4 - Past Rituals and Present “Forests”: The Craft of Memory

Summary

‘Sir Ywain, welkum home!’

(For it was lang sen he thare come).

(Ywain 3717–18)

In the previous chapter it was argued that romances frequently contain memories of other tales, even other versions of the same narrative, which are there for the audience to identify and then apply to the current tale. The process demands careful cognitive effort and also a great deal of creative freedom which is, as was explored in the discussion of classical and medieval theories, at the very centre of medieval memoria. It is no surprise therefore that romances also rely upon and encourage the memorial skills of characters and audiences throughout a romance narrative as situations are stored in the memory in order to be recollected later. We have already seen that memory relies upon a clearly ordered framework which aids in the organisation and recollection of memories which, when fitted together, form a complete and coherent narrative of individual episodes. To work through the sequence of episodes is, essentially, the ritual of reading a romance. Equally, however, rituals are an important concept in memory studies, as the repetition of an action reaffirms the memory of that particular event along with any previous recollections. The frequency with which the ritual is performed permits more challenging recollections to be undertaken. With each journey the route towards a particular past episode becomes more and more familiar and the original memory is likewise shown to be increasingly adaptable.

This chapter will examine the way in which romances use episodic structures and rituals to shape the memory work within a tale. Yet we should be cautious in how we understand romance structures to be “ritualistic” as to speak of ritual purely in terms of a repeated action implies safety, familiarity, and perhaps a corresponding lack of adaptability. They therefore do not give an accurate impression of a lived experience – life is not predictable and romances are full of unexpected encounters or present moments that seem to lack any correlative with past events or stored memories. Such is the case in Ywain and Gawain where the ritual remains essentially the same but its individual features change with each performance.