by Paul Lewis
Sir Dodinale the savage Knyght
and the Questing Beeste...
APPENDIX I
The Salisbury Manuscript and the Hereford Fragment
Uncovered in June 2006 in the vestry of the nine-hundred-year-old parish church of St. Barbara and St. Christopher in Salisbury, the Salisbury Manuscript (British Library MS Add. 1138) was one of the most explosive documents to hit the generally quiet world of medieval literature in decades.
More than seven hundred published academic papers have been dedicated to the Salisbury, discussing its age, provenance and authority, the symbolism and themes in the texts, its influences, and its place in the Arthurian canon. Careers have started, or ended, over the text and its implications.
Arthur Drake, canon at St. Barbara and St. Christopher, has been pleased by the attention the church has been receiving since the manuscript’s discovery, although it has caused a certain amount of disruption.
“The manuscript itself is in the British Library now, of course,” says Drake, “but we receive visitors every day, interested in seeing where it was found, and asking about the history of the building. They even study the stained-glass windows, looking for clues as to the manuscript’s history, although I try and tell them that the windows are Victorian.
“I’ve heard from someone at the Council about having a small museum annex built on the church grounds. Last I heard, they were talking to the Bishop, although with budget cuts I suppose it may end up being cancelled.”
Purporting to be “The Seconde Boke of kyng Arthur and also His noble Knyghts, as writen by Sir Tomas Malorye before hys deth,” the manuscript appears genuine: written on fifteenth-century paper stock, it bears marks suggesting it was in Caxton’s workshop around the time Le Morte D’Arthur was printed.
Unlike the Morte, which weaves dozens of stories into a more-or-less continuous narrative, the Second Book is more disjointed, consisting of stand-alone stories, loosely – and erratically – organised into chronological order, with no clear connections between most of the stories.
The second story, “The worthie Tale of Sir Dodinale the savage Knyght and the Questing Beeste,” is of particular interest to medieval scholars, in that it appears to draw a connection between the Second Book and an obscure piece of Arthuriana from Hereford.
The Hereford Fragment
The Hereford Fragment (Hereford Cathedral Library MS 1701.E) is an incomplete manuscript consisting of forty-seven leaves of seventeenth-century vellum, originally found bound into the back of an eighteenth-century volume of the New Testament in the home of a wool-merchant in Hereford. Removed from the scriptural volume and rebound in sheepskin sometime in the early nineteenth century, it has been kept in Hereford Cathedral’s library ever since.
Written in Welsh, the fragment consists of seven disconnected narratives. Known as the Lesser Dodinal, the Lesser Bors, the Lesser Pellinore and so on, the narratives deal with the upbringings and childhood adventures of seven of the members of the Round Table, and the events that led to them taking up arms as knights and entering Arthur’s service.
Prior to the discovery of the Second Book, the Hereford Fragment was largely disregarded by Arthurian scholarship. Welsh texts were not often studied in the nineteenth century, the fragment was assumed to have been written late – certainly no earlier than the second half of the seventeenth century – and the stories themselves were deemed ideosyncratic, even frivolous.
“The fragment was brought before the worthies at Cambridge in 1836 or 1837,” writes Dr Nadine Holmes, author of Children’s Tales: The Hereford Fragment (Nottingham University Press, 2009), “and summarily dismissed. From the surviving correspondence, it seems that the good men of the University not only thought it ‘of questionable provenance’ and ‘assuredly recent heritage,’ but felt that ‘the generally bucolic and frequently domestic subject matter suggests that it may have been composed by an aristocratic woman, possibly the wife of an English knight living on the border, presumably to practice writing in Welsh, and was never intended for public consumption.’”
Holmes criticises this view, “although why the text would have any less value or relevance if it were true is unclear.” The hand and various marks suggest a professional scribe, possibly a church clerk, she argues; and the language and spelling – particularly the use of the letter k, which disappeared from written Welsh in the sixteenth century – suggest that the source material is older than the fragment. “Whoever wrote it, the original source of the fragment is not only ancient, but was considered important enough, in the late seventeenth century, to be copied, preserved, and bound.”
And the discovery of the Second Book in 2006 has changed everything. In particular, one detail of “The worthie Tale of Sir Dodinale the savage Knyght.”
“We were working on the second story in the Second Book,” remembers Becker Balisovitch of the University of Southern California, “and trying to interpret the phrase ‘flamys of the trees liffes.’ The ‘flames of the trees’ lives’? What the hell does he mean by that? There was nothing like it in any of Malory’s other works.
“I was talking to my brother Jared and he reminded me of an old book our mother used to have, Children of Camelot (Oxford University Press, 1929). It’s got the story of when Dodinal was a child in it, and he could see these ‘life-lights,’ from any animal or plant in the wild.”
The Lesser Dodinal was brought back into the light, and closely compared with the Second Book. Although written in different languages and telling largely different tales, the argument that there is some kind of common origin for the texts is compelling.
“Put simply,” says Balisovitch, “these two documents are the only places where Dodinal’s ability to sense wild creatures can be found. On top of that, Dodinal appears to reminisce about events – the slaughter of his parents’ village, for instance – that only appear in the Lesser Dodinal. It’s uncertain whether Malory had access to the Lesser Dodinal, or the author of the Dodinal had the Second Book, or both books were influenced by a common source, but there’s a strong possibility of some sort of connection.”
One way or the other, Abaddon Books’ translator Paul Lewis chose, in his adaptation of “The worthie Tale,” to incorporate the majority of the Lesser Dodinal (specifically, lines 4-187, 192-403, 443-688 and 727-802) into his translation, as four “flashback” sequences in the story, arguing that it serves – and may once have been intended – as a narrative whole.
APPENDIX II
The Savage Knight
“Inceste ond mourdre are i’faith like
the two faces of but ane coine.”
What is savagery? What is wildness? First introduced to the Arthurian canon in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec and Enide in the twelfth century, Sir Dodinal (or Dedinet, or Dondanix, or Oddinello, or any of a dozen other names) is more or less a cipher for the question of what civilisation means, to the medieval mindset, and what it means to be wild. Called le Sauvage (“the Wild” or “the Fierce”), he is generally described as having a love of hunting, or as living in the wilderness; in Ulrich’s Lanzelet, he lives near the fearsome Shrieking Marsh. And certainly, to the medieval mind, the wilderness was a terrible thing: wolves and bears haunted the countryside, even in the British Isles, and brigands and thieves preyed with impunity, rarely challenged or pursued from one lord’s demesne to the next.
And yet, the tales told of his deeds do not suggest a particularly fearsome man. In Le Morte D’Arthur and the Prose Tristan, he is humiliated by Tristan and Morhalt. In the Vulgate Merlin and Lancelot, his adventures generally involve him being rescued from imprisonment – variously, in Dolorous Guard, the Castle Langree, the Forbidden Hill and Meleagant’s castle – by the more famous and heroic Lancelot. A minor knight, the incestuous son of King Belinant and his niece, Dodinal serves the King and the Round Table, quests, fights, and dies, either falling in Arthur’s final battle against Mordred or killed by Sir Gaheris.
Enter the Lesser Dodinal. In this utterly remarkable an
d criminally under-recognised Welsh work, we encounter a very different Dodinal. He has gone from royalty to the son of a commoner, raised in a village in a wood. Not merely at home in the wild, he is now mystically tied to the forests he calls home, moving like a ghost amidst the trees, able to sense his fellow beasts and track them without error.
And he has become fearsome. Gone is the pompous knight made to look a fool by the great and good; gone is the hapless adventurer needing rescue by his betters. Driven by vengeance against his family’s murderers, he is subject to an ungovernable rage, in which he cannot even distinguish friend from foe. It is this rage, and not his honour or his courage, that impresses King Arthur and earns him an invitation to the Round Table. Savage indeed.
Perhaps most extraordinarily, Dodinal is an atheist. Not merely a pagan or Saracen, like Sir Palomedes, to be converted to the Christian faith, but a true nominalist, denying even the existence of the supernatural, believing that “everie deth, everie tragedie or mishap in the Worlde was the caus of heedlesse Natoure or of cruell Man.”
How exactly to interpret Dodinal’s beliefs is a matter of fierce debate. “[The Second Book]was written three hundred years before the Enlightenment,” argues Prof Brubaker (Inst. Stud.). “There was literally no such thing as an atheist; there wasn’t even a framework to question God’s existence. Malory wouldn’t have had the mental tools to understand what an atheist was.
“Dodinal’s faithlessness is intended as a satire on the nominalism of Occam, of the philosophers and early scientists of Malory’s time. People who professed not to believe in the existence of the supernatural in a world which, to Malory and his contemporaries, was still full of wonder.”
Dr Katherin Ann Lee (Laesi Fortes, Aevum), however, argues that “skepticism was rife by the fifteenth century. The ontological proof was already four hundred years old; why produce a proof of the existence of God if there’s no question of it? Malory himself was dubious about the authority of the Church – consider the prevalence of wise hermits and holy ladies in the Morte, as opposed to priests and ministers, and the corrupt, sinister power of Rome in Book II – and may have been questioning the whole Christian mindset. Sir Dodinal’s outlook on the world, and the tension between his materialism and the existence of creatures like the Questing Beast, arose from Malory exploring his own ideas about faith and the world.”
More than anything, though, in both the Lesser Dodinal and the Second Book, Dodinal is an outsider. Among knights of royal lineage, he was born a peasant; among the ceaseless tourneys and banquets, he is most at home in the trackless wild; among those who quest for glory or honour, he seeks only to quench his boundless rage; and among Christians, he is and steadfastly remains a heathen.
And being an outsider, he is ideally placed to observe and pass comment on his world. As a young man, he watches Arthur’s men as “they slitt the throtes of theer enemies and gave mercie unto theer allyen.” With a slight change of emphasis – casually murdering their enemies, giving mercy to their allies – he emphasises the blandly awful nature of medieval warfare, undermining Arthur’s chivalry at their first meeting.
As his comrades and peers still seek to make their names as heroes, he reflects that they’re all growing older, and should be grateful that they do not have to face the Saxon menace again. And even when confronted with proof of the supernatural in the form of the Questing Beast, he questions whether it should be regarded as the cause of the nameless village’s downfall, or as an excuse. Did the Beast inspire the villagers’ incest, or was it drawn to it? In many ways, this is the major question of the story: are all our beliefs about ourselves and the world merely excuses for our conduct?
Which brings us back around to civilisation, and savagery. Ultimately, “The worthie Tale of Sir Dodinale the savage Knyght” is a story about crime: specifically, murder and incest, two of the worst crimes one can commit, and the antithesis of civilisation.
For all that he was motivated by revenge, and fought for the King, Dodinal sees himself – in his fury and violence – as a murderer, and unfit for the sanctity of Camelot. He drives himself through the wild, punishing himself, looking for a just death. The villagers in the hills, in turn, have committed incest, and are punished by their own progeny, and allow themselves to pass into history.
And Dodinal finds he cannot judge them. Incest and murder are reflections of one another, he believes, and the uncontrollable lust they felt on the night they condemned themselves feels too like the blinding hate that comes upon him in battle.
But Dodinal, who judges the world around him so impartially, cannot truly see himself. His rage is terrible, of course, but he exercises constant restraint, and not once in the story lays hand on anyone who does not merit it. The outsider, the heathen, the humble peasant turned knight, more at home in the wild and in the company of beasts, proves to be the true champion of civilisation.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Paul Lewis has written hundreds of comedy sketches for UK network TV, including Spitting Image, as well as radio sitcoms and plays. Paul co-edited the Cold Cuts horror anthology and is co-author of the novels The Ragchild and The Quarry, several novellas and numerous short stories, including a Doctor Who contribution for BBC Books. Paul works as a journalist and lives with his wife and son in a village near Swansea, Wales.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to everyone at Abaddon, particularly David Moore for his razor-sharp editing; thanks also to my family; and Steve Lockley, Paul Meloy, Keith Rees, Bob Lock, Steve Savile and Lee Russ for friendship, kind words and encouragement (and beers).
Titles
Indicia
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Appendix I
Appendix II
About the Translator
Acknowledgements
