Ancient Greek and Middle English Literature
Odysseus, Constance, and Sir Degaré
8th century BC, Ancient Greek ¦ 14th century, Middle English
In all these stories there is a sense that a person is returning to a place where time has not moved on.
'The thing which strikes me most about the Odyssey,’ said Quintin, ‘ is how ludicrous it is! I don’t mean the voyage that Odysseus makes around a sea full of giants and goddesses. That part is quite fun. But he is trapped in this ocean for nine long years after the fall of Troy, and the ludicrous thing is the situation at home. The suitors who are living it up in Odysseus’s palace at the expense of his estate, waiting for his wife Penelope to make up her mind about marrying one of them since Odysseus hasn't returned from Troy. Are they going to spend their whole lives hanging around like this? Is that what they intend? I would have thought that three long years would have been stretching the limits of credulity a bit! But nine!’
‘Well, it's the same with Chaucer’s Medieval story of Constance,’ replied Miranda. ‘Twice she is thrown into a small boat alone and set adrift on the ocean, and after ten years, finding herself in the middle of the sea once again, she comes across another vessel carrying a friend of her father’s who is returning from business that directly follows events that happened all those years ago. It is a jolt, a dislocation. Purposeful? I don't know. One would have expected things to have moved on a bit.'
‘And in the Medieval romance of Sir Degaré,’ said Quintin, seizing upon another example. ‘His mother is being jousted for by suitors, as is not unknown in a story of this kind. She conceives a baby illicitly and abandons it at birth, but the little boy is brought up elsewhere and knows nothing of his real mother. Then when he is a young man of twenty – twenty years old! – Sir Degaré journeys to a city where a lady is being jousted for by suitors. It only requires one suitor to defeat her father in combat and she will have to marry him. And in victory Sir Degaré finds that the woman he has just won in combat is his own mother!’
‘His mother?’
‘After twenty years! Again, this same sense that time should have moved on but it hasn't. As though the main character is returning to the past. A dislocation.’
‘Were these authors fools?’
‘No,’ said Quintin. 'Certainly not.'
‘Then I guess that these jolts must have been written into the story on purpose,’ said Miranda.
