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21 January
Continued from Merry birthday ! (1)
I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) – the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode Bretayn he settles with wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.
(lines 13–19)
(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde – no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)
So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 21–22) – unless you are a football thug – that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)
We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 23–29). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.
And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold – apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]
(lines 37–45)
If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College – and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.
Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.
C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.
I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended – that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)
End-notes
¹ The opening lines of Gawain:
Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes
(lines 1–2)
I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.
² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?
³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.
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