“Togider alon”: Isolation and Community in Narratives of Amis and Amiloun

Toward the end of the highly popular story of Amis and Amiloun, a horrifying murder occurs. Since the earliest days of their childhood, two nearly identical knights have had an unbreakable bond of friendship. When Amis commits fornication, Amiloun realizes that he can disguise himself as his guilty friend in order to fight and win a trial by battle on Amis’s behalf. For this act of deception, God punishes Amiloun with leprosy. In a cruel turn of events, an angel informs the two knights that Amiloun can only be healed by the blood of his best friend’s children. Amis weeps over the sleeping forms of his children just long enough for the audience to wonder whether God might intervene and halt the father’s hand. The scene of violence that follows is swift and unsettling: Amis kills his children and proceeds to collect their blood to heal his friend. A few lines later, the unthinkable is reversed by the miraculous: the children are raised from the dead, as happy and as whole as they were before.

The murder and resurrection of the children occurs in all of the many versions of the Amis and Amiloun story, which appears in Latin, Middle Welsh, Old Norse, Anglo-French, German, and Old French, as well as in Middle English. Yet in the first extant version of the story produced in England, the twelfth-century Amis e Amilun, the friendship between the two knights begins to take on a more exclusive character than in its precursors. This characteristic of the poem becomes clear upon comparison with two important analogues: the Latin Vita Amici et Amelii Carissimorum, the earliest extant manuscript of which dates from the twelfth century, and an Old French chanson de geste, Ami et Amile, which survives in one thirteenth-century manuscript.¹ All three texts share two episodes that are crucial to the development of the knights’ friendship. The first is a gift of specially crafted cups that come to signify the friendship between Amis and Amiloun.² In the vita and the chanson, the cups are a gift from the pope that act, in effect, as a public endorsement of the knights’ relationship. In the Anglo-French version, they come instead from Amiloun, an exchange that takes place in private between the two knights. The second central episode, the death of Amis’s children, follows a similar pattern. In the vita and chanson, when Amis takes his children’s lives, his people act as spectators to the miracles of Amiloun’s healing and the children’s resurrection. In complete sympathy with their lord, they grieve, rejoice, and pray, acting as a sort of devotional chorus in the narrative. However, in the Anglo-French text, the knights experience these same events in near-total isolation from their people.³

The Middle English Amis and Amiloun, the first extant version of which dates to around 1330, adopts these solitary moments from the Anglo-French text and accentuates them, creating scenes that emphasize the distance between the knights and the people they supposedly lead. In this version, not only does the exchange of the cups take place between the two knights when they are alone, but it also occurs explicitly outside their respective cities, far away from the eyes of their subjects. Even more strikingly, both the murder and the resurrection of the children remain secret from everyone but the knights and the children’s mother. Here is a friendship whose most significant episodes are lived entirely in isolation.

I am not the first to observe these discrepancies. For the most part, critics have tried to explain the distinction between the Middle English Amis and Amiloun and its earlier counterparts as a function of their generic differences. Generally, the twenty-seven versions of the story are divided into the categories of hagiography and romance, a division that does little justice to the fertile literary exchange between the two genres.⁴ The Middle English version, written in the first half of the fourteenth century, has proven particularly resistant to generic categorization, so...