9 - “As egir as any lyoun”: The Ethics of Knight-Horse Relationships in Lybeaus Desconus

Summary

If medieval, as modern, society sought to draw strict theoretical boundaries between the animal and the human, literary examples from noble lions to werewolves to beastly giants abound to suggest that in practice these boundaries were both tenuous and porous. This fragility, and the possibility of slippage between one category and another, is on spectacular display in Lybeaus Desconus, a fourteenth-century Middle English romance in the “Fair Unknown” tradition sometimes attributed to Thomas Chestre. Its eponymous hero, an illegitimate son of Sir Gawain, seeks to rescue the Lady of Synadoun, who has been turned into a serpent by malevolent enchanters. Readers of the romance have produced a rich body of scholarship on the resonant image of the feminine serpent, an image signifying both the transformative potential of the Lady's metamorphosis and a dangerous monstrosity that the text attempts to contain. By comparison, the text's many horses initially seem mundane, part of the ubiquitous construction of the knight on horseback that serves to signal a romance hero's chivalry.

I argue, however, that the horses of Lybeaus Desconus merit further attention as an important marker of its hero's ethical development and as part of the poem's exploration of the appropriate relationship between animals and humans. As Paul H. Rogers asks in his argument about the complex signification of horses in medieval French literature, might the ubiquity of the horse convey its value “not only as an intelligent, wondrously effective means of transportation, but more importantly as a faithful animal companion to be cherished?” The many steeds of Lybeaus Desconus are not named or cherished as Arondel in Bevis of Hamptoun and Gawain's Gringalet are, but this very lack of personal loyalty between the hero and his horses suggests the significance of these steeds in Lybeaus Desconus's growth from wild child to Arthurian knight. Even as the romance indicates that Lybeaus's “stedes” are chivalric combatants in their own right, the text's repeated attention to their wounding and death suggests that corporal frailty and vulnerability to violence connect the animal to the human. Such a connection prompts a reading of the romance that is critical of the violent hero and perhaps of chivalry more generally.