Mapping Movement

in the Alliterative Morte Arthure

Introduction

Medieval texts – in particular, medieval chronicles, romances, travel literature, and mappae mundi – are notorious for their fuzzy geography. Fantasy and reality blend together to set the stage for stories that invoke historical figures and biblical narratives as well as giants, monsters, and other magical creatures. Mythical locales are placed alongside historical realms and cities; outlandish descriptions of distance traveled in a day are common; forests expand to gargantuan size and confuse all who wander through. This manipulation of space to accommodate the real and the unreal can be disorienting, especially to a modern audience. A modern audience often expects described places to represent real-world locations accurately and with a certain degree of realism unless a text is explicitly marked as fantasy. But, because places in medieval texts are not always where we expect them to be, we can become lost trying to find a way through the story.

When thinking about these texts, I wondered: how much does our understanding of medieval texts depend on our understanding of characters’ movements through geographical space? With this digital project, I wanted to see what other information we can learn by focusing our attention on spaces themselves and not just the plot that moves through them. I have chosen to make this project's main user interface a map so I can foreground the locations described in a particular medieval romance – in this case, the Alliterative Morte Arthure. I have also included an option to filter the locations marked on the map by geographic feature, so the user can see the prevalence of certain geographic features at a glance. Each location is accompanied by an analytical description. In these, I note any spatial details such as dense underbrush or an imposing mountainscape mentioned by the text, their thematic resonances, and any important plot points that happen there. In my metadata, I focus on thematic elements that are either intrinsically tied to places or commenting on characters' movement through spaces. With this user interface, I hope to draw our attention to the text's places first and foremost.

I have chosen to use the Alliterative Morte Arthure as my case study for this digital project because the text represents the movement of King Arthur's journey across England and Europe with more specificity than is often found in Middle English medieval romances. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, we follow Arthur's military campaign against the Roman Empire after the Emperor tries to subsume England into the Empire. Arthur and his army engage in skirmishes with the Roman army across much of France and Italy, to emerge victorious in the end. However, they must quickly retrace their steps to return to England once Arthur receives word that Mordred has usurped Arthur's throne, stolen Guinevere away, and raised an army in support of his specious claim to the throne.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure takes care to name and describe rest stops, battle locations, and even areas only generally traveled through. This emphasis on naming locales works to ground the text in its geography in a way that translated easily to my particular mapping project. My hope is that this visualization of the places mentioned in the Alliterative Morte Arthure helps to give modern readers a sense of the extent of Arthur's military campaign as well as how his journey may have been affected, literally and figuratively, by the terrain they travel through.


Mapping Movement through the Alliterative Morte Arthure

The map can be filtered by geographic features using the menu below. Mountainous regions include cliffs, individual mountains, and mountain ranges; places that include mountainous regions will turn orange when this option is selected in the menu. Greenspaces and forests include forest space, wooded areas, fields, farms, bushes, and shrubbery; these places will turn green when selected. Political boundaries include towns, cities, and other regions whose boundaries are defined by political or national relationships; these places will turn purple when selected. Water and coastal regions include large bodies of water, rivers, running water, and shorelines; these places will turn blue when selected. I list more specific definitions of pertinent geographic features in the analyses for each place, which you can access by clicking on the places on the map.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure

The Alliterative Morte Arthure is an alliterative poem concerning King Arthur, his military campaign against Rome, and his ultimate death. It is part of a long-standing tradition of texts and art created about King Arthur, his kingdom, and the circumstances of his death; the tradition dates back to the 700s and includes works in many genres and languages. Written by an anonymous author, the Alliterative Morte Arthure was completed between 1400 and 1402. The only copy survives in the Thornton Manuscript, a codex that contains Middle English and Latin texts including romances, devotional and religious works, and medical recipes. The compiler and scribe Robert Thornton, lord of East Newton in Yorkshire, created this manuscript for “his own and his family’s use and enjoyment,” according to Mary Hamel (p. 4). Two distinct hands at the end of the Alliterative Morte Arthure add dedications in Middle English and Latin that celebrate Thornton by name. The Thornton Manuscript is housed at the Lincoln Cathedral Library under the shelfmark  Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91 . A more detailed plot summary of this text can be found at the  Database of Middle English Romance . For more on the Arthurian tradition in general, the  Camelot Project  contains a wealth of essays on prominent characters and themes from the legend, as well as texts and images from across the tradition.

I use  Edward E. Foster’s revision of Larry D. Benson’s edition of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (1994)  as my base text; any Middle English place names or quotations cited throughout my digital project come from this edition. I rely upon the notes from Mary Hamel’s and Valerie Krishna’s editions in my commentary. These editions, along with other prominent editions and critical analyses of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, are listed in a Further Reading bibliography below.

The anonymous poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure makes specific references to places, battles, and theories on law and warfare contemporary with the turn of the 15th century. These references suggest to many medieval scholars, particularly scholars from the early to mid-20th century, that the poet’s writing was informed by the poet’s own life experiences. Prominent theories include that the poet must have been a pilgrim (Parks; Benson, “Date”; Hamel) or a diplomat with a legal and administrative background (Hamel; Vale), or that the poet must have known someone in one of those positions. Another long-standing theory is that the places and battles from the poem were inspired by Edward III’s military campaigns. Some scholars, hoping to date the poem to the mid-1300s, suggest that the poet had been directly inspired by current events (Neilson). Other scholars propose that inspiration came from “romanticized chronicles” that reported recent historical events and journeys, which would date the poem to the late 1300s or early 1400s (Finlayson, “Date,” 629; Gӧller; Benson, “Date”). 

From this scholarship, it is clear that historical events, journeys, and schools of thought had some amount of influence on the Alliterative Morte Arthure. However, extrapolating autobiographical or historical facts from fictional narratives is notoriously tricky and provides tenuous conclusions at best. Although the poet displays considerable familiarity with some European geography, this by no means proves that they have walked in the footsteps they give to Arthur, nor does it guarantee the poet’s complete or correct knowledge of Europe. The Alliterative Morte Arthure is, after all, a fictional narrative, not a historical record of a journey or an itinerary meant to be used as a guide. As such, my digital project does not propose to map fictional places definitively on a modern map, but to represent how geographical spaces were described in the medieval text.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure does go into some detail describing different locations, but it does not afford that same courtesy to describing or naming people from non-centralized locations (i.e., not from England or the main continent of Europe). In romances, it is common for characters, even main characters, to be left unnamed. The text does name its main antagonist to be Lucius, Emperor of Rome, and some lesser antagonists are referred to by a title (most notably, some recurring sultans titled “Sowdan” in lines 589-95 and the rebellious Duke of Lorraine in lines 1401 and 2652). However, the narrative uses the term “Saracens” (see line 598 for the first mention of “Sarazenes”) to refer to the majority of people who are considered enemies (most typically, Arthur’s enemies) and who are not specifically Roman. The term “Saracen” has a fraught history. In the Middle Ages, “Saracen” was used as a “generic term for all enemies” (Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England, p. 1977, as cited in Rajabzadeh p. 3), but most often is used to describe and denigrate people who are Muslim. The label conflates race, religion, bodily attributes, places of origin, and other identity characteristics together in such a way as contributes to a “racial, political, and social project to represent Muslims as inferior to Christians and to motivate their expulsion from and extinction in the Holy Land” (Rajabzadeh p. 2).

Since the early 2000s, there have been groundbreaking articles, collections of essays, and scholarly monographs that demonstrate the importance of reconceptualizing our understanding constructions of race and identity in the Middle Ages. Among these are the monographs of Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450, and Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which have informed my understanding of how race is presented as a spectrum made up of multiple identity characteristics. These texts, along with other collected bibliographies on race in medieval studies, are listed in a Further Reading bibliography below.

Scholars are inconsistent on how they employ and analyze the term “Saracen” when discussing race and representation in medieval texts; some use the term to reproduce the language of primary source material, while others use it more cavalierly. Recently, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh has made a persuasive argument in her article “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure” that such use of the term “Saracen” – a term she calls “a derogatory label” (p. 2) – perpetuates the misidentification and erasure of Muslims. She cautions us that, “If we use Saracen in an interest to preserve the historical object in our criticism, or to speak about the object on its own terms, then we need to be far more cautious and deliberate in our use . . . and not as we do now – as placeholders for Muslims in the Middle Ages” (“The Depoliticized Saracen,” p. 5). 

Although the Alliterative Morte Arthure employs the term “Saracen” frequently throughout its alliteration, the narrative does not appear to use the term specifically to refer to Muslims, or indeed to reference any sort of religious or bodily identity. Instead, the Alliterative Morte Arthure uses the term “Saracen” in such a way that conflates all enemies together. At different times throughout the narrative, it describes Arthur’s enemies fighting on behalf of the Roman Empire (again, see line 598 for its first use), previous enemies of Rome itself (see lines 2032-43 for Lucius’s pep talk referencing how the Romans defeated invading peoples he calls “Saracens” as inspiration for defeating Arthur), and Mordred’s allies who support his usurpation of Arthur’s throne (see lines 3933-42 for a list of Mordred’s allies who have surrounded Gawain on the Shores of Southampton). The label is applied to people from places as widespread as Africa, Syria, Norway, and Denmark, among others. Because the Alliterative Morte Arthure uses the term “Saracen” so indiscriminately, I want to take note from Rajabzadeh and be cautious and deliberate in my own use of the term. In my descriptive summaries, I have consciously refrained from using the word unless it is part of a quote from the text, or I am referring to it specifically as a term or a label. In either case, it is surrounded by quotation marks. In my own analyses and summaries, I use the generic terms "enemy" or "enemy army" to refer to the people the text describes as "Saracens."


Mapping Methodology

This digital project was built in collaboration with Blair Tinker, the GIS research specialist for the University of Rochester’s Digital Scholarship Lab. We initially built the map in Omeka using the Neatline plugin. We updated the digital project and its map using StoryMap templates in Esri's ArcGIS.

This map is meant as a general guide to the text for a modern audience, and so I have chosen to use modern names and locations, rather than medieval. Instead, I have recorded the Middle English variations of place names in my metadata and my analyses. I have approximated the locations of fictional places using itinerary-based clues from the text. Additionally, for this map, I have chosen to plot only named locations where the narrative actively takes place, rather than every single location mentioned in the text. The geographic feature information is coded into points, lines, and polygons, all of which can be selected on the map.

The background of the map is a watercolor base map that details some waterways and terrain in abstraction, but removes modern place names and political divisions. I combine the location layer with the abstracted background in order to simulate the blending of fantasy and reality that occurs in medieval romances. When this background is combined with specific names from the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the resulting map prioritizes locations in relation to the narrative.


Metadata

Metadata for Mapping Movement in the Alliterative Morte Arthure - Google Drive

Further Reading

In creating the look and the functionality of this project, I drew on the following digital projects for inspiration:

The following is a selected list of recent editions and translations of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, sources on the concept of space in the Middle Ages, critical commentary on the poem itself, and sources on race in the Middle Ages. This list is by no means comprehensive; rather, these suggestions are meant to be starting places for those curious to learn more.

Major Editions and Translations on the Alliterative Morte Arthure

I use  Edward E. Foster’s revision of Larry D. Benson’s edition of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (1994)  as my base text; any Middle English place names or quotations cited throughout my digital project come from this edition. In addition, I rely upon the notes from Mary Hamel’s and Valerie Krishna’s editions in my commentary.

The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Valerie Krishna. University Press of America, 1983.

Benson, Larry D., editor. King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure. Revised by Edward E. Foster. Middle English Text Series. Medieval Institute Publications, 1994.  https://metseditions.org/editions/ArW747G4izeLNHe99xFaVNKS5kwdvz5dl 

The Death of King Arthur: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Simon Armitage. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Hamel, Mary, editor. Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition. Garland Publishing, 1984.

Krishna, Valerie, editor. The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition. Burt Franklin & Co., 1976.

The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91). Introductions by D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen. The Scolar Press, 1975.

Space in the Middle Ages and in Middle English Literature

Finlayson, John. “Rhetorical ‘Descriptio’ of Place in the Alliterative ‘Morte Arthure.’” Modern Philology, vol. 61, no. 1, August 1963, pp. 1-11. JSTOR. Accessed 23 February, 2016.

Ganim, John M. “Landscape and Late Medieval Literature: A Critical Geography.” Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative. Edited by Laura L. Howes. University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

Geck, John. MORROIS: Mapping of Romance Realms and Other Imagined Spaces.  http://www.morrois.net/Morrois .

Hanawalt, Barbara A., and Michal Kobialka, editors. Medieval Practices of Space. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Howe, John, and Michael Wolfe, editors. Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe. University Press of Florida, 2002.

Parks, George B. The English Traveler to Italy: The Middle Ages (to 1525). Edizioni Di Storia E Letteratura, 1954.

---. “King Arthur and the Roads to Rome.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 45, no. 2 (1946): 164-70.

Saunders, Corinne J. The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. D. S. Brewer, 1993.

Tomasch, Sylvia. “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control.” Chaucer’s Cultural Geography. Edited by Kathryn L. Lynch. Routledge, 2002. Pp. 193-224. ProQuest Ebrary.

Verdon, Jean. Travel in the Middle Ages. Translated by George Holoch. University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

Withers, Jeremy. “Forests, Animals, and Ambushes in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Parergon, vol. 27, no. 1, 2010, pp. 85-104. ProjectMUSE. Accessed 6 April, 2018.

Scholarship on the Alliterative Morte Arthure

Adler, Gillian. “‘Yit that traytour alls tite teris lete he fall’: Arthur, Mordred, and Tragedy in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Arthuriana, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 2015, pp. 3-21. ProjectMUSE. Accessed 6 April, 2018.

Benson, Larry D. “The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure.Medieval Studies in Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein. Ed. by Jess B. Bessinger, Jr, and Robert R. Raymo. New York University Press, 1976. Pp. 19-40.

The Camelot Project. Edited by Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack. Robbins Library Digital Projects.  www.d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot-project 

Chism, Christine. Alliterative Revivals. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Finlayson, John. “Morte Arthure: Date and a Source for References.” Speculum, vol. 42, no. 4, Oct. 1967, pp. 624-38. JSTOR. Accessed 17 Sept. 2018.

Gӧller, Karl Heinz, editor. The Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Reassessment of the Poem. D. S. Brewer, 1981.

Matthews, William. The Tragedy of Arthur: A Study of the Alliterative “Morte Arthure.” University of California Press, 1960.

Peck, Russell A. “Willfulness and Wonders: Boethian Tragedy in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century. Edited by Bernard S. Levy and Paul E. Szarmach. The Kent State University Press, 1981. Pp. 153-182.

Schiff, Randy P. Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History. Ohio State University Press, 2011.

Tolhurst, Fiona, and Whetter, K. S. “Memories of War: Retracting the Interpretive Tradition of the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Arthuriana, vol. 29, no. 1, 2019, pp. 88-108. ProjectMUSE, doi:10.1353/art.2019.0007

Vale, Juliet. “Law and Diplomacy in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.Nottingham Medieval Studies, vol 23, 1979, pp. 31-46.

Race in the Middle Ages

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450. Cornell University Press, 2009.

Coles, Kimberly Anne, and Dorothy Kim. A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Conklin, Ashley R. "Race and Ethnicity: Saracens and Jews in Middle English Literature: An Annotated Bibliography for Teachers." TEAMS Once and Future Classroom.  https://teams-medieval.org/race-and-ethnicity-saracens-and-jews-in-middle-english-literature-anannotated-bibliography-for-teachers/ .

"Featured Lesson: Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages." TEAMS Once and Future Classroom. https://teams-medieval.org/featured-lesson/

Hahn, Thomas, editor. A Cultural History of Race in the Middle Ages. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Hahn, Thomas, editor. Special Issue "Race and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages." The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2001.

Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Hsy, Jonathan, and Julie Orlemanski. "Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography." postmedieval, vol. 8, 2017, pp. 500-31. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0072-0.

Rajabzadeh, Shokoofeh. “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure.” Literature Compass, vol. 16, 2019. Wiley Online, doi: 10.1111/lic3.12548


About

This digital project began when I was the Robbins Library Digital Fellow in the 2015-16 academic year. I am extremely grateful to the Robbins Library for the funding and resources made available to me during and after my fellowship, and to Blair Tinker, the Research Specialist for GIS in the Digital Scholarship department of the River Campus Libraries, for his willingness to share his time and expertise when troubleshooting the actual map-making of this mapping project.

Steffi Delcourt is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Rochester. Her research interests include Middle English literature, the Arthurian tradition, the use and representation of space in medieval romances, and medieval death culture. She works as a Graduate Library Assistant at the Robbins Library and a Staff Editor at the Middle English Text Series.

 The Rossell Hope Robbins Library  is a non-circulating medieval studies library at the University of Rochester. The Library contains comprehensive holdings in all aspects of medieval England. It has significant holdings in vernacular literatures, Arthurian studies, material culture, the medieval Mediterranean, medieval history, the history of science, art and stained glass, philosophy, theology, manuscript studies, the history of the book, witchcraft, critical theory, and medievalism. It also has a substantial collection of rare books and incunabula. The Library also houses the  Koller-Collins Center for English Studies , a reference collection for literary and cultural studies that comprises major reference materials and handbooks for literary history, critical theory, the history of the book, and the digital humanities. Additionally, the Robbins Library hosts a number of other  digital projects , including the  Camelot Project  and the  TEAMS Middle English Text Series , among others.