Depiction of the Natural World in Selected Works of English Medieval Literature Essay Example

style="text-align: justify">The poetry of wit in Middle English comprises a larger corpus than most commentators have realized. These are some of the reflections of the supernatural as it appears in the natural world. Superstition, however, is in constant traffic with another world than that of mortals. This otherworld is not necessarily heaven, nor the land of the dead; nor is it specifically fairyland In pagan times the sacred well was the home of the god, the source of fertility. Hence the mention of water, be it the sea, a river, a spring, or a well, may be significant.

Trees, mountains, and caves were also entrances to the otherworld. Such natural disappearances as death by drowning were journeys by water to the otherworld; getting lost in the forest or in a cave was another sort of passage. King Arthur (according to another version of his death), Der Alte Barbarossa, Thomas of Erceldoune, and the Pied Piper with his horde of children vanished in this way. The many stories of strange journeys through the forest may have helped to form the conception of Robin Hood's domain, which could be reached only by the initiated.

At a time when English lyric poetry was still colored by an earlier pessimism, and by medieval preoccupation with mortality and the sense of sin, the carol made its appearance. With its light-heartedness, its modern touch, its reflection of natural emotions and its pervading rhythm, its popularity is not surprising. Its later history is soon told. Until the time of the Commonwealth there must have been much honest guileless carol singing, but the Puritans suppressed it as a pagan practice, along

with the Maypole and the Morris dance and Christmas.

Recent collectors have found few really ancient carols, though there are some which in their moral tone show an effort to adapt their earlier gaiety to a graver pace, and thus pass muster with the Puritans. There are many allusions to the tomb, to falling from glory, to the pangs of death and hell, in carols meant originally to wish you joy at the New Year. The carol is another instance of song revived and strengthened by oral tradition, showing the endless revolutions of folk poetry and dance, from ancient ritual through the secular and back to the religious again.

The Franciscans unwittingly caused a wheel to come full-circle when they restored to sacred uses the song of a once religious expression, the circle-dance. As ancient as the ring-dance is the chanted story, told by the professional storyteller since earliest times. "In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry," says Shelley, 16 and all simple people speak a language very close to poetry when, in repeating a story again and again, with a sense of its importance for narrator and listeners, they stereotype its phrases and rhythms more and more.

The character of some ballad tunes recovered from tradition often points to a beginning in chanted speech. Arthur Stories Some of the medieval English Arthur stories keep the earlier tendency to dwell on fighting rather than on loving. The glamour of the Celtic fairyland which gave these stories birth, and the courtliness of chivalry in which they had been dressed by the French, generally appealed

less to the English poets. And beside these negative traits we may discern certain positive English characteristics that persist in our literature.

Tristram, huntsman, harper, lover of the fair Iseult, is in this north-English romance a ruder figure, the nearer perhaps to the simplicity of the original Celtic folktale, but the further from the French courtly lover. The English Tristram, like the English Percival (page 135 ), is more Germanic, a wild, strong youth, a fighting man. And the manner of telling the story is rapid, sometimes too abrupt for clearness, never elaborate. Perhaps this story was oral. At any rate, the English poet has compressed the romance within a little over three thousand short lines.

His conciseness, however, is not the artistic selection of a few incidents for presentation in detail. It is not the artistic conciseness of the finished French and Latin short romances (page 95 ), or of the later English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (page 154 ), but simply the telling of all the incidents more briefly. But again there is more art in the verse. The eleven-verse stanza has, first, eight three-stress verses riming alternately, then a single-stress verse on a third rime, and finally two three-stress verses on the second and third rimes respectively.

All these English developments--epic handling, stanza, love of nature rather than love of woman, are marked in Sir Perceval of Galles. Here the old story of exile and return keeps its primitive character. The English Percival, brought up by his mother in the wildwood, is almost as much the fair, strong barbarian as the Norse Sigurd. There is little care

for courtesies; there is hardly a detail of love-making, in spite of the fact that love is the main motive of the original; there is no trace of the Grail legend which made later versions of the Percival story mystical.

This Percival is a thoroughly real epic hero, rejoicing in fight, simply humorous, closely akin in conception to Havelok. In form the romance is like Sir Tristrem, summary in much the same manner, but with rather more skill in planning and with far more direct and vigorous phrase. Learning as well as folk culture found an early retreat in the valleys of Tweed, Teviot, and Tyne, whose monasteries became the homes of scholars and missionaries from the Celtic churches of the Hebrides and the Anglo-Saxon churches of Northumbria.

Thus a Scottish school of learned poetry arose, which continued to yield verse in times when England was barren of poetic harvest. This was especially true in the fifteenth century. The interactions of learned and folk poetry are never long quiescent, and in Lowland Scotland the native and scholarly streams constantly replenished one another. The shepherds of The Complaynt of Scotland ( 1549) who have given us a list of contemporary dances, tales, and songs are not wholly rustic.

The Thomas Rymer of "True Thomas" who figures largely in both legend and record toward the end of the twelfth century illustrates these mingled elements. Thomas was a courtly poet, but "Rymer," as Aubrey tells us, is the sobriquet of a popular singer. 40 Thomas' rhymed romance tells of his sojourn in Fairyland and his resulting power to foretell events. He was a sort of

Scottish Merlin, retained at court to prophesy for the king. In and about his home, Erceldoune (now Earlston), legend is rife as to his magic powers.

It was at the Eildon Tree on Huntley Bank near Erceldoune that he trysted with the Fairy Queen. Scott liked to claim that Huntley Bank was on his property at Abbotsford. Thomas did not die a mortal death. Obedient to the summons of fairy fauns and does, he followed them one day into the forest and disappeared from men; and there, or under the Eildon Hills with Arthur, he still lives. True Thomas' traffic was with the otherworld, like that of many a ballad hero, and the borderer's dominating sense of another world and more than natural influences over his life has given us some of the finest ballads.

Nature's influence on the imagination and temperament of a people, so consciously cultivated by the Romanticists, was an unconscious force in the poetic tradition of the borderers, who were always aware of the austerity and violence of the physical world. To retell Troy in terms of medieval life was a settled literary habit. Whether or not this is less true than the laborious classicism of the Renaissance, it is at least consistent. The romances make Hector and Diomed dukes or knights in feudal society, as Italians continued to paint the Blessed Virgin in Italian costume against an Italian background.

So for both Boccaccio and Chaucer the setting of the Trojan lovers is neither Homer's nor Vergil's; it is medieval high society cultivating the fiction of courtly love. Chaucer makes this setting not only ampler than Boccaccio's, but

more active. For since he is bent on putting courtly love to the test of real life, he keeps that life before us in details of daily habit which at the same time reveal the characters. Setting, character, plot, are all woven together. Speech and gesture, tone and manner, are sharpened in this scene not merely to brighten the social comedy, but by interaction to advance the story.

For that onward movement of Troilus and Criseyde, at once leisurely and constant, is the development of character. It makes impulse stir habit, and mood reveal motive, in order to lead through decision after decision to the inevitable issue of character. Thus has been transformed a Troy story already old.

Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, knew the episode as it was scattered in seven different passages through Benoit de Sainte-More Roman de Troie, and as it was told again in Latin prose by Guido delle Colonne. n Boccaccio in his Filostrato n had made out of them a new story of love at first sight, wooing, winning, loss, and heartbreak at the desertion. Fatal passion leads his Troilus through rapture to ruin. That love should be irrevocable was the code. Change of love was outlawed. Yet real life showed passion not only shifting, but essentially transitory. As if recognizing in Boccaccio's presentation of passion something truer than the romantic code of courtly love, and at the same time discerning deeper springs of character, Chaucer made the Filostrato over.