The purpose of the Medieval Narratives in Transmission series is to consider how stories and ideas moved around medieval Europe and how that process reshaped them in different linguistic cultures. Erin Michelle Goeres applies this brief to the Latin and vernacular literatures of the three regions that came into conflict in 1066 to understand how these cultures navigated trauma. As such, although the chronology of the subject--the battles and conquest of England in the late eleventh century--is narrow, the timeframe for the writing of that history is much broader, taking into account works stretching from the eleventh-century Latin chronicles written in Normandy to the Old Norse kings’ sagas of the thirteenth century. The book as a whole adds to the growing number of studies about trauma in medieval sources and Goeres is clearly inspired by the work of Elisabeth van Houts, Catherine Clarke, and others.
Goeres begins her introduction with two interactions between the English and Norwegians on the one hand and the Normans on the other. Her first example comes from the Heimskringla, in which a Norwegian encounters a local farmer during the retreat from Stamford Bridge. The soldier wants to buy the farmer’s warm jacket, but the latter refuses saying he would prefer to kill him but has no weapon. Instead, the Norwegian kills the farmer and takes the jacket anyway. Her second is Orderic Vitalis’s famous account of William the Conqueror’s coronation. This is a moment of linguistic confusion in which the Norman soldiers mistake English shouts of acclamation for a riot and set fire to the city. These episodes set the tone for the book by showing how individuals or groups experienced trauma, highlighting suspicion, vulnerability, and the perpetuation of violence in these narrative accounts. Goeres’s analysis is grounded in the growing scholarship on trauma in history, but as she points out, her work focuses on “literature about trauma” rather than the “literature of trauma,” namely the first-hand accounts we might be more familiar with in our contemporary world (28).The book is structured around four chapters that focus on shared points of comparison within the different linguistic traditions before breaking down the differences and regional variations that made those themes meaningful in regional contexts.
Chapter 1 focuses on “Histories Entangled” and examines key moments of interaction between the English and various invaders in 1066. What is particularly interesting here is how the much later Scandinavian sources draw on the Anglo-Norman sources for Hastings to explain the events of the Norwegian invasion culminating in the battles of Fulford and Stamford Bridge. These borrowings serve to show William and Haraldr harðraði as two sides of the same coin. Harold Godwinson is introduced through comparisons with a statue of Christ at his foundation at Waltham Abbey in the Waltham Chronicle in which the statue bowed to the king, prefiguring his eventual fall in battle. The gestures and movement made by the kings and interpreted in different linguistic and cultural contexts, for example stumbling, bowing, feigned flights and so on, demonstrate how they respond to portents or omens, the thin line between daring and arrogance, and the consequences for the kingdom.
Chapter 2 turns to dreams, beginning with an analysis of Edward the Confessor’s vision of a tree cut down and severed from its roots, which is included in the eleventh-century Vita Ædwardi. This dreamforeshadows his death and the end of his family’s dynasty. The vision also contains the possibility that England might be redeemed if the tree is rejoined to its trunk, which Goeres suggests is a way of representing the impossible--the tree/England healing itself--through metaphor. She argues that metaphor picks up where words fail, in order to underline, explain, and represent the trauma of 1066. Edward’s tree contrasts with the evocation in the kings’ sagas of trollwomen and other disruptive beings drawn from Norse myth in dreams and visions. These creatures illustrate the horror of war, for example the feeding of men’s flesh to wolves. Here Goeres focuses on the failure of Haraldr to interpret the visions correctly. His greed in wishing to take England is mirrored in that of the flesh-eating wolves or the trollwoman’s trough of bloodied limbs. Instead of winning victory, the visions foretell death and destruction. These visions reflect the utter horror of conflict and allow the saga authors to imagine and explore trauma.
In Chapter 3 Goeres considers the theme of fratricide. This section would have benefitted from tables illustrating the real and mythical relationships between the various pairs of brothers to aid the reader’s navigation through some dense and complicated texts. For example, in the Old Norse material, Morcar, son of Earl Ælfgar of Mercia, and Waltheof, whose father was Siward, previously earl of Northumbria, are cast as brothers to the Godwinsons. Goeres explores the biblical parallels through the story of Cain and Abel, and the mythological through the slaying of Baldr, carefully unpacking these tales of treachery through the various influences on the writers. Discord and fratricide serve as a micro-lens to help rationalise the much bigger ripples these acts cause in the realm as a whole. The killing of brothers, for example Harold’s killing of Tostig, stands for the moral decay of the kingdom, and the broader trauma is explored through these more personal events. Given the consideration of links with Normandy, for example Edward the Confessor during his exile, I was surprised not to see some consideration of how Robert the Magnificent’s adoption of Edward and Alfred as brothers, described by William of Jumièges in the Gesta Normannorum ducum, fitted into this wider imagining of the events of 1066.
The final chapter examines the survival myths surrounding, particularly, Harold Godwinson and Earl Waltheof. The title “Enigmas of Survival” derives from Cathy Caruth’s work on Freud, through which Goeres explores these myths as having a healing potential. Her analysis of penance as the means of dealing with trauma in the thirteenth-century Vita Haroldi is particularly interesting. Here Harold comes to terms with both his own trauma and that inflicted on England through acts of pilgrimage, penance, and prayer, eventually achieving a spiritual victory over the Normans. There is scope here for future work comparing this later text with documentary evidence such as the Penitential Ordinance that might also be read as a means of the victors’ coming to terms with trauma, rather than just a transactional quid pro quo for sins committed in killing fellow Christians.
The book concludes by looking further past the events of 1066 to the stories surrounding groups of English exiles who settled in former Byzantine imperial territories and a passage in Salman Rushdie´s The Satanic Verses in which the Battle of Hastings is experienced as a vision. This jump to modern fiction sits a little awkwardly, given the introduction’s emphasis on not flattening out the differences in trauma experienced in the modern and medieval periods. It does, however, serve to reinforce Goeres’s subtitle “learning to hear” (19). Through her careful analysis of the various traditions associated with 1066, their shared motifs and different expressions, the reader does, indeed, begin to hear how people in the past used literature to give some voice to otherwise inexpressible trauma.