Authors: Lisa Hilton
In this reading of the poem, Beowulf is ultimately shown as an
anachronism, albeit a glorious one. What is the alternative to the ‘toxic’
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violence of the heroic code? If traditionally ‘feminine’ attributes can be incorporated into heroism, then heroes can reinvent themselves. This is not to suggest that Beowulf is best advised to stay at home and take up weaving, but to absorb the more fluid understanding of gender roles that typified Anglo-Saxon culture. It has been proposed that sexual difference in the Anglo-Saxon world was less a result of biological distinction than of the way in which the individual accessed and interacted with power -sex was effectively dependent on status. In the ‘old’ code, such status was predicated on aggression, but it could, potentially, be spiritual. Spiritual militancy was a means of transcending gender: women could be
geworht werlice
(made male), through faith. Anglo-Saxon hagiography is rich with examples of ‘transvestite saints’, women who have overcome their biological femininity by attaining spiritual masculinity. The wisdom which was traditionally associated with women in Germanic culture, and which is frequently referred to in ‘Beowulf’ was, when combined with Christian faith, a route to power and thus a crossing of gender boundaries. As the tenth-century divine Aelfric put it, ‘If a woman is made manfully and strong in accordance with God’s will, she will be counted among the men who sit at God’s table
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But what constituted spiritual as opposed to martial strength? In the section of ‘Beowulf’ known as Hrothgar’s ‘Sermon’, the aged King advises Beowulf that the real enemy is not monsters and dragons, but ‘secret temptation’ and ‘the seeds of arrogance’. Beowulf must ‘learn the nature of nobility’ if he wishes to achieve ‘gain everlasting’ that is, battles are no longer to be fought only with swords, but with the will. If ‘heroic’ maleness can in this manner be associated with the ‘feminine’ qualities of the mind, the gender distinctions might meld into a new definition of ‘heroic femininity’ which offers a positive prospect for the future when compared with the deadly code of the fading Germanic twilight. If the arena of battle is relocated to the spirit, then peacefulness is rendered heroic, and ‘Beowulf’ can be seen as gesturing ‘toward a new model of masculine heroism, one rooted less in external proficiency in war than in a cultivation of the inner self’.
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As observers and critics, the queens of ‘Beowulf’ posit and endorse such a model.
In the centuries between the composition of ‘Beowulf’ and the
Morte d’Arthur
, it could hardly be said that pacifism acquired heroic status. The splendours of war bedazzled the fear of death and the elites of Europe continued slaughtering one another (and their unfortunate retainers) with familiar gusto. Norbert Elias offers a picture of the practical psychology of the warrior of the Middle Ages. ‘(He)not only loved battle, he lived in
it. He spent his youth preparing for battle. When he came of age he was knighted and waged war as long as his strength permitted … His life had no other function. His dwelling place was a watchtower, a fortress … If by accident he lived in peace, he needed at least the illusion of war. He fought in tournaments and these tournaments often differed little from real battles.’
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Several critics have pointed out the ‘chronic form’ of war and the ‘universal uncertainty’ it produced,
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and the tension between knightly Christianity and its clerical form is at the centre of scholarly discussion on the definition, meaning and uses of chivalry. The world of
Morte d’Arthur
, for which Malory drew on the French romances that had been such popular reading matter with many English queens, largely endorses the ‘knightly’ version in its tales of gallant warriors, beautiful women and conveniently flexible aristocratic morality. (Casual encounters are one thing, but ladies
of family
quite another.) Early on, Sir Lancelot’s view of the ‘feminine’ world of marriage is similar to Beowulf s own: ‘But for to be a weddyd man, I thynke it not, for then I must couche with hir and leve armys and turnaments, batelys and adventures’. For Lancelot and his fellows, women might be a good excuse for fighting, but there is nothing feminine about heroism.
Then something odd happens. In Book Six, ‘The Tale of the Sankgreal’ (the Holy Grail), Malory abruptly shifts the moral focus of the Arthurian world to incorporate a version of heroism which looks very much like the one posited by the ‘Beowulf’ poet. Suddenly, earthly valour is shown as inferior to spiritual might; ‘Goddys workis’ take the place of ‘worldly worlds’. Chastity is now imperative, and even killing is off the menu: Lancelot declares that ‘sith that he wente into the queste of the Sankgreal he slew never man nought shall, tylle that he come to Camelot again’.
Yet even as he raises the possibility of such a new form of heroism, Malory disenchants his reader. Lancelot fails in the Grail quest because of his sinful relationship with Queen Guinevere, and from that sin springs the disaster which overwhelms the world of the knights. As in ‘Beowulf’, it is the private world, the interior world, that is the real enemy, but whereas in ‘Beowulf’ the private is figured as a new battleground to be conquered, in
Morte d’Arthur
it is the imprudence of allowing the private into the public realm that brings destruction. Lancelot and Guinevere fail at the challenge the ‘heroic femininity’ laid down in ‘Beowulf’. Malory does not quite condemn their relationship, but their love gives an opportunity for evil to slip into Camelot, just as Lancelot (in one of the sexiest passages in medieval literature) breaks the iron bars protecting the Queen’s bedroom. The lovers are trapped and discovered, and now the world of
‘private ambition and greed’ represented by the wicked Mordred pollutes Arthur’s kingdom with avarice and ambition, treachery and dissent. The values of chivalry no longer apply, the public good is overwhelmed by the personal and private. When Mordred and Arthur confront one another in their final showdown, Malory offers a vision of a world in which battle is anything but noble: ‘That pyllours and robbers were corn into the fylde to pylle and robbe many a full noble knight … And who were not dead all out they slew them for their harneys and their riches.’
Morte d’Arthur
, like ‘Beowulf’, takes place in a mythicised past; what Malory is presenting here is a window on the future, in a sense, his present.
If the queens of ‘Beowulf’ anticipate a form of feminine power, then Guinevere’s end closes off the possibility of its achievement. She sees out her life as a nun at Amesbury redeemed, but enclosed and powerless. Her spirituality is penitent rather than militant. Her laments recall the
geomuru ides
, the ‘sad women’ of Anglo-Saxon literature who, like Hildeburh in ‘Beowulf’, can do nothing but weep and mourn the destruction their men have wrought. Like Beowulf, Guinevere is barren. Beowulf s lack of heirs can be read as positive, as making way for the new type of hero the poem envisages through its queens, but Guinevere’s childlessness can only confirm the ignobility of the future anticipated by the thieves who stream over the battlegrounds. If, then, we see these two ‘historical’ texts as casting a question and an answer, how does Malory’s response in the fifteenth century allow us to examine the paradigm of queenship from the Conquest onwards?
The tension between the heroic potentiality of the ‘Beowulf’ queens and the ambiguous presentation of Guinevere in Arthurian literature corresponds with several of the dynamics discussed in relation to the lives of English queens. The source of this tension has been identified as the ‘structural misogyny’
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that characterised the era, in which powerful women were increasingly defined in terms of their ‘masculine’ attributes. Women could, and did, participate in politics, economic and religious matters at the highest level, but such participation was consistently figured in relation to the superiority of a masculine model. Hence the trans-gender possibilities offered by heroic femininity anticipate the cultural case for the medieval virago, a ‘third sex’ of women whose power traversed the traditional confines of their role, a position which was ‘unconsciously addressed in the legislation of the era, but that had never been overtly categorised’.
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The sixth-century
Life of the Holy Radegund
confirms the potential of spiritual militancy signalled in ‘Beowulf’. ‘He wins mighty victories through the female sex and despite their frail physique He confers
glory and greatness on women through strength of mind. By faith, Christ makes them strong who were born weak so that … they garner praise for their creator who hid heavenly treasure in earthen vessels.’
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Yet while such possibilities were recognised, the figure of the virago remained troublingly anomalous, and it might be argued that in the period between ‘Beowulf’ and the
Morte d’Arthur
its connotations were increasingly negative.
A skilful queen could negotiate the ambiguities of the ‘virago’ label to her advantage. Confronted with rebellious French magnates during the minority of her five-year-old son, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s granddaughter Blanche of Castile met with them on her bed, holding her child. This image — maternal, intimate, sexual and beseeching — convinced the magnates to support her, placing them in the position of chivalrous protectors, after which Blanche governed as actively as any man. In post-Conquest England, Matilda of Boulogne was able to manipulate the stereotypes of femininity in such a manner that in her case, ‘virago’ became a term of praise, in contrast with its negative use by the detractors of her rival, the Empress Matilda. Eleanor of Provence was positively commemorated as a Virago’, but anxieties about Isabella of France’s sexuality and ruthless ambition again saw the description used pejoratively. By the fifteenth century, Marguerite of Anjou’s desperate struggle for her rights earned her the sobriquet ‘shrill virago’.
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Considering Guinevere’s portrayal in the fifteenth century, it would seem that the virago had descended from a richly able figure whose role as counsellor, peace-weaver and ruler in post-Germanic culture was accepted and honoured (if not unequivocally) to a transgressive fomentor of dissent who needed to be kept in her place. Malory is careful to display Guinevere as less an individual woman than the occupier of a role. His portrait of her exists because of the purpose it serves ‘at the heart of the /files/06/80/70/f068070/public/private clash which heralds and provokes the downfall of the realm’.
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In a sense, she exists at all only insofar as she is a queen. When Lancelot rescues her from being burned at the stake, he rides ‘straight unto Queen Gwenyver and made caste a kurtyll and gown upon her’. Lancelot cannot speak to her as a woman before he has restored her fitting apparel as a queen; she has no power of her own, merely that with which her role, literally, in this instance, covers her. Her position has superseded her personality, and when, as Lancelot’s lover, Guinevere casts it off, the ramifications are terrible.
Morte d’Arthurs
answer to the question posed by ‘Beowulf’ summarises a model of queenship from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries in which queens’ active authority slowly declines while their ceremonial, ritual role
becomes increasingly complex and codified. The move from actual to symbolic efficacity of the intercession dynamic, as we have observed in the examples of Philippa of Hainault and Anne of Bohemia, the elaboration of ceremonies such as coronation, childbirth and churching fix the queen ever more firmly in her place, reducing her, like Guinevere in her kirtle, to a powerless image. Malory refuses the possibilities of heroic femininity opened up by ‘Beowulf’ just as he despairs at the passing of the chivalric world he celebrates.
The Morte d’Arthur
is, as we have seen, coloured by contemporary events. It is theorised that Malory diverted from his sources in the tale of the ‘Knight of the Cart’ to reflect Marguerite of Anjou’s ‘Queen’s gallants’, who died for her at Blore’s Heath, in Guinevere’s company of ‘Quene’s knyghts’.
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This is not to suggest that Malory believed the violence and conflict of 1485 was brought about by a queen, but, as noted in the case of Eleanor of Provence, a foreign queen was always the preferred scapegoat in times of conflict, and perhaps it is not going too far to say that the diminution in queens’ actual power by the fifteenth century, as best exemplified by Elizabeth of York, was correlated to the anxieties provoked by the paradoxical figure of the virago.
And yet. The sixteenth century was to see England’s first queen regnant, and in the figure of Elizabeth Tudor its most heroic female of all. Any dynamic of slow decline in queenly power from the Anglo-Norman period to the fifteenth century is abruptly arrested by a peek into the future. Compared with Wealtheow at the beginning of the period, Guinevere is a pessimistic queenly model for its end, but while Thomas Malory may have been despondent about the possibilities of queenship, the political and cultural legacies of all the women discussed combined to inaugurate perhaps the greatest period of female power in England before the twentieth century.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Adam of Eynsham,
Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis
, ed. D.L. Douie and D.H. Farmer (Oxford, 1985)
Adam of Usk,
Chronicon Adae de Usk
, ed. Edward Thompson (London, 1866)
Adams, N. and Donahue, C. (eds.),
Select Cases from the Ecclesiastical Courts of the Province of Canterbury
Donohue (London, 1981)
Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘
Gene alogia Regum Anglorum’
in
Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I
, ed. Richard Howlett (Rolls Series, London, 1884)
Ambroise,
Histoire de la Guerre Sainte
, ed. G.Paris (Paris, 1897)
Andreas Capellanus,
Tractatus de Amore et de Amoris Remedio
Anselm,
Opera: S. Anselmi Opera Omnia
(6 vols.), ed. F. S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1938—61)
Aungier, G. (ed.),
The French Chronicle of London
(London, 1844)