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" Fairies, Kingship, and the British Past in Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium and Sir Orfeo "
Schwieterman, Patrick Joseph
Nolan, Maura
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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903823
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TL8zh4b6x4
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Schwieterman, Patrick Joseph
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Fairies, Kingship, and the British Past in Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium and Sir Orfeo\ Schwieterman, Patrick JosephNolan, Maura
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UC Berkeley
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2010
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2010
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| Abstract
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My dissertation focuses on two fairy narratives from medieval Britain: the tale of Herla in Walter Map's twelfth-century <i>De Nugis Curialium</i>, and the early fourteenth-century romance <i>Sir Orfeo</i>. I contend that in both texts, fairies become intimately associated with conceptions of the ancient British past, and, more narrowly, with the idea of a specifically insular kingship that seeks its legitimization within that past. In Chapter One, I argue that Map's longer version of the Herla narrative is his own synthesis of traditional materials, intended to highlight the continuity of a notion of British kingship that includes the pygmy king, Herla and Henry II. In Chapter Two, I contend that the two fifteenth-century versions of <i>Sir Orfeo</i> are likely descendants of an intermediary version that was copied from the Auchinleck text after it had been mutilated; therefore, the conflation of Thrace with Winchester in the Auchinleck version is unlikely to be an interpolation by a scribe. In Chapter Three, I examine the <i>Orfeo</i> poet's manipulation of his sources, both actual and ostensible. I assert that through the substitution of insular fairies for the Classical gods, the poet audaciously claims for the story of Orpheus an origin in the British past. Similarly, he implies that his poem, rather than being a translation of a now-lost <i>Lai d'Orphey</i>, is instead the English "original" of that work. In Chapter Four, I examine the depiction of the fairies in <i>Sir Orfeo</i>. Drawing on a range of medieval fairy narratives as a basis of comparison, I argue that the <i>Orfeo</i> poet seemingly invites the use of conventional aspects of fairy alterity as an interpretive paradigm early in the poem, only to dissolve boundaries between the fairy and human realms later in the work; in this manner, he prepares the way for the climax of the narrative, in which the fairy king, Orfeo, and the steward are all figured as types of a virtuous British kingship.
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Nolan, Maura
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UC Berkeley
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