9 - The Hero and his Realm in Medieval English Romance

Summary

The point of departure for this paper is the fact that, for the authors of Anglo- Norman and Middle English romance, there was no available word unambiguously denoting the concept of the ‘hero’. Both the classical heros and the Germanic Held/hæleð had always implied a range of different meanings, but the vernacular writers of post-Conquest England worked with languages in which no direct descendant of either of them continued to be in common usage. The diagram below is a simplified illustration of this development.

Etymological tree: Hero

The classical Latin heros had its own ambivalences. Associated with ancient demigods on the one hand, it was also open to sophisticated scepticism and the charge of fictionality on the other, as for example in Cicero's assertion that ‘non heroum ueteres casus fictosque luctus uelim imitari’ [‘I have no wish to rehearse the ancient fortunes and imaginary tragedies of heroes’]. The Old English word hæleð, meanwhile, had a range of meanings which could be translated with greater or lesser intensity, from ‘hero’ to simply ‘man’, by way of ‘warrior’. This range is in itself illustrative of the demands of the culture which produced Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon, a culture which sought heroic deeds from all its fighting men; but it left the word with an ambivalence which later writers expose – the poet La3amon provides evidence that by the thirteenth century the word had a much diluted sense: ‘þær þu findest seouen houndred þa hæleðes beoð kene’ [‘there you will find seven hundred brave warriors’]; ‘forcuðest hæleðe’ [‘basest of men’]. This Germanic word vanished altogether from later Middle English. In medieval Latin, heros retained its meaning in reference to the heroes of old – Orderic Vitalis had a Saracen princess urge the Franks to think of the ‘miros heroum euentus’ [‘marvellous deeds of the heroes’] of the Trojan War – but it also had the new, diluted meaning of ‘lord, master’. This is the translation offered by various Latin-to-vernacular glosses; and it establishes the most important point of all: that the intense meanings of heros, the superhuman warrior, the man of ‘extraordinary bravery or greatness of soul’, did not enter the vernaculars of medieval England. The Old French herus appears to have been rare, and it was a synonym for barun. The word was not used in Middle English.