12 - As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein

Summary

GEOFFREY CHAUCER'S SQUIRE'S Tale, a fragmentary and somewhat disjointed romance that fictionalizes relations between the Mongol and Mamluk courts in the first half of the fourteenth century, alludes twice to Arthurian figures. First, the emissary bearing gifts from the ‘kyng of Arabe and of Inde’ (110) is portrayed as more decorous even than Gawain, whose ‘olde curteisye’ and habitation in the land of ‘Fairye’ (an odd detail) are cited as a point of reference (95, 96). Second, the courtly dances that ensue after the presentation of gifts are said to defy description: only Lancelot would be up to the task, and ‘he is deed’ (287). Critics have not adequately accounted for these jarring Arthurian allusions – and particularly their dismissive tone – in this culturally probing Eastern romance uncircumscribed by any notion of Western translatio imperii. While some critics have discerned in these Arthurian references an intertextual dialogue with the contemporaneous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [hereafter SGGK] and others have offered precedents for Gawain's association with ‘Fairye’, none has assessed the dynamic between Arthurian allusion and the treatment of marvel, or ‘wondryng’, in the tale (305) – a motif centered upon the wondrous gifts, all instances of mechanical mirabilia, presented to the Mongol court. As Patricia Clare Ingham has observed, the Squire's Tale complexly interweaves ‘disenchanted rationalism with [a] kind of enchanted absorption in the new and unusual’. This conjunction of wonder, mechanical marvels, and Arthurian tradition deepens when Chaucer's English poem is set next to the similarly oriented Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein [hereafter Walewein], composed in the thirteenth century by two otherwise unknown authors, Penninc and Pieter Vostaert, and made available to an Anglophone audience in David Johnson's invaluable 1992 translation. To date, Chaucerians have not taken stock of this most esteemed of medieval Dutch romances, but the intractability of the questions surrounding the creative orientation and tone of the Squire's Tale rewards a venture across disciplinary borders less traveled by modern scholars than by medieval cosmopolites, for whom England and the Low Countries were linked in dynamic and competitive interchange.