Even Outlaws Love the Springtime

Now that winter is over and green has returned to the land, I am thinking again of the greenwood, something I presented on last fall at the 9th Biennial Conference of the International Association of Robin Hood Studies at Saint Louis University. 

I really love spring

I was presenting on a new topic (and one I am still struggling to understand), but one that may have been influenced somewhat by my teaching Shakespeare that semester. As I was preparing my presentation on the ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk, I was teaching Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, both plays involving escape to the world of the greenwood. As You Like It even features Shakespeare's only reference to Robin Hood, when Charles explains that the exiled Duke and his men live in the Forest of Ardenne "like the old Robin Hood of England" (1.1.101). The difference between these plays and the early ballads, however, is in the liminal nature of the greenwood space. Like The Tale of Gamelyn, after which As You Like It's plot was partly based (and one of my cats is named as well), and Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert, Erle of Huntington and Death of Robert, Erle of Huntington, Shakespeare describes a temporary movement away from urban space. The greenwood in these texts allows for freedom and resolution and the ultimate return to the city. In the early ballads like Robin Hood and the Monk, on the other hand, the greenwood is the permanent residence of the outlaws. 

My paper, "'As light as lef on lynde': Dangerous Play in Robin Hood and the Monk," grappled with the fact that the forest in Robin Hood and the Monk is a space of beauty and joy, and yet the ballad is filled with terrible violence. I felt disturbed by the disjunction between the tone of the ballad and its content. I had been thinking a lot about the ballad as I worked on the Much the Miller's Son page for the Robin Hood Project. It features one of Much's most memorable (and terrible) moments, when Little John murders a monk and Much murders the monk's little page, presumably a child. Yet the opening of the ballad gives us no sense of the carnage to come, but rather invites us into a merry springtime world:

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and long,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song. (1-4)

       [In summer, when the woods are bright,
       And leaves are large and long,
       It is full merry in fair forest
       To hear the birds' song.]

It's May, the season in which lovers and outlaws alike can rejoice, and birdsong fills the forest with music and our hearts with delight. The short ballad (we have 358 lines, and there were originally around 406) spends the first 12 lines, in fact, on how merry the forest is, and then, when we are finally introduced to a character on line 13, it is Little John, announcing that "'This is a merry mornyng'" ['This is a merry morning'] and continuing with more discussion of the joys of summer in the greenwood. The idyllic realm with which the poem opens, however, belies the violence underlying the carefree lifestyle of this outlaw band. One of the earliest extant ballads, Robin Hood and the Monk is best remembered not for the beauty and delight to be found in the greenwood, but instead for the shocking violence perpetrated by the outlaws who reside there. Many men are slain over the course of the ballad, and, in a moment that unsettles modern fans and critics alike, Much beheads a child without a second thought. Although it might seem that the playful tone of the ballad ill-suits such grim content, I have begun to think that the ballad instead promotes a specific kind of violence that is playful in nature, a kind of violence that, like the ballad itself, can trick a person outside of the outlaw band even as it can lead to shame, discomfort, or death. The ballad does not contrast violence with harmony, but instead contrasts varieties of violence to show that merry and playful violence is the most successful for those residing in the greenwood world. This playful violence is in turn indicative of the link between outlaw identity and greenwood space.

"In Somer, when the shawes be sheyne"
(Sun through the trees at Letchworth Park)

As the ballad opens, Little John is immediately aligned with the greenwood environment; he speaks the language of Sherwood itself. His initial speech about the "merry morning" mirrors the language that the opening of the ballad uses to describe the setting. His enthusiasm for the space around him and his irrepressible merriness represent a respect for the greenwood life. Little John's initial emphasis on the merriness of the surrounding, corresponding as it does to the merriness inherent in the ballad descriptions, contrasts starkly with Robin Hood’s anxious speech. In response to Little John's enthusiastic monologue, Robin replies that “on thyng greves” [one thing grieves] him and does his “hert mych woo” [heart much woe] (21; 22). The forest may be nice, but Robin is focused instead on what he’s missing back at Nottingham; he wants to attend mass, which the greenwood can’t provide. Much introduces the dangers that attend a known outlaw back in town when he advises Robin to 

       'Take twelve of thi wyght yemen,
        Well weppynd, be thi side.
        Such on wolde thi selfe slon,
        That twelve dar not abyde.' (31-4) 

       ['Take twelve of your strong yeomen,
       Well armed, by your side.
       Such a person as would slay you,
       Would not dare face those twelve.']

I suppose you know you’re an outlaw when going to church requires twelve bodyguards. Robin’s rejection of this plan is also a rejection of the group mentality. He separates himself from his men not only by his attitude and his plan to depart from the greenwood, but also by his unwillingness to bring members of the greenwood band with him. His subsequent squabbling with Little John, a character who represents the merry greenwood world, cements his role in this ballad; he is out of sync with the outlaw realm, neither merry nor attuned to the natural world around him. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren note in their introduction to the text that "[t]he forest setting seems a state of harmony to which the outlaws return after urban disruptions. But just as violence enters this Edenic world, the communal calm of the outlaw band is disrupted by conflict." I would add to this that the conflict comes when Robin is not aligned with the greenwood space and outlaw band; it is this internal "ferly strife" that serves as a catalyst for the larger violence (and notably high body count) of the ballad (51). When Robin and John part, the ballad explains that, 

Then Robyn goes to Notyngham,
       Hym selfe mornyng allone,
And Litull John to mery Scherwode,
The pathes he knew ilkone. (63-66)

        [Then Robin goes to Nottingham,
        Mourning to himself alone,
        And Little John goes to merry Sherwood,
        The paths he knew each one.]

Howard Pyle image (1883) courtesy of the
  Robin Hood Project

Their parting of ways sends Robin to town alone, while it leads Little John back into the forest, a place he knows so intimately that all of its paths are clear to him. Robin and John thus appear as contrasting figures, but not just in that John is merry while Robin is brooding. As the ballad progresses, each exhibits a propensity for violence, but Little John uses playfulness to accomplish his violent acts, and it is this playful violence that succeeds repeatedly over the course of the ballad where Robin's more straightforward violence fails.

Robin’s most violent moment, a scene in which he slays twelve men and wounds “mony a moder son” [many a mother's son] caps off a succession of astonishingly reckless actions on his part. (109). Not only does he head to mass alone, but strolls right in with no disguise and kneels to pray in front of the whole congregation so that “[a]lle that ever were the church within/ beheld wel Robyn Hode” [all who were ever within the church/ beheld Robin Hood well] (73-74). By the time he starts fighting and killing, it’s because he’s surrounded, and he can’t save himself from imprisonment regardless. It may be an impressive show of prowess, but his solitary sword breaks and leaves him without recourse. The very fact that he could kill and wound so many men indicates the impossible odds he was facing. Unlike John’s more subtle tactics, Robin chooses to enter the scene as himself and ends up playing a desperate defense. It is not surprising that Robin chooses this moment to announce, “Alas, alas! ... Now mysse I Litull John” ['Alas, alas! ... Now I miss Little John'] (101-102). Separation from Little John and the kind of behavior and thinking that Little John represents leads Robin straight to a dungeon. And it is only Little John’s bold trickery that can bring him back to the forest.

Little John, on the other hand, delights in tricking and playacting. He and Much have the monk convinced that they’re fellow travelers, innocent men with a shared fear of Robin’s gang. They approach the monk and page “[a]s curtes men and hende” [as courteous and gracious men] while commiserating with the monk over Robin Hood’s murderous crew of  “many a wilde felow” [many a wild fellow] (160; 179). Because Little John's identity as an outlaw is so clear to him, because Sherwood is in his very being, he can take on new personas as he pleases. He has freedom of movement and role precisely because he is inextricably bound to the greenwood and to his place as outlaw there. He and Much act the part of friendly, courteous men while contrasting their own behavior with that of the wild outlaws, but they are far more dangerous in their amicable guise than they would be in their own outlaw roles. Where Robin walks into church as himself and raises immediate suspicion, Little John aligns himself with the monk even as he plays upon the monk’s fears of outlaw attack. John can win such games easily because non-outlaws don’t even know they’re playing. His confident playfulness allows him to overcome his opponents time and again, employing such subtle offense that the defense never enters the field. The only moment of the ballad in which Little John reveals his identity to those he's tricked is in fact the moment in which he beheads the monk. The ballad explains that,

  The munke saw he shulde be ded,
Lowd mercy can he crye.
'He was my maister,' seid Litull John,
'That thou hase browght in bale;
Shalle thou never cum at oure kyng,
For to telle hym tale.' (197-202)

        [The monk saw he should be dead,
        Loud mercy he did cry.
        'He was my master,' said Little John,
        'That you have brought to harm;
        You shall never come to our king,
        In order to tell him the tale.']

The beheading isn't instantaneous; John gives the monk time to see his imminent peril and cry mercy, and the outlaw responds to the cry for mercy with his own identity as Robin's man and with his reasons for killing the monk—apparently a blend of vengeance and expediency. In this way, Little John makes utterly clear that his playacting is always within the context of his true role as an outlaw of Robin's band.

Charlotte Harding image (1903) courtesy of the
Robin Hood Project

The moment in which Little John beheads the monk and Much beheads the little page has managed to lodge itself firmly in readers' minds, a horrifying scene emblematic of the violent nature of these early ballads. Derek Pearsall writes in "Little John and the ballad of Robin Hood and the Monk" (In Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval. Ed. Helen Phillips. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Pp. 42-50) that the murder of the little page “is the truly shocking moment of the ballad” and goes on to say that the episode serves to remind  us “of a world of brutal and unsentimental saga-heroes in which decency, a respect for the lives of the innocent, what we usually call a sense of honor and fair play, are not part of the code of behavior in the way we might expect” (46). It is true that this is a brutal and unsentimental scene, that the beheading of a child is simply a smart cautionary move to these men, but this is not straightforward violence. Brutal it may be, but it is couched in play and trickery, and those very traits are part of a different kind of code. The scene of clever trickery and dramatic irony could be funny or cute if it didn’t lead to a double execution. (It occurs to me that an alternate title for my paper could have been "It’s all fun and games until someone gets beheaded" ... ) What really makes the incident so shocking is not just the violence, but that the violence exists in a ballad filled with such joyful language and during a scene of such playful disguise. The ballad lulls the reader even as Little John lulls the monk. 

Once John and Much exact their revenge on monk and page, the stakes of Little John’s trickery grow higher with each scene. Initially he just impersonates a friendly traveler, a courteous fellow. But then he has the monk’s letters and takes on the role of emissary from the sheriff. The letters functions as tangible proof of his assumed role, and they gives him direct access to not just the court but to the king’s person. The king responds with trust, providing John and Much with a twenty pound reward, making them “yemen of the crown,” and giving Little John the royal seal (229). His dangerous game thus leads directly to a promotion in class from the king himself. Carrying the royal seal is not to impersonate the king, but it is to impersonate the king’s messenger, to claim that your words are his. At every stage, John more boldly uses his words to trick, and his tricks increasingly give him access to information and spaces that would otherwise have been unavailable to him. As the letters ushered him into the king’s company, the seal renders the boundaries of both city and prison permeable to him. Whereas Robin’s overbold actions lead to imprisonment, John’s brand of boldness breaks through prison walls. John is no less violent, no less willing to kill and wound, but he does so with a spirited playfulness that Robin never manages in this ballad. The king may get the final word in the ballad, but he only admits that Little John has won the game: "'Speke no more of this mater,' seid oure kyng,/ 'But John has begyled us alle'" ['Speak no more of this matter,' said our king,/ 'But John has beguiled us all'] (353-354). Focusing on John's success in beguiling everyone rather than on the murders committed along the way, the king's final words sum up the ballad's interest in John's trickery above the moments of violence.

"As light as lef on lynde"

The outlaws, for their part, aren't phased by the high death count. When Robin escapes jail and returns to the greenwood, the ballad explains that he is "[a]s light as lef on lynde" [as carefree as a leaf on a tree], connecting his joy at returning to the greenwood with the very leaf imagery associated with that space (302). He's a part of the green world again in a way that he wasn't at the beginning of the ballad, when he interrupted the merry tone with his worries about attending mass. His freedom is both stemming from the natural world and bound to it. His very lightness is not just like a leaf, but like a leaf on a tree, linked to the greenwood at its very core. The opposite of being locked in "depe prison," the ballad indicates, is the tenuous and yet stable bond that links foliage to branch and branch to root and root to the larger network of the forest (246). Freedom of movement thus comes with a kind of stability associated with certainty of place, with rootedness. John's playful violence can exist because, connected as he is to the greenwood and his position in it, he can move in and out of  forest and in and out of his outlaw role. Identity is thus fluid only to the extent it is fixed.         

Little John's outward identity is as malleable as his physical location; he can deceive and playact and win games only he knows are being played. The ballad, which combines beautiful and joyful natural imagery with startling violence, in fact presents us with a world in which the two are mutually constitutive. Dangerous and even deadly play must be used in order to maintain the outlaw condition. In The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge, England; Rochester, NY, USA: D.S. Brewer, 1993), Corinne Saunders describes the greenwood of the Robin Hood ballads as a place where “it is always spring, and where merriment and plenitude of dear dominate. In the ballads, the threats and oppositions are caused not by the difficulties of the life in the greenwood, but by the problematic nature of the position of the outlaw and the occasional reminders of a harsher society whose laws do not look favorably upon such as Robin Hood” (200). While the greenwood of Robin Hood and the Monk is certainly, as Saunders describes, a springtime world of merriment, it seems to me that this ballad complicates the simple opposition between greenwood and town. It is not simply a tale that contrasts the peace and freedom of the greenwood with the oppression of the town, but a ballad in which the very peace and freedom provided by the natural space of the forest is predicated upon a specific kind of violence. Playful acts of violence come naturally to Little John, and Little John in turn is a representative of the greenwood. Little John speaks a language of birdsong and sunlight and green leaves, and he lies and kills as easily as he breathes. The paths of Sherwood make up the cartography of his brain, and with that knowledge he infiltrates court and town and prison. He brings the rules (or lack thereof) of the greenwood with him where he goes, and through them he returns Robin Hood to the forest. He might not have been able to cheer Robin up at the ballad's opening, but he can ultimately render Robin leaf-like and free. As this freedom, like a leaf, is imagined to be affixed to a tree, so is the link to the greenwood essential for Robin and his merry men. Their merriness thrives insofar as their identities remain tied to the forest where they make their home.

Of Words and Worlds

And I mean whirlwind literally ...

I am just recovering from the whirlwind that was the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I am torn between a desire for rest/hibernation and a frantic need to write down as much of my experience as possible. (In reality, neither of these options is possible in the face of gradinggradinggrading.) It was, as always, a rich experience in a variety of ways. I am consistently blown away by the generosity and intelligence and engagement of the scholars in my field, and I am feeling a renewed excitement about my work and my career despite the depressing challenging nature of the academic job market. I can't sum up all of the panels and papers I saw and heard right now, but I will post the roundtable presentation I gave, "England by any Other Name: Nominal Topographies in The Tale of Albin." The roundtable—"What a World!"—was sponsored by the BABEL Working Group on the theme of worldbuilding, and it featured inspired and inspiring papers on topics that seemed wide-ranging but that came together in surprising and delightful ways. I had difficulty crafting my contribution, since I have never participated in a roundtable before, and I am not used to writing such short papers (for those not familiar with such things, a traditional conference presentation is 15-20 minutes, and a roundtable presentation is 5, which allows for more in-depth discussion). Although cutting the paper down to size was physically and emotionally painful, it was also liberating to just present the core of an idea and see how it functioned in terms of a larger conversation. I've written about the strange tale of Albin here before in my Jurassic Park post, but for this presentation I was thinking about naming as a form of worldbuilding. I was considering how a chronicle presents everything side-by-side even as individual colonizers attempt to write over what came before. Here is the basic presentation (minus, of course, spontaneous ad-libs and larger discussion):

Every schoolchild in medieval Europe knew that countries worth a name could trace that name back to the battle of Troy. And every schoolchild in medieval England knew that a man named Brutus climbed from the wreckage of his fallen city and sailed to an island on the edge of the world, which he called Britain for himself. Conquest, lineage, and naming are all interconnected in England's mytho-historic beginnings. But the island has another name, Albion, and thus another origin story. Texts such as The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle describe a Greek princess, Albin, who plots to murder her husband because he attempts to restrict her wild nature. Exiled from her homeland, she lands on an unnamed, uninhabited island, naming it for herself and populating it by mating with a devil to produce giant offspring who rule the island until Brutus arrives to rename it. I contend that the tale imagines national origins as deriving from words as much as actions. Speech acts claim the island for each named character. When Albin names the island for herself, she makes it in her own image. Naming is both the catalyst for worldbuilding and also a kind of worldbuilding. Just as important as their actual building is their imagined construction of the place by virtue of the names they choose.

The Chronicle opens with a declaration that "Here may men rede whoso can/ Hou Jnglond first bigan" [Here men may read if they can/ How England first began] (1-2). The text itself is a "here," a place for readers to discover their own national background. And though the tale begins in faraway Greece, Albin soon arrives on an island called "þis lond" [this land] and "here" (306, 307). Thus we have a tangible connection between the story and the current location. When Albin arrives with her sisters on “this land,” she colonizes with a speech act: "'Listeneþ sostren þat be min,/ Y schal ȝou telle hou it schal be:/ Þis lond ichil sese to me,/ After mi name Albion/ ȝe schullen it clepe euerichon'" [Listen sisters that are mine,/ I shall tell you how it shall be:/ This land I shall seize to me,/ After my name Albion/ you shall call it everyone] (312-316). The colonial fantasy of an uninhabited and unnamed land allows Albin a blank slate upon which to create a society in her own image. The island contains nothing "Bot wode & wildernisse" [but wood and wilderness], and their main impact on the land is to populate it with giants (325). The giants hold the land until Brutus arrives 800 years later, finding that "Al was wode & wildernisse," indicating that neither Albin nor her giant progeny did much to cultivate the land (369). The fantasy of arriving on an empty island is followed by the fantasy of arriving on an island populated only by monsters. Brutus gives the island the familiar name of Britain for himself, replacing an earlier title as he reinscribes the land with his own culture. He and his men kill off the giants and "falwede erþe & felled wode/ Of þis lond þat was so wilde./ Þai bigun tounes to bilde" [tilled earth and felled wood/ Of this land that was so wild./ They began to build towns] (450-452). He repurposes the wood and stones he finds, creating an urban landscape out of a wild one. 

Even fences can't contain what was there before
(A photo I took in Scotland, 2011)

Like Albin before him, Brutus displays the power of words to shape reality. The narrator explains that as "Brut sett Londen ston" [Brutus set London's stone] he announced that if kings who were to come after him continued to care for the city as he did in his day, then men would be able to see hereafter "'Þat Troye nas neuer so fair cite/ So þis cite schal be.'" [That Troy was never as fair a city/ As this city shall be] (457; 463-4). The scene concludes his speech with the comment that the city was named "Þilke time, þurth Brutus mouþe" [At that time, through Brutus's mouth"] (465). Brutus's speech is conflated with an image of literally setting London in stone, giving his words a monumental quality. The words Brutus uses to discuss his city look forward to future generations, extending the line and connecting to the larger chronicle leading to contemporary London. Yet if Brutus's words are meant to ring true and if the stones he placed contain in them a tangible connection to the readers' own environment, then Albin and her giants must also be connected. Brutus might build upon Albion and add his name to it, but his is a palimpsestic relation to Albin. Her name and her wild country still remain underneath British cities. Maybe she and her giants bear no blood relation to later people of the island, but they bear a chronological relation. They trod the same ground and called it their own.

Both Brutus and Albin exist for British history only insofar as their names link etymologically to the names associated with that island. The land Albin claims and the giants she produces are both wild, and both must be restrained and re-envisioned in order for Brutus to create a land in his own image. But Brutus's words, though they can reimagine and restructure the island, cannot undo the words spoken by Albin. Albin's name is still associated with the land to this day, and the ground is still that her giants tread, the wood and stones that make up the city still those that she claimed when she arrived on the island and called it her own. Words, even spoken words, can be written permanently onto a landscape and shape how a nation sees itself. If worldbuilding serves to construct an imaginary world, then perhaps a chronicle works to build an imaginary past for an existing world. Brutus places his name over Albin’s, but the chronicle presents them side-by-side, creating a national identity out of an amalgam of fantastic origins.

What a (virtual) World!

I just made my first virtual appearance at a conference, and was so grateful to have been able to listen in on the session I organized for this year's Kalamazoo. Having just given birth a few weeks ago, there was no way to make my annual pilgrimage this year, so I decided to take a note from Petrarch and attend virtually!

I posted the description of the session a while back, and it was such a delight to see how well all of the speakers' papers intersected with one another. Due to connection issues, I missed a portion of the session but -- thanks to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the wonders of live-tweeting -- was able to get brought back into the room! The connection issues made my ability to comment somewhat limited during the QA, but I greatly enjoyed getting to listen to all of the questions and comments that cropped up during the discussion. I was struck in particular by a question about how we might define "world" and "earth" against/alongside one another in light of the papers presented today, and I think that this session raised some compelling ideas about such definitions. The papers tended to emphasize how world-building is born out of various kinds of desires/impulses and, with that in mind, perhaps we could say that in contrast with "earth" (which could suggest concreteness, reality, etc.), "worlds" and "world-building" encompass a vast -- even infinite -- array of imaginary realms born out of desired alternatives. As Asa said at the beginning of his talk, for instance, Christendom itself is a deeply imagined, and deeply desired, world, but it is hardly real. And so, perhaps one of the main questions both raised and addressed by the session is how and why worlds are created in medieval literature. Moreover, what kinds of new understandings can we reach about medieval literature by considering the engendered worlds that appear within them, most of which are so very different from the earthly cultures that produce the texts in question?

This is a discussion I hope to see continue in the near future (more on that later!).

But for now, I'll simply express my gratitude for having been able to transport myself (however briefly) to Kalamazoo in order to see this session (engendered over pints at Bell's Brewery last year) come to fruition.

Thanks to Edith Burney Donnell for the photo! 

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Kalamazoo 2014

As I get ready to depart for the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I thought I would post about the many things that I and my co-blogger Kate are up to. Unfortunately, Kate isn't able to make it this year, but she still has put in lots of work organizing things, and I am presenting and performing and presiding as well. So, here are the panels featuring Kate and me:

1. Friday at  7:30 p.m. (Valley III, Stinson Lounge) will be the always-fun Malory Aloud readers' theater. The theme this year is "Malory Interruptus: Sex and Love in the Mort." 

Kate has chosen and casted some really fun scenes from Malory, and, since she can't be at the conference, my colleague Kara McShane and I are taking the helm. It should be a lot of fun!

Malory Interruptus: Sex and Love in the Mort.
Organizer: Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur Univ.
Presider: Leila K. Norako 
A readers’ theater performance with Stephen Atkinson, Park Univ.; Alison Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona; Laura K. Bedwell, Univ. of Mary Hardin-Baylor; Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester; Kimberly Jack, Auburn Univ.; Timothy R. Jordan, Zane State College; Kara L. McShane, Univ. of Rochester; John Lowell Leland, Salem International Univ.; Bernard Lewis, Murray State Univ.; Meredith Reynolds, Francis Marion Univ.; Rebecca Proud, Clermont College, Univ. of Cincinnati; Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Aberystwith Univ.; Kendra Smith, Univ. of California–Davis; Padmini Sukumaran, St. John’s Univ., New York; and Paul R. Thomas, Brigham Young Univ./Chaucer Studio.

2. Saturday at 1:30 (Session 429 in Bernhard 204), Kara and I are also presiding over a panel on "Animals in Arthuriana." We're exciting about the range of interesting papers we've collected.

Animals in Arthuriana
Sponsor: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Organizer: Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester, and Kara L. McShane, Univ. of Rochester
Presider: Kristi J. Castleberry and Kara L. McShane

The Monstrosity of Sin and the Prose Merlin’s Demon Cat
        Sharon Rhodes, Univ. of Rochester
Tristan and Medieval Hunting Manuals
        Emily R. Huber, Franklin & Marshall College
Shoulders Like an Ox, or, Smiling Like a Tiger? Arthurian Animal Identities in Terry Pratchett’s Albion
        Kristin Noone, Univ. of California–Riverside

3. And, lastly, on Saturday at 3:30 (Session 446 in Fetzer 1005) I will be presenting on BABEL's roundtable, "What a World!" Kate pulled together the papers for this one on the theme of worldbuilding, and she will be skyping in. I am sure it will lead to some great discussion.

What a World! (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Presider: Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur Univ.

An English Hero, a Barbarian Kingdom: The Colonialist Impulse in Chivalric and Ruritanian Romances
        Andrea Lankin, St. Joseph’s Univ.
The Once and Future Herod: Vernacular Typology and the Worlds of English Cycle Drama
        Chris Taylor, Univ. of Texas–Austin
England Is the World and the World Is England
        Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.–Chico
England by Any Other Name: Nominal Topographies in The Tale of Albin
        Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester
A World without War: Chaucer and the Politics of Unconditional Friendship
        Paul Megna, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
Imagining Medieval Futures
        Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Univ. of Toronto
Engineering Beowulf: Multi-media and Multi-modal Medievalism
        Valerie B. Johnson, Georgia Institute of Technology

"Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born": On Seasons and Genres in The Winter's Tale

I found a flower in the snow

The last play I taught in my Shakespeare class this semester was, appropriately to the season,  The Winter's Tale. A strange play that few of my students had read or seen before, Winter's Tale spends its first three acts as a tragedy and then makes a surprising and bittersweet comeback by the end. The play begins with King Leontes's unfounded jealousy over an imagined relationship between his wife Hermione and best friend Polixenes. This jealousy serves to tear apart his family and friendship and country. His heir dies, his wife dies, and his newborn child, whom he wrongly believes to be illegitimate, is left out in the cold and bear-filled landscape to face the elements. Antigonus, the man sent to leave the baby, receives one of the most famous stage directions in history: Exit, pursued by a Bear. Perhaps Antigonus is punished by nature for abandoning the child, perhaps this is a lesson in conflicting loyalties (loyalty to the king's orders vs. loyalty to personal morality), or perhaps he is a scapegoat figure. In any case, the last we see of Antigonus he is running for his life. Offstage, he dies a terrible death (while the bear, presumably, gets a good meal). Also offstage, a young man observes the violent mauling, while onstage the man's father, a shepherd, finds the baby. And here, at the end of act three, we get the first moment of real hope in the play. The play has been filled with jealousy and despair and death and cold and darkness, but the baby lives. At this time of year, when days are short and temperatures are cold and it feels like spring may never return, a glimmer of hope can mean life. (I never really understood this when I lived in California, but I certainly get it in upstate New York.) To survive winter, we need something to look forward to. A celebration. A winter holiday. A candle or a sprig of holly. And, of course, the shortest day of the year means that each subsequent day will be longer. The play, tied to seasonal change, is rooted in such inevitable cycles. A tragedy or a comedy, the play suggests, is only a matter of where you stop the tale. And this play keeps going into spring.

The shepherd is amazed by his discovery of the helpless child, and his son is horrified by the violence he has witnessed, and their conversation brings despair and hope, death and life, into contact. It is no accident that it is the old man who finds the new life. The pivotal moment of the play is this one of life and death, beginnings and endings. At the same time as father saves a new life, the son can do nothing to stop a life from ending. Hope, it seems, comes at a price.

I won't go into lengthy summary or analysis (though I have much more to say on the play), nor will I give away the ending. Instead, I just want to say a few words about the play in terms of this holiday season. In keeping with my Christmas posts from the past two years (one on Gawain and the Green Knight and another on The Second Shepherd's Play), I want to think here about how The Winter's Tale might help us contemplate this time of year. It's a play in which hope comes just as things seem the most tragic. Death is everywhere and we are sure this must have been mislabeled as comedy or romance. Surely it's a tragedy. In Act 2, the doomed little heir Mamillius explains to his mother that "A sad tale's is best for winter" (II.i.25). And what we get is indeed a seasonally-appropriate sad tale. But then something miraculous happens. A baby is born; a baby lives. Time passes, and it is winter no longer.

One of the many things I love about this play is that it manages to bring together genres in the way that seasons come together, not as separate entities but as parts of a larger, interconnected cycle. Even the play's ending, which allows for resolution, reconciliation, and even joy, is not completely free from the sorrow of the first three acts. Time has passed, bodies once young are now wrinkled. The years cannot be regained anymore than the wrongs can be forgotten. People have died, people have been slandered and exiled. And though some wrongs can be righted, others never can. Leontes regrets and learns and gets some redemption, but none of this erases what he's done. His happy ending is truly happy, but also bittersweet. The characters value their happiness because they know how dearly-bought it is. Likewise, we can always do better and the world can always do better for us, but what we've done and experienced won't just go away. It makes us who we are. The baby grows into a woman, but this doesn't eliminate the fact that her father intended her death. Her name, Perdita, means "the lost one," indicating that if she's found she will nonetheless represent that which has been lost. It is in this lost one, this Perdita, that we find hope, and the hope is real, but that doesn't disconnect it from the circumstances that required hope in the first place. This looking forward as well as backward, this Janus posture fitting to the new year, helps us to see that joy and sorrow are not always distinct, nor do they need to be. As redemption is only possible after a fall, hope only means anything in times of despair. This holiday season, as we move to a new year, let's think on the fact that looking for joy and hope and goodness in the world need not mean that we've forgotten the bad and the sad. Instead, let us try to see the bigger picture, to learn from mistakes and to understand that sometimes our gain comes from another's loss. And as the happiness found at the end of Winter's Tale is more meaningful to the characters in that they've known such sorrow, perhaps we can remember that life has no simple happy endings. Happiness is tangled and complicated, and life very often continues even after marriages or deaths that would make such neat conclusions to comedies or tragedies. And even the times of year we associate with joy can be filled with loss as well. I shine with love for those around me, but I also ache with fresh grief for those I have lost. I know I am warm and safe inside, but others are stuck in the cold. Part of being in the spirit of the season, I think, is in realizing what it means to celebrate light in the middle of the winter. In the spirit of The Winter's Tale, then, I wish for more joy and compassion for you all this holiday season. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

An Exercise in Gratitude

When I was a little girl, and whenever I’d have a particularly bad day and found myself feeling as though nothing, absolutely nothing, was right with the world, my father would send me off to my room with a pencil and paper. My task was simple: to write down ten good things that had happened to me that day. I frequently responded to his insistence that I complete this exercise with some version of the following:

“BUT NOTHING GOOD HAPPENED TODAY! EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING!”

My father, however, is nothing if not persistent, and so off to my room I went, even though I was convinced in that moment that the paper would remain blank, the pencil just as sharp and unused as it was when he gave it to me. 

I’d sit in my room for a while, refusing to consider anything aside from all of the wrongs and hurts that had afflicted me over the course of the day. But after a while, some kind of quiet miracle would occur: I’d start to remember the beautiful birds I saw flying high above me as I walked into my school building, or the way a friend made me laugh at lunch, or the puppy I saw from my school bus window. I’d start there, and after a few minutes I’d find that recalling and writing down those ten good things wasn’t nearly as hard as I had thought.

This exercise taught me an important lesson growing up: that even when life kicks you repeatedly in the unmentionables (over and over . . . and over again in some cases), there are still a wild array of reasons to be grateful for each day that you’ve been given. 

The importance of this exercise came back to me rather suddenly a few days ago. I came home from an exhausting (and, to be honest, somewhat demoralizing) teaching day, only to find yet another quasi-rejection from a university to which I’d applied earlier this Fall.  I’ve been rather silent here on the blog over the last few months, and this silence has stemmed from the fact that I’m overwhelmed by the stresses of contingent labor as an adjunct and that I am equally overwhelmed with the job application process. There are so many aspects of both this process and adjunct life that frustrate and depress me, but as a powerless, contingent member of the academy, there is little to nothing that I can say here or elsewhere that will help me or anyone else in my position. And that realization only further adds to the anger and frustration, and leads to me feeling trapped by the very system to which I’ve devoted so much of my adult life and about which I care rather deeply.

I do a decent job on most days of keeping these broader anxieties at bay, but they creep up nevertheless, and I found myself so trodden down and beaten up a few days ago, that I retreated to my bedroom to take a wildly uncharacteristic nap. Having resisted nap taking with a vengeance since I was a toddler, however, I unsurprisingly found myself lying in bed, awake with all of my worries.

The simple truth is that I am terrified, just like any other recently-minted Ph.D. in my position. I’ve worked hard, I’m finding ways to publish and to keep my research projects afloat, and I am fortunate enough to be able to afford to continue going to conferences. I know that I’m good at what I do. But I also know that none of those things makes me any more likely to land the kind of job that I’ve worked so hard to achieve. And it terrifies me to think of having to start all over again.

As I mulled over these worries and tried to fly swat them away, I suddenly remembered the exercise that my father gave me so long ago, and I found my thoughts starting to shift. Yes, countless aspects of the job application process and the state of academy are cause for justifiable anger, depression, and resentment right now, especially for adjuncts like myself. And I am certainly entitled and justified in feeling those feelings. However, I know that what I’m really hungry for is a sense of purpose and a sense of happiness in my deeply uncertain and contingent professional life, and focusing on all of the things that enrage me (things over which I have little to no control) will not help me find either of those things. It dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, writing about what I am grateful for in the midst of this hell-storm could help buoy my spirits, and perhaps the spirits of others out there who are struggling along with me. And I say “with” because I truly believe that we are in this together, and, as a wise a wonderful friend recently observed, a win for any of us is a win for us all.

So friends, for what it’s worth, here is my list from a few days ago:

Today, I’m grateful for . . .

1. The fact that it was 41 degrees when I woke up. It finally feels a little like winter, and I now have plans to go out and purchase an obscene amount of hot chocolate and start decorating for the holidays while drinking said hot chocolate.

2.  This video, which (miracle of miracles) actually got me to crack a smile this afternoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iehOvkO54g

3.  Nutella. Because, let’s face it – stressful days are simply made for nutella.

4. The fact that even with all of my fears about my professional future, I am still madly in love with medieval literature. Case in point: I can’t wait to curl up by my parents’ fireplace and re-read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight this Christmas.

5.  Being able to teach world literature. Where else can you help students forge meaningful comparisons between Old Norse sagas and Japanese warrior tales?

6. Being able to end the content portion of my current course with Midsummer Night’s Dream, and having a rollicking good time discussing the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in class this week.

7.  My husband, for always being able to make me laugh, especially on a day like today.

8. My friendship with Kristi. We've swapped countless job letters, CVs, teaching statements, and the like over the past few months, all in an attempt to help each other create the best portfolios possible. That we were often applying to the same positions was never even so much as a concern, and I count myself so very, very fortunate to have her (and several others like her) in my life.

9. All of my family, friends, colleagues, especially those who have buoyed my spirits over the past few months. You might not know this, but your words of encouragement are ones I go back to immediately on hard days, and I find myself deeply humbled and truly grateful for the number of people out there who believe in me.

10. The fact that I had the opportunity to do EXACTLY what I loved most for well over seven years. Grad school was certainly brutal at times, and it came with no guarantee of an academic job; those years, however, were richer beyond anything I could have imagined, and I know that they will always be meaningful, no matter where I find myself in my professional life.  

Coda:

After I wrote this post, I asked my scholar friends on Facebook for some advice on how to survive the job market, and I was truly humbled by the warm, honest, and heartfelt responses that so many people took the time to compose. My hope is that both that conversation and this post might help others out there who are feeling similarly trodden down by the application process. I know that writing and responding to both have helped me immeasurably. And as I said to my friends on Facebook, their responses reminded me of how very grateful I am for pursuing the career that I did, because I’ve managed over the past several years to surround myself with truly wonderful people, and that makes all of the struggles I’m experiencing right now far more than worth it.

CFP: Animals in Arthuriana, Kalamazoo Medieval Congress 2014

"The Questing Beast," by Arthur Rackham

Courtesy of The Camelot Project

CFP: Animals in Arthuriana

Kalamazoo Medieval Congress 2014

Sponsored by The Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester

My colleague Kara L. McShane and I are gathering papers for a panel on Animals in Arthuriana for the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 8-11, 2014) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. We've been talking for a while about the fascinating roles animals play in the Arthurian tradition, and Kara has also been working on a wonderful Arthurian Bestiary for The Camelot Project, and we're hoping that this panel will reflect the excitement we feel about the topic. For a conference affectionately called "The Zoo," we feel that this subject will be particularly appropriate.

From dragon-laced dreams to lion companions to warhorses, animals play a vital role in a wide range of Arthurian materials. Kara and I invite proposals engaging with the varying roles of animals within the realms of Arthurian literature, art, film, etc. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to, the relationships between humans and animals in Arthuriana (for example, a knight and his horse), the historical place of animals in the tradition, the distinction (or lack thereof) between humans and animals, figures who can not be easily categorized as human or animal, animals symbolism and heraldry, prophetic animals, the adaptation of animals for contemporary Arthurian media, and more. 

Please send 250-300 word abstracts to me at kristi.castleberry@gmail.com by September 15th.