click here
|
Appendix 10: Mil Du
the Knight
Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
Mil Du turns up in two widely
different Breton stories, the Life of St.Malo
and the heroic poem Yonec. The less
impressive of his two appearances is in the Life,
an undistinguished fiction copied almost word for
word from the adventures of the Irish St.Brendan
the Navigator. One of the few episodes not
imitated from Brendan is the meeting of the
adventurous company of monks with a giant called
Mil Du, buried on an island. Raised to
temporary new life, he helps them in their quest
and as a reward is absolved of his sins post
mortem and returned to his rest. There
are two inferences to be drawn from this: that
Mil Du’s life was seen as sinful, but not
irredeemable; and that he died without the chance
of getting absolution, that is, presumably, in
battle. That the Life interrupts its
steady imitation of the Life of St.Brendan
to insert a legend whose closest parallel does
not belong to Ireland at all, shows that someone
had an interest in placing this ancient figure
under the protection of the local Saint, and this
suggests that if there were descendants of Mil Du
anywhere in Britain, they were in the diocese of
St. Malo.
The parallel for the story of the
resurrected giant comes from North Britain and
concerns Caw, the father of Arthur’s
opponent Hueil. The Life of St.Cadoc
says that the Saint, who had gone to Scotland to
found a monastery, found an enormous collarbone
and prayed and fasted to be allowed to understand
the mystery. In answer to his prayer, the
owner of the collarbone, an enormous giant, was
raised up to answer their questions. He
told the Saint that his name was Caw of Prydein
and that he lived beyond Mount Bannog (that is,
Campsie Fells; the ancient name is preserved in
the river Bannockburn). He regularly
sailed to raid the country where Cadoc was now,
until, after years of pirate raids, he was killed
by its king; and he died unshriven. The
Saint promises him absolution in exchange for the
help of his great physical strength in building
and serving around the monastery. Because
of the fame of the miracle, the local king (the Life
says, anachronistically, the king of Scotland)
grants the new monastery “twenty-four
homesteads”.
This is an important detail.
The granting of land strongly suggests that
somebody had reason to feel grateful to the
Saint; or rather (given that this is an account
centuries later, and cannot be taken to be
historical) that the possession of these
twenty-four homesteads was justified in terms of
the favour done to Caw by letting him out of
Hell. That, in turn, suggests opposing post
mortem views of Caw: what the legend seems to
be doing is justifying a positive view of the
ancient king as redeemed, in God’s grace, a
benefactor, in the face of a strong historical
memory that made him a raider and a pirate justly
slain in battle by the legitimate “King of
the country”, and who, having died in his
sins on the field of battle, had quite rightly
gone to Hell with the applause of all his
victims.
It was the monastery that had to
justify the positive view of Caw; and it
justified it by saying that the hero had helped
build the monastery itself, thus atoning for his
crimes. And as he was known to have died
long before the monastery itself was founded, the
difficulty was got over by having him
resurrected. The narrative difficulty is
visibly in how to get the dead man resurrected in
the first place; Cadoc’s prayer to be
enlightened about the mystery of the collarbone
is not an adequate reason to contravene the laws
of nature by resurrecting a long-dead man (or
giant). The idea of the monstrous bone
proving the immense size of a past hero is a
widespread one, told for instance of our old
friend Hygelac, but rarely in
connection with a resurrection; the one does not
imply the other. In other words, this story
is specific to the particular time and place in
Scotland, that is, it is, as I argued, an answer
to the specific problem of a monastery which
honoured a hero whose memory other groups in the
same country held in horror.
One thing that follows from this
is that the description of Caw’s activities
is probably historical, or at least older than
the legend itself; since the legend was
constructed to rescue Caw’s memory from his
reputation as a bandit. That reputation is
not contested; interesting, in view of the fact
that Caw was remembered elsewhere as the father
of several saints, including the indubitably
historical Gildas and one Maelog, who may well
have been the bishop of that name in the British
colony in Spanish Galicia. It is also
exactly the same account as is given of his
mighty son Hueil. The career of both is
said to have lasted a long time – in the
case of Hueil, it is clearly said that his
raiding lasted for years; it is not a matter of a
single war, but of continuous, probably seasonal
piracy. Both of them come raiding by sea
rather than by land; in the case of Caw this is
particularly significant, since his kingdom
definitely was on land rather than on any island
– its border, according to the Life,
was on “Mount Bannog”. And both
were eventually caught up with and killed by
“the king of the land”, who, in the Life
of Gildas, is none other than Arthur. No
other source known to me has Caw being killed by
Arthur or anyone, and it is possible to suspect a
certain amount of confusion between the patriarch
and the most famous – bar Gildas – of
his sons; it goes without saying that the
politics and great deeds of the descendants of
Caw would tend to be attributed to their
longfather. But we need not doubt the
Arthurian context; indeed, if we suggest that Caw
has been confused with Hueil, the association is
strengthened. Even the giant size of Caw
(and Mil Du in the Life of Malo) might
hint at Arthurian lore, since we know from The
Dream of Ronabwy that the heroes of
Arthur’s court were believed to have been
giants, and that Arthur looked with pitying scorn
on the tiny men left to defend the island after
his generation passed away.
It is therefore interesting that
two separate heroes, at the opposite ends of the
British world, both enemies of Arthur, should be
attributed similar stories of resurrection and
redemption through the agency of the local saint,
who, in both cases, is committed to founding a
monastery. An important difference is the
site: while Caw’s great bone is found, it
seems, on the very grounds of the monastery Cadoc
is building, Mil Du in the story of Malo is found
on a fabulous island in the course of the
saint’s sea journey. Now it makes
plenty of sense for Caw to be closely associated
with the monastery; it gives us an obvious reason
why his memory should be honoured there even
though other parts of Scotland reviled it. Quite
simply, whatever the historical association of
any historical Cadoc with the site in Scotland,
the monastery must have pertained to the family
and kingdom of Caw. On the other hand, this
tells us just as clearly that Mil Du was known
not to have died anywhere near Malo’s
eventual stomping grounds in Brittany; and given
that Malo’s Life is not only
imitative but quite late – scholarly opinion
dates it to the ninth or tenth centuries –
it seems clear that whoever wanted Mild Du’s
reputation cleaned up was quite aware, even so
long after the facts, that Mil Du had died
nowhere near Saint-Malo.
There can be no doubt that the
story reflects a desire to clean up Mil Du’s
name. In his case as in that of Caw, we are
not told that they were pagans, but that they
died in their sins and that they are in bad need
of rescue from Hell; that is, not as pagans, but
as bad Christians. Ad it follows that in
both cases the monasteries concerned by the
stories had reason to want to pull the ancient
heroes’ reputation from the mire.
It is interesting to find that two
traditions about enemies of Arthur, so close in
many ways in spite of coming from the opposite
ends of the British world, both seem to leave the
king’s name out of the account. The
name of “the King of the country” in
the Life of Cadoc is not mentioned, and
nor is that of the enemy of Mildumarec in Yonec.
That is understandable in the case of Yonec,
in a country and a time where the memory of the
great King was revered; it is not so easy to
understand in that of Caw and Cadoc, in which
“the King of the country” was in the
right, and there was no perceivable reason for
his identity to be obscured. And be it
noted that the difficulty would be the same even
if we did not take Arthur to be that king: why
not mention the name of someone who was,
according to the story, manifestly in the right,
and who defended the men of the country? But
there are enough reasons to think that Arthur is
the victorious enemy in both stories.
Whatever the case, this reminds me
of the vanishing of the name of St.Patrick in the
story of Ninian, discussed in Book IV; and we
remember that that that, too, came from the old
British lands of the North. It is hard to
examine an ancient, isolated culture that fell
under Viking and Scottish blows long ago and
whose very fingerprints are only to be sought for
in material that has passed through two or three
other languages after; but there seems to be, in
all of these negative stories of famous men, a
certain common habit of shrouding identities and
not mentioning names. What strongly
suggests that the identity of Arthur was known to
the authors and the readers of the
Northern material that eventually entered the Vita
Cadoci is that of the two stories, that of
Caw and that of Mil, Du, that of Caw is certainly
the archetype, and that of Mil Du the imitation.
Even if we did not know on other grounds that the
Life of St.Malo is a tissue of imitations
from older Saints’ lives, it seems to me
undeniable that the Northern story is by far the
better constructed, better rooted, and the one
whose origin is easier to explain. Its
roots are in that Northern soil in which someone
granted twenty-four homesteads to a specific
monastery in the name of Caw of Prydein. That
Caw was held to have helped build Cadoc’s
monastery means that his family had done so.
The deed was attributed, as so often, to the
patriarch; and when annalistic computation proved
that an early-sixth-century Caw could not have
assisted a late-sixth-century Cadoc, he was
simply resurrected to do so. We know the
place, the name, and the reason. On the
other hand, Mil Du’s body rests neither in
Brittany nor in Britain, but in an unnamed island
in the ocean, and there is no proper reason for
him to appear to the monks at all: they do not
directly receive any benefit from him, except to
continue their journey – certainly they do
not receive twenty-four material, this-worldly,
tangible homesteads to base their legend on.
On the other hand, the heirs of
Caw and those of Mil Du have a common problem: to
raise the profile and clean the reputation of a
patriarch who died in battle at the hands of the
most famous of all kings. Which, in turn,
suggests that the adoption of the Caw/Cadoc story
by the author of the Life of St.Malo was
no accident, and that he understood the common
plight of the two heroes. But the story of
Caw, as we have it, does not name the king of the
land; and the story of Mil Du and Malo does not
mention the enemy who killed him at all. Yet
why adopt this peculiar account, which is not, to
the best of my knowledge, a hagiographical
commonplace – in fact, I would be surprised
if it turned up in any other saint’s life
except these two – unless the plagiarist
author of the Life of St.Malo had seen
good reason to adopt this particular story?
And in that case, can it be a coincidence that
both patriarchs shared one enemy, and that that
enemy certainly killed the one and the son of the
other?
There is another reason, though
very weak and vague, to suspect that the author
of the Life of St.Malo knew of Arthur as
Mil Du’s enemy: namely, the island in the
middle of the ocean in which he was buried.
In Glewlwyd’s words to Arthur, when he slew
Mil Du son of Dugum, he destroyed the retinue of
Gleis (current) son of Merin (sea). Unless
this is a separate boast of Glewlwyd’s,
alluding to some fabulous or invented adventure,
this seems to suggest that Mil Du son of Dugum
was a man of the sea, a pirate, and that in
challenging and destroying him, Arthur destroyed
the power of the ocean. This, if any faith
could be placed on the chain of argument, would
seem to agree with the Mil Du of the Life of
St.Malo being buried in an island somewhere
in the Atlantic. The story was indubitably
placed in the Life in deference to family
traditions of some important family in the
St.Malo area; and it seems that those traditions
involved the death and burial of the patriarch in
an ocean island.
The bad reputation and bad end of
Mil Du are both reflected in what is by far the
most substantial of his two legends, in which he
features as Mildumarec, that is Welsh Mil
Du Marchog, Mil Du the Knight: Marie de
France’s lai Yonec (a lai is a short
heroic or romantic story in verse, reputed to
come originally from Brittany). The story goes
hat there was once a very rich old man in
Britain, who married a very young and beautiful
woman for the sake of having children and
jealously shut her in a tower. However, she
was visited by a bird who turned into a handsome
young Christian man (she tested his religion
before she gave herself to him). The old
man got wind of it, and laid a trap for the bird:
as it flew into the window of the lady’s
tower, hidden blades cut his wings to ribbons.
He only had time to tell his lover that she was
pregnant by him, and that she was to call their
son and future avenger Yonec, a messianic
name meaning “the desired one”. Clad only
in her shift, she fled the tower through the
window (some magic power, perhaps, protected her,
since it was a twenty-foot jump) and followed the
blood trail of her beloved to a wonderful city,
where every house, hall and tower seemed made of
solid silver and the harbour was full of over 300
ships. (Reading though the exaggerated
description, we perceive that this was an
important harbour in Britain, surrounded by
fertile fields and protected by swamps and
forests.) She found her dying beloved, who
sent her back to her husband, with the gift of a
ring and a sword for their son. Yonec grew
up in the house of his mother’s husband, but
on a holy day, he was taken as if by
chance to the former kingdom and tomb of his real
father. His mother told him the truth and
promptly died of grief; he made use of his
father’s sword on his stepfather’s
head, and took over his father’s kingdom,
whose throne had been kept vacant in expectation
of him.
At the hart of this story there is
a crowing sense of triumph at the expense of the
legitimate but undeserving husband, who all but
bought his beautiful young wife for no other
reason than to have a child and not only had
none, but ended up being punished by the person
he thought to be his son but who is in fact the
son and heir, acclaimed by his subjects, of the
man he hounded to death – the hero
Mildumarec. Mildumarec had died, not in a
fair fight, but by deception and treachery.
He had paid dearly for what the legend admits was
the invasion of another man’s bed; and so
did his wife; but while the old man’s
childless death is clearly meant as a
“serve-him-right!”, the deaths of the
lovers are just as clearly meant to atone for
their adultery and are, therefore, redemptive and
fruitful. What they do is clean any stains
that might otherwise have stuck to the son and
heir, the desired one of his people.
In other words, the fate of the individuals takes
second place to the destiny of the dynasty, whose
continuation is what the people desire;
and that is sufficient to prove the dynastic
origin of the legend and to show that the dynasty
to which it pertained still existed when it was
first turned into a permanent story or song, and
was still concerned to be clean of the stain of
what it took to be its adulterous origin.
Given that we are investigating
Mil Du as ex hypothesi an enemy of Arthur,
it is very odd to find that the character who
kills the hero and is in turn killed by his heir
is an unmilitary, grasping old man; but the central
elements of the story on the one hand, of Mild
Du’s mention in Cullhwch on the
other, confirm the identity. The central,
crowing point of the story is that, while the
triumphant and legitimate husband has no sons,
the persecuted and destroyed lover – whose
people were without a king for decades because of
his death, until his heir came back – has a
descent; a long one, to judge by the fact that it
was still around in Brittany long enough to have
its dynastic legend recorded, and to influence
the Life of St.Malo. And we have
seen that a defining point of the tragedy of
Arthur is that his son or sons pre-deceased him,
so that he had no heir; a point which no defeated
enemy could fail to contemplate with glee. That
the dynasty of Mil Du endured, I repeat, we know
from the mere existence of this story; and if
that would not give them a warm feeling of
contemptuous superiority over their mighty enemy,
I don’t know what would. From the
other side, we have seen that Mil Du was defined
in the tradition that went into Cullhwch and
Olwen as an enemy Arthur defeated and killed;
and the protagonist of Yonec is likewise
defined as the hero defeated and killed by the
old husband. That is central to the whole
story. Finally, there is the fact that when
all is said and done, he was committing adultery,
which the Christian Middle Ages would approve no
more than the pagan Celtic antiquity; and this
seems to relate to his spiritual condition in the
Life of St.Malo, in which he needs
absolution to be freed from Hell –
evidently, he died in his sins. The legend
of Yonec, in effect, accepts that what
Yonec’s father was doing was wrong, but
justifies it; the legend of St.Malo confirms that
he died doing what is wrong. The tradition
is therefore unanimous: all the traditions define
Mil Du by his fall and his sins; two of them
attribute to him a definite enemy, to be
identified with Arthur.
A good deal of thought has gone
into the story of Yonec. Take for instance
the irony of the name, which might, for the
lady’s husband, have stood for his long hope
of an heir, but which in fact embodies the
expectation of revenge on him. It was
certainly not the work of Marie de France, who
makes nothing of the irony and who seems not to
have spoken Welsh/Breton; which shows that the
legend has a long prehistory. The fact that it is set
in the island of Britain, a setting which is
underlined with considerable insistence, is
significant; in particular, it is made quite
clear that the bird-lover, in spite of his
magical characteristics, is not a fairy or other
supernatural being, but a Christian man like
herself. He even takes Communion in her
presence (Marie de France does not seem to have
stopped to wonder at this somewhat dubious use of
the Body of God to explore the suitability of a
candidate for the sin of adultery!), and she
manages to walk from her husband’s
tower to his city in what
seems quite a short time. She goes over a
hill, and there is the city beyond it; there is
not even mention of day and night, as though it
was maybe one day’s walk for a tired,
uncomfortable young woman “naked except for
her shift” and prostrated by grief. In
other words, the bird-lover was the lord of a
neighbouring kingdom, if not indeed their own
overlord.
There is much in this story to
remind us of Arthur, and even more of Guinevere.
The unnamed lady is a kin of reverse Guinevere:
Arthur’s queen is often confined inside
castles or towers, but it is, without any
exception, by her abductors, and it is quite an
Arthurian cliché to see Arthur and his knights,
or Lancelot, besieging, storming or penetrating a
castle in which the queen is kept. A
variation of this occurs in the Vulgate Morte
d’Arthur, in which the queen shuts
herself of her own will in the Tower of London to
escape Mordred’s advances.
What is more, everything that
happens to the bird-lover is reminiscent of what
happens to Lancelot in Le chevalier de la
charrette, Chretien de Troyes’ romance.
Lancelot, like Mildumarec, has to enter a foreign
kingdom which he has never visited to free his
beloved from a tower. Lancelot, in a famous
episode, has to crawl along a sharp-edged sword;
to reach his beloved in her inaccessible tower,
and cuts himself to ribbons (Knight of the
Cart 3124-3130; Chretien lays great emphasis
on the fact that it is the power of his love for
Guinevere that drives him on that agonizing
path); Mildumarec cuts himself to ribbons on a
spike while reaching her. Both stories have
special mention of the spite, jealousy and
unfairness of the man who holds the heroine,
Meleagant (3150-3194) and the unnamed old
husband. Both the queen and the heroine of Yonec
are so closely imprisoned that no human being can
reach them (though in Knight of the Cart
this, curiously, includes Meleagant himself;
3364-3404). Lancelot finally enters
Guinevere’s private room through a window,
and there is some play, in both stories, about
the iron bars that close it; Mildumarec-the-bird
flies through them, Lancelot bends them back and
forth like rubber (4612-4666); he is, however,
slightly cut in going through, as if in a memory
of the blood he shed at the Sword Bridge –
and an echo of Mildmarec’s’s horrible
wounds when entering through the window. In
their final meeting, Mildumarec’s lover wore
only a shift (and in this poor clothing she
walked all the way to his kingdom); in their only
meeting in her room, Guinevere wears only a white
smock. They manage to have sex in spite of
the presence of one person who should have given
the alarm; in Yonec, the old
husband’s evil spinster sister; in The
knight of the cart, Kai, who was sleeping in
the same room, and who, as King Arthur’s man, could not possibly be
expected to tolerate adultery against the King
(and, in spite of the presence of that terzo
incomodo, Meleagant, this reminds us that the
person who suffers most from their adultery is
King Arthur, Mil Du’s enemy). There is
a common theme of the adulterous lover leaving
his trace by his bloodstains, and a common visual
picture of red blood on white sheets (4755-4758). And if Lancelot
is not, unlike Mildumarec, killed, at least there
is a well-substantiated rumour of his death that
reaches the queen in her tower (4125-4262) –
which said that Lancelot had been killed on his
way from the tower to the border between Gorre
and Logres, not unlike the way Mildumarec died
after crossing the border between the
husband’s kingdom and his own.
The notice that Meleagant is also
kept from Guinevere, has probably a different
origin from the group of items which connect
Lancelot to Mildumarec. It is one of a
group of notices which seem to harken back
straight to two of the greatest Indo-European
epics. These notices include the very
existence of Meleagant’s father, the
righteous king Baudemagus, who has no parallel in
Yonec and whose relationship to his wicked
abductor son Meleagant is comparable both to that
of the Indian Dhartarashtra with his son
Duryodhana, and of Priam with Paris. The
relationship of Guinevere with the two characters
is reminiscent both of fair Draupadi’s
relationship with Dhartarashtra and Duryodhana,
with the beautiful queen appealing to the father
to protect her from the injustice of the son; and
of Helen’s relationship with Priam. At
one point, Guinevere and Baudemagus stand on the
walls of Baudemagus’ castle to watch the
duel of Lancelot and Meleagant, for all the world
like Helen and Priam watching the Greek hosts
from the walls of Troy –Iliad
3.145-244 – which is immediately followed by
the scene in which the King’s wicked son,
cause of the war, is defeated in duel by his
enemy and only saved from death by
Guinevere’s request, for all the world like
Paris saved from Menelaus by the power of Love,
Aphrodite, when he had already been well and
truly defeated in a formal judicial duel – Il.3.245-382,
which is followed by a strong reminder of the
close connection between Helen and Aphrodite; in
effect, the power of Love has saved Paris for
Helen, just as the power of Guinevere’s love
has saved Meleagant. But in both cases, it
is made clear that the dark lover and anti-hero
is only saved for a time; in The knight of the
cart, Meleagant is misled, the very next
morning, into swearing a false oath about
Guinevere, so that Lancelot can legitimately kill
him; and though postponed for a while, the
killing punctually concludes the story.
I will explore these analogies
when I start my projected investigation of epic
traditions; for the time being, it only matters
in so far as it can show that the points in which
The knight of the cart does not agree with
Yonec are points in which it has a quite
different, expansive and structured source.
The knight of the cart represents the
fusion of at least two different narrative
traditions, which argues that the material which
went into Yonec was earlier; but the
parallels between the Lancelot of Chretien and
the Mildumarec of Marie de France certainly hint
at a common prehistory which I hope to
investigate in the future. Certainly they
do nothing to deny that the legend of Mil Du and
his long-desired son had Arthurian
connections.
Notes
History
of Britain, 407-597 is copyright © 2002, Fabio
P. Barbieri. Used with permission.
Comments
to: Fabio P.
Barbieri
|
