'Blue' Indians, Ethiopians, and Saracens in Middle English narrative texts

'Blue' Indians, Ethiopians, and Saracens in Middle English narrative texts In a number of Middle English narrative texts peoples who inhabited, or were believed to inhabit the 'East' are described as 'blue'. In the Brut, for example (ca 1205), La3amon says the king of Africa came to Rome, and 'mid him com moni Aufrican. of Ethiope he brohte ba bleomen' (Cotton Caligula M S , 12666).1 In Cursor Mundi (ca 1300), India 'lies mast vnto be south/ ber be blamen mast er cuth' (Cotton M S , 2117)2 In Kyng Alisaunder (ca 1300), there are m e n whose 'visages ben blew so ynde' (63).3 Other texts in which such references are found include The King of Tars and Sir Tristrem (both in the Auchinleck M S , ca 1330), Octavian (mid fourteenth century), Firumbras (ca 1375-1400), and Sowdone of Babylone (ca 1400). The background and significance of such references has not to date, been traced systematically, and the present essay is an attempt to address this lack. The expansion of East-West contacts from 1250 to 1350, a period of unprecedented economic and cultural interchange between Europe and Asia, had relatively little influence on various long-established European ideas about nonWestern peoples—the authority of ancient tradition weighed more heavily than information provided by recent first-hand accounts. Typically, the writers and redactors of medieval encyclopedias and travel accounts wove ancient literary traditions about the peoples of the East together with empirical observation, regardless of any clash or contradiction, since the texts of these traditions constituted an unassailable, authoritative body of knowledge. References to 'blue' Indians, Ethiopians, and Saracens in Middle English texts are a case in point. These references to 'blue' people are, however, less mysterious and arbitrary than they appear at first glance. They have their origins in the ancient and medieval 'science' of physiognomy, the principles of which are fully described in medical texts, but whose influence on medieval geographical and ethnographical literature has rarely been addressed by modern scholars. It has long been known that medieval Europeans, inheriting classical traditions, believed that local Layunon: Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, Early English Text Society (E OS 250, 277, London, 1963, 1978. 'Bleomen' is also found in the Otho MS; there is no equivalent in the source. Information about dates and sources for this and other medieval (or classical) texts referred to is derived from the critical apparatus of the relevant editions. 2 Cursor Mundi, ed. R. Morris, EETS OS 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101, London, 187493 . 3 Kyng Alisaunder, ed. G. V. Smithers, EETS O S 227, 237, London, 1952, 1957, repr. with corr. 1969. P A R E R G O N ns 11.1, June 1993 36 A:. A. Kelly climate directly determined the skin colour of the various races. A parallel notion, elaborated in physiognomical texts, was that an individual's skin colour served as the outward indicator of one's physical health and personality traits. In certain medieval texts, it becomes apparent that these two sets of ideas and traditions have converged. Once we become aware of this convergence, we are better able to understand how the scattered literary references to 'blue' people would have evoked the Other in an immediate and compelling way, and would have widened the already considerable psychological gap between English readers and the imagined inhabitants of the countries of the East. 1 It is necessary to bear in mind the kind of geographical knowledge possessed by medieval Western Europeans, including climatology and its effect on skin colour. In the extant sources from antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, we find tremendous confusion over the precise location of both India and Ethiopia (the latter much bigger than the modern country). Some geographers believed that the countries bordered one another. Ethiopia was sometimes called 'Middle India' to distinguish it from 'Lesser India' (that is, the northern sector of the Indian subcontinent) and 'Greater India' (the southern part of the subcontinent). 'India' and 'Ethiopia' can denote specific geographical places in medieval texts, but they also can simply designate the homes of strange peoples who live somewhere in the great indefinite East4...