In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and Its Afterlife: Essays in Memory of J. J. Anderson ed. by David Matthews (review)

All collections of essays face a problem of maintaining thematic unity, and the problem is compounded in the case of a Festschrift. Any scholar worth fêting has likely had a diverse scholarly career and worked with colleagues and students in a number of fields, and those students, if mentored properly, go their own ways in terms of specializations and critical approaches.

That the essays in this collection dedicated to J. J. Anderson, late of the University of Manchester, do cohere very effectively is due in part to the contributors’ focus on the fields in which Anderson primarily worked: the Gawain-poet, Laʒamon, Arthuriana, and popular drama. But the thematic unity of the book would seem to be due at least as much to the hand of the editor. In previous monographs and collections, notably The Making of Middle English, David Matthews has demonstrated expertise in the study of medievalism, and the interests and approaches of this subfield inform many of the essays in the present collection. In their introduction, Matthews and Anke Bernau explain that their title derives from the description of Gawain in the wilderness as he searches for the Green Chapel: “Mony klyf he overclambe in contrayes straunge, / Fer floten fremedly fro his frendes he rydes.” For Matthews and Bernau, this passage evokes the irreducible otherness of Middle English literature, “its strangeness, and a preoccupation with strangeness which occasionally, as in Sir Gawain, becomes self-conscious” (p. 2). Paradoxically, though, these essays have the effect of making their often foreign-seeming subjects seem less alien. “Medievalism” often connotes the construction of the Middle Ages in subsequent historical periods, but these authors reveal history as always the product of imaginative construction. Above all, the essays in this collection are distinguished by their authors’ adventurous disregard for conventional distinctions of period and genre.

The clearest example is the first essay, Steven Knight’s “Robin Hood versus King Arthur.” These two legendary figures are normally assumed to inhabit completely separate imaginative universes, like Batman and Spiderman. But Knight traces their surprising interactions, from earliest textual evidence to the most recent cinema, while also providing, in a dozen swift pages, capsule histories of the representations of both figures. The comparison reveals the inherent conservatism of Arthur, the authoritative and patriarchal king, always associated with nation, nobility, and law. Robin Hood, in contrast, is an unruly plebeian outlaw; among Knight’s many surprising observations is that “Robin in fact never routinely rides a horse until the time of film” (p. 14). Although writers have since the late Middle Ages been trying to gentrify him, Knight shows that Robin always resists full assimilation into the social order.

Gillian Rudd’s “The Green Knight’s Balancing Act” begins with a notable image of equipoise: the Green Knight’s entrance into Arthur’s court, holding a holly-bob in one hand and an axe in the other, and therefore not holding his horse’s reins at all. This uncanny balance also figures the Green Knight’s ambiguous position between the human and the vegetative, and between the natural and the supernatural. Such tensions in the poem, Rudd suggests, reveal not an essential and innate balance of natural cycles but rather the irresistible human tendency to imaginatively construct equations and distinctions. The essay exemplifies the subtlety and versatility of eco-critical approaches to medieval literature.

The next two essays bring similarly eclectic approaches to the Brut. Carole Weinberg contrasts the depiction of Brutus both to Wace’s treatment of the same figure and to Laʒamon’s characterization of Arthur to demonstrate the thematic centrality of Brutus to the Brut as a whole. Rosamund Allen, even more eclectically, compares Laʒamon’s descriptions of battle in the Brut to Tennyson’s in the Idylls. Allen’s goal is a dual defense of each poet against a...