Dream vision archetype: A dream vision or visio is a literary device in which a dream or vision is recounted as having revealed knowledge or a truth that is not available to the dreamer or visionary in a normal waking state. While dreams occur frequently throughout the history of literature, visionary literature as a genre began to flourish suddenly, and is especially characteristic of early medieval Europe.[1] In both its ancient and medieval form, the dream vision is often felt to be of divine origin. The genre re-emerged in the era of Romanticism, when dreams were regarded as creative gateways to imaginative possibilities beyond rational calculation.
This genre typically follows a structure whereby a narrator recounts their experience of falling asleep, dreaming, and waking, with the story often an allegory. The dream, which forms the subject of the poem, is prompted by events in their waking life that are referred to early in the poem. The ‘vision’ addresses these waking concerns through the possibilities of the imaginative landscapes offered by the dream-state. In the course of the dream, the narrator, often with the aid of a guide, is offered perspectives that provide potential resolutions to their waking concerns. The poem concludes with the narrator waking, determined to record the dream – thus producing the poem.[1]
[An] allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory throughout history in all forms of art to illustrate or convey complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its viewers, readers, or listeners. Writers and speakers typically use allegories to convey (semi-) hidden or complex meanings through symbolic figures, actions, imagery, or events, which together create the moral, spiritual, or political meaning the author wishes to convey. Many allegories use personification of abstract concepts.[3]
During the Early and Middle Ages, the Medieval mind was in a different and difficult place to reach from ourselves. Whilst we, used to having products in our buildings and countries from 17 different places, all of which are intrinsically only possible in the cauldron of 21st century technologies and trade agreements, the medieval hand was much more based in the cottage industry and the castle, were you to look for that international fix.
The poetry of the Medieval was in this way, as diverse as the modern industrial age and digital age. Britain became aware of the Japanese by around 1300.
With these two pieces of information, Zipangri entered the chat, chat. Therein the role dreams and journeys took in shaping the medieval understanding of the Other became a role of Japan as first the mythical land of Paradise by some hands, and an island ripe for colonisation in the hands of others. Thus from Hereford to Lisbon, Zipangri of the East Indies washed away into the milieu of Mandeville's headless torsos and Arthurian fish-kings swimming from pages two to six, where he shall be of more service to thee, than 300 salmon.
Arthurian myth/Matter of Britain travel monologues c.600-present
The Arthurian myth within the Matter of Britain context has a number of travel poems and narratives which extoll the virtues of the traveller as a person, who is travelling to achieve a lofty goal.
This may derive from the Anglo-saxon tendency to think of Wyrd (destiny/fate).[2]
Many of these tales came to be about the travel between different places such as from Camelot (Arthurs house) to Annwn (the Otherworld), some French stuff, proto-Grand tours around Europe wherein Arthur and his knights went on crusades (medieval lads trip stuff), almost dream vision genre allegory to find the Holy Grail, replete with fisher-kings, knights and damsels, and the Vulgate cycles grand prose styles which are sort of like the later years of Arthur and that time Lancelot wanders off.
Stories of the Preiddeu Annwfn, Grail Quests, De Ortu Walwanii, La'Morte de Arthur (the death of Arthur), Vulgate and Post Vulgate all include allusions to the travels these many characters faced. In Welsh tales many of these travels were the result of coming and going to and from the overall Camelot and crusade business trips of the knights. In the Grail Quests and De Ortu, the travelling is famously the more important part of the trip, rather than the actual end result. Travel becomes a literary allusion to the role of the idea that the journey itself there, in Gawain's case, finding identity is the more important moral takeaway for the role than most of the other themes present. The Death of Arthur is a total compilation like some madman with a whiteboard and a pen, stringing together the multiverse of Arthurian mythos from across all of the overall worldtree of Arthurian mythos.
In these many ways, travel becomes our modern understanding of the idea that 'the journey is more important than the destination', see Monty Python's Holy Grail movie for better clues because I'm just a floating text on your screen.
The Dream of the Rood c.700
The Dream of the Rood, is a crossover example that exemplifies the role pagan-Britain thought of dream vision poetry in the sense of how the Rood is in fact the literal animistic cross Jesus died on come alive. The Rood comes to life, telling its tale in a dream to the writer who leaves their vision from a dream into the poem left down to us of the emotions surrounding such a pivotal event as the crucifixion for a newly minted Christian kingdom.
The Dream is an allegorical alliterative text. It tells us about the overall thoughts given to the general ideas that the Rood embodies, that being one of sacrifice and loyalty to it's Master. It does not think in human terms, it embodies allegory. This way of thinking about using allegory to give across ideas about ethics and morals the Anglo-Saxons certainly applied to their narratives and poems. This was the basis in Britain for beginning the dream vision genre. Applying this to the wider Grail quests and we have our initial ideas about how travel narratives were to be not only written, but consumed by the masses, their writers and their producers, as well as at the time the people who had to rewrite the damn things over and over again (the Christian monks).
Beowulf 975
In Beowulf, we see a return to the glory of earthly conquest, taken from the newly inclusive Viking myths and legends of the Danes. This became mixed with the other travel narratives again, making travel narratives part of the mythical, and not simply a matter for the everyday. The travel to a fallen world, certainly reinforced existing ideas about themes such as exile, loss and longing, as well as onto the transitory nature of life when travel took place, and how travel was used to relate to the peril of existing.
By this time, all of these many great stories had emerged into the cauldron pot that was 11th century England. English travel narratives thus became wrapped up in stories such as the Holy Grail, wherein the allergorical message was more important than receiving the Grail was. Travel became not something done solely to the everyday sailor, merchant, jester or knight, but was a message to would be listeners about moral piety and ethical virtues.
Alfred the Great translations of Boethius Consolation of philosophy (c.899)
Alfred the Great (849-899) during this time was trying to make the English language into something more concrete, putting English vernacular as an important self-identity marker for the English. This of course found its way into the travel narrative conversation. When translating Boethius 'Consolation of Philosophy', a text on wealth, happiness and religious themes to raise the literacy rate of his populace, he shifted parts around to befit his own needs. He saw making this metaphysical text commonly available as important to shared identity in a fracture heptarchic system. In building education and personal virtue, this would lead to a shared common culture, in an educated society. This took away elements such as the Lady Wisdom, referring instead back to personal fate, suffering and search for the meaning of life which was Alfred's main motivation. Instead, Boethius was translated as the new almost self-help gospel. True Happiness came from within, with wealth, power and fame being fleeting objectives on his wheel of fortune.
Truly to be happy, meant to be at ease with ones self, to be bereft of satisfaction from external sources. Good was the natural state of things, with evil becoming a form of negation, taking away from the lives of those deemed evil. Being evil meant to regress into animalistic violent tendencies, and turning away from was a way forward into retribution, as we find ourselves in the Seafarer and the Wanderer travel narratives. In the term of how does free will exist if God controls everything, it is said that omniscient Gods exist in a type of 'now', an infinite dimension outside of time watching everything simultaneously. Boethius in other words saw free will as voluntary in this system, with human beings thus being responsible for their own actions. This was the new philosophy system pushed by Alfred to unify England which shapes future narratives, laying the groundwork for accepting a diversity of opinions into this new kingdom of 'England' (Angle land). Thus, the travel narrative became justified in seeing the journey as a factor of fate, whose impermanence was to be respected, not feared.
Elegies (Exeter Book; The Seafarer; The Wanderer; Wifes Lament) c.900
The Wanderers 'solitary exile's grief and search for meaning in a transient world'
Wife's Lament 'woman's intense grief and loneliness after being exiled and separated from her beloved husband, forced to live alone in a desolate cave under an oak tree, longing for their past happiness and cursing her husband's treacherous kin while questioning his love and motives. It's a poignant female-voiced elegy exploring themes of love, loss, isolation, and betrayal in a world where women often had little power.'
In the evidence locker of early medieval British travel genres, and therefore the British user, there is then the elegies. The elegies are the later Anglo-Saxon works mostly taken from the Book of Exeter (c.10th century), which are basically secular and everyday poems and texts written by Anglo-Saxons about their thoughts and feelings on life as a feudal serf sheep farmer, etc. Many of the surviving works surrounding the travel genre are at this stage ones of longing and loss. This tells use between the Arthurian age and this age, that an increasing number of people had begun to feel comfortable not only with the written word but with the production of art in the written and spoken word, particularly of the Old English vernacular that had begun to be encouraged by the royals who had upon unifying the Heptarchy begun to transform the literary and cultural scene of the country into one of cultural export, not cultural import from France.
This however meant that with increased exposure to the outside world and it's chaos, the simpler systems many people knew under serfdom had begun to transform by 1000 CE into the modern global world we now recognise. The Seafarer for example is a poem about a sailor who must travel overseas. Rather than the excitement of the Elizabethan pamphlets or Victorian naval fairytales read to young people, these were tales of the horror of loss and longing to return home to England. The elegies are not just facebook poetry, however, they are serious longform reflections on the state of affairs of the lives of their contemporaries and are to be taken as such or are otherwise just content slop for the AI overlords we all now seem to worship as of late. The poem is a bleak, dark tale told by the traumatised and for the survivors of what was in reality a very bloody age.
Travel was at the time, both a luxury and also a necessity. Kings travelled for pleasure and crusade, peasants were chained to their lands or sold off into foreign indenturement for their crimes of being born poor. Travel in this way was for both rich and poor more a sign of needing to move, rather than an exciting trip for tourism or to enjoy the bounties of hard work, unless you had just won a crusade and were the king of England and Normandy, which was very few people at this time. The Seafarer therefore is about the melancholy of being so far from home, longing for the time when the bleak solitude of staring out into the depths would end and a sort of trauma of longing for the solitude the sea brings when you are alone for that time, with nothing but the reflection of the never-ending horizon would take your mind far away from troubles of the current land based violence and nonsense of bastards and feudal norms.[4]
Travel therefore, under the Anglo-Saxon ideal of 'Wyrd' along with the Holy Grail quests, into a winding pathway to one's fate or destined outcome. The journey becomes a holy form of communion from man to god, ending the Seafarer in it's closing line; 'Amen' (so be it).[4]
We then also have a similar form from the Wife's Lament, an elegy surrounding the loss of men to the jaws of death. Both of these elegies share the common themes of Wyrd, loss and patience, a 'patience in adversity'.[4] The Wife's Lament by itself may be a riddle poem, a culturally specific moral poem told to listeners who would understand the significance more than we, of this time, do. Travel in the Lament becomes therefore a significant drawback and source of anger, in much the way of the longing of the Seafarer desires to both leave and return, the Lament comes from the female plight of having to now find stability after a loved one's death and in how to carry on in the journey of life from now.
The Wanderer is on the other hand, a story of an exiled warrior. The more Christian reading has the protagonist as an ānhaga (solitary man), mōdcearig man (man sorrowful of heart; or reflection man) and snottor on mōde (man wise in mind) which sees Wanderer see life as full of hardship, impermanence, suffering and that stability is something which resides for this time in the realm of Gods. The Wanderer in the medieval travel narrative is the 'eardstapa' (earth stepper) or one who roams the earth, as an 'wræclastas' (path of exiles). The now mercenary has gone beyond these earthly fixations into the emotional state of seeking stability in salvation. In this way, the travel narrative becomes one of seeing the path of walking and exile as a route to finding peace even in hardship.
In these ways, the British medieval travel narrative shifts, from these 'earthly pursuits' of travel for work to make ends meet, to more ephemeral allegories of dreams, visions, cosmic forces, longing for stability and the impermanence of man in the here and now. Instead fate decides the interlocuters outcomes, eternally finding their goalposts moved and the travel becoming not simply a means to an end, but a symbolic journey of peace, ethics and gnomic wisdom. This along with ideals about Crusading knights fed into the foreign and domestic policies and ideas Monarchs from this time took up, from Æthelred the Unready (968-1016) to Edward I (1239-1307) lead to a reformed idea of the travel narrative, that of a way to talk about the transitory nature of human life, particularly when larger forces come into play which metaphysically require the travel in the first place, such as Beowulfs journeys into Danish territory's and the elegies prefixation with the tranquillity of far-off bodies as allegories for salvation, peace and stability in the face of conquest, uncertainty and quick deaths in a time of plague, famine and colonisation.
Marco Polo (1299)
The first mention Polo makes of note is just this: “People on the Island of Zipangu (Japan) have tremendous quantities of gold. The King’s palace is roofed with pure gold, and his floors are paved in gold two fingers thick.”[5]
From this, it sparked the search for Colombus to set sail for Hispaniola as he referred to it, or Cipangu which was his aim, setting off the search for the colonisation of the New World. The ramifications of that decision, and its costs are still being dealt with as you read.
It is during this time that the interesting push from England to Japan takes place, with travel narratives increasingly seeing Europe as not a place English monarchs were interested in, but rather as hindrances. Europe became a constraint in the travel narratives at the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, and by the end had shifted to one of accepting the enrichment of foreign lands to enable the diversity of Tudor England as a more fruitful and even scientific society. Japan becomes not simply a land of paradise and fools gold, but a more powerful symbol of hope and prosperity, which took the English monarchs and sailors to North America, Russia and Japan as places of great prosperity and hope for the future in the struggle to create a stable future for the kingdom of England.
The sailor in particular, saw Japan as not a means to and end or a land to be conquered, but a sort of holy land where they would be accepted, cherished and to salvation in the land furthest to the East, in a world totally New and unlike the misery of the Old, found in travelling to the country of Polo's Cipangu, even in Dire Straits.
Hereford Mappa Mundi
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 1357
Mandevilles travels in this sense take us to Japan as a part of the Hereford Mappa Mundis idea of Japan
Pearl/Patience/Cleanness (c.1390s)
The role of journeys and dreams in shaping the medieval understanding of the other (as in relation to Japan as a mix between "Heaven/Paradise" as wonder, riches, silver and the "East Indies" as the other).
Henry VII wants us to find Japan.
Henry VIII wants to get land in France and fuck that Japan shit Sebastian
Mary I wants to gain Japan as a colonial possession if it even was on her radar atp
Elizabeth I wants to trade with Japan as common members and allies against the Catholic Empires
John Donne
Takes us to the poetical allusion of what Japan was to the late Tudors society.
Bibliography
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_vision
[2] https://pressbooks.pub/earlybritishlit/chapter/exeter-book-elegies-2/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seafarer_(poem)
[5] https://web-japan.org/nipponia/nipponia45/en/feature/feature01.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPeople%20on%20the%20Island%20of,Polo%20(1254%2D1324).
No comments:
Post a Comment