The Naked Truth of the King's Affection in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre

If I were the King of Antioch and wanted to go on having sex with my own daughter, I wouldn't publish an incest riddle and make its solution, on pain of death for a wrong answer, a condition of marrying her. If I'd just told a suitor who'd gotten it right that he was wrong, I wouldn't give him thirty days to go away and figure it out.

If I were the suitor, I wouldn't waste time going back to my private library and consulting 1001 Kinship Riddles of the Chaldeans to confirm the king was cheating. I certainly wouldn't load the getaway ship with a full cargo of grain, or mount the podium in the forum at Tarsus to announce I was relieving the city's famine in the hope that everyone present would conceal my whereabouts when the hit men arrived. But then, I'm not Apollonius of Tyre, nor was meant to be.

The fragmentary Old English translation of the prose romance Apollonius of Tyre offers rich material for reflection on constructions of gender and sexuality—material that recent scholarship has hardly failed to notice. The opening episode of the incest riddle reads like a parable of the linguistic bind imposed upon the subject by Lacan's Name-of-the-Father. Later on, the relationship of our hero to the daughter of King Arcestrates of Cyrene offers the winning combination of sex, literacy, and rhetoric as the means by which the path of desire is set right. Elizabeth Archibald stresses the ways in which incest continues to haunt the story's narrative logic well after Antiochus and his violated daughter have disappeared from view. ¹ Clare A. Lees takes up the Old English version as part of her consideration of desire and knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England. "What the Apollonius offers Anglo-Saxon culture," she observes, "is a rare moment of explicit sexual representation and regulation in the secular literature: Antiochus transgresses the fundamental law of incest. . . ; Apollonius reveals the connection between sexuality and knowledge." ² Despite the text's trajectory toward ultimate happiness after protracted trial, Anita Riedinger has expressed substantial wariness of the heroine's circumscribed options and essentially reactive behavior. ³

Such treatments notwithstanding, the secondary literature on the Old English Apollonius , compared to that on all but the most marginal surviving poetry, or on the major Alfredian and homiletic waves of Old English prose, remains relatively thin on the ground. Standard introductions to Old English literature note the text's unique status as an exemplar of its genre in the surviving prose corpus. ⁴ Two of the best (though now underutilized) American teaching texts use substantial excerpts as reading practice for beginning students of Old English. ⁵ Several doctoral dissertations over the last twenty years, one of them subsequently published in revised form, offer wider surveys of the story's polyglot reception, treating the Old English version along the way in greater or lesser detail. ⁶ But by and large, like its eponymous hero as he flees the incestuous and homicidal King Antiochus, the Old English Apollonius hides in plain sight.

One might well ask why this is so. The manifold pleasures of this mannered, campy, sophisticated text, in its English version from the turn of the second millennium, recommend it to readers' attention at the turn of the third. We might expect the postmodern vogue of our own moment to seize upon its peculiar leaps of narrative logic. Archibald has usefully catalogued such perplexities as those with which I opened above: at no few points in the tale, characters respond in the most bizarre and unprepared fashion to previous action; or else remain clueless over circumstances that a more naturalistic narrative might take as presenting no possibility of concealment...