The University of Wales Press’s Medieval Animals series strives to showcase the past significance of medieval creatures, exploring the lives, legends, and practices associated with pre-modern animals. With its fine organization, full bibliography, and fluid prose, Natalie Jayne Goodison’s Introducing the Medieval Swan is an excellent contribution to this series. Lushly illustrated and teeming with fascinating facts and stories, Goodison’s volume superbly introduces the medieval swan.
In the introduction, Goodison succinctly captures the powerful allure of the medieval swan by asking why the swan is perceived as “royal” and “regal,” and why “swansong” (7) is associated with aestheticized death. As someone who has been centrally focused on medieval swans for some time, I share Goodison’s sense of both the importance and the “quiet grandeur” of the subject (7), and I think that medieval studies is very well served by Goodison’s “academic introduction” (8) to the medieval swan. Goodison’s decisions to avoid being “comprehensive” and to stress “primary source material” (8) help ensure the strength of this volume, which satisfyingly juxtaposes surveys of the historical and cultural practices associated with medieval swans with extensive inquiry into the ways that “medieval literature” made “courtly” use of this “transformative” (8) bird.
The opening chapter organizes its illuminating study of medieval understandings of swans by showing how medieval beliefs about the “swan’s song” migrated from “natural history” into “art and culture” (17). Providing an excellent bibliography, Goodison shows how such influential medieval understandings of the swan as that disseminated by Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies depended both on natural observation and “classical sources” (19). Investigating the medieval belief that swans are prone to singing (and particularly so before their death), Goodison discusses key examples of “funereal” (21) swan song in Plato, Aeschylus, Aesop, and Ovid. Goodison also demonstrates the crucial connection between swan-song and poetry by pointing to classical understandings of Homer and Virgil under the rubric of “swan-as-poet” (21).
After noting that Pliny expressed skepticism of “the truth of swan song” (22), Goodison transitions seamlessly into a survey of the swan within “medieval natural history” (23). Introducing readers to the conflation of natural science and morality in bestiaries, Goodison shows that Hugh of Fouilloy’s highly influentialAviarium combines “natural history” with the “moralising” belief that swan’s combining an outwardly white appearance with “black flesh” (24) makes it the symbol of a “hypocrite” (25). Goodison next discusses how what we could today recognize as careful natural history emerges with the “Aristotelian” shift towards focus on the “observation of organisms in their natural habitats” (30). Analyzing Albertus Magnus’s close “observation” (32) of swans in their natural habitats, Goodison convincingly shows how the popularity of moralizing bestiaries did not prevent advances in medieval biology.
Goodison closes the first chapter with an extended discussion of what might seem a paradox, namely, the “persistent” medieval reference to the “swan’s song,” even as the most likely swan medieval Europeans would see would be the “Mute Swan” (34), named for their near silence. After discussing the long-standing interpretation in classical and medieval Europe of Mute Swans’ “distinctive wing-beats” as music (36), Goodison notes that classical and medieval swan song may also be due to the presence of the “vociferous musicality” of Whooper Swans and Bewick’s Swans (39).
Goodison’s second chapter explores the fascinating question of why medieval swans are frequently associated with “transformation” (47). Beginning with “classical accounts” (47), Goodison provides a stimulating survey of the importance--and edginess--of Leda’s story. Dwelling on the “extremely popular” status of the legend of Leda’s rape by Zeus in the form of a swan in both “classical art” and in “the Renaissance,” Goodison notes that the imagined incident could range from a “celebration of bestiality” to a merely “erotic” depiction that (troublingly) deprioritizes the “rape” elements in favor of the “transgressive, the deviant, and the pornographic” (48). Goodison’s discussion of medieval efforts to “draw spiritual meaning” (48) from this story is especially intriguing, particularly with the “shocking” understanding in the Ovide Moralisé of the rapist god’s action as figuring “Christ’s transformation into mortal flesh” (49).
After returning to the classical era to discuss the multiple men “all named Cycnus” (50) who, most famously in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, are transformed into swans, Goodison uses William Caxton’s translation of the moment when Achilles fails to find a “sowle” while stripping Cycnus’s corpse to show that “birds” were sometimes “symbols of human souls in medieval literature” (52). Goodison then provides an absorbing survey of “swan-maidens” (52). Beginning with the “earliest medieval reference” to these figures in the Old Norse Völundarkviδa, Goodison shows that these swan-maidens differ from Stith Thompson’s influential view in his “folklore index” (53) that these women lack agency and are merely subject to men who seize their shape-shifting clothes)--for these earliest swan-maidens leave of their own accord. Goodison surveys a number of stories (including Graelent and Guingamor) that the medievalist Henry William Schofield linked with Thompson’s swan-maiden model, and in each case Goodison shows that these stories, either due to agentive women or differing birds, do not support “swan-maiden typologies” (56).
Goodison next explores the more significant medieval motif of the “swan children,” beginning with brief discussion of the Old Irish Fate of the Children of Lir (59). Goodison spends considerably more time on the relationship of the swan children story--that is, of multiple children born wearing chains whose removal transforms them into swans, and who are saved from the death planned for them by their evil grandmother by a hermit who raises them--with stories of the Swan Knight. Providing an excellent summary of the story’s earliest version in Johannis de Alta Silva’s Dolopathos, Goodison relates how the story of the part-swan “septuplets” (61) was folded into the Old French Crusade Cycle in two versions (the Elioxe and Beatrix versions, named after the swan-children’s mother in each iteration). While Goodison in my view does not devote enough attention to Le Chevalier au Cygne--which follows the two versions of La Naissance du Chevalier du Cygne in the Old French Crusade Cycle, and which helps strengthen Goodison’s case that the cycle’s poets sought to emphasize “knightly prowess” (63), Goodison does a fine job describing the Middle English Chevelere Assigne, in which the Crusade Cycle’s Elias becomes “Enyas” (63). After describing the happy ending provided for the one swan child doomed to remain a swan in La Fin d’Elias (63), Goodison surveys the medieval German Swan Knight tradition. Beginning with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, Goodison observes that Wolfram “fuses” two key medieval “traditions,” as the “Swan Knight becomes Arthurian” (66). Goodison provides a fine reading of the action of Lohengrin, but the discussion of the Swan Knight’s “interdict” against asking about his “origin” (68) in the German poem would have resonated more fully had it been related to the motif occurring in Le Chevalier au Cygne.
Continuing to study the influence of the massive, thirteenth-century Old French Crusade Cycle, Goodison’s third chapter provides excellent analysis of the political use made of the Swan Knight legend in medieval Europe. Goodison opens this important chapter by showing how the swan became a “symbol of courtliness” (73), moving from evidence for King Edgar’s 966 management of swans to a telling, if “inaccurate” legend of Richard I’s introduction of swans into England as reinforcing swans’ “royal” connections (73). After recounting literary legends of a singular swan’s attachment to Bishop Hugh of Lincoln (74), Goodison turns to the key figure associated with the medieval swan, Godfrey of Bouillon. Offering a fine survey of medieval understandings of Godfrey as a grandson of the Swan Knight, Goodison demonstrates how swans thus became key to the story of “one of the great medieval heroes” (77).
Goodison’s chapter is especially strong in showing how many noble European families sought to associate their bloodlines with the legendary Swan Knight. Beginning with the “houses of Brabant, Cleves, and Brandenburg” (78), Goodison produces a fascinating, richly illustrated study of how various medieval nobles aggrandized themselves by cultivating connections to the swan-knight and swan-children myths. Goodison’s discussion of German and Dutch would-be swan-knight descendants shows how the cultivation of such family associations went beyond mere storytelling, to include social orders, heraldic symbols, and architectural motifs. Goodison’s study of French aristocrats’ efforts to link their ancestry with the Swan Knight is especially interesting in showing how swans became associated with “courtly love” (84), as can be seen with special clarity in the manuscripts patronized by John, Duke of Berry.
Goodison’s exploration of the cultivation of “Swan Knight Ancestry” is particularly intriguing as regards “English politics” (85). Discussing the “Swan Knight lineage” of King Stephen and Empress Matilda in The Red Book of the Exchequer held in Faversham Abbey (85), Goodison proceeds to show the considerable influence of swan imagery in Edward I’s regime, particularly in the 1306 Feast of the Swan that literally linked knights and swans (86). Goodison provides a rich analysis of the “swan-ancestry” (88) imagery linked with the Bohun family, as well as by Edward III and his son Edward the Black Prince.
Goodison’s study of the clash between the royally-linked swan symbol with Richard II’s influential but doomed effort to develop an alternate symbol of royalty, is absolutely fascinating. After showing how swans were associated with two of Richard II’s key rivals, Thomas of Woodstock and Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV, who would usurp the English throne in 1399), Goodison deftly uses an explanation of the politics of medieval badges in fourteenth-century England to explain Richard’s “White Hart” as a “foil” to the “White Bohun Swan” (94) used as a livery symbol by his competitors. After the defeat of the White Hart faction by the swan-wearing Henry, Goodison shows, the swan became a truly Lancastrian symbol, borne both by Henry IV and by his popular and successful son, Henry V (96).
Despite the glaring error of describing Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, as his mother (96), Goodison proceeds to present a compelling case for seeing the swan’s role in Henry VI’s troubled era as a marker of transition beyond the chaos of the Wars of the Roses. After describing the intense association of swans with the houses of Warwick and Buckingham, whose families each provided major players in England’s fifteenth-century civil war, Goodison notes that the fact that Henry VII did not cultivate the swan as a “symbol” of the “house of Tudor” (99) marks a key transition period both in medieval politics and swan management.
Goodison’s excellent fourth chapter focuses on the culinary and economic uses of swans in medieval Europe, in an England-focused study that links increasing exploitation of swans with increasing royal management thereof. Goodison opens with a survey of intriguing anecdotes about swans’ high status as comestibles at nobles’ feasts. Goodison shows that medieval cooks sometimes increased the showiness of such already-expensive meals by making them literally spectacular, as with Master Chiquart’s recipe in the 1420 Du fait de cuisine for anelaborately decorated, four-tiered “castl[e] of pastry” (104), atop which a swan was made to seem to breathe “fire” (105), or in the description of French medieval cooks’ meticulous removal of the swan’s skin “in one piece,” and later to reinsert the cooked carcass, so as to create the “marvel” of a “redressed swan” made to look “alive” (106). Stereotypes about the superiority of French to English cooking might be unintentionally reinforced for readers who turn from the theatrics of French medieval cooking to Goodison’s discussion of the recipe for English “chawdoun sauce,” the prime ingredient of which is the “offal of swans” (108).
This chapter is especially strong in its analysis of medieval swans’ economic value. After describing the high prices of swans relative to those for other edible birds, Goodison demonstrates how such high valuation led to considerable “record-keeping” (112). Moreover, the fact that such birds were kept in a state of “semi-domestication”--that is, swans were allowed to “wander on commons and in private lands, and to mate and nest” in various watery spaces (112)--led to the development of a range of economic and cultural practices. Goodison offers a stimulating survey of the practice of “marking” swans, according to which these valuable, yet mobile pieces of avian property were marked with ownership symbols (samples of which are offered here), either with a knife or by branding (113-14).
Consistently emphasizing the high economic value of swans, Goodison shows how swans’ mobility created a web of economic practices and legal policies. After discussing the rise of the position of “swanherds,” who both cared for swans and strove to prevent their “theft” (115), Goodison traces the beginnings of a nearly full royal appropriation of swan regulation in England by exploring the development of the royal office of “Swan Master” (116) and the creation of a series of increasingly aggressive royal policies on swans issued by Edward IV. Moving to the Early Modern era, Goodison shows how Elizabeth I cultivated “ever greater control over swans” (119), leading to Charles I’s 1632 assumption of royal control over any swan not specifically marked as a noble’s property. After discussing the annual practice of royal management of disputes over swan ownership known as the “Swan Upping” (121),
Goodison observes that the crucial economic importance of swans diminished precipitously as “turkeys” displaced swans as the “preferred dinner bird” in the early nineteenth century (122).
In a short conclusion, Goodison notes the enduring cultural importance of swans in the modern era. Swans and poetry remain linked through such singular associations as Shakespeare’s association with the bird (128), while such influential works as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan each show traces of medieval swan legends’ ongoing impact (128). Goodison also traces the persistence of such practices as the Swan Upping and British royal control over most of the territory’s swans, though such practices are now shown to be more concerned with “conservation” than economics (128). Observing that the Swan Knight legend has survived most significantly in modern Germany, particularly through Richard Wagner’sLohengrin and the nineteenth-century transformation of “medieval ruins” into Neuschwanstein Castle (131), Goodison closes by noting the frequent use of swan imagery in modern pubs throughout England: the association of swans with alcohol consumption in “medieval Britain” evidently lives on.
Featuring some gorgeously reproduced color plates and extensive bibliography, Goodison’s Introducing the Medieval Swan provides a superb introduction to the historical and cultural legacy of medieval swans. Although the work focuses on English, French, and German traditions, its vision illuminates the European-wide engagement with swans by also exploring Scandinavian, Irish, and other medieval swan texts and practices. Any medievalist is encouraged to procure a copy of this richly sourced, tastefully illustrated, lively, and very thought-provoking analysis of medieval swans.