Medieval British Literature

The aim of this work is to analyze the structure of the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight according to the Joseph Campbell’s version of the journey of the hero as discussed in his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces and as part of this aim to discover mythical patterns and actions and identify the possible archetypes of characters present in this poem.

What does it mean that so many medievalists, especially in the United States and in Canada, study the European middle ages without being from or of Europe? What does it mean if we specify, further, those who don’t come from the United States or Canada either, but from areas of the world that experienced western European empire, as most of the globe did, as a systematic political and psychological subordination to Europe? I take the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s depiction of late twentieth-century London in his long narrative poem Omeros as a way to pose the question of what Europe might look like from the other side of the relationship of domination, that is, to define Walcott’s Europe. Walcott’s London repudiates Europe, and with it what he calls History, exactly the kind of history made by the European epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante in the form of the world-destinies they constructed for Europe in the cities of Troy and Rome, and made by their would-be successor London. But he does so with difficulty: the Troy of Homer and Virgil has long sought to seduce him into rendering his own island into its terms, elegiac and nostalgic. He seeks instead a poetry of the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present tense. In doing so, he constructs a point of view that exposes the presumption and the brutality that sits inside medieval texts offered to the reader as celebrations of London and the history it contributes to making; but his perspective also brings out of the same texts their half-conscious efforts, repressed in the name of History, to speak for the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present, on behalf of the desire for human adequacy to self, sociality, and community without war. Roughly speaking, desire, or history, shows up in the view from Walcott’s St. Lucia in the face of the History for which Europe is a metonym. Medieval texts read from outside the European frame are liable to be different from those read from within that frame; we need medieval readings from underneath  and  outside  the  European  matrix  that  can  put  Europe  in  question, though it may be that History, and the project of a dominating Europe, remains too seductive to renounce.

The centrality of national independence and democracy in the reception of the Declaration of Arbroath begs the question whether it anticipates modern postcolonialism. This essay investigates the issue, situating the document in a writing back to English colonial discourse that also involves Geoffrey of Monmouth, Edward I's letter to the pope, and the Scottish "Instructiones" and "Processus". This also facilitates discussion of some general problems in Postcolonial Medieval and Scottish Studies.

A peculiar term appears in five Old English poems. The term is "reordberend," which translates to "speech-bearers" in modern English. The reordberend are described in Dream of the Rood, Daniel, Andreas, the Christ poems, and Elene. Speech is the defining characteristic of humanity in these poems, an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. However, objects also speak in Old English poetry and therefore, the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulating sounds is not a skill that belongs exclusively to humankind. Silence often surrounds the reordberend despite the significance of speech in each poem. The reordberend bear speech as an ability, as the potential to carry out speech in the future; this is quite different from actively speaking. The lack of conversation from the speech-bearers is ironic and paradoxical. Considering how speech occupies each poem and examining the moments in which the reordberend appear in apocalyptic and prophetic Anglo-Saxon poetry reveals a complicated message concerning humanity's ability to participate in God's activity in the world.

What does it mean that so many medievalists, especially in the United States and in Canada, study the European middle ages without being from or of Europe? What does it mean if we specify, further, those who don’t come from the United States or Canada either, but from areas of the world that experienced western European empire, as most of the globe did, as a systematic political and psychological subordination to Europe? I take the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s depiction of late twentieth-century London in his long narrative poem Omeros as a way to pose the question of what Europe might look like from the other side of the relationship of domination, that is, to define Walcott’s Europe. Walcott’s London repudiates Europe, and with it what he calls History, exactly the kind of history made by the European epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante in the form of the world-destinies they constructed for Europe in the cities of Troy and Rome, and made by their would-be successor London. But he...