The Search for Scottishness in Golagros and Gawane

Summary

Golagros and Gawane is a translation of part of a French romance: so two recent surveys (of ‘Middle Scots Romance’ and Scotland's ‘Alliterative Revival’ respectively) inform us without further qualification. This is an unpromising start for anyone looking for a distinctive Scottish contribution to medieval Arthurian literature, but fortunately it is extremely misleading. Although the basic elements of its narrative have indeed been borrowed from part of the First Continuation of the Old French Perceval, the end result is so different that some early scholars missed the debt entirely, while others were convinced that the narrative of Golagros must represent parallel development rather than direct descent. The fifteenth-century Golagros and Gawane cuts a much more individual figure in the world of medieval Arthurian romance than the dismissal of it as a ‘translation’ implies. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the peculiar character of Golagros and Gawane is a function of its Scottishness. What would ‘Scottishness’ consist of in a literary text, and how would we distinguish it from the quirks of an individual author? I am not referring here to such superficial factors as language of composition or manuscript and circulation history: an English text copied by a Scottish scribe can give almost as strong an impression of Scottishness as a one originating in Scotland. If reliable national character is to be found in a literary text, it seems we must look past its language to less readily altered aspects such as outlook, theme(s), and the cultural frames of reference embedded in it.

One important reason for suspecting that Golagros and Gawane might owe some of its unique character to its Scottishness, as opposed to simply its author’s personal taste, is the fact that Scotland in the fifteenth century was a politically distinct realm, and Scottish literary culture in this period is likewise recognizably distinct from its English counterpart, despite the clear influence of the latter upon it. It seems reasonable to assume that such cultural distinctiveness would manifest itself in individual literary productions. A second reason is the everpresent political potential of King Arthur, supposed conqueror of the whole of Britain, in a text composed anywhere within the British Isles.