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- Title
Havelok in the Prose Brut Tradition.
- Authors
Marvin, Julia
- Abstract
This article examines the stories of Havelok in the prose Brut tradition. The proliferation of different Havelok stories through the prose Brut serves as a reminder of the many means unrelated to deliberate innovation or source influence by which a story may change over time, for reasons that may often be invisible or inaccessible to scholars attempting to link surviving versions of texts. It should also serve as a reminder of just how misleading and unhelpful can be the idea of standard or normative versions of even famous stories in medieval England. The Grimsby seal, which places the armed figure of Grim at the literal center of the story and leaves the characters, Havelok and Argentille, diminished, on the edges, is tangible, chastening evidence of an entire branch of the Havelok tradition that has left no books behind. The people of Grimsby would presumably have been appalled by the prose Brut's omission of their man. A reader of the Middle English Brut in the Midlands might have laughed at what could look like Grimsby's transparent attempt to horn in on the story--but then, his version, the most widespread written medieval account of the matter of Havelok, does not so much as have a character named Havelok as its hero. The more that the many versions of such stories can be practically recognized and investigated in their own right, rather than relegated to the role of sources and analogues to the chosen canonical few, the more discerning and informed our understanding of medieval and later culture can be. The metanarrative of the life of the Havelok episode in the prose Brut tradition, made through human intention and transmitted by acts of intention, but also changing in ways outside intention, testifies not only to the incorrigible messiness and sometimes arbitrariness of the processes of transmission, but also to their fruitfulness.
- Subjects
HAVELOK the Dane (Legendary character); PROSE literature; MIDDLE English literature; BRITISH folklore; LITERATURE
- Publication
Studies in Philology, 2005, Vol 102, Issue 3, p280
- ISSN
0039-3738
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/sip.2005.0014