Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.

Openings in the Middle English Romance

(Before long, I expect to post my “Mythos and Non-Myth: The English Tail-Rhyme Romances and Structuralist Methodology,” a detailed study of the romance genre, not yet ready for even the informal publication of the blog.)




     Medieval romances, broadly defined, were surely the popular medium of the era, rightly compared by Loomis to today’s “theatre, cinema, radio, and television.” In form, like situation comedies and police dramas, they were highly conventionalized; in theme, like most popular and oral literature, they tended to reinforce readers’ preconceptions. Nonetheless, now as in the fourteenth century, convention is far from a mechanical reproduction of one work by another. Rather, conventional expectations in the reader allow the poet to convey more concise and detailed data.
     A rough notion of the breadth of variation in these texts is evident simply from a review of their opening passages. A narrative beginning “Sing, o muse!” must inspire different expectations from one beginning “Once upon a time” or “It was a dark and stormy night,” but each of these well-known phrases is associated with a separate genre. Examination of a few examples of the Middle English romance from those collected in Maldwyn Mills well-edited and accessible Everyman volume indicates a wide variation in initial orientation for the reader. Although many levels of irony or conventional intertextuality may complicate the code, these opening passages in general provide a considerable degree of self-reflective definition of a text’s identity in terms of genre, sources, traditions, and function. In this way the competent reading (or listening) community is equipped to be able to pursue productive directions with the narrative that follows, accurately adjusting expectations and interpretations to produce the most productive reading. A few examples will demonstrate that, far from stereotyped repetition, even this form utilizes a great variety of openings.

1. The Sege of Melayne opens with a definition of audience — it is meant for those who relish heroic tales, heroic nonetheless for being true, as the author is at pains to insist.
This theme allows him to articulate several critical oppositions according to which the world of the poem is organized: first of all, the ordered hierarchy of feudalism (the hero is “Charlies of Fraunce,” “the heghe kynge of alle”) and secondly, the opposition to the pagan enemy, the Muslims, in a political and religious act of self-definition. However, it is clear that the authentic heroic age is perceived as in the past, or, that is, in a “dream-time,” the realm of the imagination. In fact, the poetic text may been seen as the surrogate of the heroism missing from everyday life. Those who cannot themselves do great deeds with the style they can conceive, can at least be connoisseurs. These two axes intersect: the order of European society, from top to bottom, is matched against its evil pagan twin.

2. The first words of Octavian define a larger potential listenership: everyone. The poet speaks to a universal audience: “Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge.” Far from detailing their differences, the poet seeks to amalgamate them into an all-inclusive audience, the fan-base that is the target of every writer aiming for the best-seller lists and every television producer.

3. Emare, quite differently, begins with an extended religious meditation on the gap between the divine and the earthly with the implication that this poetry, like a liturgical formula or an invocation in a hymn will itself repair the distance it seeks to describe. To the poet, it is the duty of all “menstrelles” to speak first of Christ, the mediator between heaven and earth. (One is reminded of Skip James, the country blues performer who would customarily conclude his performances with a hymn, presumably clearing the conscience from the “devil’s music” that preceded the sacred.) He speaks of his Lord, not for any reason specific to his tale, but rather because, as a pious Christian, he “sholde.” This mere mention is efficacious. Again, the text is the mediator between opposite conceptual poles.

4. Sir Isumbras takes the religious theme further, in this case specifically asking for blessings for himself and his audience, transforming the entertainment of hearing a romance into an act hallowed and protected by the divine.

5. In Sir Gowther the religious opening is melodramatic, focusing on the devil’s manipulation of women. Here we have no formal nod to the divine, nor a positive prayer, but rather an involvement of the cosmic figures in the story through the actions of “a warlocke greytt.”

     Each of these openings seeks to define the binary oppositions that create the world of the story as the creation itself grew from the distinctions between light and dark, high and low, earth and sea. Though all the medieval romances recognize such pairs as god/man, truth/poetry, ruler/subject, us/not-us, they appear not as simple alternatives, but as the foundation of a complex dialectic. Thus Christ mediates between the divine and human realms and the individual believer may imitate him with hopes of being lifted to the celestial realm in the end. Poetry, likewise, though differing from lived experience, is, as Aristotle suggested, even more “true.” The king and serf, though occupying opposite ends of the social spectrum, are both necessary for the smooth functioning of society, and military enemies may one day be defeated.
     In spite of this shared ideology, aesthetic, religious, and political, the romances set off on differing notes, each with its own character determined by the narrative to follow and by the artist who composed the particular version of the story. As always, poetry serves to first define the painful, all but impossible, contradictions of life and then to provide an imaginative escape. This commonality, though, by no means implies that each text is a slavish repetition of its models. Rather, the shared conventions allow for a free artistic play intelligible to the audience.