The Sea in Medieval English Literature (review)

For a reviewer who has long been fascinated with the richness and variety of maritime and nautical scenes in the French-language literature of medieval Normandy and post-Conquest Britain, this was a very welcome book. In which ways and with what significance does the sea figure in pre-Conquest literature in Old English? What mark did the sea, a great commonplace in Old Norse literature, leave in the Danelaw and the future Normandy? Which seascapes come into view in the evolved linguistic medium of Middle English?

The author's introductory topic, "Englishness, Myth and Connectivity," sets the tone for the kinds of answers we may expect to these questions. In Sobecki's book, the sea is almost always the Sea with an upper case S, only rarely the very real elementary component of the known world faced by fishermen, merchants, seafarers both pacific and bellicose. Recognition and promotion of British insularity, "our islandness," has deep roots. "I would … like to argue that the literary history of the sea in English literature becomes a part of the vernacular discourse of Englishness" (p. 4). In succeeding pages, it is the symbolic valence of the sea, based in its fundamental differentness, that gives signification to the land—and dominates the author's own discourse. "It is … a central objective of this book … to study the changing role of the sea as a mythopoetic agent" (p. 10). Sobecki's Introduction concludes with an assessment of the meager scholarly bibliography that serves as "a biography of the sea" (pp. 17–24).

Chapter 1, "Traditions," traces the classical, Biblical, and patristic heritage of writing on the sea. A heading such as "Classical readings of the sea" puts Ocean squarely in a mythological and philosophical framework, largely untouched by natural science or the practical concerns of trade, war, and pilgrimage. Yet the questions raised are fascinating: can law be realistically extended to the sea? Where does the sea figure in the notion of property? What is the relevance of the largely cultivated and civilized Mediterranean to those who dwell on the shores of the North Sea? The author concludes this chapter by characterizing scholarship on pre-Conquest English writing of the sea as in "the continued grip of false continuities" (p. 47). In their place, Sobecki states that "the afterlife of the Old English sea in later pre-modern literature is reduced to a set of improbable possibilities," part of the discourse of Englishness at the time.

Subsequent chapters focus on a quite limited number of texts, beginning with Benedeit's Voyage de Saint Brendan and the Anglo-Norman Tristan romances. In the former the sea is the chosen medium for "pilgrimage for the love of God." Of the latter, Sobecki writes of the "bitter sea of romance," echoing Yseut's elaborate pun on love, bitterness, and the sea. Yet the sea is a good deal more real in the poems—even though we may identify a conscious intention to pair the unpredictable, contingent sea and its microcosm, the love potion—than Sobecki allows for. It is the immediate physical conditions of a windless Irish Sea that oblige Tristan and the mariners to get in the ship's boat to row and thereby tow the becalmed ship that produces his thirst. It is the loss of such a boat in a storm that leaves Kaherdin and Yseut at a tantalizing distance from the Breton shore. It is the wrongly identified sail, reefed and high on the mast to catch a bit of wind, that precipitates the end of the romance. Throughout, the vagaries of love match the very real and contingent conditions of travel by sea.

Chapter 3, "Almost Beyond the World," returns us to the topic of English exclusivity and exceptionality, now as articulated in writers from Gildas, Bede, and Geoffrey of Monmouth to Higden. But this is more isolation than true uniqueness, more imposed than intrinsic. At the same time, Britain was early recognized as well situated...