The ‘Courtiers’ Trifles’ of Walter Map

Summary

Walter Map (c.1140–c.1209) was one of the ‘court clerics’ who thrived at the Plantagenet court of Henry II. He was born near Hereford, on the Welsh border, and much of the material devoted to the supernatural in his De Nugis Curialium draws on Celtic traditions. Written in the 1180s, the work is a compendium of the kind of gossip, anecdotes and accounts of marvellous happenings that courtiers in the royal household might indeed trifle with during their idle hours. In the chapters where Walter Map tells stories of the supernatural, his apparitions and phantoms are not so much the returning spirits of the dead as the inhabitants of a parallel world which interacts with the real world on occasion to produce the kind of marvels which he recounts. One of his most significant distinctions is that a particular story is ‘not a miracle but a marvel’. Thus, in the tale of King Herla, the mortal king's pygmy counterpart (perhaps one of the ‘little people’ of Celtic folklore) lures the protagonist and his companions away to a world where time has no meaning. When the royal retinue seek to return to their own time, they become lost wanderers, forming the basis of yet another version of the Wild Hunt legend. The stories which Walter Map tells about ghostly women reinforce this notion of a parallel world. ‘A Lady of the Lake’ and ‘The Wife of Edric Wilde’ are, according to his description, phantoms willing to take on physical form for as long as they are accorded honour by their mortal husbands; the tribute to Edric Wilde's heir Alnodus, and the recording of the epithet ‘The Sons of the Dead Woman’, attest perhaps to the persistence of an ancient belief that it is possible for mortal men to sire children upon the women of a parallel world. In the last of these stories, ‘The Demon at the Cradle’ bears a gruesome and sinister resemblance to Gervase of Tilbury's description of the ghostly creature known as the Lamia.

The Tale of King Herla

Part I, Chap. XI

We are told in old stories that Herla, the king of the ancient Britons, was enticed into an agreement by another king, who was a pygmy: his bodily height did not exceed that of an ape.