Old English Scripture on livejournal
For you livejournal-dwellers, halig_gewrit is posting bits of scripture in Old English. Join the fun!
thesis, adieu! also spancel and T.H. White
One way or another, good or bad or somewhere in between, the thesis is done. I turned it in for binding so at least for the time being, it’s off my desk. Sigh.
As I now have to catch up on about two weeks’ of grading, I am still swamped, but at least I get to write in pencil for a bit.
In unrelated news, I am curious about a passage in T.H. White and thought I’d air the question I had in reading recently, pasted from another source which shall remain unlinked (of my authorship and maintenance, though, of course):
I am absolutely certain that I have read this somewhere besides T.H. White, so I thought I’d tap the collective brain of my brilliant and well-read friends list.
That part where Morgause takes the “spancel” (the tape made from the skin of a dead man) and uses it to catch a sleeping Arthur around the neck and thus make him fall in love with her — does this have a source? I thought it did, but back when I first read this book, I didn’t realize that “contemporary witchcraft manuals” often had no problems with taking stuff out of fiction to weave the stuff of their spells and speculations, so I might have the cart before the horse, or however that metaphor would go. If the place I read it got it from White it annihilates my working thesis. But I’m still interested in discovering the origins of this bit.
Anybody know or know where to look?
ETA: I should have been more specific — I’m certain I read it in relation to using a gruesome sort of cord or tape or ligature made of skin in a love spell of the compelling type before. The source was something occult-related, probably some non-academic reporting of a supposed ancient witchy thing or other. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in where *that* may have come from, but what I’m hoping is that there is a similar Gaelic spell or medieval grimoire thing that might speak of the uses of the flesh of the dead to compel love.
So. Clueless here, but flipping through some folklore in between ever so studiously researching and grading (ha!).
The Tale of Sir Marrok
ETA: What follows is a lark, not a real announcement of any sort just in case you got here via Google. This is NOT Malory’s story. Malory did NOT write a Tale of Sir Marrok. This is just me having a bit of fun. I feel obliged to add this caveat, because after four years, this blog post still gets more hits than anything else on my blog and I would really hate for somebody to try to write a research paper on Malory’s Tale of Sir Marrok based on something they read here.
***
Scholars of medieval literature, denizens of Renaissance fairs, and countless Monty Python fans everywhere were thrilled at the unexpected discovery of “The Tale of Sir Marrok” in 2007. The manuscript pages were found buried in a bag of vintage 19th century cereal box tops sold as part of an estate lot in an online auction. They were purchased by the British Museum and subjected to rigorous analysis (scholars were particularly interested in scribal marginalia that read “John Lettou is a dolted daffe”). The pages have been typeset and printed here for the first time. The discovery of the tale should allow for greater critical understanding of Malory’s sources and his choices in redaction and serve to fill in a longstanding gap in the story of one of the knights of the Round Table.
“The Tale of Sir Marrok” is a werewolf story, as we might expect from Sir Marrok’s brief mention in “Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere,” when we learn that he is one of the knights who attempts to heal Sir Urry (Cooper 464). Sir Marrok is known as “the good knight that was betrayed by his wife, for she made him seven year a werewolf” (Cooper 464). The healing of Sir Urry, as previous scholars have noted, appears to be Malory’s own, and its brief mention of Sir Marrok indicates that the knight’s character was in no way damaged by his temporary status as a werewolf (Cooper xx, 464); indeed, he is one of Arthur’s chosen bodyguards with Bors, Kay, and Lancelot in the battle against Lucius the Emperor of Rome prior to his transformation (Caxton V.8), and one of the elect Round Table members after his recovery of his human form.
With its closest known analogue in Marie de France’s “Bisclavret,” Malory’s version emphasizes many of the motifs that characterize his redactions. “The Tale of Sir Marrok” illustrates the importance of loyalty to one’s lord as well as Malory’s consistent disapproval of women who “try to impose their desires by force or blackmail” (Cooper xiv), ending as it does in the punishment of the unfaithful wife. The episode further develops the persistent motif of “mistaken identity” (Cooper xiii) to an almost absurdly literal conclusion: Sir Marrok, stripped of his clothing, is stripped of all outward vestiges of humanity and indeed of his very identity. And in its depiction of a society threatened not because of sexual sin but because it is “split from within by warring factions” and “personal rivalries” (Cooper xii), “The Tale of Sir Marrok” illustrates how the integrity of the Round Table fellowship can be maintained even in the face of conjugal deceit and betrayal.
There exists a strong case for placing “The Tale of Sir Marrok” after, or perhaps within, the Sir Gareth episode within Le Morte Darthur as a whole. The source is undoubtedly French, unlike the bulk of the Sir Gareth material, but with its comparatively transparent moral stance (the good triumph, the bad are punished, and nobility and loyalty win out in the end) it sits more comfortably in the folkloric Gareth segment than it would in the allegorical Christian Grail quest segments or the more morally ambiguous earlier sections. The tale, like the French lays and romances which doubtless influenced it, deals with a single episode, and while it contains narrative threads that link it to surrounding material, it is set in a time when various other adventures are occurring “simultaneously offstage” (Cooper 542), notably the wedding feast of Gareth and Lyonesse at Michaelmas.
Along with “Bisclavret,” Arthur and Gorlagon, the Lai de Melion, and Histoire de Biclarel, Malory’s “The Tale of Sir Marrok” treats his werewolf in a sympathetic light (Russell 176). While similar to “Bisclavret” in every major plot point, the tale differs in a few folkloric elements that are worth further examination in future scholarship. First, while the wife is punished, there is no concern on Malory’s part with the eventual fate of the wife’s children, who in the French “inherited” their unfaithful mother’s unfortunate facial injury; in “Bisclavret,” the wife loses her nose to the wolf’s teeth and her daughters are after born noseless. Second, as in “Bisclavret,” the traditional folkloric element of the wife’s being punished in some manner related to eating is absent (Bennett 70), though Malory, unlike Marie de France, retains the setting of a feast in which to relate the episode of the wife’s punishment. Rather than being constrained to change shape or to remain tied to her original husband and thus her punishment, Malory has the wife and new husband banished entirely and Sir Marrok returned to the fold of both humanity and Arthur’s court. Third, unlike the French material, Malory’s version retains the probably Irish feature linking the werewolf’s enchantment to his being struck on the body with a magical implement. In Malory’s version, however, the sapling of Arthur and Gorlagon, by which the unfaithful wife turns her husband into a wolf, is replaced by the staff of the Archbishop (Bennett 69), who destroys the enchantment permanently. This latter aspect in particular appears to be unique to Malory’s tale.
Slouching Towards Extimacy 