10 - 'The Courteous Warrior': Epic, Romance and Comedy in Boeve de Haumtone

Summary

In Boeve de Haumtone, the earliest version of the Bevis story, there is a line that praises the hero as: ‘li pruz e li sené, li curteis guerer’ (the valiant and wise, the courteous warrior, line 2791). These terms, especially curteis and guerer, provoke questions about generic boundaries and, in particular, about the extent to which early insular romance might be said to escape the generic boundaries of ‘romance’ more generally. We might relate this issue to Horace's concept of decorum: characters should speak and behave appropriately according to their rank and the genre to which they are allotted, and genres such as tragedy and comedy should be firmly separated. To what extent, then, is the protagonist of Boeve either curteis or guerer? And for that matter, how courtly or warlike is the whole poem? Are the two kinds of behaviour not incompatible in either epic or romance? To what genre does it belong?

In fact, Boeve is one of those interesting Anglo-Norman hybrids which first appear with Le Roman de Horn (c. 1170) and include a poem about Alexander, Le Roman de Toute Chevalerie by Thomas of Kent (1175–85), and Otinel (twelfth century). They are all ‘epic’ in that they are in the laisse form of French epic narrative, the chanson de geste. which travelled to Britain with William the Conqueror and which appears to have been popular here. Their content, too, fits ideas of epic: they contain plenty of fighting, mostly against ‘Saracens’. They are, however, usually labelled ‘romances’ by modern editors, presumably because of the prominent presence in them of women and love. But several continental chansons de geste contain a mixture of these same elements. The distinction between ‘epic’ and ‘romance’ may often be useful, but it raises problems of definition; and it also tends to imply a neat chronological distinction between them that is not easy to justify. As has recently been pointed out, romance doesn't supersede chanson de geste but runs in tandem with it for a long time, the two genres existing contemporaneously in a dialogical relationship.

The question of whether Boeve de Haumtone should be allocated to either chanson de geste or romance has recently been broached by Jean-Pierre Martin. He calls it ‘a paradoxical chanson de geste, but a chanson de geste all the same… on the margin of the two genres’.