of the Roman campaign, this speculation is easy to imagine, especially since he drew his material for this section directly from the alliterative Morte Arthure. If this is the first tale Malory composed, as Eugène Vinaver suggests, this challenge is answered with a compromise between prose and poetry, which embraces the psychological plotlines from his “French books” and jettisons the strict cadences of alliterative long lines.[1]

Almost five hundred years later, J.R.R. Tolkien must have been grappling with the same question. And with the publication of The Fall of Arthur, we know that his answer was strikingly different. Within this unfinished poem, we witness Tolkien’s attempt to versify Malory’s conflation of the betrayals of Mordred and Lancelot through the undulating dactyls of alliterative poetry. The result is a militarized, yet dimly-lit, romance that offers unprecedented access into the conflicted hearts of Arthur and Guinevere, who both yearn for the return of the Lord of Benwick, Sir Lancelot. While Mordred’s aggressive pursuit of Arthur’s queen sets the sovereign’s vengeance in motion, it is the transparent musings of the illicit lovers that will grip Tolkien’s audiences.

Perhaps the poem’s most significant contribution to Arthurian legend is its descriptions of Guinevere’s love for Lancelot. Whereas most romances, such as Chrétien de Troyes’ Chevalier de la Charrette, privilege Lancelot’s ardent devotion, Tolkien imagines “Guinever the golden” (II.27) fiercely guarding resplendent jewels of desire:

. . .     But cold silver

or glowing gold     greedy-hearted

in her fingers taken     fairer thought she,

more lovely deeming     what she alone treasured

darkly hoarded.     Dear she loved him

with love unyielding,     lady ruthless,

fair as fay-woman     and fell-minded

in the world walking     for the woe of men. (III.49-56)

With the “ruthless” disposition of The Hobbit’s Smaug the Golden, Guinevere avariciously prizes Lancelot above all, causing “woe” for men and complicating her conventional restraint. The stanza even concludes with the enigmatic, “Strong oaths they broke” (III.62), which suggests a mutual violation, either of their love for each other or their loyalty to Arthur. As editor Christopher Tolkien notes, an earlier draft that read “Strong oaths she broke” [my emphasis] had been replaced with “Strong oaths they broke” [my emphasis], providing further evidence that Guinevere’s culpability was a central concern (184). Yet, in a previous draft of his characterization of Guinevere as “fair as fay-woman” (III.75), Tolkien labeled her “fair and faultless” (181) indicating an early agenda of recuperation of this much-maligned queen.

A she-dragon “with gleaming limbs” (II.27) guarding her hoarded love, nevertheless, is the image that remains. It is probable, I would submit, that this symbol occurred to Tolkien in his reading of the alliterative Morte Arthure. A dragon appears promiscuously throughout the poem, representing both Arthur in his first dream (786-832) and the Roman legions as a heraldic device (1251-2; 2026-7; 2052-7).[2] The Morte-poet’s obsession with descriptions of battle standards reemerges in Tolkien’s amplification of the grandeur of battle through heraldic ekphrasis:

            Dragon-prowed they drive   over dark billows;

            on shores unguarded   shields are gleaming

            and black banners   borne amid trumpets. (I.157-9)

More than any other symbol, the dragon pervades the poem, unfortunately to its detriment. In contrast to the variation and portability of the alliterative Morte’s heraldic descriptions, “dragon-prowed” is thrice-repeated and applied redundantly to Prydwen, Arthur’s ship (I.157; II.8; IV.177). With the exception of the abrupt ending at Romeril, the needless repetition of stock phrases such as “Dawn came dimly (III.193; IV.15) mark this brief poem as unpolished work.

Christopher Tolkien, however, provides some solace to the unsatisfied reader by appending to the poem a compelling section, “The Unwritten Poem and its Relation to the Silmarillion,” in which he attempts to reconstruct the future directions of the poem from the nearly illegible notes left behind. In addition to a provocative discussion of the connections between the Arthurian Avalon and the Silmarillion’s Tol Eressëa (137-63), Christopher Tolkien demonstrates the early use his father was making of the alliterative Morte. For example, whereas Arthur’s lament over the death of Gawain in the Morte includes the lines “A! dowttouse derfe dede, thous duellis to longe! / Why drawes thou so one dreghe? thow drownnes my herte!” (130), one draft among his notes attempts a close translation: “Ah, dread death thou dwellest too long, / thou drownest my heart ere I die” (131).[3] This exercise and the later drafts of the poem suggest that Tolkien was interested in reducing the alliterative long lines of the Morte to the shorter staves of Anglo-Saxon verse. And in a subsequent instance, he even inserts Beowulf into the scene of Arthur’s mourning, in which Sir Iwain chides his king by saying, “to weep as a woman is not wit holden / better vengeance than lament” (132). Whereas the Morte provides the first line, “To wepe als a woman, it es no witt holden,” the second line likely comes from Beowulf’s speech to Hrothgar, “Selre bið æghwæm, / þæt his freond wrece, þonne he flea murne” [Better is it for every man / that he should avenge his friend than he should much lament] (132). Apparently, Tolkien was happily raiding two alliterative word-hoards, remixing their content and rhythms for the best possible effects.

Without Christopher Tolkien’s accompanying commentary, The Fall of Arthur seems less remarkable, and at times disappointing. This is no doubt why he chose to surround this short poem of 954 lines with so much supplementary material. Yet, the amount of commentary, which ranges from a “Foreword” and “Notes on the Text of The Fall of Arthur” to essays on “The Poem in Arthurian Tradition,” “The Evolution of the Poem,” and Old English Verse,” is excessive, especially for a poem that had no previous public life. Taken as a whole, this book is comprised of a commentary that often overwhelms – and is in danger of over-determining – its text. While Tolkien enthusiasts will likely enjoy this new Arthurian context for the Mirkwood of Middle-earth, I am reminded of Morton Bloomfield’s clever characterization of Piers Plowman. He says that experiencing this often-mystifying alliterative poem is “like reading a commentary upon an unknown text.”[4] Until now The Fall of Arthur has been an “unknown text.” And while its commentary is often useful and provocative, it fails to distinguish itself from the text, making it difficult for the reader to evaluate the poem on its own merits.

Alex Mueller 
University of Massachusetts Boston

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[1] Eugène Vinaver, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), I.xli. 

[2] Line numbers refer to the following edition: King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. Larry D. Benson, rev. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994). The full text is available here: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/benson-and-foster-king-arthurs-death-alliterative-morte-arthur-part-i.

[3] Christopher Tolkien notes that his father used Edmund Brock’s 1871 Early English Text Society edition, which is also the edition used for quotations of the alliterative Morte in this book.

[4] Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Piers Plowman’ as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 32.

Barthélemy: The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian

Barthélemy, Dominique. The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian. Trans. Graham Robert Edwards. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Elizabeth S. Leet (esl8ck@virginia.edu)

In the ten years after the original publication of Mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu? (Fayard, 1997), the combative argumentation and vehement assertions that characterize Dominique Barthélemy’s monograph continue to echo throughout medieval scholarship surrounding the social, political, and military climates of the post-Carolingian period. By opposing the “reductionist and unbalanced” caricatures of both feudal society and, in particular, the so-called pivotal shifts between 930 and 1070 after which feudal society came into being, Barthélemy revisits the evidence that leads others to false conclusions. By dissecting texts and their respective contexts, he demonstrates the more complete understanding we may gain by reconsidering the evidence without anticipating the monolithic conclusions scholars have sometimes drawn.

Now, with the publication of Graham Robert Edwards’ The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian (Cornell University Press, 2009), Anglophone readers have the long-desired translation of Barthélemy’s influential monograph. With its new preface and concluding chapter, revisions to chapter one that include extensive summaries of such leaders in the field as Georges Duby, Marc Bloch, and Pierre Bonnassie, as well as an updated bibliography, this recent version has brought its heated debate to new audiences and has encouraged new participants in the ever-relevant discussion of the pivotal year 1000 A.D. Over the course of its nine individual essays exploring such topics as the rise of serfdom, the role of monasteries as centers of document production, and the different roles expected of the knightly class, The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian presents a comprehensive reevaluation of documentary evidence that has often led scholars to false conclusions.

In chapter one, “Revisiting the ‘Feudal Revolution’ of the Year 1000,” Barthélemy both acknowledges the contributions made by Georges Duby but also accuses him quite pointedly of making sweeping generalizations and using all-or-nothing reasoning. Duby postulated a deterioration in socio-political organization between 980 and 1030 that led to the rise of feudalism and its concomitant martial unrest. Barthélemy, therefore, contests any such totalizing perspective on what he argues was a gradual progression rather than a sudden change. This newly-revised chapter announces the author’s project of comparing recent historians who posit a “feudalization of the year 1000” with previous scholars who did not identify such a drastic and rapid shift. From this point forward, the book juxtaposes these two popular perspectives on post-Carolingian Western Europe and demonstrates how reevaluations of lexicon, categorical evaluations of socio-political organization, the contexts in which documents appeared and circulated, and the role of millenarianism can inform and enhance our understanding of the period.

Barthélemy moves to another case study, this time regarding the serf, a figure often cited and exploited by scholars to argue in favor of reductionist models of a sociopolitical crisis leading immediately to feudalism. In his second chapter “From Charters to Notices: The Example of Saint-Aubin, Angers,” Barthélemy identifies Olivier Guillot and Alain de Boüard as two proponents of “an ‘undeniable’ crisis in law and diplomatics.” (12) They claim that the proliferation of notices is a sign of crisis – despite an inability to define precisely what constitutes a notice.  Barthélemy structures this chapter – and the monograph as a whole – around the disparity between crisis and gradual progression, discussing the terminological differences – both assumed and supported – between notices and charters, the case for documentary diversification instead of a total rupture with previous styles and forms of legal treatises, the legitimization of the autographic cross, and finally the detailed narrative and discursive additions to evidential legal documents. The previous examples of legal documentation support Barthélemy's claim: scholars have tended to draw distinctions between notices and charters on the basis of their respective “objective” and “subjective” natures, just as they have also differentiated between the years preceding and following the year 1000 as though they, too, illustrate markedly different systems. (14) The case-study approach reduces the evidence to few examples, though thorough notes point to other instances and wider trends in documentation.

Barthélemy’s evidence demonstrates at each turn not that official documents employed radically new stylistic or formalistic modes, but rather that new types of documents joined the old. Furthermore, these documents often demonstrated little more than the particular tension between monastic orders and the surrounding communities. In other words, “The pattern is not so extraordinary: a recently founded or reformed monastery rubs up against its social environment, generating a host of charters and notices, transfers of property, and occasionally some friction, which the historian is then tempted to describe and model more or less as a sort of ‘feudal transformation.’” (27) Typifying his characteristically aggressive yet lucid tone, Barthélemy explains the faulty logic that espouses monolithic generalizations and demonstrates the limitations of scholarship that leads to such conclusions, described by Barthélemy as flimsy and spurious. The evidence points to texts that exercise a “narrative deposition of importance” instead of a total change in socio-political, legal, or juridical forms, the evidence supporting Barthélemy’s description of a world increasingly focused on the written record rather than having undergone a drastic transformation. (28)

The third chapter, “Voluntary Serfdom at Marmoutier in Touraine,” illustrates the unexpected frequency with which “free” people assumed the state of a serf and the problematic term servitude, “having dealt […] too hard a blow,” leading scholars to assumptions about what constituted such a life. (39) By examining the narrative development in acts of self-enserfment from the late eleventh century, Barthélemy illustrates the limitations of contemporary definitions of servitude and disproves two misconceptions hailing from the nineteenth century: first, that serfdom is a form of “monstrous traffic in men and women,” and second, that manumission undermined serfdom. (43) The gesture of a would-be serf to place a rope about his neck during the rite of self-enserfment would certainly seem to confirm these fears. Yet Barthélemy asserts that this rite insinuates the central relationship of a sinner to God, rather than a commodity surrendered to a new owner. Though he, too, acknowledges the resemblance between this image and an imagery of slavery, he identifies multiple referents that inform these rites and the interpretation thereof.

He concludes this chapter by discussing the contingent distinctions between serf and free person. The dependency of self-enserfment reflects yet further its similarity to vassalage as opposed to slavery, blurring the lines between serf, slave, and free person on the basis of their contractual or status-linked basis. These discrepancies appear also in the practices of chevage, or head tax, as well as marriage and inheritance taxes. In sum, the inclusion of adult members in this ritual of serfdom represents, as Barthélemy puts it, “entry into adulthood or to a stage, a new departure, in a career.” (58) As such, the stakes of serfdom fall within a social category more aptly named “servile status,” for despite the frequent use of property ownership to dominate the serf, he still, “[b]y gaining an indisputable foothold in property, […] had fundamentally emancipated himself in a way that the slave had not; on it he established a family.” (65)

Chapter four provides both a wealth of insight and a fair number of challenges. Entitled “Serfdom and its Rites,” the chapter covers an immense amount of ground, beginning by announcing the erroneous assumption made by Pierre Bonnassie that, around the year 1000, institutional Antique slavery gave way to the characteristic serfdom of feudal society. Barthélemy cites the misconception of medieval serfdom as legally rather than socially constructed, as well as the frequent terminological misconceptions that have often led scholars to equate servus with slave or serf and incurring the subsequent penalties of such a lexical leap. The fact that eleventh century servitude included diverse social and political stations, as well as the ownership of property and a juridical provision that allowed serfs to testify on behalf of their superiors is also particularly revealing. In sum, Barthélemy addresses existing evidence and unearths new texts that cover a wide historiographical territory, making this chapter equally illuminating and unwieldy.

The greatest strength of his fourth chapter is the nineteenth century scholarship that prefigures his own description of several overlapping versions of servitude, slavery, and serfdom. Initial insight into Guérard – whose theory that the three coexisting but distinct conditions of slavery, servitude, and serfdom set the tone for future historical studies of proportionality between such states of servitude – structures the evidence and allows the reader to trace the same thread throughout the chapter. Barthélemy cites Bloch’s theory that chevage, mainmorte, and formariage, while levying heavy financial obligations on the serf, also reflected the serf’s possession of a “genuine patrimony” and reinforced the distinction between life in servitude and servile status. (76) The chapter goes on to engage with popular presumptions about emancipation and manumission in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the mediation of negative associations with servitude by suggesting the only true servitude was to sin, thus rendering its feudal variety sufferable, and even the relationship between kinship-driven nobility and the possible telescoping of qualities of servitude within one noble person. By complicating the supposed dichotomy between noble and serf, Barthélemy destabilizes reader expectations yet further by describing the ministeriales (mayors or provosts) who, while technically serfs, challenge the modern assumptions that serfs were exclusively agrarian laborers.

In chapters five and six, Barthélemy moves from a discussion of serfdom to the other end of the chivalric spectrum – the knightly class. In chapter five, “The Word miles and the History of Knighthood,” he charts the terminological rise of miles (knights) in the tenth century from the previous caballius (horseman) and vassus (vassal). This medieval caste, beginning with the values of “perfect fidelity and military art,” soon grew into complex cultural rites like dubbing, tournaments, courtly rituals, and crusading. (144) Barthélemy argues for a knighthood “symbolized by arms and horses” and indistinguishable from the “public ethos” of the knight’s sword as royal weapon serving the public interest. (156) As such, he asserts that knighthood predates the “transformation of the year 1000” and moves into chapter six, “Carolingian Knighthood.” Here, Barthélemy disputes the theory that a militarized, Christian knighthood developed in the post-Carolingian period when evidence supports the existence of such a class in the ninth century. Though preceding the elaborate rituals that characterized high medieval chivalry, the ninth century knight bore the only crucial symbols of his status: arms and a horse. The “warrior beauty” (164) embodied by these “protochivalric” Carolingian knights demonstrates what Barthélemy argues convincingly, that the feudal system developed gradually over the course of a century rather than suddenly around the year 1000. (162)

The shift towards the secular and the political continues throughout chapter seven, “Knighthood and Nobility around the year 1000.” By charting the continuity of knightly roles, as well as their contribution to the surprising legal stability of this period often assumed to be rife with intertribal and intercastellan fighting. Furthermore, the relationship between hereditary nobility and earned knighthood, as well as the complex rites that solidified both – from marriage to a wealthy woman or the dubbing procedure – complicates what scholars have often argued about the nature of feudal aristocracy. Arguments illuminating the real relationship between the Church and the practices of knighthood – one that was tenuous at best – lead to Barthélemy’s exploration of the Peace of God and millenarianist movements around the year 1000 in his chapter eight. After all, violent knightly intervention might just as often serve the Church’s needs as violate its mores and Christian pacifism. The rise of the Crusades and the power wielded by the Templars belie any reticence with which Church authorities may have blessed the knights. Barthélemy explains, “[t]he Church was understandably wary of overvalidating the lay powers with whom it had such an ambivalent relationship or of providing advance cover for the sort of ‘blunders’ that sword fighters were bound to make.” (213) Even the sword and horse that defined a knight evoked luxury and “barbaric splendor” (221) such that constituted a problematic disparity between these two poles of power in the high Middle Ages – between the Christian ecclesiastical authority and the military might of the growing knightly classes.

The penultimate chapter, “The Peace of God in the Days of the Millennium,” discusses the supposed apocalyptic fervor around 1000 A.D. Moving from analysis of the relationship to the relatively secular power of the knights and nobility in chapter seven, Barthélemy demonstrates here the limited millenarian sentiment in the period and dispels the assertion that Peace of God initiatives were a popular effort to curtail the growing power, autonomy, and violence of knights. He insists, “The model narrative of the ‘feudal revolution’ uses the Peace of God twice over: as witness to the violence and as reaction to it. Is that not once too often?” (264) Barthélemy again challenges his reader to assume a healthy skepticism when reviewing the oft cited foundational studies of the period.

Added for the Cornell edition of Barthélemy’s Mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu?, the final chapter synthesizes the responses of the scholarly community to the arguments of his previous three hundred pages. After ten years of debate and controversy, he details the ground gained by the anti-transformation camp, while still admitting his role in solidifying a sort of loyal opposition to the dominant critical predisposition towards transformationism. Barthélemy even concedes that, while often the object of his critique due to a tendency towards “literal” terminological interpretation, the “transformationists” do land close to certain realities of the year 1000, despite a tendency towards “overschematization.” (305) Most interestingly, though, Barthélemy delineates his continued study of the Peace of God and its antiseigneurial reactions to the changes in the feudal aristocracy between the late ninth century and the mid twelfth century most broadly. Then, ending abruptly by mentioning the distinction between the exercise of knightly pastimes and occupations and a morally-inflected English notion of “chivalry,” the chapter – and the book itself – comes to a close.

Overall, Barthélemy presents a study both thorough and bold. By tilting at scholarly giants – challenging and correcting them, as he sees fit – the project is a quick and engaging read. Declarative sentences, exclamation points, and series of rhetorical questions lead the reader directly to Barthélemy's frustration with and corrections to more than 150 years of medieval historical scholarship. Regardless of each particular reader’s scholarly perspective or critical bent, the passion of the text, its distinctive authorial perspective, and its faithful translation by Graham Robert Edwards combine to present an exciting and energizing read that remains just as relevant today as upon its original appearance.

Elizabeth S. Leet
University of Virginia

McQueen, fashion designer: Medieval McQueen, The Final Collection

Photograph by Chris Moore

Alexander McQueen, Medieval McQueen: The Final Collection; presented March 9-10, 2010; Paris, France.

See images at http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/F2010RTW-AMQUEEN or http://huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/alexander-mcqueens-final_n_491773.html 

Reviewed by Kristina Olson (kristina.olson@mail.wvu.edu) 

and Janet Snyder (janet.snyder@mail.wvu.edu)

The last collection by fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) debuted during Paris Fashion Week a month after his death. Models with delicate thin necks and a serene air wore exquisitely cut Jacquards and silks printed with imagery from Old Master paintings, textures of encrusted pearls, cabochon jewels and feathers, rich colors of crimson, gold, black and ivory, and accessories including head wraps and sculpted stilettoes. Presented at the ornate 18th Century Hotel de Clermont-Tonnerre without the celebrated showman’s usual dramatic staging, these sixteen outfits were a departure from the street-savvy, hyper-sexualized creations that made McQueen’s reputation and a return to the medieval designs that had been an enduring source of inspiration for his work.

Any discussion of McQueen’s interpretation of medieval visual culture must begin with a definition of the Long Middle Ages, one that reaches from the twelfth century through the Early Modern Period. His was a selective articulation of essential details of medieval design enclosed within the outlines of his simple and pure forms. The extremely rich surface texture of his final collection may have been inspired by carved ivory, gold relief, pearled embroidery and metalwork as well as intricate details of panel paintings, gilded mosaics, and drawings. McQueen’s was not an interpretation of the medieval but a re-imagined medieval sensibility, carefully extracted from Holbein, Botticelli, Bosch, and Leonardo, from the silk-weavers and embroiderers of the tiraz of Roger II, and from the goldsmiths and ivory workers who produced fine crafts and reliquaries.

The designer had a life-long interest in the history of many cultures, material that he mined for his own creations. This historical curiosity was fed by his mother, Joyce, a teacher, florist, and keeper of the family genealogy. His father was of Scottish decent and a London cabbie. Raised in working-class South London, McQueen was close to his mother and devastated by her death (he took his own life the evening before her funeral). Realizing he wanted to be a fashion designer from a young age, he left school at sixteen and soon became a tailor’s apprentice to one of the most respected firms on famed Savile Row, the London street known for its shops offering traditional bespoke men’s clothing. McQueen always gave credit to this foundational experience, “I come from Savile Row. What I learned at sixteen is that to change menswear, you have to be like an architect; you work on the cut and proportion... You’ve got to know the rules to break them.  That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” [1] 

McQueen became fascinated with the traditions of historical garments while working freelance on theatrical costumes for the stage in the early 1990s. During this period he discovered Juan de Alcega’s Tailor’s Pattern Book of 1589, a source for some of his own early designs. [2] This mastering of traditional tailoring and historical influences was counter-balanced by his immersion in contemporary London’s Punk scene and gay culture where young designers self-identified as iconoclasts challenging the conventions of French haute couture. After a stint as a pattern cutter in Milan, McQueen returned to London to study design formally at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College and to finally launch his astonishing, if brief, career as a solo designer.

The observant scholar can easily discern an underlying medieval essence in his work. McQueen’s medieval encompassed a thousand years of design at the same time that it embodied a modern conception that medieval coincides with faith and prayers answered. In his final collection he did not appropriate specific designs; rather, he embraced medieval images for inspiration and moved on to articulate and extend his understanding of their essential meaning. His medieval is something original and redefined, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites [see metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf.htm]. For example, in these last sixteen ensembles, McQueen-designed textiles poetically recreated the quality of experience expressed in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Memorare and immortalized in Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Paradiso, one that articulated the most fervent faith of the medieval true believer, aspiring to the kind of hope that, even today, arises unbidden when one visits soaring medieval interior spaces transformed through light – at the cathedrals of Amiens or Chartres or Bourges. McQueen’s designs [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshows/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#13] used color, movement, and form to invoke the immediacy of personal reverence expressed during the Middle Ages through symbols of purity: the sacrificial lamb, the lily, the fleur-de-lis. In this final collection, the textiles of gowns in looks 10, 11, and 12 recalled the tender petals of spring’s first peonies like a Botticelli Primavera (1477-82) [see uffizi.org/artworks/la-primavera-allegory-of-spring-by-sandro-botticelli] or the daVinci Annunciation (c.1472-75) [virtualuffizi.com/uffizi1/Uffizi_Pictures.asp?Contatore=126]; in look 13, they whispered like the presence of angels [see tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-domini-the-annunciation-n01210 ]; in looks 5 and 16, the forms themselves embraced the body like seraphim wings, conjuring up the dark music of the second feathered cellist who serenades the Virgin in the Nativity of Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16) [see musee-unterlinden.com/assets/images/_nouvel_accueil/nativite-detail-slider.jpg].

Perhaps the most striking garment in the collection was the red and gold coat [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#6] derived from the Coronation regalia of the Holy Roman emperor (see kaiserliche-schatzkammer.at/en/visit/collections/secular-treasury/selected-masterpieces/). Here, as with all of the garments presented, the model’s head was minimized under a tight wrap. These tiny heads were not bald, but enclosed, reduced and extended in some cases with crests of feathers, recalling the helms of romantic medieval knights [see metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/475487?rpp=20&pg=1&ft=tower+of+love+ivory&pos=3]. Her head was like the finial on an architectural tower while thigh-high boots acted like piloti supporting this wedge of a coat. Finally, gloved fingertips peeked out from the flare of an arced sleeve that intersected the garment’s hem.

That Mantle of Roger II, made in Palermo in 1131 − with its lions and camels − was not copied in McQueen’s version, rather it was echoed as the faces of the lions framed the bodice; the bold red and gold striped body and clawed feet strode − minus the subjugated camels − across the model’s hips; the flanks of the lions reached across her forearms to intersect the hips while attenuated, swirling lion tails caressed her upper arms. It was the Mantle of Roger II deconstructed and restructured within the vocabulary of McQueen. The hemline pattern restated not that of the original Mantle but the swirling embroidery of the slippers of the Coronation regalia of the Holy Roman emperor.

The same appropriated lion, again striding without the camel, reappeared in a black and gold coat, complete with shoulder cape, like a cardinal’s capa or Sherlock Holmes’ shoulder cape, modified [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#8]. The hemline of the longer cape appeared to be inspired by lions that flank the Tree of Life in Palermo mosaics or sculpted facades at Mshatta, Jordan.

McQueen reconsidered and redefined the medieval throughout this last collection. In addition to the strongly-colored, weighty-fabric coats there were delicate white dresses with floor-length skirts, some with attenuated trains.  They evoked the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Annunciation (1849-50) [see tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-domini-the-annunciation-n01210] where Mary’s response is profoundly courageous and reverent: her desperation expresses a fine fragility, a terror, and intimacy. The same is true in these more subtle works by McQueen. He seems to have been inspired by visual elements of medieval ensembles, but in his use of those elements he stepped reverentially back, with no more expression than the women in Holbein’s portraits. Taken together, this final collection was ethereal, as immaterial and unknowable as angelic spirits, spectacular as the mosaics at Palermo and the regalia of the emperor.

It is in contrast with related McQueen work that his engagement with the medieval can be perceived.  As with all of his creations, these concluding designs expressed preoccupations in the artist’s own life.  McQueen acknowledged the connection between his life and work saying, “My collections have always been autobiographical ... They were about to do with my childhood, the way I think about life and the way I was brought up to think about life.”[3] His encounter with the hope and faith inherent in passionate medieval designs during the final period of his mother’s and his own lives found fresh expression in the complexities of the textiles he created here. McQueen’s last collection can be characterized as reaching for the state that Abbot Suger described in defense of his twelfth-century reconstruction of the Abbey church at Saint-Denis: “... transporting me from material to immaterial things ... I seem to see myself existing on some level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of earth nor completely in the purity of heaven.”[4]

This is the same dichotomy found across McQueen’s oeuvre and celebrated in the very title, Savage Beauty, of the stunning retrospective exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011. For many, he will be remembered for the earthy, S&M-inspired designs like the PVC underpants and spine sweater of the Banshee collection (Autumn/Winter 1994-95) or the burgundy leather armor for his modern-day Joan of Arc (Autumn/Winter 1998-99). These last sixteen designs differ profoundly even from his more ethereal, heaven-oriented work, such as his Wedding Collections, where there is dramatic depth, volume and sumptuous flavor. They differ too from the recent designs carried on by his atelier, as in the fall 2013 McQueen collection, where references to the medieval continue to be found. The heart-breaking delicacy is gone now, replaced by a frank self-confidence, an internal completeness and secure finality in each ensemble. In the final collection, this openly autobiographical designer made use of the medieval to bare his soul and leave us with the rich legacy of the essential medieval, the essential McQueen.

Kristina Olson
Janet Snyder

West Virginia University
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[1] From an interview in GQ Magazine from 2004 quoted in Judith Watt, Alexander McQueen: The Life and the Legacy (New York: Harper Design, 2012), 19.

[2] Ibid., 23.

[3] From an interview in British Vogue from October 2002, quoted in Andrew Bolton, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 16.

[4] David Burr, trans., “Abbot Suger: ON WHAT WAS DONE IN HIS ADMINISTRATION,” Internet Medieval Sourcebook (January 1996), http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/sugar.html.