4 - The Sege of Melayne – A Comic Romance; or, How the French Screwed Up and 'Oure Bretonns' Rescued Them

Summary

The deliberate mixture of the comic and the serious is perhaps characteristic of medieval culture; for it appears in marginalia, hagiography, the drama, the chansons de geste and romances. Yet the comic dimensions of the Sege of Melayne have gone unrecognized, and the poem continues to puzzle readers. While commentators have focused on Melayne's ‘serious’ aspects and have sought to explain its oddities by relating them to other genres, the poem actually contains far more oddities than have been noted, and when all its unusual features are viewed together, the dominant pattern appears to be one of comedy.

In addition to being in part a parody of the chansons de geste, in particular The Song of Roland, and the Charlemagne romances, Melayne contains a number of familiar comic devices, such as reversal, mistaken identity, farce, and exaggeration (not so easy to detect in a genre given to exaggeration); draws on comic motifs already in place in the chansons de geste, such as cowardly Lombards, a weak King Charles, and stock comic scenes of Saracens abusing their idols; and appears to borrow at least one comic touch, the paralyzed Saracens, from hagiography. The poem also adapts motifs from other genres, such as the ‘bestowal of a sword’ from crusading propaganda, and treats them in a comic manner. Years ago Ernst Robert Curtius observed that ‘the Middle Ages loved all kinds of crossings and mixtures of stylistic genres’. It is just this mixture of genres, and of the comic and the serious, that has made Melayne a puzzling poem for some of its readers.

The poem survives in a fragment, composed about 1400 during the middle of the Hundred Years War. While it resembles the other Charlemagne romances and contains the familiar cast of characters, it alone has no known French source. Most likely there never was one, for the real heroes, except Archbishop Turpin, are not the French but the Bretons who come to their aid. It is interesting to note that Melayne, Sir Perceval of Gales, and Richard Coer de Lyon – another romance about a siege that also takes a swipe at the French – all appear in the Thornton MSS. A century ago, S.J. Herrtage suspected that Melayne and Perceval were by the same hand. Recently, Perceval has been viewed as ‘a creative response to Chrétien and the Perceval Continuations’ and ‘a rich comic work of artistic merit’.