The court of King Amoraen honors Walewein with lavish hospitality (2953–3648). After the meal, Amoraen reveals how he knows his guest is Walewein (3138–227). He once visited the court of Arthur, where a knight excelled in courtly manners. In his account of this, Amoraen repeats the words of a squire who called Walewein by his honorary name ‘der aventueren vader’ [the Father of Adventure] (3211) and introduced him as the first among Arthur’s knights.
Maybe Amoraen repeats this laudatio to flatter the hero, so that he is willing to carry out an assignment for him. For Amoraen, Walewein seems heaven-sent. The king considers his guest to be the only one who can help him out, which is why he produces the Sword with the Two Rings. When he shows Walewein this miraculous weapon, the sword lays down humbly before the knight as a sign that it is destined for him. Amoraen then hands the sword to Walewein, and there follows a passage of almost two hundred lines in which he tells him about Ysabele (3410–599).
First Amoraen reveals what Walewein must do in order to possess the sword: he has to fetch a damsel with whom Amoraen has been in love for a long time (3410–19). His words reveal that Amoraen is under the spell of ‘amour de loin’, love that has arisen in his heart through the message about the beauty of a woman he has never seen.
1 See: Roel Zemel, ʻWalewein en Ysabele in Endiʼ, Nederlandse Letterkunde 15 (2010): 1–28 at p. 14. This king lives up to his name, as it begins with ‘amor’ and means ‘he who is in love’ or ‘the amorous’. Amoraen continues with a description of the damsel known as ‘Ysabele’ (3420–50), remarking: ‘Nu willic doen bekinnen / Hare scoonhede uut ende uut’ [Now I would describe her beauty for you in detail] (3420–21). This is how the narrator in courtly romance starts the portrait of a female protagonist.
2 On this subject in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, see: A. M. Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature: An Example of the Stylistic Originality of Chrétien de Troyes (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1965), chapter 5. Take, for example, the first part of Chrétien’s
Erec et Enide. When Erec finds lodging at the castle of a vavasour, the narrator describes his daughter.
3 Roques, Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ll. 411–41. An analysis of this portrayal in Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature, pp. 138–44. Later we learn that her name is Enide. In hyperbolic style, the poet presents his heroine in this portrait as the most beautiful woman in the world.
In these expositions of a woman’s beauty, medieval narrators often describe the various parts of her body in descending order, starting with the head, and extolling her beauty as superior to that of other women known from literature.
4 Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature, pp. 20–22; p. 27, with a reference to Curtius, who speaks of ʻthe topos of outdoingʼ. In his portrait of Ysabele, Amoraen takes a slightly different approach. He omits a list of everything that is beautiful about her. Instead, he gives a series of comparisons: ‘she is more beautiful than’. In this series, however, he also mentions women unknown in literature at the time that the
Roman van Walewein was written (3427–35), like Olympias, Empress of Rome, and the twelve famous goddesses depicted in Rome. Amoraen concludes his portrait of Ysabele with a reference to the goddess Venus (3446–50). In courtly romance the poet usually attributes the making of a beautiful woman to
Natura.
5 On the Nature-topos: Colby, The Portrait in Twelfth-Century French Literature, pp. 20–22; 28–29. In Latin: Natura formatrix or Natura artifex. Amoraen mentions Venus, not as the
formatrix of Ysabele, but as the donor of the beautiful hair which perfects the princess’s beauty.
Amoraen tells what he fears, if it were to remain
verre liefde ‘love from afar’ for him: he will die or lose his mind (3416–19; 3451–53). With these words, he appeals to his guest to bring Ysabele to him. But those who, like Amoraen, sing the praises of the princess, run the risk that their listeners will fall in love with her. If Walewein considers what Amoraen said about Ysabele, love for the distant princess could also arise in
his heart. And that is exactly what happens. Later in the story, the hero arrives at a river he must cross to get to Ysabele. There he meets the fox Roges, who tells Walewein what he expects of him, specifically that he intends to look for her (5776–93). Only Walewein, according to the fox, would dare to take Ysabele away from her father’s house, ʻhorde hi van hare yet gewagenʼ [if he were by chance to hear of her] (5789), words that fit a hero possessed with ‘amour de loin’. With the fox as his guide, Walewein goes into a tunnel under the river, and then the narrator notices: ‘Walewein die sere begerde / Die joncfrouwe te siene’ [Walewein, who desired greatly to see the damsel] (6064–65). Thus, the hero looks forward to meeting the damsel based on Amoraen’s account. Later, when he ends up in the dungeon, Walewein expresses his great love for Ysabele in a lamentation (7689–733).
6 On Walewein and ʻamour de loinʼ, see: Zemel, ʻWalewein en Ysabele in Endiʼ, pp. 14–16. He has only just seen her for the first time, and yet he has been in love with her for much longer: ‘Hare minne [….] / Die ic langhe hebbe ghedragen’ [The love for her that I have cherished for so long] (7710–11).
Returning to King Amoraen: After he describes Ysabele, he expounds on her father and the castle where she lives (3454–77). Again, he turns to Walewein as his auditor:
Nu hoort wie hare vader si:
Die rike coninc Assentijn;
Ende hevet ghedaen mijn minnekijn
In hoeden verre in gont Endi
In enen casteel […]
[Now hear who her father is: the mighty King Assentijn; and he has shut up my love for safe-keeping in a castle in faraway Endi […]]. (3454–58)
King Assentijn has placed his daughter, Amoraen’s ‘sweetheart’, under guard in that castle. Twelve walls surround the castle, a moat runs between each pair of walls, and at each gate of each wall eighty heavily-armed guards are posted (3459–73). The purpose of this defense is explicit: ʻDits om te behoedene tscone wijf / Datse gheen man soude ghewinnenʼ [All this was to protect the fair maiden so that no man could win her] (3474–75). All those walls and all those combat-ready men, twelve times eighty in number, are not there to protect the fortress against a hostile army, but to deter someone who pursues the beautiful princess.
Amoraen recounts that Ysabele lives a pleasant life in the castle; she lacks nothing (3478–79). To relax there is a garden in which all kinds of things grow and blossom (3485–501). This is what a
locus amoenus ‘lovely place’ looks like in courtly literature.
7 See D. Thoss, Studien zum locus amoenus im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1972), pp. 73–112. Amoraen continues his topography with: ‘Noch es daer een ander praeyeel’ [There is yet another arbor] (3502), after which he describes it in detail (3503–92). The first part is about a golden tree with little golden birds and bells (3503–49). This tree is a work of great originality: ʻMi wondert, hoet noit man ghedochte / Dat hi den riken boom ghewrochteʼ [It amazes me how anyone could have devised to fashion such a magnificent tree] (3507–08). Its branches are hollow inside, and to explain this the speaker asks for his listener’s attention: ʻNu hort, ic sal u doen bekinnen / Waer bi het es ende doen verstaenʼ [Listen now and I shall describe and explain why this is so] (3512–13). From a room under the tree, men with bellows send air upwards, causing the bells to ring and the birds to sing a polyphonic song. Even if a listener was mortally wounded, the singing would heal him completely.
Such a mechanical tree is found, for instance, in the garden of the Indian king Quasideus, as described in an adaptation of the
Epistula (end of twelfth century) by Prester John.
8 Ad Putter, ʻWalewein in the Otherworld and the Land of Prester Johnʼ, in Arthurian Literature XVII: Originality and Tradition in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein, ed. Bart Besamusca and Erik Kooper (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 79–99 at pp. 95–99. On ‘organ trees’ in medieval reality and literature: R. Hammerstein, Macht und Klang: Tönende Automaten als Realität und Fiktion in der alten und mittelalterlichen Welt (Bern: A. Francke, 1986), pp. 46–50; pp. 137–57. In the
Roman van Walewein it is clear that by presenting the tree as a technological miracle, Amoraen lends an exotic atmosphere to Ysabele’s garden, reflecting the medieval fascination with the world of the East.
9 About the enchantment of the East as a theme in medieval romance, see: C. Gaullier-Bougassas, La tentation de lʼOrient dans le roman medieval: Sur lʼimaginaire médiéval de lʼAutre (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), chapter 1. In the second half of the twelfth century, the mechanical tree made its appearance in Old French literature, for example in Floire et Blancheflor. The ‘organ tree’ in Ysabele’s garden is not a creation of
Natura but a product of
Ars. An extraordinarily inventive artist has made a tree of great beauty, which produces music in a mechanical way. Here Amoraen shows his mastery of the art of description with an
ekphrasis, the presentation in words of a perfect work of art.
10 On description and ekphrasis, see: D. Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion. Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 127, 201.As the ‘author’ of a digression, Amoraen knows no bounds. In the second part he elaborates on a beautiful fountain which discharges a small stream of water that originated in the Earthly Paradise (3550–92). A golden eagle covers the fountain with its wings. Ysabele enjoys herself with her ladies in the garden, and if she wants to drink the water, she must turn the mouth of the eagle. At the end of his description, Amoraen presents this spring as a Fountain of Youth (3586–92).
11 Such a source can be found in the Epistula of Prester John, see: Putter, ‘Walewein in the Otherworld’, pp. 92–95. A description of this source can also be found in the story of Alexander the Great’s voyage of discovery to the East in Le Roman d’Alexandre by Alexandre de Paris. Alexandre de Paris, Le Roman d’Alexandre, trans. L. Harf-Lancner (Paris: Librairie Générale Française,1994), Branche III, ll. 3588–94; 3652–712. When an old man immerses himself four times in the water, he becomes thirty years young. According to Amoraen, one drop of the water is enough to achieve the same result (ll. 3586–92). Someone five hundred years old would successfully undergo a rejuvenation cure in it!
The poet gives the floor to Amoraen for a descriptio loci, a hymn of praise to the garden as the beautiful setting for the Princess of Endi’s daily activities. When the narrator later introduces Ysabele, he says nothing about this garden. Only Ysabele mentions it when she is in the process of freeing Walewein, with whom she has fallen deeply in love, from prison. When Ysabele has the hero taken outside, she expresses her thoughts in a monologue in which she brings up the pleasure garden (7784–817). She would much rather be with her hero outside the castle ‘Danne mi te mergen inden boemgaert / Dien mijn vader hevet so waert’ [than stroll in the garden that my father values so highly] (7799–800). The princess continues with a brief description of the garden with the famous golden tree (7801–11), and she concludes with a confession. Regarding the subject about which Amoraen has spoken with so much enthusiasm, this is revealing: as far as she is concerned the beautiful garden can go to blazes when it comes to choosing between it and Walewein (7812–17). Thus, there is a strong contrast between Amoraen’s elaborate praise of the garden and Ysabele’s belittling of it.