SOURCE: "Community and Consciousness in Early Middle English Romance," in Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative, Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 16-54.

[In the following excerpt, Ganim describes a repeated pattern found in Havelok the Dane in which the epic gives way to the real—which in turn yields to comic synthesis. Ganim further explores the use of geography to evoke distinctions between social classes.]

A number of scholars have described the change in society, sensibility, and form that surrounded the transformation of epic into romance.¹ Most studies, however, have concerned themselves with the elegant Old French productions of the twelfth century or have debated the degree of overlap and continuity between the two genres. The shift from heroic to chivalric values, from social struggle to individual quest, from concern with the survival of the entire community to concern with the perfection of specific class ideals, all these have been documented and explained. The road that takes us from the gloom of Beowulf to the glitter of Chrétien's romances crosses barriers of language, social structure, taste, and historical change, but it is a road that has been mapped in some detail.

One reason why the early Middle English romances have not as often been taken seriously is that in most respects they seem to represent a decline in literary history:

Beowulf was composed for persons of quality, Havelok for the common people. Old English narrative poetry was, in its day, the best obtainable; English metrical romances were known by the authors, vendors and consumers of them to be inferior to the best, i.e. to the French; and, consequently, there is a rustic, uncourtly air about them. Their demeanour is often lumbering, and they are sometimes conscious of it.²

I do think that the poets were often "conscious of it," even to the point of playing with an occasional sophisticated air and sometimes contrasting a rapid and deftly constructed narrative with details and phrases that, though they were perhaps striking, were also rustic and quaint. This is not to argue that the Havelok-poet was nearly as sophisticated as Chaucer in such a respect. But he thought he knew what he was good for, and he liked to show it.

From a broader point of view, this note of rusticity, even of naiveté, has a certain rhetorical function, and it is this function that I want to explain here. These romances announce potentially epic themes and then retreat from the implications of those themes. They seem to manifest a sense of history, growth, and change and suddenly retreat into a timeless utopian vision of existence. They sometimes represent the dimensions of physical and social reality in profoundly disturbing detail and then counter that sense of reality with comic or grotesque devices. The conceptions of time and space implicit in the narrative structure of these romances differ from such conceptions in either chivalric romance or in epic. They borrow the conventions of courtly romance but use those conventions to appeal to the reader in a radically different way.

There is no question that French courtly romance was the most characteristic genre of high medieval culture, in much the same way that Gothic architecture was the dominant architectural mode. But in twelfth-century France, romance had flourished in a rarefied atmosphere, that of court patronage, with an elite audience capable of comprehending an often esoteric code of social values. Indeed, the very source of courtly literature is in its insistence that its audience is exceptional and could understand things that a larger audience could not.³ It was an art of delicate balance—on the one hand, hints and cues that serve as signs to the initiated; on the other, long and sometimes tiresome exploration of states of consciousness, fused in an action of fantastic adventure. In a totally different social and literary situation, that of thirteenth-century England, in which class distinctions, though clear, seemed to require less elaborate markings and in which, in comparison, the flowering of provincial courts had never advanced that far, this art was under strains that threatened to transform it beyond recognition. This is not merely to repeat the observation that English romances are less refined and therefore more popular than their French antecedents. Rather it is to describe an entirely different literary and rhetorical situation. Far from confirming the elite nature of a court audience, early Middle English romance speaks to a larger community, and the narrating voice makes an attempt to include itself and its audience in that world. The "flaws" that result are only contradictions if we abide by whatever generic standards we draw from French romance. The result is a form in Middle English romance that borrows widely from many different genres in an attempt to establish its own authenticity and that moves towards a form less courtly and exclusive and more encyclopedic and inclusive, a combination that has considerable implications for the development of later Middle English poetry.

Not only does English romance borrow from a wide variety of genres, which in themselves each imply a specific audience, but it borrows from a wide spectrum of romances.⁴ During the high point of Middle English romance, romance as a genre in France was already two hundred years old, and without too much exaggeration one could point not only to clearly aristocratic but also to popular romances, as well as to those that combined such elements. Often the earliest English romances have the quality of anthologies; consistency of tone is one of their problems. Elements that derive from lyric or epic, from delicate lai, from chanson de geste, from chivalric romance, are found together, as if jerked from their original historical context. But this problematic situation also leads to Middle English literature's greatest strengths—the multiplicity of perspective and wide appeal of such works as The Canterbury Tales—as well as to a kind of included criticism of an entire tradition that I, along with other critics, believe is found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

As I argued in my Introduction, this inclusive but contradictory attitude towards the action is most clearly evidenced in those passages that create the sense of time and space in the poem. Hence the following description of Havelok the Dane, the most interesting of these early Middle English romances, concentrates on such transitional scenes. After some conclusions about the effect of these scenes I move to a discussion of King Horn in light of these conclusions, and then to an attempt to characterize the mentality of the early Middle English romances.

Havelok the Dane is based on a nicely merged dual plot. The king of Denmark dies, leaving his heir, Havelok, in the hands of one Earl Godard. Godard, not about to give up such power, imprisons the boy and his two sisters. He slits the throats of the two girls but spares the prince, ordering a fisherman, Grim, to drown the boy. Meanwhile, we are told of a similar situation in England, where a king has died, leaving his daughter, Goldboro, in the hands of an equally nefarious guardian, one Godrich. Godrich, who dislikes the idea of handing the country over to a mere girl, locks her up in a tower, and prevents her marriage to anyone save the strongest man in England in ironic loyalty to the oath he has sworn to her father. We return to the story of Havelok. Grim, converted by a magic flame that comes out of the hero's mouth, has spared the child, adopted him, and migrated to England. In time of want Havelok travels to Lincoln, where he works as a cook's helper, engages in sports, and establishes a reputation as the strongest man in England. Godrich, delighted that he can break Goldboro's claim to the throne by marrying her to such a commoner, forces the match. The marriage presumably lacks spark, until she too sees a magic flame shoot from the mouth of her husband, notes a magic birthmark, and recognizes by these signs his royal origins. At any rate, Havelok grows conscious of his position, gathers an army, which becomes larger and larger, overthrows both Godrich and Godard, unites England and Denmark, and settles down with Goldboro and their fifteen children, who all become kings and queens, to a long and happy reign. The action takes place in slightly over three thousand lines, which assumes a somewhat more leisurely pace than most early Middle English romances.

Whenever the narrator of Havelok shifts the scene of his action, he feels compelled to impress upon us the importance and seriousness of his theme, either through an elevation of style or through outright statement. His perspective is suddenly enlarged, and he comprehends units as large as miles and years:

Fro londe woren he bote a mile—
Ne were it neuere but ane hwile—
That it ne bigan a wind to rise
Out of the north—men calleth "bise"—
And drof hem intil Engelond,
That al was sithen in his hond—
His, that Hauelok was the name—
But or, he hauede michel shame,
Michel sorwe, and michel tene,
And yete he gat it al bidene;
Als ye shulen nou forthward lere,
Yf that ye wilen therto here.
 In Humber Grim bigan to lende,
In Lindeseye, rith at the north ende.
Ther sat is ship upon the sond.…
(721-735)⁵

This passage is a good starting point for a study of how the poet constructs and uses the "world"—the time, space, and scene—of his fiction and also of the anxiety the poet feels towards the attitude of his audience to this world, for at the same time that he exerts this effort to shift the locus of his action, he also reminds us that this story is about serious issues, which make a claim to be read as history.

In these few lines the narrator seems especially concerned with establishing a sense of place. He tells us exactly where the ship has gone. The fateful "bise" is more than an accident, for it takes Havelok to the proper place at the proper time, a providence the poet calls to our attention. Yet his geography is schematic. This world is like a map, neither felt nor experienced, nor is it described in the easy and proficient style of the poet's most vibrant local scenes. He provides enough information here to avoid the sense of scene thrown against scene, but at best, the world between remains abstract, though with the convincing accuracy of an annal. More necessary to his narrative, especially a narrative about heroes and heroines growing up, with a theme of succession and a plot device of coincidence, is the establishment of time referents. Within the fairly limited compass of a hundred lines surrounding the passage quoted above, we are given three significant time indications. One deals with plot time, one with the narrator's and audience's sense of duration, and one with historical time. The last lines I have quoted above (728-732) return us abruptly and gravely to the time of the narrator and his audience, hence emphasizing the importance of this journey as a turning point in the narrative. However, we can also feel a qualified note in such narrative self-importance, which tells us a good deal about the relationship of poet to audience, as expressed in the somewhat apologetic line: "Yf that ye wilen therto here." Such humbleness comes, of course, precisely at the moment when the pieces of the narrative seem at their farthest point apart, yet also at the point when they are about to come together, and both author and audience know this. The shift to historical time is contained in those lines that have always attracted critics who praise Havelok's realism:

And for that Grim that place aute,
The stede of Grim the name laute;
So that Grimesbi calleth alle
That theroffe speken alle;
And so shulen men callen it ay,
Bituene this and domesday.
(743-748)

I do not think that these lines mean the poet of Havelok is a thirteenth-century precursor of local color and regional writing. First, the narrator's elevatea perspective seems to work against an entirely local flavor. Second, the passage is part of the entirely conventional time indication, in this case putting all of us—characters, narrator, auditors, and Grimsby itself—into the framework of historical time. The narrator wants to emphasize the drama and importance of this journey for the plot. The brief reference to apocalyptic history is another distancing factor. It puts the story into a larger reality, just as the first time indicator "woke" us up from the fiction itself. Yet this epic appeal is suddenly reduced in the next few lines by the humble and local place names, which neither demand nor display such grandeur. Finally, the plot time indicator tells us that while all these distancing factors have taken up our attention, twelve years have passed, during which, while we have been floating around in history and rhetoric, Grim has been working:

 Thusgate Grim him fayre ledde:
Him and his genge wel he fedde
Wel twelf winter other more:
Hauelok was war that Grim swank sore
For his mete, and he lay at hom:
He thouthe, "Ich am nou no grom.…"
(785-790)

And while Grim has been working, Havelok has grown up. It is an important fact, though thrown out at us indirectly. The passage of those twelve years is not at all indicated to us by the wonderful scenes of Havelok eating and Grim fishing. They are indeed splendid scenes in their own right. But they are static and separable rather than dynamic parts of the narrative. The poet has to provide essential narrative information in scenes other than those in which he describes the most distinctive actions of his characters.

The smaller transitions are handled more deftly. An excellent example of the proficiency of the poet in these smaller units is the scene in which Havelok leaves Grim to go out on his own. Starving, barefoot, unemployed, it is his social nadir, the king as lumpenproletarian:

He tok the sheres of the nayl,
And made him a couel of the sayl,
And Hauelok dide it sone on.
Hauede he neyther hosen ne shon,
Ne none kines other wede;
To Lincolne barfot he yede.
Hwan he kam ther, he was ful wil:
Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til;
Two dayes ther fastinde he yede,
That non for his werk wolde him fede;
The thridde day herde he calle:
"Bermen, bermen, hider forth alle!"
Poure that on fote yede
Sprongen forth so sparke of glede.
Hauelok shof dune nyne or ten
Rith amidewarde the fen,
And stirte forth to the kok,
Ther the erles mete he tok
That he bouthe at the brigge:
The bermen let he alle ligge,
And bar the mete to the castel,
And gat him there a ferthing wastel.
(857-878)

There is, I think, no need to emphasize the Christic paradigm of Havelok's ordeal. We could search through a thousand literatures and always find a heroic ordeal similar to Havelok's. As Auerbach has shown, Christianity, and the specifically devotional intensity of this period, allowed the mixture of the humblest details with the highest spiritual and literary aspirations.⁶ All I would maintain at this point, however, is that the first half of this passage is clearly of a mythic dimension.

Our interest is in the way in which this passage, clearly a transition from Grimsby—on the road to Lincoln, to the town, over the Witham bridge, and on to the castle—organizes the space of the narrative for us. When Grim and his family migrated from Denmark, the journey was narrated in an almost epic conventional voice, from a distance, in a way that involved a good deal of strain on the poet's style. The shorter movement of Havelok to Lincoln in the first half of this passage is handled with a good deal more confidence, though it is an aspect of the mythic dimension of the story: the deposed king, barefoot, starving, alone, clad in the sail which Grim takes from his ship. He fasts for two days and is saved by a voice on the third, a time period that owes less allegiance to narrative realism than to mythic resonance. Suddenly, in a stylistic moment that reminds us of Langland, we are brought down to earth with a markedly earthly and unmistakably naturalistic cry: "Bermen, bermen, hider forth alle!" And we are in a world, and a specific street, filled with a social reality of great and almost poignant detail. That the cook who calls for help should be so rushed suggests the quite awful reality of famine, in an image that would not be all that exotic in some parts of the world today. And as Havelok bowls down his fellow workers, we wonder what happened to the aura of Christian humility that surrounded his journey to Lincoln.

The mythic sobriety of his journey in the first few lines of this passage disappears. The spatial organization of the second half is specific and moves us quickly along from city to bridge to castle. The tempo reflects Havelok's own energy, I suppose, his willingness to work, and the fact that his fortune has changed. In addition, we now know that the larger theme of union with Goldboro and revenge upon their usurpers has some realistic basis since Havelok is in the employ of Godard and has access to him. The bustle of the street is suggested but not described in detail. The careful "three days" of Havelok's starvation was mythic and otherworldly. But the carelessly accounted nine or ten battered porters are paradoxically more likely to convince us of the "reality" of the scene. Havelok, carrying the food to the castle, becomes more tangible then the figure who "To Lincolne barfot … yede." The movement to the castle is more comprehensible and more able to suggest literal life than Havelok's outlined journey to Lincoln.

Whenever the poem shifts its locus of action, it cannot help also shifting the social as well as the geographic surroundings. In fact, it tends to see geography and scenery almost in class terms. The fishing village, the town, the castle, correspond to different levels of society, of modes of life. But there is a limit to Havelok's realism. True, we can learn a great deal about the poem's social milieu from the fact that the porters run so quickly to the cook and from the fact that it is the cook who is the contact between castle and town. However, such serious, problematic realism is quickly dispelled by the poet: "Alle made he dem dun falle." The poet defends himself, and perhaps his audience, from the texture of quite real social conflict behind all these entertaining details by a sort of zany cartoon hyperbole. It is classic depression comedy. Such caricature also distends our perception of a "realistic" street scene, confusing our spatial orientation, as if the poet were putting off the possibility of too many questions about the mimetic, social, and even moral intent of the story.

This pattern, we might note, is repeated throughout the poem: a static, almost epic background, suddenly filled with a remarkable sense of life, realism, local immediacy, then, before we can question the contradiction between these two stylistic tendencies, a comic synthesis of the two into a cartoonlike hyperbolic distortion. The same stylistic pattern and the same identification of geography with social class is found in the transition that takes Havelok and his new bride Goldboro back to the town of Grimsby. Havelok decides that the threat to his own life and the possibility that "men sholde don his leman shame" are too great in Lincoln:

Forthi he token another red:
That thei sholden thenne fle
Til Grim, and til hise sones thre;
Ther wenden he altherbest to spede,
Hem forto clothe and for to fede.
The lond he token under fote—
Ne wisten he non other bote—
And helden ay the rithe sti
Til he komen to Grimesby.
Thanne he komen there, thanne was Grim ded…
(1194-1203)

Havelok discovers when he gets to Grimsby that Grim has died, but his children are still alive and they offer themselves and their possessions to the couple. We note again that the poet seems incapable of changing his scene without letting the facts of life intrude: "Hem forto clothe and for to fede." The locales have names, Lincoln and Grimsby, but the movement of the couple is recounted by means of the more economical cartographic perspective of the narrator.

That cartographic perspective also conditions the realism of the journey. Havelok and his wife move in the same mythical way that Havelok, barefoot and alone, came to Lincoln. We wonder in fact, what the "rithe [sti]" is. The line is unfortunately mangled. What does the direction indicate? To the right? The most direct route? A moral quality? It could easily be a desperate rhyme. But why had Havelok not heard until now of Grim's death? How long has Grim been dead? And by extension, how long has Havelok been in Lincoln? On the one hand, these may be naive questions that we are not supposed to ask, but on the other hand, the poem does offer half answers. The poet is again straining his style, heightening it, in order to rearrange his characters into dramatic confrontations in which everyone—Havelok, Grim's family, Goldboro, the Angel—has set speeches. So perhaps all the spatial indications we need are stage directions. But the very ambiguity or absence of those indications and the fact that this transition hinges together two quite different scenes is also indicative of some larger patterns.⁷

In Lincoln we had a marriage, political plans, ambitions, class "conflicts," fear, a city. In Grimsby we have a group of loyal retainers, dreams, magic conversions, comfort, and despite the lower social standing of the inhabitants, a sense that they all recognize and respect "the right way," the natural order. Even the gap between rich lords and starving porters in Lincoln is resolved here in favor of a "middle" class, for Grim's sons, nouveau riche fish entrepreneurs, have done well for themselves. And significantly, it is in Grimsby that the political and social contradictions that arose in Lincoln—that Goldboro must marry a commoner, that the couple would starve, that their marriage would be uneasy—are all resolved by ordination, as if by magic. The road from Lincoln to Grimsby is not only a physical road.

Everyday life, though it bursts from every scene, is only uneasily integrated into the narrative. I have examined above, with a close eye to formal and narrative elements, the passage in which Havelok, under Grim's care, migrates to England. In that passage the poet was working with fairly conventional narrative elements, straining to achieve a flexibility and fluidity for which his style and immediate literary models are at this point historically unprepared. If we read the passage only with an eye to content, however, its variety of realistic themes is extraordinary. Within the compass of a few hundred lines we travel through social classes from kings to commoners, through economic periods from plenty to starvation, and in however stylized a way, we worry about politics, weather, food, clothing, travel directions, and business. So to some extent Havelok the Dane does demand for itself a special niche in the classification of romance, rebelling both against the strict class interest of romance and against its stylized and formal unreality. It might well belong to what we have come as common readers to consider a peculiarly "English" strain of literature, filled with God's plenty, genre scenes, robust and hearty details, looking life straight in the eye. But it must also be pointed out that the style of the narrative prevents this realism from crucially influencing the action of Havelok. All this life is recorded, to be sure, but it remains supplementary. The beginning and the end of Havelok sound very much like a verse chronicle.⁸ The natural ground of Havelok the Dane, as we learn from both the introductory and concluding passages, is one of peace, order, and fecundity, and that which disturbs that peace is not only evil but unnatural and should be punished in kind. When Godrich is executed, when Havelok punishes his attackers, we can forget both balance and compassion. We are certain, with the poet and his audience, that such retribution is indeed the wrath of God and his earthly king, as we indeed know that any absorption in such nihilism and violence is a fairly safe business, for eventually we will return to a natural ground of stability.

Significantly, the poet uses a narrative style in both the opening passage, describing the life and death of the old kings, and in the concluding passage, describing the return of the kingdom to Havelok, which is very much like the style of an aristocratic chronicle. For all the mixing of classes in the poem, the normal state of things, in both the beginning and the end of the poem, is communicated in a style that suggests a rigid class order.

We are meant to compare the death of Aethelwold, dignified and peaceful, with that of Godrich, outrageous and unnatural. The lesson is that a man dies as he lives. Aethelwold, and a number of other good characters, are described time and again as the best that ever rode a horse. Godrich and Godard, however, at their death, also end up riding horses, though backwards, and face down, with their noses in the horses' "crich," an almost Dantesque suitability of punishment. But the contrast between good and evil characters goes further than that. We are told that except for his soul Aethelwold's greatest concern at his death is for the safety of his daughter. Godrich and Godard, on the other hand, are punished precisely because of the way in which they treat their charges. In the abstract, of course, their crime is usurpation, disloyalty, and treason to one's knightly oath. In the concrete, however, their villainy is communicated to us by the way in which they treat their charges, the children they have sworn to protect. It becomes a battle, not so much of political forces and dynasties, but of generations. In many romances we find such alignments between the hero and his disenfranchised followers against usurpers. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, had to fight them in the form of his wife's suitors. Havelok, a peasant, fights against Godrich, who, we learn, is a propounder of a new order in law. Romance as a mode frequently pits the traditionalists and the young against the new men.

Towards the end of the story, when Havelok is finally able to command a following of warriors, he proceeds with dispatch to return and regain his land and punish his usurpers. It is at this point that the narrative becomes obsessed with feats of arms and the descriptions of the battle scenes reach the stage of the grotesque:

Hauelok lifte up the dore-tre,
And at a dint he slow hem thre;
Was non of hem that his hernes
Ne lay therute ageyn the stemes.
The ferthe that he sithen mette,
Wit the barre so he himgrette
Bifore the heued that the rith eye
Vt of the hole made he fleye,
And sithe clapte him on the crune
So that he stan-ded fel thor dune.
The fifte that he ouertok
Gaf he a ful sor dint ok
Bitwen the sholdres, ther he stod,
That he spende his herte blod.
The sixte wende for to fle,
And he clapte him with the tre
Rith in the fule necke so
That he smot hise necke on to.
(1806-1823)

We are meant to sense a turnabout in Havelok's fortunes in these explosions of violence and to realize that, having married and established a band of retainers, he is close to fulfilling his calling. The narration is no longer like love-romance. We are reading a chanson de geste.

Yet the political theme that such a change in fortune should suggest gets lost. The poet delves into the grotesque when the subject approaches the socially problematic. Similarly, the poet not only fails to resist the temptation of comedy but indulges in comedy at precisely those moments when either tenderness or piety threaten to overwhelm his narrative, or when the audience is about to be overwhelmed by magic. Havelok is awakened by his suddenly ecstatic wife after she discovers his "king-mark." Later Ubbe's men enjoy the sight of the half-naked couple when they investigate a light coming from the tower in which Havelok and Goldboro are bedded. Saved by a conversation between Grim and leue, the baby Havelok is dropped on a rock and wishes that he had never been born a king. After Havelok defeats the other participants in a shot-putting contest, they walk away muttering, "We dwellen her to longe!"

Even in the frequent scenes of violence in the poem the horror of what is being described is very often mitigated by an exaggerated scale and an enthusiastic, uncritical tone. Such a style allows a certain evasion. The peculiar moral climate of the poem, in which bloodshed is rendered downright entertaining, is not, I think, a remnant of a healthy paganism. Rather, the blood, gore, and torture of some of these scenes suggest to the audience not naturalism, but a rather naive fantasy world not unlike a modern cartoon or western. The battle scenes, which are meant as references to the battle scenes of epics and chansons de geste, are devoid of criticism, moral imperative, or martial excitement, for the vigor and frequent zaniness of the description tend to reduce either our delight at Havelok's revenge or our horror at a peaceful scene being destroyed. For the moment, we are drawn into a cheerful nihilism, by which destruction imposes its own effect, a holiday from morality, resembling comedy.

The poem ends on a utopian note that at the same time recalls the chronicle mode in which the poem opened, for we began as we end, with a perfect government. The poet becomes a recorder, and his record is truth, though one that we might only hope for were we the poet's contemporaries. The irony is that having seen how such a union and such a kingdom might come about, a medieval audience could well throw up its hands, for there is no human way to organize and will helpful angels, magic flames, and incredible coincidences. In a sense, then, the serious political advice, even the indirect criticism, that is contained in the prologue to the poem is compromised.⁹

The world of Havelok never seems particularly amenable to human will. Even the markedly realistic details for which it has so often been praised are communicated in such a qualified way that we are rarely impressed with the poem's handling of physical reality. Instead, the mind of the reader backslides, concentrating on miracles and gruesome or bizarre images. For the poet too the integration of epic themes with the genre scenes that he too is fond of is accomplished only at moments, and then, only with the aid of magic and dreams:

Herkne nou hwat me haueth met!
Me thouthe y was in Denemark set,
But on on the moste hil
That euere yete kam i til.
It was so hey, that y wel mouthe
Al the werd se, als me thouthe.
Als i sat upon that lowe,
I bigan Denemark for to awe,
The borwes and the castles stronge;
And mine armes weren so longe
That i fadmede, al at ones,
Denemark, with mine longe bones;
And thanne y wolde mine armes drawe
Til me, and hem for to haue,
Al that euere in Denemark liueden
On mine armes faste clyueden;
And the stronge castles alle
On knes bigunnen for to falle;
The keyes fellen at mine fet.—
Another drem dremede me ek:
That ich fley ouer the salte se
Til Engeland, and a] with me
That euere was in Denemark lyues
But bondeman and here wiues;
And that ich kom til Engelond,
Al closede it intil min hond,
And, Goldeborw, y gaf it the…
(1285-1311)

Throughout the narrative we are aware of various patterns that seem at some points to dominate the story. There is the theme of political destiny. Then there are striking and successful localized pictures of domestic life, rare in medieval romance and therefore valued perhaps more by modern readers than the author might have intended. Finally there is the Marchen-like progress of the hero, which connects the story to fairy tale. But only at certain points in the narrative, which tend to be revelations, as in this dream, does the style rise to any great imaginative power and connect with ease the themes of magic, cabbages, and kings. The dream acts as a unifying device. We know, after Goldboro's commentary on Havelok's dream, not only what their destiny will be but also how the Cinderella theme is connected to the historical imperative, the union of Denmark and England.

In a series of delightfully linked wonders, all occurring on Havelok's and Goldboro's wedding night, Havelok's description of his dream stands out. To prevent Goldboro from having a claim to the throne, the wicked Godrich marries her to a commoner who has achieved renown in the land for his deeds of strength and kindness. Distraught by her new social position, surrounded by commoners with "hors and net, and ship on flode," who brag of their gold and silver, who promise to wash her clothes and bring her water, she lies awake at night, realizing that she has been deceived, when suddenly a beam of light blazes out of the mouth of her new husband. She is now, of course, more terrified than ever, but the voice of an angel tells her that this means her husband is king and she shall be queen after all. At this, with a change of heart, she embraces and kisses her comfortably sleeping mate, who awakes and tells her his dream.

As I have shown in detail above, the narrative has placed great emphasis on geography. But this dream shrinks the entire known world into a surrealistic, iconlike single scene. In this one dream Havelok as king stretches out his arms and, from the hill he imagines himself on, is able to embrace the. castles and cities of Denmark. On the night of his actual marriage he also dreams of a mystical political marriage, of the king and his land.¹⁰ As we learn from the second dream, in which Havelok flies to Denmark and brings back all of the land in his hand and gives it to Goldboro, she too plays a political as well as romantic role. Havelok's vision is as much-a love song as it is a dream of empire. One reason why this dream is so fascinating is that it seems to have other medieval parallels. The geographic detail that the poet of Havelok imparts in the course of his story is touching and naive, but the fantastic scale of this dream is sophisticated and accomplished. The literary models for dream visions were no doubt more sophisticated than those for the representation of reality. The overarching perspective, the point of view of the dreamer from a height far above the world, is a common one in medieval dream tradition. The dream combines perspective, geography, prophecy, and apocalypse. In addition, the figure of the hero reaching halfway across the world, embracing oceans and cities, is not unlike those on icons of royalty in the visual arts. Finally, the delicate tone of Havelok's description resembles that of a love lyric:

And, Goldeborw, I gaf it the:
Deus! Lemman, hwat may this be?

Medieval love poetry often combines visual images in a similarly elusive fashion, but the combination is significant here because the poet assumes such an intimate style to communicate information of potentially monumental significance.

The fact remains that the style of this spatially fantastic dream is more accomplished and striking than the style used in presenting the realistic, localizing details for which the poet is so often praised. It is as if the narrator is more concerned with lifting Havelok out of the mire of day-to-day existence than he is in exploring the literary possibilities of that existence. The Havelok-poet is not a realist in the sense of dealing seriously with the everyday or the socially problematic. Havelok brings a touch of grace to the lives of fishermen, wrestlers, and merchants. It does not draw its grace from them.

Auerbach has conjectured that the breadth and sense of freedom of movement in the Germanic epics derived from the fact that their historical setting was in the period of tribal migrations, so that, compared to later narratives, "the spaces about the occurrences and the heaven above them are incomparably wider … and the structure of society is not so rigidly established."¹¹ Narratives such as the Roland, for their part, seem constricted, limited in their settings, with distinct, parceled scenes, resulting in a structure reflecting feudal political forces. What can such suggestions tell us about Havelok? True, the alignments of its characters might be seen as a "post-feudal" alliance of king and commons against the barons, but that does not explain its form and movement.¹² Rather, its uncertain locus of action and its backgrounds, which vary from the realistic to the schematic, indicate a wariness, perhaps unconscious, on the part of the poet as to where the weight of his action should lie. Neither the court nor the street seems powerful enough to sustain the presentation of the world by itself. The social forces that we can now identify in the poem—urbanization and mercantilization—seem to have crept into its structure almost by accident.

The poet's seriousness, or at least what he considers as potentially serious in his material, is made clear in the opening section describing the death of Aethelwold. The poet's comments are political and social, attempting to bring the poem into a kind of history. Although such themes are not immediately subverted by his narrative style, it is worth noting that although the poet can sustain a heightened tone when he wants to, he is a nervous entertainer. When he thinks his audience is tiring of high seriousness, or when he tires of it, he switches his tone in an alarmingly adroit, almost apologetic fashion. Similarly, the poem at first exhibits a well-planned structure. One could mark off divisions in the poem, using the frequent summaries of the plot that the poet includes, something like chapters or books; but gradually, we, and the narrator, lose sight of such ordering, and episode piles upon episode, climax upon climax. We lose the sense of history that the poet establishes at first and have only a denouement that reverses the trials of—how many?—years. I emphasize these structural patterns less to be critical than to underline the themes that the poet himself considered important. In fact, paying attention to such "epic" elements in Havelok the Dane corrects the excess attention critics have paid to the story's charm or "Cinderella" theme. That is what the poet does best. But it is not all he has tried to do, and it is not all he has done. The narrative pays due attention to epic and potentially tragic themes and aspires, however awkwardly, to some status as a monumental poem. That the miniature and the comic should be what we value the poem for is certainly not what the poet intended. Yet that disparity is part of Havelok's fascination as a narrative.

The sensory realism in the scenes of Grim fishing, Grim's barnyard, and Havelok working in the streets of Lincoln (for the realism of the story is limited to this series of episodes) is energetic and exuberant, but that energy is explosive, and neither the poet nor the rhetorical means he has at hand have much idea what to do with it. We become conscious, on the one hand, of these images of real life. On the other hand, the actual narrative seems to be indulging in the machinery of monumental epic. Yet the poet seems to lack the means to integrate the two. However much we explain this distance in terms of medieval rhetoric or medieval "perspective," the fact remains that the poem is attempting to harness energies for which the literary means have not yet been perfected.

Only at moments of revelation, as we have seen, is there even an uneasy alliance between the marvelous, the epic, and the realistic elements of the poem. The coordination is possible because, as Dieter Mehl has pointed out in another context, the poet borrows more from the typical saint's life than he does from the typical romance.¹³ Indeed, one could find the basis of Havelok's cartoonlike humor in any number of saints' lives. But it may also be that the saint's life illustrates in a similar way the workings of the supernatural in a setting that is entirely mundane. So indeed does the Grettisaga, and so, to some extent, do folk tales. The Havelok-poet's problem is the opposite: he must invest the everyday with a sense of wonder. It may well be that there is some stylistic or structural debt by the Havelok-poet to folk tales or saints' lives. But it may also be that such an artful contrast of the mundane and the miraculous is an obvious solution to a common medieval literary problem. The aesthetic result of such a narrative style is to reflect the light that comes from royalty or the supernatural onto the lives of fishermen, peasants, villagers, and the humble apparatus of works and days.

Although there is no character development as such in the narrative, there is a hint of growth, a step towards characters having some strength of their own outside simple narrative functions. Havelok does seem to undergo an education fit for a king, growing from child-like fear to strength and bravery and love.¹⁴ He experiences the conditions of life of all the various social castes that he will rule. Reversals of loyalty are common. Godard and Godrich both turn against their sworn oaths and rationalize their actions in soliloquies. Goldboro, who grows from a baby to a rather haughty young princess, at first despises Havelok, then loves him, in a scene which displays at least as keen a sense of sexual comedy as Chaucer and Chretien, when she discovers his royal origins. Grim and Leue, whose plight is first rationalized in sociological terms, also turn their allegiance from Godard to Havelok. Grim, Leue, and Goldboro, however, change their minds only when Havelok's mouth shoots its magic flame. And Havelok, no matter what his experience, will still be a king, for kings, in this poem, are born and marked, not made or taught. These attempts at character development, too brief to be convincing, represent an impulse on the part of the poet to invent psychological explanations for that which is already explained by destiny.

Nor is there the attention to tone we can find in a number of other medieval narratives, most specifically those of the alliterative school, but also such romances as King Horn. The Havelok-poet's art is closer to the art of the preacher, reaching here to the abstruse qualifications of theological speculation, there to the popular and coarse joke.¹⁵ Indeed, the pulpit "stance" of the common preacher, explaining to an often unlettered following, and hence conscious of when the common or the abstract is heading too far in one direction, is analogous to the stance that Havelok's narrator takes. The desire for both ale and salvation is thrown together in the final words of the poem, in a not entirely irreligious or parodic combination of the human and the eternal.

Thus it appears that the voice of the narrator, in however primitive a fashion, begins in Havelok the Dane to take on far greater aesthetic importance than in most romances. It may well be that when romance as a narrative form broke beyond the class boundary that originally defined it, it required, to hold it together, a voice rather than a class ethic and idealized ethos, for in the place of the sophisticated and graceful voice of poets such as Chretien, we begin to sense a more earnest and anxious narrative stance, less confident, though not without irony, humor, and self-awareness. The development of such a voice is not without importance for the poetry of the next century, especially that of Chaucer.…

Notes

¹ The classic distinction is W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (2nd ed., 1908; rpt. New York: Dover, 1957). See too Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 123-142; Vinaver, The Rise of Romance, pp. 1-14; Bloomfield, "Episodic Motivation and Marvels in Epic and Romance," pp. 97-128; D. M. Hill, "Romance as Epic," English Studies 44 (1963): 95-107. For a judicious survey of scholarship, see Lillian Herlands Hornstein, "Middle English Romances," Recent Middle English Scholarship and Criticism: Survey and Desiderata, ed. J. Burke Severs (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 55-95. Recent studies such as Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), suggest interesting distinctions within "romance" itself along the lines of the present chapter. A similar distinction between thirteenth- and twelfth-century romance in France is made in an important article by Per Nykrog, "Two Creators of Narrative Form in Twelfth-Century France: Gautier D'Arras—Chretien de Troyes," Speculum 48 (1973): 258-276, though his distinction seems to be based primarily on aesthetic differences. An important attempt to categorize the romances by length is Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1968).

² W. P. Ker "Metrical Romances, 1200-1500, I," The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1907-1908), p. 277.

³ On the social context of medieval lyrics, see Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., "The Medieval Lyric and Its Public," Medievalia et Humanistica, NS 3 (1972): 133-153.

⁴ Among the most important of recent researches is the attempt by Paul Strohm to deduce medieval generic definitions from terms in the texts themselves. See his "Passioun, Lyf, Miracle, Legende: Some Generic Terms in Middle English Hagiographical Narrative, I and II," Chaucer Review 10 (1975): 62-75, 154-171; "Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives," Speculum 46 (1971): 348-359; and "Some Generic Distinctions in the Canterbury Tales," Modern Philology 68 (1971): 321-328. A summary of definitions is available in Mehl, Middle English Romances, pp. 13-22.

⁵ For the purpose of convenience, all line numbers from the romances in this chapter are to the edition by Walter H. French and Charles B. Hale, Middle English Metrical Romances, 2 vols. (1930; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964). Archaic letters have been modernized both here and in other Middle English extracts.

⁶ Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 143-173.

⁷ Unfortunately for our analysis, the road back to Denmark is contained in a missing leaf. In addition, a copyist's error seems to have omitted the journey back to England.

⁸ On the relation of chronicle to romance, see the important comments by M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), pp. 139-175. My comments on the "ground of being" of medieval history draw upon Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History.

⁹ Perhaps such evasion is characteristic of medieval political theory in general: See John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956); and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 1-131.

¹⁰ Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), prints a number of illustrations. His discussion informs this scene. On the political theme in Havelok, see Mehl, Middle English Romances, pp. 161-172; and David Staines, "Havelok the Dane: A Thirteenth-Century Handbook for Princes," Speculum 51 (1976): 602-623.

¹¹ Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 110-111.

¹² For an interesting reading of Havelok in social terms and for a comparison with a French analogue, see John Halverson, "Havelok the Dane and Society," Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 142-151.

¹³ Mehl, Middle English Romances, p. 172.

¹⁴ See Robert W. Hanning, "Havelok the Dane: Structure, Symbols, Meaning," Studies in Philology 64 (1967): 586-605; and Judith Weiss, "Structure and Characterization in Havelok the Dane," Speculum 44 (1969): 247-257.

¹⁵ See G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1933).…