My First New to Me ME Reading

I have entitled this blog "Venuses of Middle English" because it ties with the life drawing I have been doing and previous blogs. further, I will be writing a bit about eroticism in ME lit. for my paper on "the presentation and significance of other worlds and/or magic in ME Romance." I posted this to the U. of Nottingham site in Feb. I started Havelok the Dane as my bedtime reading, switching from my perennial Chaucer, just before I started the Middle English Romance course and finished it a few weeks too many into it, having no idea I would have to evaluate whether it can be classified a literary romance. Of course I looked in my standby Holman's Handbook of Lit. Terms from So. Cal. Coll. for a handy definition of the genre and got that it was related to the languages from whence they came. I was also pleased to learn that my sister-in-law's family, surname Grimbelby, hail from where some of the action of Havelok takes place. I loved Havelok. I was blown away by the image of light coming out of Havelok's mouth as he was knocked about by his captors, and I was pleasantly surprised that I understood that passage without consulting the glosses or notes. I say this because of the romances I've read for the course, Havelok, Ywain and Gawain, and Sir Orfeo, none of them is predictable enough to anticipate vocabulary, as I think I could in Malory, for example. But we will read his Gareth of Orkney on the course, and that is one tale that is not predictable, with its chopped up body parts reassembling themselves like in some Schwarzenegger film. John Finlayson lists the supernatural as characteristic of the romance. Fine. Eric Auerbach helped me see the fairy tale element of Ywain, which was painful to read until that pronouncment. Havelok has both this supernatural and the fairy tale feel (sans magic) with its damsel in distress in a tower, at least at the beginning of the poem. But Finlayson made a distinction between the romance and the geste, this latter that Paul Strohm gave a very broad definition too. Though Finlayson's defintion of the geste is rather brief, as his essay has to do with other forms of the romance, I think geste fits Havelok. It's that kind of a romance: but in this geste, our hero, is both the knight and king whose court he is fighting for. So, the most illumination of the three essays was John Finlayson's "Definitions of Middle English romance": "The basic definition of romance, therefore, is that it is a tale in which a knight achieves great feats of arms, almost solely for his own los et pris in a series of adventures which have no social, political, or religious motivation and little or no connection with medieval actuality." Havelok the Dane requires more knocking about to fit this definition than it does to fit that of the geste.