Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNuméros59Textual PorosityLinks and Traces: Remanence in La...

Textual Porosity

Links and Traces: Remanence in Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne

Liens et traces : formes de la rémanence dans Lay le Freine et The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne
Martine Yvernault
p. 133-149

Abstracts

Drawing mainly on Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, and referring to a selection of other works such as the middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, the romances Lybeaus Desconus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, John Russell’s treatise The Boke of Nurture, this paper explores the issue of disappearance which lies at the core of many medieval texts, in the form of exile, removal and abduction, estrangement and metamorphosis. Disappearance, however, is never complete and this paper focuses on restoration and the return motif while proposing a theoretical reflection on the preservation, transmission and circulation of texts for both literary and political reasons.

Top of page

Full text

  • 1  The process of the never-ending story which forms the basis of The Arabian Nights establishes a pa (...)

1Rewriting, retelling and transforming sources may amount to a formal task consisting in sorting, reusing and reformulating the topoi, motifs and narrative structures that sound obsolete or ill-adapted for transmission, or simply too old-fashioned for the taste of new readerships or cultures towards which these sources migrated and circulated across geographic borders. Is this task, however, limited to these objectives? Can one ever completely delete the original? I wish to first refer to Roland Barthes’ concept of “remanence” which appears in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Barthes, 1972: 20), in the chapter “Qu’est-ce que l’écriture?” In this chapter he explains that writing blends creative freedom and memory, the echoes of voices of the past, the traces of previous texts which—consciously or not—a writer conjures up and summons in his or her composition. This literary reality, Barthes further posits, resembles what happens in a chemical precipitation: at first the surface of a text may appear neutral and clear but soon it proves to be a cryptographic process making the quest for encoded and embedded forms indispensable. In his study on Foucault’s approach to literature, Jean-François Favreau also insists on the essential feature of writing. Literature is fundamentally guided by the principle of mise-en-abyme: “Chaque œuvre donne à voir l’invisibilité de la littérature” (Favreau, 2012: 230). Paul Zumthor, in his Introduction à la poésie orale, refers to these traces as “relics” or “surviving forms,” particularly in the case of medieval oral compositions (Zumthor, 1983: 59-75). The reality of remanent literary forms and systems is probably reinforced by the lack of certainty surrounding authorship which tends to shift the reflection on texts away from the issue of the authors’ unreliable identity to concentrate on the permanence and circulation of available stories and motifs, as well as on the variations which affected them. Circulation is central in Zumthor’s theoretical approach to medieval literature which he conceptualizes in the notion of mouvance (displacement). Mouvance manifests itself through the circulation of manuscripts and variants, of poets, and the cultural legacy which preserved and circulated some texts rather than others. The notion of border may obviously reflect this geographical translation of literature, but Zumthor posits that borders should above all be defined as the expression of a text’s ambiguous liminality, the expression of the porous quality of literary frameworks, which contain elements and motifs borrowed from other literary pieces or that circulate from various cultures and eventually inspire other texts. For this reason, he prefers to refer to the “floating” reality of a literary piece, thus emphasizing in fact its lability, which caused multiple variations to take place (Zumthor, 2000: 83-92). Helen Cooper makes the issue of storytelling and retelling more complex and more fascinating as well when, drawing on Gilgamesh and The Arabian Nights, for instance, she broaches the question of the end / ends of storytelling. For her, storytelling is not “simply a matter of recounting a narrative.” It involves a boxed-in construction which is more or less visible, a “recursion, the telling of stories within stories” which, she concludes, means that stories may outlive the narrator, listeners and readers and thus resist mortality.1 Stories remain through the use of “memes” undergoing rewriting, alterations, continuation and reformulation while pursuing the same ideological aims as their preceding sources.

  • 2  The editions used here are the following: for the Middle English Breton Lays, Laskaya, & Salisbury(...)

2This paper reflects on the conservative and palimpsestic nature of Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, based on Marie de France’s lai and French MS BNF 12 558.2 Both texts and Marie de France’s lai derive from similar folklore motifs and narrative frameworks. Lay le Freine focuses on the issue of twin births, on the status and fate of children, and on the value of words in the form of rumours, gossip, lies and silence kept until the final denouement of the story. When one of her friends is delivered of twin boys, a noble lady claims that twin births can only be the fruit of adultery until she herself gives birth to twin girls. To avoid being exposed for her own calumny, she asks her servant to take one of the girls to a convent where the baby girl will be abandoned; evidence of the girl’s noble origin (in the form of precious objects) is left with the baby, who is placed in the trunk of an ash tree where she is eventually discovered by the porter of an abbey. The issue of multiple births also fuels the story of The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne. Queen Beatrix gives birth to seven children, bearing silver chains around their necks; King Oryens’s mother Matabryne replaces the seven children with seven puppies and orders a messenger to murder the babies. The messenger cannot kill them, and the children are taken care of in a forest by a hermit. Matabryne sends a forester to get rid of the children and bring the chains back as evidence that the deed has been done. When he removes the chains, however, six of the seven children transform into swans, the seventh child being away in the hermit’s company. I wish to focus on remanence through three issues: the theoretical function of links, the issue of transformation, and finally liminality, the multiple meanings of borders and porosity. These issues are obviously highlighted in the two texts briefly summarized above, which revolve around the themes of geographical displacement and distance as well as the contiguity that characterizes the courts and the natural environment surrounding them. Themes of return, metamorphosis and identity that is temporarily jeopardized are also central.

Links and Traces

3Multiple forms of links hold narratives together, bind the various episodes into a whole which may reflect both unity and disunity before resolution and coherence are reached at the end. The motifs borrowed from a variety of sources to create narrative links express the process of transmission, the permanence and circulation of texts. Narrative links create an impression of projection, expansion and development while also emphasizing the root, the origin or source of an action, of an adventure. Links must be considered in relation both to the centre and to eccentricity, to movement beyond limits and to returning. In Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, narrative links may be related to characters, to objects connecting the space left by and travelled by protagonists.

  • 3  I am using the term “category” to express the notion of types and structures as used by Aarne & Th (...)
  • 4  Messengers, good or ominous, may be characters invested with a mission, but also porters, guides, (...)
  • 5  “The messenger left and dutifully served his mission.” Translations are my own.
  • 6  Before Lybeaus goes on his quest, the court of Arthur is visited by two messengers: Ell[y] ne, “[a (...)

4Human links in the form of go-betweens or messengers stand in a first category.3 Entrusted with a mission, messengers must go beyond the court’s limits, are invested with diverse good or noxious functions, which are often closely reflected by the moral nature of the landscapes they travel through;4 their commitment is usually triggered by an order binding them to leave a place, convey a message or perform a task. In Lay le Freine, a messenger is requested by one knight to bring the news of his twins’ birth to his friend. The order appears in a dialogue form and is confirmed in a narrative form: “The messanger goth, and hath nought forgete” (43).5 The messenger (who has no name) receives the present of a palfrey for the happy occasion; this present also makes sure that he will return and—as in Libeaus Desconus6—his return proves that the message was delivered, favourably received and reacted to in both an emotional way and in positive material form. The palfrey reinforces the status of the messenger as conveyor of news and as a mobile link between the two static senders and receivers (i.e., the two knights tied by their friendship).

  • 7  “The dark river.” The terrifying depths of the water where the children are doomed to die echo the (...)
  • 8  “Christ sends me to tell you who these six children are.”
  • 9  “Without a guide.”
  • 10  The forest and its wilderness (the equivalent of the desert) is the mirror of the hero’s solitude. (...)
  • 11  “[An angel] on his right shoulder, to guide him forever.”

5The nature of the messengers’ mission in a narrative is made explicit if the messengers (for instance Markus or Malkedras in Assigne) are given names which help the reader or listener memorize their role and contribute to identifying them with evil or good and repentance. Not only is the memory of narrative episodes made easier but the identification of opposite values through contrasted figures is meant to reflect the binary moral approach at work in Cheuelere Assigne. Thus, in Cheuelere Assigne, the angel who visits the hermit, possibly a reminiscence of the angels going up and down Jacob’s ladder as links between the divine and the human, prepares the final stage in the restoration of Christian values in a dark and monstrous story of utter destruction plotted by Matabryne, the king’s evil mother. Her plot, a horizontal fateful terrestrial progress from the castle of Oryens and Beatrice to the “grymme watur” (51)7 where the seven children are doomed to be drowned, is defeated by the angel’s spiritual descent towards the hermit unveiling a divine message, the truth about the swan children’s identity (“criste sendeth þe worde of þese six children,” 193).8 As in John Russells Boke of Nurture, describing the encounter between a forester and an idle young man with no “gouernaunce”9 (2002, 118), the hermit10 is told what he should do for Cheuelere Assigne, the only child who was not transformed into a swan: make sure that he gets christened, teach him what a true mother is, teach him how to become a knight who will be protected by the angel (“Euur to rede þe chylde vpon his ryȝte sholder,” 221).11

  • 12  “Wonderful brocade from Constantinople.”
  • 13  Though helpful signs of Le Freine’s noble origin, laces and textiles should first be read as the e (...)
  • 14  “A stately ash tree with remarkable limbs.”

6Material links often lead to an ambivalent interpretation. Lay le Freine provides the reader or listener with a range of objects that are first part of Le Freine’s elimination plan by her mother: the rich “baudekine from Constentine” (137-138)12 in which she is wrapped, the gold ring attached with a silk lace,13 circular objects or objects suggesting circularity through wrapping. Despite her exile after Le Freine’s birth, a symbolical umbilical cord preserves her connection with her origin and makes her return and happier fate inevitable, sooner or later (Durand, 1992: 369-370). To some extent, birth really takes place when Le Freine is eventually placed in a womb-like tree trunk, which may be read as regressum ad uterum, thus being granted the possibility to be born again or restored to her status. This tree is said to be of “michel priis” and “wel bowed” (175),14 an example of those remarkable trees but also a reference to links and lineage that can never be severed as in the Tree of Jesse or aristocratic family trees. Whether natural growth or an emblem, the tree in Lay le Freine suggests order and reflects the full development of its body through its roots, trunk and branches, as well as the promise of Le Freine’s own development.

  • 15  “Told her she was never forsaken.”

7Material links of an archetypal nature used by legend or fairy tale makers, though given with an evil intention, often express the fear of disappearing and the quest for memory and identity preservation, which is confirmed by the statement made by the abbess: “[t]o tellen hir hye nought forsoke” (246).15 Indeed, narration, telling and revealing seem to be the best remedy against disappearing and an antidote against evil.

  • 16  This can be read as a form of psychomachia.

8Cheuelere Assigne is perhaps more explicit as to the protective function of material links, as the chains given the seven children at birth are part of a tragic plan and remain with them through their metamorphosis. Even if chains first suggest imprisonment, the chains in Cheuelere Assigne play a crucial role in delivering the swan children from their animal condition, since in the end the goldsmith gives the chains stolen by Malkedras back to the swans (352-357). Unlike Le Freine, whose identity and status are restored, the swan children are really born a second time and the restoration of their chains is a lifegiving action which erases their problematic birth, marred by the conviction that multiple children betray an unfaithful wife and by Matabryne’s substitution of puppies for the seven babies. Just like the stylistic device of concatenation used in the poem Pearl, the chains are literal links that preserve the story—however shortened in comparison with its French source—from fragmentation and lack of coherence, as if the chains were narrative threads linking together the episodes from birth to disenchantment, from supernatural forms back to human forms, and thus making the restoration of truth inevitable. Both Le Freine and Cheuelere Assigne draw on the pattern of circularity to express return, literally and symbolically. In Cheuelere Assigne, the motif of the circle is, however, more subtly invested with its spiritual significance, which Georges Poulet develops in Les Métamorphoses du cercle: the circle, Poulet posits, is a divine figure as God is an infinite, boundless sphere, the centre of which is everywhere (Poulet, 2016: 33). Cheuelere Assigne cannot be deemed a metaphysical meditation, but it seems relevant to stress that the fateful story circles back to order when an angel is sent by Christ and when Christian values defeat evil forces in the fight opposing one of the children (Enyas) to Malkedras.16

  • 17  For a more detailed analysis of Classical and continental sources, see Barron (1967: 25-37).
  • 18  “According to my source.”
  • 19  See for instance the beginning Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, 61-63: “For wel I wot that folk (...)

9However, the prime narrative link in the two poems remains the poet of Cheuelere Assigne himself. His role as a link cannot be severed from his transmission of the sources and folklore motifs he draws upon. If Lay le Freine borrows mainly from Marie de France’s Lai le Fresne, which also inspired Galeran de Bretagne, the range of sources in Cheuelere Assigne is more complex. Literature contains countless examples of human beings turned into animals, and Cheuelere Assigne echoes mythological narratives, particularly Ovid. Swan Maidens appear in Old Norse Völundarkviða (Goodison, 2022: 53-56). Swan Children equally appear in literature in the twelfth, beginning of the thirteenth century, in Les Enfants-Cygnes and La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne (Lachet, 2023) but the source text for the Swan Children is Dolopathos, a Latin prose text dating back to the twelfth century (Edlich-Muth, 2018: 174-175; Goodison, 2022: 60). Texts centering on the figure of the Swan Knight were apparently far more popular than stories involving swan children (Edlich-Muth, 2018: 174-175). La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne is far longer than Cheuelere Assigne, and it introduces matter celebrating Godfrey of Bouillon, who is said to descend from the Knight of the Swan (who surfaces as well in Wolfram von Eschenbach in the thirteenth century) and the crusade context.17 The use of sources is conventionally admitted by the poets who, at the beginning or in the course of their compositions, resort to formulas such as “as þe book tellethe”18 (Cheuelere Assigne 7, 270) or pay tribute to the art of lay makers (Lay le Freine, 1-18). In plainly admitting the use of other sources, the poet both defends and praises his art, his own voice, even if he “modestly” claims to be a gleaner picking his material in the field of others,19 and he asserts the part of metatextuality and intertextuality disguising or openly revealing influences.

  • 20  “Unlocked the church door.”
  • 21  “She stole out at nightfall.”
  • 22  “Took her wonderful brocade out of her coffer” […] and “displayed it with art on the bed.”
  • 23  “The maker crafting matter.”

10Lay le Freine treats the issue of the voice quite literally, and refers to various modes of expression: dialogues, gossip and lies, description, silence or expression through objects and actions. The poet’s own narrative voice clearly stands apart from these modes. As the poet barges into his own story for instance to recall formal points on lay-making (1-22, 231-234), two spaces seem to be marked out: the story as entertaining creation and the poet’s personal imaginary workshop where he shapes his story and then delivers it from beginning to the end, keeping in the wings, in the margin of his own text without ever losing control of it. In remaining in the shadow, the poet transforms his narrative into a dumb show in which his characters are made to perform actions that are eloquent enough to make the revelation of truth inevitable. Thus, the porter brings the baby inside a Christian place: as the porter “undede” “the chirche dore” (189),20 the poet signifies the opposite of the maid’s action when she “stale oway in an eventide” (146).21 And when Le Freine goes to her coffer and “out nam” “her riche baudekyn” and “deftly on the bed it layd” (363-367),22 the poet resorts to the eloquence of silence, things and gestures to suggest, through the coffer being opened and the “baudekyn” displayed in full sight, that the truth will out by means of signs that are more efficient than words. The poet’s lay then becomes something more than just a narrative; it acquires a material quality as actions and manipulation of objects are a visual language that dramatizes the story (a semiotic function specific objects were invested with on the platea in early medieval drama). This treatment of both the characters and the objects justifies the frequent use of the poet as a maker/“makere” giving shape to “matere,23 a source which is shaped and given a new form.

  • 24  “Craft a cup.”
  • 25  Zumthor (1980: 97) uses the metaphor of the chain which links the text which is written and the te (...)

11This technical approach is confirmed by Cheuelere Assigne, in which the poet himself is one of the protagonists, wearing the mask of and performing the highly symbolical task of the goldsmith. Like an alchemist, the goldsmith gives a decisive twist to the story when he is ordered by Matabryne to melt the children’s chains and “forge” a cup (153).24 By using only half of one chain to forge the cup, the goldsmith causes Matabryne’s own forgery to be revealed while ensuring that, through the remaining chains, the narrative line will not be broken and the pursuit of truth continued.25 The fairy tale motif of the lost children will be fully developed until their final transformation and return to the court of Oryens.

Transformation and Restoration

12Transformation in the form of metamorphosis is an extremely frequent source of inspiration, involving in ancient times the relations between the gods and humans or between humans and nature. Metamorphosis is a convincing form of border-crossing as it implies changing from one state to another. Stories and fables thus reported the transformation of heroes and other human beings into beasts, rocks or trees as seen in Nicander’s Heteroeumena, which inspired Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Lafaye, 1994: iv). Transformation may be literal, as when a human being acquires another shape. Transformation combines both death and life, closure and, conversely, hatching, blooming and birth; it contrasts secluded spaces (tombs, eggs, trunks or chrysalises) with release into the open (Durand, 1992: 270-271, 362).

  • 26  See Barkan (1986), Chapter two, “Ovid and Metamorphosis” and Chapter three, “Metamorphosis in the (...)
  • 27  Lafaye (1994: I, 7), my translation. After Phaeton’s fateful death, his bereaved sisters were turn (...)
  • 28  “He smote the chains and broke them.”
  • 29  “A stately ash tree with remarkable limbs.”
  • 30  “Almost frozen to death.”
  • 31  In Cheuelere Assigne, one of the seven swan children never recovers his human appearance.
  • 32  “Its trunk was hollow.” Marie de France’s lai, “Le Frêne” stresses the impressive and stately aspe (...)
  • 33  For the ambivalent moral symbolism of the swan in Isidore of Seville and Raban Maur, as well as th (...)
  • 34  “She believed in Satan.”
  • 35  “The dark river.”

13In literature, transformation appears as the possibility of changing a textual form, of altering stylistic patterns, of inventing and creating continuations and variations. In this lay and in this romance, however, its function is both more conservative and ambiguous as transformation takes place in pagan, magic and Christian contexts, particularly as seen in Cheuelere Assigne. The issue or transformation in medieval and premodern literature often draws on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.26 In the medieval lay, as the maid conceals Le Freine inside the protective ash tree, one is tempted to read this episode as a story reminding one of Daphne’s father transforming her into a tree to escape Phoebus’s love in Ovid. Ovid’s opening discourse at the beginning of Metamorphoses has much in common with biblical Genesis but as he claims to be a poet, he in fact explains what poetical creation at a human level is: “In noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas / Corpora” (“I intend to narrate the metamorphoses of bodies into other bodies”).27 Beyond the metaphysical value and the narrative interest of transformation, the question of its textual function is posed: why do poets and storytellers resort to transformation and why do readers and listeners enjoy transformation? In stories involving transformation, specific characters appear, such as magic beings or witches; otherwise, transformation is performed through unexplained actions, thus adding to the dramatic pleasure and the suspension of disbelief. In Cheuelere Assigne, the children turn into swans because Malkedras “smote of þe cheynes” (146),28 as if his grim sword had turned into a magic wand and because divine providence protected them. Le Freine is more ambiguous as transformation does not imply a physical change. The lay constantly oscillates between narrative possibilities, between opposites, between truth and altering truth, birth and death or a parody of death when Le Freine is concealed in the tree and then in the convent for many years. The use of the names of trees for the two sisters (Le Frain, Le Codre) suggests the noble and symbolic aspect of Le Freine’s tree, which is reminiscent of a family tree being “[w]el ybowed, of michel priis” (175)29 and suggesting that Le Freine’s status will be restored. She will not actually turn into a real tree; the Ovidian reference is just a fine poetical motif embroidered into the story. Moreover, the meaning of the tree is unclear and rich: it may be interpreted as a womb, a cradle or a sort of tomb where Le Freine is eventually found “neighe ded for cold” (204),30 or as a hiding place for stolen things (193). The tree is an element of the story that expresses the freedom to follow various narrative paths at the same time, thus creating the temporary illusion that a story may transform into something wonderful, or unnatural (“vnsemelye,” as Cheuelere Assigne reads, 30) or even discard the option of temporary metamorphosis.31 When describing the tree, the Middle English poet emphasises that “[t]he bodi was hollow” (176),32 meaning that it was a place of hypothesis, of oscillation between good and evil and narrative expectation, the resolution of which finally appears when the porter took up the child between his hands and thanked Jesus Christ (195-198). At that point the figure of the midwife is replaced by that of the abbey’s porter, and his elevation of the child out of the tree lends itself to a Christian reading (the Eucharist) prefiguring the religious ceremony performed by the bishop at the end. To some extent, never in Le Freine is transformation a central issue. Le Freine’s recognition is postponed, and the foundling is restored to the status that was never lost thanks to her mother’s gifts. Metamorphosis is much more evident in Cheuelere Assigne, more dramatic and tragic as it implies a change from human to animal, as in Ovid, possibly referring to emblematic figures in bestiaries,33 but with a strong emphasis on the subversion of human nature and the potential triumph of evil over Christian values as Matabryne had “sette her affye in Sathanas of helle” (10).34 Transformation implies the defeat of God’s creative order as the children, replaced by seven puppies, are doomed to die in “grymme watur.”35 Beatrice, their mother, is thrown into a dungeon and doomed to be burnt, and the witnesses’ eyes are put out. The unnatural and the natural face and fight each other in ways that are all the more pungent as the story is far simpler and shorter than the French versions Les Enfants-Cygnes and La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne until the point at which the children turned into swans are saved by a hermit and fed by a hind. Salvation from metamorphosis is never a discarded hope. Though broken (half of one chain only being molten), the five chains stand as the reliable evidence that the tragedy will circle back to the beginning. Circularity and transitory transformation ensure resolution and the preservation of order.

  • 36  Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess: 445-479; Laskaya & Salisbury (eds.), Sir Orfeo: 240-264.

14The river where the evil Markus abandons the children in fact marks the limits of monstrosity and transgression. The dark waters threaten to devour the narrative itself as if it was doomed to be gnawed by the accumulation of tragic elements. Evil is not allowed to go beyond that river where the swans glide and the river stands as the last stage of the fateful adventure. To some extent Cheuelere Assigne paves the way for future literary transformations of the role played by natural spaces, rivers and forests, which are identified as the liminal moral spaces one returns from once the experience is over. Thus, the forest in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess or in Sir Orfeo is described as a place of mourning,36 and a liminal space between death and life which is visited (and where Orfeo lives) before the Black Knight returns to his castle and resumes his life. Transformation thus affects the evolution of motifs and the status of literature as an entertainment also often meant to please the prince through the limitations necessarily imposed on subversion. Forests and wild places are kept under control as they are—often—easily returned from. What lay beyond the limits of forests and rivers, mattered little once the story was over, and was discarded then as “either irrelevant, or potentially threatening” (Cooper, 2004: 70). Late medieval and premodern literature still establish the forest and natural landscape as places of transformation and instruction but as Saunders posits (1993: 200-203), much ambiguity emerges in their depiction, as a forest or natural experiences may be short-lived, based on stereotyped behaviour. Familiar spaces, however prone to crisis and disorder, tend to be more reliable than strange places which are only discovered through the travelling protagonist’s report or the narrator’s voice.

Liminality and Porosity

  • 37  The term porosity should here be understood as spatial permeability and contiguity.
  • 38  “A convent.”

15Liminality is concerned with passage or crossing, and implies geographical stages and thresholds. In medieval literature, protagonists often leave well-identified spaces (a court, a country or a city) and enter spaces that look other, unknown, even weird. The strangeness of places situated beyond familiar geographies is often emphasized by a reference to mists, hostile climates, or by the descriptions of perilous encounters with threatening creatures. In Le Freine, however, the maid who takes the baby to the convent simply passes from one type of topography to another, through heath, through field, through wood (147-148). The description only takes two or three lines; brevity and fluidity suggest that geographical borders are easily crossed. Spatial porosity37 is also enhanced as the poet gives the impression that the maid treads farther and farther into imprecise topographies, without being hindered, to finally reach the ultimate meaningful destination, “an hous of religioun” (160).38 In Le Freine and in Cheuelere Assigne, the maid and Markus thus carry the children through space, as if they easily walked through invisible topographic limits and were only bent on reaching the convent and the fateful river. Spatial porosity suggests that distance is covered without difficulty, in no time as it were. The poet also implies that perilous places are contiguous to the official space, and that evil lies not far from good.

  • 39  “Thus Launfal, forsooth, / That noble knight of the Round Table, / Disappeared into fairyland.”

16How far do the protagonists travel after leaving the place where the story starts, a distance in time and space which for the readers or the audience is made up for by the narrative or the production of objects sent as evidence by the protagonists? In Sir Orfeo geographical limits are explicitly trespassed as Orfeo visits the Otherworld in his quest for Heurodis. Launfal also travels into the Otherworld with Dame Tryamour and, at the end of Sir Launfal, his disappearance beyond the Arthurian world is merely stated as a fact that is not really given a rational explanation: “Thus Launfal, wythouten fable, / That noble knyght of the Rounde Table, / Was take ynto Fayrye” (1033-1035).39 Such supernatural visits do not take place in Le Freine or in Cheuelere Assigne but the treatment of space in these texts is specific, and space becomes a literary reality when a protagonist leaves and goes beyond the limits of the official space of the court. Literature is concerned with space and, through description, gives the reader the illusion that he or she is travelling or dwells in a place which is created by fiction. Literature describes places which seem to be real, yet these places correspond to representations that are different from real space because they are expressed in literary terms (such as figures, metaphors or connotations; Genette: 1969, 43-47). Distance and limits tend to be complex to grasp since they can correspond to subjective evaluations, personal itineraries through moralized landscapes, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where Gawain’s predicament and journey are made harsher by the passing of time. Gillian Rudd (2016: 50-51) posits the limits of this moral vision of nature long upheld by critical approaches centering on the topoi of vanitas and memento mori. Rudd, for example, considers new approaches to space, limits and nature. Ecocriticism denounces “the fraught relations between humans and nature” (Rudd, 2016: 51). New critical readings tend to blur the influence of past theoretical approaches to fiction and to privilege readings focusing on what literature tells us about our contemporary vision of space and limits, the place of people in space. Such is Andrew Richmond’s approach, specifically in Landscape in Middle English Romance (Richmond, 2021).

  • 40  “Through a wild heath. / Through field and through wood.”

17Limits are ambiguous for yet another reason: most protagonists, as Northrop Frye posits (1972: 186), set out on an adventure with very little knowledge of their itinerary and destination. In Le Freine and in Cheuelere Assigne, protagonists know nothing about their destination because they are newborn, abandoned beings who are exiled or left in a convent, and are passively carried away as is often the case in fairy tales. This explains why Cheuelere Assigne must be thoroughly educated by the hermit. Distance is not clearly asserted except through reference to different topographies and outstanding landmarks. However, the lay and the romance seem to suggest that a limit must be reached at some point. In Le Freine, the limit takes the form of the convent which is reached after passing “over a wild heth. / Thurch feld and thurch wode”40 and finally through a forest (146-151). In Cheuelere Assigne, the limit is materialized by the river where the children are abandoned and which, symbolically, marks their passage from human form to that of swans, as in Ovid’s story of Cygnus. Paradoxically, travel and displacement are characterized by one character’s aim, purpose and intention (albeit evil) and they lack accurate directions. Strangely enough, romance protagonists seem to go straight to a specific, isolated place without being provided with an itinerary, a map, or a set of directions given before departure (one of the most significant examples of missing directional clues is found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). Yet erring is crucial in exploration and thus a journey may create an impression of illusion, of estrangement, of utter loss while remaining within familiar boundaries and topographies (very much like the wild Green Chapel which is at a stone’s throw from Bertilak’s refined castle). Moreover, the external landscape blends with the protagonist’s inner perception of the environment, and sometimes he or she becomes an element of the environment: Le Freine makes one with the ash tree as if the bark was a skin and, likewise, Orfeo is absorbed by the heath (243-245); on returning to Winchester, the memory of his forest life is still so visible that Orfeo looks like an old tree (508). The limit between personal disorientation and destabilizing topographies is often tenuous and porous. Yet the wilderness and its unknown spaces are offset by landmarks and architectural motifs forming a rhizomatic network of reassuring values—for instance, the abbey, its church, Guroun’s castle, the abode of the hermit acting as a father for Enyas, the forest as a refuge where a hind suckles the babies like a mother. The environment is only temporarily threatening because, on the one hand, a return is bound to take place and, on the other, travels and quests are limited in time and space. As Goldie posits, medieval space, particularly “the local space of the period typically reaches out from a viewer in a planar fashion” (2019: 9) until a horizon is eventually reached and border-crossing becomes pointless. The journey stops there and “interest focuses on what is ‘compassed’ all about within the ‘orisonte’” (Goldie, 2019: 9). Space seems to be split up into geographical stages that parallel chapters, episodes or events; geographical expansion is measured and limited according to narrative truncation, echoing Odysseus’s narration of his adventures on his return journey in The Odyssey.

  • 41  “The west country” where “two noble knights led a happy life.”

18Reaching limits in both texts also means that the protagonists, though far from their original place, inevitably encounter figures that represent the doubles of figures described at the beginning. The two knights whom Le Freine and Le Codre marry replicate the two knights at the beginning of the story; in Cheuelere Assigne, the hind and the hermit are but for a short time a mother and a father for the seven children, until Beatrice is restored to her status as queen and mother; the child (Enyas) who never transformed into a swan is dubbed by his father Oryens and is in line to replace him in due time. If doubles often express the confrontation of opposites, doubles also mean returning to the same in a very conservative way and, to some extent, remanence, through the reiteration of familiar motifs, of well-known sources, contributes to preserving stable moral values and political patterns. Returning is not simply a form of resolution and closure. Returning and narrating the events that took place elsewhere implies reflecting on the experience and thus forces the protagonist to convey the experience back to where he or she started, to restore the primacy of the initial space, which can be connected with political power, such as Winchester, the kingdom of Oryens, or the “west cuntré” where “[r]iche men in her best liif” lived (Le Freine, 31).41 Cooper suggests “the mirror symmetry of the outward-and-return journey” (2004: 57-58), and she points to the theoretical nature of narration on returning: not only does the hero tell the story of their adventures but he or she performs a literary task, a stylistic exercise in which the narration is analysed and explored as it is delivered and commented on. Cooper concludes that “[t]he outward journey tells a story; the return not only completes the story but comments on that first half,” making “prefiguration” and “fulfilment” obvious. Clarity prevails not only in the resolution of the predicament but in the restoration of political categories and places. This raises the question of whether the exploration of distant spaces essentially corresponds to the reflection of an individual on his or her legitimate place in society, which may be threatened by exile, subversion or usurpation (Cooper, 2004: 294). The preservation of place as a social and political concept entails probing periphery and endeavouring to eradicate the threatening aspects medieval texts often tend to associate with liminality and otherness.

  • 42  On this aspect of liminality and the fear of remaining in a state of in-betweenness in the Middle (...)

19Though inspiring and fuelling the plots of stories, liminality often reflects medieval anxieties regarding the other, other spaces, and unknown situations. In Cheuelere Assigne, the river echoes Ovid and Cygnus’s predilection for the water element, but the river also expresses the conflict between the human and the animal that must be solved. Transformed there into swans, five children turn human again but the seventh remains a swan, a beautiful bird but still, a beast. His self-mutilation expresses the fear of the human being stifled in animal form forever. Medieval thinkers were concerned with the distinction between homo spiritualis and homo animalis, a distinction that appears in Genesis (9: 1-3). In Eden people lived in harmony with other creatures, beasts small and big; the Flood put an end to that harmony and entailed a hierarchical distinction on earth between people and animals (Dittmar, 2009: 153-172).42

  • 43  “No one was to know.”

20Lastly, poets, who often praise art at the beginning of a poem, must curb the influence of liminality. Monsters, subversion and the unknown undoubtedly provide an inspiration for stories. Yet, Cheuelere Assigne could have turned into an anti-romance. Fortunately, Providence sent the hermit an angel to bring about the restoration of Christian order. Likewise, Matabryne appears as the poet’s potential rival. In forcing Markus and Malkedras to keep silent (127), she complies with the requirements of her role as the evil one acting against the narrative, stifling the imagination and frustrating the senses at work during listening or reading: she has the eyes of her servants put out, hearing is impaired by her lies and false reports, and telling is prohibited (“no man wyte moste,” 136).43 Frustration ends when Matabryne is eliminated, when the narrative starts again towards its resolution, when the hermit and Enyas, at the court of Oryens, launch into the expected processes of revelation, clarification and explanation.

21The issue of borders and of the porosity of borders lends itself to numerous approaches that point to the circulation and rewriting of texts in medieval Europe. From a narrative viewpoint, border crossing expresses the dangers of transgression, evil and subversion and the necessity of preserving order to keep stories within reassuring moral and political boundaries. In Le Freine, the threat of going beyond limits is never really felt as so many links and objects related to Le Freine’s past, which is never lost through their presence, weave a reassuring network. In the end, very much like Ariadne’s thread, these objects bring about revelation of the truth, and make return and restoration easier. Cheuelere Assigne is more problematic since the plot seems to emphasize evil and monstrosity. One wonders if anti-romance cannot at some point outplay romance. The poetical voice is seldom directly heard, which may be the result of major abridgements (Edlich-Muth, 2018: 173-174). The memes that are used could have such a destructive impact that the end does not just bring about the restoration of order but urgently reasserts the role of the poet, of telling and of sensible words that are contrasted with actions devoid of sense and spirituality. The story recovers its course towards a happy ending; teaching and clarifying are reaffirmed, and truth prevails again. But can truth be reliably established in fiction? Truth in fiction remains very ambiguous, as ambiguous and wavering as the swan remaining forever swimming on the liminal space of the river, floating between human and animal conditions, between his former state as the son of a king and his pagan metamorphosis.

Top of page

Bibliography

AARNE, A. & THOMPSON, S. (1961): The Types of the Folk-tale: A Classification and Bibliography, Helsinki, Folklore Fellows Communication, n° 184, 588 p.

BAIN, F.E. (2021): Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary: The Performance of Difference, Berlin and Boston, Walter de Gruyter, 303 p.

BARKAN, L. (1986): The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis & the Pursuit of Paganism, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 398 p.

BARRON, W.R.J. (1967): “Chevalere Assigne and the Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne,” Medium Ævum 36.1: 25-37.

BARTHES, R. (1972): Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, Paris, Seuil, 179 p.

CHAUCER, G. (1989): The Legend of Good Women, in BENSON, L.D. (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 587-630.

CHAUCER, G. (1989): The Book of the Duchess, in BENSON, L.D. (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 329-346.

COOPER, H. (2004): The English Romance in Time; Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 542 p.

COOPER, H. (2013): “The Ends of Storytelling,” in BREWER, C. & WINDEATT, B. (eds.), Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, p. 188-201.

DITTMAR, P.-O. (2009): “Le propre de la bête et le sale de l’homme,” in BARTHOLEYNS G. et al. (eds.), Adam et l’Astragale, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. 390 p., https://doi.org/10.4000/books.editionsmsh.1732.

DURAND, G. (1992): Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris, Dunod, 536 p.

EDLICH-MUTH, M. (2018): “From Magic to Miracle: Reframing Chevalere Assigne,” in ARCHIBALD, E., LEITCH, M.G. & SAUNDERS, C. (eds.), Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance. A tribute to Helen Cooper, Cambridge, D.S. BREWER, p. 173-188.

FAVREAU, J.-F. (2012): Vertige de l’écriture. Michel Foucault et la littérature (1954-1970), Lyon, ENS Éditions, 426 p.

FRYE, N. (1973): Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 383 p.

FURNIVALL, F.J. (ed.) (1868): The Babees Book, The Bokes of Nurture of Hugh Rhodes and John Russell, Part I. Early English Poems and Treatises, London, Trübner & Co., Early English Text Society, 405 p.

GENETTE, G. (1969): Figures II, Paris, Seuil, 293 p.

GIBBS, H. (ed.) (1932): The Romance of the Cheuelere Assigne, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 38 p.

GOLDIE, M.B. (2019): Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 293 p.

GOODISON, N.J. (2022): Introducing the Medieval Swan, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 197 p.

LEITCH, M.G. (2017): “The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarves and Porters in Malory and the Middle English Gawain Romances,” Arthuriana 27.1: 3-27.

LACHET, C. (ed.) (2023): Les Enfants-Cygnes suivi de La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne, Paris, Honoré Champion, 795 p.

LASKAYA, A. & SALISBURY, E. (eds.) (1995): The Middle English Breton Lays, Kalamazoo, Medieval Institute Publications, 456 p., https://metseditions.org/editions/vMwewNZhMkppHg3eUmKGbi3r1pzrQ8M.

MILLS, M. (ed.) (1969): Lybeaus Desconus, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 302 p.

OVIDE (1994): Les Métamorphoses, vol. 1(I-IV) in LAFAYE, G. (ed.), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 149 p.

POULET, G. (2016): Les Métamorphoses du cercle, Paris, Plon, 699 p.

PROPP, V. (1970): Morphologie du conte, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 254 p.

RICHMOND, A.M. (2021): Landscape in Middle English Romance: The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 287 p.

SAUNDERS, C. (1993): The Forest of Medieval Romance, Cambridge, D.S. BREWER, 235 p.

SAUNDERS, C. (2009): “The Affective Body: Love, Virtue and Vision in English Medieval Literature,” in SAUNDERS, C., MAUDE, U. & MACNAUGHTON, J. (eds.), The Body and the Arts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 87-102.

VOISENET, J. (2000): Bêtes et Hommes dans le monde médiéval. Le bestiaire des clercs du ve au xiie siècle, Turnhout, Brepols, 535 p.

ZUMTHOR, P. (1980): Parler du Moyen Age, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 109 p.

ZUMTHOR, P. (1983): Introduction à la poésie orale, Paris, Seuil, 312 p.

ZUMTHOR, P. (2000): Essai de poétique médiévale, Paris, Seuil, 621 p.

Top of page

Notes

1  The process of the never-ending story which forms the basis of The Arabian Nights establishes a parallel between the narrator’s life saved by telling a continuation and the life of a narrative which never stops, changes, and is amplified: “As those stories accrete, they acquire a momentum of their own—a life of their own; and that ‘life’ can in turn become conscious, as a way of keeping death at bay” (Cooper, 2013: 192).

2  The editions used here are the following: for the Middle English Breton Lays, Laskaya, & Salisbury (1995); for Cheuelere Assigne, Gibbs, 1932; for the Lais of Marie de France, Harf-Lancner & Warnke (1990).

3  I am using the term “category” to express the notion of types and structures as used by Aarne & Thompson as well as Propp in their approaches to folk and fairy tales and the reproduction of the same motifs in those narratives.

4  Messengers, good or ominous, may be characters invested with a mission, but also porters, guides, human beings with outstanding physical qualities, for instance the giants and dwarves studied by Megan Leitch (see Leitch, 2017: 3-27).

5  “The messenger left and dutifully served his mission.” Translations are my own.

6  Before Lybeaus goes on his quest, the court of Arthur is visited by two messengers: Ell[y] ne, “[a] lovely messengere”/ “a pretty messenger” (Lybeaus Desconus, 120) accompanied by a dwarf. She begs Arthur to send one of his knights to rescue the lady of Synadowne. On his quest, Lybeaus faces various fights and tests and, each time, news of his successful encounter with enemies are sent to Arthur together with a piece of evidence, for instance, a falcon that Lybeaus wins after defeating Jeffroun (Lybeaus Desconus, 993-1004).

7  “The dark river.” The terrifying depths of the water where the children are doomed to die echo the depths of the pit where Matabryne gets rid of her enemies.

8  “Christ sends me to tell you who these six children are.”

9  “Without a guide.”

10  The forest and its wilderness (the equivalent of the desert) is the mirror of the hero’s solitude. But, as a place of testing, its wilderness is paradoxically peopled by a profusion of strange, good and bad beings the hero must face, defeat or learn from (dragons, wild men and savage creatures). Hermits found in forests are usually connected with introspection and conversion (Saunders, 1993: 121-122). In Cheuelere Assigne, the introduction of the hermit offsets the manifestation of evil and monstrosity and is instrumental in the passage from magic and the supernatural to the Christian restoration of order (Edlich-Muth, 2018: 173-188).

11  “[An angel] on his right shoulder, to guide him forever.”

12  “Wonderful brocade from Constantinople.”

13  Though helpful signs of Le Freine’s noble origin, laces and textiles should first be read as the expression of her exile and symbolic death. As such these links are archetypal figurations of a predicament and of an ominous future (Durand, 1992: 117-118).

14  “A stately ash tree with remarkable limbs.”

15  “Told her she was never forsaken.”

16  This can be read as a form of psychomachia.

17  For a more detailed analysis of Classical and continental sources, see Barron (1967: 25-37).

18  “According to my source.”

19  See for instance the beginning Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, 61-63: “For wel I wot that folk han here-beforn / Of makyng ropen, and lad awey the corn; / [And] I come after, glenynge here and there.” “Others before me, no doubt, have come before / To reap the field, and carried away the harvest; / [And] I come after, gleaning forgotten ears.”

20  “Unlocked the church door.”

21  “She stole out at nightfall.”

22  “Took her wonderful brocade out of her coffer” […] and “displayed it with art on the bed.”

23  “The maker crafting matter.”

24  “Craft a cup.”

25  Zumthor (1980: 97) uses the metaphor of the chain which links the text which is written and the text which is read. This linking process reveals an infinite space containing the trace of former compositions and the text given life by readers and future writers. Zumthor also refers to the text as a mirror of a palimpsestic nature, “captant le reflet de valeurs mortes sur le tain de valeurs vécues” (“revealing the reflection of past values on the silvering of present values”).

26  See Barkan (1986), Chapter two, “Ovid and Metamorphosis” and Chapter three, “Metamorphosis in the Middle Ages: Figura and Cosmos.”

27  Lafaye (1994: I, 7), my translation. After Phaeton’s fateful death, his bereaved sisters were turned into trees and, on seeing this tragedy, Cygnus (Phaeton’s stepbrother) was changed into a new bird (“Fit noua Cygnus auis,” 377), white feathers replaced his hair, his mouth protruded into a round beak and his fingers were covered over by a membrane, wings appeared on his sides. Blaming Jupiter and the sky for Phaeton’s death, Cygnus fled fire and elected lakes, ponds and rivers as his abode (Lafaye, 1994: II, 150-377).

28  “He smote the chains and broke them.”

29  “A stately ash tree with remarkable limbs.”

30  “Almost frozen to death.”

31  In Cheuelere Assigne, one of the seven swan children never recovers his human appearance.

32  “Its trunk was hollow.” Marie de France’s lai, “Le Frêne” stresses the impressive and stately aspect of the tree: “Un fraisne vit, le e branchu / e mult espès e bien ramu” (“She saw an ash tree with large limbs / thick, and branching,” Harf-Lancner & Warnke, 1990: 96). The adjective “espès”/“thick” suggests that it was a fit hiding place.

33  For the ambivalent moral symbolism of the swan in Isidore of Seville and Raban Maur, as well as the positive qualities granted deer, geese and swans, see Voisenet (2000: 123, 272 n. 70). Goodison (2022: 48-50), discusses the fourteenth-century Ovide Moralisé and the reference to Christ in the swan figure. Whatever the symbolic interpretation, it seems relevant to emphasize that at the end of Cheuelere Assigne one swan never turned human again “for losse of his cheyne” (“for his chain was lost,” 358). He was so desperate that, like Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, he started to mutilate himself (“He bote hym self with his bylle þat alle his breste bledde,” / “He bit his breast so badly that it was all bloody,” 360). Conjuring up the vision of inescapable imprisonment in the animal and of impossible rebirth (even resurrection), this passage suggests that, unlike Heurodis, his body in its physical and political sense will never be restored (see Saunders, 2009: 91-92).

34  “She believed in Satan.”

35  “The dark river.”

36  Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess: 445-479; Laskaya & Salisbury (eds.), Sir Orfeo: 240-264.

37  The term porosity should here be understood as spatial permeability and contiguity.

38  “A convent.”

39  “Thus Launfal, forsooth, / That noble knight of the Round Table, / Disappeared into fairyland.”

40  “Through a wild heath. / Through field and through wood.”

41  “The west country” where “two noble knights led a happy life.”

42  On this aspect of liminality and the fear of remaining in a state of in-betweenness in the Middle Ages and the premodern period, see Bain (2021: 152).

43  “No one was to know.”

Top of page

References

Bibliographical reference

Martine Yvernault, “Links and Traces: Remanence in Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere AssigneRecherches anglaises et nord-américaines, 59 | 2025, 133-149.

Electronic reference

Martine Yvernault, “Links and Traces: Remanence in Lay le Freine and The Romance of the Cheuelere AssigneRecherches anglaises et nord-américaines [Online], 59 | 2025, Online since 30 June 2025, connection on 11 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ranam/1931; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/148d7

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search