Medieval romance, from the perspective of critical race studies (CRS), justifies medieval imperial expansion. Medieval romances frame themselves as celebrating the culture of elite knights and ladies by imagining their borders as inhabited by dangerous people who must be defeated and eliminated, with the result that enemy territories are subsumed into the territories of the elite knight. From this viewpoint, medieval romance uses chivalry to define who is accepted within the boundaries and who is left out of that formation. By studying differing patters of dehumanization in medieval romance with a focus on Old French and Middle Welsh texts, the chapter shows some examples of the ways that the genre of romance makes race and of how the repercussions of making race further systems of oppression. The chapter’s aims, then, are to use CRS to show a possible form of analyzing race in medieval romance.

Chapter 4 examines in detail the early medieval evidence for godlings in Britain, from both Brittonic and Old English sources, dealing in turn with the main categories of folkloric beings such as fauns, elves, the various categories of supernatural women, pygmies and giants. The chapter stresses the interaction between folk belief and learned commentary, identifying biblical commentary and the work of Church Fathers such as Isidore of Seville as the main source of discussions about godlings and, perhaps, as the source of much of the folklore itself. It is the argument of the chapter that by the time of the Norman Conquest, the various elements of fairy lore were present in British popular belief but had yet to be brought together into a single synthesis. These elements included a belief in wild ‘men of the woods’ gifted with prophetic powers; belief in elves; belief in supernatural women, often in a triad, governing the fates of human beings; belief in diminutive otherworlders, sometimes living beneath the earth and belief in heroes who have somehow become supernatural beings.