Chaucer and the Norse and Celtic Worlds
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Chaucer and the Norse and Celtic Worlds

Rory McTurk

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Chaucer and the Norse and Celtic Worlds

Rory McTurk

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Through an examination of Old Norse and Celtic parallels to certain works of Chaucer, McTurk here identifies hitherto unrecognized sources for these works in early Irish tradition. He revives the idea that Chaucer visited Ireland between 1361 and 1366, placing new emphasis on the date of the enactment of the Statute of Kilkenny. Examining Chaucer's House of Fame, McTurk uncovers parallels involving eagles, perilous entrances, and scatological jokes about poetry in the Topographia Hibernie by Gerald of Wales, Snorri Sturluson's Edda, and the Old Irish sagas Fled Bricrend and Togail Bruidne Da Derga. He compares The Canterbury Tales, with its use of the motif of a journey as a framework for a tale-collection, with both Snorri's Edda and the Middle Irish saga Acallam na Senórach. McTurk presents a compelling argument that these works represent Irish traditions which influenced Chaucer's writing. In this study, McTurk also argues that the thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdæla Saga and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale each descend from an Irish version of the Loathly Lady story. Further, he surmises that Chaucer's five-stress line may derive from the tradition of Irish song known as amhrán, which, there is reason to suppose, existed in Ireland well before Chaucer's time.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351952545

Chapter 1
Chaucer and Snorri

1.1 Analogies and Analogues

In a recent discussion of Old English studies by various writers, a distinction appears to be made between 'analogies', defined as 'resemblances in style, structure, mood or idea between works which have no other connection' (Lapidge 1997, 20), and 'analogues', defined as 'two or more texts which draw either immediately or at greater distance upon the same source, although none is in the same line of transmission from that source as another' (Scragg 1997, 40). In the second section of this chapter I shall argue for certain analogies, in the sense of the term just indicated, between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, composed mainly in the last two decades of the fourteenth century, and the prose Edda, composed by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241), most probably in the third and fourth decades of the thirteenth. In the third section I shall consider the possibility that one of the stories told in the part of Snorri's Edda known as Skáldskaparmál ('The language of poetry') is an analogue, also in the sense just indicated, to Chaucer's poem The House of Fame, composed probably in the late 1370s.
While I may be unusual in discussing Chaucer's work in relation to Snorri's Edda, I am not the first to do so. Barakat (1964) referred in passing to Snorri's Edda in suggesting that the Germanic god known as ãðinn in Old Norse-Icelandic sources was the model for the mysterious old man encountered by the three revellers in the Pardoner's Tale, one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Barakat, as I understand him, was not arguing for the influence of Snorri's Edda itself on Chaucer, but for the possibility that certain aspects of Óðinn as described in various Old Norse-Icelandic accounts, including Snorri's Edda, derived from traditions which became known to Chaucer independently, and were used by him in the Pardoner's Tale; in other words, that the Old Norse-Icelandic accounts on the one hand and Chaucer's account on the other descended independently of each other from a common source, the precise nature of which – whether oral or written – could not easily be determined. Snorri's prose Edda, in Barakat's view, would thus have been an analogue, in the sense of the term used here, to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Barakat's arguments were disputed by Schmidt, P. (1966), but were supported by Harris, R.L. (1969), who, however, came nearer than Barakat to suggesting that Chaucer's account derived from a literary source of Old Norse-Icelandic origin.
Taylor (1990) drew attention to the word scathe 'a shame', 'a pity', used twice in The Canterbury Tales in connection with the Wife of Bath, a narrator, like the Pardoner, of one of the Tales. He further noted the resemblance of this word to Skaði, the name of a giant's daughter who features in Gylfaginning ('The tricking of Gylfi') and Skáldskaparmál, the first two parts of Snorri 's Edda. Pointing out that the Wife of Bath and Skaði, as portrayed by Chaucer and Snorri respectively, both regard beautiful feet as a desirable quality in a husband, Taylor (p. 79) argued that this predilection of the Wife of Bath's, as expressed in the Prologue to her Tale, derived from a 'folk-tale reflection of Nordic myth in fourteenth-century England', thus implying that Snorri's account ofSkaði was an analogue, as the term is understood here, to Chaucer's account of the Wife of Bath. Taylor's arguments will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4, section 4.3, below.
I have myself argued elsewhere (McTurk 1994, 16) that the arrangement in the part of Snorri 's Edda known as Gylfaginning whereby the protagonist, Gylfi, must prove himself wiser than his three interlocutors, Hár, Jafnhár and Þriði, by asking them questions to the extent of exhausting their store of narrative information, might be compared with the pact made by the pilgrims in the General Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to the effect that whoever tells the best tale on the pilgrimage to Canterbury will win a free supper on the return journey; and in two articles published still more recently (McTurk 2002b; 2003), I have laid the basis for the arguments offered in the second and third sections, respectively, of the present chapter.
In the second section of this chapter I shall be pointing out what I would claim are analogies between The Canterbury Tales and the prose Edda, in the sense of the term indicated above. In the third section of the chapter, on the other hand, in discussing part of Skáldskaparmál in relation to The House of Fame, I shall be arguing that these are analogues to one another, also in the sense of the term used here.

1.2 Snorri’s Edda and The Canterbury Tales

The proposed analogies may be discussed under the three headings of framed narrative, literary anthology, and pilgrimage. Since most of what I have to say that is new falls under the first of these headings, I shall say considerably more under that heading than under the other two.
It is clear that both Snorri's Edda and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are examples of framed narrative, that is, they both involve stories told within a framing story, with the consequent use of different levels of narrative. It is true that this is more consistently the case with The Canterbury Tales than with the prose Edda; in the former the tales, the stories told by the pilgrims, which are clearly the main point and focus of the work, are told within the framework of the story of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, which imparts a unity to the work as a whole. Snorri's Edda is not unified in quite the same way; nor is storytelling as such quite as major a preoccupation of the entire work in the case of Snorri's Edda as it is in that of The Canterbury Tales, as will be shown below.
In The Canterbury Tales it is possible to distinguish at least four levels of narrative. This may be illustrated by the Nun's Priest's Tale. The first level is that on which the story of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, which provides the framework for the Nun's Priest's Tale as well as for the tales told by the other pilgrims, is itself told. This framing story is told by a first-person narrator who presents himself as having taken part in the pilgrimage and hence as a witness to its events. Because of the convincing personality of this narrator it is tempting, though not necessarily correct, to identify him with Chaucer (cf. Genette 1980, 213). The second level is that on which the Nun's Priest, a character within the story of the pilgrimage, tells his tale. It is in fact on this level that all the Canterbury Tales are told, including those contributed by the first-level narrator of the story of the pilgrimage in his capacity as a character within that story; this narrator thus appears, along with the other pilgrims, as a second-level narrator within the story he tells on the first level. The third level is that on which the cockerel Chauntecleer, a character within the Nun's Priest's Tale, tells the hen Pertelote about an ominous dream he has had which seems to foreshadow what later turns out, in the story told on the second level, to be his encounter with a fox; on the third level also he tells her a story which he attributes to an anonymous writer, 'Oon of the gretteste auctour that men rede' (VII. 2984), about two pilgrims who stayed at separate lodgings and of whom one dreamt, as later turned out to be true, that the other had been murdered. The fourth level is that on which the murdered pilgrim, a character within this story told on the third level by Chauntecleer, tells his companion, to whom he appears in a dream, that he has been murdered, and where his body is to be found.
In addition to these four clearly marked levels of narrative it may be said that at least two other levels are hinted at, if not fully realised, in the Nun's Priest's Tale. One of these is arguably represented by the anonymous writer cited by Chauntecleer as a source for his account of the two pilgrims. I am reluctant to take this writer as representing a separate level of narrative, however, partly because it is not at all clear whether Chauntecleer is quoting him word for word – one has in fact a strong impression that it is Chauntecleer, rather than the writer he refers to, who is telling the story – and partly because this writer can hardly be said to be a character in a story told by Chauntecleer, in the sense that each of the narrators taken here as representing the second, third and fourth levels of narrative respectively (Nun's Priest, Chauntecleer, murdered pilgrim) is a character in the story told on the immediately preceding level in the ordinal sequence. Another level of narrative arguably hinted at rather than realised in the Nun's Priest's Tale is that on which the story of the pilgrim's dream is likely to have been made available to the anonymous writer referred to by Chauntecleer. As Cooper (1996, 347) points out, 'dreams cannot be known about unless their narratives are told by their dreamers', and if the story of the pilgrim's dream is to have the authority Chauntecleer wishes to claim for it – he tells it in order to convince the sceptical Pertelote that dreams are indicative of the joys and tribulations of waking life – it must be assumed to have been narrated at some stage by the pilgrim who experienced it in order to have become known to the writer Chauntecleer refers to. This level of narrative may perhaps be glimpsed in the words of this pilgrim to the people of the town in which his companion had been slain, making it clear that he knows from his dream where the body is to be found. Although the two narrative levels just discussed are in my view implied rather than fully present in the Nun's Priest's Tale, they may be taken together with the four clearly marked narrative levels discussed above as an indication that among the preoccupations of the Nun's Priest's Tale is the very concept of narrative level itself.
The use of framed narrative in Snorri's prose Edda may now be discussed. Snorri's purpose in his Edda seems to have been to provide an introduction to the language, subject matter and metrical forms of skaldic and (to a lesser extent) eddic poetry, the two major genres of Old Norse-Icelandic poetry;1 it is thus taken up to a considerable degree with explanations and illustrations of metre and poetic diction. Since, however, skaldic poets in particular made frequent use of the circumlocutory expressions known as 'kennings', which often involved a knowledge of Old Norse mythology (such as Ægis dœtr, 'Ægir's daughters', for 'waves', Ægir being a sea-giant) (Faulkes 1998, I, 36; 1987, 91), the prose Edda often appears to deal more with mythology than directly with poetry, and it is largely through the medium of storytelling that the mythological background to the poetry is conveyed. It consists of a Prologue and three parts, namely Gylfaginning ('The tricking of Gylfi'), Skáldskaparmál ('The language of poetry') and Háttatal ('List of poetic forms'). In all of these three parts, framed narrative is used to a greater or lesser extent, and it is in Gylfaginning that it is used in the most sustained and consistent way. In the Prologue, which does not make use of framed narrative, an anonymous narrator describes the migration of a people called the Æsir, descendants of the Trojans, to Scandinavia from their original home, Asia Minor or Turkey. In Gylfaginning, the anonymous narrator tells how the Swedish king Gylfi visits the Æsir at their Scandinavian stronghold, Ásgarðr – built on the model of their former home, Old Ásgarðr or Troy – in order to find out whether their apparent ability to make everything go according to their will is due to their own nature, or to the gods they worship. They are aware in advance of his coming, and subject him to various optical illusions, the purpose of which is apparently to trick him into believing that they, the human Æsir, are identical with the divine Æsir, their gods (McTurk 1994,6–8). He is received by three of their number, Hár ('High'), Jafnhár ('Just-as-high') and Þriði ('Third'), whose names, they later reveal to him, are among those of the god Óðinn (Faulkes 1982, 21, 22; 1987, 21), and Hár tells him that in order to depart unharmed Gylfi must prove himself wiser than they. Gylfi proceeds to ask them questions about (among other things) their gods, as much with a view to exhausting their store of knowledge as to satisfying his curiosity, and their replies are for the most part what are today regarded as the major stories of Old Norse mythology, told on the second level of narrative. Among them is one told by Þriði in which the god Þórr, competing with his hosts in feats of strength at the castle of the giant Útgarðaloki, succeeds neither in draining a drinking-horn nor in beating an old woman at wrestling. Later, after Þórr has left the castle and is no longer a threat to it, the giant reveals to him that he has been using optical illusions to conceal from Þórr that what he had been drinking out of the horn was in fact the sea, and that the old woman whom he had failed to defeat was Elli ('Old Age'). When Þórr, furious at having been so deceived, raises his hammer to smash Útgarðaloki and his castle, both vanish. When Gylfi finally brings Hár and his companions to the point where they can answer no more of his questions, they too vanish, as Utgar5aloki had done in the story Þriði was telling (Faulkes 1982, 37–43, 54; 1987, 37–46, 57). Gylfaginning can thus be seen to work on three levels of narrative: the first level, on which the story of Gylfi's visit to the Æsir is told by an anonymous narrator whom it is tempting, but not necessarily correct, to identify with Snorri (cf. Genette 1980, 213); the second level, on which Har, Jafnhár and Þriði, characters within the story told on the first level by the anonymous narrator, tell Gylfi, another character in that story, the stories of Old Norse mythology; and a third level, on which Útgarðaloki, a character in one of these stories told on the second level, tells Þórr, another character in these stories, the story of how he had been deceived as to the nature of his combatants at Útgarðaloki's castle.
Other levels of narrative than the most obvious ones are sometimes hinted at, if not fully realised, in Gylfaginning, as they also are in the Nun's Priest's Tale. In Gylfaginning the anonymous first-level narrator and each of the three second-level narrators quote narrative passages of poetry as sources for the information they supply; the first-level narrator quotes two passages of skaldic poetry, naming in each case the author of the passage (Faulkes 1982, 7; 1987, 1–2), and the second-level narrators quote many passages of eddic poetry, often identifying by title the poems from which they are quoting. These quotations differ from Chauntecleer's reference to an unnamed author, discussed above, in being for the most part identifiable as word-for-word quotations from works other than that in which they are quoted, and hence as belonging primarily to other narrators than those in whose mouths they are placed in Gylfaginning; none of them gives the impression, to the extent that the relevant part of Chauntecleer's narrative does, of a narrator making thoroughly his own the source to which he refers. In these respects they certainly seem to hint, perhaps more than Chauntecleer's reference does, at a level or levels of narrative other than that on which each of them is introduced. On the other hand they cannot, in my view at least, be regarded as forming part of the system of narrative levels in Gylfaginning, because their primary 'speakers', i.e. the personae who give voice to them in the poems from which they are quoted, are not characters in the stories told by the narrators who quote them in Gylfaginning, in the sense that Hár, Jafnhár and Þriði are characters in the story told anonymously on the first level, and Utgarðaloki a character in a story told by Þriði on the second level, etc. The sybil, for example, who in the eddic poem Vöuspá ('The sybil's prophecy') makes a number of narrative statements which are quoted in Gylfaginning by one or other of the three second-level narrators, does not herself feature as a character in any of their narratives. Once this point has been made, however, it may be noted that a narrative passage of verse spoken by a character in Gylfaginning as an integral part of the story in which he or she features, rather than as a quotation, may legitimately be regarded as representing a level of narrative, even if it is in fact identifiable (outside the context in which it appears, i.e. by the reader of Gylfaginning) as a quotation; an example, albeit with little narrative content, might be the stanza from the eddic poem Skírnismál ('The lay of Skírnir') spoken by the god Freyr as part of the story of Freyr and Skírnir told by Hár on the second level of narrative (Faulkes 1982, 31; 1987, 32). Another example, with perhaps rather more narrative content and from no known source, would be the stanza of eddic poetry spoken by the giantess Þökk in the story of Baldr, also told by Hár on the second level (Faulkes 1982, 48; 1987, 51). These verse passages may thus be said to represent the third level of narrative in Gylfaginning.
The second part of Snorri's Edda, Skáldskaparmál ('The language of poetry'), deals more directly than Gylfaginning with poetry, but also makes use, if not as consistently as Gylfaginning, of a narrative framework in which mythical stories are told. An anonymous narrator tells how Ægir, who is here described as a man from the Danish island of Læsø, visits what appears to be yet another Ásgarðr, the mythical home of the divine Æsir, the gods worshipped by the human Æsir. At the banquet held to welcome him Ægir finds himself sitting next to Bragi, the god of poetry, from whom he leams, among other things, about how the god Óðinn gained access to the poetic mead of which the giantess Gunnlöð had been placed in charge by her father Suttungr, drank it, and taking the form of an eagle flew with it in his body to Ásgarðr, the abode of the gods, where he spat out part of it but also expelled part of it backwards ('sendi aptr suman mjöðinn') (Faulkes 1998, I, 5; 1987, 64). This story (which will be discussed in the next section of this chapter in the context of analogues rather than analogies) is told to Ægir by Bragi...

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