Jane Chance

Rice University · Department of English

This chapter, “The Arthurian Knight Remythified Ovidian: The Failures of Courtly Love in Three Late Medieval Glosses,” explores the conjoincture of classical myth and Arthurian romance—classical myth used in an allusion or image to gloss or interpret the transgressions of the knight of medieval romance and conveying implicitly the known moralizatio...

In Chap. 3, “Bilbo as Sigurd in the Fairy-Story Hobbit (1920–1927),” Tolkien composes The Hobbit as a fairy-story, in the light of his regard for Andrew Lang’s paradigmatic Victorian fairy-story of the northern hero Sigurd. Fairies (=Elves) and the magic associated with them in this redacted fairy-story are based on the Völsungasaga, which Tolkien...

This chapter argues against the frequently articulated opinion that Tolkien was a misogynist. As a “queer creature” Tolkien was drawn to medieval women similarly abject in his earliest scholarship—specifically other rather than Other in the postmodern essentialized definition of not male. They occupied singular positions in medieval saints’ lives a...

This chapter argues that two-thirds of The Lord of the Rings, written during World War II and several years thereafter, explores a world dominated by violence in which an arrogant masculinity has failed, leaving it stripped of the female. The failure of masculine heroism logically connects with the similar failure of leadership acknowledged in Tolk...

The second chapter is an exploration of the reasons for Tolkien’s own sense of himself as different from others, queer—“Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writings (1914–1924).” Here, South African-born Tolkien emerges as a modest and unassuming author who never considered what he created as monumental. Orphaned at twelve, relatively slig...

In the introduction, titled “This Queer Creature” in reference to a “little man” Tolkien describes in an encounter in “A Secret Vice,” Jane Chance explore his use of this persona or doppelganger in terms of the concepts of alterity and the queer identified by theorists Lee Edelman, Alexander Doty, and medievalist Tison Pugh to identify what might b...

Chapter 5 emphasizes Tolkien’s consciousness of the similar endings of both Beowulf and his own adaptation, The Fall of Arthur. What all three of Tolkien’s original medieval poems and his own translations or interpretations of them involve is the fall or death of a hero or king, in each case, one who has no legitimate heir to take his place and, as...

Tolkien’s repugnance toward apartheid (apartness) as defined in his retirement lecture suggests he deeply resented throughout his career being treated as set apart from others because he was a Roman Catholic South African-born medievalist and philologist—a friendly foreigner—whose family came from the rustic West Midlands in England. The medieval w...

The conclusion sums up Tolkien’s concept of the true hero as the most self-effacing of individuals—not only the Hobbit Frodo but Halfelven Arwen and her ancestor Lúthien and the men who love them both. Toward them and the Fourth Age, of Man, the Third Age has been moving all along.

In Chap. 4, “Tolkien’s Fairy-Story Beowulfs (1926–1940s),” just as Tolkien rewrote the harsh “Story of Sigurd” as a fairy-story in The Hobbit, here Tolkien’s adaptations of Beowulf are explicitly marked by his desire to rewrite Beowulf as eucatastrophic, happily. While Sellic Spell and the lays differ in nature and style from his Beowulf course tra...

Franco-Italian Christine de Pizan rereads mythographic glosses on female deities in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as protofeminist in her Epistre Othea. Having participated in the university debate over Jean de Meun’s misogynistic allegories in the Rose, she learns to valorize female gods in part from an Aristotelian mythographic commentary on an adaptation...

Chapter 1 clarifies the origins and nature of the hybrid mythography characteristic of the authors discussed in this volume, which can be said to have emerged at the historical conjunction of the condemnation of Aristotle by Bishop Stephen Tempier in 1277 with the near-simultaneous construction of Jean de Meun’s Aristotelian-flavored poetic comment...

Visible early on in Boccaccio’s Latin mythological works is his practice of using classical myth and allegory as a vehicle for concealing the personal and political. Illegitimate himself, Boccaccio throughout his career focused on mythological conflicts between son and father figures and his own legitimacy as a poet and scholar like Dante or Petrar...

Christine de Pizan moves radically from allegory to a history of mythological, legendary, and historical women and saints in the Cité des Dames (1405), in which she emphasizes the euhemeristic concept of the gods as actual human beings who had once lived on earth. Although the reasons for Christine’s abrupt change in her attitude toward allegorizat...

Coluccio Salutati “Virgilizes” his Boethian hero Hercules in De laboribus Herculis by focusing on his allegorical underworld descents. Reacting to the newly-rediscovered versions of Seneca’s plays about the violent and wife-murdering hero Hercules in Hercules furens and Hercules oetatis and to commentaries on them by Nicholas Trivet, Salutati const...

Dante borrows from the tradition of mythography by means of a reversal and exploitation of allegorical commentary in his Commedia. This reversal privileges the literal text and marginalizes allegorical (usually moral) comment, to ensure, through significant imagery, that the author glosses the characters in his visionary epic (and himself as person...

Gregory Heyworth's formalist monograph, about the ways in which Ovid's Metamorphoses and Ars amatoria (among other works) have influenced the change in literary form from "romance" to "epic" during the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, takes up the definition of the genre to rehearse (at least implicitly) various debates that have circulat...

From Plato to Lancelot is an interesting, but methodologically flawed, revised transoceanic studies dissertation on the influence of Mediterranean (Greco-Roman) and Atlantic (Celtic) contributions to the literary figuration of the twelfth-century romance-writer Chrétien de Troyes. The boundaries academic scholars have erected to segregate their lit...

How might postcolonial theory illuminate the psychology of female alterity? Caught between two cultures, one dominant and controlling and one passive and controlled, women suffer marginalization similar to that of the colonized because of gender difference. That is, alterity arises because of a tension between the subject and what Judith Butler has...

The twelfth century, with its panoply of Arthurian chroniclers and romance writers, established King Arthur of England as a preeminent founder of a Round Table renowned for its chivalry and idealized masculinity to advance the prestige of the Plantagenet connection with the British throne. Although Breton Geoffrey of Monmouth had finished his popul...

The singular Margery Kempe (born around 1373, but flourishing in the early 1420s and alive in 1438), the daughter of John Brunham, mayor of King’s Lynn, married John Kempe and mothered fourteen children, after which she took a vow of chastity and traveled throughout England and to holy sites in Europe and the Mediterranean to obtain indulgences for...

Sometime between 1296 and 1306, the book Le mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour [The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those Who Only Remain in Will and Desire of Love] by the beguine Marguerite Porete of Hainaut (b. 1250?-d. 1310) was burned in her presence by the bishop of Cambrai, Guy II...

Medieval women writers, as described in the previous chapters, created their own minor literature through dissonance within the larger literatures we call “medieval,” that is, those essentially written by male clerics and court poets. Their various discursive strategies, whether of feminized encoding, gender inversion, fantasization, or legitimatio...

One of the most popular saints in England in the eighth to the tenth centuries, the Roman martyr St. Agnes (291–304) was lauded in Latin works about virginity written by Aldhelm (640?–709) and the Venerable Bede (673–735).1 Aldhelm’s influential Prosa de virginitate, of which fourteen English manuscripts exist, was “popular in England and the conti...

Tolkien Studies 2.1 (2005) 262-265 The refusal of some contemporary critics and scholars to confirm the popular assessment of Tolkien as a major modern writer has consistently annoyed Tolkien readers in America and Great Britain over the past twenty-five years. Subsequently, following Tom Shippey's lead in papers and lectures since 1992 and in his...

Tolkien Studies 2.1 (2005) 271-273 Finally, someone has had the excellent sense to put together a collection of the medieval literary works most important to J. R. R. Tolkien, both as scholar and as fantasy writer, written in the translations of his day that he most likely knew. The Tolkien Fan's Medieval Reader was astutely collected by Turgon (Da...

In director Hrafn Gunnlaugsson's 1988 film, "Í Skugga Hrafnsins" (In the shadow of the raven), conversion to Christianity, despite the promise of spiritual salvation and national unification, is inherently a competition for social dominance. In the opening sequence, Gunnlaugsson juxtaposes midshots of the boat's passengers with voice-overed long sh...

The figure of Heloise, whether historical or fabricated, from the earliest juncture to the present moment has dominated in varying and extreme ways subsequent poetic or fictional recreations and learned discussions of her relationship with Abelard.1 Although Heloise herself penned but three letters to him, apparently composed in the mid-1130s and f...

Preface**1. Chaucer: real-life observation versus literary convention.**2. Monologic versus Dialogic Chaucer.**3. Allegorical versus humanist Chaucer**4. Misogynist versus feminist Chaucer**5. Conclusion - Chaucer: validity in interpretation.

The Silmarillion is a lost book in a double sense. Originally entitled ‘The Book of Lost Tales’, as if it had been lost and then discovered as a ‘mythology for England’,1 it represents yet another attempt by Tolkien to pretend that he is the editor or translator of works belonging to a previous era, as he has done in Farmer Giles of Ham, The Advent...

In the nineteenth century, fairy-tales were regarded as fantastic and trashy, and found little support from moralists and educationalists concerned with informing young minds: ‘it would be absurd in such tales to introduce Christian principles as motives of action’.1 In the twentieth century, in part due to the efforts of the Victorian compiler of...

The medieval parodies differ in genre or form and theme from Tolkien’s earlier creative and critical efforts. Neither lecture, children’s story, nor fairy-story, they consist of lay, romance and fabliau, alliterative-verse drama, ‘imram’, and lyric. Such genres specifically derive from the Middle Ages. ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ is modelled upo...

When Tolkien delivered the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture of 1936, he changed the course of Beowulf studies for the next forty years and also permanently altered our understanding of the Old English poem. As a scholarly article, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ sought to demonstrate the coexistence of Germanic and Christian elements in...

A story about growing up or maturation, The Hobbit has been regarded by some critics as merely a work of children’s literature,1 or else as a badly-muddled mixture of children’s literature and adult literature.2 While critical interpretations have revealed the psychological and literary underpinnings of the adult level of the work,3 they rarely jus...

The epic form has proved useful in reflecting the clash of value systems during periods of transition in literary history. In the Old English Beowulf Germanic heroism conflicts with Christianity: the chivalric pride of the hero can become the excessive superbia condemned in Hrothgar’s moralistic sermon. Similar conflicts occur in other epics or rom...

Nitzsche's survey of the Genius figure touches on Gower as the last link in a chain of medieval adaptations. After reviewing the Geniuses of Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus de Insulis (Alain of Lille) and Jean de Meun, Nitzsche turns to the CA. Gower's Genius "appears to be an Orpheus figure who wishes to rescue Euridice (concupiscence, or Amans) from...

Jane Chance , Rice University, jchance@rice.edu