[In the following essay, Dane centers on the function of Auberon, a pagan messenger, and concludes that in Jeu de Saint Nicolas, Bodel is parodying the "structure of an aetiological myth."]

In Jean Bodel's Jeu de Saint Nicolas (1200), a mysterious pagan messenger named Auberon functions as a link between the various stage loci of the play—the pagan court, the land outrerner of the pagan allies, and the tavern.¹ Early in the play Auberon is given the mission of going to the pagan land outremer and summoning the King's allies to war against invading Christians. Despite the urgency of this message, Auberon stops off at the tavern, drinks and dices with Cliquet (one of the thieves who will eventually steal the King's treasure), then proceeds on his way (lines 251-314). His message is delivered accurately and efficiently; the four Emirs arrive in plenty of time to massacre the invading Christians. With the arrival of the Emirs, Auberon's role in the play is over; he is last mentioned at line 348, about one-fourth of the way through the play.

The logical contradictions involved in Auberon's journey have been noted: the tavern seems to be in the French province of Artois, hardly "on the way" between two points in a pagan land; the global military conflicts have no effect on the tavern—the next time we see the tavern (following the supposed journey of the Emirs and the battle against the Christians), the same character, Cliquet, is still there drinking, just as Auberon left him (line 661). Most importantly, Auberon's long delay at the tavern has no effect on the military efficiency of the pagans. Time seems to apply only to the personage on whom our attention is fixed. If Auberon moves to the locus of the tavern, time begins at the tavern; time at the pagan court is stopped and his delay is irrelevant. When he leaves the tavern, time stops there—Cliquet does not move.²

But what does an audience make of this juxtaposition of scenes and thematic material? In the Saint Nicholas Iconia legends on which Jeu de Saint Nicolas relies, thieves are required in order for the King's treasure to be stolen. In none of the versions of this legend are the thieves given any characterization; they are purely functional—someone has to steal and return the treasure, for it is on such theft and recovery that the conversion of the protagonist and his faith in Saint Nicholas depend.³ But in Jeu de Saint Nicolas, we do not even know that Cliquet will be one of these thieves required by the plot until the second tavern scene (lines 651 ff.). Unless we are satisfied with taking the first tavern scene as comic relief and purely gratuitous, Auberon's delay at the tavern will be incongruous and disturbing. In this note, I will propose an alternative explanation. Jean Bodel is simply drawing on audience recollections of other popular stories, not all of which relate to legends of Saint Nicholas. Auberon's delay at the tavern and his carousing there is a parody of the popular story type of the forged or fatal message.

The motif of the forged message has many variants in medieval literature. In the Old Norse Atli poems from the Old Edda, Guthrun's message warning her brothers is tampered with; Hagan and Gunnar are suspicious but proceed to Atli's court where they are killed.⁴ In later medieval legends, contemporary and later than Jeu de Saint Nicolas, a variant appears in the Constance saga.⁵ A queen bears children and sends a message to her husband; the message is intercepted and changed to read that the queen has given birth to monsters. The King's return message, generally sympathetic, is also intercepted and changed, to read that the children must be killed. In both cases, an improperly delivered message proves fatal.

The motif of the distorted message is in a sense fixed. It is a motif embedded in various myths and one that a poet might himself feel called upon to explain.⁶ In the Old Norse Atlakvitha noted above, no explanation is given; but in the later version (Atlamdl in Groenlenzko), an evil messenger, Vingi, is introduced as responsible.⁷ In the legends related to the Constance Saga, a more rational explanation is given: a messenger, on his way to the King, is delayed by the King's mother who gets him drunk and thus is able to steal and alter the message. This is the variant that appears in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale; the drink offered by the queen is Chaucer's way of providing a rational aetiology for the fixed motif of the forged message. To the question posed by the fixed motif "How does a message get distorted in transmission?" Chaucer responds "The messenger is delayed and gets drunk."

Jeu de Saint Nicolas is notorious for its denials of ordinary audience expectations. It is the only variant of the Saint Nicholas Iconia legend that has the Christians invade pagan territory; the ordinary variant, where the pagans are aggressors, appears in the prologue.⁸ Similarly, the protagonist of the Latin Iconia plays is a merchant;⁹ in Jeu de Saint Nicolas, he is a pagan King. In a sense, this technique used by Bodel is only an application of the thematic structure of the story itself to particular motifs of the legend; the story itself is one of negation, conversion, and reversal: the treasure is stolen then returned; pagan becomes Christian. Bodel's additions are a further realization of this pattern: the Christian army's decisive defeat is a decisive victory (they gain Heaven); his thieves gamble fervently but to no effect—each dice game ends in a brawl and a redistribution of stakes; money is exchanged constantly, but no state of equilibrium is attained.

Bodel's treatment of Auberon at the opening of the play is a further denial of expectations: it negates the ordinary bipartite, cause and effect structure of an aetiological myth, for example, the "rationalizing" technique in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. To make Auberon's actions coherent, Bodel draws on a popular aetiology for the delivery of garbled messages. He then omits the expected conclusion. Auberon, the carrier of the royal message, is intercepted and indeed drinks (in the Constance sagas, this would explain why the message was distorted). However, despite this delay, Auberon delivers his message efficiently and in perfect form. What Bodel has done is to retain the logical explanation for a popular motif (the messenger's drunkenness explains an improperly delivered message) and to omit what that aetiology is intended to explain. His use of Auberon becomes a parody of the structure of an aetiological myth. All the expected explanations are there, but there is nothing left to explain.

Notes

¹ Line references are to Albert Henry, ed., Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas de Jehan Bodel, 2nded. (Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires, 1965). Auberon himself has no clear parallel in Old French, although he has been connected with the "petit roi de féerie" of Huon de Bordeaux; A. Jeanroy, "Réminiscences de Fierabras dans le Jeu de Saint Nicolas de Jean Bodel," Romania, 50 (1924), 426 and Henry, JSN, p. 22. For other inexplicable messengers in Arras drama, see Jean Rony, ed., Adam de la Halle: Le Jeu de la Feuillée (Paris: Bordas, 1969), pp. 90-91 note, on Crokesot.

² See esp. Klaus Heitmann, "Zur Frage der inneren Einheit von Jehan Bodels Jeu de saint Nicolas," Romanische Forschungen, 75 (1963), 289-315.

³ For earlier Saint Nicholas legends (particularly the Iconia), see: Otto E. Albrecht, ed., Four Latin Plays of St. Nicholas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), pp. 43-47; Charles Foulon, L 'Œuvre de Jehan Bodel (Paris: Rennes, 1958), pp. 624-38; Charles W. Jones, The Saint Nicholas Liturgy and Its Literary Relations (Ninth to Twelfth Centuries) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Patrick R. Vincent, The Jeu de Saint Nicolas of Jean Bodel of Arras: A Literary Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1954), pp. 15-39. For texts of Latin Saint Nicholas plays, see Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), II, 307-60. Two deal with the Iconia legend, one by Hilarius, and one from the Fleury manuscript (Young, II, 337-50).

⁴ Texts and extensive commentary are available in Ursula Dronke, ed., The Poetic Edda, vol. I: Heroic Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 1-141.

⁵ See Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer's Constance and Accused Queens (New York: NYU Press, 1927), references in chap. 2, pp. 12-35, and p. 69 to motif of the Exchanged Letter. For similar motifs in folk-lore, see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), references under K 511, K 1851 and K 1612. African mythology has been credited with an aetiological myth explaining the origin of death in a garbled or misinterpreted message; see James Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1919), I, 59-86 (Frazer's sources to be used with great caution).

⁶ That alteration of a message is a persistent motif in medieval literature may relate to the mechanics of oral and written transmission. Messages in the chanson de geste are generally delivered accurately and efficiently, but only to a point; see, e.g., Le Couronnement de Louis, ed. Ernest Langlois, CFMA, 22 (Paris: Champion, 1925), lines 1791 and 1812. The forty knights the messenger is supposed to report become thirty when his message is delivered, despite his efforts to give Louis' message word for word. Although the culprit is undoubtedly a careless scribe or forgetful jongleur, these extra-textual entities are as inevitable as the motif itself.

⁷ Dronke, Heroic Poems, p. 77, stanza 4 and notes p. 117.

⁸ Henry, JSN, pp. 9-16, argues convincingly against the authenticity of the prologue. Cf. Tony Hunt, "The Authenticity of the Prologue of Bodel's Jeu de Saint Nicolas," Romania, 97 (1976), 252-67, whose defense of the prologue is based entirely on aesthetic grounds.

⁹ The protagonist in Hilarius' play is called a barbarus; in the Fleury play, he is a Judaeus; Young, Drama, II, 337-50.