Attitudes to Islam from the chansons de geste to the riddarasögur

Attitudes to Islam from the chansons de geste to the riddarasdgur Twenty-one years ago I stood by the font in the cathedral at Toledo after a solemn celebration of divine service according to the ancient Mozarabic rite. M y thoughts went back to a probably apocryphal story of an ancestor of mine, who, according to traditions later preserved in the Netherlands, submitted to baptism into the Christian Church. It was presumably not with joyful conviction that this poor Jew was born again as a child of God. Behind him, at least metaphorically, was a Spanish dragoon with drawn sword to effect the conversion of one more 'perfidious' son of Israel.1 He later managed to escape to Venice, perhaps in the wake of the expulsion of 1492, and finally certain of his descendants reached Amsterdam, where some members of the family are recorded as having reverted to Judaism in a Sephardic synagogue in that city. Even if this tradition is vague, romantic, and probably unreliable, I could not help but ponder, as I stood at the font in Toledo on that bright Sunday, on man's inhumanity to man and on the thoughts that this ancestor had, as he rose from the baptismal waters as a new-bom heir to the kingdom of heaven. M y thoughts ranged from the boundaries between reUgious traditions to how people perceive those on other sides of humanly constructed frontiers. The Morranos in the third quarter of the fifteenth century could not have harboured great devotion to the Latin Church which they were forced to join. Perhaps the thoughts of some of them at their baptism were centred on the great days of the long-past U m m a y a d emirate at Cordoba, when the Moslems treated the Jews with considerable dignity and respect and when multifaceted Jewish culture attained such a prestigious height. In this paper I plan to take up not so much the problem of the boundaries between two of the great world religions but rather the view of Islam in the chansons de geste and the romans courtois in France and then in the riddarasdgur in far-off Norway and Iceland. The inherited ecclesiatical ideology The ecclesiastical ideology which the riddarasdgur inherited from the chansons de geste and the romans courtois is firmly rooted in the mentality of the Western Church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I would like to comment on two aspects: (1) the ethos of the contemporary Latin Church and (2) 1 The term 'perfidious' is applied to the Jews in the seventh of the great prayers in the Good Friday liturgy of the Latin Church. Even if liturgists in the 1920s discovered that the Latin perfidus originally meant 'non-believing', it was used as a term of abuse in the liturgical setting. 82 /. S. Martin the assumption underlying French epic and romance that the Latin Church comprises the whole of Christendom. Perhaps the handiest way to understand the cultural development of the Christian Church is to apply the concepts of mythos and ethos as employed by George Fenwick Jones in his study on the Chanson de Roland.1 The mythos is seen as being the official understanding of the divinity and the accompanying communal behaviour or, in other words, the theological and liturgical perspectives of the rehgion. The ethos, on the other hand, is the accepted norm of ethical behaviour, which can precede the mythos in a specific setting in time. As a new religion is adapted by a tribal or national group, a new mythos replaces that formerly held, whereas the ethos need not necessarily undergo a substantial change. Jones writes: The way in which men can accept a mythos without the corresponding ethos is weU dlustrated in an anecdote about a caravan that was captured by bandits whde crossing the Gobi Desert. Knowing the reputation of their captors, all the members of the caravan lost hope, except for one young American missionary still new to the area. Convinced that the poor benighted heathens would see the light if only it were shown to them, he announced to the bandits that he had a tale to tell them. Then, with...