The Harp and the Gloves in Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré

Morgan Dickson

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R ecent studies in material culture emphasise the importance of objects in many romance texts.1 The objects can shape the texts or they can serve as keys for our understanding of them. This is certainly the case for the two

texts chosen for study here: Sir Orfeo reserves a central place for the harp that identifies and comes to define the character of the King of Thraciens / Winchester. The harp also ties the character of Orfeo to the Classical tale in which our story originates and points to a particular nexus of noble heroes who play the harp, such as the Biblical King David and the staunchly secular Tristan, who are both so clo-sely associated with their instruments as to be recognisable when depicted with a harp in visual representations.2 Sir Orfeo, like his Classical forebear, cannot be Orfeo without his harp; the object is too closely connected to his identity and to his story. The objects in Sir Degaré are perhaps less immediately striking, and being several, they also have a less central impact on the story than does Orfeo’s emble-matic harp. In Sir Degaré, the objects serve as recognition tokens; the gloves given to the abandoned hero-baby prove a means of recognition by his mother; later, a broken sword will allow the youth to be recognised by his father. Unlike in Sir Orfeo, the objects are not an inherent part of the hero’s identity, since they neither define nor represent the protagonist; the gloves are not destined for him to wear and the acquisition of a sword, however particular, hardly sets a knight apart in terms of individual identity. In Sir Degaré, the objects play a role in the fabrication

1. See, for example, the recent issue of Études anglaises, Florence Bourgne (ed.), n° 66/3 (“Medieval Objects”), 2013, or the forthcoming volume of essays, Medieval Romance and Material Culture, Nicholas Perkins (ed.), Cambridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2015. See also Claire Vial, “Clothing the Debate: textiles, text-isles and the economy of gift-giving in four Middle English Breton lays”, Études anglaises, 67/1, 2014, p. 3-18

2. David is frequently represented with a harp: see Colum Hourihane (ed.), King David in the Index of Christian Art, Princeton, Princeton University Press, “Index of Christian Art Resources II”, 2002. Tristan appears in several visual contexts: see Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen and Kathryn Starkey (eds), Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. On the transformation of the Orpheus story, see John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1970; repr. Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 2000.

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of the narrative, rather than character, and this alters our perception both of the objects and of our approach to the story itself. The complicated state of Degaré’s domestic arrangements necessitates the separate recognition devices,3 and the objects are chosen, I will suggest, for a reason. The role of the sword as a means of uniting a martially-destined son to his aristocratic father is perhaps evident enough. The significance of the gloves is less immediately striking, and merits fur-ther attention.

Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré share many thematic concerns:4 kingship, the impor-tance of good, solid continuous government and the imperious social necessity of male heirs to this end. Both narratives involve strange incursions from the land of Fairy that serve to galvanise the plot. Of course, the plot of Sir Orfeo evolves from the pre-existing Classical story. However, we will probably never know when this version of the story underwent the generic change that transformed it from tragedy to comedy, since like for Launfal and Le Fresne, an earlier French version of the now lost Lai d’Orphée existed at some point, but we do not know anything more about the lai than its title, which is mentioned in many contemporary works.5 Thus, it is also not clear when the young newlyweds of the Classical tradition became the established king and queen who have enjoyed an ideally positive marital rela-tionship up to the point at which the Middle English lay opens. The unity of their affection and mutual dependence is emphasised by the king, who calls Heurodis his “lef liif ” (102), and whose importance to him is greater than his own life: “Lever me were to to lete mi liif / Than thus to lese the quen, mi wiif!” (177-178).6 Yet, if the couple have been happily married, they have not been entirely successfully married in a technical sense, and the rhyme used in the couplet – liif / wiif – serves as an ironic emphasis of Heurodis’s wifely failure: she has of course not produced the life, in the form of heirs, that is her primary social function as queen. Moreover, the perfect, idealised unity of the couple is perhaps exacerbated by their childles-sness; when the crisis comes and Heurodis disappears, Orfeo is unable to dote on his children as a means of seeking solace for the loss of his wife, unlike widowers in

3. On the complex pattern of Sir Degaré, see William J. Stokoe, Jr., “The Double Problem of Sir Degaré”, in PMLA, n° 70/3, 1955, p. 518-34.

4. For the texts of Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré, see The Middle English Breton Lays, Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (eds), Kalamazoo, Michigan, Medieval Institute for TEAMS “Middle English Texts”, 1995; repr. 2001.

5. See Sir Orfeo, A.J. Bliss (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1966, p. xxxi-xli.6. The rhyme “liif/wiif” also occurs in 335-336, 405-406 and 485-486; this contrasts with

Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale”, which is concerned with the theme of marriage in a different way: in addition to rhyming with “lyf” no fewer than 10 times (71-72, 133-134, 143-44, 311-312, 331-332, 727-728, 765-766, 867-868, 879-880, 927-928), “wyf” also rhymes with “stryf” (85-86); see A.C. Spearing, Chaucer: The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale, Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press, 1966; repr. 1994.

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other stories, Sir Degaré for example, however misplaced or exaggerated that doting might be. The plot of Sir Degaré, unlike that of Sir Orfeo, is not based on a Classical tale, but interestingly it might also follow an earlier French version, the lost Lai d’Esgaré that is now rather fittingly, like its hero, égaré.7 The plot of Sir Degaré is less compact and despite its survival in a relatively large number of medieval manuscripts and its subsequent transformation into later versions,8 Sir Degaré had a rough start to its modern critical career, being early branded the work of a “hack writer” and subsequently receiving less attention than other lays.9 Howe-ver, its recent return to the limelight suggests another approach, and the critical attention the story has received has primarily focused on the problematically incestuous relations between the father and daughter of the first generation and the mother and son of the second.10

One element that unites the narratives of Sir Degaré and Sir Orfeo is the extreme violence perpetrated against the female characters,11 violence that is inherent to the plot and as such problematically inscribed into the fabric of the text. The abduc-tion or ravishment of Heurodis and the graphic rape of Degaré’s mother are dis-turbingly functional elements of plot progression. Although it seems possible, I do not wish to suggest that the female characters in these stories are in any way reduced to the role of objects themselves: a grail-like royal accessory for Orfeo to seek during his non-quest in the wilderness, or in the case of the nameless princess, a structurally convenient means of “righting” a patrilineal wrong through the for-ced imposition of a male heir on a resisting subject, whose very subjectivity is thus threatened. Both acts of violence, which Orfeo painstakingly seeks to supress or resist in the case of Heurodis, and which is reduced to a painful banality in the case of the princess, serve in different ways as catalysts for the plot, and the acts perpe-

7. Rather than the Lai d’Orphée, modern critics identify the Lai d’Esgaré as a probable source for Sir Degaré, given the name of the hero. See Laura Hibbard Loomis, Mediaeval Romance in England, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1924; repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1963, p. 301.

8. For a list of the manuscripts, see the extremely helpful Middle English Romance web-site of the University of York: http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/mer/52

9. See Clark H. Slover, “Sir Degare: A Study of a Medieval Hack Writer’s Methods”, Texas Studies in English, n° 11, 1931, p. 5-23.

10. Cheryl Colopy, “Sir Degaré: A Fairy Tale Oedipus”, Pacific Coast Philology, n° 17, 1982, p. 31-39.

11. See Claire Vial, There and Back Again: The Middle English Breton Lays, A Journey through Uncertainties, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2013, p. 93-96; A.C. Spearing, “Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender”, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (eds), Harlow, Pearson Education, 2000, p. 258-272; Corinne Saun-ders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2001, p. 213-217.

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trated on Heurodis and Degaré’s mother entail their recovery or recognition through the use of the objects employed by male characters.

Objects serve to fill up narrative spaces and function in a different way to words. Objects can make multiple references, both visual and verbal in a first instance, and even aural in the case of the harp. Moreover, they exist simultaneously both in the story and outside it, even perhaps in the lives of the story’s audience. This multipli-city of types of meaning is particularly appropriate to the multi-faceted aspect of romance, and perhaps to the sub-group of the Breton lays in particular in which a good deal is happening simultaneously in a very small space. This condensation of meaning and form has led certain lays, Sir Orfeo in particular, to be described in terms of a precious stone or jewel – a strikingly visual, if not material, image. If the shape of Sir Orfeo is a “perfectly carved gem”,12 it is a gem that we see simulta-neously from inside and out; we recognise the beauty of the work both in terms of its formal perfection and balance and in terms of the depth of its brilliance. The harp adds to this depth, creating the interiority of the central male character, Orfeo, and adding to the layers of meaning in his relation to the central female character, Heurodis. The unitary perfection of Sir Orfeo is, like that of a gem, exceptional, and if it is a single perfectly crafted jewel, Sir Degaré can be likened to the rather com-plicated and gaudy setting of a piece of jewellery in which the different elements, each with a perfectly satisfactory individual presence, do not combine to form a unified whole with a single depth of meaning. We are kept on the outside of Sir Degaré, observing the contours of the setting rather than being admitted to the centre in order to be immersed in the work as a whole.

In a recent study of the relation of objects to medieval people, Roberta Gilchrist discusses the role of objectification, “when the agency of persons and things becomes entwined”.13 This is perhaps a useful means of envisaging the harp in Sir Orfeo; the identity of the hero and his harp are so closely intertwined as to become inextricable. This contrasts with what is happening in Sir Degaré, where the objects serve as resonant markers on Degaré’s path, but the gloves and sword are a means of recognition, of advancing the narrative, rather than being related to the particu-lar identity of the primary character. The gloves lead Degaré to his mother, but are uniquely associated with neither; the sword links Degaré to his father, but defines neither. As suggested earlier, the harp is an indicator of interiority in Sir Orfeo; it is inherently associated with the essence of the hero, and in an almost circular way, both indicates who he is (a harper-king), and thus tells us about him through our

12. Vial, There and Back Again, op. cit., p. 152.13. Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course, Woodbridge, The

Boydell Press, 2012, p. 223.

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associations with other harper kings whose stories resonate through insular litera-ture and are carefully collected in insular stories from the time of the Norman Conquest.14 The objects in Sir Degaré remain exterior items; they serve as links between two (or three) characters, and they re-forge the relations in Degaré’s frac-tured family circle.

The gloves in Sir Degaré function differently to the more obvious sword; they are magical, connected to the Land of Fairy and disconcertingly obscure, like their sender. The point-less sword, which has been largely discussed,15 is an evident enough link between martial father and aristocratic son, and like Orfeo’s harp, the sword missing a splinter that was detached in a fight with a giant serves to connect this narrative into a particular insular context. The best-known insular harper, Tristan, also lost a splinter of his thereby recognizable sword in a battle with a giant.16 The scene in which Tristan battles the giant is depicted in the Chertsey Tiles, a set of thirteenth-century floor times from Chertsey Abbey. Also shown in the tiles are scenes in which Tristan harps, suggesting that these are visually evoca-tive moments of the story.17 The circulation of these motifs tie the stories to one another and suggest, by transferral, that Degaré fights, in some ways, on the same plane as Tristan, his precursor, whose tortured engendering is perhaps echoed in the differently tortuous engendering of Degaré. While Tristan’s mother dies for sorrow, caused by the death of Tristan’s father, Degaré’s mother’s shame leads her to abandon the baby that she in no way sought to produce. The sorrowing of both mothers, for different reasons, creates a hero whose prowess is as great as his mother’s suffering was profound.18 While Orfeo’s harp, and in a different way, Degaré’s sword, are linked to other stories, and are objects that elicit certain images or even ideals, the gloves have proven more difficult both to interpret and to place.

14. The importance of harpers in an insular context is discussed more fully in my forth-coming article, “The Image of the Knightly Harper: Symbolism and Resonance”, in Medie-val Romance and Material Culture, op. cit.

15. Most recently in Vial, There and Back Again, op. cit. p. 101-115. 16. This is recounted in the Norse saga, a translation of Thomas’s twelfth-century Roman

de Tristan, that preserves the parts of the story missing from the fragmentary earlier text. For Tristan’s fight with the giant, in which he leaves a splinter of his sword in the giant’s skull, see chapters 28-29 of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, Peter Jorgenson (ed. and trans.) in Norse Romance, Volume I: The Tristan Legend, Marianne E. Kalinke (ed.), Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 1999, p. 78-85.

17. An artist’s drawing of the scenes depicted in the tiles mentioned can be found in Manwaring Shurlock, Derek Bryce (eds.), Arthurian and Knightly Art from the Middle Ages, Lampeter, Llanerch Press, 1989. See plates 12 and 13 for Tristan’s fight with the giant and plates 24 and 25 for Tristan harping.

18. Tristan’s mother dies, leaving behind a son destined to sorrow; Degaré’s mother sur-vives in a shadowy limbo, waiting for the delivery that is programmed into the hero from his birth. See chapters 11-16 of Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar, op. cit., p. 42-49.

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I would like now to look at what the gloves might have meant in a medieval context, and what makes their role in this story particularly appropriate.

The gloves appear four times in Sir Degaré: at the hero’s birth, at his coming of age, at his first martial victory and, rather belatedly, at his marriage. The first we hear of them is at the hero’s birth, when his heretofore sorrowing mother, now “glad” (184) at the birth of a healthy baby, is packing her new-born son into the “cradel” (187) in which her faithful attendant will bear him away:

Yhit is moder was him hold:Four pound she tok of gold,And ten of selver also;Under his fote she laid hit tho, –For swich a thing hit mighte hove;And seththen she tok a paire gloveThat here lemman here sente of fairi londe,That nolde on no manne honde,Ne on child ne on womman yhe nolde,But on hire selve wel yhe wolde.The gloven she put under his hade,And siththen a letter she wrot and made,And knit it with a selkene thredAboute his nekke wel god sped That who hit founde ssholde iwite.Than was in the lettre thous iwrite:“Par charité, yif ani god manThis helples child finde can,Lat cristen hit with prestes honde,And bringgen hit to live in londe,For hit is comen of gentil blod.Helpeth hit with his owen god,With tresor that under his fet lis;And ten yer eld when that he his,Taketh him this ilke gloven two,And biddeth him, wharevere he go,That he ne lovie no womman in londeBut this gloves willen on hire honde;For siker on honde nelle thai nereBut on his moder that him bere.”

(Sir Degaré, 189-218)

The visual imagery of the scene is disturbing on many levels: the packing of the tiny body into the cradel with the memorial objects and the money almost suggests

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preparation for burial;19 in any event, the princess, bereft initially of the mai-denhead that might assure her marriage, then of the companionship that should come with the presence of a “lemman” – however violent – is here bereft of the fruit of her trials and remains, once again, alone, immured in the enduring twilight of her non-status of not-maiden, not-wife, while her son and his father, as well as her own father, get on with the business of being heroes, Fairy Knights and kings. However, the appearance of the gloves, sent to her by Degaré’s father from “fairi londe” suggests that some sort of communication, or at the very least, a parcel service, exists between the lonely princess and her son’s father. Why gloves? The description of their magic qualities makes them a convenient recognition device; they will be convenient for him to carry about with him in the quest for his mother that is dictated in the instructions attached to the baby’s neck. Yet the fact that they are sent by Degaré’s father means that they are, in a sense, a present from him to the princess. They were initially sent to her, they are personalised in manner infini-tely more far-reaching than a monogram, and they serve to reunite the son to the mother from whom he would never have been estranged had his engendering been more straightforward. Gloves as a present have strong connotations in the medie-val period: Andreas Capellanus claims that the Countess of Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, cites them as appropriate items to be accepted by a woman from her lover, along with rings, mirrors, sleeves and brooches.20 Gloves would be a fitting gift from a lover for several reasons: they are worn next to the skin, and they are a luxury item requiring great skill to make.21 Beyond love tokens, gloves were seen as particularly appropriate items to serve as a betrothal gift; along with rings, also worn on the hand, gloves either physically represent or they cover, and thus appropriate, the hand that will be given in marriage. In one study of work and exchange practices in later medieval York, it has been suggested that “Gloves were given to mark an agreement, such as a contract of employment or property lease, but may have been thought especially appropriate for a contract of marriage invol-ving the joining of hands. Gloves were thus tangible symbols of handfasting.”22

19. The practice of burying objects with babies is discussed in Gilchrist, Medieval Life, op. cit., p. 218-27.

20. John Jay Parry (ed. and trans.), Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1941; repr. New York, NY, Ungar, 1959, p. 176. This is also discussed in ibid., p. 109-110.

21. John Cherry, “Leather” in English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Pro-ducts, John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (eds), London, The Hambledon Press, 1991, p. 295-318 and p. 316.

22. P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300-1520, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 239. See also Shannon McS-heffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, p. 62-66.

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Handfasting, the physical act of joining the hands to symbolise betrothal,23 would thus be appropriately represented by the gloves that form a perfect outline of those hands, especially in the case of Degaré’s mother’s magic gloves, which only fit her. This link between gloves and betrothal is suggested in a passage from the earlier Middle English romance, King Horn. The magnificent young Horn, skilled in all things – including harping – and here exiled after having been slandered in his initial court of adoption, is at this point travelling under the assumed name Cutberd. He has just arrived at the new court and is being entrusted by the king into the care of the king’s own son, Berild:

Than sede the King so dere, “Welcome beo thu here!Go nu, Berhild, swithe, And make him full blithe.And whan thu farst to wowe,Tak him thine glove:Y-ment thu havest to wive,Away he shal thee drive;For Cutberdes fairhedeNe shall thee nevre wel spede.”

(King Horn, 795-804)24

This odd comment seems bizarrely placed; the king would appear to be saying to his own son that the new arrival is so utterly gorgeous that he would steal away his own son’s prospective bride. As the text’s editor states in a note, “The passage is disputed; it could mean ‘When you [Berild] go a-wooing, entrust him [Horn] with your glove [i.e., as a symbol that he will not compete with you]; [but if] you intend to marry, he’ll drive you away; because of Cutberd’s handsomeness, assuredly, you’ll never succeed [in love].’”25 This reading suggests that the giving of the glove is a gauge of fidelity between the two men. The glove, a covenant between the men, is meant to protect Berild from the uncontrollable desire that Horn/Cutberd will assuredly inspire in any woman, even Berild’s prospective bride.26 Yet what if Berild’s wooing and marriage, rather than any homosocial relation, were linked to the gloves? Is it possible that gloves are such an expected gift in wooing and betro-

23. The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary dates back to 1200. 24. See Donald B. Sands, Middle English Verse Romances, New York, Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1966; repr. Exeter, 1986. 25. Ibid., note to 799-804, p. 36. 26. The role of the glove in the relation between the two male characters is also discussed

by a previous editor of the poem: Joseph Hall, King Horn, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1901, note to 793-797, p. 141-142.

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thal ceremonies in this period that the reference, now problematically obscure, would have been perfectly understandable to the poem’s audience? If we unders-tand the gloves here to be a wooing gift, then the king could be suggesting that Berild should give his gloves to Horn/Cutberd as a messenger to take to his belo-ved, as would seem to have been common practice at the time; yet the king goes further, emphasising the phenomenal quality of Horn/Cutberd’s beauty by saying that he would divert the attention of Berild’s potential wife to himself.

The use of gloves as a love-gift also appears in the later fourteenth-century lyric, “In a Valley of this Restless Mind”, a love complaint in which Christ regrets the treatment that his lover, “mannes soule” has inflicted upon Him. In the 6th stanza, he describes his hands, covered by the gloves his lover has given Him:

‘Loke unto myn hondis, Man:These gloves were yove me whan Y hir soughte –Thei ben not white, but rede and wan,Onbroudrid with blood. My spouse hem broughte.Thei wole not of; Y loose hem noughte.I wowe hir with hem whereevere sche go —These hondis for hir so freendli foughte,Quia amore langueo.

(41-48)27

The elaborate image of the gloves, now embroidered with the blood of Christ’s wounds, provides a new force to the depiction of Christ’s suffering, incorporating the wounds themselves into the experience of the audience through the gloves. They are originally a wooing gift from the lady to her beloved, as they may have been from many ladies to their beloveds, or vice-versa. Yet in this particular, and exceptional case, the lover is now unable to remove them; they have become part of himself, and so the wooing has become perpetual. The visual force of this image indicates the extent to which objects can be tailored for the uses to which they are put in different narrative contexts. We have seen two cases of gloves being used as clear or probable references to wooing and betrothal gifts, supporting the idea that this is the role that the magic gloves serve in Sir Degaré.

This reading of the gloves as a token sent from Degaré’s father to his mother, and used as a recognition token between Degaré and his estranged mother, would serve to ease the tensions that have been discerned in the message Degaré’s mother

27. Susanna Greer Fein (ed.), Moral Love Songs and Laments, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Medieval Institute for TEAMS “Middle English Texts”, 1998, available at <http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/fein-moral-love-songs-and-laments-in-a-valley-of-this-restless-mind>. See also Douglas Gray, A Selection of Religious Lyrics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 41-45, which uses a differ-ent base manuscript, giving slightly different readings.

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sends “knit […] / Aboute his nekke” (201-202). Degaré’s mother’s wording of the note, “That he ne lovie no womman in londe / But this gloves willen on hire honde;” (215-216), has been seen to be ambiguous, if not worse, since the gloves fit none other than the mother herself, as she goes on to state. This couplet has been read as an indication that Degaré’s mother is trying in some ways to keep him for herself, and the ambiguous narrative treatment of the gloves have been seen to point to an “awareness […] of the darker and more threatening aspects of maternity”.28 This ambiguity would also seem to perpetuate the parental refusal of exogamous marriage to which the princess herself has been subjected by her father.29 This reading sits uncomfortably both with her evident joy at learning the identity of her son when they are in fact (briefly) married and the idea that if these are a wooing or betrothal gift from Degaré’s father, then she might well consider herself to be betrothed, and thus she gives her gift into the safekeeping of the least threatening (for the moment) member of her immediate family as a means of reu-niting them. The suggestion of some sort of formatted incest is also disproved by Degaré’s own interpretation of the letter, which he reads when he has grown to be a strapping lad of twenty:

For in the lettre was thous iwrite,That bi the gloven he sscholde iwiteWich were his moder and who,Yhif that she livede tho, For on hir honden hii wolde,And on non other hii nolde.

(311-316)

The gloves are here clearly a recognition device, and are further used as such when Degaré is offered the land of the Earl he has rescued from the attack of a ferocious dragon. In an intensely dramatic scene, Degaré reduces the dragon to a boneless pulp with nothing but a staff that he has himself cut from an oak tree. The Earl, with fitting gratitude for such an extraordinary intervention, offers to reward Degaré in the rather ordinary, even technical terms of “Rentes, tresor, an eke lond” (391). Yet Degaré, zealous in his mission of family re-composition, asks first to be brought all the local female humans, the Earl’s lady and the other women of the land. He has some magical testing to do before he can settle any questions related to land transaction:

28. Jennifer Fellows, “Mothers in Middle English Romance”, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500, Carol M. Meale (ed.), p. 41-60 at p. 51.

29. Another reading of the letter, closer to my own, is proposed by Lynn Rodgers Flickin-ger, “The Magic Glove Motif in Sir Degaré”, unpubl. MA Thesis, University of Cornell, 1955, p. 1-4.

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Thi levedi and other wimmen bold,Maidenes and widues, yonge and olde,And other damoiseles swete.Yif mine gloven beth to hem meteFor to done upon here honde,Thanne ich wil take thi londe;And yif thai ben nowt so, Iich wille take me leve and go.

(395-402)

The initial suggestion, that the Earl’s wife might be Degaré’s mother, would be a very tidy solution, meaning that Degaré would presumably have found mother and father in one place. The question arises of why, if he is looking for his mother, would Degaré be interested in meeting with maidens and damsels, since they are on a technical level incapable of motherhood; on the other hand, his own mother provides an exception to this rule: she is a “damaisele” (585) on the very day of her marriage to her own son. The problem of female classification, a question that seems to hang over Degaré’s mother as it hangs over Mariana in Measure for Measure,30 is here indicated, and it seems strange that Degaré does not call for the simplest group after widows from whom a mother might be expected to come: wives. The passage also links the gloves to landholding, through the rhyme honde/londe, suggesting a link between the possession of land and the homage ceremony in which land, and service, is transferred through the clasping of hands.31 However, since the gloves do not fit any of the collected women, Degaré must carry on, but the meaning of the gloves has increased in this episode, by taking on connotations of land tenure, and Degaré himself has advanced since the Earl does not let him leave without being properly equipped with the arms and horse that are more fit-ting to his abilities than his oaken bat.

Degaré does not have to travel far before he hears of a tournament worth his while, and now that he is properly accoutred, he can participate, which he does with great success, winning the “pris” (584) of the princess and the land, promised as a reward. Degaré’s success in the tournament neither discomposes the king, who

30. It is also echoed in Degaré’s choice of his own wife, when he asks if she be “widue or wif, / Or maiden yit of clene lif?” (864-865); when “wif” rhymes with “lif” in Sir Degaré, it defines social status, rather than the relation between two characters as in Sir Orfeo (see n. 6, above). See also 23-24 and 259-260 in Sir Degaré. For Mariana’s riddle of what she is, nei-ther maid nor married, see William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, V.1.182-185. See The Norton Shakespeare, eds Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, New York and London : W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 2079.

31. See the entry for “homage” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Robert E. Bork (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, 4 vols: vol. 2, p. 807.

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has been putting off this moment from the beginning of the narrative, nor pleases the princess, who is “sori” (585), regretting “That hi sholde ispoused ben / To a knight that sche never had sen,” (587-588). Here the tension begins to build in the proposed mother/son marriage, and if the princess, given her experience, is cer-tainly well placed to understand stranger danger in the form of an unknown, handsome knight, it is possible that her sorrow is compounded by the secret hope of recomposing her exploded family and regaining the ties of which she has thus far been deprived. A version of the story told from the princess’s point of view would certainly not entail the boisterous good spirits of the narrative as it stands. The story of Sir Degaré remains concerned with exteriority, giving us little insight into the darker spaces hidden from our view. Neither her father nor her intended husband seems to notice her unhappiness, and her father’s jovially ironic congra-tulations to his “hende sone” (594) plays on the brutal disregard he has shown for his daughter’s wellbeing or even opinions from the start. Rather than seeing the narrator’s use of the glove motif as in any way sloppy or inconsistent here, I find the delayed mention of the gloves essential to the climactic build-up of tension in this scene.32 In his congratulatory speech to Degaré, the King states that despite knowing nothing of Degaré’s character or worth, he will keep his “covenaunt” (601), granting Degaré the attributes of adulthood: “Mi douwter I take the bi the hond, / And seise the her in al mi lond.” (603-604). The land and the wife are here both placed into Degaré’s hands; he is to have and to hold, but the hand he holds in his should be gloved, as we know only too well. This increasing tension is fur-thered by the description of the wedding – twice, 610-612 and 629-630 – which the audience knows perfectly well should never take place and which the narrator care-fully highlights as an aberration (613-620). Yet it does. After the second description of the ceremony, the narrator brings the characters to bed, at which point Degaré suddenly remembers something very important.33 This could almost be the origin of the modern phrase “no glove, no love”. Degaré’s laments and the King’s fear of his displeasure lead to the final and ultimate description of the gloves:

“Ya, sire,” he saide, “bi Hevene King!”“I chal never, for no spousing,Therwhiles I live, with wimman dele,Widue ne wif ne dammeisele,But she this gloves mai take and fonde

32. Stokoe, “Double Problem”, op. cit., proposes a similar reading, p. 530.33. As does Tristan, when the time comes for him to go to bed with the second Iseut (Iseut

aux Blanches Mains) whom he marries in a failed attempt to find solace in his longing for Iseut the Queen, his lover: see Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Ian Short (trans. and notes), “Le Roman de Tristan”par Thomas suivi de “La Folie Tristan de Berne” et “La Folie Tristan d’Oxford” avec les textes édités par Félix Lecoy, Paris, Champion, 2003, (574-828).

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The Harp and the Gloves in Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré

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And lightlich drawen upon hire honde.”His yonge bride that gan here, And al for thout chaunged hire chere And ate laste gan to turne here mod:Here visage wex ase red ase blod:She knew tho gloves that were hire.“Schewe hem hider, leve sire.”Sche tok the gloves in that stedeAnd lightliche on hire hondes dede,And fil adoun, with revli crie,And seide, “God, mercy, mercie!Thou art mi sone hast spoused me her,And ich am, sone, thi moder der.Ich hadde the loren, ich have the founde;Blessed be Jhesu Crist that stounde!’

(653-672)

For the first time since her baby was safely born, the princess has “chaunged hire chere”; this is the one moment in the entire text in which the princess herself has a semblance of control of the situation. She acts, rather than being acted upon; she tells the little of her own story that is hers to tell. Like the gloves themselves, she fills in the gaps, informing the powerful actors who surround her and who have heretofore restrained her from expressing the narrative that is hers,34 either through compulsion, in the case of her father, or through omission – by simply not asking her opinion, in the case of her fiancé/son. The gloves serve to redress the chaos, restoring the son to his rightful place and freeing him to go off and find the missing character whose role he can never fill, armed with the more straightforward reco-gnition device of the point-less sword.

While the objects in Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré function in very different ways, they all serve to fill up narrative spaces that are unreachable by characters or words. Orfeo’s harp both reveals and at the same time defines his inherent nobility through the nearly mystic power vested in harpers from David to the harper kings mentio-ned in the Prologue to his lay and found in many other insular stories. The gloves and the harp are instrumental in freeing the suffering female characters from their troubles; Orfeo rescues Heurodis from the Otherworld with his harp; the cunning and the power and the mystical minstrelsy of this act have been much discussed.

34. Like that of Heurodis, the nameless princess’s silence serves to reinforce the kingship of those who surround but do not understand her experience; see Christina M. Carlson, “‘The Minstrel’s Song of Silence’: The Construction of Masculine Authority and the Femi-nized Other in the Romance Sir Orfeo”, in Comitatus, n° 29, 1998, p. 62-75.

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Morgan Dickson

The gloves in Sir Degaré fill in what are perhaps darker spaces; spaces that point to silence and the untold story of the nameless princess, who waits for a generation, “warming up on the touchline, as it were, for the last fifteen years”35 and missing out the life both of young mother and of joyful spouse until a role finally becomes available into which she steps and, like the gloves, once more disappears.

35. Thus is described Organata, a princess in Sir Eglamour of Artois: Nicholas Perkins, “Ekphrasis and Narrative in Emaré and Sir Eglamour of Artois”, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, (eds), Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2011, p. 51.

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