Mapping Malory

Regional Identities and National Geographies in Le Morte Darthur

D. Armstrong, K. Hodges

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137443274
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Medievalists are increasingly grappling with spatial studies. This timely book argues that geography is a crucial element in Sir Thomas Malory's M orte Darthur and contributors shine a light on questions of politics and genre to help readers better understand Malory's world.

CHAPTER 1

MAPPING MALORY’S MORTE: THE (PHYSICAL) PLACE AND (NARRATIVE) SPACE OF CORNWALL*

Dorsey Armstrong

Place is three-fourths of time.

—Ursula Le Guin, “Walking in Cornwall: A Poem for the Solstice”¹

Hit befell in the dayes of Uther Pendragon, when he was kynge of all Englond and so regned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornewaill that held warre ageynst him long tyme, and the duke was called the duke of Tyntagil. And so by means kynge Uther send for this duk, charging hym to brynge his wyf with hym, for she was called a fair lady and a passing wise, and her name was called Igrayne. (7.1–7)

Thus begins Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, the most comprehensive, coherent, and consecutively ordered single-author treatment of the Arthurian legend until the modern period. Drawing on multiple French and English sources, Malory rearranged, de-interlaced, and reworked his source material to tell the story of King Arthur from the events surrounding his conception and birth to his death, including the immediate aftermath of the realm he had established and the fates of the knights upon whom he had depended. As we have already suggested in the “Introduction,” Malory’s text is in many respects contradictory, vexed, and divided: a work that seems to celebrate the values of chivalry while simultaneously mourning their self-destructiveness. Written during the tumultuous time of the Wars of the Roses by a knight-prisoner who had allegedly consistently engaged in some very unknightly behavior,² and existing in both manuscript and print versions, the Morte Darthur is a text fraught with—and implicated in—questions of borders and limits, boundaries and identities. That this is so is heralded from the outset, when Malory tells us that “kynge of all Englond” Uther Pendragon is engaged in a conflict with the Duke of Cornwall. The very fact of this opposition is significant, as technically Cornwall should be considered part of “Englond”—both in Malory’s day and during the historical periods when most of Malory’s sources were composed. The very fact of the titles being used here—“duke” and “king”—implies a feudal relationship and that Uther is the duke’s liege lord, even if the duke has “held warre ageynst him long tyme.” At the same time, the passage suggests that the issue of overlordship may exist as only a technicality in the Morte: in Malory’s source text, the thirteenth-century French Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, the Duke of Cornwall is explicitly characterized as one of Uther’s barons, whereas in Malory’s version, mention of this relationship is not made. As Patricia Clare Ingham observes of this contradiction: “Either the ‘all’ of England Uther rules does not include Cornwall, or Uther remains only titular ruler there, his power compromised by the Duke’s rebellion.”³

This complicated state of affairs concerning the relationship of “England” with “Cornwall” persists beyond the opening of the Morte Darthur: narrative threads originating in the realm of Cornwall make up the massive middle third of Malory’s text, and upon Arthur’s death his throne passes to his cousin, Constantine of Cornwall, a fact we learn on the last page of the text. Thus, the Morte Darthur begins and ends with Cornwall, and its middle portion is firmly rooted in this southwest corner of Britain. When considered in this light, understanding Cornwall would seem to be critically necessary to understanding Malory’s text.

The treatment of Cornwall in the Morte Darthur becomes all the more intriguing when we compare carefully the opening of Malory’s text with the parallel moment in Malory’s source, the thirteenth-century French Suite du Merlin:

Tant que une fois auint que au roy prinst talent quil semonroit tous ses barons & por lonor & lamor de lui quil amenassent tout lor femes & baron & chevalier . . . le dus de tinaiel y fu & ygerne sa feme . . . & sot bien en son corage que li rois lamoit.⁴

[At length the king happened, one certain time, to wish to call his barons together, and, for the honor and love of him, he wanted them to bring their wives and noble vassals and knights . . . the duke of Tintagel was there and Ygraine his wife . . . And when he saw Ygraine, the king knew well in his heart that he loved her.]⁵

The differences, though subtle, are striking: as we have suggested above, Malory is identifying “this mighty duke” as an enemy of King Uther Pendragon, rather than a vassal, as his source text states explicitly. Malory’s text also suggests that Uther already has a particular interest in the Duchess Igraine—she on whom he will conceive the future King Arthur—while the French Suite characterizes Uther’s love for Igraine as sudden and unlooked-for. And a key difference: Malory’s text takes care to note that Tintagel is the castle of the Duke of Cornwall, where the source does not.

It is this regional specificity and this specific region—and the larger matters to which it calls attention—that we wish to discuss in this chapter. Engaging Malory’s text through the lens of Cornwall in its various guises and functions helps us see that in large measure the logic and progression of the Morte Darthur is the product of an “othering” that occurs on multiple levels: first within the movement of the narrative itself, and second, in terms of the physical shape and structure of the text—the selection and arrangement of the narrative sources that make up its whole. The “physical place” of Cornwall—its geography in both Malory’s text and the “real world”—is a locus marked both by odd difference and striking familiarity when considered alongside the “England” of which it is supposedly a part. At the same time, the “narrative space” of the Cornish material—Malory’s arrangement of his sources so that the narrative strands concerned with Cornwall are at the center of his text—repeats and reinforces many of the themes, ideals, and plotlines of the larger narrative but in a strikingly different (some might say discordant) key.

From what we might call an English point of view, the Morte Darthur is about the greatness of Arthur, the exploits of the knights who act as his agents, and the cruel forces that undo the magnificence of the Arthurian community. When we consider the text from the Cornish point of view, the focus shifts dramatically, and this becomes a very different narrative, one that focuses on other concerns: the failure of kingship; the Duke of Cornwall’s strained relationship with King Uther; the jealous tyranny of King Mark of Cornwall, detested by his wife and subjects; the refusal of Arthur’s kingdom to provide Cornwall a champion in its hour of need, when confronted with a challenge from Ireland; the decision of the Cornish faction to side with Launcelot in the final conflict between Arthur and his greatest knight. There is a powerful tension in Malory’s text between the English and Cornish attitudes toward Arthur’s realm.

Other(ed) and Same

While concerns of geography, place, and conquest/control are prominent in much medieval romance literature—particularly Arthurian romance—Malory’s text is unique among accounts of King Arthur for the way in which it imagines the map of Arthur’s world, an imagining that is best understood when viewed in light of some of the specific concerns of fifteenth-century England. Engaging the Morte Darthur from the perspective of Cornwall helps throw into sharp relief the contours of the unique problems inherent in the late medieval British relationship between regionalism and nationalism. Using Cornwall in Malory as a kind of pivot point, we can apprehend this relationship between the whole and the part, but we cannot resolve it. Indeed, close analysis reveals that it can never be resolved, and herein lies the significance. The stubborn refusal of Cornwall to be categorized—and our attention to this refusal—helps us better see the Morte Darthur as a text that produces difference and presents challenges so that its characters have a means of defining themselves. Cornwall helps make plain the necessity of always striving toward resolution, toward incorporation, but never achieving it. The endless deferral is essential to Malory’s narrative.

Armstrong has argued previously that the Morte Darthur is a text that depends on a logic of alterity and indeed, often deliberately creates “otherness” as a strategy for advancing its narrative; and further, she has suggested that certain aspects of the narrative may be most fruitfully excavated by means of the tools of postcolonial theory.⁶ Concerns about difference are prominent in many areas of Malory’s Arthurian community, as several recent important studies that analyze and engage the tensions that fracture Camelot have shown, and significantly, postcolonial theory has been key in many of these studies.⁷ Among other issues, many of these studies have focused in particular on constructions of gender and concerns of kinship, demonstrating how ideals of masculinity/femininity and familial bonds can simultaneously support and undermine Arthur’s realm. For example, a particular ideal of the feminine as helpless, rape-able, and in constant need of rescue seems to provide Arthur’s knights with an endless array of quests that help them to define, consolidate, and maintain their masculine individual identities as particular knights and as members of the Round Table Order, even as adherence to this gender ideal contradictorily produces a situation in which knightly identity is ever always under threat.⁸ Similarly, Malory’s Arthur receives some of his strongest support from his kin—particularly his nephews, sons of Arthur’s sister Morgause and King Lot of Orkney—but kin loyalty also precipitates the collapse of his kingdom when blood feud erupts between cousins as the Orkney brothers fight the family of King Pellinore, as we discuss in much greater detail in the chapters that follow this one; in addition, Arthur’s nephews grow resentful of the prominence enjoyed by Launcelot, who is neither relative nor countryman. In a telling moment, Aggravain and Mordred sum up their antagonism toward Launcelot by pointing out his lack of blood connection to the king: “We be your syster sunnes, and we may suffer hit no lenger” (1163.7–8).

While gender and kinship are sources of conflict, the category of the geographic is just as divisive to Arthur’s community, especially because geography is so often folded into matters of gender and kinship. Geographic concerns permeate Malory’s Arthurian narrative. Opening as it does with the conflict between Uther and the Duke of Cornwall, geography is front and center from the first words of the text; after Uther’s reign the young King Arthur must deal with matters of geography, as his first tasks involve subduing rebel realms within the borders of Britain and bringing these territories back under his control. To do this, he forms alliances with Kings Ban and Bors in Gaul, bringing continental concerns squarely into the orbit of his rule. Once Britain is securely held, he turns his attention to Rome, conquering and claiming the remnants of the Empire as his rightful patrimony, and soon, Arthur is a ruler on a truly international scale. The composition of his Round Table attests to this: the knights who sit at Arthur’s table include representatives of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, Turkey, Sarras (the Middle East), and many others. And if Sir Perceval’s aunt is to be believed, then the diversity of the Round Table extends beyond mere geography and into religion: “all the worlde, crystende and hethyn, repayryth unto the Rounde Table, and whan they ar chosyn to be of the felyshyp of the Rounde Table they thynke hemselff more blessed and more in worship than they had gotyn halff the worlde” (906.18–21). But concerns of geography trump those of religion, and manifest themselves again and again in the text: for example, Arthur’s nephews are his kin but they are also from the far north of Britain (the Orkney Isles)⁹ and must negotiate multiple loyalties: to their father; to their mother;¹⁰ to their homeland; to the claims of vengeance and justice; to the man who is their uncle and made them knights, and who also warred against their father to bring his realm within his domain.

We see in the example of the Orkney brothers too how gender issues overlap with those of geography: upon his marriage to the Duchess Igraine, King Uther marries his stepdaughter Morgause of Cornwall to King Lot of Orkney, presumably in an attempt to avoid precisely the conflicts of loyalties the text later describes. Other marriages throughout the Morte similarly function to wed places as well as people to one another, an unsurprising reflection of the realities of the medieval world, especially among the noble classes. And after all, the Wars of the Roses—the backdrop against which Malory composed his text—was in essence a family feud writ large; cousins contested violently against one another and measured success to some degree by their ability to claim the loyalties of certain geographic regions within the broader borders of “Britain.”¹¹

It is a commonplace to note that the world in which Malory lived was one full of territorial concerns and the mourning of geographic losses.¹² At the time when Malory was writing his text, the Angevin Empire had long been whittled away. All English contine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Places of Romance
• 1.   Mapping Malory’s Morte: The (Physical) Place and (Narrative) Space of Cornwall
• 2.   Of Wales and Women: Guenevere’s Sister and the Isles
• 3.   Sir Gawain, Scotland, Orkney
• 4.   Trudging toward Rome, Drifting toward Sarras
• 5.   Why Malory’s Launcelot Is Not French: Region, Nation, and Political Identity
• Conclusion   Malory’s Questing Beast and the Geography of the Arthurian World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index