The Vulnerable Hero: Havelok and the Revision of Romance
Julie Nelson Couch
The Chaucer Review, Volume 42, Number 3, 2008, pp. 330-352 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/cr.2008.0002
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v042/42.3couch.html
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THE VULNERABLE HERO: HAVELOK
AND THE REVISION OF ROMANCE
by Julie Nelson Couch
Þe tale is of Hauelok imaked:
Wil he was litel he yede ful naked.
(Havelok the Dane, lines 5–6)1
This first image of Havelok the Dane in the early-fourteenth-century Middle
English poem is striking because it introduces the protagonist first and foremost as a destitute child. Doubly striking is the lack of attention these lines
have drawn. Generally, editors attend to the more conventional introductions of Havelok as a “god gome” or the “wicteste man at nede” (lines 7, 9).2
The critical conception that reduces Havelok the Dane to an early example of
a formulaic or “popular” Middle English metrical romance has periodically
obscured the poem’s particular appropriation of the medieval romance
genre, that is, the alternative cultural-literary aesthetic it expresses, beginning with the atypical introduction of its hero.3 The hero, son of the King
of Denmark, is presented to the reader first as a child, as “litel,” and, in this
Middle English version, it is Havelok’s childhood—his experience of it and
the narrator’s focus on it—that fills out the tale, fills the hero’s speech, and
motivates his drive to reclaim his kingdom. In a genre better known for its
invincible heroes, “litel” and “naked” immediately establish this hero’s
defining characteristic: vulnerability.4 These descriptors dog Havelok
through the story, signaling the hero’s material and social lack and underlining an unshakeable susceptibility. Ultimately, this romance dramatizes an
experience of vulnerability—rhetorically and culturally epitomized by childhood—as the core of a less aristocratic heroic subjectivity.5
Romance
Inscribing heroism with vulnerability violates a generic dictum of chivalric
romance that equates nobility with invincibility and aristocratic identity
with social supremacy. Prototypical twelfth-century Francophone romance
THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2008.
Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
JULIE NELSON COUCH
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formulates an idealized aristocratic world in which the knight-hero retains
his innate high-born identity as an invincible shield even while he
constructs that identity, and even when he ventures, nameless or mad, into
the treacherous forest of romance.6 In contrast, the vulnerability adhering
to childhood never diminishes in the upward, social-and-maturational
trajectory of Havelok, so that a generic model that focuses exclusively on
aristocratic ideology is not sufficient for analysis of this Middle English
poem.7 This essay will demonstrate that Havelok becomes king through vulnerability, not in spite of it.
The vein of vulnerability that infuses the Middle English Havelok
evidences the poet’s appropriation of the romance genre into a nonelite vernacular. By virtue of not being composed in a status language,
the English poem does not concern itself so persistently with aristocratic
exclusivity.8 My argument about the function of vulnerability in Havelok
participates in recent criticism that approaches Middle English
romances in terms of their distinct aesthetic and cultural priorities,
rather than in terms of their assumed aesthetic inferiority beside French
models. The essays collected in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert’s The Spirit of
Medieval English Popular Romance (2000), for example, read Middle
English romances as “strategic interventions,” especially in relation to
the elite genre they adapt.9 Traditionally, the alterations to the romance
genre evident in Middle English poems—more action, less speculation;
gratuitous, sans-sword violence; non-aristocratic characters and activities; unrefined love and speech—have been interpreted as an inability
on the part of a vernacular writer, accommodating a socially inferior
audience, to render fully and appropriately aristocratic romance into
English.10 In contrast, Gilbert and Putter, among others, recognize that
Middle English narratives relate in oblique rather than in imitative ways
to the aristocratic basis of the genre.11
To earlier readers as well as to current ones, it has been obvious that
the Middle English Havelok the Dane is neither courtly nor chivalric.12 The
poem hosts a surplus of emotional bluster and indignation from a garrulous narrator who also supplies a store of homely proverbs and “realistic”
details of peasant work and life. The hero grows up in a fisherman’s hut,
and, to secure employment, the starving youth knocks down other aspirant porters on a Lincoln bridge. Even when Havelok marries the English
princess Goldboru, their union is not an occasion for courtly spectacle.
Fin amor is not on their minds when Goldboru’s evil guardian Godrich
forces her to marry his cook’s scullion (Havelok) in an attempt to deprive
her of the English throne. As Laura Hibbard writes, Havelok “is frankly
horrified at marriage with a wife whom he is too poor to support.”13
Later, when Havelok returns home with Goldboru and Grim’s sons to
reclaim Denmark, he successfully overthrows the evil usurpers not by
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chivalric conquest, but by popular verbal support, capture of the villains,
trials by jury, and tortuous executions.
Leaving off the usual chivalric apparatus of love and conquest, the
poet of Havelok nevertheless negotiates the issue of identity that is
central to the romance genre.14 In romance’s most familiar arc, a knight
embarks on a quest that, while reaffirming the particular social identity
of an empowered, glorified nobility, inflects his character with a certain
individualism of experience. Initially, the Middle English Havelok appears
to fulfill the generic function of reasserting noble identity in the traditional manner—that is, of resolving the anxiety of aristocratic identity by
fantastically representing nobility as innate and readable. Although
child Havelok loses his kingdom, he eventually regains it with the help
of miraculous recognitions of his proper identity via a king’s birthmark
(kynmerk) on his shoulder and a light-beam that emanates from his
mouth when he sleeps. Though “proper” identity is ultimately recognized in Havelok, anxiety is not sublimated from the narrative plane by
means of an abiding presence of invincibility.15 Instead, the hero
Havelok—going without food and clothing, and being abused and
threatened without the ability to fight back—is perpetually vulnerable.
And the poet perpetually concretizes the hero’s vulnerable subjectivity
by means of expressions of fear: Havelok’s own utterances as well as the
narrator’s urgent prayers for help. In Havelok anxiety is incorporated
into the very structure of heroic identity.
A special feature of romance, idealization, is used in Old French and
Anglo-Norman romances to glorify an exclusive, feudal elite. It is turned in
Middle English romance toward the glorification of a society that perceives
itself (whether accurately or not) as more centralized and integrated.16
Middle English romances typically promote the proper fulfillment of roles
within boundaries of family, social class, kingdom, and church, and these
institutions are represented as entities that intertwine to form ideal
society.17 Middle English poems such as Havelok never presume to duplicate
an idealization of aristocratic culture.
Since the poem is not so bent on maintaining a discrete caste of
elites, the happy ending goes beyond the conventional restoration of
prior nobility. In fact, the nobles of Havelok—the grasping guardian
earls—are demoted to donkeys’ backs. Hence, when Havelok regains
his position after an ignoble, vulnerable childhood and youth, the
result is not merely a rematerialization of a static aristocratic court with
its proper personages back in their places. In Havelok the experience of
vulnerable childhood, by being reenacted through the course of the
poem, redraws the final configuration of (noble) adulthood.
Furthermore, the rearticulations of Havelok’s childhood experiences
become more than simply repetitious; they create an operative tissue of
JULIE NELSON COUCH
333
textualized memory.18 As Havelok’s vulnerable childhood is “remembered”
through the poem, the memorializations shape a nobleness constitutive of
vulnerability and commonness.
Childhood in the Text
Hwo micte yeme his children yunge
Til þat he kouþen speken wit tunge,
Speken and gangen, on horse riden,
Knictes an sweynes bi here siden.
(Havelok, lines 368–71)
When Havelok’s father, King Birkabeyn, consults his knights about who
should “yeme,” or take care of, his children after his death, the narrator
maps in little a journey through age. The young children will progress
from not-speaking to speaking, walking, and, finally, to the class-signifying
activity of noble adulthood: riding on a horse accompanied by knights
and swains.19 In this image of accretion, as in Havelok and Middle English
narrative generally, childhood falls just outside the social identity that
delimits adulthood, occupying a preclassed space.20 Though the son of a
king, Havelok grows up as fisherman Grim’s son and works in his youth
as a fishseller and cook’s scullion, experiencing the activities and oppressions of the lower social classes before returning to his birth status. As I
will demonstrate in this essay, Havelok’s social nonalignment and his
subsequent freedom to work and play as a commoner moderate the
concomitant experience of harsh vulnerability. The narrative represents
childhood as outside the secure props of social hierarchy in ways that are
both dangerous and exciting.21
A notion of vulnerable childhood does not inform identity in the
earlier account of Havelok in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman
L’Estoire des Engleis (ca. 1135–1140), nor in the Anglo-Norman poem,
Lai D’Haveloc (ca. 1190–1220), the two versions most often linked with
Havelok.22 Writing a History of the English, Gaimar logically focuses on the
English side of the legend: the English princess and the injustice
wrought against her. When Haveloc the cook’s scullion enters the tale
as Argentille’s unlikely betrothed, he is already an invincible youth. The
reader never sees him as a child.23 The later Lai, in traditional romance
style, redirects the focus onto the hero and does begin, like the Middle
English poem, with Haveloc as a child. However, the unnamed heir’s
childhood slips by in two lines, which simply note that Baron Grim and
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his wife raised him well.24 Moreover, the hero is never described as
childlike but rather as precociously invincible. Unlike the AngloNorman versions of this tale, the Middle English Havelok centers the
hero’s identity on his experience as a child, and the poem engages with
the social and material conditions of childhood. While still a child, the
Middle English Havelok is named, possesses a voice, and suffers his
trials because of the vulnerable state of childhood.
Contrasting Havelok to the baronial preoccupations of Gaimar’s L’ Estoire
and the Lai testifies to the Middle English poet’s unique and fundamental
interest in children, an interest that ultimately casts heroic subjectivity as
familial rather than simply lineal, developmental rather than static, and
vulnerable rather than invincible. The Anglo-Norman versions begin and
end on a broader plane of territorial and baronial politics.25 The Lai narrator announces he will tell a story of a “riche rei / E de plusurs altres
baruns” (a rich king and many other barons) and then relates King
Arthur’s conquest of Denmark and his man Odulf’s subjugation of the
Danish barons.26 The Lai ends with Haveloc’s victory over King Edelsi of
northeast England and his fief settlements with the English barons. The
last image of Haveloc in both Anglo-Norman versions is of his successful
reign as a conqueror.27 In contrast, the Middle English Havelok begins and
ends with an attention to children that equates their good keeping with the
proper, orderly continuation of the kingdom. At the beginning the Danish
and English kings’ foremost desires—to find trustworthy guardians for
their soon-to-be orphaned children (Havelok and his sisters in Denmark,
Goldburu in England)—are fully elaborated with dialogue and deathbed
scenes.28 And at the end the writer celebrates the success of Havelok and
Goldboru by rewarding the happy ruling couple with a generous excess of
fifteen offspring. The narrator hyperbolizes the heroes’ successes in terms
of children rather than aristocratic power.
Though the Anglo-Norman Lai and the Middle English Havelok may be
grouped together on the basis of shared baronial concerns and audience,
as Susan Crane does in her seminal reading of insular romance, the Lai
relies more heavily upon the ideological conventions of aristocratic
romance.29 Whereas the Lai clearly presents a baronial narrative, Havelok
tells a familial story, concerning itself not simply with the due inheritance
of a noble child, but also with the right treatment of that child when he
or she is left without his/her primary natural protector (in this case, the
father). The narrator’s excessive emotional investment in the bad and
good treatment of child characters quickly moves beyond an initial
concern with safeguarding an inherited estate. The narrator curses
vehemently those who mistreat Havelok and renders affectionately those
who care for him tenderly. With its narrator’s attention to saving, feeding,
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335
and tucking in bed the orphaned prince, Havelok comes across as more
familial than baronial, more intimate than political. The narrator’s
concluding proverb on the blessing of having a “good child” dramatizes
how (caring for) the child is centrally important to this poem: “Him
stondes wel þat god child strenes!” (line 2984).
The Vulnerability of Havelok
With its attention on Havelok as a vulnerable child, the poem postulates
the hero’s subjectedness, elaborating the concept of childhood as a
plight that lies dangerously outside one’s proper identity. Vulnerability
registers on child Havelok’s subjected body, which is starved and fed,
abused and disguised, ogled and exhibited. While Havelok falls prey to
deprivation and abuse, the hero of the Anglo-Norman Lai D’Haveloc is
always already noble and does not suffer a real “tyranny of circumstances.”30 When we see the Anglo-Norman Haveloc in any detail, he has
“gr[own] and matured, bec[o]me stronger of body and limbs.”31
Though still young at this point, he can fight and beat any “bearded
man.”32 Surmounting the danger implied by the hero’s exile is made a
foregone conclusion by a rhetoric that brandishes his nobility like a
talisman: the narrative regularly refers to the child Haveloc in terms of
his status, as “le dreit eir” (true heir), for example.33 In contrast, the
Middle English Havelok exposes the violence involved in the subjecting
of the subject to adventure; the subject’s being a “child” concretizes the
vulnerability that produces subjectivity.34
Because of its distinctively dependent nature, childhood inflects the
romance with a degree of victimization that the poem amply magnifies
and foregrounds. The narrator’s initial portrayal of Havelok as “little
and naked” proves accurate: he and his sisters first appear as the baby
prisoners of the traitor Godard, their assigned guardian, who starves and
freezes them before they are three years old (lines 408–21). Godard kills
and dismembers Havelok’s sisters before the young hero’s eyes, and
then, with Godard’s knife at his heart, Havelok, too “litel” to defend
himself, must plead for his life. He cries, “Louerd, merci nov!” (line
483), a plea in which desperation, not invincibility, shines through.
Godard relents momentarily: instead of killing Havelok himself, he
hands the boy over to fisherman Grim to be drowned. The conventional
assumption that all will turn out well for the hero is much disturbed
when Grim stuffs Havelok into a bag and his wife hurls the bagged child
against a big stone (lines 568–70). In Havelok the hero is thus stripped
violently of both class identity and class power.
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This representation of a vulnerable child-hero runs counter to a
common movement in romance to separate the hero from vulnerability,
often by projecting this trait onto the heroine of the tale. Geraldine
Heng explains that, typically, a “problem assailing male elites is presented
in romance as an occasion of feminine vulnerability, necessitating male
intervention and rescue.”35 Medieval romance often separates the knight
from any weakness, upholding him as the one who rescues others and
solves their problems. In Havelok, though, no separation between hero and
vulnerability is proffered. The child Havelok is the one who is imprisoned,
starved, ill-clothed, and mishandled. One could say that the child-hero is
both “knight errant” and “maiden in distress” who must be rescued—that
is, the subjected subject.
The poem proceeds with a generic awareness of its more vulnerable
hero. The singular moments in Havelok are those in which the anxiety
merely sensed in other romances blooms into the actual event of child
abuse and Havelok is physically menaced and harmed. In this poem the
lion or wolverine that in other stories takes the child away and shelters
him until it is safe for him to return to his proper station is but a child’s
fantasy; the boy Havelok wishes a wolf or lion would rescue him and eat
his tormentor Godard:
“Weilawei
Þat euere was I kinges bern—
Þat him ne hauede grip or ern,
Leoun or wlf, wluine or bere,
Or oþer best þat wolde him dere!”
(lines 571–75)
Havelok’s words refer to the deus ex machina that appears in other
romances to rescue children in the nick of time.36 His lament exposes
the poem’s awareness of its forays into a world not proscribed by traditional romance genre, that is, into the “real” world of harm inflicted on
a vulnerable child. In this world Godard’s diabolical child abuse is the
“dragon” of the romance, a dragon remade into the physical suffering
of children. Havelok’s moments of destitution are comparable to a
knight’s relation to a progressively difficult set of obstacles, such as the
boar, lion, and dragon in Sir Eglamour. Havelok’s “victories,” that is, the
mere receipt of food and clothes, are elaborated in a narratorial tone of
pathos and relief.
Exhibiting intimate scenes of feeding and clothing, this poem renders
the child-hero somatically. Havelok’s initial utterance expresses an
awareness of physical need: “us hungreth swiþe sore,” he groans to
Godard (line 455). After Grim and wife Leve recognize the boy-king and
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337
refrain from drowning him, the narrator thoroughly and reassuringly
dramatizes his first meal in their house. Havelok’s destitution continues
through a narrative that halts at scenes of hunger and nakedness, food
and clothes. When, as a youth, Havelok goes to find work in Lincoln,
his starvation drives the scene. He goes two days without food, at last
receiving on the third day a little cake from the earl’s cook in return for
carrying fish (lines 866, 879). When the cook finally hires him as his
full-time scullion, Havelok asserts that he needs no pay other than
“inow to ete” (line 912). And once again his meal of bread and broth is
staged in full.
The desperate need for food and clothes makes tangible the experience
of loss that other romance heroes experience as easily won adventures.
For example, Havelok’s journey to Lincoln out of necessity may be set in
contrast to Baron Grim’s sending of the Anglo-Norman Haveloc to
Lincoln so he can be around courtly people and learn manners. While no
sense of material hardships intrudes on courtly convention in the Lai, the
Middle English Havelok goes to Lincoln “barfot” (line 863) and hungry.
Ruminations on his appetite, not on his noble status, are what prompt
him to go to work (lines 791–811). In turn, Grim continues to nurture
Havelok as if he remains a vulnerable child; when he sends him off to find
work, he makes Havelok a cloak from a sail so “no cold þat þu ne fonge”
(line 857). Even as a youth Havelok remains subject to his bodily needs.
Unlike Haveloc in the Lai or the child-heroes in some French Enfances
(or even other Middle English romances such as Bevis of Hampton),
Havelok functions specifically as a child in his relations to others; he is
not simply an early version of a noble king.37 Hence, after Grim and
Leve feed him, the thralls feed and tuck the “king” into bed. Assuming
the role of foster father (rather than humble subject) to Havelok, Grim
undresses him and soothes him to sleep:
“Slep, sone, with muchel winne!
Slep wel faste and dred þe nouth—
Fro sorwe to ioie art þu brouth!”
(lines 661–63; my emphasis)
Grim’s injunction against fear is not only characteristic of a parent’s
goodnight to a child. It touches on the centrality of Havelok’s experience as a vulnerable child: he has already experienced great “dred” from
an abusive adult and great “ioie” from nurturing guardians, and he will
continue to do so in varying degrees until his final restoration. The
scene of feeding and tucking little Havelok into bed stands as the
emblem of Havelok’s nurturance in the Grim family and confirms his
nonchivalric identity as a vulnerable child.
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A Vulnerable Nobility
Havelok’s persistent vulnerability and its attendant anxiety inhere even in
the recognition scenes. Since the adults who recognize Havelok are
deciphering and handling a subjected body, reading Havelok as noble
emerges as another instance of the vulnerability of the child-hero.
Significantly, Havelok’s true status, though efficacious, is only visible in
the private space of his bedroom, a circumstance that places the very act
of identifying Havelok uncomfortably close to the site of previous abuse.
Two of the three instances of recognition—those by fisherman Grim and
Earl Ubbe—take place at night when Havelok lies at the mercy of his
caretakers.38 Leve and Grim’s position of power over him is not abated by
their discovery of the light-beam; they still take him up and proceed to
strip him: “Als he tirueden of his serk, / [they find] On hise rith shuldre
a kynemerk” (lines 604–5). Reading Havelok’s body proves an extension
of the hero’s subjection.
This power dynamic between reader and what is read is even more
hyperbolized in the scene at Earl Ubbe’s house, which is noteworthy
because Havelok is, at this point, technically not a child but rather a
married man. The act of reading is arranged here explicitly as an act of
surreptitious voyeurism on the part of Ubbe, who has put Havelok and
his wife Goldboru in a room divided from his own only by a willow
screen. Ubbe sees light coming from their space, so he gets up and “totede in at a bord” (line 2107). Ubbe then calls a huge crowd of knights
and sergeants to witness the marvel of the light-beam issuing from
Havelok’s mouth. The crowd stares at the young man and woman as “Bi
þe pappes he leyen naked” (line 2133). The voyeurism is deliberately
displayed and prolonged; the act of reading Havelok’s body conflates
with the erotic pleasure of gazing at the naked couple:
Þe knithes þouth of hem god gamen,
Hem for to shewe and loken to.
(lines 2136–37)
Formerly the victim of abuse, Havelok, here literally naked and still
vulnerable, becomes the victim of others’ eroticizing gaze. The objectification of the youth with his wife infantilizes him, and Havelok
remains functionally a vulnerable child.
Readable nobility in Havelok does not erase the memory of Havelok’s
vulnerable childhood; in fact, it serves only to remind the audience of
Havelok’s experience of abuse. Though Ubbe’s knights’ prolonged
reading of his body is to the advantage of Havelok (“he knewen at þe
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laste / Þat he was Birkabeynes sone” [lines 2150–51]), the imbalance of
power remains. It becomes palpable when Havelok wakes to a hundred
men kissing his feet, “Þe tos, þe nayles, and þe liþes” (line 2164).
Havelok grows pale and fears for his life. His fear is articulated in the
very terms of abuse he has already suffered: he fears “he wolden him
slo, / Or elles binde him and do wo” (lines 2167–68). The act of reading, which leads to homage, recalls earlier acts of abuse.
As stated at the beginning of this essay, the vulnerability of childhood
does not disappear as Havelok ascends the social scale, so that narrowing
the intent of the romance genre to a matter of confirming nobility does
not account for what occurs in Havelok. The hero is produced in terms of
vulnerable childhood, not in terms of social status alone. In fact, as
attested by the recognition scene in Ubbe’s house, Havelok becomes king
by way of his vulnerability. Ubbe, who will lead all of Denmark to crown
Havelok king, comes to acknowledge his status via the oppressively
intimate scene of voyeurism and kissing described above.
The original instantiations of Havelok’s vulnerability—starvation,
Godard’s graphic murder of his sisters, the threat to his own life—exemplify the constant presence of the hero’s status as vulnerable child. At
every transitional moment in his identity, Havelok (or the narrator, or
another character) recalls these initial childhood insults. As I discuss in
the following section, this repetition is symptomatic not of a monotonous style but rather of an intricate rhetorical operation of reconstitution, which animates Havelok and reorients the romance genre. This
alteration of the aristocratic genre at the turn of the fourteenth century
confirms that divergent narrative strategies were already in play in early
Middle English romance.
Reconstituting the Romance Hero
Like other medieval romances, Havelok is a narrative of the development
of identity, yet it posits a more fluid version of the process of constructing identity than the more familiar aristocratic one.39 By adding the
traits of vulnerability and childhood, this romance presents a dynamic
strategy of reconstitution that holds in tension two contrary movements:
the alterations an ignoble childhood imposes on heroic identity versus
the generic drive to maintain a noble hero.
The rhetorical structure of the narrative can be described as a continual
process of renarrativizing what has gone before in light of present events.
The method is not simple repetition. Specifically, the narrative and its
dialogue regularly reenact Havelok’s childhood, creating a “surrogation”
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that does not repeat exactly the original event (of father, starvation, abuse,
and so on) but rather draws an altered version of it.40 Thus Havelok’s first
(real) father is repeatedly substituted, first by an evil father and then by
good foster fathers (Grim, Bertram, Ubbe). The fact that these subsequent
characters function as surrogate fathers is made plain by a repeating of
words and a deliberate recalling and recasting of the traumatic events of
Havelok’s encounter with the evil usurper.
Feeding scenes exemplify the rhetorical pattern of reconstituting the
original father/identity and simultaneously establishing Havelok’s early
deprivation as the basis from which he follows a new, uncharted path of
identity. Though Havelok is quickly relieved of his hunger by Grim and
his wife Leve, the narrator pursues his hunger for five more lines:
Couþe he nouth his hunger miþe—
A lof he het, Y woth, and more,
For him hungrede swiþe sore.
Þre dayes þer-biforn, I wene,
Et he no mete—þat was wel sene!
(lines 653–57)
At the very moment that Havelok is being nurtured, the narrator forces
the audience to dwell on his recent deprivation—when he hungered
very sorely; this moment recalls and replaces the ordeal, but does not
erase it from textual consciousness. Later, cook Bertram’s proverbial
comments on Havelok’s eating reinstate the link between the hero and
hunger. His exclamation—“Wel is set þe mete þu etes” (Wisely placed is
the food you eat) (line 908)—and curse—“Daþeit hwo þe mete werne!”
(A curse on who refuses you food!) (line 927)—recall the one who did
not feed Havelok and whose starving of Havelok is damnable. The
proverb unexpectedly reappears after the married Havelok has returned
to Denmark. Telling Earl Ubbe about Havelok’s great feat in killing the
thieves, host Bernard expands his praise until it finally reaches an
exclamatory climax: “We[l] is set he etes mete!” (line 2037). In this
instance, the idea of food is not in any way related to the event of
Havelok battling thieves. The recourse to this proverb recalls specifically
the cook’s restorative feeding of him, and, more generally, the path that
Havelok is taking from deprivation to good guardianship. With each
repetition, Havelok’s present circumstances first recall and then replace
the initial non-fostering by Godard. Havelok ultimately ascends to the
throne not merely by reclamation of a noble identity but also by the
recollection of ignoble circumstances.
Dialogue plays a crucial role in the poem’s strategy of reconstitution,
with utterances functioning as reflexive memory. Not only do the narrator
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341
and characters such as Bernard or Ubbe rearticulate assessments of
Havelok’s identity, but Havelok himself also constructs his subjectivity, that
is, he articulates his own process of self-identification by means of an
access to potent speech. Notably, being a vulnerable child does not erase
Havelok’s verbal power to represent his situation. Indeed, he first speaks
when he is “little and naked,” when he tells Godard that he and his sisters
are hungry (lines 455–64).
With his power of speech, Havelok ultimately owns his vulnerability, his
childhood, transforming it into the core of his heroic identity. Havelok’s
monologues as a young man and his subsequent work in his father
Grim’s trade betray no anxious concern about royal status. In fact, his
experience of childhood in a fisherman’s home seems effectively to
transform Havelok’s identity from king’s son to fisherman’s son. As
Havelok matures, he does not assimilate to a traditional generic form
and metamorphose into a knight errant, concerned with arms and
women. Instead, aphorisms on the worthiness of work come readily to
his lips, and he goes cheerfully off to learn “his mester” (lines 789–824).
Calling the work of selling his father’s fish his “mester,” his occupation
or trade, is significant. Havelok’s words are those of a worker and son of
a worker. As he had outlined his hunger to Godard, Havelok outlines
thoroughly, in a twenty-one-line soliloquy, the need and the honor of
working; to paraphrase: “I eat more than the rest of the family put
together; I can learn how to earn a profit; it is shameful that a man
would eat and drink without working for his board” (lines 791–811).
The depiction of Havelok as a meek, laughing, tireless young worker
reminds us not of a romance hero, nor even of an idealized laborer like
Chaucer’s plowman, but rather of Havelok’s childhood.41 In this way, the
child-hero has not “forgotten” his identity, as some critics have
suggested; he (the text) is (re)forging it.42 The unique foregrounding of
Havelok’s love for children takes us back to his own childhood:
Euere he was glad and bliþe—
His sorwe he couþe ful wel miþe.
Jt ne was non so litel knaue
For to leyken ne for to plawe,
Þat he ne wode with him pleye.
Þe children þat yeden in þe weie
Of him he deden al here wille,
And with him leykeden here fille.
(lines 948–55; my emphasis)
The poem’s poignant reminders do not allow the audience to forget
Havelok’s burden of experience, his “sorwe,” even though they have seen
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him fostered well for awhile. Significantly, Havelok’s “sorwe” is directly
associated with his deliberate attention to children. The representation
of his informed sensitivity is salient: the image of a little “knaue” needing
a playmate recalls the little Havelok and the great perverter of play,
Godard.43 The abundance of Havelok’s regard for children—his concern
to do “al” their desire, to play with them to their “fille”—contrasts sharply
with his experience of privation in childhood. Affection for children
derives from his experience as a child rather than from any conventional
set of romance hero virtues.44 The child-hero is distinctively free to shift
identity and to rearticulate himself—as worker, as playmate—as each
situation requires, constructing identity as he goes along, out of narrated
experience.
Havelok shares a certain passivity with the traditional romance hero,
but it is a passivity that accumulates identity from a situation rather than
by simply passing through a situation. This accumulation of identity is
absent from the French lai where the young Haveloc is unaware of his
royal past and thinks he is what he appears—a baron fisherman’s son.
He learns of his heritage only after his return to Grimsby. Unlike in the
Middle English Havelok, identity in the Lai is figured as a static object: a
discrete, untouched royalty that is temporarily hidden and then revealed
at the opportune moment.
Havelok’s Identity: Tricks of Memory
The idea that noble identity could be affected by circumstance, especially ignoble contact, contradicts the romance assumption that nobility is innate and inheres, unperturbed, in a select group of persons.
Unlike invincibility, vulnerability is a mode that leaves its bearer open
to imposition, to change, to moving outside of a status-based identity.
By continually articulating his own experience and, later in the poem,
narrating his past, Havelok actively speaks and thereby shapes his own
subjectivity rather than having his identity simply happen to him.
However, the act of carving a heroic subjectivity out of vulnerability is
not a seamless labor. Havelok is a romance hero whose generic goal of
regaining his rightful royal position remains the audience’s expectation. Recapitulations of Havelok’s childhood negotiate this narrative
tension between, on the one hand, Havelok’s construction of his
ignoble past as unbefitting his royal status and, on the other, the
substantive influence of that childhood on Havelok’s mature identity
and its tangible reconfiguration of his kingdom.
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343
When Havelok begins his ascent to kingship, his “memory” (as
vouchsafed in speech) takes on a more active role, at times decrying
his ignoble childhood. Havelok’s verbal reconstitution entails a
remembering and forgetting—a rhetorical performance of selective
memory. In other words, this “surrogation” does not repeat exactly the
original event. What Havelok retells is linked to the identity and
personal connections the hero must forge at particular moments.
Thus Earl Godard’s crimes are repeated, remembered, and assigned
blame for Havelok’s harder childhood while fisherman Grim’s initial,
whole-hearted intent to drown the boy and his wife’s complicity—their
binding, bagging, gagging, and hitting him, for example—are recalled
by Havelok the child at the time (lines 635–41), but are carefully left
unmentioned by the adult Havelok in his account of the experience to
Grim’s sons (lines 1401–25). Havelok wields rhetoric to shape usurped
royal identity out of a lower-class childhood.
Havelok’s (re)construction of his royal identity begins the morning
after Goldboru learns of her husband’s royal status (via the light-beam
and an angel) and advises him to reclaim his rights in Denmark.
Havelok goes directly from their bed to church, falls on his knees before
the Cross of Christ, and prays “Haue merci of me, Louerd, nou!” (line
1363)—the same words he uttered to Godard to stop his knife, and the
same words Grim uttered to him after seeing his light-beam. While his
prayer recalls medieval adorations of the Cross, we receive not a picture
of Christ’s pains but a reiterated picture of Havelok’s painful experience, or, more accurately, an image of Havelok’s childhood experience
wholly in terms of pain.45 Havelok’s prayer does not serve the orthodox
function of reinscribing Christ’s suffering and passion in the penitent;
rather it serves an analogous function within the narrative of (re)inscribing Havelok’s suffering as the essence of his subjectivity.
In his prayer Havelok ascribes his entire childhood experience as
following from Godard’s villainous theft of his position (by slaying his
sisters and ordering his death), and he reconstructs his childhood
wholly as a time of suffering:
For I ne misdede him neuere nouth,
And haued me to sorwe brouth.
He haueth me do mi mete to þigge
And ofte in sorwe and pine ligge.
(lines 1372–75)
Working for his food, which he had praised earlier as a worthy exercise
(“Jt is no shame for to swinken!” [line 800]), is now refigured as shameful begging. All the activity of his childhood—the lively eating, working,
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and playing—is here transformed into a passive image of a poor beggar
who lies pining for relief.46 Havelok’s childhood is reduced to victimization in order to configure his identity as a usurped king, without any of
the modifications of tone or animated activity that had earlier tempered
the portrayal of his childhood.
The first public assay of Havelok’s revisionist childhood narrative
comes immediately after his prayer, when Havelok tells Grim’s sons who
he is. Havelok is telling them, as he says, “A þing of me” that they “wel”
know (line 1403), so it is the act of telling, of self-articulation, on the
part of Havelok, not the information itself, which is new and crucial
here. In his rendition to Grim’s sons, Havelok elaborates the unbefitting
cast of his childhood, going back to his dying father who was given
“wicke red” in regard to entrusting him to Godard (line 1407). He
magnifies Godard’s murder of his sisters, rendering it more graphic
than it was in his prayer, including now the cutting of their throats and
the dismemberment of their bodies. He elaborates Godard’s order to
Grim to drown Havelok. On this point, Havelok performs a radical
reconstruction: he erases Grim’s initial willingness to drown Havelok,
telling Grim’s sons:
But Grim was wis and swiþe hende—
Wolde he nouth his soule shende.
Leuere was him to be forsworen
Þan drenchen me and ben forlorn.
(lines 1422–25)
The audience of the romance can recall that Grim, regardless of the
threat to his soul, was quite ready to drown the child in order to receive
freeman status from Godard. Havelok’s revision of Grim works not only
to secure Grim’s sons as his loyal subjects but also enhances the justification for overthrowing the usurper Godard—both results leading toward
a coup on Havelok’s part, thereby building his kingly identity.
The poem’s strategy of rhetorical reconstruction should alert critics to
reassess the generic function of repetition within Middle English romance
and to reconfigure the critical parameters for reading these poems.47
Repetition, or rather, re-narrativization, participates in the overall function of romance to provide cultural meaning for shared experiences. In
other words, repetition instantiates romance’s generic act of regrouping,
recasting events to smooth over possible cultural contradictions.48 In
Havelok reiterations attempt to reconcile anxieties about the vulnerability
of childhood and the consequent permeability of social status, not by
occulting such hazards, but by rhetorically recasting the hero’s past—in
this case a particular ignoble childhood—in order to create the proper
JULIE NELSON COUCH
345
king—proper in his body and his connections. Significantly, though, the
(re)constructed “memory” of childhood, the revision, insinuates vulnerability into the construction of adult nobility.
Hence, vulnerability becomes part of the official encomium attached
to Havelok’s drive toward the kingship; it is part and parcel of his identity as king. Havelok’s childhood was a time literally outside his proper,
potent, classed position—in England, in a working-class home, and in
service to another. Returning to Denmark to recover his kingdom,
Havelok takes his “child-ness” with him. For example, in the midnight
recognition scene in Earl Ubbe’s bedroom, Ubbe’s speech conflates the
dual identity of Havelok as a child and king into one expression of
homage. Ubbe calls him “Dere sone” (line 2171), as Grim had done
before. Ubbe’s words recall Havelok’s relation to King Birkabeyn, which
he goes on to relate explicitly, but his words also play an immediate role
as those of a parent reassuring a frightened youth who finds himself the
object of a manifold gaze in the middle of the night. The repetition of
this simple phrase richly enfolds the identities of Havelok, merging them
all into the central image of Havelok as a child and a royal son, here on
the verge of his kingship.
Ubbe’s review of Havelok’s life extends the obligation of (re)establishing
Havelok’s identity to all the people. As he presents his vassals with the legitimate heir to their kingdom, Ubbe begins in identical manner to Havelok:
he will show them a “þing” they “ful wel knawe” (lines 2207–8). Ubbe
dwells longer on the part of the “thing” the vassals would know: the transfer of governance and guardianship from the dying Birkabeyn to Godard.
Ubbe extends the guilt of Godard and Grim to the people as he clearly
implicates his audience in the evil that befell Havelok. What Havelok had
called “wicked red” that led his father to trust Godard, Ubbe calls “youre
[the people’s] red” and points out that they all witnessed Godard’s oaths
(lines 2212, 2217–20). Havelok’s identity becomes a matter not only of his
own making but also of the community’s making. The people, both high
and low—“drenges” and “thaynes,” “knithes” and “sweynes”—become part
of the revised narrative of Havelok’s childhood and must subsequently
accept this redrawn king (lines 2261–62).
The aventure of childhood in Havelok does not simply open up a little
free time before the classed role of adulthood; rather, it actually reconfigures that role. Havelok’s experience as a child motivates his subsequent
actions as the ruler who judges the evil earls and who replaces them with
his foster family. Fisherman Grim’s sons and daughters take possession of
the earldoms and join with Havelok to govern England. Havelok’s peasant
childhood family has become the royal family and the country’s family.
The subjectivity of Havelok and the new configuration of the realm all
derive from his experience as a vulnerable commoner’s child rather than
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from the experience of high-status or chivalric conventions. Havelok’s
childhood functions as the source of both heroic subjectivity and a proper
kingdom. What Crane calls in Havelok an “ideal of transcendent and
universal social harmony” takes on a more dynamic, less striated, more
socially inclusive shape because of the central experience of vulnerable
childhood.49
Conclusion: Romance and Childhood
Havelok thus exploits a tension between the generic drive of romance to
make individual identity a matter of aristocratic class (an always alreadyinvincible subjectivity) and an alternative drive to make identity a matter
of narrated experience, a (re)constructed subjectivity. The rhetorical
maneuver of selective rearticulation of the past, a performance of
memory, enables a stretching of the genre (as it inevitably adapts to a
different context) to include the constitutive influence of the experience
of vulnerability. Havelok’s childhood is not simply a personification of a
lower class with designs of upward mobility (although that reading is, I
think, available). Rather, vulnerable childhood is presented as the essential shape of Havelok’s heroic subjectivity, possessing aesthetic value and
existential power.
If vulnerability can plague or make a noble king—and not just a
long-suffering Custance—then all are vulnerable. Havelok and other
later Middle English romances formulate, I suggest, a ubiquitousness
of vulnerability, and thereby effect a modification of the romance
genre. The chivalric romance tradition contrives the inevitability of
noble invincibility, the glorification of aristocratic power. In the insular appropriation of the romance genre, the attention given to
childhood, to vulnerability, and to characters high and low implicitly
calls into question the idealized power of an invincible nobility. With
one Middle English romance at least, the motif of the underdog—a
motif widely exploited in subsequent narratives—finds its romance
niche.50 Well before Geoffrey Chaucer’s renovations of genres, the
Havelok poet was engaging in a revision of the romance genre and in
writing childhood as a site of productive vulnerability.
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas
([email protected])
JULIE NELSON COUCH
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1. My emphasis. All citations from Havelok the Dane are drawn from G. V. Smithers,
ed., Havelok (Oxford, 1987), by line numbers. Havelok is found complete in one manuscript, the Bodleian Library’s MS Laud Misc. 108 (ca. 1300) and in fragments in the late
fourteenth-century Cambridge University Library MS Add. 4407. See Smithers, xi–xciii, for
a comprehensive account of the texts and manuscripts.
2. In his notes, W. W. Skeat begins referencing formula analogues at line 9 (The Lay
of Havelok the Dane, EETS e.s. 4 [London, 1868]). Other editors of the poem—including F.
Holthausen, ed., Havelok (London, 1901); W. W. Skeat, ed., The Lay of Havelok the Dane, 2nd
edn. rev. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, 1915); Smithers, ed., Havelok (1987); and Ronald B.
Herzman, Graham Drake, and Eve Salisbury, eds., Four Romances of England: King Horn,
Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1999)—have also not commented on these lines. Nancy Mason Bradbury notes the emphasis the lines place on “the
importance of misery and deprivation in childhood” (Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late
Medieval England [Urbana, Ill., 1998], 94). Her argument concerns the poem’s relation to
an oral poetic tradition.
3. Derek Pearsall’s criticism of the poem’s tendency to use “characteristically arbitrary
and inane formulae and phrases” typifies the early tradition of reading Havelok (and Middle
English romances generally [see note 10 below]) as popular narrative (hack-)written for a
peasant or bourgeois audience (“John Capgrave’s Life of St. Katharine and Popular
Romance Style,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 6
[1975]: 121–37, at 125). See, e.g., H. le Sourd Creek, “The Author of Havelok the Dane,”
Englische Studien 48 (1915): 193–212; and John Halverson, “Havelok the Dane and Society,”
Chaucer Review 6 (1971): 142–51. This critical approach has largely been superseded by
reading Havelok as the artistic work of a literary writer. Critics frequently praise Havelok for
its formal and thematic virtues, admiring, for example, its original use of local legend, its
show of legal expertise, and its structural symmetry. See, respectively, Nancy Mason
Bradbury, “The Traditional Origins of Havelok the Dane,” Studies in Philology 90 (1993):
115–42; Smithers, ed., Havelok, lix–lxiv; and Robert W. Hanning, “Havelok the Dane:
Structure, Symbols, Meaning,” Studies in Philology 64 (1967): 586–605. Other analyses have
destabilized assumptions of a popular audience for a “non-literary” Havelok; see Roy
Michael Liuzza, “Representation and Readership in the Middle English Havelok,” Journal of
English and Germanic Philology 93 (1994): 504–19; Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in
Middle English Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 1987); and Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics,
Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley, 1986).
4. Donna Crawford also notes the attachment of vulnerability to the hero; she reads
the vulnerability of Havelok’s body metaphorically, as a figure of the vulnerability of the
body politic (“The Vulnerable Body of Havelok the Dane,” Medieval Forum 1 (2002),
http://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/Volume%201/Crawford.html). Her article participates
in the dialogue on English national identity and governance which has become a mainstay in Havelok criticism; see also Sheila Delany and Vahan Ishkanian, “Theocratic and
Contractual Kingship in Havelok the Dane,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 22
(1974): 290–302; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and
National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), 143–55; Diane Speed, “The Construction of
the Nation in Medieval English Romance,” in Carol M. Meale, ed., Readings in Medieval
English Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 135–57; and Robert Rouse, “English Identity
and the Law in Havelok the Dane, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild and Beues of Hamtoun,”
in Corinne Saunders, ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England
(Cambridge, U.K., 2005), 69–83.
5. I use the term subjectivity here as a function of language: a text constitutes a subject
through linguistic acts. See H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject
in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, 1990), esp. 8–10, 24–25, for a discussion of grammatical
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subjectivity in relation to Chaucer’s CT. This textualized subject is not to be confused with a
psychological entity: “the linguistic subject is equivalent neither to the subject of consciousness nor to the subject of action: it is frequently their simulacrum” (Peter Haidu, The Subject
Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages [Stanford, 2004], 3).
6. Chrétien de Troyes’s knight-heroes do find themselves in predicaments—Yvain
trapped in his enemies’ castle, for example. In such instances, chivalric romances rely
upon audience recognition of the potency of the hero’s noble status. In other words,
imminent danger does not register as a vulnerability on the part of the hero. Though
Yvain is trapped, he is not vulnerable: a young woman instantly enters the room and offers
efficacious aid: an invisibility ring and a well-prepared meal. Lunete helps Yvain because
she immediately recognizes who he is: “Sir Yvain, the son of King Urien,” who acted
courteously toward her in the past. She also commends his lack of fear in the situation,
reading it as a further sign of his nobility (David Staines, trans., The Complete Romances of
Chretien De Troyes [Bloomington, 1990], 268–69). See also Chrétien de Troyes, Chevalier au
Lion, in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 794 (ms. H), ed. Pierre Kunstmann, lines
965–1023, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu.lib-e2.lib.ttu.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/TLA/.
For the chivalric hero Yvain, his identity, his noble bearing, his prowess, a hermit’s food,
or a damsel’s magic ring is ever at the ready. While chivalric heroes manifest a variety of
emotions, ambivalences, and ironies as they cultivate their identities through aventure,
they remain within the bounds of a noble knightly world as it is being staged for a noble
courtly audience. On romance adventure as a “class-specific behavior” and the genre as a
vehicle of aristocratic ideology, see Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales (Princeton, 1994), 167. See also Eugene Vance, “Chrétien’s Yvain and the
Ideologies of Change and Exchange,” Yale French Studies 70 (1986): 42–62; Marc Bloch,
Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (Chicago, 1961), 316–19; Georges Duby, The Chivalrous
Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley, 1977), 112–22; and Erich Auerbach, “The Knight
Sets Forth,” in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard
Trask (Princeton, 1953), 123–42.
7. Contemporary definitions of medieval romance account for the broad scope of
the genre, unhinging it from the necessity of belonging solely to one historical moment of
aristocratic, feudal ideology. Geraldine Heng reminds us that chivalric romances are but
“one skein of magical narrative” (Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural
Fantasy [New York, 2003], 4; her emphasis). See Heng’s “Introduction,” 1–15, for a discussion of the multifarious medieval romance genre, that “expanding category of fabulous
narratives of a literary kind” (1). John P. Boots also disentangles chivalric content geared
toward an aristocratic audience from a rhetorical style which distinguishes a nonchivalric
narrative as romance (“Parataxis and Politics: Meaning and the Social Utility of Middle
English Romance,” in Dennis M. Jones, ed., A Humanist’s Legacy: Essays in Honor of John
Christian Bale [Decorah, Iowa, 1990], 3–10). See also Paul Strohm, “Storie, Spelle, Geste,
Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives,” Speculum
46 (1971): 348–59, at 354.
8. See Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries (London, 1968), esp. 3–6; and Crane, Insular Romance, esp. 6–8, for accounts of
the distinctive, less aristocratic cultural milieu of Middle English romance.
9. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, “Introduction,” in Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, eds.,
The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance (Harlow, 2000), 1–38, at 22.
10. For the traditional view, see Helaine Newstead, “I. Romances: General,” in J. Burke
Severs, Albert E. Hartung, and Peter G. Beidler, eds., A Manual of the Writings in Middle
English 1050–1500, 11 vols. (New Haven, 1967–2005), 1:11–16, esp. 11–12. For a more
recent proponent of this view, see Robert B. Burlin, “Middle English Romance: The
Structure of Genre,” Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 1–14.
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11. In their “Introduction” to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, Putter and
Gilbert offer a review of the critical tradition that has regularly devalued Middle English
romance. Putter deconstructs the romantic/revisionist dichotomy that insists on either a
minstrel or hack-writer origin for metrical romances, either position shackling the narratives
to an assumption of literary inferiority (3–15). Gilbert exposes the social-class discrimination
inherent in the popular-versus-canonical opposition and the resulting conflation of literary
quality and social status (17–28). See also Rosalind Field, “Romance in England, 1066–1400,”
in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, U.K.,
1999), 152–76; and Corinne Saunders, ed., Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval
England (Cambridge, U.K., 2005).
12. Because of the poem’s nonchivalric “homely” character (a ubiquitous adjective in
Havelok criticism), some critics have fretted about its generic status. Most notably, John
Finlayson has argued that Havelok is mistakenly identified as a romance by its manuscript
association with the romance King Horn. His censure of the uninformed, non-courtly
author of the poem unconvincingly discounts Havelok by restricting the definition of
romance to chivalric narrative (“King Horn and Havelok the Dane: A Case of Mistaken
Identities,” Medievalia et Humanistica 18 [1992]: 17–45, esp. 36–41). For a recent response
to Finlayson’s argument, see K. S. Whetter, “Gest and Vita, Folktale and Romance in
Havelok,” Parergon 20 (2003): 21–46.
13. Laura A. Hibbard, Mediaeval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues
of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (New York, 1960), 106.
14. “[R]omances contemplate the place of private identity in society at large” (Crane,
Insular Romance, 11). On the centrality of identity across the romance spectrum, from
eleventh-century French romance to later Middle English romance, see Roberta L.
Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (Cambridge, U.K., 2000). As
Phillipa Hardman states, “at a profound level the subject of identity is the matter of all
romance” (“Introduction,” in Phillipa Hardman, ed., The Matter of Identity in Medieval
Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 2002], 1). See also Edmund Reiss, “Romance,” in Thomas J.
Heffernan, ed., The Popular Literature of Medieval England [Knoxville, 1985], 108–30, esp.
117–20). Tracing the etymology of romans, Strohm finds it attached early to a narrative “de
cui,” about someone (“The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce,” Genre 10
[1977]: 1–28, at 4; see also Strohm, “Storie,” 355–56). Mehl also elaborates the idea of
romance centering a hero (Middle English Romances, 16–17). Other critics define Havelok
specifically as a romance in terms of its working out the relation between social and
personal identity; see, for example, Hanning, “Havelok,” 592–93.
Crane’s Foucauldian-informed articulation of the social web that contains and
defines the romance hero—that is, the framework that articulates and grants meaning to his
actions—fine-tunes classic statements on romance genre and subjectivity and is representative
of the current critical awareness of the genre as a “fabulous” site for constructing identity,
specifically status-, gender-, and race-based subjectivities (Gender and Romance, 32–33; see also
Heng, Empire, esp. 1, 7). Classic statements on the romance genre include Northrop Frye, The
Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Pamela Gradon,
Form and Style in Early English Literature (London, 1971); and Frederic Jameson, The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981).
15. A Middle English example of the perpetuation of an aristocratic ideology of
invincibility is found in the same Laud Misc. 108 manuscript, in the early Middle English
romance King Horn. Horn, like Havelok, is orphaned (by the murder of his father) when
young, but his youth is seen solely as an asset, not a vulnerability. Though he is exiled,
danger never truly threatens. Horn’s radiant, youthful beauty saves him: because of his “fairnesse” (Herzman, Drake, and Salisbury, eds., Four Romances, 19 [line 91]), the heathens will
not kill him, choosing to exile him on a rudderless boat instead. Subsequently, his fairness,
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prowess, and a magic ring will bail him out of thorny situations with pagans and other
enemies.
16. See Crane, Insular Romance, esp. 6–8, on the more centralized political landscape of
insular society. On idealization in romance, see Gradon, Form and Style, and W. R. J. Barron,
English Medieval Romance (London, 1987).
17. The more inclusive-looking social and political landscapes of Middle English
romances have been variously interpreted as baronial (Crane, Insular Romance); didactic
(Mehl, Middle English Romances); domestic or familial (Lee C. Ramsey, Chivalric Romances
[Bloomington, Ind., 1983], esp. 157–88; and Felicity Riddy, “Middle English Romance:
Family, Marriage, Intimacy,” in Robert Krueger, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval
Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 2000], 235–52); and nationalistic (Heng, Empire ; and TurvillePetre, England the Nation).
18. In key readings of the poem, critics have seen repetition in Havelok as meaningful,
arguing against an assessment of hackwork or banality. See, for example, Hanning,
“Havelok,” esp. 590–99, 602; Mehl, Middle English Romances, esp. 162–63; Bradbury, Writing
Aloud, 92–97; and A. C. Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, 43–55 (Cambridge, U.K., 1987).
19. A parallel image represents the child Goldboru, whose dying father also laments
that she is yet unable to “speke ne sho kan go” (line 125). He imagines her coming of age
with an image of riding a horse accompanied by “a thousande men” (line 126–28).
20. I have argued this elsewhere, identifying child characters who range outside adult
formations of identity. See Julie Nelson Couch, “Misbehaving God: The Case of the Christ
Child in Ms Laud Misc. 108 ‘Infancy of Jesus Christ,’” in Bonnie Wheeler, ed., Mindful
Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kirk (New York, 2006), 31–43,
and “‘The Child Slain by Jews’ and ‘The Jewish Boy,’” in Daniel T. Kline, ed., Medieval
Literature for Children (New York, 2003), 204–26. Daniel T. Kline also discusses the “malleable”
identity of medieval child subjects, both historical and literary (“Textuality, Subjectivity, and
Violence: Theorizing the Figure of the Child in Middle English Literature,” Essays in
Medieval Studies 12 [1995], http://www.illinoismedieval.org/ems/VOL12/kline.html).
Other critics have investigated the features of child characters in medieval literature,
emphasizing distinguishing qualities or demonstrating sympathetic adult interest in children. For the most recent scholarship, bibliographies, and surveys of the field of medieval
childhood, see Barbara Hanawalt, “Medievalists and the Study of Childhood,” Speculum 77
(2002): 440–60; and Albrecht Classen, ed., Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin, 2005); see also Nicholas
Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven, 2001).
21. This literary representation of childhood as a time of both vulnerability and adventure corresponds to what Hanawalt and others have found in the historical record where
childhood is also marked by a rhetoric of vulnerability and of play; see Barbara Hanawalt,
Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (New York, 1993), and
The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York, 1986). See also Ronald
C. Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York,
1997). Court records reveal youth using a rhetoric of vulnerability to elicit sympathy,
expressing their pleas with excuses related to age: for example, “I was but a child then” or
“. . . being of tender years”; such remarks “evoked a sympathetic and sentimental picture of
helplessness in his or her adult listeners” (Hanawalt, Growing, 6). In Havelok the paralleled
loss of the hero and heroine’s fathers and subsequent assignation of guardians showcase the
legal issue of wardship (what a child enters upon the death of a parent); the situation also
manifests the cultural intolerance for abuse of dependent children and their inheritances.
As Hanawalt has demonstrated, law and custom placed a high priority on protecting and
nurturing minors, especially when a child is orphaned by the death of a parent (Growing,
esp. 89–107). Noël James Menuge goes so far as to label Havelok a “wardship romance”
JULIE NELSON COUCH
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(“The Wardship Romance: A New Methodology,” in Rosalind Field, ed., Tradition and
Transformation in Medieval Romance [Cambridge, U.K., 1999], 29–43).
22. Alexander Bell, ed., Le Lai D’Haveloc and Gaimar’s Haveloc Episode (Manchester,
1925). For English translations of the Lai, see William A. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories in
Search of an Author: The Narrative Versions of Havelok,” Allegorica 5 (1980): 21–97; and
Judith Weiss, trans., The Birth of Romance: An Anthology (London, 1992). There is also no
comparable child-hero in any of the accounts of Havelok interpolated into later chronicles. On these, see Smithers, ed., Havelok, xxii–xxxii.
23. Bell, ed., Le Lai, 146–47; see also Smithers, ed., Havelok, xvii–xix, for an English
summary.
24. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 48–49. I refer by page number to Kretzschmar’s
facing-page copy of Bell’s edition and his English translation of the Lai.
25. The contested territories in the Anglo-Norman versions consist of smaller domains,
while the baronial ties between the English parcels and between England and Denmark are
more convoluted. Smithers remarks that the Middle English Havelok “modernized” the tale
by streamlining to one ruler over all England, with the usurper being the Earl of Cornwall
(xxxii–xxxiii). On the baronial context, see Crane, Insular Romance, 6–24, 40–52.
26. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 42–43.
27. The Lai ends: “Vint anz regna e si fu reis, / Assez conquist par ses Daneis” (He
reigned twenty years and was the king; he conquered much with his Danes) (Kretzschmar,
“Three Stories,” 96–97). For Gaimar’s version, see Bell, ed., Le Lai, 175; and Smithers, ed.,
Havelok, xix.
28. The kings are primarily introduced in the context of their children, as dying
fathers needing to assure proper guardianship. The narrator mentions promptly that
Birkabeyn has three children, noting immediately that “he hem louede so his lif” (line
349). When Birkabeyn entrusts his realm to Godard, it is the children who are mentioned
first (line 385), and the narrator later specifies that the treason Godard contemplates is
against the children (line 445).
29. Crane acknowledges that the Lai adheres more to “the limited aristocratic terminology” of baronial concerns than does the Middle English poem with its broader social
appeal (Insular Romance, 50).
30. In Secular Scripture, Frye writes: “Identity means [for romance] . . . a state of existence in which there is nothing to write about. It is existence before ‘once upon a time’
and subsequent to ‘and they live happily ever after.’ What happens in between are adventures, or collisions with external circumstances, and the return to identity is a release from
the tyranny of these circumstances” (54; my emphasis). What the archetypal approach does
not make visible is the insistent, protective presence of noble identity in an aristocratic
genre. While the hero may temporarily lose his position or his mind, his inherent beauty,
courtesy, or prowess—traits that mark him as invincibly noble—never leave him. Such
noble accoutrements dilute the potency of the word tyranny.
31. “Li enfes crut e amenda, / De cors, de membres, efforca” (Kretzschmar, “Three
Stories,” 48–49).
32. “Home barbé” (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 48–49).
33. Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 46–47.
34. Kline observes that children who appear in Middle English texts are frequently
abused, “regularly threatened, violated, killed, or already dead” (“Textuality”). He
argues that the subjectivity of the child is persistently voided by the child’s victimization:
violent acts resituate the child in a fixed position in the social/political hierarchy. While
Kline claims this operation erases the child’s subjectivity, he does note the possibility of
a transgressive agency in certain child characters.
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35. Heng, Empire, 326n52. She cites the dispute over an inheritance between the two
sisters in Chrétien’s Yvain.
36. For example, see Sir Isumbras, in Harriet Hudson, ed., Four Middle English
Romances: Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Sir Tryamour (Kalamazoo, Mich.,
1996). Havelok’s wish points to the genre awareness and intertextuality Carol Fewster finds
in Middle English romances (Traditionality and Genre, esp. 1–25).
37. On the representation of the invincible child-hero in Old French Enfances, see
Anna P. Carney, “A Portrait of the Hero as a Young Child: Guillaume, Roland, Girard and
Gui,” Olifant 18 (1993–94): 238–77.
38. The third, Goldboru’s recognition of him as noble on their wedding night, also
takes place at night in the private space of the bedroom with as yet no public support.
39. Though the particulars vary, the chivalric knight-hero generally follows a recognizable pattern in his self-discovery: the hero will realize his chivalrous, knightly nature—
e.g., his prowess, his desire to love—and contend with all the attendant dilemmas.
40. I borrow the term surrogation from Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York,
1996), who applies the term to dramatic performance as a mode of cultural memory.
41. Critics have read the Middle English Havelok as the figure of an ideal laborer,
functioning as a desirable fantasy for an upper-class audience. See Crane, Insular Romance,
44–45; and Delany and Ishkanian, “Theocratic and Contractual Kingship,” 297.
42. I disagree with those readings, including Whetter’s, that suggest Havelok has
forgotten his identity. Whetter applies implausible psychological features to the hero,
conjecturing that the trauma of his escape has affected his memory (“Geste and Vita,”
25–27). My reading of Havelok takes a converse approach: the poem is not a narrative
about forgetting identity but one explicitly about reshaping and rearticulating remembered identity. One could argue that Havelok epitomizes the romance genre in that it
more visibly (re)constructs the identity of the hero.
43. Godard was pretending to play with Havelok’s sisters when he cut their throats
(467–71).
44. This poem’s emphasis on Havelok’s playing with children contrasts to the description of the young Haveloc in the Lai: after he becomes the cook’s scullion, he immediately
shares any food he can get with valets and squires (Kretzschmar, “Three Stories,” 54–55).
This franchise toward fellow courtiers is the conventional virtue of the young romance hero.
45. Smithers notes that Havelok calling on “Croiz” and “Crist” (line 1359) in his prayer
imitates the adorations of the Cross, such as are found in the Ancrene Riwle (Havelok, 128).
46. Even his physical posture in prayer converts his body into a performance of such
a childhood: he lies prostrate before the Cross and “Siþen yede sore grotinde awey” (lines
1390–91).
47. Mitsunori Imai has recently called for revisiting the aesthetics of repetition in
Middle English romances (“Repetition in Middle English Metrical Romances,” in Risto
Hiltunen and Shinichiro Watanabe, eds., Approaches to Style and Discourse in English (Osaka,
2004), 27–50. Imai suggests, for example, an integral relation between the repetition of
merisms and the plot and themes of Havelok (31–40).
48. Heng calls this generic operation “cultural rescue” and analyzes how romances
reformulate historical events (Empire, 2–3). See, for example, Chapter 1 in Empire, 17–61.
49. Crane, Insular Romance, 45.
50. What Field finds in later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English
romances, an emphasis on vulnerability, is already given precedence in Havelok (“Romance
in England,” 173–75). Though Havelok may not have any heirs in terms of its specific
narrative tradition, as Field suggests (166), its hero bequeaths a place for vulnerability in
romance.