Attention to embodiment is palpable at every level within the Middle English texts The Awntyrs off Arthur and Ywain and Gawain. These texts are particularly attuned to the bodies of literature they are a product of and perpetuate, exposing a keen attention to the creation of textual bodies both at the level of characterization and form. As an example of Alliterative Revivalist poetry, Awntyrs displays an interest in hearkening back to a distinctly (Old) English literary tradition, which suggests a proto-nationalistic impulse. Similarly, the Middle English translation/adaptation of Ywain and Gawain– originally “Yvain, le Chevalier au lion” in Old French by Chretien de Troyes– illustrates a similar desire to Anglicize Arthurian materials. Both productions of text motion toward anxiety over the production of an English identity through the creation (or, recreation) of art/literature – either via the revival of Old English poetic structures or the translation/adaptation (and thus “reclamation”) of Old French Arthuriana.  Yet, while these bodies of work present a desire for normalization and the curation – via art and literature – of a distinctly Anglicized literary tradition, the bodies of characters within these narratives constantly evade those hegemonic structures and refuse neat categorization. As the forms of the narratives attempt to locate or establish discrete lines around a unified English identity, the bodies described within continually breach the boundaries the texts establish. Consequently, the texts – as well as the genres, forms, and characterizations they employ – just as strongly suggest an impulse toward voicing contemporary social commentaries. Form becomes tied to a complex proto-nationalism that demonstrates both an anxiety over establishing a unified identity while simultaneously expressing a displeasure with ruling ideologies of the period.  

By examining the embodied and nuanced proto-nationalism of the Revivalist Awntyrs and the translated/adapted Ywain we can chart a kind of proto-nationalistic impulse displayed in texts such as these by looking at the genre employed by each narrative. Yet this proto-nationalism is unique in that it continually becomes complicated by critiques of social norms that manifest at the level of form and characterization. The tension between the genre, form, and characterization within these texts paints a delicate image of the nascent proto-nationalist impulses while continually turning towards the bodies (of literature and of individuals) these impulses stand to protect or imperil. 

The Alliterative Revival classifies a form of verse poetry produced between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that utilizes alliterative, long-line verse structures found in Old English poetry of the eleventh century and earlier. Although critical opinion on the Alliterative Revival differs, many scholars see this regressive movement of Middle English poetic form towards that of Old English as a Francophobic proto-nationalistic impulse to (re)create a distinctly Anglicized literary tradition. As Randy Schiff details, “Revivalism fantasizes the continuation of eleventh-century Saxon-Norman struggles on fourteenth-century metrical battlefields, with neo-Saxon alliterative poets revolting against French-influenced (though English-speaking) syllabic competitors” (5). This tradition is born of the tumultuous period that saw plague, frequent shifts in borders and land ownership – often via inter-family warfare – as well as, in the Hundred Years’ War, frequent French invasions. Yet, as Ardis Butterfield notes, “No modern version of nationhood is complete without an understanding of how the English and the French have lived and articulated their mutual history during, and as a result of, the long medieval war” (xix). French and earlier Norman invasions aside, the cultural dissemination of narratives necessitated by the simple reality of proximity often works to blur the boundaries of English and French history/literary tradition, and many Arthurian narratives are recorded first in Old French. Revivalism – along with other English literary practices of this era such as translation and adaptation – attempts a clumsy (yet careful) proto-nationalism that doubles back on itself through keen social commentary: the problems these texts are attuned to are often not Francophobic, but feelings of dissatisfaction with the social systems that haphazardly and arbitrarily endanger individuals.  Thus, the proto-nationalistic impulse – showcased by literary traditions like Revivalism and translation – expresses a nuanced awareness of both a yearning to establish a unified identity from a hybrid timespace, and a displeasure with the current social systems/systems of power. These texts, especially the examples that engage with the Arthurian tradition, often depict the court as despotic, confused, entrapped within outmoded or idiotic customs, or as often is the case with King Arthur, absent causes/signifiers. This creates a nuanced, dual-minded literary tradition that attempts to both resurrect the past into the present (and rectify the past with the present) while expressing concerns of and for the present, such as language, national identity, and social hierarchies. 

As Revivalist poetry, The Awntyrs off Arthur engages directly with this proto-nationalistic, socially minded tradition. The poet’s adoption of the alliterative, Old English verse form discloses a desire for cultural resurrection: Christine Chism notes that Revivalist poetry enacts an “embodied and spectacular performance of history. These alliterative romances enact an association with past traditions, histories, and languages. They harness a highly sophisticated historic consciousness to a spectacular imagination” (2). The materialization of this anxiety in poetic form is particularly refined: here, Old English alliterative verse combines with a bifurcated narrative structure akin to what Jane Alison terms “cells” in her work on narrative patterning. The two distinct narrative cells of Awntyrs appear as separate episodes yet take place within a single day wherein Arthur, Gaynour (Guinevere) and his entourage of knights and barons first go for a hunt which is interrupted by the ghost of Gaynour’s mother, followed by a dinner interrupted by the angry Sir Galeron who challenges Arthur’s rights to his lands. As Alison notes in Meander, Spiral, Explode, cellular narratives create narrative continuity through a literary spatiality rather than diegetic linearity: “Spatiality becomes most clear in cellular texts made of discrete ideas rather than sequential; incidents” (190). They ask readers to “find vectors of association that cut across a narrative, like shafts of light in a stairwell, or find exciting relations among passages that have zero to do with chronological sequencing” (190). These cells are aptly named as they begin to resemble cages, yet both are notably interrupted by (the bodies of) characters to which the text devotes particular attention and care.  

The two cells of Awntyrs are linked in their written proximity to one and other, and depict a dualistic approach to narrative interruption: first, the dead body of Gaynour’s mother interrupts the hunt – the past erupts into the diegetic present – calling attention to a social world wherein the feminine speaking subject must be revived or revenant; finally, Sir Galeron interrupts the feast to challenge Arthur’s right to his lands and thus bring readerly attention not only to the colonialism of the court, but to the the masculine body as a speaking subject that both the drives force of action and is subject to social norms as subject of the king. Chism describes how: 

In the second narrative cell of Awntyrs, a knight errant, Galeron of Galloway, accuses Arthur of unjustly seizing his lands, thus precipitating a tournament between himself and Gawain. Gawain nearly slays his opponent, but in the last moment is stopped by the intercession of Galeron’s lady and Queen Gaynour. The ghost’s warnings to remember the poor and the servants are already forgotten as the ornaments of the court– musicians, expensive cloth, and exotic food– lull the nobles back into an ornate comfort. Galeron, coming to reclaim his lands that Arthur has won “in werre with a wrange wile” (AoA line 421, in war with deception/an unjust trick), erupts – like the ghost – into the dinner to disrupt the idyll. In the battle that ensues, Gawain (on Arthur’s behalf) and Galeron “beten downe berries and bourdures bright” (AoA line 587, beat off beryls or jewels and bright trim). The shedding of jewels here juxtaposed with the ornate accouterments of both Rondole’s Hall and the bedazzled noblemen, suggests a masculinized version of the discussion raised by the ghost in the earlier cell of narrative: here masculine bodies must enact violence upon each other in order to unmask the violence (and colonialism) of the court.I am particularly interested in the way the corporeality of “goost” asks the audience to visualize culture being inscribed on the bodies both of the living and the dead: the ghost of Gaynour’s mother asks Gaynour to concern herself with bodily virtue (AoA lines 204-208) and the living bodies of others via charity (“Have pite on the poer – thou art of power” [AoA line173]). Butler, drawing on Foucault and Nietzsche, notes that:

Although Butler, Nietzche, and Foucault certainly have more contemporary, capitalist forms of the carceral network and ideological state apparatuses as signifying structures in mind, it is striking how applicable this description of the body is to those within Awntyrs. The ghost/zombie and the warring, nearly indistinguishable knights typify the “corporeal destruction” necessary to create a “speaking subject” jarring enough to arrest the attention of the court. These bodies express a metafictive concern for those of the British Isles during the Hundred Years War wherein individuals found themselves subject to arbitrary systems of power. Violence not only became acceptable but honorable, and bodies became interchangeable, expendable, perhaps to the extent that they required the intercession of violence – enacted by or upon them – in order to speak at all. As Butterfield details, The Hundred Years’ War “is not a war of nation-states where the boundaries of aggression are clearly marked, but a feudal and familial one where the two sides are tightly bound by lengthy and intimate identifications, through marriage and territorial possession” (xx). The eruption of the dead into the world of the living offers a complicated image of the need to speak truth to power while remaining safely at a distance – be it via the utilization of an archaic form such as alliterative verse (and the creation of a textual body), or a diegetic revenant erupting to speak the sense of a lost past to a senseless present. Embodiment can be read as the universal throughline: diegetically there is a constant attention to embodied experiences, while materially the embodiment and production of the text itself as a piece of Revivalist literature and its attention to form through bifurcation motion towards this motif. Christopher Cannon, speaking of a Marxist, materialistic attention to Middle English texts, writes on the “matter of a given text” as being “the written shape that unspools on any page in which that text could be said to appear — the shape it has as a particular instance of writing (the layout, the sequence, the ordinance)” (12). The matter of the diptych text here – as it is concerned with the violent creation of speaking subjects in the world of the court – is born of the larger literary form of Revivalist poetry concerned with the proto-nationalistic impulse to (re)establish a distinctly English literary tradition. Yet, the materialization through the form of the argument doubles back and expresses, instead, a concern for the individuals being interpolated by these systems of violence.  

The “matter of the text” in Ywain and Gawain is neither Revivalist nor bifurcated yet expresses a similar proto-nationalistic concern for establishing an English literary tradition, while simultaneously offering fantasy-based critique of the court through narrative patterning. Though hailed as a close translation of Chretien de Troyes’ twelfth century, Old French Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, the Middle English Ywain and Gawain is easily viewed as an act of adaptation. In his work on the adaptation of Chretien’s Yvain into the Middle English Ywain, David Matthews explains how:  

As illustrated in Awntyrs, this Anglicization also allows for a self-conscious attention towards subject formation in a systemic context. Critics like Matthews and Christopher Jensen note that the major change that takes place in the Middle English translation of Yvain is a subtle shift in attention: where Chretien’s central theme of Yvain is love, in English, trowth is privileged (Matthews 461). Jensen notes that this shift towards an attention to trowth/trueth/truth (“Fidelity to one’s country, kin, friends, etc., loyalty; allegiance; also, genuine friendship; also, faithfulness; (b) fidelity or constancy in love, devotion” [“Treuth”]) creates a narrative “with perhaps more immediate application for his fourteenth-century audience” (114). The aspect of truth that becomes widely overlooked in critical engagement with Ywain is that of “fidelity to one’s country, kin, [and/or] friends.” Ywain and Gawain follows the adventures of Ywain as he ventures out to a mystical well, slays its keeper, and weds the slain lord’s widow. Continually, he is pulled away from this marriage by his obligations to the court. Ywain’s adventures here depict a tenuous relationship with fidelity, as his homosocial faithfulness to the court and his fellow knights divides his loyalties and distracts him from his promise (one he seems interested in keeping) to return to his wife and steward her lands. In this detail we find the beginnings of another nuanced critique of social practice wrapped neatly within what first appears to be a colonial project.  

Like Awntyrs, Ywain employs a distinct and innovative narrative pattern: In his travels, Ywain spirals around figures of the natural, non-Arthurian or court-dominated world. These spirals are mainly heralded by the image of the enchanted well and a storm that is summoned when the land is under threat of invasion:  

Thus, rendered by a necessity to defend against the colonialism of Arthur, masculine bodies become interchangeable forces of violence and feminine bodies become commodified through ties to landownership. The “land, kastel, and towre” (YaG line 1081) become tantamount to the body of Lady Alondyne herself, while the armor of the knight both eschews and constitutes his identity. The well here appears to signify a space outside of the Arthurian court; it signals the tenuous relationship between the proto-nationalistic impulse to reclaim by Anglicizing and a longing to construct a form of subjectivity distinct from that of the royal subject. Our next spiral around the well storm displays Arthur himself attempting entry into these lands (not knowing Ywain has become their lord), and a fight between Sir Kay and a disguised Ywain – in the armor of his wife’s late lord – taking place. Alison notes that “A spiral begins at a point and moves onward, not extravagant or lackadaisical like a meander, but smooth and steady, spinning around and around that central point of a single axis” (143). Alison continues to detail the way – and perhaps the reason – the mind turns towards these narrative constructions: “obsessing, my mind spirals, spinning through different elaborations of a problem, pulling me deeper and deeper into a vortex until I say enough and take a walk to knock it free” (143). What is particularly interesting here is that Alison pits the spiral squarely against the walk, the meander, as much Middle English Arthurian literature, including Ywain, embodies this kind of meandering storytelling. As we see Ywain himself take up later, the romance genre sees knights literally meander through the countryside searching out quests, marvails, and adventures – the spiral here is not only strange but generically incongruous. Already approaching his third narrative spiral around the well, Ywain has become trapped by his concern for extricating himself from the court, yet every attempt he makes only works to fold the “uncivilized,” the wild, into the realm of courtly subjectification.  Ywain’s various attempts at extricating himself from the court – via the pursuit of the knight at the well, an exogamous marriage, a stint of madness in the woods, and culminating finally in his adoption of the lion – are all thwarted. The implication being that every departure from the hegemonic social system naturally necessitates an assimilation of the aberration. Foucault, of course, reminds us that “There is no outside. It [the carceral network] takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other” (1496). Ywain’s attempts to extricate himself from Arthur’s court, a place ruled by “unsely laws [unholy laws]” and chivalric codes that endanger both the bodies and the individual interests of the knights (as illustrated when Ywain is pressured by Gawain to return to court after his marriage to Alondyne) only work to fold in the aberrant areas and characters he encounters. The closest image of a body apart from this social space is that of the beast-man who tends to the “lions, beres, bath bul and bare” (YaG line 241) by keeping them separate, corralled: “In wildernes ne in forestes, / That kepeing had of wilde bestes, / Bot thai war bunden fast in halde”(YaG lines 287-9). Characters such as this suggest that to truly leave you must first abandon your humanity – a theme made good by Ywain’s bout of madness in the woods and relationship with the lion – yet by the beast-man’s own account he is, of course, a person still: “‘I am a man’” (YaG line 279).  

Instances of characterization such as these appear to combat the ideological interpolation of the court through an assimilation of outsiders, yet the narrative obsessively reorganizes itself as a spiral around this well. It seems ironic that in a text about the Arthurian court, the central point of the diegesis would be an image of the non-Arthurian world. The well is not a true outside, but a will to remove the body from its context – like our adaptation – and reclaim independent subjectivity. This theme creates a tension between content and form or an instance of form embodying and informing content: even as the depictions of characters and their actions seem to show a way out of the social order, the narrative and its bodies continually shepherd us back to the well, signaling perhaps Ywain’s ultimate inability to create a speaking subjectivity for himself while remaining subject to the king. The well does not represent an outside, but a longing or yearning to be outside the court – one thwarted continually by an adherence to troth: “the fidelity to one’s country, kin, friends.” 

In Ywain’s final return to the well, he is no longer Ywain, but The Knight with The Lion. Like the lion who loses the tip of its tail when rescued from the dragon, Ywain must lose part of himself in order to finally be able to re-approach the well and his estranged wife. Jensen asserts that the lion, as a non-verbal animal embodies a kind of unspoken form of justice that “transcends the letter of the law in order to protect the blood of the innocent, one of the cornerstones of chivalric ethics in any formulation, and Ywain ultimately upholds the poem’s ethical ideal of trowth by challenging authority” (119). Alternatively, I would assert that the lion becomes an anthropomorphic counterpart for Ywain’s own apparent interest in leaving the court behind and represents the social sphere’s ideological ability to fold in aberrations via conversion. Ywain goes through bouts of zoomorphization (which prompt a likening of him to the beast-man who shares so many characteristics with the animals he herds), while the lion undergoes an intense anthropomorphization and literally loses a part of itself (its tail, to be exact) when it is claimed by Ywain and enters – for better or worse – his social space. In both cases, these bodies ultimately spiral around a longing to be outside and a realization that, everywhere they go, they bring the court with them.  

Thus, a concern for the textual body as it participates in the body of a canonical tradition that precedes it naturally leads to a concern for the bodies of the text (and, of course, the bodies in the world that produced it). Both romances illustrate a keen interest in demarcating the boundaries of a distinctly Anglicized, English literary tradition. Yet, this proto-nationalism is complicated by a lack of Francophobia, a hybrid timespace, war, and plague. The authors of both texts display a nuanced approach to nationalistic tendencies that feels prescient: where the proto-nationalism of the Revivalist tradition and the Anglicizing of translated texts work toward the establishment of a unified, English identity via literary tradition and storytelling, there is also a deep concern for the conscription and inscription of power upon bodies. Embodiment in both Awntyrs and Ywain thus functions on the level of generic participation (Revivalism and translation), on a granular level within the texts and the stylized forms they employ (cellular bifurcation and narrative spiraling), and, finally, at the level of characterization within the narratives themselves via the gendered bodies in Awntyrs and the body attempting to escape its royal subjecthood in Ywain. These forms of embodiment work to paint an image of proto-nationalism that is consciously aware of the function of literature as both a means of ideological interpolation (a kind of precursor for an Althusserian ISA), and a way for social commentary to probe the boundaries of both the body and the body politic. Preceding Marxism by centuries, these poems suggest a distinctly materialistic attention to the inscription of power upon the body and the need to conceive of a body – physical or textual – able to transgress.  Although the spiral of Ywain winds ever toward the court, and the cells of Awntyrs begin to resemble the cells of a prison, neither poem concludes with a message of hopelessness. In both romances, the closing images are of women responding to the problems raised by their texts: Gaynour holds the masses for her mother, and Lunet (Alondyne’s maid who often textually resembles a knight) lives on after Ywain and his lady have died in “joy and blis” with “the liown / Until that ded haves dreven tham down” (YaG lines 4024-6). These conclusions are remarkable and depict in these closing moments the feminine subjectivity that, as yet, has not written herself out of the textual body/tradition. She has– at least– survived to speak in the end.