Medieval English Literature

by W. P. Ker

My lady of Sinadoune

Is brought in strong prisoun

That was of great valour;

Sche praith the sende her a knight

With herte good and light

To winne her with honour.

This quotation came from the beginning of the story, and it gives the one problem which has to be solved by the hero. Instead of the mixed adventures of Sir Bevis, there is only one principal one, which gives occasion to all the adventures by the way. The lady of Sinodoun has fallen into the power of two enchanters, and her damsel (with her dwarf attendant) comes to the court of King Arthur to ask for a champion to rescue her. It is a story like that of the Red Cross Knight and Una. If Sir Bevis corresponds to what one may call the ordinary matter of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, the wanderings, the separations, the dangerous encounters, Sir Libeaus resembles those parts of Spenser’s story where the plot is most coherent. One of the most beautiful passages in all his work, Britomart in the house of the enchanter Busirane, may have been suggested by Sir Libeaus. Sir Libeaus is one example of a kind of medieval story, not the greatest, but still good and sound; the Arthurian romance in which Arthur has nothing to do except to preside at the beginning, and afterwards to receive the conquered opponents whom the hero sends home from successive stages in his progress, to make submission to the king. Sir Libeaus (his real name is Guinglain, the son of Gawain) sets out on his journey with the damsel and the dwarf; at first he is scorned by her, like Sir Gareth of Orkney in another story of the same sort, but very soon he shows what he can do at the passage of the Pont Perilous, and in the challenging of the gerfalcon, and many other trials. Like other heroes of romance, he falls under the spell of a sorceress who dazzles him with ‘fantasm and faerie’, but he escapes after a long delay, and defeats the magicians of Sinodoun and rescues the lady with a kiss from her serpent shape which the enchanters have put upon her. Compared with Spenser’s house of Busirane, the scene of Sir Libeaus at Sinodoun is a small thing. But one does not feel as in Sir Tristrem the discrepancy between the miniature stage, the small bright figures, and the tragic meaning of their story. Here the story is not tragic; it is a story that the actors understand and can play rightly. There are no characters and no motives beyond the scope of a fairy tale—

Sir Libeaus, knight corteis

Rode into the paleis

And at the halle alighte;